Me, I didn’t care one way or the other because I didn’t work anyway, just enough to get by. But we earned five days of extra goodtime a month for working there, so that was a good thing for anybody who ever expected to get out, which included me.
I had already lost all my statutory goodtime, which was the goodtime that was automatically awarded by law and was subtracted from your sentence by the record office when you first got to prison. You didn’t have to earn that, but you could sure lose it quick. That was the catch.
The lazy summer puttered along. With September came the college football games on the radio, and then the NFL, and finally the World Series in October. And with the World Series came our vacation, because we got off work to listen to the games on loud speakers on the yard, and if you listened or not it was extra yard time, which suited me just fine, the extra yard time. I had a ball.
I even won a game of bridge. Not from Jackrabbit, sadly, but I found a couple of beginners and beat the shit out of them, me and my partner. I don’t even remember my partner’s name but I do remember he was just as dumb as I was.
Jackrabbit didn’t lose any money on the World Series because his precious Boston Red Socks were not in it, didn’t even come close, therefore he couldn’t bet on the bums that year, so he spent his vacation playing bridge and won money, uh, cigarettes, instead.
It was about that time that some convicts started betting their Christmas bags. Even though Christmas was still a long way off nobody was going anywhere, so it was legitimate to bet your bag early. Some people, like Russell, who had plenty of cigarettes, started buying up future Christmas bags as far as six months in advance, buying them up cheap as an investment, because the closer you got to Christmas the more they were worth and he could sell them after Christmas for twice what he paid for them. Others who worked in the factory bought bags early with factory money, with production tickets, for example. Like, if you worked in the glove shop, which was on piece-work, and you sewed a box of gloves, you had to initial a ticket proving you had sewn them. Well, if you made a deal with somebody who sold you a Christmas bag, you could let him initial the ticket and he’d get paid for it. That’s the way some of them did it.
Me, I wasn’t about to get rid of my bag for any amount of money. I was going to eat it, every bite of that sweet delicious candy, for we didn’t get any candy at Alcatraz, except on Christmas. And though I hadn’t yet spent a Christmas at Alcatraz, I had heard about the delicious contents of that Christmas bag described a thousand times. So, end of discussion.
Every once in a while I moseyed up on the concrete bleachers and checked out the paintings in progress by the convict artists. This one guy always got irritated when I stood peeping over his shoulder, so I stopped and peeped over his shoulder. Still the same painting, a big one of the whole panorama, the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco waterfront, all in great detail that even included the tiny cars crossing the far-away bridge.
But there was something missing. So I kept looking, standing there with my hands in my pockets. So this guy had finally had enough, I guess, for he suddenly turned with his paint brush gripped tightly in his hand and his jaw clenched and said, “Why don’t you go bother someone else. A painting is private and personal and I don’t want you staring over my shoulder.”
Well, I was a little surprised, I guess, and maybe a little off balance, but I still stood there without taking my hands out of my pockets, for I didn’t feel threatened by his anger. And I finally said, “It ain’t got any sea gulls in it.”
“What!” His voice was about an octave higher.
“There’s seagulls all over the sky out there and not a single one in your picture.”
Well I thought he was going to strangle, and he very nearly did, I think. But he finally got control of himself and with a look of disgust on his face, he said, “There’ll never be one of those nasty filthy things in this painting.” Whereupon he seemed to think he’d won a point, I guess, because he went back to painting and ignored me. So I moseyed on, thinking about what he’d said.
Well, so help me I’m not making this up, I swear on my mother’s honor, a few days later a miracle happened, the first of two that happened that October.
The first miracle blew my mind. I was walking the yard one day when I heard a blood-curdling scream come from up on the bleachers and when I looked I saw this artist who had been so put-out by my watching him paint. He was shaking his paint brush in the air. Then he had a genuine Alcatraz fit, kicked his painting, easel and all, so hard it bounced all the way down the bleachers and landed with a splat out on the yard. Then he slung his paint brush and all his paints after it, after which he continued cussing and shaking his fist in the air.
I knew what had happened, because I had heard that scream of disgust many times by now, though I had never heard it with so much anguish, maybe. But I had to see for myself. I moseyed over and looked down at his painting laying there, and sure enough, there was a big splat of seagull shit right in the middle of it with sickly streaks running in every direction. That seagull had dumped one hell of a load.
I know it was an accident and all, but, well, justice had been done.
The second miracle very nearly made a believer out of me. One weekend in late October when I went to the yard, the first thing I did was get me some water out of the faucet to water my raggedy weeds and when I got just about there I stopped suddenly and stared. My weeds had bloomed.
I mean it was just an ordinary day like any other day on Alcatraz Island, no angels singing, no trumpets in the background, and I don’t believe in miracles anyway, but goddammit my weeds had bloomed. On a stack of bibles and my mother’s honor, my sorry weeds had bloomed.
CHAPTER SIX
Mama Nature was on the rag. Dark clouds rolled in from the west. Lightning flashed in jagged lines and thunder boomed. We were barely able to make it in off the yard before the rain came down in buckets, and even then, as last man in line I didn’t entirely escape her wrath. Mama Nature could be a bitch sometimes.
The only thing that sort of saved the day was that the guards had to stay out till we were in so they got drenched too. And that included Simmons. He was sputtering and shaking himself off like a wet dog when he came in.
I don’t mean to pick on Simmons, but he really had been on a roll lately, tearing up cells and writing petty disciplinary reports for everything. He nailed me one day for having my hair too long. Hair had to be cut smartly, well above the ears, and mine was just starting to get a little shaggy when he got me. I mean nothing ever came of it except I had to get a haircut, but it was his cocky attitude, like he had just busted me for attempted escape or something. That pissed me off. I kept my mouth shut, though.
And he caught Benny Rayburn masturbating in his cell one night when he was working the evening shift and actually wrote him up for it. I swear he did. We kidded Benny unmercifully about it, of course, because he was so easily embarrassed by things like that. And of course they threw the report away before it ever made it to court, so nothing ever came of that either, but Simmons didn’t slow down a bit and many of his reports did stick. I mean he was a correctional officer at Alcatraz so they had to respect his uniform enough to process his most serious reports just to keep him happy. And like a traffic cop at a speed trap, he thrived on numbers: Write enough tickets and you’d get enough convictions to pay the rent, I guess that’s the way Simmons looked at it.
As for Benny Rayburn, our pleasant-mannered jailhouse lawyer, he hadn’t heard the end of it, yet, for Lieutenant Mitchell really rocked the boat the next day after dinner when we lined up to go back to work. We had no idea what was coming, of course. We lined up as usual in groups according to work detail, and Fat Mitchell and a couple of guards, serious as hell, walked down the lines looking everybody over. When the lieutenant got to Benny Rayburn he stopped, just stood there looking at Benny Rayburn for a minute, and then he moved on. When he got through with his inspection he took up a position in fron
t of the whole gathering. “Benny Rayburn,” he called out loud enough for everybody on the island to hear. And Benny, without any notion of what was coming, held up his hand and mumbled something.
Well Fat Mitchell asked, still serious and still loud enough to wake everybody up, “Are you able to work today?” Whereupon Benny, still puzzled, said, “Yes sir.”
“Did you get through masturbating, yesterday?” Still serious as hell.
Well that was like dropping a hand grenade right in the middle of the crowd. At first everybody was sort of stunned that Fat Mitchell would say such a thing on the yard in front of everybody like that, then there were a few snickers, and then, man, we rolled on the ground with laughter while Benny Rayburn stood there turning twenty shades of red. And while you may not find this in the official history of Alcatraz, that really happened right there on Alcatraz Island just like that.
Anyway, back to Mother Nature’s fit, I looked at old Simmons standing there sputtering and fuming like a drowning dog and I turned my head quickly so he couldn’t write me up for laughing in his face and I just about busted trying to hold it in. But the fun was about over because they locked us in our cells and that was it for the day. It was too late in the day for a rainy-day movie.
Most of the time I love Mother Nature. I love how she sometimes paints her blue sky with puffy white clouds that look like a stagecoach herding a flock of sheep, and how she decorates the land with trees and plants and flowers of every color in the rainbow, the endless variety of colors and shapes around every corner and over every hill, the simple truths and simple laws that even I can understand with which she keeps order in her kingdom. But she can be a bitch, sometimes, that’s what I was thinking on that rainy day as I lay on my bunk with my wet clothes hanging over my fold-out desk and sulked, stuck in my cell for the rest of the day. I mean, Mother Nature, wise in all ways, nevertheless can’t even tell the difference between real butter and Parkay margarine, the dumb bitch.
I’ll give her credit for her art work, though, for I love this land called America, every inch of it, every hill and valley. I’d seen many miles of it before I was even sixteen years old, hitch-hiking around the country, setting pens in bowling alleys in Detroit, picking fruit with the Mexicans in California, up and down the highways I went wide open, and it didn’t matter which direction I headed or how much money I had in my pocket, which was usually none, I loved every minute of it. We had no interstate highway system back then, only two-lane country roads when you got away from the cities, so around every turn and over every hill you saw a different sight, a one-of-a-kind painting you would never see again anywhere else, each one uniquely beautiful and constantly changing, and even if you took the same road back Mama Nature was there ahead of you, busy redecorating while you were gone.
The interstate highway system destroyed all that, of course, as I’m sure you’ve noticed as you cruise down Interstate-Whatever trying to stay awake from the sheer depressing monotony of a billion miles of the same scene repeated over and over again.
A painting on the wall may be a pretty sight, all right, but it’s like a dead deer head, you have to kill it to paint it. My art is America, alive and changing every second, a deer running through the forest, dogwood trees blooming in the Spring, a thin trail of smoke coming from the stovepipe of a mountain cabin in the wintertime with white snow on the ground, the heat of summer when the girls come out of their clothes, a dog barking in the distance, Kathleen Vinson’s pink panties hanging on a clothesline panting in the hot summer sun—what could be more American than that?
That painting on the wall might be worth a million dollars, a Picasso, a Rembrandt, but America was painted from sea to shining sea by the greatest artist of all, Mama Nature.
So, okay, I love my grandma and I love my dog and I love America. But that’s it.
What? You don’t think a thief can love his country? I’ve got news for you, I’d fight like hell to defend this country, except I am busy right now providing job security for a bunch of Alcatraz Island prison guards who don’t seem to appreciate me the least bit. But many of America’s biggest thieves served in the military with distinction and earned honorable discharges. Take the Hell’s Angels, for example. As a group they are fiercely patriotic, and while they may steal the gold teeth right out of your mouth I’ve read of their fighting spirit in times of war, and I’ve witnessed their fighting spirit firsthand in prisons and jails where many of them wind up. On several occasions they volunteered for special military operations that required bravery and cunning far beyond the call of duty. The military didn’t have the Navy Seals back then, I don’t think, and dirty work had to be done. Well, let me tell you something, in later years I learned to admire and respect the heroic bravery of the Navy Seals, but when it comes to fierceness in battle, to pure meanness, they might not be too far ahead of the Hells Angels.
And did you know that almost every prison in the country has an official VFW chapter, the convicts? Yep, they do. Except for Alcatraz. We didn’t have anything.
Nothing much happened the rest of my first year at Alcatraz until Christmas, nothing that I remember anyway. I don’t remember who won the World Series or much about the football games except Y. A. Tittle and Hugh McElhenny were raising hell for the San Francisco Forty Niners, which many of us convicts considered our team. We didn’t win the title but we beat the Los Angeles Rams, which was the main thing. The Baltimore Colts won everything, of course. They had Otto Graham.
And I remember I learned how to imitate the bawing of a fog horn on one of those tugboats that pestered us at night when it was foggy in the bay. I practiced it in my cell but never told anyone it was me, and never did it after the lights were out, for it’s a part of our unwritten convict code that you never wake up a sleeping convict for anything unless the world’s on fire.
I sure remember Christmas, though. On Christmas Eve day they called us in from work early and passed out our bags. When they were done all you could hear in the cell house was the rustling of paper sacks as prisoners tore into their precious bags, me included. I laid every item in my bag out on my bunk, salivating as I went, but I never ate a single thing until I had every item arranged and accounted for. I had a big bag of hard candy, that I would save till last and maybe start eating around February or March, maybe. And I had some candy bars I would eat right away, like right now, which I did, right then, for I could go no further. I chowed down.
Then somebody yelled out, “Three cheers for the Christmas bags!” And everybody yelled back, “Yea, yea, yea!” All at the same time, so it must have been a yearly tradition. And then somebody yelled out, “Three cheers for the guards who passed them out!” And everybody answered, “Shit, shit, shit!” And everybody laughed like hell. I had a hard time laughing with a mouth full of candy but I did.
When a couple of hours had passed and my stomach was stuffed, I carefully placed my big bag of hard candy on the shelf in back of my cell, and I vowed I wouldn’t touch it again until January or February. Nope. And I opened up a fresh pack of Camels, which also had been in my bag, and I puffed away—that was back before cigarettes caused cancer, and a grown man would walk a mile for a Camel.
It was about that time that I heard one hell of a banging and clanging as the first of the check-ins started throwing all his belongings out of his cell and over the rail where they splattered and bounced on the cell house corridor below. Adding to the racket was the applause and yells of encouragement from other convicts. Yes, Alcatraz had its share of check-ins, those convicts who for one reason or another couldn’t make it in regular population. Some just got bored with doing time and decided to take a break and check in the hole for a while to break up the monotony. Others checked in for their own protection, like those who got too far in debt and decided it was time to get out of town for a while. There were nearly always a few check-ins after a big ballgame, like the World Series or something. But the biggest number of check-ins came every year shortly after the Christmas bags
were passed out, for many of the sorriest inmates had sold their Christmas bag to three or four different people, or lost it gambling to three or four different people, the same bag, so they just sat in their cells and ate up their bag as quickly as possible and then threw their belongings over the tier and waited for the guards to crack their door and take them to the hole, where they remained (in segregation) for things to cool down a bit.
Anyway, that was the traditional method of checking in at Alcatraz. And after Christmas, the cells in the hole filled up all the way.
And, yeah, in the late, rainless, Fall, my raggedy weeds died, despite my attention, no big deal, just part of Mother Nature’s recycling operation, I guess, and the weeds didn’t complain about it, they just turned brown and dropped dead, so I didn’t make a big deal of it either, no burial ceremony or anything. I was still curious, though, about the flowers, because that had seemed like a miracle to me at the time. But Benny Rayburn told me a lot of weeds sprouted flowers, dandelions for example.
Shit, I always thought dandelions were flowers. So, oh well, maybe some people’s weeds are another person’s flowers. Because, me, I always did like dandelions. I used to admire them in the Spring, because they were among the first flowers to bloom, and I even picked a bunch of them when I was a kid and made a bouquet out of them, they were so yellow and beautiful. I proudly took them to school with intentions of presenting them to Kathleen Vinson, but before I got the chance she saw me coming and wrinkled up her nose at the sight of them, so I gave them to Miss Bell, the teacher, instead. I don’t know what she, the teacher, did with them but she didn’t put them in a vase on her desk where she usually put flowers her students brought her, and my grades didn’t improve any, so I don’t know.
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