Straight Life (20 page)

I stripped. I got everything off but my shoes and socks. In those days you could take your pants off over your shoes. I thought once this was over maybe they'd stop, but as I started to bend over one guy said, "Hey, get your shoes off!" And my heart sunk. I had loafers on. I took my left shoe and sock and pulled them off in one motion. I did the same with my right. Then I stood up and spread my cheeks and waited. They weren't even looking at me. They were looking at my shoes. One guy grabbed the left one, hit it, pounded it, threw it aside. The other took the right one, pounded it, threw it aside. Finally they got up. "Bend over." They looked. "You're clean, motherfucker." I grabbed my clothes and started to put them on, but as an afterthought one fed went over and took my sock, my left one, and shook it. He stretched it out and threw it down and I thought he was going to give me a pass, but he went on to the other one, shook it, stretched it, and the ten caps fell out in the cellophane.

The cops were so happy, man. They looked at Susan and they said, "See what we were talking about, little girl?" "Yeah, well, there it is! There it is! Now what have you got to say?" They told me that the guy who'd turned me in had said I was a big dealer. I said, "What kind of a big dealer?" I pulled out the pawn ticket. I said, "I went and pawned my saxophone, man. Here's the ticket. Today's date." I had pawned the alto for twenty-five dollars. I had bought a gram of stuff for twenty dollars. I had bought a couple of packs of cigarettes. I had put some gas in the car. And I'd bought a burrito. What kind of a dealer could I be?

I said, "I spent the night with this chick. She doesn't even know that I use. This guy is a friend of hers. He doesn't know nothing. I spent the night here, got sick, grabbed the car keys off the table, went out, hocked my horn, and bought the gram. I never even got a chance to fix. Here's the gram." They realized they'd gotten some bum information but they said, "Alright. Great! Great! We'll add car theft to that."

I had told Susan that if anything ever did happen to say she didn't know about my taking the car, to say I stole the car and file a stolen report on it. That way they couldn't take it away from her. I wouldn't have gotten any more time; the charges would have run concurrently. And it was such a beautiful car, this Cadillac. So after they found the stuff, I immediately said that I had taken the car, but then the chick jumps in. She says, "He didn't steal anything from me! He can have anything he wants! Anything he wants he can have! He can have anything of mine! I love him! I told him he could use the car anytime for anything at anytime! He didn't steal the car, and I gave him the keys. No matter what he wants it for he can have my car!" The cop said, "Ohhhh! So you told him he could take your car? You knew he took your car? You gave him permission to take your car?" She said, "Yes!" So that was it. She had voluntarily given me her car; I had used it for transporting narcotics; and they ended up getting the car.

They went to Joe and looked at his arms and found four or five marks. They said, "Alright, we're going to book you for marks." The feds didn't have a law for marks, but they were going to take him down and turn him over to the state. They looked at Susan and found two marks. "Oh, you don't know anything about it, huh?" They really got rank. I said, "What's wrong with you guys? You've got me. Give the girl back her car and take me down." So the guy said, "Well, I'll tell you what we'll do. If you cop out that the stuff was yours and sign a statement, we'll cut 'em loose." I said alright.

We all went downtown to the federal building. I signed the paper. I said that I'd gone down to the Central Market, the produce market, and I saw a Mexican there in a leather jacket, and I thought I'd seen him someplace before. I went up to him and asked him, "Hey, you got any carga?" He said, "How much you want?" I said, "Un gramo," And he said, Hora le!" I bought it from him, but I didn't know his name. It was totally ridiculous, and they didn't go for it, but there was nothing they could do. Then one of the guys says, "Well, we're going to take the car." I said, "What do you mean, man? I signed the paper!" He said, "You didn't give up no names." He said, "If you want to take a ride with us and show us where you got the stuff, then maybe we can talk about the car."

They told me if I came up with a dealer they'd turn me loose. I guess they figured a musician is weak. It was a musician that set me up; I guess the feds figured, "Well, here's another musician." I must be weak, too. And maybe I would know somebody that was dealing. I had a lot of connections in East L.A. I could have turned over. They said, "Here, we'll give you the gram, the car, cut all of you loose, and all you have to do is take a ride and point out somebody." I have to admit that the thought of being free and being able to shoot the gram was very tempting, but I couldn't do it. When I first started using, this friend, Henry Garcia-we used to cop together-told me, "Do you know what you're doing? If you do this you may get busted and you may have to go to jail. If you're not willing to go, just don't do it." I'd said, "No, I realize and I'll be able to go when the time comes." And I thought, "Well, here's the test." So that was it. I knew I couldn't inform on anyone because I would never have been able to relax. There's one thing you have if you don't inform: you don't feel bad about yourself. No matter how bad things get, you have that. It's something that a lot of people don't understand, but anybody who's been in that position realizes what it is and knows what I'm talking about. So they kept after me, and I told them no.

I told Susan, "File a theft report. Say I stole your car and get it back. They can't hold it and I'm not going to turn over on anybody to save it." The feds walked us across the street to the L.A. County jail, where they house you even if you're a federal prisoner. Just before we went upstairs one fed said, "Well, this is your last chance. You don't have to go up there. Take a ride, make a buy, and that's it. We'll cut you loose and you can go to your pad and get loaded." I was deathly sick. I told them no. I said, "Are you going to keep your promise about cutting Joe and Susan loose?" The fed motioned to this other fed and he told them, "Okay, you're free. Say goodbye." Joe shook my hand. Susan said, "Oh, Arthur, I love you!" She said, "Is there anything I can do?" I said, "No, take care of yourself." She asked the detective, "Can I kiss him goodbye?" She grabbed me and kissed me and held on to me. She was just, like, a little girl, you know, that had cared for me. I had never cared for her but she was so sweet and I felt so sad. I watched them walk off.

The feds pushed the elevator button and we got in. They pushed the jail floor; I think it was nine. The elevator opens and they walk me to the gate and they say, "One for booking, federal narcotics." One of the feds says, "You got any money for cigarettes?" I said no. He reached into his pocket and gave me a five-dollar bill. I almost fell over. Then the guy put out his hand and said, "Come on, man, this is our job. This is what we have to do. I hate a fuckin' informer and I just want to shake your hand, not being a rat." I shook his hand, and the other guy patted me on the shoulder and he said, "Good luck."

8

The Los Angeles
County Jail

1953

WHEN YOU'RE BOOKED into the Los Angeles County Jail they put you in a cage with a wire gate, and you have to wait while they type up a whole bunch of stuff. You lie there and sit there, and then, when enough people are ready, the guards call out the names and you walk to another section, where they take your fingerprints. They do each finger and your whole hand, and they take your picture. Then you wait again, and there's no place to sit. You lie on the cement floor, and people get sick-they're vomiting. I was sick before I got busted; I was sick before I went and hocked my horn; so I was deathly ill by the time I was waiting. And it took thirty-six hours to be booked in.

The agony of kicking is beyond words. It's nothing like the movies, The Man with the Golden Arm, or things you read: how they scream and bat their heads against the wall, and they'd give up their mother, and they want to cut their throats. That's ridiculous. It's awful but it's quiet. You just lie there and suffer. You have chills and your bones hurt; your veins hurt; and you ache. When water touches you it feels as if it's burning you, and there's a horrible taste in your mouth, and every smell is awful and becomes magnified a thousandfold. You can smell people, people with BO, their feet, and filth and dirt. But you don't scream and all that: "Kill my mother, my father, just get me a fix and I'll do anything you want!" That's outrageous.

The depression you feel is indescribable, and you don't sleep. Depending on how hooked you are, you might go three weeks or a month without ever sleeping except for momentary spells when you just pass out. You'll be shaking and wiggling your legs to try to stop the pain in the joints, and all of a sudden you'll black out and you'll have a dream that you're somewhere trying to score. You'll get the shit and the outfit, and you'll stick it in your vein, and then the outfit will clog, or the stuff will shoot out the rubber part of the dropper, or somebody'll get in the way-somebody stops you and you never get it into your arm. I used to dream that my grandmother was holding me and I was hitting her in the face, smashing her in the mouth-blood came out of her face-and I could never get the dope in. You'd have terrible dreams: you'd flash to a woman, your old lady; she'd become a dog and she'd have a peepee like a dog instead of a cunt like a woman; and all of a sudden you'd come and immediately you'd wake up, and you'd be sticky and dirty and wet.

The first time I went to the county jail, I went seventeen days and nights without sleeping at all, I was so sick. I kept vomiting and couldn't eat. Seventeen days and nights, and all they gave you was aspirin. You could get three of them at night when they had sick call come around. And at night they had salts and soda. You could get either one. Salts to make you go to the bathroom or soda to settle your stomach.

In the county jail for a while they had a kick tank. They'd lock you up in a solid cell all alone. I knew a young Chicano cat who got put in the kick tank, and he started vomiting. He vomited and vomited, and he called for the guards but they ignored him. He kept vomiting and he ruptured a blood vessel in his stomach and bled to death, choked in his own blood. That's the treatment that the dope fiend got.

I was once in jail with a Chinaman. He had been shooting "black" (opium) for years and years. Chinese didn't get busted for a long time because the Chinese as a whole are much stronger than the whites and the blacks. But then some of the young Chinese got out and started shooting regular heroin, hanging out with the other dope fiends, and they got Americanized. And so, when they got busted they ratted on their elders. This Chinaman was an older guy; he looked like a skeleton; and he was really strung out. He was shaking so much he could hardly walk. They assigned him to a cell but he said, "I can't bear the cell. Just put me on the freeway." The freeway is the walkway that goes by the cells. They put him out there, and for two weeks he did nothing but sit in one position. He didn't eat one bit of food. Every now and then he'd drink a little something, take some broth out of the stew. For two weeks he sat with his feet on the floor and his arms around his knees in a corner on the freeway not saying a word to anybody, sweat pouring off his face. When he got a little better I talked to him and he said that he was trying to put himself into a trance, to leave his body, to get over the misery. I've seen guys put their pants legs into their socks and tie strings around them so no wind could get to their bodies. Then they would walk up and down the freeway for days, walk all night long, and they wouldn't sleep for weeks except for these horrible moments.

So kicking is the most insidious thing. It's a million times worse than they portray it. It's not an outward, noisy anguish. It's an inner suffering that only you, and, if there's any such thing as God, like, maybe you and He know it.

The amount of time it took to be booked in was incredible. That first time the place was jammed with people, people that stank and derelicts. I looked around and thought, "What am I doing here? What did I ever do to get put in a place like this?" And I had no conversation during the whole thirty-six hours that I was being booked in.

As I said, when you're sick the sensation of water touching your skin is like a physical pain. So the first thing they make you do, they force you into a shower, a funky shower; the floor is filthy, and the soap they use is yellow soap that you wash clothes with, floors with. Then, after you've showered and you're shivering and your pores are wide open, before you get a towel, you walk out and they've got trustees there with the guards. The trustees have big cans with long handles on them, like fly spray cans, and they make you raise your arms and they squirt this bug juice underneath your arms, and it's so strong it goes right into your pores and burns. They make you pick up your balls and they squirt it all around your joint. They make you bend over and spread your cheeks, and they squirt it in your ass, and it runs down and burns like fire. They squirt it on your hair, and it's horrible-smelling stuff. I made the mistake of thinking that trustees would be cool so I said, "Could you go easy?" As soon as I said that they shot more on me. Then they give you a towel to dry yourself. You put on these clothes that they give you that don't fit, and then you go to the linen room and get a mattress, a "donut" they call it. You get an old, funky blanket and a filthy pillow that smells of urine and vomit and come. You get a mattress cover that you use as a sheet and an old, beat towel.

I was so sick by that time I didn't know what was happening. You go to the hospital and they have you stand there and drop your pants, grab your joint, and squeeze it to see if you've got a venereal disease; if you don't that's it. They take you to whatever cell you're going to. I was white and I was a heroin addict, so I went to the white hype tank. That was 12-B-1. As you walk up to the front of the tank the guys come and look at you and they give you the coldest looks imaginable. And then you go inside. They finally open the gate, and you walk inside.

If you have money, anything over six dollars, they put it with your property, with your rings or your watch, but you can keep six dollars on you, cash, to buy candy and cigarettes. They give you an envelope: it's like an ID and it shows your charge, your name, and how much cash you kept. If you're a narcotics addict they stamp an N on your envelope so they'll always know you're an addict. Then, if you go for visiting and you get underwear or socks or anything, they'll soak them first in water because people sometimes cook up heroin and pour it in an agreed on spot in the shorts or whatever, and when the guy gets them in he can cut that part out and put it in the spoon. If you're an addict everything is soaking wet when you get it.

In the block there's about eighteen cells, and the number one cell is the trustees' cell. These aren't trustees like the ones that were squirting us, trustrees dressed in brown who live upstairs and do the work in the jail. These were just the trustees that run the tank. They interrogate you. Where are you from? Who do you hang out with? Who busted you? What officer? Have you got anybody running for you on the streets? Your old lady? Is she going to send you any bread, any dope? They want to know if there's a chance of you doing them any good. If they think you've got something going for you they'll try to put you in a better cell. Fortunately, I knew a couple of people there and I was pretty well known because of my music, so I was spared a lot of indignities. But the other people who come in, if they're not known or they're grasshoppers, busted for pot, the tank trustees might march them into a cell at the back of the tank and take all their six dollars. If the guy won't come up with it they might sneak up in the night and cut his pockets with a razor blade and take it. And they'll sell him his own food.

Once a week they'd have a horrible stew. Instead of potatoes, it had parsnips and turnips in it, just awful. But there would be a little bit of stew meat. So when the pot of stew came, the trustees and the people in the number two and three cells, the strongest or most popular people, would put up a rope at the end of the number three cell and say, "Deadline," so nobody from the back could walk up there. Then they'd take the pot into the number one cell, take out all the meat and put it on a tray, and they'd keep the bread, too. They'd eat all they wanted and send the remains to the back cells, and then they'd sell sandwiches, late at night, to the other guys for fifty cents apiece. Any little treat that came in special, like peanut butter, the trustees would hide and sell. There were vendors that came around selling cigarettes and books and candy, and when the candy man came the guys in the front would butt in the line and crowd back in and buy up all the candy. Later they'd sell it to the grasshoppers and the weaker, less known fiends for fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five cents a bar, when the candy was five cents a bar.

Sometimes, before he brings a new guy in, the guard will say, "Well, nothing better happen to this guy." That's the same as saying, "He's a rat." So when the rat comes in first they take his money and later on they get him. They make him sit on the floor in one of the back cells and put his legs up on the bottom bunk, and someone gets on the top bunk and jumps down on his knees and busts them backwards. They then kick him in the head. Blood comes out of his ears and eyes and nose and mouth, and he has to say, "Squeal, squeal. I'm a rat."

Two guys came in one time and they said, "There's these two rats that are going to come here soon. They turned .over on us and got us busted, and if we leave before they get here, really take care of them." Everybody said okay, and these guys were shipped out to max at the farm, Biscaluse Center. A couple of days later here come two more guys and they had the same names as the first two said had turned over on them, so before they could say anything the guys in the tank just beat them to death. Well, one guy died later in the county hospital. Right after that, another guy came in and said, "Did So-and-so and So-and-so come through here?" They said, "Yeah, we really took care of the two rats." But the new guy said, "They weren't the rats!" And it was the ones that had come through first that were the informers! They immediately sent word out to max and they got them out there, killed one of them and beat the other nearly to death. But the poor guys that weren't rats ... And there were many cases like that. If somebody didn't like you, they'd just make up a false jacket. There were always people who were hanging bum jackets, people who were weak or were jealous or had got burned by somebody or thought some guy had balled their old lady. So you were always afraid because you didn't know who was going to say what. Knowing yourself, that you were alright, had no meaning as far as those people went. Sometimes they'd just beat people up because there was nothing else to do.

I thought the army was bad. Now here I was in jail. The army was a warm place in comparison. I was lonesome; I wanted love; I was losing Patti; I wanted to cry. But there was no privacy at all in jail. There's eyes always watching. Even at night when you're trying to sleep there's people not sleeping; they're sick; they're watching. There's always lights on because of security. I wanted to pour my heart out to somebody; probably a lot of the people felt the same way, but you had to be strong and act like nothing bothered you. I had to be tough. I had to ridicule anything that indicated weakness. I had to be real cynical and act like the only thing that was important was getting loaded. I was double tough and real cool, and I was miserable.

My father helped get me out on bail, and I went back to plead. I thought they would leave me out until sentencing, but I pleaded nolo contendere so they jerked me otf bail and put me back in the county jail. I was sentenced to two years. At that time I could have gotten probation by the feds or I could have gotten a year. They gave me two years and sent me to Forth Worth.