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By Root 1508 0

and lay them on me for nothing. And he's the one that told me, "You're getting that rep of being a loner and kind of flippy, and that's a good front to have because you gotta have a front in jail so nobody'll mess with you. People'll leave you alone. They won't try to steal your commissary or fuck you in the ass or use you or rob you or kill you. They won't bother you because a nut-there's no telling what a nut might do." So I'd make my noises and stare into space, and when I was eating I'd let the food fall out of my mouth onto my clothes. And I noticed people, like, "Wow! Dig that cat! Boy, that Pepper, man, that musician! Isn't that that musician? Boy, that cat is way out! Dig him, dig him. Dig! Boy, he's really strange. Is he jivin' or is he for real?" And Myaki would run me stories about guys coming to him saying, "Hey, man, you're a friend of that guy, that Pepper, man. What is that? Is he kidding around or ... ?" And Myaki would say, "Ohhhh, I don't know, man, We're friends, but he's kinda ... He's told me some strange things. I get kinda leery. I get kinda scared sometimes. I think he's got a lotta violence in him, man. He's a weird cat, a weird cat."

One day they called my name and said, "You have a visitor." I ran to my cell and got cleaned up as well as I could. I walked into the visiting room and there was Patti and Thelma and my daughter, Patricia. She was ten years old, and she saw the whole thing-me being brought in by guards, a terrible per son who had to be locked away, who must be evil because he couldn't be let out with the other people. And I felt that Patti did that purposely so she would have something to back up her degrading remarks about me. I felt so awful when I saw them that I cried. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I looked at Thelma and thought, "Couldn't you stop them?" And she looked at me and started crying, as if she knew what I was feeling.

The time in Terminal Island was very strange; it was a strange prison; there wasn't too much happening there so it was "hard time." Unlike Fort Worth. And the worst thing was ... Every now and then I'd be in the yard or in my cell and I'd hear the fog horn. In San Pedro, at Point Fermin, there's a fog horn that goes "Booooohhh-ooooooohhh." I used to hear it as a child. I used to lie at night and listen to it. Now I heard the same fog horn in prison, and I relived all my childhood over and over, and it was a terrible, terrible three hundred and fourteen days. And when the time came to get out, I thought, "Oh, man, I don't ever want to go back to prison again." I got out and got a room in Hollywood, a little room on Yucca, right off Hollywood Boulevard.

The first night I was out, you know, I wanted a woman. I went to jazz City, which was on Hollywood Boulevard right off Western. There was a girl there, a waitress, and I knew she had eyes to ball me. I went to the club, and she wasn't there, and I didn't have any money to be hanging around. I talked to a girl I knew who'd worked there for years. She probably would have made love to me just to give me relief, but I didn't care for her sexually. Then while I was sitting I noticed another waitress, one I'd never seen before. She was an Oriental-looking chick. She kept glancing at me as she walked by. And when they went to their stations, to the bar to get their drinks, I noticed that she and the other girl were talking together and I saw them motion toward me. Finally, the girl I knew said, "There's one of the waitresses that would like to meet you." She brought her over and said, "Diane, meet Art-Pepper. This is Diane."

- -- - - - -- - - - -- - I said hello, and she said hello, and a little later she walked over and said, "Would you like a drink?" I said, "I don't have much bread." She said, "I know that." She said, "What would you like?" I asked for a screwdriver and she brought me one, and from then on she kept dropping off drinks for nothing. She asked me, "Would you like to go and have some coffee after? If you can stick around until I get off ... " She took care of her checks, and then