Salvation on Death Row

by John T. Thorngren

  “I can’t,” I replied, “If I go to sleep, I’ll wet the bed, and then you’ll whip me.”

  “There ain’t nobody gonna whip you here. I’ll put some plastic over that mattress, and, Honey Child, you just go ’head and pee your little heart out.”

  Funny what a little compassion can do. I never peed a bed again.

  Shortly thereafter, Mistress Puberty called, and what little was left of my childhood forever departed.

  CHAPTER 3

  At the end of 1968, I officially became a teenager. At thirteen years old, I climbed into the front seat of California’s drug-coaster at the apex of Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” It was a peer thing with little pressure applied. I needed closeness with others. I needed to belong. Drugs were readily accessible. The oldsters hadn’t yet figured out the devastation they would bring to America.

  My drug of choice was reds, one of the many street names for secobarbital, or its brand name, Seconal.(6) Regardless of whether one called them reds or red birds, seggy, seccies, or Dolls,(7) they were simply reds to me—a bright chunk of fun-filled flame unknowingly borrowed from the very fires of hell itself. Being on reds allowed me to be what I wanted with my friends, to be one of them, to giggle and say bizarre things that they, being in their own false chemical happiness, would joyfully affirm. Yes, I was there. I belonged. And although there were those alarmist cries of addiction circulating, I knew it was just a rumor. Besides, I could stop anytime I wanted. I had proof: Namely, I didn’t care for marijuana or LSD, and that must have meant I did not have an addiction.

  In an odd arrangement during the spring of 1969, I was between foster homes and staying with Little Joe in Lynwood. Prior to allowing me to return home, there had been a family-counseling meeting at Los Padrinos Juvenile where Little Joe swore he wouldn’t do anything. Besides, he had his new wife, Helen. I wasn’t unduly worried. Helen was nice. I liked her.

  On a Saturday night, my friend Mary and I walked the several miles from Lynwood to South Gate Park, a hundred-acre recreational oasis in another of the daisy-chain suburbs of southern LA County. South Gate, California, was angrily white until the riots of 1965 in nearby Watts. After that, the demographic gradually changed to predominantly Latino, but even in the late ’60s, it was still unwelcome turf for anyone but self-avowed Anglos. Likewise, the lowriders in South Gate that cruised the four miles of Tweedy Boulevard from State Street to South Gate Park were largely Anglo; Latinos occasionally queued in line but mostly preferred Whittier Boulevard some thirty minutes to the east.(8)

  A gentle breeze carried a distinct smell from South Gate Park as we approached, and it wasn’t that of azalea blossoms from the “Azalea City,” the name South Gate adopted in the same year as the Watts riots. Besides, azaleas don’t have a perceptible aroma.

  “Like, what’s that funky smell?” I said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, heavy. Maybe they’re burning some rotten leaves in the park,” giggled Mary.

  “Nah, people don’t burn leaves anymore. Maybe they’re burning Mary Jane’s clothes,” I said, laughing so hard that Mota,(9) the little puppy who had become my sidekick, jumped and pranced as if she thought it was a fabulous doggy joke also. Mota had recently joined the Walker family; a friend had given her to me as a six-week-old puppy, and she was a cute little ball of fur.

  When we reached South Gate Park, I noticed more lowriders than usual. Their springs were shortened to the point that their frames almost touched the pavement, some of them hydraulically equipped to raise and lower the rear end or even the whole frame. In their low position, they slinked slow and low like jungle cats, ready to pounce. Normally, high riders predominated the Park area, hot rods and souped-up cars with their large V-8 engines, sporting lots of chrome trim. A blue-and-white Impala lowrider was turning around to head back down Tweedy. “That’s Tom’s car,” I said as I turned to Mary, thinking it was a guy from school. “Tom!” I yelled. “Tom, wait.” The Impala stopped and raised its rear up and down—slowly—as if to say, “Yeah, whadda ya want?”

  “Oh, you’re not Tom,” I said, chuckling when the driver looked toward me. And what a look. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life: beautiful mocha-bronze skin, and beneath his dark curls were see-through-you blue eyes, eyes that penetrated my heart and soul with a flash of lightning. His arm hung loosely out the window, every inch covered with tattoos—not the store-bought sort of tats, but prison-made with black ink, raw and real, a gorgeous sleeve. I can hardly remember what was said because my heart was throbbing too loudly, but soon we were all in his car. Mary and a male friend who happened to be standing nearby sat in the back, and Mota and I settled in up front with the handsome guy who introduced himself as Sammy Perillo.

  “Let’s go dancing,” said Mary.

  “Yeah, to the Pike, to the Pike, to the Pike, Pike, Pike” came a voice from lips I almost didn’t recognize—from me, as if I were sitting in a balcony watching a big-screen movie in the distance showing a ravishing actor driving a blue-and-white Impala, an actor who combined the best of Paul Newman, James Dean and every other Hollywood hunk. My usual earthly detachment, induced by reds, was no longer my mood. Instead, everything seemed amplified. I gazed at the straight and meticulously curved lines in Sammy’s tattoos, far better than those raggedy ones I had painfully endured in Juvenile.

  As we neared our destination, the Pike, its ambiance and its smell of the sea brought back good memories. The night melted into dancing with Sammy in the Pike ballroom on a euphoric red cloud wet with liquor that we smuggled in from his car to mix with the punch. Sammy was on some sort of relaxed high—I could tell, even in my altered state—but I couldn’t figure out what he was using. Must have been pills.

  When we returned to the parking lot, Mota, who had been locked in Sammy’s car, jumped with glee; her tail, which was twice the size of her little tan body, seemed to fill every window. But Mota had paid us back for her long confinement: doggy poop. Sammy was livid.

  “Look what your damn dog did to my wheels, man…Lurida cagna! Filthy bitch!”

  Words I’ve never heard before, many never together, and some that I assumed were Italian. Again I felt rejection, but after we had cleaned up the mess, Sammy cooled down, and we were back to having fun. After dropping the others off, he parked in front of my house and said for me to put the dog up and come back out. I watched him from inside for what seemed like half an hour. I wanted to go with him, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. Finally, he pulled away.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sammy Perillo was constantly on my mind after that first night. I wondered how I would ever be able to see him again. Then, one afternoon while Mary and I were hitchhiking along Atlantic Boulevard, a blue-and-white dream floated by: Sammy in his Impala. One might say, from this point, the rest is history.

  My brother Randy enjoyed drugs, but not nearly to the extent that I did. His focus was on women, and at the time he was married to his first wife, Sandy. Mary was dating a boy named Terry. When we went out together, it was Randy and Sandy, Mary and Terry, and of course, Sammy and Pammy. Sammy and I became inseparable. Here I am as a young girl. If a picture speaks a thousand words, this one of me, I believe, says everything with only three: “Pammy’s in love.”

  Pamela Lynn Walker, age 13

  Like a Greek tragedy, I would do anything for Sammy. He was my focus, and the drugs, unfortunately, came with the package. Juvenile Hall, foster homes, drug rehab—nothing could hold me. I would run away from anything and anywhere to be with Sammy. Eventually, Little Joe and the State of California declared me an emancipated adult, under the promise of marriage to Sammy, and agreed that I would live with Sammy’s parents. Sammy was nineteen. I was thirteen. I gave my little dog, Mota, to Dad, who’d liked her since she’d first arrived at his house.

  One afternoon while Sammy and I were staying at Randy and Sandy’s home…

&nbs
p; “Let’s go, Pam,” yelled Randy. “Tijuana quickie marriages won’t wait forever. Let’s go before it gets too dark. Where’s Sammy?”

  Sammy was holding up our marriage. He had been in the bathroom for what seemed like an hour. I banged on the door. “What are you doing, Sammy? Let’s go make it legal.”

  “Give me a few more minutes.”

  The doorknob to the restroom was worn and wobbly, with several different colors of paint crusting through chipped and grease-worn places. I tried it; it was locked. Below that was an ancient, yellowed-white faceplate with a large skeleton keyhole. I peeked through. Sammy was sitting on the commode and injecting what I instinctively knew to be heroin. When he came out, I asked, “What was in that syringe?” He mumbled, but I knew. All that time, I thought he was doing pills like me. No wonder he wouldn’t take me out with his friends at night. Theirs was a drug bond to which I wasn’t privy.

  But for now, blissful marriage. So in the merry month of May we made the two-hour trip to Tijuana along the coast on Interstate 5. It was a beautiful night with sea-scented air blowing through open windows, and after a few reds, I was mellow, along with my husband-to-be, wrapped up in each other’s arms in the back seat. In Tijuana, after we paid fifty dollars and filled out some paperwork, a man asked us in a thick Spanish accent, “Do you consent to marriage?” We both said, “I do,” and that was it. If all we had to do was jump over a broomstick, it was still good. It was official; well, almost—we never had it notarized in California.

  With Sammy’s heroin secret revealed, I soon made him shoot me up. My first hit on Satan’s sweet syrup made me terribly sick to my stomach. But it didn’t stop me; Sammy wouldn’t take me out with his friends, and I knew this was the key—riding the devil’s horse together. Thus began the “wonderful” days of spoons and needles.

  By breaking and entering, shoplifting, and other petty thefts, Sammy, his friends, and I supported our habit. Sammy was on parole, and a dirty urine test landed him back at California Rehabilitation Center (CRC)(10) for eighteen months.

  When Sammy was released, I, along with the other two-thirds of the trio—Randy and Sandy with Mary and Terry—picked him up at the gate. Per his request and certainly with no objections from us, we brought drugs with us. So much for rehabilitation.

  ***

  We were cruising along El Segundo when I noticed Sammy nervously checking his rear-view mirror. He reached into his pocket and handed me a spoon, a syringe, and an empty balloon.

  “Take these. If I get caught, they’ll send me back to CRC.”

  I did as he said, not that I would ever do otherwise. We both knew that as a juvenile, I would get far less time than Sammy. Following the brief howl of a siren, the police curbed us.

  “Miss Walker, you’re underage and out past curfew. Would you step out of the car?”

  “But I’m married to him,” I yelped.

  “I don’t see any proof of that.”

  The officer grabbed hold of my right arm, tightly until it hurt, and pushed me into the back seat of his car. He tried to arrest Sammy on endangering a minor, but Sammy smooth-talked him out of it. And so, from time immemorial as Eve took the hit for Adam, who subsequently feigned innocence, I took the hit for Sammy, my beloved. As we drove to the station, I surreptitiously emptied my pocket of the heroin objects and tried to push them as far out of sight as possible between the back of the front seat and the corner post.

  Shortly after being booked, an officer came in holding my balloon, spoon, and syringe. There was still cotton in the spoon with heroin residue.

  “Pamela, we found these in the back of the patrol car.”

  “What makes you think they’re mine? They could have been in there from the last person you pinched.”

  “Sorry, doesn’t fly. We search the car after every arrest.”

  Once again I went to Juvenile, followed by a stay at the new Tarzana Rehabilitation Center. I ran away within a week.

  Sammy was in a revolving door with incarceration. When he was absent during my fifteenth year, I was “forced” to experiment with other drugs since Sammy was my heroin purveyor and nurse practitioner all in one. Reds were still good, but I needed something stronger, something to distract me from the heroin I wasn’t getting. Ginger, my friend from early childhood, was readily available to help me out. It wasn’t heroin, but it was something totally different: the next trip, LSD.(11)

  Ginger was in to the California hippie scene, so much so that the walls of her room were painted black and covered with fluorescent paintings. Black lights amplified the LSD effect. Hers was a perfect tripping room. It was also secluded; the entrance to her room was outside the rest of the home, and her parents left her alone.

  That whole summer we tripped out on LSD, either in her room or surfing at Long Beach. We’d spend the day watching waves become animals and listening to the salt spray singing songs. At night, through the prismatic waves, a rising moon became a brilliant kaleidoscope of parrots and flamingos. Sometimes we’d stay at the beach all night and sit on the curb at five in the morning in front of Winchell’s Donuts on the Pacific Coast Highway, laughing at the customers.

  “Look at that guy in the green suit,” I giggled. “Look at him chew. Wait, he’s a giant frog munching a fly.”

  “And that woman in yellow,” chortled Ginger. “I swear she’s a rolling lemon.”

  To many a set of glaring eyes, we hysterically laughed the mornings away. But there was one instance of those trips that seemed prophetic. Years later, Ginger told me, “One time when we were tripping in my room, I saw a hatchet floating over your head. I heard it saying, ‘This is a symbol of your death at a young age.’”

  Toward the fall of that year, I tried another hallucinogen, something called cannabinol, intravenously, as injection was now my procedure of choice. Pills, alcohol, and marijuana were fast becoming little but tide-me-overs. The cannabinol was a white crystalline powder that we dissolved in a little water and heated in a spoon until it became a syrupy liquid.(12)

  Although I never had a bad experience or flashback on LSD, this drug “came back” on me days afterward. I understand that the medical profession does not recognize it as a psychoactive drug, but nonetheless it happened to me. I admit it might have come from a combination of all the drugs I had been using.

  One day, I was painting a small Buddha statue with fluorescent paint when I slipped into another dimension. The statue was holding a little girl and boy, one in each arm. They were crying, “Please help us.” I jabbed at the Buddha; blood squirted from his head. An hour passed, then two, and I emerged in an eerie fog where I was poking him repeatedly with a paintbrush filled with fluorescent-red paint.

  In 1972, at age sixteen, I became pregnant, and at the beginning of 1973, Sammy entered San Quentin Prison(13) on a five-year sentence for armed robbery of a Fotomat kiosk.

  Shortly thereafter, San Quentin officially began its transition to a maximum-security prison, although Sammy was not in the league of violent offenders. In prison, he ran with the Aryan Brotherhood, as a matter of survival, and he always carried his membership card with him. Whenever he entered prison, his credentials appeared permanently engraved in black on the canvas of his skin: thunderbolts and Nazi symbols. And he had other tats to let everyone know his nature: a giant gorilla on his back, a hand holding a syringe on his stomach, the number 666 on his neck, the familiar scales of justice, and, of course, my name in several places.

  I knew this baby would cement Sammy and me together. At five months into my term, when I visited Sammy, he would rub my belly and feel the baby kick. I knew he wanted this baby. This 180-pound handsome husband and I would become one forever, cementing our love through this child. I was still living with his parents, and they helped me kick the heroin habit. I had to do this for my unborn. It was brutal. I was sick for two weeks with chills and nausea. I couldn’t eat, and what I attempted
wouldn’t stay down. Finally, I was clean. I wanted so badly to do the right thing, to be a good mother.

  On the morning of February 4, 1973, I wakened with a feeling that something strange was happening inside me. A gray mist clouded the view from my window. Later, a cold drizzle followed. Perhaps it was the weather—I never liked the cold—but by late afternoon, I knew I was in labor. Sammy’s parents drove me to St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood. The next morning, as the delivery process escalated, I screamed and hollered. I remember one of the nurses yelling back, “Hush, you aren’t the only woman to ever have a baby.” But I hurt, and so I screamed all the more. Finally, they gave me a shot, and I didn’t wake up until the evening of the next day when a nurse touched my arm.

  “Ms. Perillo, you have a beautiful baby girl.”

  “Ohhh…where is she?”

  “She’s premature. We are keeping her in an incubator. Would you like to walk down and see her?”

  “I can’t…I’m too groggy to walk. I can barely hold you in focus. Can’t you bring her here?”

  “No. You will just have to wait until you can walk down there,” and she spun around to leave like a Tilt-a-Whirl starting up at the Pike.

  “Wait, was it raining when she was born? They tell me I was born in the rain.”

  “No, not at all. Yesterday was one of those rare clear days when you could see the outline of the San Gabriel mountains. The rain the day before washed out all of the smog. It was a gorgeous day.”

  I remember mumbling something about good and bad luck and drifted off. Several days passed before I was able to walk down the hall and look at my baby through a big glass window. As the nurse rolled the baby’s little cart toward me, the emotion became intense. I just stood there dazed, and then I started crying. All the tubes and wires connected to her faded as I beheld this precious part of me. She was part of me, and for the first time, I felt that this was something that belonged to me that no one else could take away. Such a treasured memory I will never forget. Sammy and I had already agreed on a name if the baby was a girl.