Christmas Eve night I hung a sock on the bars for Santa Claus to fill up, a small act of silliness, I guess, to go with the Christmas spirit, and when I woke up the next morning my sock was empty, of course, but my heart and stomach were full. It’s a good thing Reader’s Digest didn’t see the Christmas dinner they fed us that day or they’d have been screaming for our heads.
After Christmas, every time I came in from work that week I was greeted by the sight of that big bag of hard candy on my back shelf, but I vowed not to touch it until New Year’s Eve and I didn’t, except for a few small pieces just to sample it, maybe five or ten pieces, not many more.
New Year’s Eve came and I still had almost half a bag of that delicious hard candy left, almost. After the lights were out many of us stayed up late to bring in the new year. Jackrabbit started a game of twenty-questions and we played on and on for a couple of hours, a bunch of supposed-to-be hardened convicts playing like a bunch of kids. It was a warm feeling between us that night that I remember so well for I felt a closeness to somebody that I hadn’t felt since my grandma died. A lot of good people did time at Alcatraz.
I thought Burgett had given up on his plans with the air bags, but when we went back to work in January I saw him in the bathroom one day, again dunking a bag of air up and down in a bathroom sink filled with water. I must have earned his trust by then because he gave me a friendly greeting and asked me to watch for the boss for a little while. Which I did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Forest Tucker was walking the yard with Roy Drake, both hunched forward like humpbacked turtles against the winter wind. And both were talking with a good deal of excitement, so I knew they were talking about robbing banks. That’s what Forest Tucker liked to talk about. I might have joined them but I’d heard their stories so many times I decided against it, and, besides, I didn’t like Roy Drake all that much, anyway. There was something sneaky about him. He liked to talk about how he moved into this little town in Arkansas and opened a little business of some kind as a front, and then proceeded to make friends with the local businessmen, joined the Chamber of Commerce, buddied up to a local bank official until he learned the routine at the bank, and then he robbed that bank, took all the money and split. I don’t see anything wrong with robbing a bank, but to make friends with a man and then rob him, there’s something wrong with that. And so I walked alone, thinking some serious thoughts.
I remember that scene very well because that was the day I decided I’d had enough of prison life. I decided I needed to learn a trade. That’s what I decided.
They had a lot of bank robbers at Alcatraz, and most of them had a wheelbarrow load of time. Twenty-five years, fifty years—federal judges in those days had a lot of time to give and not enough people to give it to, so I guess they had to give it to somebody. That’s what I figured. Therefore, I decided I didn’t want to be a bank robber.
So when I saw old Courtney Taylor all alone over in the corner of the wall nearest to the card tables, where the wind didn’t seem to be blowing as much, which was a good sign, in my mind, that he was smarter than a bank robber, for at least he had sense enough to get somewhere out of the wind. I cut across the yard and approached him. He was a portly man—sort of fat but not obese, so I guess that’s portly—I approached him and asked him if he’d teach me how to make counterfeit checks. We already knew each other well enough for me to ask him that question, and he agreed without hesitation, for he was the best check-man in the world and never missed a chance to talk about it.
He told me about transit numbers and routing numbers and account numbers and bank logos and company logos, he talked till my head got dizzy. And I didn’t learn a thing that first day except that Courtney Taylor was a downright genius, but in the weekends that followed, his teachings started to sink in and I slowly absorbed every word he said. So that winter in Alcatraz I learned a trade.
I was talking to Benny Rayburn about it one day, for by then his likable manner had earned my trust. In fact we had already decided to invite him to play on our raggedy softball team in the coming season. I mean, jailhouse lawyer or not, anybody stupid enough to let old Simmons catch him jacking off in his cell was worthy of being a Gullie. Anyway, I was talking to him about all the good stuff I was learning from Courtney Taylor and he listened for a while, but then he just had to interrupt.
“He’s in here,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
“He’s in here,” he repeated.
“What?” I said.
“He got caught, just like the rest of us. Everyone in here got caught. These are the wrong people to learn from, don’t you think?”
Smartass Benny Rayburn.
Actually, Benny Rayburn’s last name was spelled with a “born,” Rayborn, instead of a “burn,” but we called him Benny Rayburn, using the whole name, because it had a lyrical quality to it which better matched his personality, maybe, I don’t know, that’s just what we called him, and the only reason I mention it here is so if you decide to Google him in Federal Defenders of San Diego, about Ben Rayborn, you’ll spell his name right and you’ll find out that he was considered by J. Edgar Hoover to be the most dangerous gangster to come out of World War Two, which shows you how paranoid old J. Edgar was and also how wrong, for Benny Rayborn was probably the least dangerous man I’ve ever known. But he was the most remarkable.
At age twenty-one Benny Rayburn was the leader of a gang of bank robbers who called themselves the Benny-Denny Gang and he received a life sentence in the state of Kentucky where he led a prison riot in protest of the inhumane conditions there. For that he was sent to Alcatraz. That isn’t the remarkable part. When he got to Alcatraz he got a job in the prison library and started reading every law book he could find.
Well, Benny Rayburn had an unusual mind in that he could understand the gibberish in law books and translate it into plain language in such a clear and reasonable way that before long he was writing briefs and writs and all that tricky stuff for fellow prisoners at Alcatraz. He was getting results, too.
Eventually, because of his ability to understand and translate what he had read, he got his own sentences reduced, both his life sentence in Kentucky and a Federal sentence related to the same crime, and he was set free.
However, his freedom didn’t last long. He was convicted in Tennessee. Again for bank robbery. While serving his time in Tennessee he continued to file briefs and writs and such for inmates there. And while there he also started a class in Constitutional Law, teaching other inmates. His work in law was so brilliant that he attracted the attention of John Cleary, a professor of law at Emory University and head of an advocacy group which helped prisoners with post-conviction relief. He was so impressed with Benny Rayburn’s work that he convinced state authorities to release him into his custody after Benny got his state sentence in Tennessee cut in half.
Again Benny Rayburn was free. This time, though, he went to work for John Cleary’s law group and followed the group to San Diego when they opened the Federal Defender office there. And for the next thirty years Benny Rayburn worked for that group as Chief Legal Research Associate, training new lawyers in the practical aspects of law, himself filing thousands of briefs all the way from the local level to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. All this without a single day of law school. That’s what’s remarkable.
Me, I didn’t know anything about the law except how to break it.
He tried to tell me some things about law a few times, just talking. I remember one time he told me that a law book doesn’t necessarily mean what it says, that it means what the judge says it says. I remember that. And I remember thinking that a law book must be sort of like the bible, that the bible says what the preacher says it says.
Benny Rayburn worked in the prison library at Alcatraz for a long time, but now he was working out front somewhere as a clerk for the warden and his bunch. As a result he was able to pick up a little information here and there and start some pretty pot
ent rumors. One rumor was that funds were approved for the purchase of a big walk-through metal detector, which they planned to install somewhere between the yard and the factory. Jackrabbit came up with a bigger rumor than that. He heard, from his position as a clerk in the factory business office, that there was a lieutenant pushing for building a fence across the concrete bleachers on the yard so you could only go up so high and therefore couldn’t see over the wall. He claimed that such a fence would be good for security reasons because if you couldn’t see the free world by looking over the wall you would be less tempted to want to escape, that the sight of the world was a temptation that could be eliminated by such a fence.
Well, we declared Jackrabbit to be the winner for the worst rumor, for we couldn’t think of anything more terrible than not being able to look out over the wall.
Prison guards earn brownie points and promotions for new ideas on how to make prisons more secure, not only from the standpoint of preventing escapes but mainly for better control of the inmate population, better control with less work, of course. Guards don’t earn points on suggestions like better food and education and recreation and nonsense like that.
In the federal prison system the captain is responsible for the daily operation of the prison. His office schedules the work hours of the guards, days off, vacations, things like that. He is also responsible for security. All ideas involving security issues or anything that might become a security issue has to cross his desk for approval. So the captain is all powerful when it comes to passing out brownie points. But the captain has to go to the warden for his own brownie points.
The warden is king. And when he steps into his kingdom people start trembling: staff, guards, inmates, dogs, cats, everything. And at Alcatraz the warden was more powerful than God. He, the warden, had the power of life and death and he could terminate your existence on Earth whether it was your time to go or not. Not that he walked around terminating people, but you knew without a doubt that he could. You could tell. Just the way he walked.
A prison warden is two foot taller than everybody else, but I think that’s because people shrink a couple of feet in his awesome presence and that he’s just taller by comparison. That’s what I figure.
I’ve noticed over the years one peculiarity that all wardens have in common. They have a compulsion to build a fence. I think it’s in their genes. I mean, whenever a new warden takes over a prison, the first thing he does, it seems to me, is survey his little kingdom to figure out where to build a fence, his fence. There may be fences all over the place, and I don’t mean fences around the prison to keep people from escaping, I mean fences inside the prison, a fence around the yard, two fences around the yard, a fence between two buildings, another fence around the yard, forever and ever. I’ve seen a warden tear down a perfectly good fence just so he could build one of his own. And if you think I’m making this up just go look at USP Leavenworth today. It has a huge sixty-foot wall around it that few have successfully climbed over, and I’ll be dammed if some warden didn’t build a fence all the way around the outside of the wall. Look inside the prison out on the yard and you’ll see another fence inside the wall. Then look around you and you’ll see fences in every direction, so many that you can hardly walk fifty feet without bumping into one.
There were so many fences in Leavenworth at one time that one warden just threw up his hands and painted the wall purple. Figure that out.
But back to Alcatraz in the winter of fifty-seven/fifty-eight, old Benny Rayburn walked up to me one day all friendly-like and asked me what color my cell was. He was always thinking up some weird question or riddle or something, so when he asked me that stupid question I knew he was up to something. But I’ll be dammed, I couldn’t answer because I really hadn’t noticed what color my cell was, exactly, I mean I hadn’t ever really thought about it, but the best I could remember at that exact time was that it was some kind of shitty gray color, so I answered, “Gray.”
He just sort of smiled and said, “Nope. Gray is the color of your mind.” And he went on about his business without any explanation. Caught somebody else with it, then somebody else. He really had a fly up his nose.
Messed my head up. Like I said, Benny Rayburn could sure be a smartass sometimes. What a stupid question, but I couldn’t wait to get back to my cell and see. And what I saw messed my head up even more, for it wasn’t gray, it was sort of a dirty two-tone color, the walls, with so much nicotine stain from cigarette smoke, well, it could have been gray. I wasn’t about to wash the walls to find out.
Gray is the color of your mind.
Bullshit. Not me!
I decided it was time to stir up some shit again. Maybe make some more home brew, only this time I would do the counting myself and leave it set for ten days. Well, maybe five days. Or maybe I could think of something to do to Simmons. He was tearing up cells again.
As it turned out Mama Nature gave me a whole new idea, for the fog rolled in that night and the tugboats started chugging and the foghorns started bawing and opportunity knocked on my head.
I got out of bed and started answering the foghorns, imitating their sound with my mouth and hands, as I had previously learned to do. Since each horn had a different pitch, I was even able to imitate that. But then I decided I’d make my own pitch, different from any of those out in the bay. And I chose a lowdown ghostly sound that was so real it sent chills down my own spine.
I violated the convict code of never wake up a sleeping convict, all right, but it was time for a wake-up call on Alcatraz Island and it was up to me to do it. So I did it. At first there were sleepy grumbles from the cells, then louder protests as more people woke up. Amid all this somebody said, “Sounds like there’s a foghorn in the cell house! Hear that sound?” And somebody else said, “Sounds like it’s coming from upstairs.” Then somebody else said, “Naw, it sounds like it’s coming from the ceiling. Sounds like a ghost!”
Whitey Knight, my next door neighbor was very superstitious. He called out my name and asked me if I heard it. So I said, “Yes,” and added, “It sounds like it’s coming out of the pipe corridor behind the cells. It sounds like a ghost to me too.” When I said that, Whitey cleared his throat as was his habit when he got nervous, and I heard him walking his cell. There were rumors that Alcatraz was haunted, anyway, so who was I to spoil a good rumor. I mean Alcatraz was once an old military prison and it was rumored to have dungeons and more dungeons below our cells that we never saw but we heard about them all the time, rats and water dripping and that kind of stuff. And ghosts.
So I kept up my ghostly bawing and it began to sound like the foghorns out in the bay were answering me! It was like a witches’ convention had gathered around the island.
Well that did it. Everybody was awake now, a party in the making. At first there was one tin cup banging on the bars, then another, and then all hell broke loose, whooping and hollering and banging. Stuff started sailing over the range and then the smell of smoke came from every direction as people started setting things on fire and tossing out blazing paper airplanes and things like that.
Off-duty guards and the goon squad were called in quickly, but it was too late. Alcatraz wouldn’t sleep that night, and that included the whole island, guards, women and children, cats and dogs, everything.
They arrested about a half-dozen people, those who they caught in the act of setting fires or getting a little too wild, like one guy busted his toilet bowl off the wall and started a hell of a flood, but otherwise they didn’t mess with anybody, just let them holler and bang till they got tired, and by daylight it was all over. That’s the way they did things at Alcatraz. The old warden didn’t believe in mass punishment, they only arrested those who were caught in the act. And then the next morning they cracked the doors and everybody went to chow and they blew work-call and everybody went to work just like nothing had happened. In any other prison they would have locked the whole place down for days, maybe weeks.
The only thing they
did was while we were at work they tore up our cells and threw a lot of our stuff out. They did that. And they weren’t nice about it. When I came in from work that day, all sleepy-eyed and tired, all I had left in my cell was standard issue, and that was on the floor.
But we expected that. And time went on. But the color of our minds were not gray anymore for a while, thanks to Benny Rayburn.
One day I went in from work and found a library book on my bed. Instead of being a Zane Grey book, as usual, it was a raggedy old science book that I’d had on my list forever. So I plopped down on my bunk and consumed it, one painful word after another. It had a lot of stuff in it about space and time and inertial frames and Einstein and Newton and a guy named Galileo, and I walked around with a sprained brain for weeks as I read it over and over trying to figure it out. And when it was due back in the library I didn’t send it back, and I got a dirty note from the librarian and I still didn’t send it back, I hid it under my mattress, and then one day I came in and the book was gone. So I guess the old librarian had come and shook my cell down and found it, and I guess he was pissed off for he left my cell all tore up. That’s what they do if they’re pissed off, leave your cell all tore up.
I lost my library privileges for a month, but that’s all right because I had it all floating around in my brain somewhere, all those great people and all the great things they said. Einstein: “The laws of nature must be the same in all inertial frames.” Hot damn! And Newton: “A body in motion tends to remain in motion.” And Galileo: “In the cabin of a ship moving at constant velocity, water drips straight down, a ball bounces equally in any direction—you don’t notice the motion of the ship because you are a part of that motion.” All three great men talking about the same thing in different words leading to a conclusion that neither space nor time is absolute, that, uh, never mind, it was all washing around up there in my brain but it hadn’t quite washed up on the same shore.
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