Straight Life - Art Pepper [187]
The adjustment center is for people that stab people and things like that. They said, "This is where you have to go." A guard came in and said that the psychiatrist thought I was trying to kill myself with the black-and-whites. He said, "What are you doing this for? Look at you!" I said, "There's nothing wrong with me. I just want to get out." He said, "Well, you're never going to get out this way."
In the adjustment center you only leave your cell for about five minutes each Saturday when they walk you down, one at a time, to take a shower, with guards watching you through a glass. They bring you your food in your cell, push it through a slot. You sit there for the whole time in a cell, and that's it. I was there for about two months. You never see anyone because there's nothing across from you, just a wall, but everybody knows what's happening and who's there. On my second day a guy down the way asked me, "How're you doing?" I said, "Terrible." He said, "Well, I'm So-and-so. I'm a friend of So-andso's. I'm going to send you down something." He hands something to the next cell, reaching outside the bars. He says, "Pass that to number seven." The guy passes it down to me, and I open it up, and here's about twenty-five black-and-whites! I took them and got wasted. For two days I had a ball.
It had a lot of romance, being in the adjustment center. People look up to you for being there and being cool, not whining. There were guys in there waiting to go to trial for murder or for shanking people, and I was digging this whole scene. I'd hear the others talk, and I started thinking how great it would be to kill someone and really be accepted as a way-out guy. As a rough cat. All the guys that were really in would know about it. "Man, that cat, Art Pepper, he wasted a cat, cut him to ribbons. Stabbed him and stabbed him, blood pouring all out of the guy. Don't fuck with him, man." I started dreaming about it and thinking about it and seriously planning it. I was all ready to do it and could have done it. I had the nerve, I had the shank, and I was in the process of choosing my victim when I got my date to get out.
(Jerry Maher) I'd seen Art play before I ever met him. I first met Art, I think, in Quentin through John Wallach. John Wallach and I were working on the waterfront together, and him and Art were close for years. I was working at the paymaster's office in Quentin, and Art decided he wanted to work, so I got him a clerk's job in the paymaster's office. It was me and him and Joe Coletti and a guy named Larry Steckler. We worked there for a couple of years. There were some trips in that paymaster's office, really some trips.
Art was a pretty good-lookin' dude then. When you first meet Art, he's pretty quiet and introverted, but after you get to know him well, and he's around people he feels comfortable with, he falls his loony hand, you know. He's pretty comical. And we used to have a lot of laughs together. But right off the top, right after you meet Art, talk to him a little bit, you snap that he's extremely sensitive. And I also snapped that he was highly uncomfortable in that setting. You know, I've been raised in YA's (Youth Authorities) and joints, so I was as comfortable as you can get when you're surrounded by a bunch of lunatics, but Art doubted his own ability to cope with it and was a little ill at ease behind that.