Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  Whit was on the run, and traveling fast. He was in a hurry and yet not too certain of where he was going.

  He tried and failed to find a lead to Barbara, who had never written his modier. He looked up one of Barbara’s former girl friends and asked for Barbara’s address.

  “If I knew it, I wouldn’t give it to you,” the girl said and looked at him with loathing. She knew he had been in reform school.

  “I loved Barbara,” Whit said simply. But there was no explaining to this girl. He sensed that.

  “I know what love means to your kind,” the girl said.

  “You fool!” Whit said, the anger rising in him suddenly. “You goddam virtuous fool!”

  He jammed the Ford in gear and roared off, still on the run. Still in a hurry.

  He didn’t want to find Barbara any longer. He no longer needed to find her. He had loved an ideal and not a girl, and now he hated the ideal because it still had the power to torment him. And he couldn’t bring Barbara’s face into focus in his mind, try as he might—at least not with the sharp, clear perfection he desperately desired. So he rejected the face. He had to, urgently. And he apologized. He said, “I’m sorry, Barbara. I’m sorry.”

  And he ran faster.

  Whit looked up some reform-school graduates who lived in a tough section of the city, a slum quarter. That night they had a “tea party.” Even in those days marijuana was plentiful, although Whit “blasted” his first “stick,” and his last, that night. He got so high he had to get down on his hands and knees to get off the curbs. Everything was hilariously funny and when he started coming off the kick he was ravenously hungry. “No more of that stuff,” he said, “I don’t have too much sense on the natural, so I can’t afford to give up what I do have.” They assured him it would be different next time. But he shook his head, no next time.

  Where was the stuff coming from? He found out, paid a visit to the upstanding citizen who was masterminding its distribution. A violent argument developed and was resolved suddenly and decisively by Whit, who then buried his snub-nosed gun where it would never be found. Later he told a friend, “But don’t go jumping to the conclusion I murdered the sonofabitch, because I didn’t.”

  Whit was arrested in the early morning hours of his seventeendi birdiday. Two radio-car officers spotted him in front of a Glendale, California, drugstore. Investigating, these officers found a crowbar and jimmie marks on the establishment’s front door. Parked nearby was the postmaster’s missing auto. At the police station Whit told one glib lie after another in accounting for his presence near the drugstore at that early hour of the morning. His conduct developed into a foolproof technique: tell near-trudis, half-truths, but never the whole truth. Throw in a few outrageous fabrications and the police will give up in disgust. They’ll become convinced you’re a fraud and won’t look too far.

  • 14 •

  “Apparently You Didn’t Learn Your Lesson.”

  Whit was recommitted to reform school—for vehicle theft and forgery—by the same chief juvenile judge who had ordered his unconditional release but a few weeks earlier. The hearing was in chambers and brief. That Whit had stolen the Pasadena postmaster’s car and used the credit card by forging a name and creating a fictitious identity appeared reasonably certain. That he had been involved in other and more serious offenses could only be strongly suspected. Physical or tangible proof was lacking, and Whit had declined to implicate himself beyond leading the officers on several wild goose chases.

  Near the conclusion of the hearing, the judge fixed his gaze upon Whit and said sternly, “Apparently you didn’t learn your lesson, and certainly this report shows you haven’t been cooperative with the investigating officers. I see no alternative but to commit you to the industrial school in the hope further training there will prove beneficial.”

  Whit’s eyes met and held the judge’s, and they were squinting with appraisal. Apparently you didn’t learn your lesson . . . haven’t been cooperative . . . further training . . . The same old words. The same meaningless mumbo jumbo. The same complete lack of rapport.

  Whit smiled faintly—or did he sneer? And he, then being judged, passed judgment.

  What did he have to say for himself?

  Nothing.

  Whit was returned to the overcrowded juvenile tank at the jail to await transfer to the school. Another folly, jamming all these youngsters in together—the dumb ones and the bright ones, the lions and the lambs, the romantics and the psychotics—and then leaving them that way for weeks at a time, while their cases were being processed through the courts. Leaving them to fight and gamble and agitate and scheme and dream and brag and bully and pervert. Establishing a hierarchy of cunning and brute force. A nice place for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old—unless he happens to be your son.

  Whit was self-reliant. He got along. Nobody tried to hoosier him out of his money. Nobody bothered him. He didn’t bother the others. He did his own time, minded his own business. Then he was on his way.

  While being driven north, he and another boy to whom he was manacled escaped by a ruse from the two officers transporting them. For a hectic hour the two boys ran, hid and ran. Then, still manacled together, they were recaptured by a posse of high-school students who had volunteered to aid the police and the juvenile oflicers in the search for them. On arrival at the school, both boys were ordered to the isolated two-story building where the most rebellious of the institution’s wards were quartered. The other boy’s mind and body proved less durable than Whit’s. He lost his reason. He deliberately infected his hand and then, after transfer to the school’s hospital, where he persisted in sticking wire and pins into the infected area and tearing off the bandages, he was sent to a mental hospital. He had failed to benefit by the training program.

  This disciplinary unit was called G Company. Here Whit’s room was a cell, with a steel door and bars and heavy mesh screening on the window which kept out most of the sunlight. A low-watt bulb furnished illumination and was turned off at nine in the evening. Whit spent sixteen hours a day behind the locked steel door and sixteen times a day a supervisor, making a check of the cells, would peer in at him through a rectangular opening in the door. One of the supervisors, who clomped heavily when he walked on his rounds, invariably would ask, “Still in there?” Whit never answered but many of the other boys did. An excitable youngster quartered next door to Whit listened to the question for a couple of weeks and men, one evening, shouted back, “Yeah, and I got your peg-legged, syphilitic mama in here with me, you bastard!” This malefactor was, of course, appropriately disciplined.

  A Bible was kept in each cell and was the only reading material permitted. Whit knew many of the inmates used the thin pages to roll smuggled tobacco in. He discovered, however, that no pages were missing from the Bible in his cell. He read the book through from cover to cover. He reread it. Particularly was his mind provoked by Ecclesiastes:

  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: . . . a time to die . . . a time to kill ... a time to cast away ... a time to hate . . . a time of war.

  Out of context? Admitted. But no more so than this place was out of social context.

  It was midsummer of the year 1938. The school’s brick yard, where its segregated disciplinary offenders worked, was a veritable hell hole. There, shirtless, his face caked with sweat and brick dust, his hands blistered and raw before the thick calluses formed, his body being bronzed by the burning sun’s rays, Whit labored each weekday with a kind of maniacal fury, ruthlessly driving himself to the very limit of his endurance. One of the many supervisors, seated close by in the shade, marveled at Whit’s astonishing industry and grew curious.

  “Hey, kid, come here a minute. . . . Yeah, you there.”

  Whit set his wheelbarrow down and approached the supervisor, a large man turned flabby and sour, with watery eyes and numerous chins.

  “What’re you trying to do, kid, impress somebody?”

  Whit
smiled, and his face was more masked than ever. “Maybe you could call it that,” he replied, amiably insolent. “I just wanted you people to know that the tougher it gets the better I like it.”

  “Oh, a tough guy, huh?” the supervisor snapped, his fleshy, sagging face crimsoning with sudden anger. “Well, we got ways of teaching you tough guys some respect for authority.”

  “Have you?” Whit said. “I never would have guessed it.”

  The supervisor bit off an angry retort, clamping his jaws shut. A vein near his Adam’s apple throbbed. His thin lips parted in a travesty of a smile, and he said, “Now, now; there’s no reason for you to feel like that. Here, have a drink.” He offered Whit his canteen.

  Whit contemptuously matched the other’s surface change of attitude. “Sure, be glad to,” he said, unsuspecting. He should have known better. He knew he had been working for two hours under a broiling sun; he knew supervisors carried ice water in their canteens. But he didn’t stop to think. He filled his belly with ice water, drinking greedily, and promptly became violently sick.

  The supervisor laughed mirthlessly. “Now, tough guy, get back to work.”

  Whit retched, worked and cursed himself for a fool.

  Two days later he was caught whispering to another youngster and put on light rations, the standard punishment for those seen or heard violating the strictly enforced no-talking rule—strictly enforced, that is, unless you were one of The Man’s pets or finks. For breakfast light rations meant some prune juice, three or four prunes, a scoop of mush; for the noon and night meal, one soggy slice of bread, some bean juice, a few beans and a cup of milk. The boys on light rations were fed in their cells, but they were worked the same as those on the regular diet. This latter group ate in a small mess hall on the first floor; they filed in and stood at their assigned places. When The Man clapped his hands they seated themselves and began to eat. When he clapped again they got up and filed out. If you bolted the food you got enough. Sometimes.

  A blind anger he did not attempt to control took possession of Whit one evening when another of the supervisors accompanied the inmate waiter to his cell with the light rations and made a smart crack.

  “You pus-gutted bastard,” Whit said, “take those goddam beans and . . .” He took a step toward the supervisor, his fists clenched tightly.

  The supervisor slapped him across the face with a beefy hand that held the cell door keys. He struck back. The supervisor slammed the door shut in his face, locking it, and minutes later returned with two other supervisors. Whit was forcibly taken from his cell and marched to a special, empty cell. He knew what was coming. When the door banged shut on him, the supervisor said through the slot, “Here’s something to keep you company.” Then they shot a cartridge of tear gas into the cell.

  The next several minutes of Whit’s life were not pleasant ones.

  They were didactic minutes. They taught him the folly, the futility of open, unbending defiance against such embodiments of authority as the world’s Supervisors. Whit perceived that the social function of The Supervisors was a relatively simple one—they were the agency through which the rebel, if goaded to self-destruction by an ugly, unreasoning hate, quickly achieved his unnatural purpose.

  The Supervisors were vise-turners. But they didn’t put you in the vise; they waited for you to do it. And when you did, they would keep turning until you told them—politely, hoarsely, shudderingly, however you were able—that you had had enough. Then they released you to the custody of gentler hands, if not less inflexible minds. Yet should the pain of the vise so enrage you that you defied them to turn and be damned, they would accede to your masochistic demand. Refusing to bend, you broke.

  Jackie broke. One day at work he tried to run a pick through his head and only failed when another boy grabbed him. Back in his cell, Jackie became hysterical. He cursed the supervisors. That was his mistake. They gassed Jackie. Whit listened to him alternately continue to scream obscene defiance and beg for a drink of water after he was brought from the gas cell and put into a stripped cell. They tried to shut Jackie up; they slapped him around, but this only made him worse. So they took him to the hospital and when he failed to improve they shipped him to the “bug house.” They used a lot of big words to describe what was wrong with Jackie and to explain why it was he had reacted so adversely to the school’s training program.

  After his enlightening experience with the tear gas, after observing what happened to the Jackies and the others, Whit grinned and fought back in more cunningly subtle ways. The brick yard baked almost all traces of his asthma out of him. Simultaneously, he let the brick yard bake Hate into him. He made Hate his friend and counsellor. Hate told him to grin. To be wily. He heeded the advice. It won him release from the disciplinary company into the school’s general population and a short while later reassignment to his former job in the assistant superintendent’s office.

  First he was hospitalized, but not because he had become a “bug.” The physical machine he owned simply had been subjected to too great a strain. His pulse was irregular; he had developed a heart murmur, a rapid pulse; he ran a fever; he had night sweats. They had him in a private room and for a week he didn’t think he would make it. But he did, and here again Hate helped him when medicine and medical care couldn’t. One of the attendants used his bathroom to sneak a smoke every day. And one morning this boy had just walked out when Table Legs, one of the nurses, walked in, smelled smoke and accused Whit of malingering, of just pretending to be sick, of himself sneaking into the bathroom and smoking. Table Legs ranted at him for ten solid minutes. And he just grinned, denying nothing, and thereby agitated this bombastic female all die more.

  Sure he was sick—he was so sick he had diought he was going to die—but Table Legs would never know it. She and the rest of them could flunk what they pleased. In time he recovered, with Hate’s help, by simply getting out of bed and ignoring what was wrong with him; by getting back up when he fell on his face; by refilling his belly when he threw up what he had eaten; by paying no attention to the black dizziness, and acting as though it weren’t there.

  Back at his job in the assistant superintendent’s office, a friendly grin and a willingness and ability to carry an enormous work load offered the protective coloration he needed while he sought an early release. Again he was made a cadet officer, but his enthusiasm to help the weak ones was gone, put on cold storage. And he didn’t fight as often; slugging it out with the big-mouthed tigers was no longer a pleasure. It was simply a job to be done when they got in his face and that was the only way to get them out. He knew what he was doing—withdrawing. Reform school had taught him all it could; truly he had learned his lessons. Not singular; plural. He was nearing his eighteenth birthday—he felt as though it might be his eightieth—and he knew he had a choice to make. It was a very simple choice. He either had to go out, go home, settle down, get a job, get married, have kids, forget everything he had seen and had started out to learn, becoming a washer in a barrel, or he had to go on living in the jungle until he destroyed it or it destroyed him.

  A square, a John, with its effete, futile, burlesque connotations. A blindly believing, wholly obedient, ineffectual, unthinking square. That was the safe thing to become. Safe until he started to think. Until he recalled what happened to the weak and the meek. Until the Hate rose up in him and his trigger finger began to itch.

  An employee of the school had drawn Whit to one side, covertly sympathized with his mistrust of his society. His capitalist society. Blame your plight on that society and its cancerous economics, he had been told. Its degradation, its enslavement of the masses. Look you that Marx and Lenin and the other comrades have conceived how the perfect society may be achieved. So put your Hate to work, consecrate it. Become one of us.

  Of course this proposition had not been made suddenly or crudely. First there had been the build-up, the winning of confidence, the offered friendship, the doing of small favors, the idea planting. But in vain. “
No thanks,” Whit had said. “I don’t think I’m interested.” Why not? “Let’s say I just don’t think I’d make a very good comrade and let it go at that.”

  Why not? Because the Hate inside him didn’t deserve consecration. Because it was a disease with a peculiar pathology of its own, not a noble weapon. Whit had traded fear for it, and for guile.

  And that was his trouble. He had allowed Hate and Guile to serve him too well. He had contracted with them to do his bidding, and their devotion to him had become fanatic. They clamored to aid him in everything he did. Their loyalty to him was so fierce, so unwavering, they made him believe he could not get along without them. They made him believe they were the only friends he had whose loyalty was absolute. They had persuasive ways of convincing him even against his will.

  For example, Whit’s work brought him into daily contact with an attractive female administrative employee. Whit liked Miss Turner—as we shall call her—because she was never superior or highhanded with the inmates, and particularly because she wasn’t forever lecturing or scolding them. Being totally human, she refused to take offense because others were human too. Her evident friendliness to the school’s charges assigned to do clerical or cleanup work in the administration building set prudish tongues to wagging and prompted one prim lady to warn her that “I think it’s only fair I tell you what ‘they’ are saying.”

  Miss Turner responded to this warning by laughing heartily in the prim lady’s face.

  “Well, I never!” huffed the prim lady indignantly before marching off. The prim lady saw her duty and set out to do it. She pumped a sneaky boy who did house-squad work on the top floor of the administration building where Miss Turner and other employees had rooms, learning from the sneaky one that the friendly lady now and then had a bottle of beer in her room, which was strictly verboten by the rules. By promising a rich reward of extra credits, the prim lady exacted an assurance from the sneaky one that he would keep his eyes open and promptly report to her the next time he located a bottle of the brew in the friendly lady’s room.