Straight Life - Art Pepper [84]
One day a week, sometimes twice a week, we'd play in the women's section. These were the wives and daughters of people in the coast guard. A lot of the women, I was told, had syphilis, cases that had progressed to the stage where, when they were finally aware of the fact that they had it, it was beyond cure. The nurses and doctors said that in the end the patients got to the point where they would have to be locked in a cell, to die there a horrible death, writhing and beating themselves against the padded cell, ripping at their bodies.
We'd play for these women and it was sad in actuality, when you look back at it, but at the time it seemed very funny. There was one woman, about twenty-eight, and I noticed that if you looked at her, she'd get excited; she'd really get frantic. So I'd be playing and she'd be standing, her left hand grabbing at her stomach, bunching up her robe, and I'd stare at her, and the longer I looked ... She'd start shaking all over; she'd stamp her feet; she'd start screaming and calling me names: "You son-ofa-bitch!" And then I'd stop, but I couldn't help doing it again and again. There was another girl. She had long, black hair, and I guess at one time she was sort of pretty, but she was really wasted. This girl would lie on a couch while we played. Once while I was playing I happened to look over at her, and I noticed she was staring at me. I looked away. I played. I looked back again, and I saw her glance around to see where the nurse was. When she saw that the nurse wasn't looking, she took her robe and opened it up, and she had nothing on underneath. There she was, just lying there with the robe pulled back and her legs spread. She was looking at me and I was looking at her and then all of a sudden she closed the robe. She'd keep opening it and closing it, and a couple of times the nurse saw her and made her stop.
I started taking nutmeg. They had tunnel crews that cleaned at 2, 3, 4 A.M., when all the action stopped. They'd wash down the tunnels with big hoses and scrub them because the mental patients would urinate against the walls and sometimes shit on the sides. These guys brought papers of nutmeg and mace smuggled in by the guards, and I took it because it was very difficult to get anything else.
They sold it in penny matchboxes; one box cost four packs of cigarettes. You'd put it in a glass with hot water and stir it up. It wouldn't dissolve: it would kind of float around. It was very hard to drink. I gradually increased the amount I took and finally got up to four matchboxes a day. The guy would wake me at about four in the morning and give me the nutmeg. I'd get up, go to the bathroom, put it in my glass, get it down without gagging, and then go back to sleep. I'd wake up again at about 6:30 or seven, when they rang the bell, and by the time I was ready to go to breakfast the nutmeg was hitting me and I'd really be sailing. It makes you feel like exceptionally good pot; you giggle; you laugh; everything is insanely comical. I'd walk down the tunnel with another guy (we'd take it together), and we'd pass the mental patients walking with their eyes on the ground, dragging their feet. We'd pass the one that was praying and the other one counting the money, and we'd start laughing. Sometimes five or six of us would take it at once. We'd go to the mess hall and rush to the table. They'd have coffee on the table in a big pot, and it was really delicious. We'd put our trays down and sit, and by the time we'd finished one cup of coffee we'd be completely out of it, goofing around, acting crazy. That's at about seven o'clock in the morning. And I did this every day for about six months at one period. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself.
The nutmeg made you think about sex. The bad thing about Fort Worth-it was both good and