Alcatraz-1259

by William G Baker

  Stories get old. In the hole in the Oregon State Prison I was getting tired of Buck Poe’s stories, legendary or not. I liked him a lot and he liked me, but we began to notice little picky things about each other that were irritating. Like he liked to take naps, but I was young and full of energy and had not yet learned to take naps. And he snored in his sleep. And he often forgot to wipe the toilet bowl rim clean after he took a piss. On and on, little things that I’d begun to notice.

  I’d once heard it said that a man wouldn’t be able to survive six months in a cell with his own wife without one of them killing the other and that after a judge heard the story he’d have no choice but to rule it justifiable homicide, no matter who killed who. And that was pretty much the truth, I guess. A few days was all right, even a few weeks. After that it was cruel and unusual punishment.

  In fact in later years, when the U.S. Justice Department took over temporary management of some state prisons that were found guilty of unspeakably bad conditions in their treatment of prisoners, it was ruled that small, two-man cells were, indeed, cruel and unusual punishment, and guidelines were set for the exact minimum space in square feet that each prisoner was entitled to in a locked cell. This became the Law of the Land for a number of years and worked out real well. But then, as prisons became more and more crowded, prison administrators presented a suit in federal court to overturn those guidelines, and they won. A federal judge in Cincinnati, Ohio said words to the effect that since prisoners were let out of their cells for recreation during the daytime hours, the square feet of the day room and all common areas were to be counted when figuring the space a prisoner was entitled to. Therefore, a two man cell, no matter how small, was not cruel and unusual punishment.

  His ruling still stands today and allows massive overcrowding in every prison and jail in the United States of America. Way to go, judge.

  Anyway, I guess Buck Poe was getting tired of my ways too, because one day he packed up his few belongings, including his little rubber donut for his sore tailbone, and moved to another cell, no hard feelings, and left me with a single cell all to myself. Which suited me just fine, for now I had the perfect cell partner: me. And for a while that worked out just fine. Now that I was alone I was able to expand to fill my whole cell, whereas my personal space had previously been confined to my nest up in the top bunk. Now I was bouncing off walls. But even that got tiresome. After a few months of solitary confinement I couldn’t even stand my own company and I had to get out of that cell every day when they opened the doors for recreation just to get away from myself. True story.

  One day they threw a guy in the hole, threw him in the cell with me. His name was Bob Something, I don’t remember his last name. He was a short guy, but what he lacked in height he made up for in width, and his width provided a good canvas for tattoos for he was covered with them, his upper body anyway. He said he was in prison for dealing dope, heroin mainly, and that he’d been busted coming up Highway 99 from L.A. on his bike, busted in Southern Oregon somewhere.

  Well I looked at him in awe and asked him how in the world he could pedal a bicycle all the way from L.A. hundreds of miles to Oregon, and he tilted his head back and surveyed me like he was trying to figure out if I was making fun of him or something, and when he saw I was serious he said no, no, a bike, a hog, not a bicycle, a Harley. I guess that was his first inkling of how dumb I was, but I figured out pretty quickly that he was talking about a motorcycle not a four-footed hog so I didn’t make that mistake. He was a biker. Ah hah!

  We didn’t have many bikers in the Oregon prison, and we didn’t have many dope peddlers, a few heroin dealers but that’s about it. And I listened with youthful interest as he told me about dealing dope. He said heroin was where the money was. He didn’t fool with anything else because there wasn’t any money in anything else. Benzedrine, white crosses, were semi-legal and you could get a whole fruit jar full of them at a truck stop for practically nothing, so there was no money there. And you could buy benzedrine and wyamine inhalers across the counter at any drug store, so there was no money there, and methamphetamine, which had been around since the thirties and sold as desoxephedrine or methedrine, no money there either. And cocaine, that was just a recreational drug for rich people and there wasn’t much demand for it. And marijuana, that was too bulky to haul all the way from L.A. on a Harley, so Bob Something just dealt in heroin where the money was.

  I was impressed with my new cellie, a genuine biker and dope dealer.

  He also told me the reason he got thrown in the hole was that they busted him with a bag of heroin in his locker, said somebody must have snitched on him because a guard came straight in his cell and went straight to his locker, so he must have already known it was there, but then he scoffed and said they didn’t get his main stash, though, where he kept his money and most of his dope.

  When he said that a warning bell went off in my head, for it didn’t make sense that a real dope dealer would tell a complete stranger about his stash like that. But I didn’t say anything.

  He went on to tell me he was saving his money to buy a transfer to the farm, outside the wall. He said a convict clerk named Punchy Bailey, who worked in the warden’s office, was halfway running the prison, behind the scenes, of course, but he handled every cell move, every work transfer, you name it, he had more power than the guards themselves. In fact if a guard wanted something done, he often didn’t bother going to the warden, he went to Punchy Bailey. Faster and easier that way.

  Well he, Bob the Biker, said Punchy Bailey could get him a ticket to the farm for five-hundred dollars, and he, Bob the Biker had over five-hundred dollars in real green money in his stash, so ten days from now when he got out of the hole he was changing his address to a plush rural farm outside these prison walls. That’s what he said.

  Strike two. Something wasn’t right with this guy.

  Strike three wasn’t long in coming. He said he had a bottom bunk pass, and he showed it to me with just a little too much smugness on his face. I looked at it, and sure enough it was a real bottom bunk pass, all right, signed by the old quack doctor and the captain. Some people with medical issues that prevented them from climbing up to a top bunk had them. I figured anybody who could wrestle a motorcycle all the way to California and back ought to be able to climb to a top bunk, but I didn’t argue with him, he had a legitimate pass. But I also figured the only “hog” he ever rode was the four-legged kind, and that he was a phony.

  But he only had ten days, so I let it go. I moved my mattress to the top bunk and climbed up into my nest, retracting my soul to fit my new nest-sized boundaries.

  Guys they usually threw in the hole were sentenced to a definite number of days of hole time, while guys like me and Poe and Doolin were segregation prisoners with indefinite sentences, which meant forever for all we knew, which was getting a little tiresome and which we were planning to change in the near future as soon as we figured out how.

  Bob Something slept all day and was up all night, one of those kind of people, which was okay but that made it hard to get any private bathroom time because when I had to go during the daytime when we were out for rec I didn’t want to wake him up and ask him to leave the cell and I didn’t want to go at night with him there. I mean it was just a matter of respect, you for him and he for you, but he had no such respect, so one day when I was out for rec and he was snoring away, I asked Buck Poe, who was playing cards with Al Doolin and Joe Benson and the guys, if I could use the bathroom in his cell, and of course he said yes. Like I said, I didn’t want to wake my cell partner up. Out of respect you never wake a sleeping convict. Golden rule.

  But Al Doolin, who I guess had for days been watching that problem develop, didn’t live by any such rules when the situation called for action otherwise. He laid his cards down, walked over and picked up an empty tin cup, opened the door to my cell, which, like I said, I had closed out of respect for my cellie, Al Doolin opened that cell door and banged like hell on the st
eel bars nearest my sleeping cellie’s head. “Wake up, the world’s on fire!” Al Doolin shouted.

  Bob Something raised his head with a jerk, but I guess he didn’t comprehend what was going on, for his head plopped back down and he resumed snoring instantly.

  Al Doolin had an answer for that. He grabbed my cellie’s blanket, pulled it all the way off of him with a violent jerk and slung it across the corridor. “Get up and get out of that cell, asshole!” he shouted, but he didn’t wait for a response, he grabbed ahold of a sleeping arm with both hands and pulled the arm, with a big tattooed body attached to it, out of bed and all the way out of the cell and halfway across the corridor. That got my cellie’s attention. He was awake now. But Al Doolin wasn’t finished. He kicked him twice for good measure, kicked him hard right in the butt. Now my cellie was really awake. He scrambled on hands and knees and came to a sitting rest with his back against the corridor wall and a wild-eyed look on his face, but I guess he didn’t like what he saw in Al Doolin’s eyes, for he made no effort to get up.

  Al Doolin then addressed him in plain convict language, told him that he, my cellie, was to get up out of bed every morning when everybody else did and get out of the cell so that people, me, could have some privacy to wash up or shave or jack off or take a “goddam shit,” whatever! And he left no doubt that he meant it because he punctuated the “whatever” with a final wild kick that was received with a yelp from Bob, the ex-biker, who scrambled to a corner in the back of the corridor and sat in that corner the rest of the day with very little movement.

  I grinned at Al, shaking my head in wonder, and he grinned back then sat down and resumed playing cards as if nothing had happened. And that was the end of that. My cell partner was a model prisoner for his final days in the hole.

  And when he left I moved my mattress back to the bottom bunk. I had a single cell again, just me and myself, and I got along with myself just fine from that day on.

  And, yes, Judge Something from Cincinnati, a two-man cell is cruel and unusual punishment.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We figured if we were going to get our hole sentences changed from indefinite we were going to have to do something pretty spectacular, because they weren’t about to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. We had tried sending in written requests to the warden, and we had tried filing a suit in state court in Salem. We really hadn’t expected either of those plans to work, and they hadn’t. So—

  So we did what we should have done to begin with. We rioted.

  They had never discovered how we had opened our cell doors when we escaped. We could still come out of our cells any time we wanted. But we had kept quiet about it all this time, and now it was time for surprise, surprise! However we had to fix a couple more doors because guys had moved around and changed cells here and there, so Buck Poe fished a couple of hacksaw blades out of his stash and we went to work cutting dead bolts in the extra doors. But this time they may have heard us cutting, because one day Lieutenant Francis came in with some guards when we were locked down for count and they started snooping around tugging on the window screens and opening and closing doors, checking to see if they locked properly.

  We thought they were satisfied when they left without finding anything, but when they failed to reopen our doors we knew something was wrong. And sure enough here they came back shortly and they came with hammers and started methodically banging on our cell bars. That was the standard method of detecting sawed or partially sawed bars. They just listened to the ringing sound of each bar as they struck it with a hammer or mallet and if they struck a bar that had been cut a different sound came from that bar, a different pitch altogether. Well those guards pounded every one of our cell bars and then they pounded the grill bars between the sections, while Lieutenant Frances paced up and down snooping here and there. Once he stopped in front of my cell and looked at me for a while. I didn’t know what he was thinking but I knew it was nothing good. Finally he went on.

  When all our bars checked out okay, they all left, but they reappeared outside the building and pounded all the window bars. That done they disappeared again and a long time later the regular guard opened our doors and let us back out of our cells. Figuring they might come back to shake down, Buck Poe stashed our blades and we didn’t do any sawing for a couple of days.

  What was scary was we didn’t know how they’d heard the relatively quiet sound of the hacksaw blade what with all the noise we were making while Poe was working, and we talked about it in whispers for fear the walls had ears. We waited the entire weekend before we resumed our cutting. This time we posted lookouts and made even more noise to cover the sound. But we’d barely got started when a crew of guards led by Lieutenant Francis rode in on us at full speed. They appeared suddenly and rushed down the corridor, slinging open the grill doors and leaving them open.

  I happened to be in my cell getting a fresh pencil to keep score with when they reached the back section, and when Lieutenant Francis saw me that’s where they stopped. He, Lieutenant Francis, ordered me out of my cell and up against the wall where they shook me down good and then went in my cell and commenced to tear it apart. The Lieutenant stayed outside to watch me. He also watched everybody else and wouldn’t let anybody move. Everybody was just sort of frozen where they were.

  Buck Poe had been working in a cell near the back and had managed to get the hacksaw blade out of sight when they rushed in, but I knew he hadn’t had time to put it in his stash and conceal it right and if they shook him down they’d find it for sure. It was fortunate that the Lieutenant had such a dislike for me that he shook me down first, otherwise they’d probably have seen Buck Poe where he was and busted him cold turkey.

  But, with everybody frozen in place they’d get to him next. Lieutenant Francis was already eyeing him. There wasn’t much we could do except—except maybe create a distraction.

  When the opportunity presented itself I had no choice but to take it. A guard came out of my cell with a football. My football. He showed it to Lieutenant Francis like he’d made one heck of a score, he’d found a football, of all things. He handed it to Lieutenant Francis who took it in the palm of his hand and gave it a perplexed look.

  Me, I remember that moment well, what I said and did, what they said and did, I remember every word and every action. What I said was, “Hey, that’s my football.”

  Well, they looked at me, and Lieutenant Francis sort of tossed the ball up a couple of times in the palm of his hand and said, “It’s mine now.”

  And me, I suddenly lunged and grabbed that football out of the palm of his hand and ran like hell. Through the grill gate I went, through the middle section, through the next gate, all the gates having been left open in their mad dash to catch us red-handed. I sped past the death row cells really flying and skidded to a stop when I came to the locked grill that separated the hole from the guards’ area. I turned and laughed like hell and I tossed that football way up toward the ceiling, twirling it mockingly.

  That’s all it took, they came after me on the run, keys jangling, faces red. I backed up against the bars and bent over like I was a running back ready to take the hike from center and when they got about half way through death row, I took off straight for them. If there was one thing I could do it was run. I cut right and then left and I dodged this way and that, and even though they grabbed at me I broke loose and was off again, the ten, the fifteen, the twenty the fifty the forty the thirty the twenty the ten the five, TOUCHDOWN! I even spiked the ball and did a little dance to emphasize my brilliant touchdown run.

  They came puffing up behind me out of breath and mad as hell. I saw that Buck Poe was out at the card table. He gave me the okay sign so I knew he’d successfully stashed everything, so I surrendered with a big grin. I was pretty proud of my touchdown dance, but it was nothing compared to the dance old Lieutenant Francis and his boys put on my skinny ass, but they waited until they got everybody locked down and shook down. When they didn’t find any
thing they came after me.

  When they got through with me I hurt like hell for a few days, but like I said, when I was eighteen I was made out of rubber so even though each kick was enough to bend me out of shape I sort of popped back to my original form like a Rubbermaid garbage can and within a couple of days I was on my feet again. I had taken a pretty good professional ass-whipping, professional because they didn’t kick me in the face or head, only in the body where the scuffs and bruises wouldn’t show in case the warden or somebody came through.

  The warden must have got wind of it, though, because the next day he came down to the hole with the prison doctor in tow and they cracked the door and looked me over good, made me take off my shirt and then my pants. The doc examined my bruises, asked me how I got them and I answered that I’d slipped on a bar of soap in the shower—standard answer. I mean as much as I disliked Lieutenant Francis I still figured it was wrong to snitch on him. I’d once heard a good convict say if you’d snitch on a guard you’d likely snitch on a convict too if they squeezed your nuts a little. And, anyway, snitching on a guard was a little too much like whining. I knew when I grabbed that football from old Lieutenant Francis and took off down the corridor for my heroic touchdown run that I was subject to a pay-back of some kind, considering who I was dealing with, so I didn’t feel it was right to whine about it. Not everybody shared this view, but, well, I had to look at myself in the mirror every day, not them. I didn’t snitch on him. Nor did the warden expect me to. He was soft on the treatment of prisoners, but he was no fool.

  I had no bones broken, no permanent damage that the doctor could see, so he gave me some aspirin and told me to walk slow, and then they left.

  Warden O’Malley transferred Lieutenant Francis to another post where he no longer came in contact with us, and he assigned the guards who had been in on the ass-whipping to tower duty, which was considered by most guards to be the worst job in the world, sort of like solitary confinement. How did we know all this? The convict grapevine, while not always accurate, was nevertheless faster than the speed of sound. We often got the word, even in the hole, before the guards did. I once heard a guard, when asked a question by another guard, say I don’t know, go ask a convict, they know before we do.