Straight Life - Art Pepper [94]
(Hersh Hamel) After Art had been in jail a couple of times, Patti flew the coop. We were close during all those years. He had another old lady for a while-Didi, the hairdresser. I knew all his old ladies. Didi was not really a good-looking woman. She was sort of chubby. She loved Art. Art was still a beautiful man, features and body. Didi just took care of him, didn't let him do anything himself, which wasn't very good for him. All Art liked to do was lay back and get stoned and watch TV and go play when he wanted to play. That period was a little strange. I think that was in between some jail ... And he took a bust for her. He wouldn't cop out on Didi. That's the way that went.
I HAD a federal parole hold, but they don't tell you until you get out whether you're going to be reinstated on parole or whether you're going to have to do more time for your violation. I knew I was going to be in the county jail for about six months.
They put me in 11-B-1. That was the white hype tank at that time. They'd changed it from 12-B-1 because the women had been right above on the thirteenth floor, and guys would talk to the chicks through the air vents. Guys would holler up and say, "There's a little broad up there named Louise; she just came in; this is her old man, Richie. Call her to the phone." And some chick would go call her to that particular cell, and they'd run their cases. "I ran this story to them-did you cop out?" Aside from that guys would just flirt with chicks, "Yeah, baby, I'm Soand-so. I'm getting out on bail soon. What's happening with you?" "I'm waiting to get out on bail, too." "Well, where do you hang out at? Why don't we get together?"
They'd line things up. Maybe the chick's a hustler, or they can pull some robberies together, or maybe it's just the contact, talking to a chick, because you get very horny when you get clean. There were water pipes going from floor to floor, and they dug out the hole around the pipes, so there was a spot where a chick could send down a note on a string. The chick would take a piece of paper, rub it around her cunt, pull out some pubic hairs, fold them up in this paper, and send it down. Then the guy would get it and smell it and talk to the chick on the phone, you know, "I got your paper; you sure smell good. Boy, I sure wish I could be lickin' on you now." And he would jerk off at night with the paper, and the guys would pass it around.
In order to stop all that, the bulls moved the hypes from the twelfth floor to the eleventh floor and onto the twelfth floor they moved the regular convicts who were nothing, just regular . people in for traffic violations. They might have some armed robbers in there but no dopefiends, and the dopefiends were the ones that were the hustlers, the people that were playing at being gangsters and real hep and all that. When I went back to the county jail I noticed that on my legal status they'd stamped 11-B-1, and I said to the first officer I could find, "Man, what's happening? I'm a dopefiend. I want to go to the hype tank." He said, "That is the hype tank. We moved you assholes so you wouldn't be fuckin' around with the broads upstairs." I said, "Well, that's okay then." I just wanted to be sure I was with the dopefiends so that if any action came down I'd be with people that were cool. People that were like me.
I went through the thing of saying hello to everybody, bull shitting with everybody, and I got word that people were hollering about integration. That was in '54, '55. The guys had said, "Never, man! Never! We're never going to have any spooks or greasers in our cells." The Mexicans had their own tank and the blacks had their own tank. But you never called them black then. You respectfully called them colored or suedes. If you called