Jailing

by Clifford Irving

  *****

  J A I L I N G

  Clifford Irving

  *****

  August 28, 1972

  This morning I ate a good breakfast of orange juice, French toast, crisp bacon and a pot of hot coffee, and then surrendered to the U.S. Marshall at the courthouse in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  He handcuffed me, shackling the cuffs to a steel belt chained round my waist. He apologized for doing this, but the last man for whom they’d made an exception, the left-wing activist publisher Ralph Ginzburg, had stepped outside the courthouse and begun to yell and then burned a copy of the Federal Constitution in front of the TV cameras. They didn’t want anything like that to happen again. We drove off on a dusty road to the federal prison camp at Allenwood, about fifteen miles away. The day was hot and cloudy. Arriving, they took everything I owned, clothes, the works, including my diving watch and the gold ring I inherited from my father.

  In its place they gave me my federal prison number – 00040. “It’s yours for life,” one of the guards explained to me.

  Now I’m in Dorm Five, a ramshackle single-story wooden building that once was painted white but has since acquired the color and texture of a sheet that hasn’t been changed for months. The smell of sweat predominates. The men call it The Jungle. New arrivals are parked here until beds become available in the newer, better dormitories. A constant mutter, sometimes ascending to a din, assaults the ears; the entire population laughs, yells and curses at the same time.

  Two blacks are my neighbors, each of them the size of NFL defensive guards, and they get into a religious debate after supper, which is meat loaf and baked beans. “Listen, brother,” one says. “I tell you one thing – in this life they ain’t no such thing as no motherfuckin salvation. This is just one mean motherfucker from the beginning when you born to the motherfuckin end when you die. Do you dig my meaning, brother? You better motherfuckin well believe it.”

  They’ve given me an upper bunk next to the showers. The mattress is thin and gray, the springs sag, so that my back aches when I lie down. They give me clean sheets and I make the bed neatly. I want to behave. Just like summer camp back in Maine when I was a kid.

  Do I feel depressed? Better motherfuckin well believe it.

  August 29

  I woke at 5 a.m., exhausted. The hot water dripped all night in the shower room. Steam billowed into the dormitory, so that it must have been well over 100 degrees. I got up and tried to turn off the hot water taps but they were fiery hot to the touch and the nuts had been stripped. With the crawling mist, rising steam and the steady drip of the water, as from branches, I felt as if I’d spent the night in a tropical rain forest. No one else seemed to mind.

  I was called down later to the office of Mr. Weger, the Camp Superintendent, who looks like a 35-year-old, dapper version of Elvis Presley. He struck me as a bright, mean-minded man. The men despise him.

  He said, “We don’t want any trouble out of you, Irving. Just don’t make waves. Don’t be a jailhouse lawyer.”

  Me? All I want to do is make parole in June. I’m going to be as troublesome as a mouse.

  Then Weger turned me over to Mr. Huntsinger, the Assistant Superintendent, an old bullnecked pro who was a Lieutenant of the Guard at Lewisburg penitentiary. I’ve already learned that he’s tough but that the men trust him. “I followed your case,” he said. “I was rooting for you. Tough luck. Stay out of trouble in here. Don’t trust anybody. Anybody.”

  He assigned me to a job: clerk in the office of the prison factory. The factory makes wooden furniture for the government, for judges’ offices and the FBI. I’ll be paid 21 cents an hour, tax-free.

  I went down there and met the men I’ll work with: Sioti, Willie Polk, Lembke, Claude and Joe D. Sioti was a big bookie. Willie’s a hillbilly who transported stolen cars from Kentucky to Ohio. Lembke was a mayor of some town in Pennsylvania; he pocketed government funds. Claude, a printer, went for the big score and counterfeited $4 million. Joe D. is a medium-echelon Mafioso doing time for possession of stolen securities. He’s already taken me under his wing (even though he’s eight inches shorter than I am) and shown me around the camp.

  Carmine de Sapio of Tammany Hall is an inmate here, too. And an army general named Turner – he invented the handcuff-and-shackle system they use on us; but the army caught him selling machine guns, privately, to the highest bidder in Chicago – and the former Attorney General of West Virginia, and the assistant to a U.S. Senator, a sheriff, and a couple of judges. Classy company.

  August 30

  Sioti told me that at his trial in Philadelphia his lawyer, who was a sixty-year-old veteran and considered very good, made a long impassioned summation speech in his defense. His sick wife, his kids, his work in the community, etc. Then the very young U.S. Attorney spoke to the jury. “I don’t have the eloquence or the $350 suit of the defense attorney or the defendant. I’m wearing a suit from Robert Hall. But I’m working for the people, for you.”

  Sioti: “That motherfucker convicted me on a lousy $70 suit.”

  September 3

  Allenwood is a minimum security “honor camp,” whatever that means. It spreads over 4500 pastoral acres and supports about 900 head of scrawny beef cattle, butchered periodically to feed the inmates of various eastern federal prisons. No gates, no walls, no guntowers – just an easy-to-penetrate wire fence that circles the perimeter. No rehabilitation, either. They just warehouse men. The men are called residents, not inmates or prisoners. They keep a constant population mix of about 40% white, 50% black, and 10% Spanish-speaking, mostly Puerto Ricans. There are five dormitories housing between three and four hundred men. They’re short-timers or else finishing out big bits begun elsewhere; this is supposed to be a decompression chamber.

  The hacks – guards; or, as they call themselves, Correctional Officers – are mostly local yokels who’d be working in a lumber yard or on a farm if they didn’t have this job. Some of them seem decent enough.

  It’s easy to escape from Allenwood. You just walk out when no one’s looking. Some men go out for a few hours to meet their wives or girlfriends at a local motel. It’s risky, though.

  Joe D. says the government makes hardly an effort to recapture you if you escape. They just wait. “The feds know you can’t stay away from your family forever. It would destroy whatever faith you’ve still got in human nature to find out how many of those poor bastards are turned in by their wives or some other relative. Or else they get nailed committing some other crime. You gotta remember, most of our residents here ain’t playing with a full deck.”

  September 5

  Sure enough, four men went over the hill this weekend. One of them had only five weeks left to serve on a two-year sentence. They say he got a Dear John letter from his wife. That’s common, I’m told. The other three flipped out after the Saturday night movie, 99 Women, a skin flick about dikes on an Italian island prison. The men took off early the next morning. I had to leave the movie in the middle and go back to bed in the dorm and, surrounded by clouds of steam, jerk off. I don’t want to be reminded that there’s an outside world with women in it. I just don’t want to know. And I think the mind can do extraordinary things, block out what it wishes, create a companionable and easeful world where, by most standards, none exists.

  September 7

  I’ve learned a new vocabulary.

  A hack is a guard. The joint, of course, is the prison. A good stop is an easy joint, like this one is supposed to be. Leavenworth and Terre Haute are bad stops. The Street is life outside. Lewisburg, our neighbor facility seventeen miles away — the maximum security prison for the northeastern United States — is The Wall. A shot is a disciplinary report for an infraction of the rules. To get shot is to be reported. A copout is an inmate’
s written request to the administration for just about anything from a furlough to a change of jobs. A rat and a snitch are informers, and that’s about the worst thing you can be in the joint. Your bit is your prison term. Your beef is what you did to earn it. Your house is your bed and its environs, your slice of personal territory. The hole is solitary confinement – the administration calls it Segregation. A shank is a home-made knife, usually fashioned from the guts of an iron cot. A five-year sentence is a nickel. Ten years is a dime, 25 is a quarter. Two tens running wild would mean two consecutive ten-year sentences.

  Willie Polk says, “I had bad luck. I went before a dime-store judge. All he knew was five, ten, and a quarter. First time out of the box he slips me a nickel.”

  Other than vocabulary, I’ve been here ten days now and I’ve learned three basic things. How to use the word motherfucker in every sentence, how to eat an entire meal with a spoon, and how to steal. That may be the essential prison experience.

  September 10

  Joe D. is about 45, short, neat, slick, olive-skinned, with warm liquid brown eyes. He has a tic – he blinks constantly. He says it gets worse as the time approaches for him to go before the parole board.

  He tells me about The Wall, where he recently spent a few years.

  “There’s no Mickey Mouse at The Wall. Everything is security over there. It’s a five star penitentiary – max max max. You’re the garbage of the world and that’s where you belong. They expect you to play their game, try to con them. And they respect you for it, and they’re happy. The alternative is to be a hardnose and then they’ll play with your head. You’re a number. You’re constantly searched. The man examines you, sticks his nose up your asshole – it can’t be pleasant, but the man’s used to it by now. You’re not a body, see? – you’re a number.

  “Good jobs go to the heavy men, the guys who are doing ten years up to double life, or else the Warden will have trouble. But he expects these men to keep order, to run the joint, and they do. Also the choice jobs, like clerks, go to the Jews and the Italians, then the Anglos. Blacks get sent to industry and work their ass off – they need the money. The PRs dominate food service, and they steal for you, for a price. Apparently they’ve proven statistically that Jews and affluent Italians can stay loyal to their own kind and at the same time not try to fuck the institution.

  “It’s not really so bad over there. You get good food at night – I mean steaks stolen from the kitchen, packed in laundry carts. There are fourteen hundred men at The Wall, kid, scheming day and night – got nothing else to do. The man condones this to avoid pressure building up. The wops run the gambling. Men lose a lot of money. They play for cigarette cartons but it adds up, and if you can’t pay up inside you better fucking well have your old lady pay up on the street within a week or they give you a blanket party. And then there’s always, I’d say, thirty or forty thousand dollars in cash floating around inside The Wall at any given time, hidden here and there. They found a stash of ten grand once in the greenhouse, buried under the geraniums. No one ever raised his hand and said, `Hey, that’s mine, give it back.’

  “Booze is made inside – yeast from the bakery, alcohol from the Medical Department. I’m telling you, these people have years to scheme and practice. The guys doing big bits know which of the hacks can be had. And they get drugs, too. They steal the drugs meant for other inmates. Their attitude is, `Fuck you. You’re here today, gone tomorrow, maybe doing a nickel, but I’m doing twenty years, man – I live here.’ You pass some guy in the hallway over there at The Wall and just brush his sleeve, and you better say, ‘Excuse me.’ A guy doing natural life don’t care if he kills you. What can they do to him? Put him in the hole? He’s been there. He don’t care. While I was there, a man was shanked in the chow hall over a jelly donut. These guys were on the chow line. There was one jelly donut left on the tray. The guy at the head of the chow line was about to take it when the guy in back of him reached around and took it from under his nose and laughed and says, `Fuck you, bubblehead.’ So the guy in front reached up his pants leg and whipped out a shank he had taped there and shoved it into the other guy’s stomach. And he laughed, and says, `You a bubblebelly, bubblehead.’ He took the jelly donut from the guy’s tray as this guy started to fall. Then he went over to a table and ate the jelly donut while the other guy lay on the tile practically at his feet, blood gushing out of him and crying for help. I saw that happen.

  “My first job over there, they put me in food service, handing out pork chops. I was getting about two hours sleep a night around then because I was in F block, which is rough – I was shitscared. So these black dudes start fussing and saying, `Gimme a different pork chop, man,’ or `This pork chop’s too small. Gimme two, motherfucker.’ I dropped my spatula and went over to the hack and said, `You got a fucking nerve assigning me to this job. I got to live with these animals. Put me in the hole, but I ain’t working here any more. I may get killed in this joint, but I ain’t getting killed over a goddam pork chop.’ And so they gave me a job mopping the corridor.”

  And Joe laughs.

  Sounds interesting, but I think I’ll try to skip it.

  September 14

  I like to watch the Italians playing bocce in the sunlight. They play so subtly, studying the contour of the sandy pit for minutes at a time, kidding each other softly, tossing the ball gently with backspin. The older men play and the younger men sit on the grass, watching. Carmine de Sapio has a young man who’s always with him, obviously been assigned to him, to take care of him. He’s dark and quiet and he plays bocce very well. He and Carmine are the champs. Across the fields the Puerto Ricans are playing handball, sweating hard, and the young blacks have got a basketball game going.

  This is Saturday. I can smell soap as the breeze carries the aroma drifting from the dorm, across the grass, where the men are washing their underwear and socks in silvery metal buckets. I sit in the sun, watching and sniffing. A yellow butterfly floats by. Then a beetle, creeping cautiously through the grass, which must be to him as a jungle. I see these things. It’s a lovely, peaceful day in prison.

  September 15

  I finally got moved out of The Jungle into Dorm Two. Willie and Joe D. are in there. I have a bed by the window. Willie produced a second pillow, a wooden bedboard and an innerspring mattress for me. I don’t know how he did it. These are extraordinary luxuries.

  My cubicle, as it’s called, is about 6 x 10, bounded on one side by a four foot high sheet of stiff brown cardboard which is supported by the backs of my neighbor’s two upright lockers. My own lockers in turn support my other neighbor’s cardboard partition. Between the lockers a thin plank of plywood rests on two hinges, forming a small, wobbly writing area. I have a window shelf where I put my books. The dorm is dusty and we have to sweep and mop constantly. Dust gathers under the beds like shearings off a sheep. It’s either quiet and remarkably restful in here, or it’s a shrieking, howling asylum – depending on events.

  Advice from Joe D., who’s assumed the role of my rabbi: “Never talk to a man during or just after Mail Call. Might have received a Dear John letter, divorce papers, word of a new indictment, anything. And don’t aggravate anyone at lunch, because that’s right after Mail Call. Some of these guys don’t need too much of an excuse to go bananas.”

  September 18

  A new man in the dorm, transferred from the penitentiary at Terre Haute. His name is Jimmy Hogg, from Louisville. We lift weights together. The Weight Room is a dusty wooden shack on the lower edge of the compound and it smells of sweat, leather and cold iron. I like it down there. The men who lift weights are friendly to one another. Hogg usually keeps to himself but one evening we walked up the hill together in the rain and got to talking. He claims to have had 38 arrests in the midwest without a conviction, before this one. Always paid off the judges, $500 to $2000. Shot three or four men, he says. I believe him. He has pale skin and small, cold, light gray eyes.

  Hogg’s kid brother – so he t
ells me – out on bail on a phony credit card rap, goes to see his girlfriend, finds her with another man, shoots him three times, flees to Hogg in Florida where it’s winter and Jimmy’s doing a little house-breaking on the Gold Coast.

  Hogg gives him six sets of fake I.D.s, but the kid drifts to L.A. and starts selling them there at $300 a set. He’s picked up eventually and gets five years. “Too much mouth on that dude,” Hogg says, “and they jammed him.”

  Hogg heard Willie Polk describing a friend who was shot in Akron, and he said, “Sure, I knew him. It was me shot him, you turkey.”

  “Oh,” said Willie. “Well, he weren’t really no good friend of mine.”

  “How damaged was he?” I asked Hogg later, when we were resting between sets of bench presses. He said: “He didn’t die, the fuck. It must of been a bad bullet.”

  September 24

  Carlos, a Puerto Rican, living across the way from me in the dorm, stands silently for a full minute this evening, gazing at his picture frame on top of his locker. In it are out-of-focus Polaroid snapshots of his wife and kids. The usual awkward pose: everyone in a row, kids staring gloomily into space, dark-haired wife’s face frozen in a brilliant-eyed smile. Carlos wants to stop, to pull his gaze away, but he can’t. He wants to keep looking, too, but he can’t do that, either. Finally he steps away, shuffles toward the door, snarling. At who? At what? At night he sneezes endlessly and spits into a paper bag he keeps on the floor beside his bed.

  An old man on the other side of the dorm hawks and doesn’t spit. My neighbor, Bubba Stiles, a quiet kid, farts. Some of the men always laugh and giggle no matter how many times he does it. Wolfe, a new man, snores like a runaway motorboat. We shake him and wake him up and heave him into his stomach, but nothing stops his snoring. Someone throws a boot in the darkness and it hits Wolfe over the eye, cutting him, so that in the morning his pillow is brown with blood. But he keeps snoring.