Straight Life - Art Pepper [166]
When Baldonado, Moya, and Ma Duncan were to be executed they took her from the women's prison at Corona and brought her to San Quentin to be killed. I saw them when they drove up. The next morning, when Metzger came in, I said, "Uh, yesterday I saw Ma Duncan drive in." He said, "Oh, did you see 'em? Yeah." I said, "Wow, it's sure far-out, huh? She looked like a little of mother." He looked at me. When he saw I was trying to draw him out, he gave me a straaaaange look. It wasn't a scary look. It was a haunting look. He wasn't threatening me. It was a cold, detached, penetrating look, and I tried to read it, and we looked at each other for a long time. I was writing up his ticket, and he was waiting for me to finish, and I found myself shaking. I would have given anything in the world if I could have met him on the streets as a free man and gone into a bar with him and talked to him and tried to pick his mind and find out what he felt, what he thought, if it bothered him that he'd killed all those people, if he had a reason for wanting to do it, if he felt a moral duty to rid the world of evil, if he was so desirous of money that he didn't care how he got it, if it was sadistic. I just wanted to know. It fascinated me.
It takes a while to learn the ropes of being in prison. It's like anything else-being in the army or being at a new job on the outside. If you work at a factory you have to learn what you can and can't get away with and who are the people to know. It took a little while to learn what was happening, how to do my time, and how to get little benefits and to use situations to my advantage.
I found out after being there for a while and working in the paymaster's office that that gave me a lot of advantages I wouldn't have ordinarily. A lot of people just stay out in the big yard and play dominoes. They loan money and are collectors, and they do all kinds of things that are very dangerous, and they don't have any juice, any status as far as the guards go. But I had a responsible job that set me above most of the people in the prison. I dealt with people's pay. I dealt with their clothes. I dealt with things that were valuable to the people that worked there.
After you shower, you line up to get your whites. The guys that work in the white room handle the towels and socks and shorts and T-shirts. If you have a friend in the white room, if you've got a contract, you do something for him, he does something for you. I knew a guy, Spider Barrucho, an evil-looking cat with blonde hair and a Zapata moustache. A great cat. We'd been friends on the streets. I'd come up to the white room and say, "Hey, Spider!" He'd say, "Hey, Art! What's goin' on?" And if he wasn't handing out the particular item I wanted he'd nod to the guy that was. They had the new stuff stashed. Now, you could get twenty dollars a month, which was your allowable draw, plus getting money on someone else's name. You'd get somebody on the outside to put money on another guy's books. He would draw the twenty in ducats and give you fifteen in cigarettes and other commissary and keep five. That's the standard rate. So, some guys, if they had a lot, they'd pay so many packs of cigarettes a week to the guy in the white room and get brand-new shorts, socks, T-shirts. The guy in the white room had a hell of a job. He made a lot of bread-until he got busted. He'd work so long, and then the heat would bust him. The guards knew everything that was going on because of informers, and they were very sharp. But if you had juice, that's what I'm saying, they'd say, "Well, that's Art Pepper. He works out of the paymaster's office. Let's give him a pass." And they wouldn't come down on me for my starched