Chessman I knew vaguely from my previous sojourn in isolation.
They were pacing the range outside the cells. As they got close to the front, Chessman recognized me and stopped. "Hey, Bunker, they got you again."
"Looks like it."
"Yeah," Zekonis chimed. "He turned Campbell's desk over on him."
Bob Wells: "Say what? A.J. Campbell!" He burst into laughter and showed a gap where several teeth were missing, broken off it the gum with a club.
Chessman: "That was a baadd idea."
"I wasn't thinking very clearly."
"I guess not."
"Knock it off, Bunker," admonished an escort. He said nothing to the men behind the mesh screen and bars. What could he say to men awaiting a trip to the gas chamber?
Wearing white undershorts, I was escorted down the other tier, passing cells where men looked out, a couple of them nodding at me as I went by. Lined up on the floor next to the outer wall of bars were the folded mattresses. They were taken away at 8 a.m. and returned at 8 p.m. A year or two before I arrived, Warden Clinton Duffy had stopped the practice of making prisoners in isolation stand on "the spot," an eighteen-inch circle painted red, from 8 in the morning to the afternoon count. Talk was forbidden then; and still is now.
Zekonis stopped at an empty cell and turned the key; then signaled the bull up front to pull the security bar. After I dragged the mattress onto the tier, the gate closed and the security bar dropped. Here I was again. Damn!
I expected the disciplinary committee, usually chaired by the Captain or Associate Warden, to give me twenty-nine days in isolation (all that was allowed) and assign me to segregation for six months or so. Captain Nelson and Associate Warden Walter Dunbar were in Sacramento for the day; the Business Manager chaired the committee. They gave me ten days, which would pin me back on the yard the following Monday. I anticipated that release very much as I would anticipate a release to society, except I had no idea when that would be.
All we were allowed in isolation was a comb, toothbrush and a Gideon bible, which I studied whenever I was in the hole, not in search of God, but for the secular wisdom within its pages, such as, "Speaketh not to fools, for they despise knowledge." And, "It is better to live in one small corner of the attic than in a wide house with a brawling woman."
Thursday morning, Captain Nelson and Associate Warden Dunbar came along the tier. They were commuting isolation sentences. That afternoon, everyone was released except a black convict who'd been caught with a shiv — and me. I asked Zekonis what was going on. He explained: "Santo, Perkins and Barbara Graham are going to be executed tomorrow. They want Barbara downstairs in one of the overnight cells. Santo and Perkins are coming over here ... up front."
California law required that those about to die by cyanide gas had to be moved away from the other condemned prisoners the night before the execution. Downstairs were two overnight condemned cells, side by side. The so-called "last mile" was more like five steps. Next to the first cell was a steel door painted San Quentin's ubiquitous green. Three feet beyond was the door into the octagon-shaped gas chamber, also green. Barbara Graham, the junkie whore sentenced with Santo and Perkins, had been transferred from California's only women's prison eight or nine months earlier. She'd been held in the prison hospital those nine months, teasing convicts through a window strip. At count time, when the prison was locked down, she was moved to one of the cells downstairs.
From up front, I could hear Santo and Perkins being moved into the first two cells; the security bar went up, the resonance of steel on steel as the tier gate opened and shut, the loud click-CLACK as the big key turned the cell lock. Voices, a scattered word or phrase: ". . . open telephone ... all night . . . attorney governor ..."
The security bar dropped, the outer gate clanged shut and the voices were more distant. I could faintly hear the elevator, and I was pretty sure no guards would hear me.
"Hey, Santo! Jack Santo," I called. "Emmett Perkins."
"Yeah. Who's that?"
"A convict who thinks you motherfuckers are dog shit!"
"Fuck you, asshole!" one yelled, and the other added, "Fuckin' punk."
"Tell me that tomorrow afternoon ... ha, ha, ha ..." I really despised them. In addition to the murder of an old woman in Burbank, who supposedly had a stash of cash from a bookmaker son, for which all three were sentenced to die, Santo and Perkins had murdered a small town grocer and his five children, stuffing the bodies in the trunk. The grocer had been carrying his money from Nevada City to Stockton or Sacramento. The slaughter of innocent children made me sick. I knew armed robbers who killed when someone reached for a gun or tried to jump them, and although society would judge them, I would not. It was life's first law, to survive. They paid their money and took their chances. This was a slaughter of the innocent - for perhaps $2,000. Jesus. " You Motherfuckers deserve to die!" I yelled, and within seconds heard keys jangling and the squeak of crepe soles on the polished concrete. I was supine on the floor with the Gideon bible when the guard on the gun walk looked in and kept going. He must have thought The bellow came from Santo or Perkins up front. They had more to scream about than me. The other guy, he with the stabbing, was in one of the last three cells; they had soundproof doors about three feet in front of the cell bars. For some reason they left me about ten or twelve cells from the front.
The gun bull came back and went around the rear. He also covered Death Row.
"Hey, convict!" Jack Santo called in a softer voice.
It had to be for me. "Yeah," I said. "Whaddya want?"
"You're a convict, huh."
"I'm not an inmate, that's for goddamn sure."
"Then why don't you do your own time?"
I looked out and saw the gun bull in front of my cell. I dared not answer. Talking would get me another five days. As if to emphasize my danger, the gun bull nodded knowingly and shook an admonishing finger. Fuck Jack Santo. Telling him what I thought wasn't worth five more days in isolation. I did, however, think about his admonishment to do my own time. It was the number one rule for a convict doing time. It meant what it said: mind your own business, worry about your own crime, your own time, your own punishment. See nothing; hear nothing and, above all, say nothing. If Christ could not find one to throw a stone in a crowd of average citizens, where in a universe of criminals could one be found? Let them die by themselves. Still, they gave thieves a bad name.
A dinging bell announced the elevator, and a moment later there was the rattle of the food cart. Even with just two of us, Zekonis shook the dipper level and laughed when I shook my head. Other guards scooped up all the dipper would hold and dumped it on the paper plate. What the hell did they care how much spaghetti a convict got? I knew better than to complain.
When Zekonis handed me the plate, he said, "Chessman says hello."
"Thanks, Zeke." I'd learned that it was better to have even a mangy old dog for a friend than an enemy, a piece of convict proverb with efficacy.
I saved a cup of spaghetti and a slice of bread. It tasted better cold and late at night. On the yard, I ate meagerly, but up here with nothing else to do and meals the mark of passing time, I was hungry most of the time.
Isolation was always silent and gloomy, the light dim outside the cells, the shadows angled and sliced by vertical bars, horizontal cross-bars and grids from the wire mesh. As it got dark, by pressing my left cheek to the bars I could peer at an angle to the front of the tier. A Death Watch guard was visible, seated at a card table up against the gun walk bars. He had a telephone and a radio, coffee and Camels. It was said that just before it was time to go, the prison doctor gave you a choice of a shot of morphine or a double shot of bourbon. I had no idea if it was true, but once when I'd seen the pharmacological safe open in the hospital, there had been a sealed fifth of I.W. Harper's bourbon.
After the elevator arrived again, the outer gate opened and a cart wheeled in. It had the meals of two doomed men. I could hear rattling pans, and soon came
the powerful odors of steak, onions and good, strong coffee. Its rarity made it more intense. Goddamn, what I'd give for steak and onions and fresh ground coffee. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to eat their meal. They might eat it, but they wouldn't get to digest and shit it before they were dead meat themselves.
How did it feel to be strapped into a chair and put to death? Nobody could answer that, but I did know two youths who escaped from a juvenile camp, were caught up north, perhaps in Portland, and when two rural county deputies were bringing them back, the youths somehow overpowered and killed them. Sentenced to die, they had been on the row for nearly two years before the California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction but overturned the death sentence. Rather than re-try the whole case, the District Attorney of the small county let the judge sentence them to Life. When they were on the yard I asked one of them how it felt and what he thought. It was a time when executions happened regularly. Bobby told me, "Any time they take a guy downstairs and top him, you die right with him, and every night thereafter. I reached the point when I was so accepting that I wanted them to kill me rather than play more games." Viscerally I could feel what he was saying.
Now I was sitting the night out with men awaiting execution. The elevator came and went, the outer doors on the tier clanged open and shut. Words were exchanged. The priest came and was chased away. The sweep hand turned slowly but inexorably, and the other hands moved with the same relentlessness. Midnight came and went.
Barbara Graham was downstairs. Al Matthews had taken her case a few weeks ago. Would he save her? Maybe. Very few women were put to death, none so far in my sojourn, although they took a man every Friday at 10 a.m., or at least it seemed every week. As for the deterrence of it, convicts on the yard seldom knew who was being executed or what they had done unless it was a headline case. They did know about Jack Santo, Emmett Perkins and Barbara Graham. Ex-cons with multiple killings and a sexy broad; that got their attention. The fool who went before them had been executed for punching a child molester they put in his cell in the Fresno County Jail. The victim's head hit the edge of the bunk. His family screamed like banshees, and poor Red didn't have a penny. The lawyer they appointed him was nicknamed "Death Row Slim," so we know what his clients thought of him.
Even when the convicts didn't know who was being executed, or what they had done, they did know that someone was going. It was always at 10 a.m. on Friday. Gas chamber day. The red light was turned on atop the North Cell House. When everything was normal, the green light was bright against the sky.
They were late returning our mattresses. It was almost 10 p.m. when two guards and a sergeant pulled the security bar and unlocked the isolation cells, one at a time, so we could step out and carry our mattress back in. As I passed the Sergeant, I told him I needed some toilet paper.
"We'll bring you some at count."
Count was an hour away. I could wait that long.
The mattress was comfort manifest after fourteen hours on the concrete. I tried to read the Bible, but the archaic English of the King James era took more concentration than I could muster that night. I was left with listening to the faint sounds of the radio outside the cells of the doomed killers, and to the comings and goings of officials. Once again I was alone with my thoughts, a situation I found myself in far more often than most. I'd seemingly spent an inordinate amount of my life meditating in a dungeon. Nearly everyone I knew had done some time, or was doing it, whereas the average person had not merely never been arrested, but also didn't even know anyone who had been in jail, much less state prison. Driving Mrs Hal Wallis around Beverly Hills to visit her friends and take care of her business had let me peek into a world I'd never previously imagined. She had come from 6th Street and Central Avenue, as scruffy as anywhere in LA. I had personally experienced the difference between rich and poor. I conjured memory of San Simeon's Neptune pool in burning twilight. By now I'd read The Age of Moguls and Citizen Hearst and knew that Citizen Kane had failed to capture the scintillating truth of William Randolph Hearst. Good God, why wasn't I dealt that hand? Still, if I looked from the view that all things are relative, which they are, my cards were better than most of the world. If I lacked the advantage of family wealth, at least I had the advantage of being white. I was an American, not from some impoverished Banana Republic. Where would it end? I had no idea. Maybe awaiting the executioner's summons. If someone scared me and I believed them dangerous, I would try to strike first. I might lose my temper and ice somebody in a half-accident, like Red. What if a crime partner went crazy and killed someone on a caper? All that shit could happen . . .
Into the silence came the sound of the elevator. It seemed louder because there was less background noise. The outer door opened. Voices. Words unintelligible. The clank of the gate onto the tier. I looked up. Sure enough, the security bar was raised, followed in a second by a key turning a cell lock up front. One of the doomed duo was going somewhere. That would take authorization from the Warden. Which one? Where to? I don't think he's going to get a vaccination, I half muttered; then laughed loudly at my sick humor. I had a laugh that sounded like a braying jackass or a maniac. I would hear just one like it over the years: Joe Morgan.
The gun bull came by, a shadow behind two sets of bars and the mesh wire. "What's so funny, Bunker?"
"Life . . . Hey, who'd they take out?"
"Santo. To see his lawyer."
"I hope it's bad news."
"You're not rooting for your team?"
"Shit, he ain't on my fuckin' team. I'd throw the switch on them two."
"What about Barbara?"
"I dunno about that. She's pretty fine."
"You have been locked up a long time."
"Not all that long. Just over two years."
"I'd go crazy if I went two years without pussy. You mess with those toy boys?"
I shook my head. "Hell, no!" It was true, but it was also a lie. One or two of the effeminate young queens really looked like pretty girls with fine asses in tight jeans. They were "she" to everyone. For all I knew, they really were women. But the one or two who might have stirred me were the property of terrible killers. Until race became the main issue for prison murder, the easiest way to get killed in San Quentin was to mess with someone's "sissy."
Within the hour, Santo returned. As the tier gate opened and the security bar went up, I heard Emmett Perkins. "What happened?"
The reply was delayed by the sound of the cell being slammed and locked. The security bar dropped. Then I heard what I doubted for a moment: wheezing, sobbing tears. Emmet's voice came again, ice cold steel: "You weak motherfucker! You better die like a man or I'm gonna spit in your face from the chair next to you."
Wow!
Then I heard a third voice, but the words were too soft to make out. It was the Death Watch bull.
The elevator came again, and the doors and gates opened. I heard voices down by the first cells. I pressed against the cell bars and peered down the tier as best I could. I could see shadows from figures cutting through the bright floodlight glaring into the two cages. I had given that up and was taking a leak when I heard someone behind me. I turned my head. It was Warden Teets. Damn.
"How are you getting along?" he asked. Behind him was one of his retinue. Wardens always have retinues. Nobody ever sees one alone.
"... Bunker," one of them said, telling him who I was. He came up to the bars. By now I had given it a good shake and buttoned up my pants.
"I had a letter from Mrs Wallis," he said. "She's going to be in San Francisco next month. She wants to visit you, but she's going to be busy during visiting hours."
I must have shrugged a certain way, or grunted in a sound of defeat. If she was busy during visiting hours, the case was closed.
The Warden said: "Don't give up. Maybe we can work something out."
"That sure would be great."
"Take it easy."
He went to the silent cell at the rear and a guard opened the outer door.
It was the same question: "How are you getting along?"
The answer I could not hear. Warden Teets said, "Take it easy."
A moment later they passed my cell. He gave a little wave. I didn't hear them go out the gate. Now I had suspicious thoughts. What did he mean about maybe we can work it out? Could he possibly mean that he and I could work it out? Was it a solicitation to be a stool pigeon?
It seemed unlikely. Obviously he meant "work it out" with the Mrs Hal B. Wallis; Hollywood's star maker they called Hal Wallis.
I He sure liked making those ice blonde American beauty roses. If it took putting them in a movie with Burt or Kirk, he'd do that, too.
I was so excited about the possibility of a visit, I paced back and forth and forgot the two men in the first and third cells, although on the periphery of attention I was aware that they were talking. My focus shifted when I heard the music on the radio in front of their cells. It was a slightly saccharine sound sponsored by American Airlines. It was on the earphones in the cell house because it was good to sleep by. I listened to it for its soothing qualities. But why in hell were they listening? If they liked anything, it would he Patsy Cline or Hank Williams. Both of them were country to the core. It was a puzzle I never pieced together, for I fell asleep. Thinking about it later, I decided that they were waiting for the half-hourly news bulletins. A petition for habeas corpus had been filed in a US district court. With the petition was a motion for a stay of execution while the court decided if the petition appeared to have merit. Because the world was waiting for them to die, what the judge did would come by radio faster than the Warden could walk over from his office.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 18
