Straight Life - Art Pepper [90]
Patti and junior went on the road with Stan Kenton's band. It was a whole year once that Patricia didn't see either one of 'em. And kids, you know, can be so cruel to other children, and the other kids in the neighborhood would tell her, "You don't have any momma and poppa. You only have a grandma and grandpa." And, ohhhh, she'd cry and cry and cry. But I always made sure that she knew about 'em. I had a picture of each of them and at night when I'd put her to bed I'd say, "Now, you say goodnight to your momma and goodnight to your daddy." So she didn't forget them.
Patti finally stopped going on the road with junior. Kenton, he flew, but they sent the gang in an old bus, no heat, and no cooling system in the summertime. And they must have been going over some awfully rough roads because Patti got a crack in her tailbone. She was sick for quite a while over that. Her doctor told her, "Now, don't you ever ride on that bus ever again.
That was when Patti went to work for Arlene's of Hollywood. Patricia stayed with us. Patti came down every weekend to see her, never missed a time, but she had to live in L.A. because that was where her job was and she had to work because she was determined that she was going to get enough money together to make a down payment on a house. She was just obsessed with a home of her own.
I remember Patti crying to me, saying she wished junior was a truck driver or anything but ... She wished that he had a job, a steady income, came home nights. I think they would have been ideally happy if he could've done that, but of course he couldn't. You can't put a musician in a position like that. One time when they was livin' in L.A. on Hope Street, when junior got out of the army, he did have a job in a meat-packing place. That was before he went with Kenton, and Patti's always said that that was the happiest time of their lives. He went to work in the morning and came home at night.
Poor Patricia was sick all the time, all the years that we had her. One time I was sure she was going to die. They had her in the contagious ward of the Children's Hospital: she had diphtheria. But when Patti took her, when they moved out to the valley, she stopped getting sick. The doctor told Patti it was the climate in Long Beach that didn't agree with her. Now, we didn't know that.
But that was a heartbreaking thing. When Junior and Patti got their house and moved to the valley and Daddy and I went to see them-of course, to us, Patricia was our little girl, our child. When you take care of a kid for that long, they become just like your own. Poor little thing. She'd get her little suitcase, she'd put some things in there, and she'd say, "I'm ready to go home!" Well, of course, we couldn't take her. And when our car'd start off, well, she'd follow the car, you know, running out in the middle of the street with her suitcase, just a-screamin' and a-bawling her eyes out. Hollerin' at the top of her lungs. Ohhhh. It got so bad, we stopped going. We knew if we stayed away she would realize that that's where she belonged. It was a couple of years before we could even take her home. It was too hard for her and too hard for us.
Millie [Art's mother] was the one who suspected that junior was using drugs because she's the one that told us about it. So the first thing Daddy did, he went to somebody he knew, a lawyer or somebody, to ask how he could help junior, and the lawyer was the one that suggested we put him in that sanitarium over in Garden Grove. So that's where we put him. For a month. But it didn't do no good.
Daddy was just devastated when he