“You must be getting old,” Jackrabbit said.
“I’m only twenty-three years old and I’ve started taking naps!”
Jackrabbit just chuckled.
I hadn’t had a write-up in over a year and I’d started taking naps, surely a sign of something, I thought, alarmed. But Jackrabbit was right, it was easier doing time if you didn’t fight it. Still, there was something about that that made me uneasy. But I was getting out so it didn’t really matter, not then it didn’t.
One day I got called up to an office where a man told me they were going to give me a train ticket back to Kentucky and then a bus ticket to Princeton, Kentucky, which was the nearest town to my official address and where my mother lived. I wasn’t about to tell him I couldn’t go back to Hackney Land so I said Okay, great and all that. A ticket was a ticket. And he had me sign some papers, my conditional release papers, and he explained that I’d have to report to a parole officer in Paducah by mail as soon as I got there. And I’d have to make monthly reports for the remainder of my statutory four-year sentence, which would amount to about a year—the length of my good-time. And I said yes sir, okay, and all that. And I signed some papers that said I’d do that.
And the shorter I got the higher my fever rose. And I felt so silly that I was almost afraid to talk for fear something silly would come out of my mouth, and also I figured my fellow convicts, with the loads of time they had left, didn’t really want to be a part of my silliness. So I tried to be cool, to act like every day was just another day, ho hum, no big deal, and all that. But I guess my head must have been all lit up, flashing like a neon sign, and my body must have been giving off short-time vibrations—common symptoms of convicts afflicted with short-time fever—because everybody seemed to notice me and, to my surprise, many guys I didn’t even know wished me well and seemed to want to share in my happiness, judging from their warm smiles as they shook my hand and talked to me about it on that last day. And, of course, Jackrabbit and Forest Tucker and Benny Rayburn were all over me making a big fuss, which I didn’t mind at all.
And I didn’t mind when Jackrabbit and Forest Tucker gave me a good old-fashioned lecture about how I should get a job and stay out when I got out, lectured me up one side and down the other, but I didn’t mind.
I didn’t even mind that always dangerous boat ride to the mainland, well, always dangerous to me because I do not like to be bounced around in a little old boat in the middle of a hurricane, well, not really a hurricane but, well, okay I do not like little boats in the middle of a big ocean of water even on a sunny day. But on that great day when I was released from Alcatraz, no problem. I was so happy that if that boat had sunk I could have just stepped right out and walked the rest of the way across that water without getting my feet wet.
I didn’t even mind when a prison guard escorted me all the way to the train station, gave me my ticket and stayed right there with me until I got on the train, and he still stood outside the train until it left the station. They did not want any ex-Alcatraz prisoners hanging around in that part of the country.
Me, I didn’t care one way or the other. When that train gathered speed across the Sacramento Valley on the way to the far mountains I was long gone.
The End
AFTERWORD
As I said in the beginning, I’m retired now. I’m eighty years old. Like an old car that’s been garaged for fifty or sixty years I look pretty raggedy but my engine still runs. God lets convicts live longer. I suspect the Bureau of Prisons has something to do with that. The federal prison system and, especially private prison corporations, have high-powered lobbyists running up and down the halls of the U.S. Congress armed with millions of dollars in money and gifts to ensure that the tough drug laws that supply their prisons with endless lines of prisoners stay on the books, that the status quo is maintained. So if they’d go that far for their own job security might they not also lobby God for longer lives for their prisoners so they could do more time?
What happened between the time I left Alcatraz and now? You don’t really want to know how to do hot checks so we’ll skip that part, which doesn’t leave much to talk about, but I’ll throw in a few details to bring you up to date.
I ran into old Promising Paul up in Marion. The Federal Bureau of Prisons built the maximum security prison at Marion, Illinois to replace Alcatraz, but they closed Alcatraz before Marion was ready for new prisoners, so they transferred all the Alcatraz convicts to the three existing U.S. Penitentiaries: McNeil Island, Washington, Leavenworth, Kansas, and Atlanta, Georgia. But by the time Marion was finished they discovered that the ex-Alcatraz prisoners had adjusted so well in the prisons where they had been transferred that they were no longer a problem. The younger prisoners were the ones raising all the hell, the kids, so they sent them to Marion instead. I wasn’t exactly a kid any more but I was just as dumb as one so they packed me up too on one of the first plane-loads of prisoners headed for Marion. That was my first plane ride ever and I was scared shitless, even more shitless than I’d been on that boat ride to Alcatraz. To make matters worse we rode on an old raggedy border patrol plane which flopped its wings to fly, or so it seemed to me. I swear it did, its wings flopped up and down like a bird and had big loose rivets that were ready to pop out at any second and plunge us all to an early death. That’s before the Marshalls had a fleet of planes of their own. They often borrowed that old border patrol plane. I was greatly relieved when we landed and I was in a safe cell in the maximum security prison at Marion, Illinois.
Anyway while I was at Marion old Promising Paul came through there, just touring the place. Well he came into the print shop where I worked and saw me and I swear I thought for a minute he was going to hug me. I mean he really looked old and sad and when he saw me his eyes lit up. It may have been a nostalgia thing with him, for he was retired then. But we, me and him both, had a Bridge-Over-the-River-Kwai moment, and as crazy as it might sound, I believe if he had hugged me I might have hugged him right back.
And on another one of my trips back to prison—my new career wasn’t doing all that well—I ran into Jackrabbit in Leavenworth. He was still working in the factory—Federal Prison Industries had factories everywhere, and still does. Now they call it Unicor and it’s huge.
He wasn’t playing bridge any more. There was a whole new breed of prisoners in Leavenworth by then, and they didn’t play bridge. They played the game of spades, mostly, a simple game suited to most of the prisoners there, a game that lent itself to a lot of hollering and slamming of cards on the table. And you know Jackrabbit wasn’t about to play a game like that. He was the same old Jackrabbit, quiet, easy-going—and underestimated by the chest-beating youngsters that walked the yard in Leavenworth. But Jackrabbit didn’t mind that at all; he just sort of eased along in the background, as was his way.
He lived out his time working in the factory and was finally released. The last I heard of him he died of stomach cancer, that’s what I heard. But he died free and didn’t wind up buried on Peckerwood Hill. I was glad of that. He died free.
I, myself, worked in the prison factory at Leavenworth in the early years when they had the shoe factory there. I didn’t last long. They had me working on a tack machine that tacked heels to the rest of the shoe. There were little holes in the heel and you had to put a tack in each hole, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap, like that—which was impossible. I missed the holes so bad that one day the supervisor came over and picked up a shoe I’d just finished and examined it, after which he held it out to me and in a loud trembling voice said, “Baker—when God created the shoe He put those holes in the heel for a purpose, that purpose being that each little tack goes in each little hole to attach the heel as an important step in the formation of the Shoe!” And he held the shoe up high for me to behold.
True story. Messed my head up. I decided I needed to find another occupation.
Leavenworth wasn’t a bad place to do time in the seventies and early eighties, if you had to do time. All
federal prisons were still under the influence of the Kennedy years and rehabilitation was the buzz word. But times were changing as people were beginning to realize that rehabilitation wasn’t working. The same prisoners kept getting out and coming back, a revolving door of the same faces coming and going. I was one of those faces.
It wasn’t that rehabilitation wasn’t a grand idea, but it was doomed to failure from the start because the people who were responsible for carrying out the rehabilitation programs were the same people whose jobs depended on keeping the prisons filled up with prisoners, and who can blame them if their efforts were not whole-hearted. Their excuse was “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
The second reason rehabilitation was doomed to failure is that no one thought to ask the question: “How can you rehabilitate somebody who was never habilitated to begin with?”
So, to the relief of federal prison guards and staff the Bureau of Prisons gave up on the whole idea of rehabilitation. Their official policy became: “Our policy is to provide a safe and humane environment for prison inmates to serve their time.” Meaning their new policy was to warehouse federal prisoners; rehabilitation was dead.
I ran into Forest Tucker, also in Leavenworth but in the early nineties. He was playing organ in the church. He was over eighty-years old then, I think, and he was in again for bank robbery. He sure did like to rob banks. He was playing organ in church, one of those big church organs that fill up the whole universe with sound. I went to church a few times just to see him play and he sure was a sight with flowing white hair and fingers that never missed a fly-spec on that sheet of music, and toes that kept up a steady “boop, boop” of bass notes to match. He played for the Catholic Church sometimes and for the Protestant Church other times, the religion didn’t matter. And he played rock & roll music up in the band room with me and my raggedy rock & rollers. We really made some great noise up there.
That was in the nineties when Leavenworth was engaged in bloody gang battles. The gang bangers had arrived and federal prisons had not yet learned how to handle them. But Forest Tucker wasn’t worried about any of that, all he wanted to do was play music and live to get out and rob another bank—or two or three. And at more than eighty-years old he still carried his own keyboard up three flights of stairs to the band room several times a week to play music with me. Man I loved that guy.
Forest Tucker was one of the most loved and respected convicts in Leavenworth. He had carried himself well all those years from Alcatraz to Leavenworth and the older he got the more mellow he became. And when the nineties rolled around he had a grin that would turn stone into peanut butter. He was so beloved that the California Gang adopted him and invited him to eat at their tables in the mess hall, which he did, and which was almost unheard of because the California Gang was one of the deadliest gangs in Leavenworth and never allowed outsiders to sit at their tables.
Forest Tucker did his time and got out and the last I heard of him he was robbing banks down in Texas somewhere, old Forest Tucker.
And remember Courtney Taylor? Portly Courtney? The last I heard of him he was up in Wisconsin cashing war bonds, had him a big limousine and a chauffeur, the chauffeur being the kid he used to walk the yard with in Alcatraz, had a chauffeur’s uniform and everything, the kid. They eventually got caught. That’s how I heard about it, I read about his arrest in a magazine. He got caught, but he had a pretty good run, he did, which is about the best we can expect to do, have a good run.
Me, I was getting better at it with good runs of my own—trial and error, well mostly error because I learned from my mistakes but always seemed to run into a brand new mistake I hadn’t counted on. And technology was moving so fast in America that every time I got out of prison I had to deal with brand new advances in crime prevention that Courtney Taylor had never dreamed about, like magnetic ink readers and direct telephone access to bank computers all hours of the day and night, things like that. So they didn’t make things easy for me.
But, like I said, I sometimes lucked out and had some good runs. Once I stayed out long enough to get married to a wonderful girl right out of the nut house who believed in God and country and the pursuit of Elvis Pressley, and I’m not making fun of her when I say that. She was very special. She didn’t smoke, didn’t use drugs, didn’t use profanity, didn’t drink—she truly was a good person. She knew what I was doing to make my money, but she didn’t comprehend it, and there’s a difference. She was so naïve that she even believed the words of politicians, for she saw the good in everyone, even me. So, even though we had little in common, we fit together just right, the good and the bad. I even went to church with her sometimes and filled the collection box with a good chunk of my hard-earned hot check money and felt good about it.
And like I said I had a good run that lasted about three years. Then I got busted and my American Dream came crashing down.
After that I was in and out, out and in, had some good runs and some bad runs, but no more American dreams—it was all about the chase. Up and down the road we went: dumb and dumber, the cops and me, with them being dumb and me being dumber. But I was leaving them further behind, the cops, because I was getting better at my trade, but then, while I was looking in my rearview mirror I always seemed to forget to look ahead, and just when I started thinking I was Superman, smack, mistake number ninety-nine, back to prison I went.
I was working big oil company checks, Exxon, Shell Oil, Chevron, BP, all of them, and the big insurance companies—all payroll checks, no personal checks. And like I said I became the best there is but the best just wasn’t good enough.
So now I’m retired, finished, done. I ran low on testosterone, I guess. And I’m as happy as an old steer grazing along in a never-ending pasture of green grass. I’ve got a girlfriend at the mall. I visit her every time I get out that way. She doesn’t talk much, in fact she doesn’t talk at all, she just stands there in the window of Victoria Secret’s dressed in orange panties and never says a word. But I love her just the same.
And I’ve got a little efficiency apartment with a window I can open to smell the fresh air and look out at the little toy cars people are driving these days. They look like household appliances, the cars—there goes a refrigerator, there goes a microwave oven and a toaster and a washer pulling a drier, man, how funny they look, those little cars. And I remember the huge Buick Electra Two-Twenty-Five I owned back in the seventies, took a football field to turn around in and a city block to park.
I’ve still got buddies in Leavenworth that I keep in touch with who keep rooting for me to get laid, that’s about all they think about, my responsibility to them and the whole world to get laid. But I try to tell them, hey I’m eighty-years old and Medicare doesn’t cover Viagra so give me a break, but they still push me. Besides, I tell them, I live in a Metropolitan Housing Authority apartment house, an old folks home, filled up mainly with old women and they ain’t paying any attention to me. They look good, some of them, but they ain’t paying me no mind.
Well, one of my buddies in Leavenworth, an old black man who is deeply religious but not fanatical about it—for his God is all-powerful but not all-demanding—and whose advice I value most, he asked me if the old women were black or white, so I answered, uh, mostly black. So he said, “Look, pop”—he calls me pop—he said, “Look, pop, if you want to seduce an old black woman you’ve got to go to church.” That’s what he told me. And that leaves me out because my church is way out in the woods on a dead-end dirt path with no building and no preacher, just me and Mama Nature.
My church, which I discovered while wandering the trails of a huge park, is a special place where I go to tend to my soul. It is a place of quiet, of solitude, a place among tall trees with birds chirping and bees buzzing and all that good stuff right out of Reader’s Digest—and I’m okay with that now, too, Reader’s Digest. I read one once in a while, the good and the bad thing again, I guess. My church is a place where space is equivalent to ti
me and Mother Nature is equivalent to God. It’s a place also where the good and the bad are equivalent, where neither the good nor the bad can exist independent of the other, for if it wasn’t for the bad there wouldn’t be any good.
They had a saying at Alcatraz that when you got off the boat on the way in you might as well give your soul to God because your ass belonged to the Warden. That saying is not correct. The Warden has to have it all, and when you surrender to the bells, as you must do, the warden owns both your ass and your soul. Forever. You can get out of prison but you can never be free, for the warden will keep the door open for your return.
But in my church in the woods I fooled everybody. I got my soul back. It wasn’t easy. First I had to give up an exciting career of cashing hot checks. Which I did. Then came the hard part: I had to wrestle my soul away from the warden for he had been in possession of it for many years and did not want to give it up. But in the end after the battle of all time, he did. And now I have it, my soul, bruised and banged up as it is, it is mine and I take it deep into the woods, carrying it tenderly in my hands, and I lay it before Mother Nature, God, to heal.
I have a new warden now. From him I receive food stamps and I get an SSI check every month and I live in a low-rent subsidized apartment and I am insured by Medicare and Medicaid, so I’m all right for now. I say “for now” because I know my new warden will expect my soul before it’s over. He already owns my ass, so it’s just a matter of time.
But I’ve got news for him, I’m not about to give it up again, my soul. It took me too long to get it back. And I swear on a stack of bibles and my mother’s honor that my new warden and all his men will not wrestle it away from me this time.
I mean I appreciate all that my new warden is doing for me. I am content and could easily graze along with the herd forever. This life is easy. The motto of the Metropolitan Housing Authority is “Grow old in place,” meaning “Die in place.” I am guaranteed to be taken care of all the way to my grave, all my needs, all I have to do is just give up my soul and take it easy. They even have their own Peckerwood Hill with a grave waiting just for me, compliments of the county, an indigent grave, an Unknown Convict grave, just take it easy and give up my soul, that’s all I have to do.
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