I got there just when O’Malley became the new warden after a successful riot got rid of the old warden, whoever he was. And I heard the new warden’s speech over the earphone radio. He declared that prisoners would no longer be mistreated, would no longer be beaten and starved, that new teachers would be hired so that everybody could get an education, that we would be treated like human beings, and the main thing, that the food in the mess hall would immediately get better.
We cheered the part about the food getting better. I wasn’t all that interested in the education part. When I was eighteen I already knew everything. I got dumber as the years went by. Funny how that works.
Anyway, I went wild at OSP. When they cracked the doors in the morning I was gone. They had no controlled movements, no out-of-bounds as long as you didn’t climb the high wall that circled the prison, no inside fences, no daytime counts—I think they had a four-o’clock evening count but I don’t remember for sure. I know we were out till about nine or ten before we were locked down for the night, and by then I was so tired I went straight to sleep.
I didn’t get a job because nobody had to work if he didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to. Simple arithmetic. But I figured wrong, because one day they snatched me up and put me to work in the mess hall, said they had a rule that all new guys had to take a turn at it if we wanted to eat, so I took my turn. For ninety days, and that was it.
The new warden was good at his word: we were treated okay, more teachers were hired, and the food, well, it wasn’t great—it never is when you have a bunch of lazy convicts cooking it—but it was okay.
The new warden meant well, but he had two big problems to deal with that he hadn’t counted on. One, he was too softhearted and we ate him alive. Two, many of the high brass from the previous administration, including the superintendent, still worked there, and though they didn’t have the power they previously had, they were still in a position to cause problems for the new warden, and they did, every chance they got. O’Malley didn’t have the experience to know that he needed to bring in some of his own people to watch his back.
Me, I didn’t care one way or the other. I worked ninety days in the mess hall, as required, and quit. There were too many other things to do. Like I quickly fell in with a bunch of guys my own age and we terrorized the cannery, stealing gallon cans of fruit which we sold to the wine makers to make home brew. That was a lot more fun than washing dishes and wiping tables—and we made a little money doing it.
There was Pomeroy and Lewis and Hopper and Gen (the Mexican General, who wasn’t a real general but we called him that ), and a couple more misfits who took up with us. We hung out a lot in an old vacant building right beside the cannery. The building had no windows and no doors, just big holes where they used to be, and the loading dock of the cannery was right next to it, only about ten feet away, so we could stand in our hangout and watch the action at the cannery and make elaborate plans like drawing up plays for a football game. We had the shoot-out play, which was just a simple run and snatch and run back which any of us could do in the blink of an eye, except for the General, who was good at planning but not all that fleet of foot. Then we had the turn play, where one of us would walk across to the loading dock and ask the guard a question while somebody else did a run and snatch. Then we had the double snatch, where one guy faked a run and snatch and when the guard went after him somebody else would do the real run and snatch. Then we had the sneak play and the relay play, on and on. We made up at least one new play every day. I mean, we were wanted dead or alive by the cannery guards so it was a real tactical challenge.
None of the other prisoners even came close to our hangout, they knew better because our guys could fight if it came down to it and the cannery and vacant building was our territory. Even the guards stayed away, not that they were afraid of us or anything, it’s just that while O’Malley was warden the guards more-or-less just secured the perimeter and left us alone. It was anarchy inside the walls.
As an example of how wide open the prison was, one prisoner built a small carnival on the yard, just gathered up the tools and the wood and other supplies from the shops—the carpenter shop and machine shop and plumbing shop and all the small shops along the main prison street—he gathered his materials and built a merry-go-round and a small ferris wheel right out in the yard in front of the domino tables. He built his little private carnival of fun rides to attract the young boys so that he could molest them. That’s what he did.
And the guards didn’t do a thing about it. They did nothing partly because the new warden didn’t order them to do anything about it, and partly, rumor had it, because some of the old brass left over from the old regime told them to do nothing as part of a plot to undermine the authority of the new warden, figuring, I guess, to regain power if the new warden failed to maintain control.
In the early fifties Oregon didn’t have any reform school for teenagers. They sent them all to the prison in Salem where they turned them loose on the yard with hardened criminals, murderers, child molesters, crazies, all mixed in together. They had kids as young as fourteen-years old in the Oregon State Prison at that time.
So the carnival man had lots of youthful participants for his free rides.
When it became obvious what he was up to, though, our guys and a bunch of other old convicts took matters into our own hands. We took sledge hammers and crowbars and ball bats, whatever we could pick up, and we hit the yard in the early morning in a misting rain and tore that carnival all to pieces. I mean we made a big trash pile out of it. While we were tearing it down the old carnival guy came out screaming and hollering, which saved us the trouble of hunting him down, so we took that opportunity to solve that problem, too. We tore his ass up.
And that’s the last we saw of him.
For the most part, the old convicts looked out for the kids, protected them from the sexual predators and all that, the ones who wanted to be protected, but there were some who preferred to hook up with an older convict for both protection and sex, especially if the older convict had money and power.
The old yard captain, who had a shack right on the corner of the street that went out across Shit Creek to the little yard and the long street that passed the shops on the way to the big yard, the front gate and the cannery, he was a tough old bastard. We called him Cold Slim. The main thing I remember about him was that when he ran up against a convict who was always causing problems, he often gave him some very serious counseling which included: “Why don’t you get you a punk and settle down.”
That’s his exact words, often his recommendation to problem prisoners.
Anyway, besides the underage kids, the prison had its share of full grown sissies, who swished around the yard in cut-off shorts and flowery tops and often got married in a formal ceremony on the little yard up in the boxing ring by a “bonafide” convict preacher with a certificate, vows and all: “Do you take this, uh, sissy to be—etc., etc..”
The reason I’m telling you this is to explain what kind of a prison I was in and set the record straight about how I wound up with thirty-two recorded disciplinary reports and many more incidents that were never recorded. We finally got busted by the cannery cops and I went to the hole for a very long time, a very long time not because of the cannery thing but because I ran into some guys down in the hole who were intent on escaping, which sounded like a great idea to me. These guys, Buck Poe, Al Doolin, Joe Benson, Little Al Brumfield, they were all real genuine all-American convicts. And the shit hit the fan, which is a cliché nowadays but we are the ones who invented it.
The shit hit the fan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The hole in the Oregon State Penitentiary was in the basement below one of the cell houses. I don’t remember the name of the cell house, but I remember every square inch of that hole. Each cell had two bunks, one above the other, and each cell had a sink and toilet with running water, and each cell had a couple of shelves and a fold-out metal desk and that’s
it, not a lot to remember. I took the top bunk in a cell with Buck Poe, a little old convict with a big mustache and a whole library of stories which he was only too happy to share with me every night after they locked us down. He was a legend.
For one thing he told me all about the big riot that happened just before I arrived at the prison. I had missed it, unfortunately, by a matter of only a few weeks. But I changed the “unfortunately” to fortunately when he told me it was a food strike, not a riot. I’m not fond of food strikes.
But I was wide-eyed with interest as he told me all about it, for Buck Poe was a legend and I was eighteen years old. He said he was the main strategic advisor to the strike leaders, telling them exactly how to win a hunger strike, and win they did, thanks to that advice. First, and most important, he told me, is that if you’re going to have a hunger strike or a work strike, any kind of strike, you can’t have any violence, can’t break windows or destroy any government property or hit a guard or take any hostages, can’t do anything to give the cops an excuse to use force, otherwise your strike was doomed to failure. Second, and just as important, you have to keep your fellow prisoners from going to the mess hall to eat, if it’s a hunger strike, and that’s the hard part. During the food strike at Oregon the leaders had stabbed the first prisoner who tried to go eat, and when the rest of them saw blood that ended that problem.
The inmate population went without food for a full week and won the strike. And they brought in a new warden to right the wrongs at the prison. End of story, except Buck Poe took two hours to tell it, and I listened eagerly to every word, for he was a legend.
In the hole they let us out into the basement corridor every day all day long and locked us back down for the evening meal, and that was the end of our day and it was talking time for Buck Poe.
He really wasn’t no joke, though. Every day while we were out for recreation he was sawing on the window bars which he had to do through a thick mesh steel screen using a hacksaw blade attached to a foot-long steel rod he removed from the sink each day. It was tedious work, sawing those bars, but Buck Poe showed great patience doing it. And he quit work early enough each day to conceal the fresh cut in the bar with a gray paste he made out of soap and cigarette ashes. He even had a tiny mirror small enough to fit through the tiny hole in the screen which he could use like a periscope to see behind the cut bar after he applied his paste.
While he was cutting the bars some of us played pinochle, me and Joe Benson and Al Doolin and Jonesy. Little Al Brumfield was in the middle section of the hole, which was separated from our back section by a grill of steel bars, so we couldn’t include him in our game. The front section was reserved for death row prisoners.
The noise we made playing pinochle, laughing and signifying and slamming cards on the floor, helped to cover up the sound of Buck Poe’s hacksaw blade. And when we weren’t playing pinochle, I passed the time doing other fun things like kicking out light bulbs in the corridor ceiling with our football. We could get just about anything in the hole. All we had to do was holler out the window at somebody we knew and he would get it for us, thus we had a football with which I could kick out light bulbs.
And when we got bored we looked for more exciting things. And like convicts will do we often tested the authority of our prison guards, a probe here a probe there, just to see how far we could go. And if we spotted a weakness we just naturally pushed a little harder to see if we could go even further. And of course a new guard was fair game for some serious pushing.
And the anarchy on the yard began to affect the resolve of the guards in the hole. Old guards quit in ever-increasing numbers. New guards without any experience or training appeared every day, even in the hole. And we found out quickly that we could get away with just about anything.
At first, Doolin and Poe and Benson started running different games on the poor naïve guards, like faking illness in the middle of the night in order to get sleeping pills. They got away with that, got their sleeping pills: yellow jackets, blue heavens, seconals, you name it. The guard would listen to their sad stories, their moans and groans, and go call the hospital and a physician’s assistant would come down to the hole and listen to their pitiful complaints, and their sleeping pills would be forthcoming.
Well, when the guards and the PA caught on to what was going on and started ignoring our complaints, we took it up a notch; we started banging on our bars with our metal cups, and hollering and screaming, until we woke everybody up in the cell house above us, and they started hollering and screaming for us to shut up and when we didn’t and they were wide awake, we hollered up to them that we had a sick man in the hole, so they just naturally joined in, banging and hollering and screaming until the whole prison woke up and joined in.
And that brought the warden himself down to the hole, Warden O’Malley, and he sent for the PA and told him to give us our pills, whatever it took to shut us up, for by now a good part of the city of Salem was wide awake, the neighborhood nearest the prison anyway, for we made enough racket to wake Rip Van Winkle himself.
After that the guards and PA were quick to tend to our requests.
Me, I wasn’t crazy about any kind of pills that would put me to sleep. I slept like a baby without them. But I did my share of hollering and banging when it was necessary, for that was fun enough by itself, never mind the pills.
I think I was still eighteen when I went to the hole for the first time, though I don’t remember for sure because I didn’t have birthdays.
One day they threw a guy in the hole, threw him in the back section with us. At first Buck Poe was afraid to do any sawing on the bars, afraid the new guy might be a snitch or something, but the guy came out of his shoe with a sock full of white crosses, amphetamine sulfate, and he was all right then, a great guy, our best buddy and all that. I tried a couple of them, just to see what they’d do. Tried a couple more just for good measure. Well, in about thirty minutes my eyeballs popped out of their sockets and my nuts shriveled up to the size of bee bee’s and I feared I would have to squat to pee because I had a difficult time finding anything to pee with. Scared the shit out of me at first, but everybody laughed and told me that was normal when you were taking bennies.
And that historic night when they locked us down I out-talked Buck Poe so badly that he finally went to bed and covered up his head, whereupon I took up a conversation with Al Doolin in the cell next door and talked till daylight before I shut up because my throat was raw and my jaw was sore.
Al Doolin was a dangerous man. He was in the hole for stabbing another prisoner. And this wasn’t his first time. He told me he’d stabbed a guard a long time ago when he was trying to go over the wall, him and another guy. The guard survived the wound at first, got out of the hospital and did okay for eight or ten months, but then had a relapse from some kind of complications, for it was a stab-wound to the lung and had never fully healed. The guard died. Al got a life sentence for that, would have got the death penalty except that the guard had taken so long to die that the jury couldn’t be sure his death was a direct result of the stab wound.
Anyway, we had two Al’s in the hole. Al Doolin was a big guy, not fat just big, and Al Brumfield was a little guy. We called Brumfield Little Al, but we didn’t call Doolin Big Al, we just called him Al. He had the right to the title, Al, because of the pecking order. You know how that goes.
Little Al got a life sentence for murder. He didn’t kill anybody. He was in jail for something else. But he faked an illness of some kind and they took him to an outside hospital where he took off running down the hospital corridor and his escort guard shot and killed a nurse trying to hit him, so they charged Little Al with murder. That’s the way it works, the law. It was a busy hospital with doctors and nurses and patients moving up and down the busy corridor and the cop just whipped out his gun and started shooting, shot up the whole hospital, hit the nurse right between the eyes, killed her instantly. The cop, not Little Al. But the law says Little Al killed her bec
ause if he hadn’t been trying to escape the cop wouldn’t have been shooting at him, therefore it was Al’s fault. Figure that one out if you can.
Little Al was a quiet guy, had a whole stack of Reader’s Digests in his cell, liked to read about nature, you know, birds and trees and things. We were going to let him escape with us, but we didn’t expect him to be of much use to us if the going got tough. Buck Poe cut a few bars in the steel grill between our section and the middle section where Little Al celled so he’d be ready to go when the time came.
And he, Buck Poe, cut the deadlock bolt in our doors so we could open our own door with a bent spoon handle any time we wanted, day or night. I don’t know how he knew where to cut, for the bolt was completely out of sight and had to be cut through a narrow crack in the door frame just by feel. The good thing, though, is that the guards had no way of telling the bolt was cut. The doors closed normally and locked normally, they just couldn’t be deadlocked even though they appeared to be. Buck Poe, I realized was more than just talk. He was a mechanical genius.
And last Buck cut the corner of the window screen where it attached to the window frame so that we could bend the whole corner of the screen up and out to get to the hole where the bars were cut. And all we had to do then was wait for a foggy night. Everything was ready.
And one night when I was sleeping soundly Buck Poe shook me awake and whispered for me to get up and get ready. The fog was in.
I’ll have to admit I was scared. This was the real thing and it took a few minutes after being woke up so suddenly for my heart to quit pumping piss. But quit it did, and I crawled out of bed and got dressed. Everybody had to carry something, some homemade rope to tie a chicken ladder together, some tools, knives and things. Count time was nearing, so we waited for that, got back in bed with our clothes on and waited.
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