Alcatraz-1259

by William G Baker

We took the guy into the shower room and cleaned him up, stuffed some toilet paper up his nose to stop the bleeding. After that we had no more trouble out of him. He was the nicest guy in the world, brought his own guitar, the one he had in his cell, to practice. It was amazing what a good smack in the nose would do for an attitude.

  The reason I didn’t reveal his name is because musicians don’t criticize each other in public, so out of respect for him and his family you’ll have to settle for “the other guitar player.”

  And he was probably right about me being lazy. But I was young and still had forever.

  That afternoon I hit the yard. Burgett was walking up and down with Clyde Johnson, which drew my curiosity because none of our guys hung out with Clyde. He was a good guy though, Johnson was, slight of build, easy going. I didn’t know where he worked, but then I remembered him and Burgett had a part-time job on the weekends on the garbage truck which went around the island outside the wall, around the guards’ living quarters picking up trash. And then it hit me and I did a double-take. Uh-huh! That was it. And I looked again.

  Burgett had been testing his air bags again so time must be getting short. They were walking close together, and every once in a while they stopped and huddled, talking excitedly, stopping whenever anybody walked close to them and then resuming their conversation when they were sure they were alone again. They weren’t very cool.

  I went on, forcing myself to think about something else just in case a snitch had his radar tuned to my thoughts, which might be exaggerating a bit but not much. You couldn’t be too careful.

  I wandered behind Jackrabbit hunched over a card table, had a sudden impulse to goose him so I did, goosed him in both ribs. Well, he’d been concentrating real hard and he jumped and gave me an aggravated look, saw it was me and softened up. He said, “When are you going to pump your nuts up enough to play some more bridge.” And I said, “Probably never. You’re too good for me.” And I walked on, but I had a plan. I had borrowed a good bridge book by Charles Goren and I was studying it. My time would come.

  I didn’t play much softball that summer. Jack Waites and Fat Duncan had gone to the hole again and a couple of other guys had a different routine so the Gullies sort of drifted apart. We didn’t have an organized softball league anyway, just a few teams that sort of hung out together. Punchy Bailey still had his team, him and Belew and those guys. They were good. Beat everybody on the yard.

  I had known Punchy Bailey up in Oregon in the state joint. I never hung out with him, but I knew him. He worked in the Associate Warden’s office as a clerk, but the AW had quit, as had most of the brass, because Warden O’Malley, Beet Face, refused to be tough on the inmates and now the inmates were practically running the place. It was anarchy. They had a ninety percent turnover in guards and staff during my time there. Anyway, the warden was doubling as warden and associate warden, doing both jobs, so Punchy Bailey was clerking for both jobs.

  Punchy Bailey had so much power in Oregon that he could assign an inmate to any job in the institution, assign any cell, he could even send you out to the farm, all the way out of the prison if the money was right. And before the big riot, when they got rid of O’Malley and brought in an old gimp-legged warden from the federal prison system, Punchy Bailey had so much power that he was doing the captain’s job, making out daily work assignments for the guards, work assignments, vacations and everything else that a captain normally does.

  So the first thing the new warden did when he took over was send Punchy Bailey straight to Alcatraz.

  At Alcatraz, Punchy Bailey worked in the tailor shop in the cutting room, him and Belew. They cut out the different parts for pants and shirts and things like that from a bunch of stock patterns of different sizes. And they drew new patterns for new clothing items requested by various agencies. The military was the main customer, of course.

  Up in Oregon I never talked to Punchy Bailey. We hardheads never talked to politicians. That’s what we called anybody who worked for the cops, politicians, which was a dirty word in our limited list of words. But at Alcatraz he, Punchy Bailey, was an okay guy. Everybody talked to him, convicts and cops alike. In fact, whenever the captain and his crew of lieutenants came through the tailor shop, as they did quite often, they passed right by the tailor shop supervisor with just a wave and a brief hello and went straight on into the cutting room, where they usually stayed for maybe an hour talking to Punchy Bailey and Belew, mainly Punchy. They didn’t close the door or anything. Punchy wasn’t snitching, they just chatted and chatted and chatted, that’s how interesting Punchy Bailey was to talk to. He was a genius of conversation, always interesting, always saying just the right thing in just the right way, just natural, none of it put on.

  And Belew wasn’t far behind him when it came to conversation. Belew was tall and handsome with a fresh schoolboy look and a personality that would disarm the devil.

  I don’t know why they called Punchy, Punchy. I guess he did look a little like a prize fighter with his thick neck and stocky body. His looks were nothing to brag about. But once he turned those clear eyes on you and started talking you listened. And when it was your turn to talk, he listened with equal interest. His eyes were always clear and guileless and every word he said was the truth on a truckload of bibles.

  He was not a con man, I’ll say that for him. A con man misrepresents himself as someone he isn’t in order to gain something. A con man is deceitful. Punchy was not deceitful, he was just a magnet, a natural leader. People came to him and bestowed him with power and influence as if it were his due. All he had to do was just be himself and everybody else deferred to him. So he was not the “politician” I had thought him to be up in Oregon where I hadn’t really known him. He was just Punchy Bailey. And the tide always flowed his way.

  Punchy Bailey was a state prisoner, farmed out by the state prison in Oregon to the federal prison at Alcatraz; as such he was eligible for parole in the state of Oregon. The parole board from there came to Alcatraz yearly and held a hearing as required just for Punchy Bailey, but it was just for show because no one could be paroled from Alcatraz, state prisoner or not, and as persuasive as Punchy was he couldn’t buck a stone wall. But his argument did make sense, that he should be transferred back to Oregon because state law required a meaningful meeting with the parole board once a year with a meaningful chance to make it. His argument was so clear-eyed logical that the captain at Alcatraz, along with some of the lieutenants and even the warden, old Promising Paul, himself, went to bat for Punchy Bailey so strongly that the warden in Oregon had no choice but to, with great reluctance, accept Punchy back to Oregon.

  And once back in Oregon, The Gimp got rid of him real quick, called an emergency meeting of the parole board and paroled him straight to the streets, that’s what I heard, and it must have been true because I later learned that he, Punchy Bailey, got a job in Portland as a car salesman and within a short time ran the entire business. Just like old Punchy.

  For now, though, Punchy Bailey was still at Alcatraz and had a softball team that beat everybody on the yard. And me, to tell the truth, I didn’t like him all that much at all. I’m just trying to be fair and accurate in describing him in case somebody reads this raggedy book. I mean I swore on a stack of bibles and my mother’s honor, so I’m sort of beholden to tell the truth whether the truth agrees with my convict code of honor or not.

  You may not believe that convicts have such a code, or are even worthy of such a code, but we did just the same, as strong and honorable as any group of people in the world; in fact it was necessary that we have such a code just to live together. For example, stealing from another convict was a serious violation of the code, a violation so serious that it could get you killed. And you didn’t piss on a toilet seat without cleaning it up, a violation not as serious as stealing, of course, but one that could get you a bloody nose. And, of course, you’d better pay your debts and you’d better do that on time or give a good explanation why you couldn’t.<
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  Whitey Bulger was a convict who lived by such a code. He was just a youngster, himself, maybe twenty-seven or eight, but the streets of South Boston had already toughened him beyond his years. I didn’t know him well. We spoke, made a few small bets once in a while, but I knew he always carried himself like a real stand-up convict, always paid his debts and expected as much from everybody he dealt with. He lived by the code. In later years after he got out and made it in the world, he had his old buddy’s body exhumed from a pauper’s grave, his buddy being Clarence Carnes, “The Choctaw Kid,” a full blooded Indian and famous prisoner at Alcatraz who was the only survivor of the deadliest escape attempt in the history of Alcatraz, the “1946 Blastout.” Whitey Bulger had his body dug up and he personally transported it in a bronze casket back to the tiny town of Daisy Oklahoma for a proper burial. That’s what kind of man Whitey Bulger was, and that’s how I remember him—never mind how he got his money; that was business between him and the South Boston mobsters, just business.

  One day as we were coming in from work to eat lunch, the water tower started shaking and clanging and the earth started trembling. Scared the shit out of us for a minute, but once we figured out what it was we clapped and cheered wishing the whole island would shake off its foundations and crumble into the bay. No such luck, it was just a little quake and was over quickly; we were locked down and counted and they let us out to eat as usual.

  In my cell at night I sometimes walked the floor to burn off a little energy, my legs fueled by testosterone and adrenaline I guess. It was nineteen-fifty-eight and more and more good radio programs were switching to television to be replaced by music and news and talk, so there wasn’t much to listen to. I had read all the Zane Grey books at least twice. I studied my borrowed Charles Goren book a lot, preparing for my planned ambush of Jackrabbit on the bridge table. I already had a partner who was really up on Goren.

  I noticed on the yard that portly Courtney Taylor was walking and talking with a youngster, the same kid I’d noticed him walking with the past several months. I knew he was schooling the kid on check-cashing but I also suspected Courtney was a little funny, and I don’t mean ha ha funny, for he was really bubbling over with it.

  Just the week before I had talked to Courtney. He was changing his M.O., he said. He’d bought some U.S. Savings bonds with the money he made in the factory and was studying them with a good possibility that he could counterfeit them. They stored them in a safe in the institution and allowed him to look at them every once in a while. And look he did. He must have had a good memory, for he could talk about them for hours.

  The summer dragged on. Every now and then I went up on the bleachers and gazed longingly out to sea, hoping my girlfriend in the red bikini would come back. But she never did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was a clear day in the San Francisco Bay, an unusually clear day. It was so clear that you could maybe see all the way to Hawaii if not for the curvature of the earth. The sky was blue, not a cloud from horizon to horizon. It was broad daylight with the sun in the middle of the sky. There was no smog, no fog, and the wind was calm and the water was calm, and the sea gulls made lazy effortless circles high above. In other words, it was a clear day in the San Francisco Bay.

  And a big ship ran smack-dab into the island, into Alcatraz Island. A fleet of ships came in, U.S. Navy ships, wearing their colors proudly, a parade of ships. And as befitting a parade, cannons boomed in salute while sailors dressed in spiffy white graced the decks preparing to invade the city of San Francisco.

  And one of their great big ships just moseyed right up smart as you please and ran into Alcatraz Island like that was part of the show or something. Thud, crunch, and that was it. Alcatraz Island grabbed ahold of the bottom of that ship and wouldn’t let go. The ship tried to back up, couldn’t. Tried to go forward, couldn’t. Tried again and again, still couldn’t. It was stuck tight.

  All the while this was going on us convicts stood on the bleachers hollering and clapping and cheering. A tug of war was going on between that ship and Alcatraz, and we were rooting for Alcatraz. Why, I don’t know, but we were.

  The cops let us stay up there and watch for a good while, maybe expecting the ship to pull free and be on its way. But when it became obvious that the ship wasn’t going anywhere, they ran us in and locked us down. On the way in I took a last look. The island had that ship in a bear hug. Alcatraz was winning.

  To this day I still wonder about that ship, how with all its radar and sonar and a thousand human eyes, in broad daylight with the sun shining bright, how a full grown ship of the U.S. Navy could ever run into Alcatraz Island. My lasting memory of it was that it looked like a giant float with four flat tires in the Rose Bowl Parade.

  The grounding of the ship was on the news that evening, all over the news. And the radio cop didn’t cut it off until the regular time for the radio to go off for the night. The ship was still stuck. From our cells we could hear tugboats chugging all night trying to pull it loose. Finally sometime the next morning they cracked our doors and let us out. And the ship was gone

  That’s just one of the trivial things that happened at Alcatraz that lazy summer. Another, a whole bunch of garbage washed up on the island shore. And that happened more than once, so much garbage that the sea gulls had a feast, so much garbage that the seagulls grew fat and lazy. They didn’t have to hunt for food anymore. All they had to do was just plop down and eat until their bellies got so full they could barely fly. Fortunately, home was only a short distance from the feast. All they had to do was make it to the factory roof and roost until their bellies got empty again.

  That winter the garbage was gone. It just stopped washing up as mysteriously as it had begun. And that winter a good portion of the seagull population died. Forest Tucker figured they died from some kind of disease. Burgett figured the guards poisoned them. Me, I didn’t say anything but I had a strong suspicion that when they got fat and lazy from all the free food, they no longer had the strength or the will to hunt like they used to, and I wondered if they were like us, or rather if we were like them, that after years in prison where all our needs were taken care of we would lose our will to compete in the free world. It was a scary thought, and one that I didn’t share with anyone at the time. But I wondered about it.

  I should have been counting my days by then, because I would be getting out next year sometime, free again, less than a year away, except there were two things that kept me from thinking about it too much. First I had lost all my goodtime for my escape attempt on that transfer bus from McNeil Island to Leavenworth. Second, I had a detainer on me from Oregon for escaping from that jail in Portland. So my expectations for getting out anytime soon were vague to say the least. In fact they weren’t even on my menu for the near future.

  The Oregon detainer was the most serious problem, a big gray cloud on my horizon. I could probably expect to get about five years for escape, and that would mean five years in Oregon State Pen, where I would not be welcome by the guards or staff, especially not by Lieutenant Francis, who hated me with a boiling passion. I remember the day I got out of OSP, having served every day of my four-year sentence. I had already lost all my goodtime, so they couldn’t keep me any longer no matter what. Well old Lieutenant Francis hated me so much that he sent a guard down to R&D with instructions to pick a fight with me while I was dressing out, hoping I’d be dumb enough to swing on him and thus fall victim to a new Oregon law which called for a five year sentence for assaulting a guard. This guard called me all kinds of names, but I was too happy to be getting out to take his bait. Lucky for me that another guard was with me who frowned on the whole thing and shushed the guard up enough for me to finish dressing and get out the door. In fact, my dress-out guard escorted me all the way out.

  It was a tradition in Oregon for the warden to shake hands with every prisoner released and wish him the best of luck and all that, but old Gimp wasn’t about to shake my hand even if I saved his life. He wa
s nowhere in sight that day, wisely so because I had already vowed not to accept any kind of handshake or anything else from that sorry fucker.

  I was eighteen when I went to prison in Oregon. I was sentenced to four years by a judge in Medford who seemed to like the sound of four years, for he gave everybody who came before him the same four year sentence, or so it seemed to me because the same day he sentenced me he sentenced three other guys, all to four years. I got mine because I was sleeping in the back seat of this car parked in front of a house and the cops saw me when I woke up and sat up to stretch my legs, and they thought I was trying to steal the car, I guess, so they arrested me, though how I could steal a car from the back seat, I don’t know.

  Anyway the judge gave me four years. I’d never been to prison before, but I’d been in reform schools in Kentucky and California, so I wasn’t worried about it all that much. That night after the four of us had been sentenced we were told we would be shipping out to prison the very next morning and this news really upset the other three guys. It upset them so much that they couldn’t eat their supper that evening. So I volunteered to do them a favor and eat it myself. Which I did. All three of theirs as well as mine. I remember it well because we had beans well-seasoned with pork, which is what I was raised on, beans and pork. I mean Zeb Hackney wasn’t about to turn his milk cows into hamburger. He killed a big fat pig once a year and salted it in the sun and then smoked it in the smokehouse, and that’s what we ate. And that’s what I liked. So I ate well the night before we were shipped off to prison.

  When we got there they didn’t hold any ceremonies to greet our arrival. They sent us straight to a raggedy old cell house with cells that housed about four people per cell and had a sink but no toilet. They gave us a bucket and told us a guy would come by our cell every morning and pick up the bucket and take it out to Shit Creek and empty it and wash it out and bring it back to us, which he did, a big black convict who would whip your ass in a second if you gave him any shit, uh, any problem.