Straight Life - Art Pepper [129]
I'm listening, pointing, and it's very spooky at this time of the morning. Very cold and damp. I'm walking around this abandoned house that's just a mess, with the broken pill bottles on the floor and a few old pieces of furniture. I'd wanted to fix before we did the job, but they had rationed the dope out. We'd fixed at around nine o'clock so we'd be clearheaded. After a certain length of time, about three or four hours after you fix, you become very aware, keenly aware, and as you start to get sick you really become conscious and supersensitive to everything-feelings, sounds.
They kept working, working, it seemed like forever, and then I heard, "I think that's it." "Yeah, I think so." They both came into the house and Frank said, "Alright. We're going in. You've got to really be careful now, man. If anything happens you've gotta run to the hole and holler inside." Both of them put handkerchiefs around their faces, and they took their guns out.
Frank went first and then Ruben, really not knowing if there was someone waiting inside. I kept running from the back of the house to the front, into the yard, listening, watching, and every now and then I'd hear a car or a siren. Finally, they came to the hole and called for me. They had a bundle, bottles of whiskey, and they had a bagful of change, money from the machines-cigarette machines and things like that. We put it in the car. I said, "Is everything alright?" Ruben said, "I don't know, man." Frank said, "There's an office upstairs, just like I thought, where the money is, but the door to the office is locked and it's wired. There's an alarm system into the office and, I don't know, there could be someone hiding in there, sleeping in there." We were standing in the bedroom of the house; they were debating what to do; and I was thinking that we'd gone through all this hassle and we weren't going to get anything. Ruben said, "Well, I think I can take care of the alarm. Run it back into itself. Rewire it." I said to Frank, "Why don't you give me a gun. Let me go into the office." I really wanted to do something that would be exciting and dangerous, and I really needed the money. Frank said, "I'll do it. That's okay." Ruben went in. After a while he came back to the hole and said, "Everything's cool. I got the thing turned around." Frank went in and he said, "Keep your fingers crossed."
They had hoped to have everything done while it was still dark; now it wouldn't be long before daylight, and I'm getting panicked. We should have already been out of there, long gone out of there. We don't know if a silent alarm has been tripped, if the police are sneaking up to get us coming out with the stuff. Here I am without a gun. I can see myself getting hung with the whole thing and them getting away. I'm standing out by the hole, and all of a sudden here's Ruben, and he's got a big smile on his face. He says, "Help me out of here, man." He was too tired to push out of the hole. I pulled him and I said, "What happened?" And here comes Frank. He says, "Here, take this." He hands out a box, a little box, and I say, "What's this?" He says, "That's it." He comes out and I say, "That's it?" He says, "That's it."
And the money wasn't in a safe. It was in a strongbox. He handed me this box, and boy, my heart was pounding, and I said, "Is this it?" He said, "Yeah, man, we really lucked out. There was no one there, and everything's cool. Let's get outta here!" We covered the hole with brush to keep it from being visible. We got into the car, and Frank said to me, "Why don't you drive, man?" Both of them were tired and cut up from breaking into the hole. It was daylight now.
I got on the freeway, the same freeway I'd taken my little excursion on when I'd decided to go back to my dopefiend life. There's no cops, no black and whites, no motorcycles. And so, after we'd traveled a certain distance I realized that we had made it. I looked over at Frank and said, "Man, let me have a drink." He handed me one of the bottles with the pouring spouts