They started living together, and by the time I came back from the service, Momma could legally get married again. By that time, Moses was in his fifties, and he always treated my mom like a queen because he saw what my dad had done to her and to me, beat me up, threw me out. Moses loved kids, and the old man would beat the poop out of my brother Bud and I. Moses couldn't stand to see children mistreated, beat, and without food. And he brought us food, gosh yes! Moses'd come to the house and bring us food and sometimes clothing because my old man would feed us. all canned tomatoes and then he'd tell my mom, "Cook me up a steak."
When we were in grammar school, Bud and I used to go over to where Art lived with Grandma and build little wooden stick airplanes and play on the floor or outside. We flew kites together. Now, everybody called him junior, and he didn't like it, and I didn't blame him. I always called him Art. And when the other kids wanted to fight or beat him up, he was always protective of his mouth because even when he was a small kid he was playing the horn. Mr. Parry, his teacher, was always warning him about hurting his mouth; he said that was his livelihood to come. So I'd get into arguments with Art, but I never fought with him like Billy Pepper did, and Bud. I'd intercede on the few occasions I was around when it happened, and Art always respected me for that. I think that was more or less the bond between us.
I used to go over, to go swimming or something with Art, and I'd have to wait while he finished his lessons. Art was excited about his music to the extent that when I came over he'd show me a music lesson or passage that Mr. Parry had left him and he'd say, "How does this sound, John?" He'd play it for me. I didn't know one note from another, but I listened and I could see just how enthusiastic he was. The last time I saw Mr. Parry and Art practicing in the living room there, Mr. Parry said, "Art, you keep this up and your name will be in lights all over this whole country." Of course, Art was a little puffed up about that.
We used to talk. I had my mom, who showed a lot of love and protection for us kids; whereas Art, his mother was not there and he had to depend on Grandma and her strictness and Moses and his very vocal-he was very forceful in the way he spoke, especially when he was a young man. Art used to love to get away; we spent a lot of time together just because of that. And he'd often say, "I wish I could just get away from Grandma, from Moses." He talked very little about Moham. Very little. Because, you see, she was too young then to be very maternal toward him. She went her way and let Art junior go his, and he resented that very much. But he liked my mom real well. Momma was always loving toward him and she petted him, which he didn't have because Grandma Noble wasn't a loving type of person in that respect except to me. She never expressed any affection or love for Art when he was a little boy.
When we got older, we did a lot of drinkin', both of us. We'd go to a drugstore; they didn't demand your identity. We'd buy a pint of Four Roses, take our girls out on a date, and we'd drink it up. Usually, I went back to Grandma's house with Art and slept in the same bedroom there, and we'd get up in the morning and drink up all Grandma's milk outta the icebox because we both had hangovers. We'd guzzle it down. And then we'd go to the beach, Cabrillo Beach. We'd mostly finagle some beer to drink down there. We'd swim, sit out on the rocks.
After the war, and just before the war started, Art took me out on some of his jam sessions that he'd go to on Central Avenue. He'd take me to these clubs, and they were mostly black people that he associated with very closely. They were fine musicians, and they accepted him when he'd come in there because he was that good.
One night Art was playing, and they had this dancer, a mulatto girl-we were drinkin' it up. She came around and danced on these tables, slipped off her garter, threw it up in the air, and I caught it. She said, "You're the one!" I didn't know what to do. I was too young. She got down off the table, stretched the garter out, and put it around my neck. She says, "You have to kiss your way out of that." I was thrilled to pieces, but here were all these people looking on. Especially all these black people. Art was still up there jammin'. I told him about it when he came back to the table, and he says, "Well, you missed your big chance." Oh, lordy! That was before the war. Now, I left in '42 and I didn't see Art again until '46.
2
Patti
1930-1944
I HAD my first sexual experience I can remember when I was four or five. I was still living with my parents in Watts. They had some friends who lived nearby, Mary and Mike, who had a daughter, Francie, about four years older than me. Francie was slender, she had black hair, she had little bangs cut across and a pretty face, and she had a look about her of real precociousness. She had a devilish look about her, and she was very warm. Hot. She had nice lips, her teeth were real white, a pink tongue, and her cunt was pink and clean. A lot of little girls smell acid or stale, but ... I remember sometimes we'd be playing together on the front lawn-there would be other kids around-and she would sit on my face in her little bloomers; nobody acted like they noticed anything. She's sitting there, and I'm sniffing her ass and her cunt and her bloomers, and it always smelled real sweet and nice.
My folks used to go out with Mary and Mike and get drunk and leave me with Francie. They'd make a bed on the floor, and we'd go to bed, and she'd want me to kiss her, to kiss her cunt. She'd make me get down there and lick her, and she would do the same thing to me. It was very exciting, and I always imagined, when we got older, that we would really make love like grownups do. Years and years later, when I was divorced from my first wife I ran into Francie, and I wanted to ball her, but she was in love and she wouldn't do it.
In addition to Richard and my father my grandmother had a stepson named Shorty, and Shorty's wife, Thelma, later married my father, but when I was a child she was my aunt and I thought of her children as my cousins. She had two boys a little older than me, John and Bud, and a daughter Edna. One time I remember we were sleeping together, me and John and Bud at my grandmother's house, and my grandmother happened to come in; she might have heard us giggling. She turned on the light, and we had the blankets off and were playing with each other's little peepees. She wigged out at us. She said she was going to tell Thelma that we were evil, she was going to tell my dad, and I said, "Oh, please don't tell dad!" She told us that our peepees were going to grow real long; they were going to grow out of our pants legs and trail after us down the street; and everybody was going to laugh at us and say, "For shame!"
Thelma and Shorty lived near my grandmother so I used to see Thelma a lot. She was sweet and pleasant, and I always wished that she had been my mother because she was very understanding and I could talk to her. Where my mother was harsh Thelma was gentle. I felt I could get her to sympathize with me and baby me.
Thelma had that typically American look, a sweet, clean look about her. She had mousey brown hair and light skin. She had a very trim body, and she was soft, like a little dove or a little doe. She wore cotton housedresses that she made herself. They folded over in front; she'd put a pin there, and you could always see part of her breast. I'd go around and watch her doing the dishes or the laundry and I'd look down her dress. And when I hugged her I would always want to put my head between her breasts.
As I said, my grandmother locked the door when she went to the bathroom and she'd leave the key in the door so you couldn't see through the keyhole. It made the idea of going to the bathroom something that was nasty, that you had to hide. But also, because of the locked door, it seemed to me that it was exciting, really evil, and I became attracted to bathrooms to see what went on in there. I started looking out our windows at night, when the lights went on, and sometimes the woman next door would be in the bathroom. I couldn't see anything, but the idea that she was there excited me. I started walking around at night and looking, when I was walking, if there were lights on in the windows.
At Thelma's house the bathroom had two doors and there were keyholes but no keys in these doors, so I used to peek at Thelma or at Edna when they were in there and get an erection and play with mys
elf. I would go in the bathroom after they left and play with myself.
By the time I was eleven I was totally preoccupied with sex. Every time a woman bent over or crossed her legs my eyes automatically saw her. It was constant. I never stopped fantasizing. I could virtually strip women naked as they walked by me. And then it wasn't like it is now. They didn't have bookstands or movies. You couldn't find pictures of naked women or people balling. I couldn't. The only thing you'd run into was an occasional little funny book. They had little, teeny comic books in those days, about four by six, about Hairsbreadth Harry, Maggie and Jiggs, Terry and the Pirates, all those old cartoon people, Blondie and Dagwood. I don't know if they were made in Mexico, but that's where people got them, and they were drawn just like the funny papers only sexy. People made love. The girls all wore little cotton dresses, and that's what turned me on-the sight of a woman in a dress that was cotton and clinging. I could just imagine what was underneath. In the funny books you buy now sex is ridiculed and used as a tool to rank some political figure or party or to protest, but these were purely sex magazines, and I used to get turned on by them.
I started asking around if there were any girls who ... I wanted to actually have contact with a woman. I did have this little girlfriend who played the accordian. She was very sweet and nice. I used to carry her accordian home from grammar school and it almost killed me because it was so heavy, but I was afraid to try anything, so I'd just rub my arm against her or something like that. Rub my hand against her ass accidentally.
Some kid I knew in school told me about a girl who would let you see her and play with her. She wasn't pretty or sexy. She was real thin and tall. She had black hair and a bony face with a long, pointed nose, but her eyes had a look about them, oh, she had a real saucy look, and just the idea that she might let me do something! I started pursuing her and talking to her and finally one Saturday we went to the park and she let me look at her cunt and play with it and she played with me until I came. I walked her home, and she invited me to come over and see her where, she said, we co'ild get more comfortable. But I was disappointed because even though it was exciting, and I knew I would be after it all the time, it wasn't the way I wanted it to be.
I started working on Central Avenue in 1941. I'd play at nightclubs and some chick would come in, a black chick or a white chick, and she'd say, "Come on out with me at intermission. I'll make you feel good." Or, "I'll take care of you." I'd be at the Ritz Club, which was very informal; the musicians just sat and played at the tables and a chick would come and sit in the chair next to me and put her hand in my lap and play with me and look at me, saying "Oh, you're sweet. I'd sure love to take you home." She might take my hand and put it on her leg, put it up under her dress. Then we'd go out and get in a car and go to a liquor store and get a jug, and we'd stop someplace. If she lived nearby we'd go to her pad real quick, and she would suck on me until I came or I would fuck her. I enjoyed parts of it, but it wasn't what I imagined when I looked in windows and played with myself and I thought that the real experience would always be denied me for some reason.
There was a girl I fell for at San Pedro High, she really moved me, and I thought everything might be different with her. She had long hair that hung over her shoulders, full lips, very light skin, and a nice body, rounded with not overly large, but full breasts, and she had pink nipples that got hard, which always denoted a lot of passion to me in a woman. She had a sexy smell, a clean smell, and she just loved to neck and to touch. I remember one time we were sitting in her dad's car in the alley. She lived in an old wooden house set way back on a big lot. We were playing around and were just about to the point where I was going to fuck her when all of a sudden here comes her dad out of the house with her mother. Her mother was hysterical. Her father screamed, "We're at war!" The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and a bunch of our battleships were sunk and thousands of Americans killed. Delano Roosevelt was going to declare war.
The war started, and they were having blackouts in San Pedro because of Fort MacArthur and the harbor. The girl left town with her family. I felt that something could have happened with her. I went back to the window peeping, and I ran into some terrible experiences with dogs chasing me, and I thought I was really hung up to be like that. But then one day I ran into Patti in study hall, and the feeling I'd wanted was there. And I changed levels from the way I'd been, preferring fantasizing to the actual act, and I realized that that had been because I didn't care for the girls, that it was the combination of sex and love that made it wonderful. And that's the way it proved out.
Because I was working so much, playing music, my grandmother and I moved to Los Angeles so I could be closer to the jobs, and in 1941 we were living on Seventy-third Street between Towne and San Pedro and I was going, on and off, to Fremont High School.
I had no friends at Fremont. I went because I had to go. I might as well have been on a desert island. But one day in study hall I looked around and saw a girl sitting at one of the desks. I looked and there she was, the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. I started ti.inking about her. I'd think about her at night and everything, you know, but she was a "nice girl" and the only kind of girl I could have anything to do with would be a bad girl, a nasty girl. I started sitting behind her in study hall, and one day she turned around and talked to me. She asked some little silly question about math or did I have a pencil. I wasn't able to speak to her. I started sweating. I couldn't look her in the eye. I mumbled something. About a week later, I walked into class a few minutes early and she was there. She said, "I don't feel like studying today." I said, "I don't feel like studying either." It just came out before I realized I was being intimate with her in replying like that. She said, "Why don't we leave and go someplace else?" We got up and walked out.
We left the school. I kept looking at her thinking how beautiful she was. I couldn't believe I was actually with her, and every now and then I'd brush my hand against her arm. Her teeth were white; they sparkled. Her eyes-the whites of them were almost a blue-white. She had dimples and this real innocent face, a kind of bewildered look on her face all the time. She had very light skin, no marks on it, and from the neck down ... What really moved me was she had a body at fifteen or sixteen that was a woman's body, full breasts, full hips, small waist, and she had a flirty look about her. She was a real flirt but I always thought that was just her way; later I interrogated her about it and she said she was a virgin. That really excited me. She had beautiful breasts and legs and skin and fingers and ears and it was almost more than I could stand. I didn't know why she had asked me to come out there, to leave the class, and I didn't know what to do, so we just walked around and talked and she told me about herself. She said her name was Madeleine Moore but to call her Patti because she didn't like Madeleine. So that was Patti.
She lived about twenty blocks from me. I walked her home, and we talked and talked and talked, and for the first time I began to doubt all the feelings I had about myself. She thought I was wonderful and that I was handsome; I could tell from the way she looked at me, from the way she acted. And she seemed like a nice girl. I was certain she was a nice girl and that she liked me. And it was so different from the night before and what would happen tonight at the Ritz Club or the Club Alabam. We spent a long time together. I finally said I had to go home. I took her to her house and no one was there but I didn't even try to kiss her; when I went to leave she took hold of my arm and looked at me and said, "Don't you like me?" I said, "Of course I like you." She said, "Well, you don't act like it." I grabbed her arm and gave it a squeeze and then I turned around and walked away. I almost started crying. It was unbearable. It was like a pain and I had to get away from her. I walked home and from that minute ... It would have been better to have gone on the way I was; I'd grown comfortable. That meeting was too much. Now I knew no matter what happened, no matter what, I knew I had to have her. I couldn't do anything but think about her and want her, to have her and protect her and look at her
and smell her, just to brush my hand against her arm.
We started meeting and talking. We'd ditch school a lot. We'd walk around. I didn't try to do anything sexually with her for a long time, but we kept seeing each other, and then I kissed her, and then we started messing around. Sometimes, if my grandmother wasn't home, we'd go over there. I'd borrow my cousin's car, and we'd go park, and we'd pet.
I met her mother. Her mother had been married to a musician who'd treated her. bad. I could see that that was going to be a problem. I had to sneak around to see her because her mother was afraid of me, but I had fallen in love and I think Patti had, too. One day her mother woke up with a pain in her stomach, and she died that evening. She had gangrene of the intestines, I think. She had had several abortions, and probably those caused that. Patti was sent to Arizona to some relatives before she could contact me. She wrote and told me what had happened. I was miserable. Finally, she came to visit an aunt in Glendale.
They were going to send her away again, and I couldn't stand that. We wanted to get married. Patti was sixteen and I was seventeen. My dad thought we should hold off and see how we felt in a year or so, but to us that seemed like a lifetime. I borrowed my cousin's car and we went to Tijuana to one of those places, and some guy married us. He called in his secretary and a guy from the street and they witnessed the ceremony: "Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?" In broken English, and we were married. I wanted it all to be legal. I didn't want that love ruined by our living together without being married because at that time I was extremely moralistic.
Straight Life Page 5