Straight Life - Art Pepper [184]
One day I noticed that the tattoo had started to fade, and I asked the guy what was happening. He said, "Oh, man, that's the trouble. Sometimes they give you India ink and it's not pure. I think I got burned, man. They gave me watered ink." It kept fading and fading, and I said, "What am I going to do?" The guy said, "All I can do is put it on again." I said, "Jesus, man, it hurts so bad." He says, "Well, you wanted a tattoo." So I said okay, and he put the whole thing on again, and it took ages, but it looked beautiful. And then it started fading again. He said, "Well, the guy burned me again, the son-of-a-bitch, man! He burned me again, and after all I've done for that asshole, man! Well, all we can do is put it on again, or it'll fade out completely." I had gone through such pain, I couldn't stop now. He put the whole thing on again, and it looked beautiful again, and to this day you can't see it. Right now you can't even see it. For a while, though, it looked great.
They took me back to San Quentin and that was my thing, to get tattoos. I'd see guys I'd known before and they'd say, "Oh, man, what's that?" I'd say, "I'm going to be covered with 'em. I'm not going to have an empty spot on my body. I'm gonna be a real gangster." I kept looking around for guys that did tattooing. One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He'd take them into a cave and ball them, and then the women would disappear. They'd never find them again. I had Pan put on my left forearm, and then-I've always liked Peanuts-a guy put Snoopy and Linus inside my left forearm. I got the smiling and the sad masks on my right forearm. On my right bicep I got a Chinese skull, with a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a drawing of Dracula, and it was going to be on my right arm over my vein. The mouth would be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could say, "Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He's hungry, jack!" You know. "Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man's hungry. He needs some blood!" But I got out before I could get it, and I always wanted that one.
One day I was sitting out in the yard. I was taking black-andwhites, which were easy to get, and I'd finally succumbed to the lowest and most dangerous thing to do in prison, which is sniffing glue. It causes you to hallucinate, it's bad for you physically, it's bad for your mind, and it's degrading. I got with a guy named Sleepy, and I was sniffing glue with him. You could buy a bottle of white shoe glue for four packs of cigarettes, which is cheap. You take a towel and cut it up into strips and pour the glue onto a strip and roll it up in your hand; then you cup your hand, put your fist to your mouth and suck in hard two or three times, and your ears start ringing.
So me and Sleepy were sitting out on the yard sniffing glue, hunched over, with our knees up, when a guy came up to me and said, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" I said yeah, and he said, "There's a friend of mine wants to talk to you, has eyes for you. She, er, he likes you. He's been watching you." I didn't know what to say. I told the guy, "Well, I'm not, I don't play any of that homosexual thing." He said, "Well,