Straight Life - Art Pepper [212]
During this period they gave me Demerol and morphine. When they started pulling me off these drugs, I dreamed and I saw things. I was being chased by police-these were dreams I'd had before-I'd be with my grandmother driving on the freeway trying to fix. She'd be trying to stop me and I'd be hitting her with my fist. I'd be running, hiding, and then I'd actually see things crawling around. Little insects.
Christine was very good. She'd stayed up with me for two days while they were trying to find out what was wrong, and when they'd decided to operate and couldn't find her, she was asleep on a little bench in a chapel they had. I kept searching my mind, trying to remember when I'd gotten a violent blow to my stomach, because the doctor said that that was the only thing that could have caused my spleen to rupture. And I remembered those times, just before I went with Buddy, when we were at our wildest, when she'd hit me so hard. I remembered that at those time I was in such pain from those punches I could hardly breathe. The first time I mentioned it to her, Christine really flipped out. I guess she thought I was blaming her. I was just trying to figure out what caused it, that's all. I don't know if she felt bad because she thought she had done it. I don't know what she thought.
While I was in the hospital-for about three months-I had visits from all kinds of people and cards and letters. It was amazing to find out how many people cared about me. There was a nurse there, a black girl; her old man dug me. When she told him I was in the hospital he got a TV for me. You have to rent them. He paid for the TV, and I never even met him.
A priest came and asked me if I wanted to talk. I said no. He came when Christine was there, and he inquired and found out she was there all the time. He asked about our financial situation. The priest made an arrangement. He paid for Christine's food, and they fed her and me at the same time in my room. That was a beautiful thing.
I didn't know how we were going to pay for the hospital. The bill was twelve or thirteen thousand dollars. Some people got together in Oakland and had a benefit for me. They rented a club in Jack London Square, and a bunch of musicians played for free. Roland Kirk played, and I had never even met Roland Kirk. It still surprises me that he would do that. They got about thirteen hundred dollars to help me pay my hospital bill. It was the nicest thing that ever happened to me. It was something amazing. I never could get over it.
For a long time after the operation, I was afraid to look down. The nurse would change the bandages, the doctor would check the incision, but I never would look at it. Finally the doctor gave me this long pitch saying, "You've got to accept yourself as you are and be thankful you're alive." He forced me to look. I got sick at my stomach. I had two incisions, one from the middle of my breastbone down to just above the pubic hair and another to the left. My bellybutton was gone. It was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. When I was young, with Patti, she had to have a cyst removed from her ovary, and I paid a lot of money to a specialist to make a tiny incision where the pubic hair was and then go up to remove the cyst so there wouldn't be a scar. That's how I felt about those things. Now here I was with horrible scars all over my stomach, just ruined. I thought, "How in the world will I ever ball anybody? Have anybody see me?" It got to the point where I'd never take my shirt off. I hated to take a bath or a shower because I couldn't stand to see myself. And I still feel the same way. I still feel the same way.
Well, we went back to Hollywood, and I was in bad shape but I was healing. Then I got out of bed one morning,