Straight Life - Art Pepper [7]
Nuevo was a country hamlet. Children should enjoy places like that, but I was so preoccupied with the city and with people, with wanting to be loved and trying to find out why other people were loved and I wasn't, that I couldn't stand the country because there was nothing to see. I couldn't find out any thing there. Still, to this day, when I'm in the country I feel this loneliness. You come face to face with a reality that's so terrible. This was a little farm out in the wilderness. There was my grandmother and this old guy, her second husband, I think. I don't even remember him he was so inconsequential. And there was the wind blowing.
It was a duty for my grandmother. My father told her he would pay her so much for taking care of me; she would never have to worry-he always worked and she knew he would keep his word. I think she was afraid of him, too, for what she had done to him. For what she had allowed to be done to him when he was a child.
My grandmother was a dumpy woman, strong, unintelligent. She knew no answers to any problems I might have or anything to do with academic type things. She was one of those old-stock peasant women. I never saw her in anything but long cotton stockings and long dresses with layers of underclothing. I never saw her any way but totally clothed. When she went to the bathroom she locked the door with a key. Anything having to do with the body, bodily functions, was nasty and dirty and you had to hide away. I don't know what her feelings were. She never showed them. She had a cat that she gave affection to but none to me. I grew to hate the cat. My grandmother was-she was just nothing. There was no communication. Whenever I tried to share anything at all with her she would say, "Oh, Junior, don't be silly!" Or, "Don't be a baby!" I had a few clothes and a bed, a bed away from her, a bed alone in a room I was scared to death in. I was afraid of the dark.
I was afraid of everything. Clouds scared me: it was as if they were living things that were going to harm me. Lightning and thunder frightened me beyond words. But when it was beautiful and sunny out my feelings were even more horrible because there was nothing in it for me. At least when it was thundering or when there were black clouds I had something I could put my fears and loneliness to and think that I was afraid because of the clouds.
We moved from Nuevo to Los Angeles and then to San Pedro, and during the time of the move to L.A. the old guy disappeared. I guess he died. My parents separated and they came to see me on rare occasions. My mother came when she was drunk. My father always brought money, and every now and then he'd spend the night. When he came I'd want to reach him, try to say something to him to get some affection, but he was so closed off there was no way to get through. I admired him, and I thought of him as being a real man's man. And I really loved him.
My father was trim, real trim. He had a slender, swimmer's body. He had blue eyes, blonde hair. He had a cleft in his chin. He had a halting, faltering voice, but pleasant sounding, and a way about him that commanded respect. He'd been a union organizer and a strike leader on the waterfront, and he had a bearing. People listened to him. I nicknamed him "Moses" because I felt he had that stature, that strength, and soon everybody in the family was calling him that.
My father was tall, he was strong, and I felt he thought I was a sissy or something. I abhorred violence, but in order to try to win his love I'd go to school and purposely start fights. I fought like a madman so I could tell him about it and show him if I had a black eye or a cut lip,