I nodded. "I got it." I felt good. I was going to general population. I also felt fear, for San Quentin's general population, "on the yard," it was called, was an unknown terrain fraught with dangerous men.
Red Nelson looked to Warden Teets. "Let's classify him maximum custody right now."
"Sounds good," the Warden said; then he looked at me. "You're just a kid. You can straighten up your life if you want. If you don't, if you give us trouble, we can handle you, I guarantee it. Nobody is too tough for San Quentin—"
"Nobody we've met," Lieutenant Hocker added.
Red Nelson wrote something on a form and signed it. He held it out and Lieutenant Hocker took it. "I'll let him out after work call."
"Good enough," Red Nelson said.
Lieutenant Hocker crooked a finger. "Let's go."
I followed him out onto the porch overlooking the Garden Beautiful. In an hour I would be on the Big Yard. Thus did I enter San Quentin, the youngest convict there at the time.
Chapter 6
Tick Tock Turns the Clock, '52, '53, '54, '55
I survived my late teenage years in San Quentin. Joseph Welch squelched Joe McCarthy (such matters were unnoticed in the prison universe) and Willie Mays made the miracle catch on Vic Wertz's towering drive to the deepest part of the polo grounds (that did get attention, for betting on baseball was a big thing at the time) and when I crossed the Big Yard, many convicts said hello or nodded or otherwise indicated recognition.
I lived two lives, one in the cell from 4.30 p.m. to 8 a.m., the other in the Big Yard and elsewhere behind the walls. In those days convicts had the run of the inside of the prison. Each morning when the cell gate opened, I sallied forth to find adventure. Just before I arrived, the jute mill had burned to the ground, leaving the prison short of jobs. I was one of 300 who were unassigned. Being without a job was virtually a waiver of parole consideration, but I'd been in too much trouble to get a parole even if I worked seven days a week in three jobs. The parole board had a written policy of not even considering parole if the inmate had any disciplinary infraction with six months. In '54, I had just gotten out of segregation for a brawl where my jaw was sliced from temple to lip (goddamn it bled copiously), so I had no imminent chance for parole.
I gambled on all sporting events, except the horses. The tote board is too hard to beat, and who knows what a horse will do — or what the trainer will want him to do in a particular race? No, no, not the horses. I bet on boxing matches (the easiest except when two black heavyweights were involved), college and professional football, and major league baseball (the hardest), and sometimes a Pacific Coast League game if it was being broadcast and I needed something to listen to on the earphones in the cell. By '54 I had gone through being a bully and a tough guy. Bullies and tough guys have high mortality rates; sometimes they can scare the wrong person. My friends were numerous, in a variety of "tips," as they were then called. Now they would be called "sets." Most of the troublemakers and tough guys were friends of mine, but by '54 I was drifting away from them toward the real professional thieves and confidence men. They had respect but avoided trouble by staying within their group. They had the good prison jobs with various fringe benefits. Paul Allen, for example, was assigned to the kitchen - but he was the Death Row cook. The condemned, who were far fewer and more quickly executed back then, were fed much better than the mainline convicts, or at least far greater care was taken with the preparation. The Death Row cook, as a fringe benefit, was allowed to make steak and egg sandwiches for friends or for sale. Another buddy worked in the laundry, so he provided bonaroo clothes, jeans and shirts starched and pressed. Best of all was the dental office. Back then, convicts did the teeth cleaning and simple fillings. Extractions were by the dentist. Jimmy Posten, a baby-faced safecracker, was the chief dentist's assistant. Jimmy ran his own dental practice during the lunch hour. Using the gold salvaged from extractions, he took impressions for bridgework and crowns, treatments not provided by the institution. He accumulated hundreds of cartons of cigarettes and a considerable cache of US currency, which was contraband. I would visit him at work a couple times a week. Once I arrived as he was splitting up a pound of marijuana. By the late '60s nearly all prisons were flooded with all varieties of drugs. It was even possible to maintain a "habit" while doing time, but back in the early '50s, real drugs were rare. Getting high was limited to home brew, nutmeg (it will get you high about three hours after you take a spoonful) and Wyamine inhalers, which had some kind of amphetamine mixture, items a guard could purchase and carry in his lunch box. A Wyamine inhaler cost 59 cents at Thrifty, and sold for $5 on the yard. It was a rare coup to get a pound of weed. I felt a member of the elite when Jimmy put a bag aside for me.
By '54, I had retired from my brief boxing career: three wins and three losses in six bouts through late '52 and '53. I maintained a locker box with hand wraps, mouthpiece and boxing shoes, and I frequently went to the gym during the day to work out or visit friends assigned to the gym, which covered the long top floor of the Old Industrial Building and was divided into sections: boxing, weightlifting, wrestling, plus a handball court and a room with a couple of ping-pong tables and TV sets. Each section had a private office, a "spot" as it was called, for the two or three convicts assigned to it.
The boxing room had the look and smell of all boxing gyms — a mix of blood, sweat and leather. Posters of Bay Area fights were on the walls, and tall mirrors for shadow boxing. Activity was regulated by the boxing cycle of three minutes' work, one minute rest. A timer automatically rang a bell on that sequence. When it started, speed bags rattled like machine guns, and the heavy punching bags thudded loud and jumped on their chains. Fighters grunted and exhaled as they threw a punch. This automatically tightened stomach muscles at the moment of their greatest vulnerability: when their arm was extended away from their body.
There were two boxing rings, one for shadow boxing and teaching, the other for actual boxing, or sparring with another fighter. When the bell rang again, everything stopped. The fighters replenished their wind and the trainers admonished and instructed.
A convict ran the boxing department, issued the training gear and decided who would fight on the various boxing cards held several times a year. The convict who had the job had to be both diplomatic and tough.
If the gym was boring, I might visit the barber shop, which was then in Shiv Alley. It had about twenty-five barber chairs, five for blacks. Two friends of mine, Don "Saso" Anderson and "Ma"
Barker had a chair in the corner. When they got out, they robbed a bank in Reno, and Saso accidentally shot Ma in the chest. For hours they drove through the woods. Ma refused to see a doctor and died.
At 4 p.m. the Big Yard filled as convicts trudged up the worn concrete stairs from industries, the furniture factory and Navy Cleaning Plant. When 4,000 voices were caught in the canyon formed by the immense cell houses, they made a roar like the sea.
When the whistles blew, lines were formed outside each cell house. To indicate that someone was, or had been, a close friend, the common phrase was: "I lined up with him." Blacks were segregated in the lineup and mess halls. I had many friendships and was welcomed in several tips, including that of Joe Morgan, who had been transferred from Folsom while awaiting release on parole. Two decades later he would be the caudillo of the Mexican Mafia, but even in '54 he was legend. It added to my status that his entourage saved a place in line for me. Of all the men I would meet in the next two decades, Joe Morgan was the toughest by far. When I say the toughest, I do not necessarily mean he could beat up anyone in a fight. Joe only had one leg below the knee. The other had been shot off by the LAPD in East LA when he was eighteen. He was still pretty good with his fists, but his true toughness was inside his heart and brain. No matter what happened, Joe took it without a whimper, and frequently managed to laugh. I will talk of him later. When all the lines had filed inside, the Big Yard was empty and the cell house tiers packed, the lockup bell sounded. The security ba
rs were raised, everyone pulled a cell gate open, stepped inside and closed it. In an instant the tiers were cleared of convicts and the security bars dropped down.
Along each tier walked two guards, each using a hand counter - click click, click click, click, click click — and at the end they compared their count and called out to a sergeant on the cell house phone: "D Section, first tier, forty-six, second tier, forty-nine, third tier fifty-one ..."
The Sergeant called the count to the Control Room Sergeant, who had a wall-sized board with tags in slots for every cell, every hospital bed, and even tags for the morgue, for if some died, the body was counted until taken away. The count was phoned to Sacramento, the final tally keeper of how many men were in San Quentin. Unless there was a problem, the whole process, from lockup to all clear, took twelve to fifteen minutes. The most common problem was for one cell house to be missing a body, while another cell house had an extra. The all clear bell didn't ring until that was straightened out. If someone was really missing, it was a couple of hours before the chow unlock started. That was infrequent, although over time I saw several escapes, and near escapes, from inside the walls. More common than an actual escape attempt was someone hiding out because he was afraid of someone, or in debt. They were always found and put in the hole; it was a way of getting locked up without going to the Man and asking for protection, which carried permanent stigma on one's manhood.
Following the evening meal, usually a few minutes after 6 p.m., those on night unlocks were checked off lists: night gym, school, choir practice. The rest were locked up for the night.
I preferred the cell. If I lacked the mental powers of Jack London's Star Rover, I had the printed page to guide me through myriad eras and countless lives. I conquered Eastern Europe with Genghis Khan, and stood with the Spartans against the Persians in a place called Thermopylae and, thanks to Emil Ludwig, watched Napoleon's hubris destroy the Grand Army in the snows of Russia. Bruce Catton escorted me through the American Civil War. Although I'd been a voracious reader since the age of seven, I had no discretion, nor sense of literary value. A book was a book until Louise Wallis ordered me a subscription of the Sunday New York Times. It arrived the following Thursday, so fat it barely went through the bars. It took two evenings to read, even though I skimmed most of it. The Book Review got most of my attention, and although the new books were unavoidable, reviews and columns talked about other writers and other books — Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, John dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway. The library shelves did have The Titan, The Genius and An American Tragedy. Of Thomas Wolfe, I first read You Can't
Go Home Again, and the words were a prose symphony unlike anything I'd read before. Wolfe's descriptions of America, of the old Penn Station that "captured time," or the prose poem where he describes the nation from a perch on the continental divide moved me to an ache near tears.
My library day was Saturday. We were allowed to have five books checked out at one time. I tried to read all five in seven nights, so I could get five more. I was no speed reader, but I had six hours every night and half an hour in the morning. Sometimes if I was entranced, as with The Sea Wolf, I came back to the cell after breakfast.
I read fiction and non-fiction. Psychology books were in great demand. It was an era when a criminal act was prima facie evidence of psychological abnormality. Group therapy was gathering momentum. Advanced penologists saw the ideal prison as really a hospital, and wanted all terms to be from one day to life, depending on when the individual was "cured." In some cases, and I was among them, the parole board specified psychotherapy. The idea that poverty was a breeding ground was never discussed. I assumed that something was wrong. Imagine turning twenty in a gray rock prison after a childhood in schools for crime. Only a true cretin would not wonder why. Was I simply bad? I'd certainly done bad things, and a few that made me feel terrible to recall, and God knows that terrible things had been done to me — in the name of society or somebody. I'd suffered beatings and torture in a state hospital. I'd had a fire hose turned on me through bars when I was thirteen, and spent the night on the wet concrete so I caught pneumonia. It was beyond estimation how many punches and kicks I'd gotten from authority figures over my brief life. Had I declared war on society, or had society declared war on me? The authorities wondered if I was crazy, and so did I. Not in the normal sense; I had no delusions or hallucinations. I satisfied the classic criterion for what was then called the criminal psychopath (now called sociopath): a person who talked sane but behaved insane. It was insane to take on the whole world even if the world started it. In the argot of shrinks, I had an id-permeated ego and a stunted superego, which is something like conscience, or a governor on a car that keeps it from going too fast. The literature said there was no treatment, although it was common for burnout to occur around age forty. My hope was to use intelligence to govern my impulses. I knew that some sociopaths are very successful, and I knew that smart people don't commit street crimes. Nobody had a Beverly Hills mansion from cracking safes. I vowed that I would be as smart as I could be when I walked out of San Quentin's walls. I would suck up all available knowledge. I planned never to commit another felony, but when Goose Goslow told me how to peel a safe open, or make a device that would allow me to drill a floor safe, which is a tough safe to crack, I also sucked up that knowledge, just as I wrote down words I didn't know and later looked them up in a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary that Louise Wallis sent me.
She wrote me, not every week, nor even every month, and when she wrote it was liable to be several partial letters she had started but not finished. She jammed them in an envelope and sent them together. She wrote well, and her wisdom affected me. We could lose our misery by concern for someone else. She wrote me from on board the Queen Mary, and from San Tropez, describing the unique blue of the Mediterranean. By now I felt a strong filial bond with Louise. She told me that I was destined for a wonderful life, and she would do everything to help me help myself. I had no idea what I wanted except I had both a rage to experience life and a pervasive craving for knowledge. Faust's deal would have tempted me: give me knowledge and take my soul, for knowledge was God anyway. On one occasion I avoided stabbing someone who deserved it because I had dreams for the outside that she had given me.
One night in '53, the spring broke the same way it had in the holding cell. Again I put the mattress on the floor. As San Quentin's cells are only four and a half feet wide and eleven feet long, the mattress up against the cell gate certainly left me visible to passing guards. In fact my pillow was resting against the bars. I was wearing my earphones, listening to a soft music program sponsored by American Airlines. It blotted out the coughs and curses and flushing toilets, the rude noise of a dark cell house.
The next thing I knew, a "bull" as all guards were called, was shaking me through the bars. Flashlights were playing on me. Two guards were on the tier, one with a clipboard, which meant they were checking cell by cell, that they had counted, recounted and were now looking for where the body was missing.
They were angry, accusing me of obstructing the count. I tried to show them the broken bed. It made no impression. I finally told them I didn't want to hear "Socratic dialogues or the orations of Cicero."
They departed and I went back to sleep.
In the morning, fastened within the clothespin attached to the bars for such things, was a pass typed in red: Disciplinary Court, 8.00 a.m. After breakfast, I reported to the custody office where a few others were awaiting disciplinary court. Usually it was the Captain or the Associate Warden, but this morning it was the second watch lieutenant, A.J. Campbell, who had the blotchy red face and the blue nose of an alcoholic. He was known both for his vitriolic temper and his fear of convicts. He had never been seen on the yard. He was in a real bad mood this morning. I was charged with messing up the count and using profanity to the officer who tried to counsel me. I pleaded not guilty, explained about the bed spring and repeated my statement about Socrates
and Cicero. I was surprised that I'd been written up. At the very worst, I thought I might get thirty days' loss of privileges. Instead, Campbell said he was referring the matter to the full disciplinary committee and putting me in isolation.
Isolation! The shelf. Indignation welled up, and when he looked up and sneered and said something about Cicero, indignation overwhelmed my good sense. I grabbed the edge of the desk and lifted. It began to tilt, drawers ran out onto the floor. He began to yell for help. One more heave and over it went. Campbell managed to slide back and jump up, but he was screaming in fear. "Help! Help!"
The escort guard leaped on my back with a choke hold. Other guards came from everywhere. Oh God! What had I done?
The journey to isolation was across the Big Yard, through steel doors across the North Cell House rotunda, through another gate of heavy mesh and a steel door into another rotunda. To the right was the green steel door to the overnight condemned cells, where those being executed in the morning were taken the night before. To the left was the elevator to isolation and Death Row.
I expected the elevator to stop between floors for an ass-kicking. It was standard procedure following an assault on a guard. None was forthcoming. The three guards with me thought what I'd done was funny.
When the elevator stopped, we stepped onto a landing outside another mesh gate and a steel door. The mesh gate could only be unlocked from the outside, the steel door from the inside. A face appeared at an observation window, followed by the door opening. "Ah, Bunker, you haven't been here in a few months," said Officer Zekonis, nicknamed "Dipper Shaker" from the way he leveled the ladle when passing out food.
The escort guards waited while I danced through the routine of stripping naked for a search. We were in the front service area. Through a set of bars covered with wire, I could look down Death Row. Some of the doomed men, fat from too much food, pale from too little sun, were outside their cells. I recognized two of them, Caryl Chessman and Bob Wells. Neither was sentenced to die for murder, although Bob Wells had killed a man in a prison knife fight. He was a prison legend long before I went to juvenile hall. The San Francisco Chronicle had run a feature article saying he was the toughest man in San Quentin. He was to die for slugging a guard with a spittoon and knocking out his eye. He was sentenced under Section 4500, California Penal Code. The jury had had no idea that once they found him guilty of the assault, the death sentence was mandatory. Bob had been on Death Row for several years. Walter Winchell had come to his aid "coast to coast and all the ships at sea ..."
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 17
