Straight Life (49 page)

The adjustment center is for people that stab people and things like that. They said, "This is where you have to go." A guard came in and said that the psychiatrist thought I was trying to kill myself with the black-and-whites. He said, "What are you doing this for? Look at you!" I said, "There's nothing wrong with me. I just want to get out." He said, "Well, you're never going to get out this way."

In the adjustment center you only leave your cell for about five minutes each Saturday when they walk you down, one at a time, to take a shower, with guards watching you through a glass. They bring you your food in your cell, push it through a slot. You sit there for the whole time in a cell, and that's it. I was there for about two months. You never see anyone because there's nothing across from you, just a wall, but everybody knows what's happening and who's there. On my second day a guy down the way asked me, "How're you doing?" I said, "Terrible." He said, "Well, I'm So-and-so. I'm a friend of So-andso's. I'm going to send you down something." He hands something to the next cell, reaching outside the bars. He says, "Pass that to number seven." The guy passes it down to me, and I open it up, and here's about twenty-five black-and-whites! I took them and got wasted. For two days I had a ball.

It had a lot of romance, being in the adjustment center. People look up to you for being there and being cool, not whining. There were guys in there waiting to go to trial for murder or for shanking people, and I was digging this whole scene. I'd hear the others talk, and I started thinking how great it would be to kill someone and really be accepted as a way-out guy. As a rough cat. All the guys that were really in would know about it. "Man, that cat, Art Pepper, he wasted a cat, cut him to ribbons. Stabbed him and stabbed him, blood pouring all out of the guy. Don't fuck with him, man." I started dreaming about it and thinking about it and seriously planning it. I was all ready to do it and could have done it. I had the nerve, I had the shank, and I was in the process of choosing my victim when I got my date to get out.

(Jerry Maher) I'd seen Art play before I ever met him. I first met Art, I think, in Quentin through John Wallach. John Wallach and I were working on the waterfront together, and him and Art were close for years. I was working at the paymaster's office in Quentin, and Art decided he wanted to work, so I got him a clerk's job in the paymaster's office. It was me and him and Joe Coletti and a guy named Larry Steckler. We worked there for a couple of years. There were some trips in that paymaster's office, really some trips.

Art was a pretty good-lookin' dude then. When you first meet Art, he's pretty quiet and introverted, but after you get to know him well, and he's around people he feels comfortable with, he falls his loony hand, you know. He's pretty comical. And we used to have a lot of laughs together. But right off the top, right after you meet Art, talk to him a little bit, you snap that he's extremely sensitive. And I also snapped that he was highly uncomfortable in that setting. You know, I've been raised in YA's (Youth Authorities) and joints, so I was as comfortable as you can get when you're surrounded by a bunch of lunatics, but Art doubted his own ability to cope with it and was a little ill at ease behind that. His music and gettin' high was his refuge. I used to get on his case all the time behind his talent, fuckin' off that talent in the pen. I told him I wish I had that much talent doin' anything, you know, and we used to argue about that all the time. That and niggers. Art was tellin' me Ray Charles was a genius, and I told him there wasn't any nigger alive that was one step above a blithering idiot.

I was a little bit in awe of the guy: he was older than me and he had so much talent. And I used to just sit and trip on it, you know, how come some people are born with so much talent and others none. I also see something in Art, which he's quick to admit to, which is almost a suicidal, a real strong selfdestructive, drive. Like those black-and-whites. We used to get on him about those black-and-whites because he'd get like a zombie, just slobbering. He was sittin' at the domino table one day, on the yard, and just fell forward and gave himself a black eye. The corner of the domino table hit him in the eye. One day he got up to go to the head on the yard and made a big, staggering U-turn and wound up pissin' on this little stage that was set up against the East Block wall, a little raised stage about two feet up in the air and about six by six. There was a stool on it where the yard cop could sit and be elevated about two or three feet above everybody, you know. Art took off from the domino tables goin' in the opposite direction, to the head, and wound up makin' a big, staggerin' U-turn around the yard and standin' there pissin' on this. He thought he was at a urinal when they arrested him.

I used to tell him, "Man, you're just a walkin' bust. Get yourself together." And Johnny Wallach, he's another dude with a heavy suicide ... And John and Art kind of reinforced each other's sickness. Both beautiful dudes, man, but they'd get on those black-and-whites together staggerin' around, and they didn't know who they were for days at a time. John finally fell out in the North Block with convulsions one day. Took him out of the North Block on a gurney. Art wound up, I think, in the hospital too. Either in the hospital or the hole.

I was in Quentin doin' a forgery beef. I'd started at Soledad, and I got popped in Soledad makin' it with a secretary. I was workin' in the procurement office. I was twenty-one at the time, and I hooked up with this little twenty-one-year-old secretary. She hit on her husband for a divorce, told him why. He snitched on us. Got her fired and me transferred. I did about two years on that, got out, got a violation and came back, and got out and got another violation and came back.

Next time I saw Art on the streets-I got out the day Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, August of `62. I was livin' in West Hollywood with my second old lady, Yolanda the Snake, and I ran into Art one day on Santa Monica Boulevard. He was just comin' out of the unemployment office. He was livin' in a little apartment behind a barber shop off La Brea and Sunset with Diane. I was dealin' at the time, and he hit on me to score, so I wound up sellin' him some stuff.

I took him out to this little old hooker's pad in North Hollywood. I had a couple of workin' girls, and one of them, I had just sold her my last quarter when Art called to cop. So I went out, and Yolanda and I picked him and Diane up and took 'em out there. I fixed Art in the bathroom and he immediately OD'd on me. He fell down on the floor. And that's when I started hating Diane. I was cookin' her fix when Art fell out, and I stopped, naturally, and turned around to help him, and she said, "Oh, he's alright. He'll be alright. Go ahead and cook my fix." I said, "You cold-blooded, stinkin' son-of-a-bitch! Your old man is layin' on the floor turnin' blue and all you can think about is gettin' fixed?" Anyway, I turned around and fixed her, and she fell out on me. And I found out, they copped later, that they'd been drinkin' Cosanyl all day. That got me hot, hot, hot because I, you know, I had to work on them for about an hour, hour and a half, somethin' like that, and I threw `em in the back of the car, soakin' wet, both of 'em, and drove from North Hollywood back to their pad at about eighty miles an hour at night with the cold air blowin' on 'em, and Art kept groanin', "Man, roll up the window! I'm freezin' to death!" I told him, "Fuck you. I hope you do freeze to death, you ignorant bastard!"

As for Diane, well, at one time Diane was a beautiful girl. I've seen pictures of her. When I met her, she was a dog. She looked like she was a hundred years old and had lived every one of `em on her face. All her teeth were gone: completely false uppers and lowers. Haggard, tired, worn. She'd put herself in the gutter and wallered in it long enough to where she couldn't ever get back. It sounds kind of cold, but her dying wasn't any loss to anybody in the known universe. In my opinion she wasn't nothin'. She was a tramp. And that wasn't Art's fault.

Art's very dependent, and in my opinion Art's relationship with women is one basically of dependence. Because of that, I could never accept the idea of Art being responsible for anything Diane did. I'd have to look at it to the contrary. I think that any man-woman relationship Art's gonna be involved in, the woman is going to have more influence with Art than Art's gonna have with her.

Art doesn't have an evil bone in his body, and he's-I don't mean this in a demeaning manner because on Art it's totally acceptable, you have to know him-but Art is a pathological physical coward. I guess it's the way he was raised and he's been in music all of his life, moving with that element of people. He's never been called upon to get violent or be violent. I remember an instance in the joint. I can't remember if it was Big Woody Woodward or Tubby Whitman. It was one of the notorious hogs that had some words with Art. They got into a hassle, and the guy told Art, "Man, I'll tear your head off and shit in your neck!" Somethin' to that effect. He had no intention whatsoever of doin' it; he wouldn't have laid a hand on him. But Art took it seriously, and he came to me and a half a dozen other people, and he was just in a panic: "Oh, God, what am I gonna do? That animal's just gonna ruin me, man! That guy's gonna break my spine, gonna tear my arms off!" I can't remember who it was, but I went and talked to him: "Man, what is this shit with you and Art?" The guy said "What?" I ran it down, and the guy cracked up. He said, "Man, you know me better'n that, Jer. I wouldn't put my hands on that guy." I said, "I didn't think so but Art goddamnsure believes it." Art was panic-stricken; "Oh my God, it's all over. I know it's all over. Fuck it, this is it!"

I WAS released in June of '66 with another guy that got out on the same day, a friend of mine, Richard Fortier. They gave us each a package and a suit-a cheap, single-breasted, black suit, but at least it fit well. I paid the guy some cigarettes to have it fixed. I put a white shirt on and a tie. We went through the gate and they gave us our ticket home and a little money. Richard had been there a long time. This was his second time, too, so we both knew all the guards. They said, "Well, good luck, man, hope we don't see you back here again."

We walked out into the little town of San Quentin and got a ride to San Rafael, and when we got there we stopped at a bar immediately and we both got brandy. Everybody could tell we had just gotten out of the joint. The bartender said, "It must be a great day." We had a few drinks and got a nice buzz and rode into San Francisco. I didn't have to be back in L.A. till Monday to report to the parole department, so we decided to goof around in San Francisco for a while.

We got off the bus on North Broadway, right in North Beach. They'd given me a package with some extra stuff in it-a couple of khaki shirts, khaki trousers, work boots, sport shirt, "dress" slacks, and assorted underwear and socks. I just took it and threw it in the trash can. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, and we were wandering around, and we heard music. We walked toward the sound of the music and saw a little, narrow street blocked off for traffic. There were some people in this street and they were dancing. They were having a festival. We walked in and looked around.

There were a lot of pretty girls. I saw one wearing a long peasant dress with long hair and beads and bracelets and rings. I noticed that they wore rings on their first fingers, which I'd never seen before. This girl really looked good, so we walked closer to the group, but as we got nearer I saw that the bottom of her dress was all torn where she'd stepped on it. It looked like she'd dragged it through the gutter. It was wet and soiled. Her clothes were wrinkled, and you could see dirt in her hair. She had strange things painted on her face. She looked like a death's head, white makeup, and her eyes were all blackened. No lipstick. Her hands and fingers and her fingernails were filthy. You could almost smell her.

When you're in prison you acquire a passion for cleanliness. You "talachi" your cell all the time, scrub it out until it's spotless. You can eat off the floors of the cells. Me and Ernie Flores when we celled together used to walk on our floor in our stocking feet to keep it clean. And Richard and I had these pictures in our minds of women, how pretty they were and how clean and how sweet smelling, a whole fantasy about what we wanted them to be. So we went to the worst place we could go: North Beach in 1966.

I looked around and saw the guys in Levis, matted dirt on their clothes, boots run over at the heels, ugly, dirty, long hair sticking out, and beards, scraggly and ugly. We noticed that there were a lot of black men. No black women. Just the men dressed in outrageous costumes with weird hats from the Three Musketeers. I guess they figured that even though these chicks were filthy they were still white, and they were dancing with them, hanging all over them and strutting around, and I could see on their faces this look of "Yeah, I got this white `ho." I thought of all the things that went on in the joint. Richard said, "Look at that fuckin' nigger. Look at that trampy white bitch with that black animal!" I noticed some people looking at us strangely, and I realized that they probably thought we were police. I said to Richard, "Man, we ought to play a little game that we are police. Jack `em up, take 'em in the alley, and beat `em half to death."

We went into a bar and had a couple of drinks and we saw the same thing in there: girls dressed in ridiculous costumes acting like they were really into something when they were into nothing except dope and filth, hanging over these black guys who were strutting around. It was disgusting to us. We sat in the bar and kept drinking, and I got pretty juiced. Finally I happened to look over and saw for the first time a halfway decent-looking girl. She must have been about sixteen. She was at the bar, and this real pimp type black guy was slobbering all over her. I walked up to the bar and said to her, "What kind of a fuckin' tramp are you?" The guy started to say something. I said, "Oh, shut your mouth, you black punk!" I turned to the chick and said, "You filthy tramp bitch. What are you doing in here with this black motherfucker? Where's your class at?" She wigged out: "Oh you white motherfucker! You honkie sons-ofbitches!"