Straight Life - Art Pepper [239]
I always wanted to go for walks, but Laurie didn't think it was good for me. I wasn't into the house enough: I should try to involve myself in the community. So one day I'm walking around the community and I can't find her. I go to her dorm: "No, we haven't seen her." I wait. I go down to the club and look around. I walk all over the beach. I come back to the Clump. Nobody's seen her. Then, here she comes with some other girl and a guy and a tall, gangly, gawky-looking rumpkin. She sees me. This tall asshole gives me one of those looks, "Yeah, sucker." She says, "Oh, Art, this is So-and-so." I say, "I know who he is." I say, "Can I talk to you?" He says, "I'll see you later, Laurie." "Goodbye, have a nice trip." "Be sure and come and visit."
I got her alone. "What is this shit?" She said, "Well, we went for a ride." "What do you mean you went for a ride? I thought we were going together! What's all this stuff-'we should stay in the house' and all that?" "Well, we've known each other for a long time. He's going to Tomales Bay. There were four of us. We went for a little ride to say goodbye." I told her, If you want that fuckin' asshole, go get him!" "You don't own me!" "Alright, fuck you!" I walked away.
Later on I started feeling bad so I walked to her dorm. I saw a bunch of people up in her tribe room, which was in an apart ment near the dorms. She comes down the stairs. She sees me. "Art, I want to talk to you." Her new tribe leader comes to the door, Frankie Lago, some sage of the place. Laurie says, "I want to play a game with you." "What do you mean a game? I don't want no fuckin' game! If you want to make it with me, great. I'm not going in no game with you!" Frankie talked to me: "This is the Synanon way. It's a good way. Why don't you just try it once?" Against my better judgment, I was goaded into going upstairs. I walked into the room and here were all these people, all Laurie's tribe, all totally hostile toward me. She runs down this story-how unreasonable I was. I'm acting just like I'm in the streets. She's had enough of that bullshit. I tell her what I think, one thing leads to another, and all of sudden she shouts out, "Shut up, you motherfucker!" I looked at her. I looked into her face. I couldn't believe she had said that. I said, "That's it. It's over. What did I do to cause you ... You must really despise me. What did you even start to get in a relationship with me for?" Everybody started talking: "That's the game." "You're supposed to get your feelings out." "You use those words. You don't really mean 'motherfucker' per se."
I had to get away from there. It was so humiliating to have a little chick, like, sitting there calling me a motherfucker in front of all these people and have these dumb little broads glaring at me, putting in their two cents' worth, and the madder you get the more they jump on you and the more you lose. No matter how loud you scream they can scream louder. And no matter how long you talk, when you run out of breath they're there to start raving again at you. And laughing.
I didn't let Laurie forget that incident for a long time, and whenever we got into a game together I'd rave at her about it. She apologized after. She didn't mean it in that way: "The only way you can make it here is playing games. It's worked for other people." She'd decided she wanted to do something for herself and had gone into Synanon wholly accepting whatever they said. I guess she was right. I guess that's the way. With my background and at my age I wasn't able to go along with anything or anybody that much, but I finally forgave her.
The day we got permission to be in a relationship Laurie and I had lunch together in the club. In order to get down you had to make an appointment through the woman who was in charge of the guestrooms. The guestrooms were in the club. We ran into this woman. I asked her, "Do you have anything right away?" She said, "Well, usually you have to hand in your request on Sunday night. You get two times a week to start out, just two-hour sessions. Later