Alcatraz-1259

by William G Baker

  A big guard waded in with a fresh load in his gun. He raised it to fire at somebody, again at close range. At that moment I whacked him real good across his wrist and his gun discharged into the street and we both got a good dose of gas.

  The demonstration broke up with convicts heading in all directions, so I got the heck out of there too. I made my way into the cell house, took a shower and changed clothes. Afterward I thought nothing about it, figuring it was over. But I guess the guard I’d smacked on the wrist had recognized me and wrote me up, because the next day a bunch of guards came and got me and took me straight to the hole.

  And there I was again, but this time they put me on the other side, not on the death row side. I didn’t know whether that was an improvement or not.

  So I made a lap around my cell, which was all of three and a half long-legged steps each way and then plopped down on my bunk in resignation. But like I said, I was made out of rubber, both in body and spirit and the next day I bounced up and out of my cell ready to take on the world. I ran into a guy in the hole who knew how to make home brew from scratch, without any yeast or sugar or anything, just fruit to get it started. He explained that yeast spores are always present in the air no matter where you are. You don’t notice them because they are so tiny and so few, but they are there nevertheless, invisible little yeast cells floating innocently in the air we breathe. And to prove it he, we, saved a bowl of purple plums with thick red juice from breakfast and set it right out in the open with no cover, where it sat for about three days. I watched it and watched it while he lay back on his bunk with confidence, saying don’t worry, yeast know how to find fruit, and sure enough he was right, for on the third day tiny gas bubbles started to rise from the plums and by the fourth day it was phizzing like a glass of Alka- Seltzer. In the meantime we had been saving more fruit and syrup (which had sugar in it he said, the syrup) and so on the fourth night we mixed everything together in a gallon pitcher and set it under the bed to do what yeast and sugar and fruit naturally do when mixed together and left alone, and a few days later we had home brew. It wasn’t exactly Tokay wine, but it had alcohol in it. We strained the mixture though a towel and gave five or six guys a shot of it in their cups and we sipped it together and talked. There wasn’t enough alcohol in each portion to give anybody more than a mild buzz, but it tasted good. It tasted like, uh, fruit juice.

  He, the yeast scientist, said all I had to do now was save the squeezings from the towel and use that as a kicker for the next batch, so on and so forth, home brew forever. So that’s what I did, started a forever-and-ever winery. I didn’t drink much of it. I had learned long ago that I didn’t have any special desire for alcohol of any kind, but it was fun making it—well, no, the fun was in getting away with making it, for there was enough risk in making it to get the adrenalin going. I got caught as often as I got away with it, which made it worth it. Does that make any sense?

  Fermenting brew gives off a strong yeasty-fruity smell, a smell distinct from every other smell if you have a nose for it. And a guard called Frenchy, who was working the hole at the time, had a nose for it. He could smell fermenting brew a mile away through mop water with a gallon of pine oil in it and baby powder and after-shave lotion sprinkled from one end of the hole to the other, Frenchy could still smell it. And his nose led him straight to it.

  Frenchy was a legend of a rare kind in the Oregon State Prison. First, he was as ugly as a humpback frog, short and squat with a big head, a dark blemished face and an enormous nose. He had worked at the prison forever, they say, and had survived the big food strike and the change in wardens without a care in the world for who was in charge. All he wanted to do was do his job and draw his paycheck and go home at night and come back to work the next day. Nobody knew what he went home to, but he always went home dirty, because they always gave him the dirtiest jobs, which he did without complaint, and he came to work clean the next day, that’s all anybody knew about his home life. He was, they say, incredibly stupid, and in all the years he worked only got a few minor promotions.

  He was too stupid to be afraid, which he often proved by wading right into the middle of a fight or riot, with or without backup, and he should have been killed a thousand times but wasn’t. How he had survived nobody knew. They cussed him out daily, especially when he found their stash of home brew and poured it out right in front of them. They cussed and cussed till their faces turned purple, but he paid no attention to words, just kept right on pouring the fruits of their hard labor into Shit Creek. Once he even jumped right into Shit Creek himself when a convict he was searching threw a sack of dope into the creek to keep from getting caught with it. Well Frenchy did a belly flop right into the creek and waded out stinking, but he had that sack of dope in is hand.

  One thing that may have saved him from getting stabbed full of holes is that he didn’t take it personal when he got cussed out, and he seldom wrote a disciplinary report on anybody. He just did his job, no matter what, and then went on about his business. He often had a remorseful look on his face when he poured out somebody’s wine. He obviously didn’t get a kick out of it like some guards did.

  Anyway, Frenchy could smell home brew a mile away and he was working the hole just when I had the urge to open a brewery in that same hole he was working in. And that presented a challenge that kept me busy for most of the time I spent in the hole. I tried everything to hide the smell. I hid it in garbage cans underneath the most stinking garbage imaginable. He found it, poured it down the toilet. I cussed him out. The next time I took the screen out of the exhaust vent in the back of my cell and hung it in the utility corridor, put the screen back in place. He found it, poured it down the toilet. I cussed him out. The next time I set up two batches, one where it would be easy for him to smell and then find, and the other a few feet from it but completely hidden, and I started them fermenting on the first of his two days off so that when he came back he would only have one day to find it before we strained it and drank it. When he came back to work sure enough he found the decoy, poured it down the toilet. I cussed him out. The decoy would smell up the place for another day and he would smell that as well as the hidden batch and not know the difference. That time we got him.

  The next day we drank the fresh batch of brew with the extra pleasure of knowing we had finally tricked old Frenchy’s nose. And we used the same method several more times with success, but then I made a mistake. When he poured out the brew in our decoy I forgot to cuss him out, so pleased was I with myself. Well he looked at me with those big remorseful eyes, as usual, but he knew something was wrong for he was accustomed to getting cussed out when he poured out somebody’s wine. He was slow and it took him a while to figure it out, but he came by my cell sniffing three or four times and then a light must have gone on in his brain and he came in my cell and sniffed again and then he tore up my cell like a dog digging for a mole. And he found it. Poured it down the toilet. And I cussed him out properly this time.

  He slowed me down for a few days, but I always kept a kicker in a small jar so I could start a new batch and so I did just that. I mixed up a batch and hung it on the bars outside the window and covered it with a wet T-shirt like I was drying the shirt in the fresh air and then I closed the window. He would never be able to smell that. But he did. Some idiot came along and opened the window to get some fresh air and old Frenchy got a good whiff of it and followed his nose straight to it. Just like that.

  So we won some and lost some, but it was something to do to break up the monotony.

  Then one day Frenchy didn’t come to work and we asked what had happened to him, and the new guard said they’d assigned him to a new job on the shake-down crew on the yard. And we rejoiced at our good fortune. But the new guard was so easy it wasn’t much fun anymore. To tell the truth I sort of missed old Frenchy.

  After that the days slowed down to life in the slow lane, and then one day they stopped altogether. No one knew what was happening but there was no water in the
sink or toilet, our doors didn’t open for rec, and there was no guard in the hole. And when it was time for chow the chow cart didn’t show up. And when it was time for supper the chow cart didn’t show up again, nor any guards nor any word from anybody. The cell house above us was completely silent, too, whereas you could always hear some kind of sound coming from it. I mean it was like something out of a ghost story.

  That night my mouth and throat got dry from lack of water, but I was able to sleep anyway. The next morning came and still no water, no guards, no food. Then things really got serious for I ran out of tobacco, we all ran out of tobacco, every one of us, though I think somebody was holding out because I smelled smoke coming from both sides of me.

  Finally a guard came through counting, and he was moving fast. When we asked him what was going on and where was everybody and what happened to the water—everybody talking at once—all he said was everybody was on the yard, and he kept on moving.

  So it didn’t take a genius to figure out that something real serious was going down.

  Late that same day some guards showed up and immediately began unlocking our doors, all our doors. “Get out of here, you’re free,” one of them hollered without slowing down. He didn’t have to tell me twice, I took off like a jackrabbit scared out of a bush, up the stairs I went, out the cell house door, through the rotunda and out the back door to the street, skidded to a stop in front of the commissary. The metal door was wide open and commissary was scattered all over the place behind the counter, cookies, candy, all kinds of goodies, I mean zoo-zoo’s and wham-wham’s everywhere, and soda pop too. I quickly gathered up an arm-load and headed for the sawdust bin where I plopped down and ate and drank till my belly was about to pop. And I still had not seen or heard a convict or guard anywhere.

  Eventually I wandered back through the deserted rotunda and into a cell house. All doors were wide open. I came to an unbelieving stop when I saw the mess in front of me inside the cell house. The wide corridor in front of the cells was piled high with the personal property of the convicts who lived in the cell house. It was all mixed together and scattered about like a hurricane had hit, pictures, letters, books, a busted guitar, just piles and piles of litter from the cells. All the cells had been cleaned out completely, all the way to the top tier, with nothing left but a mattress and a roll of toilet paper. That meant the guards had done it, cleaned everything out of all the cells and thrown it all over the tier as they went.

  In a little while I heard something going on and I peeped out the cell house door and saw a bunch of guards escorting a bunch of handcuffed convicts through the rotunda to the hole. They had turned us loose to make room for them.

  My freedom lasted for one night. The next day they gathered me up along with about fifty more guys who were considered troublemakers and locked us all up on the bottom range of one of the cell houses, and that’s where we stayed, our new home, no explanation or anything.

  In the days that followed I pieced together what had happened. First, we had a new warden. He was an old gimp-legged warden from the federal prison system. I don’t remember his name because we just mainly called him The Gimp or Gimpy or whatever, behind his back of course for to call him Gimpy to his face was suicide as we found out early when an unknowing convict called him Gimpy. When the convict got out of the hole he was older and wiser. The Gimp didn’t take no shit.

  They had had a big riot on the yard. And the people of Oregon had had enough. It was time to put a stop to the goings on at the prison, the riots and strikes and such. O’Malley had to go. So the state police took control, lined the wall with state troopers and herded every single prisoner, except the guys locked in the hole, onto the yard and made them all get down on the ground on their belly and stay there. And stay there they did, for every time one of them moved a shot was fired from a trooper on the wall and the convict’s body was sprayed with dirt from a bullet that barely missed him. It was a hot sunny day and there was no water. All the water inside the institution had been turned off. The heat became unbearable as it soaked the moisture from the air and from the human bodies on the ground. And the next day, when it was over, the prisoners were only too glad to go back to a cell and be locked down in a cell barren of everything except a mattress and a roll of toilet paper, and those who were put in the hole were glad to go there too, anywhere as long as there was water.

  Anyway, they rounded up all the troublemakers and locked us down, whether we had been in the riot or not, and we stayed there on the bottom range of one of the cell houses until they opened up the new segregation building which had just been completed. It was all steel and concrete with bars of hardened steel that couldn’t be cut with hacksaw blades. They put me in a single cell on the second floor, which was the segregation section. We never got out of our cells for rec and if we caused trouble they had something special for us on the first floor. I had to try it out of course. That was my nature. And I found myself in a dark cell in the back of the first floor. The cell contained nothing, absolutely nothing, no bunk, no toilet, no sink, just four walls and a hole in the floor. They came with a jug of water once or twice a day—no food. Every third day they moved me to a cell in the front section and fed me three regular meals, and then moved me back to the dark cell for another stay. That lasted for about nine days, I think, and I didn’t like it very much. That was the new hole.

  When they moved me back upstairs they kept me there another couple of months and then one day came and cut me loose back into population.

  The new warden was in complete control by now. The first thing he’d done was get rid of Punchy Bailey, boarded him out on a one way trip to Alcatraz. The next thing he’d done was fire everybody who might oppose his authority and cause him problems in the future, and that included the old superintendent who’d been so instrumental in getting O’Malley fired and who wasn’t even finished celebrating his victory. The Gimp was no fool. He’d brought his own staff with him, people he could trust. Lieutenant Francis, however, had survived the new warden’s purge. How, I don’t know.

  As for the prisoners, they had settled down to normal prison life in what was a normal prison now: everybody had a job doing something, even if it was just polishing door knobs. We probably had the cleanest door knobs in the world. Me, I bought an old acoustic guitar on credit from a guy who had decided learning to play a guitar was hard work and not at all like his five-easy-lessons book had advertised. I’d been fooling with a guitar off and on since reform school so before long I was playing in the prison band. I also signed up for school again to get out of working in the mess hall.

  And weekends and evenings I walked the yard alone. My old buddies, Pomroy and Hopper and the General, all had jobs and had settled into their separate routines. I ran into Buck Poe and Al Doolin and Joe Benson once in a while out sunning themselves or pitching horseshoes or playing dominoes, never together for they had gone their separate ways. I stopped to talk about old times, but they didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for that so a quick wave as I passed them by became the norm. They had been completely pastureized, I guess.

  But at age eighteen I still yearned for adventure, and true to form the Gimp had built fences everywhere, a fence around the big yard, a fence that cut off the cannery from inmate access, a fence here a fence there a fence everywhere. So I rode the trails with Zane Grey at night in my cell and wandered the yard alone with my head in the air thinking about this and that and space and time, but I kept running into the “f” word, “forever,” which seemed to me to apply equally to both space and time in a way that I couldn’t understand but which was maybe my first crude inkling of the concept of spacetime. But I always wound up with a sprained brain when I ran into “forever,” so riding the purple sage with Zane Grey was a welcome relief, and more my speed.

  But I wasn’t finished. I still yearned for excitement. And one day my chance came, a chance for my star-spangled swan song, my final goodbye to Oregon. And I went out with a splash. It was a hot day.
I was on the little yard watching the card games. Toilet buckets were no longer dumped into Shit Creek because the old cell house that had no toilets had been torn down and replaced with a new one that did.

  So I looked at the waters of Shit Creek and got a sudden urge. And the next thing I knew I was coming out of my clothes. Then I dove into Shit Creek head first and went for one hell of a swim. I was aware of the bull horn in the guard tower hollering an alarm, but I paid no attention for I was having a good old time, splashing up a storm. And I was aware of convicts along the bank cheering me along. And when I was finished and climbed up the bank dripping wet I was aware of old Frenchy standing there with an amazed look on his face as he watched me emerge buck naked.

  So me, I stood up straight with my ding dongs dangling in the wind and saluted him with a hand to the forehead like a true red-blooded American convict. Just like that. Frenchy turned about ten colors, and for a minute I thought he was going to have a heart attack, but then he just let out a laugh, shook his head and walked away.

  Maybe it wasn’t a big deal, that swim, but I’ll always remember it. And I can’t say it was any kind of religious experience or anything like that, I don’t know. But my brother, the Reverend R.D. Baker, had travelled all the way to Jerusalem to contemplate the sacred waters of the Sea of Galilee. Me, I swam in Shit Creek.

  And I got out of the Oregon State Penitentiary and went to Denty Moore’s Tavern and met Signey Meeker, who relieved me of my burden, after which I cast a taller shadow on the land on my way to Alcatraz.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN