Straight Life (51 page)

Every now and then, Diane would see what she was doing to her life, and that really wasn't the way she wanted to spend the rest of her days. She tried to straighten her hand, but her need for love was stronger than her need for survival. Art meant more to her than her whole, entire life. She loved him to the day she died.

When Diane got out of jail and Art was living with Christine, she was terribly upset. She wouldn't even tell me how horrible things were. But it was obvious. You just had to look at her. As for Christine, Christine was not a likable person under any circumstances. The only thing that comes to mind is-unpleasant. I don't really even remember too well what she looked like. I know we encountered her a couple of times, and she was just unpleasant, just a bitch. And Art's such a weak person that if Diane wasn't available someone had to be.

Diane came to live with me, as usual. I got her a little job, but she decided that wasn't what she wanted to do, so she screwed me again. We'd had such a good relationship until Art came into her life, and then she used me, he used me. Oh, God, it was terrible what they did. Well, being away from Art all that time, she was compelled to go back to drugs. The next thing I heard, I got a bill from an ambulance company in Long Beach dunning me. She'd gotten busted and tried to run, and a cop had hit her on the head or something, so they'd had to call an ambulance for her. And she went to jail.

I'm sure she was staying with Ann Christos at those times. She got busted in Long Beach. And then where did she go from there? I know I spent my life bailing her out. It all runs together, it happened so much. But CRC was a marvelous place. It was like a country club. I couldn't believe how well they were living there. They used to have mixed group, so I had to take her eyelashes to her just because they were going to be around guys. I took her makeup. It was cute. It was very good for her, too. When she got out, she was really trying to straighten out.

Diane and I only had each other to tell things to. And even today something will happen-like this. Or I'll see a television show or read something in the paper and think I should tell Diane. I've got no one like that left, and I'll never have anyone like that. She was a marvelously witty, bright, intelligent person, and it just killed me to see her life go that way. But the second time she got out of CRC, she'd really, truly learned a lot and she was going to straighten her hand. That's why we got back in touch with her children. She was going to be a decent, responsible human being. And then she started coughing up blood.

Well, we were sitting on the bed here one day, watching television, talking, and she was coughing, and there were little blood spots in the Kleenex. That's not really extraordinary if you've got a bad cold or something. I said, "Here, let me give you some throat lozenges." Hahahaha! She was with a guy named Tony Kennedy at that time. He was a CRCer, too, a really good guy though, an Oakie guy, very down to earth, who just worshiped her. Tony and Diane were living in Torrance or Gardena, and the blood spots appeared, and they got progressively worse. She went to Harbor General and they X-rayed her, gave her a TB test, and said, "Well, you better come in. We've got to explore the problem." Tony was still with her. They opened her up and found cancer attached to her heart, lungs, and aorta. Knew right then and there that it was hopeless.

There used to be a house next door, and I arranged for Jeff, Diane's son, to have the house. I wanted him to have some family. He was a very disturbed young man, had chippied around with drugs. Diane leaves Tony, plops in with Jeff: "I'm your long lost mother. Now that I'm about to die, you can take care of me." Well, her younger son, Mike, was sixteen when she came back into his life. He was just a normal teenager, skinny little kid. Her coming back so distressed him that he blew up like a ballon. He became the Crisco Kid, and he had never had a weight problem in his life.

Well, she moves in with Jeff, undergoing cobalt, chemotherapy. She was still in pretty good shape, but she was the most demanding bitch. Poor Jeff-my husband, Jack, had given him a job-had to get up at 4 A.M. to go to work. At midnight Diane would decide she wanted some ice cream or something, so, "Jeff, get up and get me some ice cream." She became more demanding, more bitchy.

Jeff had married a girl that we hated, because he knew we hated her. It disgraced him even more. This girl he married was the anatomical wonder of all time. She was a fat junkie! Have you ever seen a fat junkie? When it got to the point where it was difficult for Diane to drive to the hospital to get her morphine, this girl would say, "Okay, I'll drive you, but you gotta split it with me." Diane could get as much as she wanted, so what did it matter?

When Diane was staying with Jeff here, she called Synanon. Even though she loved Art desperately, she did just want to say goodbye. She wanted to go down there and say goodbye to him. She was terribly distressed when those sons-of-bitches wouldn't let her talk to him.

Diane was the only person in the history of the Nalline program that was on five hundred grains of morphine a week and passing her test! Hahahaha! We used to joke about that, too. She had to keep going down for her Nalline test because of the red tape. They knew she was on morphine.

I wasn't nice to Diane. And I know why now. I tried to avoid her because it was just breaking my heart watching her die. Can you imagine loving someone so much that you don't want to see-them?-Being so selfish?

Well, Jeff finally ... I couldn't let this go on. Mike was out on his own, working, had his own apartment. Diane goes to him, says, "I want to move in." And he comes to me, "Should I take care of her?" I said no because I could already see what she had done to him coming back into his life. He felt terrible about not letting her move in.

My mother and she got an apartment together. It was my mother's biggest thrill to be able to take care of Diane. My mother had lived her own life, and I never had loved her because she wasn't a good mother. She wasn't the kind of mother I wanted. She was a lesbian and a drunk, and I was always ashamed of her. So was Diane, but Diane wanted love so much, she found her more acceptable than I did. My mother waited on her hand and foot until her dying day. Diane was down to sixty pounds when she died. She looked like something out of Hitler's ovens. Just bones. She had just turned forty when she died.

After Diane, my mother had nothing left to live for. She died. Then our father died. And then-Bijou had had cancer a couple of times, breast cancer, and we had taken her down to Dr. Salk in Palm Springs, who's the best vet in the United States (he's the brother of Jonas Salk)-when Bijou died, it just shattered me. It was horrible to lose Diane and my mother and father, but Bijou, who had spent almost every night of her life with her face next to mine! I wanted to die.

Weirdest thing of all. About a week, two weeks before Diane died, my mother called and said, "Please come over and get us and get her out of the house. Things are really bad." I didn't want to. I didn't want to see her, but I felt guilty enough to do it. I drove down to their place in the valley, brought them over here, and Jack went down to Ah Fong's and got a great big mess of Chinese food and a big bag of fortune cookies, and I put 'em in a bowl. At random. Just dumped them in a bowl. We all took our cookie out and opened it. There must have been fifteen or twenty fortune cookies. The one Diane picked had no fortune in it. That has never happened to me in my life, and I've been eating in Chinese restaurants since I was a baby. We started giggling and Diane said, "Well, of course I have no fortune. I have no life."

I HAD a hotel room a few blocks from Christine in Hollywood, and I kept that. I had a good parole officer for a change. In fact, they changed the whole idea of the parole department. Instead of going out of their way to send their charges back to prison, parole officers were going out of their way to keep them out. Of course, at this time I didn't trust him much, but the guy was good. His name was Mr. Dom. I found out that he had played clarinet as a kid and had heard of me. He liked the way I played so he was for me right away.

Mr. Dom would send me a card telling me when to test, which was once a week every week: I was on the Nalline program. Again. Five years on Nalline and five years on parole. I'd be put in prison for violating my parole, and each time I got out parole was set at five years. Some guys never get off parole because they continue to violate and go back. That's where they have you. Mr. Dom would send a message that he was going to come and see me on such-and-such a day, so on that day I would get up early, go to the hotel room I was renting, mess the bed up and try to make it look as if it was lived in. He'd come. We'd talk. He'd ask me how I was doing.

Christine had been a singer working little gigs, little jam session gigs. It was good with her at first because she was so interested in music. I had a tendency to get away from music by doing other things. I'd read the sports pages and listen to news broadcasts incessantly. Christine was always pushing music; she'd keep music on the radio instead. But when I listened to music, it brought back sad memories. I'd start thinking about the past. Listening to the news was like listening to the old-time serials-things were happening to other people, bad things. It took you out of yourself and instead of brooding over your own plight you were listening to and living in other people's problems. And it kept you company. Music put me in a melancholy mood. I'd want to get loaded.

I had a job at Shelly's Manne Hole when I got out, but I didn't have a horn. A horn cost five hundred dollars. I got a tenor on credit. Christine signed for me, but I paid for it. I could only afford one horn, and with the rock thing going the way it was I figured with a tenor I'd have a better chance of finding work. I played at Shelly's with a great group, and we did a lot of originals of mine. I'd been playing like John Coltrane more and more over the past few years. He'd impressed me so much. I had never been influenced like that before by anyone. I knew I was playing great, but people kept asking me, "How come you're not playing alto?" They were thinking of the way I played before and couldn't accept what I was doing on tenor. It wasn't what they'd come to hear. That depressed me. Some guys came around to the club and they had some stuff, and before I knew it I was fixing again.

Christine had goofed around with stuff a few times but never got involved with it. She started fixing, too. I was only able to fix for three days, and then I'd have to clean up for four days so I could pass my Nalline test. Cleaning up meant going back to the Beverly Hills Health Club. I'd have marks all over my arms, I'd be kicking, and I'd go into the steam room and sit there while the sweat poured out of me. I'd feel like I was dying I was so weak. I'd look around and here were all these guys, all these Jews. They were wealthy, they had big Lincolns and Cadillacs, and I could hear them talking about companies merging, about producing and directing movies. After I left the steam room I'd sit with towels around me, sweating, the skin hanging on my bones. Where I had marks I'd rub with my hand, and the marks would peel off. I was sitting like this one day when I looked up and somebody said, "Hey, Art! How're you doing? It is Art, isn't it?" It was Pete Rugolo, who had written for Stan Kenton and was now a big man, writing for TV shows and movies. He said, "What are you doing now?" I said, "Oh, practicing and ... " I wanted to get away from him and crawl into a hole.

Christine had a piano so I'd sit at the piano and mess around. She was always at me to practice and to go out and jam. She'd force me out at night and we'd go to different places and ask if we could sit in. I'd play, and she'd sing, and it was great except that we got so loaded. We'd drink and drink and drink. We'd hustle people for drinks and take any kind of pill, smoke pot, or shoot stuff depending on what period it was during the week. When it came time to eat, Christine would go to her mother's house in Torrance and borrow some money and get some food.

Christine introduced me to Red Mountain wine. You could get a gallon for a dollar and fifty-seven cents. We'd put the wine in these little plastic bottles orange juice comes in and take them in the car, and as we drove we'd drink. I don't know what the two of us were running from, but we were continuously on the move and we'd drink two or three gallons of this wine a day. We'd wander around looking for places to jam. We'd play games. I started getting Christine into the things I used to do with Patti. We'd go to a park and I'd walk ahead of her and then turn around and say, "Hello." And we'd find a secluded part of the park and make love. We'd drive down the street at night, she'd pull her pants off, and I'd unbutton my fly, and we'd play with each other riding along drinking our wine.

There was a place in Venice where we'd go sometimes. The piano player there had a little sign: "The World's Worst Piano Player." And he was. He was terrible. Christine had a brother who played banjo and guitar; he'd come along with us; we'd sit in and be completely blind. Christine would sing. One night we ran into some people there who lived in Venice and invited us over to their place. The girl was one of these artsy- craftsy chicks that makes things. She made earrings for people she liked-earrings that suited the person. She took a needle and jammed it through each of my ears. She made a special set of earrings for me and put them in. We went home, and the next morning I woke up with my ears hurting and found I had these earrings on. Christine said, "I don't think you should wear two of them." She took out the one in the left ear. After that, every time we went out and ran into artsy people they'd make me another earring, and I wound up with five or six of them. Christine had a little diamond, and I used to wear that one all the time. I grew a beard. I had my beard and my earring, and I let my hair grow. Christine had boots and a little tambourine. We started wandering around the Sunset Strip, going into different places, playing rock.

In my conversations with him, my parole officer always told me, "If anything ever happens, trust me. I want to help you stay out. If you goof, don't be afraid to tell me. If you start using, don't hide." I ran into a friend of mine from the joint who had a lot of stuff, and it was good stuff. He was living in Hollywood near us, so we'd do him little favors, drive him around. He didn't have a car and he'd lay some stuff on us. Naturally I got strung out, and I wasn't able make the Nalline tests anymore. I had to hang it up. We moved to Manhattan Beach, and I was hiding out from the parole department again.