Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  Then.

  But first now, the Here-and-Now in relation to a real Big Time Operator with exactly three pennies in his pockets, a smoking gun in his hand, and much on his alleged mind. And, contradictorily, this relationship between geography, time and the individual in practical, hedonistic, psychopathic terms, for the contradictions are essential ingredients. Not only within but without.

  You’re free, aren’t you? And you know where and how to get the folding stuff the easy way, don’t you? Damn right you do. Besides, what legitimate racket, what profession, oilers the unlimited opportunities, the intellectual stimulation, the prestige, the power that crime does? Hell, if you want, you can be another Saint, another Simon Templar, a suave, smooth article. Look at the ego satisfaction you can get from outsmarting the slickers and the sharpers and Authority, and from being your own law and dispensing your own brand of justice. Justice! What an intriguing word.

  And if your Herostratus complex is nagging you, then ponder the chance for immortality that crime offers. All you have to do is be a violent, robbing, murderous bastard and your fame is assured. One of the peculiarities of squares is their screwy propensity to glorify rogues and scoundrels.

  So why lay that pistol down? Why be a hoosier, a chump? Your culture emphasizes material gain. You’ve arrived if you drive that new Cad convertible, have a closet full of sharp clothes, a swank apartment and a pocketful of dough. And it doesn’t matter where the money came from; it doesn’t matter if you shot poor old grandma to get it, not so long as you can get away with it. Just don’t get caught; don’t take a bad fall. And don’t waste your time worrying about a little thing called a creative urge. Nobody gives a damn whether you put words in a string or not. Sublimate with a blonde instead of with a typewriter.

  And keep in mind what the smart boys say. Die young and have a good-looking corpse. Or (you can add, acidly) be a criminal Alexander the Great and weep as you approach your majority because there are no more worlds left to be conquered. None worth conquering, that is.

  “Look then to be well edified when the fool delivers the madman.”.

  In the case or. Caryl Chessman, the fool and the madman were one And neither was content to deliver the other.

  • 18 •

  But This Wasn’t Fiction

  The private detective had moved to new and plushier quarters. When I paid him a visit, he took me into his private office, handed me a thick report and said, “Here’s some sad news, I’m afraid.”

  The report informed me, graphically and in detail, how long and hard he had looked for my mother’s parents. Still, he had been unable to find any trace of them. Their identity remained a dark mystery.

  I stared at the last page of the report. “Damn!” I said very softly.

  The private detective put an arm on my shoulder. “Believe me, I did everything humanly possible to find those two people.”

  It was obvious he had. But that didn’t make my disappointment any less keen.

  The idea of having to admit defeat galled. “Do you think you could find them with more money?” I asked.

  “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think I could find them with all the gold at Fort Knox. While I’ve still got two or three feelers out, I don’t believe they can be found.”

  I stood up. “Well, I guess that’s that, then.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  I walked for a long time, until I was physically weary. I thought about the report, mulled it over and over. Bitterly I realized that it would have been different in fiction. The private detective would have found my mother’s parents, or at least one of them, and there would have been a joyous reunion followed by a compelling explanation why my mother had been abandoned as an infant. Surely, too, the fictionist would have revealed these two—my maternal grandparents—as people of refinement and substance, tragic people perhaps, and somehow my learning their identities would have favorably altered the course of my life, and given it direction, purpose.

  But this wasn’t fiction.

  Only life itself would have the temerity to create—for its own perverse entertainment—such a mockery: a juvenile delinquent who had turned bagnio bandit to finance a search for unknown grandparents and who, as a consequence of his banditry, served a second savage term in a reformation factory that he might be conditioned for God alone knew what sort of unbelievable future.

  Clearly, Chessman at eighteen was a character much too improbable for fiction. Well, life had something to learn—that the mocked could mock.

  The days passed. I talked the nights away at my mother’s bedside. I worked with my father. I spent many of my evenings at a local branch of the public library, reading, studying. We traded the family sedan for a little Ford convertible which I hopped up, put in faultless running order. The Ford became my pride, my sparkling little black jewel. Two friends from grammar-school days began dropping around. Sometimes my father would join us and we’d play cards. Sometimes we’d just sit around and shoot the breeze. Other times we would go roller skating at a small rink in Glendale or to the beach, or perhaps we’d take in a show. And late at night, alone, I would feed a piece of paper into my mother’s portable typewriter and write, only to tear up and write some more, as a discipline and an index, a barometer—of that which writhed and burned and glowed unnaturally within, of a warder named Hate, of a tall, broken-nosed, sardonic young man who found it so ridiculously easy to be profound, profoundly wrong. How incredible that, on his father’s side, this violent young man should be a direct descendant of that gentle and quaint old Quaker, John Greenleaf Whittier!

  “And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.”

  I was marking time and knew it.

  Word had gotten around that I was home. Youngsters from the reformation factory came to see me, full of tough talk and ideas. “We got a big score lined up,” they’d say. “Wanta get cut in?”

  I’d shake my head. “No, not right now. I feel like taking it easy for a while.”

  And then I’d read in the papers that they’d been caught and shot up and killed. Sometimes they’d come to see me after a wild adventure and relate it. Then, “You sure you don’t want to join us?” as though flying bullets, wild rides, gun fights and near death were irresistible inducements to “caper.” These youngsters—and I was one with them psychologically—were anomalies. They committed crimes, often senselessly violent crimes, and so were criminals; but they stubbornly refused to accept crime’s cynical and harsh disciplines. For the most part, they genuinely scorned those who regarded crime as a business, unspectacularly. Crime was an adventure, kicks, glamor; crime was rebellion, a psychopathic crusade, an inviting, deadly pilgrimage; crime was getting even and forcing recognition of identity—but certainly it was nothing so utterly unalluring as an unheralded, workaday means of obtaining a livelihood.

  The police got into the habit of scooping me up every time they needed a suspect. I’d be given a ride to the police station, marched to the detective quarters and grilled by impatient, large-sized dicks. The more they rousted me around the more I needled them, gave them smart answers. What had I been doing, smart guy? Oh, just the usual stuff, robbing banks, kidnaping millionaires and that sort of thing.

  Angrily, they’d warn me, “Don’t let your foot slip.”

  I’d laugh. “You flat-footed clowns couldn’t catch a cold.”

  To me it didn’t make sense—or it made too much sense. The whorehouses and the gambling joints were going full blast and not getting so much as a rumble from law enforcement. But eighteen-year-old Chessman was constantly being grilled, rousted. He was the guy to watch, not the big-time pimps and madams and gamblers and fixers.

  Tim put in an appearance—the same old Tim, still full of bold, bad ideas, still shifty-eyed, still with his tough-guy complex, a short, husky eighteen-year-old with a fox face and a swagger in his walk. And a Tim in trouble.

  “Jeez, Chess, you gotta help me. These guys are after me and
they mean business.”

  “These guys” meant business for a fact. They were a couple of mean characters from Burbank and Tim had gotten himself into deadly serious trouble with them. They were gunning for him. I served notice that I was taking over Tim’s beef and was promptly invited to the hills to settle accounts. “And you better come ready 1” I was warned. Luckily I did. Even more luckily, running into a sort of ambush, I received nothing more than a superficial flesh wound and then raised a little hell of my own.

  There were other adventures and misadventures too numerous to mention. I loaned my gun to a friend and it bought him a bunk at San Quentin. A mincing homosexual, big enough to fight grizzly bears with his bare hands, punched a tough friend and myself groggy when this friend got it into his head to try to roll him. There was a wild ride in a hot car through Hollywood, widi the cops in hot pursuit and shooting. Seated beside me were two gay young things who squealed with fear and delight. Today, one of them is an internationally famous movie star. I arranged to spring a young hoodlum confederate from the courtroom. At the last instant he lost his nerve and, in getting away, I very nearly lost my life.

  Then it happened, perhaps inevitably, the ridiculous thing. One evening Tim and I drove onto the parking lot of a department store in Glendale, with a five-gallon can and a hose on the floor of the car. Tim got out with can and hose and walked to a nearby car. Suddenly, the vicinity was alive with people. They grabbed Tim. They had been lying in wait for burglars who had been regularly looting the premises, and they figured the hose and can were a stall, a front. Tim pointed to my Ford and said he was with me. They jerked and shoved him over to the car. “Do you know this guy?” they asked.

  “Never saw him before in my life,” I assured them.

  They marched Tim away and I drove off. Tim was quite a boy. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I went home. Anger mounted. If Tim talked, this penny-ante, spur-of-the-moment caper could cost me too much time in jail. I put a recently acquired little .32 revolver under my pillow and lay down, thinking, waiting. I didn’t have long to wait. Within minutes someone knocked loudly on the garage door and a gruff voice said:

  “All right, Chessman, we know you’re in there. Open up!”

  • 19 •

  The Dark Night’s Children

  My impulse was to snatch the gun and blow the cop (or cops) away from the door. Tim was a fool; cops were fools. Tim and the cops were crowding me. Damn them!

  I unlocked the garage door, pushed it open.

  “Yeah,” I said, glaring at the cop, a big man in a chalk-striped, double-breasted suit, “what the hell do you want?”

  “You,” the cop said. He walked in, uninvited, his service revolver in his right hand.

  “What for?” I demanded.

  The cop told me, not delicately. For petty theft; for stealing a gas cap. (When they had brought Tim over to my Ford he had got rid of the gas cap by dropping it onto the floor of the car without anyone’s knowledge. Taken to the station, Tim had told them about it and who I was. He had led the cops here to get me. That hurt.)

  The cop frisked me. Then he began looking around, in things, under things, at my personal papers, my writings.

  “You got a search warrant?” I asked.

  The cop laughed and waved his gun. “I don’t need a search warrant,” he said. He turned his back on me, jerking open desk drawers, spilling everything in them.

  I grabbed the gun from under my pillow and savagely pulled the trigger. I’d show the smart sonofabitch whether he needed a search warrant or not! But the sliver of metal used as a substitute for the firing pin, which had been broken a couple of days before, went flying. The only result was an audible click, nearly drowned by the cop’s enthusiastic desk-searching activities. Instantly I reburied the useless gun under the pillow.

  Alerted, the cop spun around. He thought I had been reaching for something; that was a break. He snatched at the pillow, then grabbed the gun. “So you got toys, huh?”

  I smiled, ever so politely.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Tim and I didn’t speak on the way to the station. The big cop sat between us, humming tunelessly. Tim huddled sullenly in one corner of the back seat, staring fixedly ahead, hating his weakness.

  The cops had a gun. They had Chessman. They had their own ideas about what Chessman had been doing. They had leads that didn’t pan out. Victims of a string of robberies said the car used by the two young hood perpetrators generally fitted the description of the Chessman Ford. These same victims said Tim “looked like” one of the bandits, but they were unable to identify him for sure, and Tim vehemently denied any complicity in any robberies. No one could identify Chessman, who denied everything. Chessman and Tim were put together in a bugged room; and this produced an ear-blistering opinion by Chessman of certain segments of law enforcement and a certain juvenile parole officer who was working with the police.

  So the cops fell back on their prize piece of evidence—one gas cap. Tim and I were charged with the theft of said cap, value seventy-odd cents “lawful money of the United States.” We pled guilty on the assurance that we would only be given a few days. And we were sentenced to ten days in jail. Then we were transferred from the Glendale station to the Los Angeles County Jail and were lodged in a crowded misdemeanor tank occupied mostly by old “winos” serving a few days for drunkenness. They were a pitiful, bedraggled lot, these ancient wine drinkers, and many of them had the shakes so bad they couldn’t have rolled a cigarette if they had had the price of a sack of makings. Tim and I spent all the money the jail had permitted us to bring in on tailor-mades and passed them around. The old guys were really grateful; they were used to getting kicked around and couldn’t quite get over it when a couple of youngsters spoke to them civilly and went broke buying them tobacco.

  My parole officer came to see me. “Don’t th’nk you’re going to get out when your ten days are up, Chessman, because you’re not. You’re a menace to society.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me; thank yourself. I warned you but you wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t cooperate.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I wouldn’t cooperate. And that makes me a menace to society, a real honest-to-God public enemy. But one thing bothers me: What does that make you?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I got up and walked out of the Attorney Room, where such interviews were held.

  Those jail nights were long. And noisy. My elderly wine-imbibing friends, an odoriferous crew, industriously scratched, snored and hacked the night away. I found such a milieu a novel one, to say the least, and there were times when my sense of humor had to rush to the rescue. Somehow I had to shoot an angle and get myself released. But how? I cudgeled my brains, paced the floor of the tank and did some checking; then I had the answer.

  My parole officer had failed to file a formal hold order against me; his intentions were to wait for me at the booking office and personally have me re-booked as a parole violator. But he got a surprise. I wangled an early release and was long gone when he put in an appearance.

  My first stop was at the house of my gun-collecting friend, where I acquired another gun, one that wouldn’t fail to fire. Then I went home. I fully intended to resist any attempts to return me to jail. Similarly, I had no intention of accepting any invitation to visit a police station.

  Finding I was gone, the parole officer made a dash for my place. He came alone and I met him in the back yard. He stormed, fumed, threatened. He told me I had no business being released without his permission.

  “I’m out,” I said.

  “And I think I should take you right back,” he snapped.

  “Don’t,” I told him very quietly. “As a favor to both of us, don’t!”

  He glowered at me, trying to make up his mind what to do. I said a silent prayer that he didn’t try to take me in, that he didn’t put his hands on me. The seconds passed. I waited; the next move was his. Dear God,
save this honorable gentleman from his own folly!

  “I’m giving you this one last chance,” he finally said. Then he lectured me some more, finding increasing strength and assurance from his own rotund platitudes. “Remember, Chessman, this is your last chance. There won’t be any next times.”

  I agreed there indeed would not be.

  And I fixed a secret back way out of my garage apartment.

  It was night. We—my girl and I—were parked high in my hills. We had the world to ourselves, an enchanted, shadowy, moonlit world. I held her in my arms; I kissed her. Her full lips clung hungrily to mine. I was alive once more, and whole. Here, I was then convinced, was the ultimate and the only reality worth knowing or possessing.

  We made love, joyously, gladly.

  And then we drifted and, for a time, were contentedly one with the night and the moon and the stars.

  Gradually the stars faded from the night sky.

  “It’s beginning to get light,” she said. “You’d better take me home.”

  I held her more tightly than ever. “I don’t want to take you home. I’m almost afraid to take you home, afraid you’ll not be there when I come for you again.”

  Later, she and I got into an argument. It was one of those silly things that started over nothing. It soon, however, grew heated and bitter. I learned I was just an ordinary, cheap thief; I was no good; I never would be any good. In reply, I did the ungentlemanly thing by assuring her that as far as I was concerned her only virtues were biological. She slapped me.

  Irrational anger boiled up inside me. “Damn you!” I whispered. “I’ve got a notion to kill us both.”