Straight Life - Art Pepper [190]
There were a lot of pretty girls. I saw one wearing a long peasant dress with long hair and beads and bracelets and rings. I noticed that they wore rings on their first fingers, which I'd never seen before. This girl really looked good, so we walked closer to the group, but as we got nearer I saw that the bottom of her dress was all torn where she'd stepped on it. It looked like she'd dragged it through the gutter. It was wet and soiled. Her clothes were wrinkled, and you could see dirt in her hair. She had strange things painted on her face. She looked like a death's head, white makeup, and her eyes were all blackened. No lipstick. Her hands and fingers and her fingernails were filthy. You could almost smell her.
When you're in prison you acquire a passion for cleanliness. You "talachi" your cell all the time, scrub it out until it's spotless. You can eat off the floors of the cells. Me and Ernie Flores when we celled together used to walk on our floor in our stocking feet to keep it clean. And Richard and I had these pictures in our minds of women, how pretty they were and how clean and how sweet smelling, a whole fantasy about what we wanted them to be. So we went to the worst place we could go: North Beach in 1966.
I looked around and saw the guys in Levis, matted dirt on their clothes, boots run over at the heels, ugly, dirty, long hair sticking out, and beards, scraggly and ugly. We noticed that there were a lot of black men. No black women. Just the men dressed in outrageous costumes with weird hats from the Three Musketeers. I guess they figured that even though these chicks were filthy they were still white, and they were dancing with them, hanging all over them and strutting around, and I could see on their faces this look of "Yeah, I got this white `ho." I thought of all the things that went on in the joint. Richard said, "Look at that fuckin' nigger. Look at that trampy white bitch with that black animal!" I noticed some people looking at us strangely, and I realized that they probably thought we were police. I said to Richard, "Man, we ought to play a little game that we are police. Jack `em up, take 'em in the alley, and beat `em half to death."
We went into a bar and had a couple of drinks and we saw the same thing in there: girls dressed in ridiculous costumes acting like they were really into something when they were into nothing except dope and filth, hanging over these black guys who were strutting around. It was disgusting to us. We sat in the bar and kept drinking, and I got pretty juiced. Finally I happened to look over and saw for the first time a halfway decent-looking girl. She must have been about sixteen. She was at the bar, and this real pimp type black guy was slobbering all over her. I walked up to the bar and said to her, "What kind of a fuckin' tramp are you?" The guy started to say something. I said, "Oh, shut your mouth, you black punk!" I turned to the chick and said, "You filthy tramp bitch. What are you doing in here with this black motherfucker? Where's your class at?" She wigged out: "Oh you white motherfucker! You honkie sons-ofbitches!"
I realized the hate that I had, and it scared me. I was a madman. I wanted to kill people. Richard felt the same. And we were so violent these guys were actually afraid of us. Richard said, "Come on, man." We left North Beach and went downtown to the Tenderloin. That wasn't as bad. At least there were some people there that dressed like human beings. I didn't want to have anything to do with the young people. They were so corny.
We ate and got a cab, and Richard took me to the airport. He told me, "Man, you gotta be careful. You're out in this world now. You could have killed somebody in there and be right back in that prison." And I was close to it. I started fantasizing forming a white vigilante committee. People who'd stick up for the white race and not lay down and take all this hate that's