Straight Life - Art Pepper [174]
Of course there are black guys that haven't succumbed to this thing. The blacks that were friends of mine, they'd look over at me when this happened and shake their heads: "What can you do?" A lot of times you'd see them just walk away and lock up in their cells because they couldn't stand to see this. But when the black guy gets up to leave, the others will say, "Saaay, where you goin', jack?" So a lot of them, in order to survive in prison, have to placate these maniacs, hang out with them, laugh, and, "Yeah, baby!"
You've worked to get into an honor block so you can do the time a little better, and now you get to watch TV, and there's something you want to see, but you cannot watch it. They will not let you watch it. So you lock up in your cell and you're thinking, "I wish I could kill all those people! I wish I could drop a bomb in the midst of them!" Your guts are churning; it aches. No wonder you get ulcers. And you can hear them in your cell, no matter where it is, fourth tier, fifth tier, you can't shut them out.
When I think of prison now the worst part used to be not having sex, being locked away from the good things, just not being free. But now, when I think about it, the thing that hits me first and is the most horrible part of it is to be locked up in an area where you have to listen to that hatred and that holler- ing-"Git that white boy!" "Kill that nigger!"-over and over and over, and you can't get away from it. I couldn't go to jail again. I just couldn't. I think I would have to kill myself rather than go through that again.
(Ann Christos) Art saved my honor. When Art was in San Quentin, some black dude came by the beach house, and he ended up in San Quentin. All of a sudden I get a letter from him asking me to write to him, and I was very naive. Art used to tell me, "You're like an open window." I said, "Sure, what's a letter?" Then Art wrote to me saying that this guy was going around saying that I was his "white ho." But Art said, "I straightened him out." And I never got another letter. Art knew me and he knew that this guy was just flashin'. Nobody had ever went to any lengths to protect my honor before, and it meant a lot to me.
17
The Check Protector
1964 - 1965
WHEN I GOT OUT of San Quentin Shelly Manne helped me. They sent me to Tehachapi, and he wrote to me there and said if there was anything he could do he'd do it; he'd like to have me play in his club. Once you make parole you have to have a job to go to in order to get out. They gave me permission to write to Shelly and I told him I was coming up for another parole hearing, and he wrote a letter saying he would hire me.
I got out and finally got together the money to get back into the musicians' union. I've rejoined that union so many times. I would have been a life member long ago if I hadn't gone to prison. I worked for Shelly, and then I got an offer to go to the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco.
I was on the Nalline program. When you come out of prison you go three times a week to get a Nalline test. It works like this. You go in; once you're in the door's locked and you can't get out; you sign in and sit there in subdued light for about twenty minutes and then they call your name. There's a doctor there, and he's got this green light, and you look in the light, and he looks at the pupils of your eyes in profile and measures them. Then they give you a shot of Nalline. They skin