Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper - Art Pepper

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and there was talk about paying some kind of insurance for her. He felt that Richard should pay part of it. My dad was drinking, and he decided to go over and see Dick—“Dicky Boy” he called him. He just hated him.

      Dick was a plain-looking man. He had dull-colored, hazel eyes; he was a dull person, nondescript and withdrawn. But he always felt that he was right. He always considered himself a good person. Maybe he was. My dad had got him a job as a longshoreman and had done nothing but good for him, but he said Dick had never shown any appreciation.

      We went over there, me and my dad. We went inside. He started talking to them. Dick’s wife’s name was Irma, and she was just like him, thin, with no beauty, dull, lightish hair, faded eyes. Everything was faded about both of them. My dad tried to reason with them, tried to find out if they would pay anything. Irma said, “No! She’s taking care of your brat: you pay it!” They got into a terrible argument. When they started hollering I got scared; I ran out to the car; but they were getting so crazy I felt something terrible was going to happen so I ran back, grabbed my dad, and tried to pull him out of the house. I got him to the car but he was too insane to drive. I opened the door and pushed him into the passenger side. He had just started teaching me how to drive. Dick ran out of the house with a big hammer, and when my dad saw him coming he tried to get out of the car to get at him, but I started the car up, praying I could get it going, trying to hold on to my dad at the same time. He’s screaming out the window at them, and Irma’s just screaming on the lawn, and here comes Dick with this hammer. By a miracle I was able to start the car. As Dick saw it moving he threw, and I pulled out just as the hammer hit the window in the back. It hit right where my dad’s head would have been and shattered the glass. We got away. I looked over at him and saw that he was cut, there was blood on his face, and he was still raging about what he was going to do to Dick. Then he stopped. I guess he realized what had happened—that I was driving the car and had possibly saved his life or stopped him from killing. He might have killed both of them.

      I drove back to my grandmother’s house, and she wasn’t there. I took him inside. I led him into the house and made him go into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet and got a washrag. During the ride he had looked at me while I was driving, and I felt that he was seeing me for the first time. And I felt really good that I had done something that was right. I wiped the blood off his face. He wasn’t cut bad, and he looked at me, and that was the first time I ever felt I had reached him at all. I felt good about myself and I felt that he loved me.

      Right after that my grandmother came home and broke the spell. He looked at her and realized how she was. I realized how she was. He started raving at her about her Dicky Boy, and I remember cussing her out myself, telling her that her Dicky Boy wouldn’t pay a penny, that he’d tried to kill my dad, that I would kill him, that she was an unfeeling, rotten, ungrateful bitch. She flipped out at both of us. She didn’t care anything at all about him being cut: “How dare you go over there and bother Richard and his wife?” She kept at him and at him, ranking him and goading him, and finally he grabbed her and started to strangle her. Probably all his life he’d wanted to kill her. She certainly deserved to be killed by him, and I had the feeling of wishing that he would kill her, thinking it would maybe free me. She wouldn’t be there and something else would have to be done with me. Maybe he would have to take me to live with Nellie, who was warm and nice and feminine and smelled pretty. And so, for this moment, I was hoping he’d kill her, but all of a sudden I realized what would happen to him, so I grabbed him, and finally he let her go, and she ran screaming out into the street.

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      (Sarah Schechter Bartold)* My husband was born in Italy. I think he said he had four sisters, but maybe there were three. Two were living when I went there many years ago. I couldn’t say a word. They brought a chair outside. They didn’t invite me in. They were country people, very suspicious.

      My husband went to study for the priesthood when he was a young man, but he didn’t like the things he saw going on there. He came to this country, and he was a waiter. He also worked in the coal mines. When I met him he was an insurance man. We met back east. I worked daytimes, and then I went with him to all his prospects at night. But I actually never got, out of fifty-eight years with him, more than he told me. And what difference does it make?

      I don’t remember anything about Ida [Mildred Bartold, Art’s mother]. She was seven or eight when she came to us. She was pretty, but she was a terrible little troublemaker right from the beginning. She was a liar, a little liar. But I really don’t remember why she was sent to live with us. Maybe they felt that she would do better in America. As far as I knew she was one of my husband’s sisters’ children. She was a little liar, and that’s the whole story. A child who fibs can do an awful lot of damage, especially when you have little children of your own. She lied about all sorts of things, about the other children—“This one did that.” And they were younger than she was, so I thought it best not to have her around. But why stir up the past and cause her son to have hard feelings about her? She was his mother. Was he her only child? Did he inherit anything when she died? She had nothing to leave? I remember her mostly as a terrible fibber.

      (Thelma Winters Noble Pepper) Arthur Senior, “Daddy,” was born in Galena, Kansas, and then I think they went to this Missouri mining town. Grandma’s [Art’s grandmother’s] first husband worked in the lead mines. And it was a real sad thing there because her husband, I think his name was Sam Pepper, was a periodic drunkard. Every weekend when he got paid, he’d go to the saloon to cash his check, and then usually there was nothing left. So this one time, they were visiting Sam’s sister’s family, and this sister’s husband and Sam, they both got drunk, and the sister called the police, who took ’em both to jail, and I think they must of give ’em a thirty-day sentence. And while he was in jail, the place where Grandma lived—they evicted her. She had four or five children at that time (one had just died), and there wasn’t no place for her to go, so they sent her to the poor farm, she and the children. And she was expecting then. She was carrying her twins. They told her, “You know that you can’t keep your children here. They’ll have to be put up for adoption.” She said no way was she going to let her children be put up for adoption, so she went back to where they had been living. She knew an old man that had a run-down, old chicken house. She asked him if she could move in there, and he told her that if she thought she could make that livable, she could have it, and she did. When Sam come out of jail he didn’t look for her. He just stayed away. He just decided to beat it. So that ended that, and that was two months before her twins was born. This all gives you an idea of why Grandma was like she was.

      

      The twins was only three weeks old when she went to work. She and her sister-in-law took in washing together. And the boys—the sister had a boy about Daddy’s age—they’d deliver and pick up. I guess this was in 1895. Daddy would have been about nine years old.

      When the twins was fifteen months old they got—at that time they called it membranous croup, but now we know that it was diphtheria. So one of ’em died, and they took him away to be buried, and then the second one got so sick it couldn’t breathe, so she’d walk it, day and night. Fifteen days apart they died. And this last one, Grandma was so wore out with taking care of them for so long, the neighbors induced her to lay down and take a nap. She washed the dead baby and dressed him and put him on a pillow on her sewing machine. While she was asleep, the authorities came in and took the baby, didn’t even wake her up. And that affected her tremendously. When she was here with me and Daddy, dying, she lived that again. One day I heard her crying and I went in there. She was crying just fit to break her heart, and she said, “Oh, why didn’t they wake me? Why did they take him away without waking me?” She didn’t even get to attend the funeral of that second baby.

      After that I think she run a kind of boardinghouse for miners. At that time women couldn’t get jobs like they can now. Joe Noble was one of the boarders. Then when Joe started a butcher shop, she helped him in the butcher shop. They decided to get married, and that’s when Joe come out here to California. They were married in 1913.

      Daddy didn’t live with them. When he was growing up he spent most of

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