Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade

by Edward Bunker

  The abiding hatred for Sheik was not for his animal physical abilities; it was a response to his animal attitude. Every word he spoke was a challenge radiant with rage. He was homosexual and an informer and once put a prisoner on Death Row. The prisoner got off without being executed, but ever after carried the nickname Death Row Jefferson. At slight provocation Sheik would spit on another prisoner, a truly awfid insult in a world where machismo reigns. When Motor and Slim finally killed him, they were marched across the yard from the custody office to the adjustment center just when all Folsom's convicts were lined up to go in for lockup and count. Every one of them clapped and cheered. Motor got life, Slim was sentenced to die, but Motor was seen in South Central in the '90s, and Slim was not executed.

  To the unknowing the Folsom yard would look peaceful and homogeneous, the convicts seeming to move as placidly as cows in a pasture, but beneath the somnolence and the guards' hawk eyes were deadly intrigues and murderous feuds. Men here had enemies they wanted to kill. The hostility smoldered like hot coals beneath gray ashes. Very little was needed to ignite a fire, maybe a glance, or a word someone thought they heard. Men maintained a watchful eye for their enemies, and stayed in areas where their friends lounged about.

  When I approached Denis, Ebie, Paul and Andy Pope, the conversation was about the death penalty. "How many they got up there now?"

  "I dunno. A hundred and fifty maybe . . . something like that."

  "And they add two or three every month; right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Sometime down the line, push is gonna come to shove. They gotta execute 'em faster than they arrive. Otherwise they're gonna have thousands. What're they gonna do then - have some kind of bloodbath?"

  "I wouldn't doubt it for a minute," Andy said. "In fact that's what I'd do to most of those worthless assholes."

  "Yeah, but you ain't running for Governor. Say they executed thirty or forty fools in two or three months. He'd ruin his political career."

  "I wouldn't be so sure of that," Andy said. "It might make him President."

  Denis saw me coming and moved to meet me. "You goin' down?"

  He meant to the library where we were both assigned. He was the law library clerk, a job I'd relinquished in favor of being chief clerk with a private office in the rear, behind the free librarian's outer office. Denis was my best friend. You may recall my mentioning him earlier as the first resident drug dealer in Hollywood. He was serving fifteen years to life, with first parole eligibility fourteen years and nine months from the date he began the term.

  The loudspeaker crackled and a voice bellowed: "The 8.30 line is going in!"

  The tidal rhythm of pacing men and superficial homogeneity began breaking apart. The greater mass began to cluster around and funnel through the #5 building gate. It was the sole route to the education department, hobby shop and hospital. Denis and I went the other way, circling along a walkway in front of the granite chapel, which looks more like a nineteenth-century power plant than a church. The Cat Man is outside the chapel, his jacket pockets filled with scraps of food and a couple of jars of milk. The cats are coming from around and beneath the building. One or two convicts lean on a rail, like spectators at a zoo. From a cardboard crate emerges Pinky, the patriarchal tomcat. His face is scarred and he is missing patches of fur, emblems of batdes with other cats and the ground squirrels that thrive on the steep hillsides and live in the spaces of the granite retaining walls. The Cat Man feeds and cares for all of them. They are his friends in a cold, friendless world. A few months earlier the cat population exploded, and during the night two litters of kittens were taken away. The Cat Man was so distraught that they put him in the psych ward for a few days. Then he took Thorazine and fixed Pinky's meal separate from the others.

  Denis and I pass through an inspection post and go down the walkway to the library. It is a low building of ocher plaster walls and gray roof, which rises and sags according to the supporting beams underneath. Originally built as an engineer's shack, it had a soft wood floor that became a plane of splinters; it was converted simply by adding some free-standing bookcases in one room, and lining the walls with shelves. Very little had changed since the library came into existence The largest of the three rooms is the law section, which the Department of Corrections wants to remove to help the Attorney General. As usual the law library table is crowded with convicts. Piled before them are the red books of codes, the cream-colored tomes of California Appeals Court decisions, the dark brown of the federal appeals courts, plus folders and scratch paper. Quiet prevails most of the time, although sometimes it gets loud when jailhouse lawyers argue the law with vehemence. "Fool, you don't know nuthin'. Read People versus Bilderbach, 62 Cal. 2d. That applies the Wong Sun doctrine to the State of California."

  Folsom convicts fde 20,000 petitions a year. Twenty years earlier it was unheard of, and a convict seen carrying legal papers received scornful derision. Law was seen as a secret religion beyond comprehension by anyone except its high priests. To fight in the courts one needed an expensive mouthpiece who knew the judges. It was Caryl Chessman's twelve-year battle to stay out of the gas chamber that changed the attitude of convicts. The ceaseless flow of petitions is Chessman's legacy. The Irish Sweepstakes are a better gamble, but for some men it is their only hope, no matter how faint, for resurrection.

  Denis turns into the law library. I go the other way, through the librarian's office to mine through another door. I like the librarian. As usual, he is reading. At a nearby desk is Dacy, who answers the phone. He is serving "all day," life without possibility of parole. After a lifetime of petty crime, he made the big gamble, a kidnaping for ransom. He has gallows humor about his situation. He knows I am an aspiring writer and jokingly wants me to ghost his biography, to be called How to Turn a Strange Child into Money, subtided: My Thirty Years in California Prisons. Alternately: How to Lose Friends and Alienate Parole Officers. His humor has been missing lately; maybe there's unfolding awareness of the true horror of his destiny.

  I handle the library's clerical work, which is more than most convicts do, but still it takes a mere two hours a day. Nobody develops work habits in prison. I drink a cup of coffee. By 10 a.m.

  I am finished and I go up to the yard to jog my twenty-five laps around the infield. I want to finish before the multitude begins jogging at the lunch hour, kicking up dust like a herd of buffalo. Only one other man, Merkouris, is circling the base paths in a trot a whde, walk a whde gait. Of medium height, with leonine white hair, he wears a white T-shirt over his spreading waistline no matter what the weather. He is in good shape for someone edging old age. Merkouris is a loner; he has no friends. He disdains convicts and is disdained by them. He is a man who obviously worked hard all his life and who possesses an inflexible, austere moral code alien to the prison ethic. A first-term prisoner, he has already served about fifteen years. In the early '50s he was the lead actor in one of LA's most publicized murder trials. His former wife and her new husband, an ex-policeman, were found shot to death in the premises of their small business. The dead man's brother was a sergeant on the Los Angeles Police Department, which added petrol to the blaze. In the courtroom Merkouris was strapped to a chair, gagged and put inside a glass booth. He still claims his innocence. He says he was the victim of the crime, that she had stolen all his money and shared it with her new man. Merkouris would never commit another crime, assuming he committed the first one, for he is no criminal and, in fact, despises criminals. He is lucky not to have been murdered in Folsom, for he tells the authorities if he sees anyone breaking the rules. I have nothing to say to him, and he would be suspicious if I spoke to him.

  The early lunch line is going into the mess hall. I'm on the list and I go in to eat with a friend who is being transferred to Chino the next morning. He has sixty days until parole and has served nine years for robbing a Thrifty drugstore. He doesn't say it in so many words, but he's afraid of going out. Another robbery conviction will bring a habitual crimin
al judgment. Thirty-nine years old, having served a total of fourteen yean in two terms, he wants to change his life. His fear is that he won't fit, that so many years within the walls will have maimed him. He will have $60 and no friends except other ex-convicts or criminals. If he is unable to find a niche in society, a place with a littleacceptance and self-respect, he will return to the world where he does have friends and acceptance and respect, even though it isn't what he really wants. He knows the probable result - the waste of the rest of his life.

  The after-lunch work whistle goes off, exploding a cluster of blackbirds from a budding roof. Almost as if it's a signal, half a dozen guards come from the adjustment center, leading a trio of prisoners in khakis (out to court clothes), handcuffs and waistchains. Their hair is too long for them to be Folsom convicts. Someone calls out. One man turns, grins and gives a nod of recognition. The trio is being held in Folsom for security while being tried for killing a Sutter County deputy sheriff.

  Back in the library, I drink tea and let time drift away in the trance in which prisoners learn to wrap themselves. It shuts out reality and lets daydreams rise. I stare out a window across the lower yard, the fences, the American River and the arid hills to the white gauze clouds. Johnny Cash was lying; you can't hear any train from inside Folsom Prison.

  So the afternoon goes, emptily. In Folsom a man becomes accustomed to the abbreviated day, so 2 p.m. is late, and by 3 p.m. things are ready for lockup.

  The lines of men begin gathering even before the lockup whistle. At a signal they trudge into the various cell houses, streaming up the steel stairs and along the tiers. The bars drop, the gates are key-locked and a guard comes by with the mail. He calls your name, you answer with your number. I don't expect him to stop; I never get any mad. This afternoon, however, the guard says "Bunker." I respond: "A20284." He puts an envelope on the bars. It is from the New York literary agent, Armitage ("Mike") Watkins, who has agreed to read my manuscripts. I've sent him my fifth attempt at a novel. Over the years I have tried to write in various genres. This all began as a collaboration with Paul Allen. He was to come up with the story and I was to write it. It was an attempt to write like Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford; a short novel about a con man junkie who thinks everyone in the world is a sucker. Allen quit on me before we got very far so I finished it, making up the story, and sent it out. Once again the agent wrote: "You are improving, but this still falls short of our representing it. You might try someone else. We will hold the manuscript until you send instructions." The agent knew the difficulties I faced getting it out of the walls.

  No, I wouldn't try another agent. I hoped the novel I'd already started would make the grade.

  Minutes later the cell house filled with the sound of a rattle — a convict carries it ahead of a sergeant and a correctional officer. When the convict passes, you stand up. The Sergeant and the guard have clipboards. They mark each empty space — one makes a positive count, the other a negative count, tallied by tier and total.

  Fifteen minutes later the chow unlock begins. It is the same routine as the morning, except that after the mess hall it is back to the cell for another count. They count often in all maximum security prisons. Whde still afternoon beyond the walls, the night routine has started in Folsom. For a few years it seems excruciatingly slow, but eventually it becomes preferred. Folsom convicts who are transferred to camps dislike dormitory living. The cell house is so quiet that it is hard to believe that the honeycomb of cages in this budding confine several hundred men. Many stare at the small Sony they are now allowed to buy. The loudest sound is of scattered typewriters, each with a different speed and rhythm, from stdted uncertainty to an unbroken pulse, from petitions for writs of habeas corpus to the Great American Novel. I am not the only Folsom convict who dreams of redemption via the literary life, of making a lotus grow from the mud. I doubt that I am the most talented. I will consider being deemed the most determined. I had written over a hundred short stories and five full-length novels without having a word in print under my own name, except in the Folsom Prison Observer and the San Quentin News.

  When the security bar is down and the spike key has closed the steel bolt in the cell lock, I tuned out the prison and immersed myself in books, reading them and writing them. I gave up the typewriter. First drafts were in longhand. Every chapter I typed, making changes as I go. If it was early, I usually read. It sounds absurd, I know, but I never seemed to have enough time to get in my reading. I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb.

  Even if they know how, failing to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what else they have or do.

  At 8 p.m., a bell rings. Typewriters fall sdent. Perhaps someone would ask someone nearby, "Did you get a score on the Dodger game?" There is no boisterous noise or prolonged conversations — not "behind the screen" in Folsom Prison where at least half the men would never see a day beyond the walls. Most wanted you to be quiet, and when push came to shove, they didn't care if it was the quiet of your grave — or their own, for that matter.

  A decade and a half earlier when my indiscriminate reading began to be influenced by some critical acumen, I focused primarily, though not exclusively, on American writers of the twentieth century. Now, however, with Colin Wilson's The Outsider as a catalyst, I was immersed in European writers, mostly French and Russian and some German, who dealt with themes of existence. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, Siddartha and Magister Ludi. Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities. Camus' novels, plays and essays. From Sartre I learned that understanding existentialism was visceral as much as intellectual, and to reach visceral understanding required going through the "nausea of existence." Reading Dostoevsky was like listening to someone foaming and overwrought as they told stories about the souls of human beings: he knew how guilt can chew at some men's souls. And there was the Italian, Alberto Moravia, who could narrate with depth and clarity what went on in the mind of his characters. In my sixth novel I was trying to write of the underworld. Many books are written about criminals, but the writer is always observing them and the world from society's perspective. I was trying to make the reader see the world from the criminal's perspective: what he saw, what he thought, what he felt — and why. I was also trying to write on three levels, first for the excitement of the story, second to reveal psychological makeup, and third to promulgate a philosophical view. I was trying to follow Hemingway's dictum that a writer should be as devoted to truth as a prelate of the Church is to God. Unlike most pundits and all politicians, I have never shaved a fact to fit an assertion. I sometimes end up positioning things that contradict each other, but we all know that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, which I read in the essay, not in Bardett's Familiar Quotations.

  At that time, all across America it was a time of disruption. Blacks rioted in the cities, and there were impassioned protests against Vietnam on college campuses. In other California prisons there had been some racial conflict and protests against the injustice of the indeterminate sentence law. Folsom however, had been quiet except for the usual quota of knifings, although recendy someone calling himself "The Oudaw" had been putting out fliers printed on stencd, calling for a strike against the indeterminate sentence. A couple of days earlier I'd gone into the library rest room where the janitor was ripping up a copy of the Outlaw flier.

  "What's the matter?" I asked. "You against the strike?"

  "Man, if they strike we won't get the weekend movie. Damn, man, it's Bonnie and Clyde. I don't want to miss that."

  "I don't want 'em to strike."

  "You don't?"

  "No ... I want 'em to riot and burn the joint down." Actually I didn't care one way or another. It was true that the indeterminate sentence had been abused by the powers that be, but I doubted that anything convicts could do would alter anything. I was simply upsetting someone I considered a fool. I seldom went to movies. While they were being shown, Joe Morgan and I were usually in the yard. It was the one tim
e when I could get on the handball court.

  I forgot the verbal exchange the moment I left the rest room, nor did I think of it during the main count lockup when a sergeant and a guard appeared outside my cell. The Sergeant unlocked the cell gate and someone raised the security bar. "Let's go, Bunker."