Straight Life (48 page)

The detective said, "I'm going to explain something." He hooks the machine on to me so when I answer a question they can tell by my heartbeat and perspiration the emotions the questions are evoking. If I tell a lie the dials register it. He said, "Just to show you that we don't want to trick you I'm going to read the whole thing to you before you start the test." This is the most diabolic part of all. I didn't realize it at the time. He said, "I'm going to start out by asking you your name." And he told me all the things that would be asked of me in the order they were going to be asked. When he finished he said, "Just to make sure there's no question about it, I'm going to run through it again." One of the questions was "Do you have knowledge of the burglary that took place at so-and-so?" And after that, "What was your mother's maiden name?" And then, "Do you own a dog?" Then, "Did you ever see a check protector?" And, "Do you know a person by the name of Arnold Samsa?" He would go back and forth like that, and because he went through it twice I knew the exact order of the questions he was going to ask. So when he asked me, "What did you have for lunch?" I knew the next question would be "Have you ever seen anyone forging the checks in question or forging a signature on the checks in question?" I could feel my whole body moving and vibrating, the blood pumping through my veins, the sweat forming on my forehead and underneath my arms; my voice sounded strange to me. There was no way I could control all that. Then we went through it again. By this time I knew every question. Three questions before, I knew when he was going to ask the real question, and I could feel myself getting excited. My mouth got dry. All these things were measured, and they were adead giveaway I knew something.

When I finished, the detective didn't say anything. The parole officer didn't say anything. They sent me back to my cell and left me there for three more days with no word. At last they called me out, and my parole officer said, "The test shows exactly what I figured. You know something about the checks. It's up to you." He said, "Do you want to talk about it?" I said, "There's nothing to talk about. I have nothing to say." They sent me back to my cell. I stayed for three more days. Then they came and interrogated me. I said, "I'd love to help you out, but I don't know anything at all. If you're going to send me to jail, send me to jail. I can't help you."

They released me. I called Diane to come and get me. I've got a big beard. I haven't shaved in nine days. We go to the house, the same apartment, and I don't know if the police are outside or what, and Diane goes to a drawer and pulls out a condom of stuff and an outfit! Here she is, as if she's got a legal pass to do all this shit! But I'm dirty and miserable and here's some heroin, the only thing that's friendly and warm and good. So I fixed. Then I went into the living room and, just as a formality, I kind of glanced around the pad. I happened to look behind the couch and here it was again! I couldn't believe it. I could not believe it. The check protector and this big book of checks. I just couldn't believe it, man.

I told Diane and I told Arnold-I got this Arnold over there-I said, "Take this fuckin' thing out of here!" I told Diane, "If that's what you want you can go with the machine and the checks and just get the fuck out!" She said, "Well, this is my place!" I said, "Alright, fuck you! I'll get out!" And then she said, "Ohhhh! Noooooo! Art!" And she started whining. Finally Arnold took it away.

We stayed in Glendale. We had all these groceries. We had nothing, really, just all this nonsense, and finally it went. I was on the Nalline program again, killing myself trying to beat the tests, and we didn't have a car. I was riding the bus to East L.A. to score. Finally I hung up everything-the Nalline program, my parole-and so we had to move. I had to hide again. We moved in with a relative of Diane's, an aunt; Diane's mother was staying there, too. I remember walking the streets, picking up cigarette butts. I'd work occasionally, and every penny I made we spent on dope and cough syrup.

Finally a guy offered me a job at a jazz club out in Orange County. I was afraid to take it, but the money was very good and I felt that even though I'd hung up my parole they wouldn't look for me that close. I told the guy I'd work the job if he didn't advertise in the paper. I told him he could put my name on the club. I got a kid I was giving lessons to to drive us out there. Diane hadn't heard me play in a long time and she wanted to come along. As we approached the club I got a feeling, a premonition, that something bad was going to happen. I told the kid, "I'm afraid to have Diane in the club. We know some people out here in Orange County. Please drop her at their house, where she'll be safe. Then you can come back." I told Diane, "Just before the job ends give me a call at the club and I'll tell you if everything's okay. Our friends can bring you over." I had the kid drop me a block and a half from the club. I walked. I had my alto case in my hand, and I saw they had my name out front, which I'd said they could do. I didn't know this: the owner had also put an ad in the Orange County papers.

I went into this club still very nervous. I had quite a few drinks, and then I got up on the stand with the rhythm section and started to play. I had been playing for almost an hour and it was time to take an intermission, when a waitress came up to me. She motioned to me while the piano player was taking a solo. I bent down, and she said, "There's fuzz in this place. I think they're after you." I said, "Is there any way out of here?" She said, "No, the back is padlocked. There's only the front door." Isaid, "Well, bring me a drink, a big one."

She brought the drink, and I remember playing. I played beautifully, and the people loved it. I really reached them. I played "Everything Happens to Me." I stayed on the stand, and the guys were looking at me. They didn't say anything, but we'd been up there for about an hour and a half. I realized there was no way out. Even if I stayed on the stand the whole night the cops would grab me, but I figured I'd play as long as I could and give the people their money's worth-so I'd have something to remember and they'd have something to remember me by. At last I announced the intermission. I introduced the guys in the band and told the people, "It's beautiful playing for you. You're a marvelous audience." Then I said, "It's just a shame that all of you aren't like most of you are." I started talking in circles. I was rapping to the people, and I think they saw some of the sadness I felt. I put my horn down, and turned to the guys, and I said, "Yeah, it was a great set. Thank you." And the minute I left the stand a guy walked up to me and said, "Please follow me. I'ma police officer."

I knew I had no chance. I walked outside, and the guy said, "Alright. Up against the wall." I said, "Ohhhh, man, why don't we get away from this club?" He yelled, "Against the wall!" So here's the front of the club, my name in big letters, and me against the sign getting shook down. "I have a warrant for your arrest. We have an APB out for you. Parole violation." They handcuffed me. All the people were out there watching and I felt that they were really with me. Some of them said, "Is there anything we can do?" It was a touching thing, but these cops couldn't have cared less. "Alright! Come on!" They threw me in the car. I was glad Diane hadn't come along. She'd had an outfit in her purse. They asked me, "Where's your old lady? How'd you get here?" I told them I'd hitchhiked. They said, "Yeah, sure." This kid I'd come with was practically crying. He came up to the police car and I said, "If you ever run into my old lady, tell her goodbye for me."

18

San Quentin: Tattoos

1965 - 1966

THEY TOOK ME to the Orange County jail, and finally word came back from the parole department: "You've been violated. You'll be taking the chain back to San Quentin as soon as the bus is ready." And I said, "Oh, that's great. That's just great-."

It was at this point I thought, "Well, man, I am a criminal." See, now, when I was a kid I read books about murders, mystery stories, detective stories. I saw all the movies about the "Big House." I loved things like that and I would have been happy to be a criminal until I saw the people who really were criminals: most of them were dumb and stupid and stank. But there were a few that were sharp and hep, and every now and then I'd see some real armed robber and I'd think, "Well, what do I like about this guy?" I thought, "I've got to make myself the kind of convict I like, a hep convict. I want to be proud of myself." I'd look at him and see that he had tattoos-a skull and "Hate" and "Death to All."

A Mexican guy I knew in the Orange County jail was good at tattooing, so I asked him to give me one. He said, "Man, are you kidding? You've been in the joint twice and you're going to get a tattoo now?" He said, "Look at me." He had tattoos all over. "I'd give anything in the world if I hadn't started putting these things on." I said, "No, no, don't talk me out of it."

He had a bunch of pictures that he'd drawn, and I could choose one. I saw a pretty one of flowers with a place to put a name, and I said, "Let me have that one." He said, "I'll put your old lady's name there. What's your old lady's name?" I said, "Diane, but, wow, I don't want her name there." He said, "Oh, it doesn't matter. Once you start you'll have a million of them." He had to get a needle and some ink smuggled in, and we had to hide and point for the bulls, and it hurt bad, but he finally got it on, and it looked beautiful. Georgeous, Every time I took my shirt off I'd stand and gaze at myself in the mirror, and it really knocked me out. I didn't want to wear a shirt anymore. I started walking around in an undershirt.

One day I noticed that the tattoo had started to fade, and I asked the guy what was happening. He said, "Oh, man, that's the trouble. Sometimes they give you India ink and it's not pure. I think I got burned, man. They gave me watered ink." It kept fading and fading, and I said, "What am I going to do?" The guy said, "All I can do is put it on again." I said, "Jesus, man, it hurts so bad." He says, "Well, you wanted a tattoo." So I said okay, and he put the whole thing on again, and it took ages, but it looked beautiful. And then it started fading again. He said, "Well, the guy burned me again, the son-of-a-bitch, man! He burned me again, and after all I've done for that asshole, man! Well, all we can do is put it on again, or it'll fade out completely." I had gone through such pain, I couldn't stop now. He put the whole thing on again, and it looked beautiful again, and to this day you can't see it. Right now you can't even see it. For a while, though, it looked great.

They took me back to San Quentin and that was my thing, to get tattoos. I'd see guys I'd known before and they'd say, "Oh, man, what's that?" I'd say, "I'm going to be covered with 'em. I'm not going to have an empty spot on my body. I'm gonna be a real gangster." I kept looking around for guys that did tattooing. One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He'd take them into a cave and ball them, and then the women would disappear. They'd never find them again. I had Pan put on my left forearm, and then-I've always liked Peanuts-a guy put Snoopy and Linus inside my left forearm. I got the smiling and the sad masks on my right forearm. On my right bicep I got a Chinese skull, with a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a drawing of Dracula, and it was going to be on my right arm over my vein. The mouth would be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could say, "Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He's hungry, jack!" You know. "Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man's hungry. He needs some blood!" But I got out before I could get it, and I always wanted that one.

One day I was sitting out in the yard. I was taking black-andwhites, which were easy to get, and I'd finally succumbed to the lowest and most dangerous thing to do in prison, which is sniffing glue. It causes you to hallucinate, it's bad for you physically, it's bad for your mind, and it's degrading. I got with a guy named Sleepy, and I was sniffing glue with him. You could buy a bottle of white shoe glue for four packs of cigarettes, which is cheap. You take a towel and cut it up into strips and pour the glue onto a strip and roll it up in your hand; then you cup your hand, put your fist to your mouth and suck in hard two or three times, and your ears start ringing.

So me and Sleepy were sitting out on the yard sniffing glue, hunched over, with our knees up, when a guy came up to me and said, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" I said yeah, and he said, "There's a friend of mine wants to talk to you, has eyes for you. She, er, he likes you. He's been watching you." I didn't know what to say. I told the guy, "Well, I'm not, I don't play any of that homosexual thing." He said, "Well, why don't you talk to him? He could do you a lot of good and he could also be a bad enemy." I knew from hearing people talk that there were some dangerous homosexuals in prison, and I knew the names of these guys, so I said, "Well, who is it?" The guy-I could tell he was a little swishy himself-said, "Mandy." And I thought, "Oh, my God, Mandy!" I'd heard stories about this guy. He was a white guy, nice looking with cold, blue eyes. He was well known in prison, dangerous. It was rumored that he'd killed two or three people and stabbed several others; he was considered insane. My first reaction was to tell the guy no, there's nothing happening, but when I heard the name I thought I'd better be careful. I told the guy, "Yeah, well, I'll talk to him." He said, "He's waiting for you down in the lower yard."

Sleepy had heard the whole thing. He said, "Man, I'd give anything in the world if that cat sounded me! Oh, man, he's a clean guy. He's, like, a nice-looking guy." This Sleepy had done more time than me for longer periods, and he'd only fallen into sniffing glue recently, but he'd been pretty sharp as a hustler in the joint. He knew all the people and all the angles. He said, "Man, I would give anything!" I said, "Yeah, but I'm not a homosexual. I don't dig them." He said, "What's the difference? Just close your eyes. All he wants to do is suck on your joint, man. All you gotta do is close your eyes and think of some beautiful girl, man, and just for that little thing, this guy will really take care of you. You won't have to sniff glue. Whatever's around he'll get it for you. He'll get you food, good clothes, cigarettes, coffee, all the best. And nobody'll mess with you because she'll let everybody know that you're her man. They'll have to answer to her, and they're really afraid of her. I'd give my right arm if she'd hit on me. You've got the chance of a lifetime!" I said, "I can't make it, man." And Sleepy said, "Well, be careful then. Don't offend her."

I get downstairs. I'm nervous. I don't know what I'm going to do. I walk down the same stairway I'd walked down my first day in Quentin with Little Ernie when we saw the guy with blood pouring out of his stomach. I'm tripping out about all the things I've been through in San Quentin. I look up, there's a guard on the walkway looking down at me. If I make a wrong move he'll kill me. I'm going to meet a fruiter that digs me, and I don't want to incur the wrath of this fruiter or I may get killed by him. I get down to the lower yard, and here are all the Black Muslims on the football field going through their exercises to get strong so they can kill all the whites. And here's Mandy.

I go over to him. The other guy, the messenger, stands off a little ways like a bodyguard. Mandy says, "Hi, Art." I say, "Hello, Mandy." His eyes are cold as death. He's dressed perfectly. He's got nice shoes, almost impossible to get, and they're shined. He's spotlessly clean. He smiles. He really looks deranged. He says, "Let's walk over here." We sit down on the lawn and he says, "Look at these black motherfuckers." He says, "One of these days, I'd like to form a group and wipe 'em out. Kill 'em all. Aren't they ridiculous! Look at that monkeylooking motherfucker!" He's raging and his eyes are beaming with lust for the violence he's going to perpetrate on the black people. "But," he says, "That can wait till later. That's something for the future I'm working on." Here's these white maniacs hating the blacks, and the blacks practicing and training to kill all the whites, and the Mexicans are standing there silent. I'm thinking, "What's going to happen one of these days when all this stuff comes to a head? What's going to happen to this country?" Mandy says, "Maybe they haven't been walking over here. I don't want to sit anyplace that they've been near, those stinkin', yella-teeth motherfuckers, big, black niggers!" We're sitting on the grass, and I look up, and from the lower yard you can see Mount Tamalpais. It's close, and there are beautiful homes on it. Little wispy clouds are floating across the sky, and the sky is blue. I'm looking at the mountain, and then my eyes drop back into prison, and I see the walls and the guards with their rifles and all these people full of hate. And then I look at this madman sitting here, going to tell me that he loves me.

Mandy says, "I've been watching you. Even when you were here last time. At that time I had an old man and I was in love with him, but I kept looking at you, and you really move me." He had never been out. I'd been out and come back. I think he'd killed a couple of people in an armed robbery. He said, Now, things are different." His old man had gone home. "I like the way you carry yourself and I don't like to see you sniffing glue. You deserve better than that. You've got too much class to be doing that. I like you. You're clean and neat and you're talented. Whenever you play out in the yard I sit in the distance and listen and watch you. You're wonderful. I really care for you. If you could feel the same way you'd never have to worry about a thing. Clothes-look at the way I'm dressed." It was the epitome of dress in the joint. He says, "Dope-when anything comes in I'll go to 'em and jack 'em up and get part of it or else. Every night in your cell, until I can arrange to move you into my cell, every night you'll be delivered steak sandwiches. Anything you want. Canteen. From now on, if you have eyes, you won't have to draw any money anymore. Just take whatever money you got and keep it. Save it for when you get out. You won't have to worry about a thing-cigarettes, coffee, chucholucos. Anything you want you've got. And if anybody ever messes with you, or if there's somebody you don't like, tell me and I'll take care of them. That's it, man. I just want someone to be close to and someone to love."

Most of the guys in the joint go for whatever situation they're in. That's how they conduct themselves. I'd asked a lot of guys how they could make that scene and they said, "Well, it's just something you do while you're here, and then when you get out it's different." But I couldn't do it. I just could not do it. I've seen three or four guys get some cigarettes together and pay them to a fruiter; they meet someplace and he gives them each head and they don't see anything wrong with it. But I couldn't do it. It would have been much easier if I could. I looked at Mandy and I said, "Man, I'm sorry. If I made that scene you'd be the one I'd want more than anyone else, but I've just never made that scene, and I can't do it. I can't do it." He said, "Well, let's be friends and we'll see what happens."

I got away from him and I got nervous. I talked to some friends of mine. I talked to Frank Ortiz. He said, "Man, watch out for that cat because if you accept anything from him you'll put yourself in a position-he might think you led him on." And right away Mandy started offering me things, so I told him no, that I couldn't take them because it wasn't right. He got drug, and he got hurt, but then he said, "I appreciate your honesty. We could have had a ball. But I can't rank you for being honest, and I admire you for not trying to take advantage of me and get something for nothing." And from then on we were friends.

I finally quit the glue sniffing, but I kept taking black-andwhites. I'd take sixteen or eighteen of them every morning in my cell with my coffee. With black-and-whites you lose your equilibrium. You fall down and run into things. There were three or four of us who'd been taking them, hanging out together. One day I was sitting with these guys on the yard, sitting on one of the domino tables, and I dropped my cigarette. I went to pick it up. I bent down and fell off the table. I cut my head and got all bloody. When blood is drawn it's a serious thing. The guards think you've killed somebody or somebody's shanked you, so my friends stood around me while one of them got a wel rag and cleaned my forehead. I'm goofing around, and right away I fall off the table again and hit my head in the same place. Now, they get a guy to sneak in the hospital and get some bandages to stop the bleeding. That night we're all lined up to go into our cells. I get into line, and we round a little bend. I go to take a step and I step too high. I fall back, hitting my head on the cement. The guards rush out and grab me and take me to the hospital. They interrogate me. Finally they put me back in my cell. The next morning walking out of my cell on the fourth tier, I walked straight out and smashed into a bar. If I hadn't hit the bar I would have fallen over and killed myself. The guards took me to Fourposts. They interrogated me again. They had had a lot of reports about me. They took my blues and put some old, beat clothes on me and walked me to the adjustment center.