The Sergeant carried a white sheet of paper, the lockup authorization.
I made no protest. What was the use? I grabbed my denim jacket and mentally inventoried my pockets. No contraband. Good.
As we headed down the tier, I asked: "Who signed the order?"
The Sergeant looked at it. "Associate Warden."
The Associate Warden. Damn. That was unusual. A lieutenant commonly signed lockup orders. What could it be? "What's the charge?"
"Nothing."
"Whaddya mean, nothing?"
"Protective custody."
"Protective custody! Bullshit!" I stopped dead and everyone bumped into each other.
"Watch it, Bunker." They were ready to pile on. For a few seconds it was undecided. "C'mon, Bunker, don't make it worse."
"Yeah, okay." I started moving, but inside I was seething. It wasn't right. Nobody was locked up for protection unless they asked for it, and it was a stigma hard to live down. I couldn't imagine asking for protection. If three mad dog killers were waiting for me on the yard, I wouldn't have asked for protection. Never. If I was really facing death, I might do something crazy to get locked up, but I would never ask for protection. I once had trouble with a known prison killer. He vowed to kill me as soon as we went to the Big Yard. It was during my first term. I wanted neither to die nor to kill him and go to the gas chamber or, more likely, get another sentence that would cost a dozen years in San Quentin. I saw him in the mess hall, walked up behind him and busted his head with a stainless steel tray. We were never on the yard together, and it added to my stature and reputation, although in truth I'd attacked from fear.
The Sergeant and the guard marched me down the stairs and through the mess hall and kitchen. In a corridor between the two mess halls was the adjustment center entrance. One of the escorts pressed the door buzzer. A moment later a guard looked out; then let us in.
I could go through the strip search like a minuet rehearsed for years. After they looked up my naked ass and down my throat, I put my undershorts back on. A guard walked me down the bottom floor in front of the cells. I was going to the strip cell in the rear. I always seemed to go to the strip cell in the rear. I looked at the faces looking out at me and thought about the big cats in the cages at Griffith Park. When I was about eight, I climbed onto the bars roofing the big cats. The only one that jumped up to swipe at me was the mountain lion. The Hons and tigers were too lazy. There was Big Raymond. I nodded and gave him a clenched fist. When I was eleven or twelve Raymond and I had been in the lockup in "B" Company in juvenile hall, the two strip cells that faced each other across an alcove. We tore it up, lying on our backs and kicking the sheet metal covered doors. The sound thundered. Nobody could sleep. The Man agitated several of the thirty boys in the company to jump us when we were let out to shower. We fought side by side in the combination washroom and shower. He was over six feet, skinny and strong as a steel cable, even then. In a melee like that, one seldom lands a punch with leverage and accuracy. Raymond did. Down one guy went. Another one, tussling with me, slipped and broke his wrist on the tile floor.
We'd known each other since then, so I nodded and showed respect, even though he was black. I'd heard that he'd transferred in from Soledad, but he'd gone directly to the hole, so this was the first time I'd seen him in more than a decade.
I could hear the control panel being unlocked. It was "maximum" segregation. One side was reserved for those considered the hardest of the hard core. The majority had killed someone in prison or were considered likely to do so. The other side of the bottom floor was mostly for men serving a few days of hole time punishment for rule violations. Ten days for making home brew, a week for having two joints, plus referral to the local district attorney for possible prosecution, twenty-nine days for having a shiv, plus referral to the local district attorney for possible prosecution, five days for possessing football parlay tickets, or for stealing sugar from the mess hall to make home brew. We came to the last cell gate; it was open and I stepped in. Five by seven, I knew it well. The escort signaled the front to close it. The gate slammed shut. The escort walked away.
Here I was with graffiti-etched walls to read, todet bowl and sink in need of cleanser. I'd thought I had a good chance for parole at my next parole board hearing. Now it was in the air, depending on what they said I did, and what their finding was.
On the following Friday I went in front of the disciplinary committee. Hearings were conducted in the outer office of the adjustment center and were chaired by the Captain or Associate Warden, flanked by a shrink and a flunky to keep minutes. Today it was the Associate Warden, whom I'd known since he started as a lowly turnkey guard. He looked like an undergraduate student and had an affable demeanor over a lousy attitude. Still, he was better than Captain Joe Campoy, who referred to the inmates as "his animals."
"You're charged with D 1101, Inmate Behavior. Writing and distributing an illicit newspaper, The Outlaw, calling for a sit-down strike against the parole board.
"You're further charged with contraband, pilfering state supplies on which to create the illicit newspaper. How do you plead?"
"It's all bullshit."
"I assume that's 'not gudty.'"
"Not gudty as it gets."
"You also told an inmate you hoped for a riot where they'd burn the place down."
Instantly I knew that it was the dingbat janitor in the rest room, the one who wanted to see Bonnie and Clyde. "I don't know anything about it. I barely read a copy of that . . . that Outlaw."
"Bunker . . . Bunker . . . come on. I even recognize your literary style."
"What can I say . . . if you recognize the style."
"Nothing."
The result was ten days' isolation and assignment to maximum administrative segregation, to be reviewed in ninety days — and every ninety days thereafter. The average sojourn in segregation was eighteen months.
Now that I'd been before the disciplinary committee, I was eligible to go to the exercise yard. Actually the adjustment center had two exercise yards. Like much of Folsom, the adjustment center was carved into a hillside. One exercise yard was on the bottom floor. This was for the bottom floor, where I was assigned: max 4A. A guard appeared. "Wanna exercise?"
"Sure do."
Inmates were released from their cells one at a time. They came out in their underwear and walked to a grille gate where several guards waited. They stepped inside, were searched and given a jumpsuit without pockets folded around a pair of high top shoes, which were kept in an open-faced locker. They gave me my jumpsuit and shoes and opened the door to the yard. It was formed by the walls of the adjustment center on two sides, and the massive pde of concrete of number 2 cell house. The ground was all concrete. There were no guards on the ground, but high up on number 2 cell house was a rifleman with a cradled carbine. He kept order with his gun.
I had to move across a red line some distance from the door before starting to put on my clothes. I was the last of the dozen or so to be let out. I knew about half of the others. Red Howard, slender country boy and card mechanic, a good guy with a paranoid streak. He hadn't killed anyone yet, but he had cut up a couple, including Big Barry, a friend of Red's. There was Gene Chester, a homicidal homosexual. Cornell Nolan, black heavyweight prizefighter, tough and mean as could be. His younger brother was later killed by a guard with a rifle in Soledad, the first death in a cause and effect chain that would leave dozens dead before it was over. Above all, Joe Morgan was in the yard. I'd known him since 1955 when he transferred to San Quentin from Folsom with a parole date.
As I put on the jumpsuit and sat on the concrete to slip on the shoes, I expected those I knew to greet me; for Joe, especially, to grin and say something funny. Nobody said a word to me. You cannot imagine the sudden, total anxiety the sdence aroused. Had somebody said I was a stool pigeon? Was Joe angry at me? Or Red, or anyone there? Should I go over to him and ask? Was he putting me on?
Suddenly, from peripheral vision, I s
aw a fast movement twenty feet away. A tall, skinny white guy had produced a weapon the size and shape of an ice pick (God knows where he got it) and was moving on an Indian, whose name I knew was Bobby Lee. He was a known troublemaker and general asshole. He wore no shirt and the first strike created a trickle of blood down his chest. I didn't know how deep it was. Puncture wounds can cause internal bleeding even when they look superficial.
The white guy trailed him like a boxer cutting off the ring. I was hypnotized, still holding a shoelace half tied.
The whistle blasted from above. Then again, followed by the mandatory warning shot. In the concrete canyon it sounded like a howitzer. I jumped and looked up. The rifleman, behind dark glasses, was drawing down on the pair. Boom! Shards of concrete jumped up. I could hear the ricochet. It might bounce anywhere in all this concrete.
Men were scattering. I followed Joe Morgan. He would know the best way to go.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Bullets were kicking up the concrete around the white guy's feet. He never took his eyes off Bobby Lee, who was now darting back and forth.
The building door opened. Guards stuck out their heads. Bobby Lee fled to their arms and the door closed.
Joe Morgan looked at me, grinning, over his shoulder. "Another day in 4A," he said. "I hear you're trying to start a strike on the yard."
"Ahhh, man . . . that's bulllllllshit!"
In another minute the door opened, a guard banged a key on the door frame. "Lockup." He looked at the white guy. "You first, Pope."
The slender white guy gave Joe a gesture of camaraderie and headed toward the door, clothes in one hand, shoes in the other. That was my first sight of Andy Pope, who became a friend for all seasons — thirty years' worth. He was an early endorser of my literary ambitions, and gave me Strunk and White's Elements of Style and Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing.
Back in the building, the authorities called us out for questioning one at a time. Convicts put a premium on getting out quickly. Without sitting down, before they could even ask a question, I gave my rote response: "I didn't see nuthin', I didn't hear nuthin', I don't know nuthin', lemme go."
The Associate Warden made a sound like a fart with his mouth, looked at the ceding and jerked a thumb toward the door for me to leave. In record time.
That night in the shadowed cell, I looked out between the bars at the barred windows and thought, I'm gonna be slammed in this cell for a year or more. The thought fit the gloom of the world around me. "Ah well," I muttered, "when it gets too tough for everybody else, it's just the way I like it." After a few seconds, I added: You're a lyin' bo diddy and your breath smells shitty. But the truth was that I could withstand whatever they did to me. If they killed me, I wouldn't know about it. I was mentally prepared to spend at least a year in the adjustment center.
Everybody gets lucky sometime. About three months later the wardens and superintendents of various California prisons met in Sacramento. It had long been a policy for wardens to rid themselves of troublemakers by transferring them. They still did so from medium and minimum security institutions, but the policy had changed in high security prisons. San Quentin, Folsom and Soledad were required to handle whoever they had locked up. The wardens did make trades, and trades were on the Sacramento agenda. Locked up in San Quentin was Red Fenton who had killed a man in San Quentin fifteen years earlier and had been in the attempted breakout of Folsom in '61, when the visiting girls' choir was taken hostage. After going to court and getting a new five year to life sentence, and spending several years in the Folsom adjustment center, he had been transferred to San Quentin and given a chance on the mainline. His reputation preceded him. Weaklings were asking for protection by the score, so he had been locked up and remained locked up for two years. L.S. (Red) Nelson, San Quentin's Warden, wanted to get rid of him and was willing to take me in exchange. So Red Fenton came back to Folsom and I rode the bus to San Quentin, which was always my joint. Within weeks I had a single cell in the honor block and a new job where I could run around the prison until midnight.
Chapter 14
Prison Race War
In the century and some since a Spanish prison ship ran aground on the tip of the peninsula called Point San Quentin, and a plank was run to shore to create San Quentin Prison, it has been the site of turbulent events. I cannot imagine how many murders have been committed there. In the age of the noose, it shared with Folsom in having a gallows, but with the gas chamber's advent, San Quentin stood alone as California's execution site. It has had violent breakouts (once they took the parole board; now the parole board meets outside the walls), and an escape or two where they don't know how the con got out (I do). It once headquartered a counterfeiting ring. The opposite side of the coin is that it was once the studio for a coast to coast radio program (long before television), called San Quentin on the Air, broadcast over the NBC Blue network during prime time on Sunday evening. Convict 4242 sang the theme song: "Time On My Hands."
Nothing, however, was both so wdd and so hilarious as the time of which I write. From the early '40s through the '50s, San Quentin went from being one of America's most notoriously brutal prisons to being a leader in progressive penology and rehabilitation. Like other prisons, it was not ready for what happened when the revolution came to America. As drugs flooded the cities, they flooded San Quentin. The racial turmoil of the streets was magnified in San Quentin's sardine can world. The polarization within can be illustrated by two events. In 1963 when John Kennedy was assassinated, it was lunchtime in the Big Yard. Everyone fell into a stunned silence. Eyes that hadn't cried since early childhood filled with tears, including those of the toughest black convicts. Five years later when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head, the response was different. Black convicts called out: "Right on!" "The chickens come home to roost," said the Black Panther newspaper. "Ten for one" was the cry of black nationalists: kill ten whites for one black and they would win the revolution.
The fiery political rhetoric was taken literally by unsophisticated men within the cage. In Soledad a rifleman in a gun tower fired three shots into a melee where five blacks had jumped two whites in the adjustment center yard. He killed three black convicts, one of them the brother of Cornell Nolan, who celled beside me in the Folsom adjustment center. That night in another wing of Soledad, a young white guard was thrown off the third tier to the concrete below. He died. Three black convicts, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and Clutchette, were locked up and charged with the crime. A Bay Area lawyer, Fay Stender, a socialist if not a full-blown Marxist, took George Jackson's case. She edited his letters, got Jean Genet to write an introduction and had them published as Soledad Brother. The book made the three a cause celebre. She got them a change of venue to San Francisco and arranged for a transfer to San Quentin, where they were locked in the adjustment center. Because of the attention to the case, Angela Davis came to the courtroom. An avowed Marxist, Miss Davis lived in a different universe than the bourgeoisie. She saw a handsome, powerful black man in chains — and they did weigh him with tonnage. She became instantly enamored with the image and the fantasy, for that was all it could be. Nothing could come of it but a miracle, and a sort of miracle did come to pass, for Cluchette and Drumgo were eventually acquitted. Alas, George Jackson was pure sociopath and had the sociopath's characteristic lack of patience. Moreover, he had a worm's eye view of the world, and somehow believed the revolution was imminent.
A black inmate who was scheduled to testify against them for a parole was being held in the San Quentin prison hospital in a locked room with a guard at the door. Albert Johnson and another black convict managed to sneak into the hospital and make their way to the second floor. They murdered the guard seated outside the door. They never imagined that the guard wouldn't have the room key. Poorly planned, one might say.
Another black inmate, Yogi Pinell, made a spear by rolling up pages of a magazine and fastening a stabbing device at the end. He managed to stab and kill a guard through the bars.
In the mess hall a black convict named Willy Christmas suddenly pulled a knife and went after the guard at the end of the steam table. The incident had a hilarious aspect, the guard running through the kitchen screaming for help with Willy Christmas in hot pursuit, knife in hand.
For almost two decades no guard had been killed in a California prison. Then within a few months a dozen were murdered in San Quentin, Soledad and Folsom, all by blacks. Guards, who are invariably conservative and narrow-minded at the outset, heard the inflammatory rhetoric along with the murders and saw it as a direct personal threat. If they had been secret bigots, they now turned into outright racists.
For several years before the guards became combatants there had been a race war limited to Black Muslims and the self-proclaimed American Nazis. They had one copy of Mein Kampf that they passed around as if it were the Holy Bible. No one could really understand it. How could they? It borders on gibberish. Except for one or two, these erstwhile Nazis were skinny, pimple-faced kids who were afraid that someone would fuck them but that fear didn't mean that several together would hesitate to stab someone. Indeed, most wanted to stab someone and get a reputation. My concern was academic. As long as they limited the murders to each other, or as my friend Danny Trejo said, "Power to the people as long as they don't hurt my white old lady or dent my Cadillac," everything was okay by me. It was George Jackson who expanded the violence to the non-involved. It started when several Muslims ambushed Stan Owens, the lead Nazi, and used him for bayonet practice. Anywhere else he would have died, but as I said,
San Quentin's doctors are the world's best with knife wounds. He lived — with one less kidney and a severe limp. Within the week the Nazis retaliated three times: one died, one survived as a paraplegic. The blacks in lockup thought the doctors deliberately let the black man die.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 39
