Straight Life - Art Pepper [133]
I've had guys let me off on a corner, and the police are going by, and I've got to find a place where they won't see me vomiting, but there's nowhere to go. I'm waiting and watching every car. The guy says, "I'll be back in ten minutes." And you look at the time, and it seems like an hour, and it's only been eight, nine minutes. Pretty soon it's twenty minutes. Then it's an hour, two hours, three hours, and you panic but you can't leave the spot because if you leave the guy's got a perfect excuse to burn you. You have to stay. And you're thinking of all the things ... You could get rousted. You could get picked up for marks; in those days if you had marks on your arms they could throw you in jail. And then you'd have to go to jail sick. You're thinking of how wonderful it feels when you put the needle in. It takes all the cold away and the chills and the agony from your mind.
Finally the guy comes back. He drives up and he looks at you and shakes his head, kind of frantic, and right away you know there's some kind of game going. The guy'll drive by and pretend that the heat are behind him, and then he'll sneak back to the street and whistle at you, and you'll go over, and it'll be, "Oh, man! I almost got busted, man! Hijo!" He'll be raving on and on and you'll know, "Oh God, I'm burned." The guy'll say, "I gave him the bread, man, and he went into the house to get the stuff, and all of a sudden the narcos came, and they broke in the door, and I was hiding in the back alley. All this time! I was afraid to run. Wow, man, I'm sorry. Hijo, I'm sick, too. You got some more money, man? Maybe I know another guy." And oh, Jesus, God. You have to go out and get more money and you're sick. Sick. And even when you get the money, you don't know whether you can cop.
Other times the guy comes back with the stuff, but you're out on the street so you can't get at it to taste it. Even if you do, it might have a lot of quinine in it, which makes it bitter so it tastes like stuff. So you get to the outfit. You go into some toilet in a gas station or in a laundromat. You put the stuff in the spoon and pour the water in it, and then you see the stuff floating! It's floating on top. It's floating on the water. It's baking soda. You try to cook it up anyway, even though you know you've been burned, and it turns into a paste. It just bubbles into a -paste.
Other times you cook up, and it's the real stuff, and you've gone through all these things to score, and I've been in a shitter, and all of a sudden the needle will clog, and I can't fix, and there's nothing I can do. I've got to get out of there and find some way to get a spike. It wasn't legal to sell them anymore. They got harder and harder to get. Or the rubber on the eyedropper might break or the jeep might leak, and you go to shoot the stuff, and most of it shoots out the end of the dropper instead of through the needle.
So I'm doing this little penny-ante boosting, making enough to get a gram or two grams at a time, and then I'm out again, and I'm thinking, "What am I doing? What am I doing with my life?" My friends were telling me, "Hey, man, what are you doing out here stealing things? Why don't you straighten up? Go to work. Make an album." I'd get letters, "Want to record? Play here?" I was too fucked up to do it. I got more and more angry at myself, hated myself for what I was doing. I'd let so many people down by not taking care of business. The talent I was given, I was wasting it, throwing it away.
And I was bitter. Bitter