Straight Life (56 page)

They put me in the hospital. The next morning, at about five o'clock, I heard a bell ring and I found I was strapped down. , looked around and I saw people, but they weren't like the people from before in the hospital. These people were nuts! I was in the nuthouse! An aide came by. I said, "What's going on? What am I doing here?" He just gave me one of those looks and walked on. I yelled, "There's nothing wrong with me, man! I'm just sick! I'm supposed to be in the medical part! I'm not crazy! All these people are crazy! I'm not crazy! What are they doing?"

Finally they took the straps off. They made us get up and wash our teeth. They stood there and watched, helped some of them wash their faces. Then we lined up in the medication line. People were doing all kinds of weird little things-giggling, moaning, doing little dance steps, talking gibberish, bowing, and howling like dogs. I get up to the medication window and I say, "There must be some mistake. They put me in the wrong place. My name's Arthur Pepper. I don't belong here." But the guy says, "Oh yes, Mr. Pepper. Here's your name. Right here. Here's your chart. Here's your medication. Here it is. Right here." I say, "Well, it's a mistake. I'm not crazy. I'm cool. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm just a little rundown, that's all. Physically rundown. I shouldn't be here." He said, "Well, you'll have to talk to your doctor about that." He gave me my medication, and pretty soon I wasn't feeling any pain.

I was there for about three weeks. You get up early in the morning. It's still dark out. A bell rings, and you go to the bathroom, and when you finish with the bathroom they put you in the hallway and lock the iron gate. You get your medication, and then they put you in the dayroom. You go from there to eat your meal and then back again to the dayroom. March to your meal. Back to the dayroom. March to your meal. Back to the dayroom. Then they line you up for medication, open the gate, and shuffle you off to bed.

I spent two or three days just looking at people as if I was at a movie. I thought, "Boy, these cats are sure far-out." They weren't as far-out as the people I saw at Fort Worth, but they were pretty crazy. The third day I was sitting in the dayroom when one of the aides came over to me and said, "Would you like to play some dominoes? Some of the fellows are trying to get a domino game together." I looked at him. I thought he was joking. He was a black cat, and I thought he was just goofing on me. I said, "Yeahhhh! Hahaha!" He said, "No, man, there's some guys here-they want to get up a domino game-and I thought maybe you'd like to play." I said, "What guys?" I saw he was serious. I looked over and here were three guys. They were standing there with their heads drooped over, kind of slobbering on themselves. I looked at this aide, and I looked into his eyes and tried to search him out. I said, "You want me to play with them?" He said, "Well, I thought, maybe, if you guys would like to get together. It's good therapy for you, but if you don't feel up to it . . ." And I realized that he really thought that I ... he thought I was like them!

I had been there three days, and I thought it was only because I had to get a paper signed. I had to get this paper signed because I had to go into Synanon because I had no place else to go. But, I mean, as far as really belonging there . . . Before this incident I thought that I could talk to the doctors and the nurses and the aides because they knew I didn't belong there, but now I realized that they were only doing their jobs and, really, the staff and everybody thought I was some kind of a nut. I couldn't imagine how they could think that way. I told the guy, "No, I don't want to play dominoes."

I went into the bathroom. They have mirrors above the washbasins. I stood and looked at myself in the mirror. I opened my mouth. I closed my eyes and opened my eyes. I smiled. I said, "You're not crazy, are you?" I answered myself, "No, I'm not crazy. Are you?" And then I thought it was very amusing. It just seemed very amusing to me that I had finally found someone I could communicate with. I got a pleasant feeling. I said, "Well, what's the matter with these people? We're alright." And the face in the mirror said, "Yeah, we're alright. What's wrong?" I said, "Nothing's wrong now. Everything's cool." And I laughed and turned to the side and gave my best profile, and I raised my left eyebrow. I learned how to do that when I was a kid, to look sexy. I forget who it was-Victor Mature or somebody did it, and all the women liked it. You raise just the eyebrow.

After three weeks the doctor told me I was alright. They would let me out. The morning came, and they gave me a little sack with some cigarettes in it, a candy bar, a package of gum, a toothbrush, and some tranquilizers. I walked outside and sat on the lawn waiting for Christine to come pick me up, and here she comes in this ridiculous little Anglia. It was hard for me to get up and down because I was in such pain. I walked over to the car, and as soon as I saw her face I knew something was wrong. I looked from her face to the back seat, and there were my clothes. She said, "Where do you want to go? Art, I just can't take it anymore. Here's your stuff. Where do you want to go?" She got tears in her eyes. I said, "Oh, man, cut the tears, that's so ridiculous." I got in the car. I wouldn't have got in, but I couldn't walk. I couldn't do anything. I thought for a minute and I said, "Let's go to Les Koenig's."

We went to Contemporary Records. I said, "You don't have to go in with me." She said, "I want to make sure you're okay." I said, "Fuck you." There was nothing I could do. I could fight her or kill her or something, but I couldn't keep her from walking in with me. I asked the secretary, "May I see Les?" She gave me a funny look. She said, "Just a minute." But Les heard us talking and he said, "Art! Come-on-in!"

I walked into his office. Les looked at me, and I could tell from his face that I really looked bad. He said, "What's happening?" I said, "They let me out of the hospital. Christine and I are breaking up." I knew he didn't like Christine anyway. He said, "What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?" I said, "I need some money. Can you let me have some money?" He said, "Well, I want to do the right thing. I want to help you. I don't want to do anything that's going to hurt you." He meant that he didn't want to give me money to buy dope with. He said, "There's a motel up the street. I'll give them a call and find out if we can get you a room. I'll come and see you every day and pay your rent, give you money to eat with." He called the place, but there were no vacancies. I said, "I guess I can go out to the valley to my mother's and spend the night." He said, "Why don't you go over to your dad's? Why don't you go out there and recuperate and then come back?" Les knew I could do nothing the way I was. I said alright. I said, "Could I have a few dollars? Just money to get out there?" He couldn't refuse me so he gave me ten or fifteen dollars. I thanked him and told him I'd go to my mother's and get my dad to come pick me up.

We got back in the car. I told Christine, "If I was strong enough to take a bus and there was a bus that would go there I would take a bus to my mother's." She started driving. I told her, "Stop here." I went into a liquor store and bought a fifth of brandy.

My mother's house was in a beautiful little area. We pulled into the driveway with flowers and birds singing and all that. My mother wasn't home. The doors were locked. I went back to the car and said, "She's not there." All this time I'm drinking my bottle. Christine's crying. She says, "I wonder when she's coming back." I said, "Oh, man, fuck you! Leave!" She looked at me. I said, "Get the fuck out of here!" She said, "Okay, if that's what you want." She screeched out of the driveway and then she stopped and looked back. She shouted, "Fuck you, motherfucker!" She gave me the finger, and she roared away. You could hear the motor fade in the distance. Then the silence came back. And I felt like I did when I was a kid, when my mother would be out, drunk, with the door locked, and I'd be sitting on the porch waiting for her. I sat on the front porch of my mother's house. I was forty-four years old, and I was finished with life.

21

Synanon

1969

CHRISTINE had taken all the clothes and junk out of the car and thrown them on the porch. There they lay, all my worldly goods. That was it. That was me, sitting there with my bottle of brandy. It was funny, actually; I started laughing. That was me, the sum total of my life at this age.

I sat and waited, nipping off my bottle. I was really loaded by this time. I was mumbling and making noises. Then I hear a car in the driveway, and here she is, my mother. She looked all pleasant until she glanced over at the porch and saw me sitting there. What a sight I must have been. She made out my belongings in a heap and me hunched over like a grinning idiot with a bottle of brandy in my hand. She shook her head: "Oh, God, what has he done now? What's in store for me now?" I just sat there. I couldn't even get up. She parked the car and walked over and said, "Junior, what happened? What are you doing?" I said, "Well, I just came to visit." And I laughed. She said, "Oh, the landlady!" The landlady lived right in front. She said, "Oh, the landlady, the neighbors! Why don't you put that bottle away? You're not supposed to drink, are you?" I said, "Oh, later with the landlady!"

My mother had changed a lot over the years. She had found God. She had accepted Christ as her personal savior, and she'd stopped drinking and smoking. Since then she'd become badly crippled with arthritis. She said, "What happened? Where's Christine?" I said, "Christine's gone. She's gone. She's finished. She's gone. She left me here." My mother said, "Oh, junior, you can't stay here! You know that. We've tried that before. It won't work." I said, "Don't get upset! Don't start flipping out, ma! I know it isn't going to work. I'm not asking to stay with you. I'm not going to stay with you. I know you don't want me to stay with you. You'd rather have me lay in the gutter and die than have me stay with you!" She said, "You don't have to talk like that." I said, "Well, it's true, isn't it?" She said, "Oh, junior, please!"

I'd gone over there before-when I'd been hooked. I'd stay overnight now and then, and I'd burn things. When you're high on stuff you nod out and drop your cigarettes. She had a piano, and I'd put cigarettes down on the side of the piano and burn holes in the wood. And in her rugs. And in her couch. In things she couldn't replace. I said, "The only favor I want to ask you is if I could call my dad on your phone. Don't worry, I'm going to call collect. I'm not going to ask you for the price of a phone call." She said okay. She opened the door and she said, "You look terrible." I said, "I know I look terrible. I feel terrible." She said, "Bring that stuff in so the landlady won't see it." I said, "Fuck the landlady." She said, "Junior, watch your language, please." I said, "Oh, fuck the landlady and everybody else!" I took the junk I had and dragged it into the front room along with my bottle. I called my dad and he said, "Of course! You know you're always welcome here." My dad was sick. He had emphysema, and his eyes weren't good. He said, "Can I come up tomorrow and get you, so I can beat the traffic?" My dad and Thelma lived way out in Yucaipa. "If there's no other way, I'll make it out tonight." I said, "That's okay. You make sure and come tomorrow." I thanked him. I think I cried. He said, "Don't worry about anything. Well take care of you."

I hung up, and my mother said, "Ohhhh, couldn't he come tonight? Oh, I wish he could have come tonight." She said that three or four times. I said, "Boy, you're too fuckin' much. You're my mother and you don't even want me to stay here and I can't even walk!" She said, "You're just hopeless. We can't get along. Especially when you're in that condition. I thought you were going to Synanon. What happened there?" I got into an argument with her and started cussing her out. She kept on and on. I got madder and madder until I couldn't stand the thought of spending the night at her house. I couldn't imagine it. It became an obsessison to get out of there right then. I got on the phone and called Synanon, and they put me through to Greg Dykes. I told him what had happened. He kept talking me into it. Anything to get away from my mother. I said, "Is there any way that you could come get me?" He said, "No, it's against the rules. You have to get here yourself." I hit on my mother andanything to get me out of there-she got hold of Merle, her husband. He was working at a gas station. She asked him if he would drive me to Synanon. I told her to please call my dad. I realized it wasn't her fault. She was just afraid. She'd had such bad experiences with me.

I never thought that I would ever really go there. Merle agreed to drive me. He borrowed an old truck from the station, I grabbed my junk, and away we went. It was evening. I had a little bit of the juice left and on the way to Santa Monica I finished it and took the rest of the tranquilizers they'd given me at the VA. Merle didn't know where the place was. We stopped at a gas station and somebody told him, "Just go down Pico till you get to the ocean. Just go all the way as far as you can go." Finally I saw the big sign that said Synanon but one of the letters was gone-SYN NON-and I remember thinking of sin. It was a foreboding, old building made of brick. It looked like a gigantic YMCA or one of the old billets the army used to take over. We parked across the street. I'm looking at the place and I'm talking to Merle: "Jesus, I don't know, man. I don't think I can make this."

Merle was younger than me by about eight or nine years. He was tall, an oafish guy, but a nice guy. We'd always gotten along. He was kind of dumb, and one eye was messed up. He's one of those guys that bumps into walls and doors and things. But you couldn't blame Merle for anything. He'd had a terrible life. He used to sleep in people's garages. That's how my mother met him. He came and asked if he could mow the lawn and sleep in her lawn swing. She started feeding him and giving him little odd jobs. She felt sorry for him. Finally they got married.

Merle said, "You gotta do something, junior. It's useless with Moham. You can't stay there. You gotta do something. Maybe this'll be good for you." After being locked up for all those years, to put myself in a position like that voluntarily! Merle helped me. He opened the doors-big, glass, swinging doors-helped me inside up the little flight of stairs. There were people standing around and all kinds of activity going on. I heard people going upstairs and I -think Iheard music.

Merle went to the desk. Evidently the guy on the desk remembered me from before and the doctor at the VA had sent his OK. I saw them looking at me and whispering. Everybody was staring at me as if I was some wild animal that had wandered in. Merle talked, and I looked at the people. It was all I could do to stand without falling down. A couple of guys that looked like house detectives came over and said, "Sit down right here. It's okay. Just sit down. Everything'll be alright." I sat on the little bench, and I looked to my right. You could see an area going into an enormous room where there were lots of people walking back and forth. I noticed a blackboard with times and meetings posted on it. Somebody asked me if I'd like a cup of coffee. I said no. A guy came up to me: "Where's your stuff?" I said, "Oh, I got a suitcase in the car. I'll go get it." I got up off the bench and started to walk down the stairs and almost fell. I grabbed hold of the bannister, and the guy said, "No, no, no, we'll get it for you." I had the same feeling I'd had before. I just wanted to get out of there. I thought that once they got their hooks into me there was no telling what they might do. I was frightened. They didn't look like dopefiends to me. They weren't like me. They all talked like New Yorkers. They wouldn't let me get down the stairs.

Merle brought my suitcase. He said, "Well, I'm going." I said, "Wait! Wait!" They said, "No, no, you go." I said, "Wait outside for me!" People were looking at me. I didn't see anybody I knew. I didn't feel any feeling I liked. They walked me up the stairs and took me into the office, and there's Greg Dykes. They started asking me the same old questions. Did I have any money? Do I really want to do something for myself? I told them, "I don't have any place to go, man. I'm fucked up. I don't have any place to go." They told me just to go along with them and not worry about anything. They took me downstairs, and I had a chance to talk to Greg. He said, "Everything's alright. We're going to put you on the couch down here. It's just a procedure that everybody goes through, in case you get sick. We'll take care of you and you'll have somebody watching you around the clock. Don't get panicked and walk out. Just stay. We'll do everything we can to make you comfortable, outside of giving you medication. I'm sure glad, I can't tell you how happy I am, that you came here."

We walked into a gigantic room. I expected to see a globe with flashing lights like the old ballrooms had that I used to play in. There was an area that looked like a bar in the back, and I saw tables and people eating. On the right there were eight or ten big, high windows. It was a huge place. And there were couches and chairs and people sitting around, young people, old people. I asked Greg, "Who are all these people?" He said, "These are just the people that are here. These are Synanon people." They had great big couches, a whole bunch of them in lines. I saw somebody else lying on a couch. He looked terrible. Greg said, "That's somebody like you that's kicking. They look after him and get him things." I remember Greg saying, "This is the only time you're really treated good, so anything you want, ask for it. Anytime they offer you something and you want it, say yes." Somebody put sheets over an old couch and a blanket. They got a wastebasket and put a plastic liner in it in case I vomited. I sat down. There was a guy that was going to sit with me; he introduced himself. Greg said, "I gotta go. I'll see you in the morning. Relax and get some sleep. Don't be scared. Everything's fine. We're all friends here."

I stayed on the couch a couple of days, I guess, and there were just too many people bothering me, coming around. That's what they do there. In Synanon people won't leave you alone. They wake up in the morning and spend the whole day putting their noses in other people's business: "What's wrong?" "How do you feel?" That's Synanon-bothering and bugging everyone. That's supposed to make you well and make you all one big, happy family. I'd be lying on the couch feeling horrible when all of a sudden some stupid-looking broad or a couple of them would come over and say, "Hello! I'm Margie, and this is Wilma, and what's your name, and how are you, and we're fine. We're from so-and-so. Where are you from?" Oh God! I told the guy who was sitting with me, "I can't stand this. I've gotta get someplace where these people won't be bugging me."

I found out I had a "tribe leader." Everybody was in tribes, like the Indians used to be, and I had a leader. I said, "Well, where's my leader at? Let me find him." He's a real important personage. They don't know if he can be bothered now or not. Finally he came. He was a black guy, and, it turned out, he was a guy like me, a guy that had been around, an older guy and a nice guy, and he liked jazz, and thank God for that. His name was Bob Holmes. I told him, "Man, I can't stand all these wideeyed, stupid little broads and idiotic assholes coming around. I thought this was a place where they had dopefiends. There's no dopefiends here. It's just a bunch of little kids. You've gotta get me away from here before I wig out and have to leave." He said, "Well, we'll see what we can do."

Bob talked to some people and came back and said, "You're still not well enough to go to one of our dorms because then you'd be required to carry on like everybody else does-with a job and the games. It would be too hard. But since you are in such bad shape I'm going to get you into the infirmary." The infirmary was in a building in a place they called the Clump, an apartment complex. I took a ride on the Synanon bus and checked in. Bob even left word that I was to have no visitors, so no one could bother me except the people that were in the infirmary. Fortunately, a couple of them were sick.

The next morning I looked around and saw that the infirmary was filled with Puerto Ricans. I was in prison in Fort Worth with Puerto Ricans. They acted the same in prison as they did here. They were clannish, and they never spoke English even when they could. I don't know if you've ever heard Puerto Rican, but it's fast and high-pitched, and they would talk and talk and loud. Here, just like in prison, they were as obnoxious as the blacks, getting together in groups and chattering when you were trying to rest or relax. The white guys talked softly. And if they walked into a cell where someone was sleeping, they would say, "Hey, your cellie's asleep. Let's go out there and talk." They'd leave quietly and go someplace where they wouldn't disturb anyone. But not the Puerto Ricans. They'd get right next to where you're trying to sleep and talk, talk, talk this machine gun language, all of them at once.

So I'm in this little infirmary in Synanon, and I hear these voices talking Puerto Rican just like lightning, and I think, "Oh, my God, am I going to have to go through this again?" Synanon was filled with Puerto Ricans, blacks, and people from New York-who of all the white people have the least regard or respect for anyone. There were maybe one or two Mexicans in the whole place. There were maybe five or six people that I called real dopefiends that were from the coast. Righteous people. Regulars.