The only gang-bangers at Alcatraz were the guards themselves, he went on, especially the goon squad. They didn’t take no “crap.” They didn’t go around messing with people either. You could holler at them, cuss them out, snivel like a baby, whatever, they’d just write you up and keep on going, but God help you if you laid a hand on one of them. They’d beat your brains out. A good example of that is what happened to the big Indian who rode the train to Alcatraz with us. They put him in the hole when they found a knife in his cell. He hollered and cussed and swore the knife wasn’t his. He threw a big fit when they got him to the hole. No problem. But when he caught a guard too close to his cell and knocked him senseless with a single blow the goon squad rolled in on him. He was big and he could fight which he proved without a doubt when they rushed into his cell. He whipped about half of them, but they called in reinforcements and when they got him down they beat the sawdust out of him. When they were through they sent what was left of him to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri where he was placed in the maximum security nut ward. There, they turned him into a vegetable by applying the appropriate combination of chemicals to appropriate places on his big body. Some say they eventually killed him. That’s what they say. I don’t know, but I do know we never saw him again. And if you don’t believe this, look him up. His name is Bruce Allmond, listed on the Alcatraz roster as white but he was at least part Indian and he was sent to Alcatraz for assault on another inmate with intent to commit murder while at the federal institution at Terre Haute, Indiana.
All I know is that he disappeared from the face of the earth and his disappearance probably wasn’t aided by ghosts. So you figure it out.
So the guards didn’t take no “crap,” Benny Rayburn went on to explain, if you laid a hand on one of them, but, on the other hand, there was nothing petty about most of the guards at Alcatraz; leave them alone and they’d leave you alone. Do your time and they’d do theirs.
There were exceptions to that, of course, guards who went out of their way to mess with everybody every chance they got for little petty things. It was one of those that I was bound to run into by my very nature, and run into him I did. But I’ll tell you about him later.
Another reason there was little violence at Alcatraz was there was little to fight over. There was no commissary, nothing to buy even if you had all the money in the world. The food you got in the mess-hall was all you got. It was good food, the best of any prison food in the country, for the warden believed in feeding his prisoners. It was said that a past warden named Johnson had started that custom, of feeding good, because, as hard-nosed as he was, he was wise enough to know that most riots and strikes in prison populations were caused by bad food. The new warden, Paul Madigan, continued that practice. It made sense. But still, there was no commissary, so you’d better not miss any meals, which I didn’t.
And there were no drugs to fight over for the simple reason that there were no drugs, period, unless you figured aspirin to be a drug. There were a few prisoners on thorazine or a terrible mixture called green lizard, but not because they wanted to be. So drugs were not a factor in causing trouble at Alcatraz.
And punks, homosexuals, well, there was a killing once in a while over that, every couple of years maybe. But there wasn’t much to be done about that. Hell hath no fury like the wrath of a jilted punk (my contribution to the conversation with Rayburn).
Gambling? Of course most of us did some of that. The institution gave us three packs of Wings a week, passed out a pack on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They must have had a million cartons of those cigarettes stored away in a huge warehouse somewhere, because that’s what we got for all the time I was there. And you could get all the Bull Durham you wanted for free from a rack on the cell house wall to take up the slack. We gambled with the cigarettes, football games, baseball, basketball, a pack here a pack there, nothing heavy enough to fight over. So gambling wasn’t a big problem.
Our most valuable possession was the Christmas bag they passed out every year on Christmas Eve, Benny explained with such relish that my mouth started watering before he got half through. Since we never got any candy or snacks of any kind, that Christmas bag was a great big deal. And it was worth fighting over. But more about that later, too.
Anyway, I remember well the first day they let me out of my cell for recreation. I hit that yard with much anticipation, so glad was I to get out of that cell, for the bad thing about Alcatraz was not physical, it was mental, the long boring grind of being locked down day and night for days at a time, of enduring the unrelenting boredom. That was it, just plain boredom. I can’t think of another single word that better describes it. So I came out of that cell and hit the yard like a horse out of the stable. And I saw the sunshine and felt the fresh air on my face for the first time in many months, and I let out a silent whoop of joy.
While Benny Rayburn was talking I was half-listening and half surveying my new surroundings. The yard, my yard now, was small. There was a wall around it, not tall enough to keep a guy from standing on another guy’s shoulders and grabbing the top and bounding right over it, but the wall had a fence on top of it running all the way around, and there was a guard shack in one corner and a guard walking around on a catwalk. And they had guns up there. No thanks.
At one end of the yard two shirtless convicts were playing a game of handball, smacking the small ball against the higher wall there. Beyond the handball court prisoners walked back and forth, ignoring a softball game that was underway and which sent an oversized softball soaring in the air and landing with a smack among them. I guess they were used to that for they paid it little attention. An outfielder scrambled between the walkers to retrieve the ball and threw it toward the infield. I asked a guy why they used such a large ball and was told the yard was so small that they had to use a larger ball that wouldn’t fly over the wall every time somebody hit it good.
Next I wandered over to the other end of the yard, just sort of moseyed along looking at this and that and enjoying the sunshine and the smell of salt air coming from the sea. Behind the batter’s box was a high metal screen and behind that were the card tables. I was surprised to learn that most of the prisoners were playing bridge, and that’s something I’d never seen before in the places I’d been locked up in, bridge.
I watched for a while. They were using what looked like dominoes as cards, shuffling them face-down on the table like dominoes, but they were actually a little bigger than dominoes, I think, and were made of ivory or plastic or something, and each player was dealt thirteen of them which were then held in a wooden holder and sorted by suit—red was hearts, black was spades, green was clubs and yellow was diamonds, the colored spots I mean. Sort of like rook, I guess, and at first I thought that’s what it was, but somebody told me no, they were playing bridge. Beat all I ever saw, a bunch of raggedy convicts playing bridge.
On long high concrete bleachers overlooking the yard were convicts with their easels and brushes, painting pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the bay, or the San Francisco waterfront in the distance. I saw all this as I moseyed about peeping over their shoulders. High on the bleachers as they were they could see out over the little wall on the other side of the yard and see all that they were painting. They were painting freedom.
Nobody was painting anything that was going on down on the yard.
And up on the bleachers a couple of guys were banging on acoustic guitars, while others were just hanging out on the bleachers doing nothing. None of the guys on the bleachers, neither the artists nor the guitar players nor anybody else, paid much attention to the fly balls that careened their way or the seagulls dumping their loads. I guess they just accepted it as part of the routine. Everybody had a routine, I guess, even the seagulls.
Me, I didn’t have a routine yet and I vowed not to get one for as long as I could avoid it, for I had learned to stir up a little shit once in a while to combat the monotony. Once you settled into a routine and
surrendered to the comfort of the bells, a bell to eat, a bell to go to sleep, a bell to go to work, a bell for everything—once you surrendered to the comfort of the bells your soul belonged to the warden. I wasn’t smart, maybe, but the zigzagging road to Alcatraz had taught me that much.
Actually, we woke up to the recorded wake-up call of a bugle, and went to bed to the sound of a bugle playing taps, but I refer to the bells symbolically because institutions normally use bells for everything. And anyway a bell is a bell.
CHAPTER TWO
A water tower rises high above Alcatraz Island shivering on long iron legs in the cold January wind. They have to bring in water on a water boat, because they have no fresh water on the island. From the boat the water is somehow sucked up into the belly of the tower where it is cooled by the winter wind to an appropriate temperature to send shock waves through the body of any Alcatraz prisoner who dares splash it on any part of himself from the sink from which it flows.
Me, I remember well those first January mornings after my arrival when I crawled out of bed in the morning and prepared my face for shaving, how that first splash of water set my teeth to chattering and sent goose bumps down the entire length of my skinny body from head to toe. Keeping a clean shave was mandatory for us convicts. It was a rule strictly enforced. A short haircut was also enforced, but it was the icy water on my face that I remember most.
It was on such a morning after my arrival that a middle-aged man in a suit stopped in front of my cell. He identified himself as the librarian. He also introduced himself as the parole officer. As the librarian he explained the rules of the library and gave me a library card and a catalog of books in the library. I was instructed to fill out the card and give it to the inmate when he made his rounds with the library cart. As the parole officer he told me no one had ever made a parole from Alcatraz and never could expect to, therefore I might just as well sign a waiver saying I didn’t want to make a personal appearance before the parole board, and he just so happened to have such a waiver with him with my name already typed in and a big X where I was to put my signature. I only hesitated a minute. With my prison record I couldn’t expect to make a parole even if I grew a halo and a set of white wings. And I only had a few years left on my sentence anyway. So I signed it.
After he left I looked through the library catalog. They had every book ever written by Zane Grey. So I wrote them all down on my library card. I’d have something to read for a while.
On the yard I met Punchy Bailey. I’d known him up in the state pen in Oregon, well I’d known him a little bit, known of him. I’d never actually talked to him. He was the warden’s clerk in Oregon and we hardheads didn’t associate with inmate politicians, which is what we labeled him up there, a politician. As the beleaguered Warden O’Malley’s clerk he had smoothly worked himself into a position of effectively running the whole penitentiary, he, Punchy Bailey. After the big riot which got O’Malley fired, the new warden, The Gimp, himself, sent Punchy Bailey straight to Alcatraz. He wasn’t about to leave anybody around as smart as Punchy Bailey.
I didn’t recognize Bailey at first, I hadn’t known him all that well, but he recognized me and he cut into me walking the yard and made some laps with me explaining his role as the warden’s clerk in which he smoothly painted himself as a champion of his fellow inmates, changing their cells when they needed a change, changing their work assignments, getting their girlfriends placed on their visiting list, all free of charge, he said. He was a good talker, and seemed honest to me, though I think I knew better, but when he was finished I believed him. He was that good.
It didn’t make any difference to me, anyway. He was liked and respected at Alcatraz so I left it that way.
And to demonstrate his good will toward me he told some people who told some people who told some people of my good reputation which he could vouch for first hand, for I had done more than two years in the hole up there in Oregon, two years in the hole as a stand-up convict, and two years on the yard raising hell and going back to the hole. So I brought a lot of respect with me to Alcatraz. And while I was no Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly I could walk any prison yard, including Alcatraz, with my head held just as high as anybody.
Next, I met two men, two convicts who I would know for life, who I would run across again and again in other federal prisons after Alcatraz was closed and who I would learn to love like brothers.
The first was Forest Tucker, a congenial man about fifteen years older than me who was the leader of the Alcatraz band. I liked him from the beginning. I had played a little in the prison band up in Oregon, guitar. I explained to Tucker that I couldn’t read music but I knew my chords and had a good ear, so I could probably figure out the songs and follow along. Well, Forest Tucker just laughed and said nobody in the band was a professional, that they just played for the fun of it. They practiced on Saturday mornings down in the basement shower area and I was welcome to come on down.
Tucker was a bank robber. That’s what he was, what he did when he was on the streets. When he was in prison he played music and walked the yard and talked about robbing banks with anybody who would listen. When he was free he robbed banks. Can’t fault a guy for that. He just liked to rob banks.
I made some laps with him walking and talking about music. I guess he was on his good behavior for he just talked about music when we first met, didn’t mention robbing banks a single time. That must have been very hard for him. But Tucker had such an unassuming, infectious personality that I would have listened to him no matter what. He was easy to talk to and listened to me with such honest interest that we spent over an hour just walking and talking that first day I met him.
My favorite musician, of course, was Elvis Pressley, that twanging electric guitar in his band. Tucker said his favorite band was Benny Goodman. That clarinet. But he said he was learning to play piano so he’d have something to play when he no longer had the wind to play sax or clarinet. That amazed me that he could plan so far in the future. Me, I could barely see past tomorrow and if I ever lived to be fifty I hoped somebody would shoot me for being so old.
And when I mentioned that I wanted to learn how to play bridge he introduced me to the second man who was later to become my friend. That man was Dick Bayless, officially John Richard Bayless, but everybody called him Jackrabbit. They called him that because he tried to escape a couple of times, jumped right in the water the first time and was swimming straight for San Francisco when they plucked him up like a wet dog and brought him on back to Alcatraz. He told me he had expected them to shoot him, even hoped they would if he didn’t make it, but I guess they had other plans for him, they and Federal Prison Industries, for he was a good worker and FPI always needed good workers.
He tried to escape again when he went back to court over in San Francisco for his first escape. He again was captured without getting shot. He could neither win nor lose.
When I met Jackrabbit he was a quiet, patient man. Tall and slender, he carried himself with the quiet dignity of a man who had died and come back to life two times and had finally said fuck it, and after that he settled down, got him a routine, worked in the factory business office, and became the best bridge player in Alcatraz.
To show you how patient he was, he played chess by mail with this guy over in Europe somewhere. They played for years, back and forth, each move taking two or three weeks, maybe a month. And he told me one day he figured by the time they played about ten more games his time would be up and he'd be free. That's how patient he was.
Anyway they still called him Jackrabbit, settled down or not, which, to me, wasn't a fitting name for a man brave enough to jump into those dangerous waters, suicidal intentions or not, for he had a quiet elegance about him that contradicted such a frivolous nickname. And, besides, I think I knew how he felt because I, myself, had rode that boat to Alcatraz on a foggy January morning.
But now he had him a routine. He played bridge on the yard at Alcatraz, content, the dying embers of lif
e lingering on his face, life as we know it fading.
Forest Tucker and Jackrabbit, Dick Bayless, had a lot in common. For one thing, they both had respect. They had the inner toughness to endure the daily grind of prison life. They didn't have to demand respect from other convicts by outward displays of muscle and noise like monkeys in a jungle, as many prisoners did. Theirs was an inner strength of character, and respect came their way naturally in bits and pieces over a period of time. But make no mistake if you get the idea they were weak. I knew them back then. For there was a day at Alcatraz when they both stood up when it counted most. It was the real deal, and I never doubted them after that.
In Alcatraz we were friends, me and Jackrabbit and Tucker, though we didn't hang out a lot together. I tried to play bridge with Jackrabbit, as his partner. That didn’t work out too well. He fired me. But he gave me a book on bridge by Eli Culbertson and told me to study it and he’d see me later.
So I studied the book and got me a partner and challenged Jackrabbit and his partner to a game. I’d show his smart ass.
They beat me unmercifully. That's when I first started to realize Jackrabbit wasn't as soft as I first thought he was, for he was deadly on the bridge table. Like I'd made a little bid of three-no-trump or something, knowing I had a lock because I had a whole hand full of aces and kings and such, and he'd quietly doubled me and I'd snickered inwardly as I took his opening lead, and then, suddenly and unbelievably, he'd torn my skinny ass up. I mean, he didn't grin or brag or anything, he just quietly tore my ass up. Down four, doubled and vulnerable.
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