Straight Life - Art Pepper [70]
7
Busted
1952-1953
THE POINT was whether I really wanted to do it or not. A month at the sanitarium cost two thousand dollars, and there was no sense in spending all that money if I was just going to come out and start using again. But I felt I wanted to stop. I was hoping I felt that-way.-
My dad phoned the sanitarium and they told him I should go and stay with him so they would know exactly how much I was shooting a day. He put his house in mortgage and took his money out of the bank. He bought dope for me. I'd make a phone call to East L.A. and line it up, and he and my stepmother would drive me to score. We. did this for three days. Then they made the appointment for me to go into the sanitarium.
Before I left, my dad got a hammer and we all went into the kitchen. Patti was there. He handed me the hammer and told me to do it right. It was like a ceremony. I broke the outfit into a million pieces and took the pieces into the backyard and threw them as far as I could. I felt that I'd be able to make it with my dad behind me.
When I got to the sanitarium I was already sick. They got me into bed and took the standard tests, and then the doctor came in with the nurse and talked to me for a while. Heroin isn't like drugstore dope: you never know what you're getting. He tried to estimate how much I'd been taking a day but he couldn't do that, so he said, "I'll send the nurse back with a shot of morphine and after you get the effects of it, call for her and let her know how you feel, if it takes away the sickness, because I don't want you to be uncomfortable." The nurse came back with a syringe and injected the morphine under my skin instead of into the vein. (Later on I tried to get her to let me fix myself in the vein, but she wouldn't do it.)
The morphine helped me quite a bit but I still felt bad. So I called the nurse and told her to get the doctor; I was still sick. She came back with another shot of morphine. They set the dosage at a certain point and keep it there for four days, and then they gradually decrease it. You get a shot every four hours. After the second shot I felt just fine but I told the doctor that I was still sick and got another shot, and after that I said, "I still don't feel comfortable." He said, "Well, I don't understand it, but alright, we'll give you one more shot." By this time I was just wasted. I was sailing. So I finally told them that I felt okay. I could make it. Hahahaha! I could stand the pain.
The next day they put me in a whirlpool bath and a guy gave me a massage, the most beautiful massage I've ever had-he was an artist. Here I was in this gorgeous room, comparable to any hotel I'd ever stayed in; I had my own private patio with flowers and lawn and birds chirping; and every four hours this pretty nurse would come in and give me an enormous shot of morphine. And I was just blind: I tripped out and sang to myself and made funny noises and looked at myself in the mirror. I stood in the bathroom for hours looking at myself and giggling, saying, "Boy, what a handsome devil you are!" I had a beautiful body. I'd get in the shower and bathe and get out and take the hand mirror and put it on the floor and look at my body from the floor. I'd look at my rear end and the bottom of my balls and the bottom of my joint, and I would play with myself until I got a hard-on and then gaze into this mirror and say, "What a gorgeous thing you are!"
I mentioned that as a child I used to play a lot alone. I loved sports and I made up a baseball game that I played with dice, and I never played it with anybody. I'd choose the names of the best players and roll the dice to make up fantasy teams, six or eight teams in the league. I would make up names like the New York Bombers, the Philadelphia Penguins. I had a typewriter that my mother's husband, Whit, had bought me, and I'd type up a sheet for each team listing all the players including pinch