“If it’s a girl, I want to name her Erica, after Erica Kane,” he said.
“Erica? That horrible woman on that soap opera, All My Children? No way! No way am I naming my child after her.”
Sammy finally picked Stephanie, and I chose Dawn for her middle name. Since she weighed just a little more than five pounds, she had to stay in the hospital for about a week or more. When I finally got to take her home, we stopped at Little Joe’s house for a brief visit.
Pamela and Stephanie Perillo
Stephanie was a doll, the joy of my life, the culmination of all the hope within the darkness. I felt loved and needed. With dark, full hair and piercing blue eyes, she was the image of Sammy. I was fulfilled—a grown woman at age sixteen. Sammy saw her when she was just a few months old, and the light in his beautiful blue eyes confirmed all the love we shared in this healthy little girl.
“We are going to be so happy together when you get out,” I told Sammy.
I call the photo below my “I have arrived” photo. I am standing in front of the house belonging to Sammy’s parents, where Sammy and I were living. I am fulfilled. I am married. I have a child. I am all grown up at age seventeen. I am woman.
***
Pamela Lynn Perillo, Age 17
And then the proverbial what goes up must come down—my life bottomed.
On a foggy June morning while staying overnight with some friends, I awoke to one of them saying, “Pam, come quick! Stephanie isn’t moving.” I raced into the room where Stephanie was lying on her stomach in a makeshift crib. All I saw was her little hand extending from beneath her tiny blanket, and it was a sickening purple. I panicked. I frantically called my older brother, Randy. Shortly after, he arrived with the fire department.
As I was sitting on my bed, one of the firemen bent down and said, “I’m sorry; she’s gone.”
At just four months, Stephanie had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
“How could a healthy child suddenly die?” I wailed.
That night, behind the closed door of the Perillos’ bathroom, I took a large hit of heroin and slit my wrists. After this, events blurred into simple flashes of existence. I awoke in a hospital with a cast on my left arm. Three of my fingers do not work to this day.
The only thing I remember from Stephanie’s funeral was kissing her cold lips goodbye. I took a picture, the last one with which to remember her. It is all I have left from her last stop on earth, my precious, darling little girl. Six months in a mental hospital did little to revive me from the bowels of depression and self-condemnation.
One of the hardest points was confronting Sammy, who was still in San Quentin. I knew his mood instantly when they brought him out into the visitation room. His blue eyes dulled and pointed at me like the ends of cold gray bullets in the chamber of a revolver.
“How could you let this happen, Pam? You weren’t even home; you were partying, weren’t you? What were you doing? Sleeping while our child died? How could you? This is all your fault. I’ll never, never, never forgive you.”
For an instant, my depression turned to rage.
“My fault! Wait a minute. If you had been there, then maybe you could have prevented it. But nooo, you had to get locked up for being stupid enough to do a robbery with a gun—right when I needed you most.” And then the conversation turned even uglier, and my life followed an uglier road as well.
From that point on, all I cared about was shooting heroin. Like a bumper car at the Pike, I just bounced from one collision to another. Nothing mattered. Life, though precious to most, meant nothing to me. I rarely ever attended high school and never graduated. Soon arrested for auto theft and drug possession, I was back at CRC. After my release, I received seven years’ probation and parole to a gay community halfway house in North Hollywood. There, I started shooting “H” again. I moved in with my friend, and we worked at the gay community center in Hollywood. But it didn’t last. I left and just kept bumping along looking for a path where I could mash the accelerator to the floor and go faster than what the world had to offer. A dirty urine test put me back, one more time, behind the concertina wire of CRC.
After this release, a methadone program became a stipulation for parole. So the day after leaving CRC, I went to the methadone center.(14)
It worked and it helped. I started dancing at a topless bar and soon moved in with a girl from the bar. Methadone works, but just for those who truly want to kick the heroin habit. Praise the Lord that there is some help for those who try. To those who don’t, methadone is like artificial sweetener compared to sugar. I started injecting heroin again with my roommate.
“Do you have any stuff?” I asked her on one of our nights off.
“No, I’ll call our dealer.” Her face brightened as she talked. “He’s just got back from Mexico with some brown heroin and wants to try it out,” she said, giggling.
We went to his place, where I volunteered to be the first, and when the brown syrup began to bubble in a spoon, he pulled it up into a syringe. It was warm and sweet in my vein, and then total blackness. After an eternity of nothingness, I awoke to a strange smell—raw garbage, a suffocating, summer-warmth smell of orange peels, egg shells, and coffee grinds. I was lying on my back, floating in a lake of cardboard boxes and other sharp objects, and I was completely nude. No shoes, nothing. Four green steel walls surrounded my little pool and opened into the evening sky where streetlights quickly told me my location. A Dumpster. I’d been tossed into a metal trash bin like so much rubbish. I climbed out and skittered into the backyard of a nearby house where I stole some jeans, a shirt, and a large sock from a clothesline. I used the sock for a belt. I jumped in front of the first car that came by.
“Where am I?” I asked somewhat belligerently.
“Why, you is in Watts,” replied a demure, elderly black man.
“Can you get me outta here?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you is right.”
And the way he said it made me feel like he was glad to get rid of this single white dot in a black neighborhood at night.
Staying in the shadows where he dropped me off, I walked back to my dealer’s place where my roommate had not yet left. When they opened the door, it was as if I had returned from my coffin in a weird set of grave clothes.
“You were dead,” they both exclaimed.
“I tried everything to revive you, doll,” the dealer said. “I stripped you and put you in the bathtub and, like, filled it with ice. You didn’t budge. And you were turning blue. Well, like, you know I couldn’t leave a dead body in my house…”
A turning point? A wake-up call to get my life together? One would think so. Instead, I used more and more heroin with methadone as a tide-me-over. I bounced between different dealers, and I kept putting off the payments to one of them. He kept calling and leaving notes on our door. One afternoon, I was standing in his kitchen trying to con him out of some more drugs when he charged toward me to make me an example to those who don’t pay and play by the rules.
“I’m tired of your games, girly,” he barked as he waved what looked like a small, black cap pistol. He didn’t wait for a response; a small pop, and I felt the whiz of a bullet pass my ear as it headed out the kitchen window. My wanna-be gangster fortunately didn’t have the proper firepower, evidently only the proverbial single shell allotted to Barney Fife. He fumbled into his front pocket for another 0.22 bullet and began to reload. My swift, hard kick between his legs brought him to his knees, and I ran out the door. Maybe it hurt him enough that he left me alone. I don’t know, but he never returned, and our business relationship, of course, ended. My girlfriend and I were now excessively into drugs, trying to tightrope that fuzzy strand between high and sickness. Then, out of the fog that surrounded me, Sammy reappeared.
CHAPTER 5
Once again, Sammy and I began anew at that point where incarcerati
on had interrupted our syrupy dreams. Sammy and I would steal together, score together, and shoot up together.
Once more I became pregnant and was again on heroin, plus methadone. After Stephanie, the last thing I wanted was another baby. Abortion, of course, was an option, but something inside me would not permit it. Looking back, there could have been several reasons for my pro-life choice. Perhaps I didn’t want the guilt of failure, or maybe it was fleeting inspiration from that old saying: “There’s so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us.”(15) Many decades down the road, I am sure it was an angel planting a good seed within me as encouragement to go through with the delivery. I will always be grateful for that inner call.
I contacted my parole officer and asked for her help. She readily agreed to help me detox from methadone, perhaps because she thought I was clean and trying to make a new life. Although I was on heroin, my urine was always clean. It had to be; it came from someone else—sneaking in a bottle of clean urine long having been a ploy of the addict. Gradually, she reduced my methadone dosage, and I stopped the heroin. Again, I suffered the hard sickness of withdrawal, but with at least some consolation from the last time: I knew that it had an end and that my baby would be born without drugs in his or her system.
My older sister, Joanne, had moved back to California with her husband, and I was renewing our sibling relationship. I soon learned that her husband was a “macho” type who liked to beat up his wife to prove how tough and manly he was, and I often tried to keep her away from him.
One day during my sixth month of pregnancy Joanne stopped by my place and honked. “Hop in,” she said as I walked out to her Volkswagen. “Like, ‘hop’ isn’t the right word,” I replied as I slid into the passenger seat with my extended belly touching the dashboard. We drove to her house to check on her husband’s whereabouts.
He was outside their house, spotted her, and headed toward his car. Once in his vehicle, he gunned the motor. In a moment, he raced ahead of us and forced her little VW bug into a ditch. As he roared onward, Joanne managed to spin out and U-turn in the opposite direction. Although we got away, my stomach squashed hard into the bottom edge of the glove compartment.
“Joanne, I just had a contraction!”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“How do I know? Of course I know. This isn’t my first child.”
“Don’t worry; just relax and take some deep breaths,” she said, which I did. And then, “I’ve had another! Great, I’m going into labor. Get me to a hospital.”
St. Francis Hospital, where I delivered Stephanie, would not accept me because of a medical insurance problem (I didn’t have any). So we went to Martin Luther King Junior General, the new county hospital nearby in Watts that had been built a few years after the riots. In the emergency room, a resident gave me a shot to stop the labor and checked me in for bed rest. Two weeks later, I went into labor, this time to the max, and delivered twin boys weighing two pounds each. At the time, I wasn’t aware that twins ran in our family. When I talked to my father, he mentioned, “Did you know I had a twin brother? But he died in childbirth.”
Sammy came to see his new sons and me in the hospital. “Those aren’t my kids, Pam. They don’t look nothin’ like me. Who in the hell have you been with?”
“No one, Sammy. No one but you. How could you think otherwise? You’ve been in a cell too long. You’re talking crazy.”
Sammy left the room in a volley of curses, and I, never prone to tears, cried for hours.
I never saw Sammy again.
Years later I learned that Sammy had been sent back to prison, this time for a murder in Sacramento, receiving twenty-five years to life, presumably from the familiar “drug deal gone bad” scenario. Samuel Mario Perillo died in 2003. I don’t know any of the details.
***
On the birth certificate for my twins, I listed the father as “Denied to State” and gave them my birth name of Walker. I told my dad that I would name one after him, Joseph Franklin Walker II. He said, “No, that won’t work. I had a son that died who was the second, so yours will have to be the third.” I had never heard of this before, nor of the fact that my parents had yet another child who died. So Joseph became the third, and I named my other twin Joel Steven Walker.
The fact that my father had been a twin whose brother had died must have been a bad omen, for twenty-nine days later, Joel died. I never got to hold him. I have since learned that twins come down through the female side of a family, that Little Joe and his twin came from his mother’s side, and mine came through Wuanita. Nonetheless, I have always felt something prophetic about the death of Joel Steven Walker.
I took Joseph, the survivor, home with me—Joseph, the only good that came from Sammy and me.
I was still on a small dose of methadone when I gave birth, and right afterward, I requested a larger allotment. Soon I returned to dancing at Clyde’s Nude Bar in Whittier, California. Whittier is another city some twenty-two miles from Lynwood. Never straying far from this area, and as a dog returning to eat his own puke,(16) I started using heroin again.
A girl and I shared a three-bedroom house. I had the downstairs and she, the upstairs. It was a good “working” arrangement: I danced at night, she worked during the day, and thus I was able to take care of Joseph. But there was little joy in Perillo-Land; I was atop the heroin horse with no way to dismount. “I’m a hope-to-die dope fiend,” I bragged to friends and anyone else who would listen. “I want to die with a needle in my arm. Oh, let me die with a needle in my arm” was my mantra, a death wish that later turned prophetic down in Texas. Brashly spoken words often mysteriously gestate in the cavern of time to birth unimaginable monsters.
There was this old dude who frequented the bar where I danced, and he was always begging me to come home with him. I’d just laugh through a gag reflex. He did tip, and money is money. But one night shortly after another of his decrepit passes, I was sick and needed a fix badly. Two guys and I met at my dealer’s house, and I suggested we rob this old man. We did.
The next day, the bartender at Clyde’s told me the police were looking for me. I had also heard that they were driving around my neighborhood showing my picture to people and asking them if anyone had seen me. Not a surprise since the guy we robbed knew me. Stealing to support drug abuse does not require much gray matter.
I called my parole officer, and she wanted me to come in and see her. Yeah, come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, and nowhere else except into a metal cage again, a place devoid of the heroin I so badly craved. While I was in semi-hiding, Mike Briddle, one of my co-robbers, called me from Tucson, Arizona, and said, “Hey, Pam, Linda and I are headed to Florida to elude the heat. Care to join us?”
“What’s in Florida, Mike?”
“I have a friend there that runs a tattoo parlor; he’ll help us. We’re with this truck driver who’ll pay your airfare to Tucson and give us all a ride. He just wants a friend and someone to talk to while we’re traveling. He’s got some good materials also.”
Why not? I’d never been out of California, and through my drug-addled thinking, I wasn’t getting any younger—I was pushing 24. Besides, the police were looking for me.
James Michael Briddle, Mike as everyone called him, was intelligent and soft-spoken. He was dark-skinned with thick, full Groucho Marx eyebrows. His eyes were like bottomless black caverns leading into the bowels of Hades. Mike probably never needed a gun for a robbery; all he had to do was stare at his victim. He had traits similar to those of Sammy Perillo, having served in CRC for grand theft and forgery. He was in San Quentin about the same time as Sammy, but I don’t know whether they knew each other. They did belong to the same “fraternity,” the Aryan Brotherhood, and had the same lifetime-membership tattoos. Whereas Sammy belonged to the Brotherhood for protection, Mike had a deeper relationship, thoroughly enjoying the fraternal partie
s where they kicked, bludgeoned, or “shanked” African-American or Mexican inmates. Mike’s prejudices were monumental.
Linda Sutton Briddle, Mike’s wife, had shoulder-length, brown, curly hair and average looks. She came from a wealthy family in Shasta, up in Northern California, an area totally distinct from Southern California. While a sophomore in college and earning good grades, Linda and several girls in the dormitory were reading a copy of Easyriders magazine,(17) a magazine dedicated to motorcycles and the wild side. An advertisement for prison pen pals appeared on a back page, and each chose an inmate. The purpose of their correspondence was never clear but appeared to be a self-chosen extracurricular experiment. Mike answered the letter that Linda had addressed to another inmate in San Quentin, Mike’s frequent home away from home. Mike bragged about being a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and the fact that he had met Charlie Manson, whom he highly regarded. He further wrote that he knew he could duplicate Charlie’s hypnotic power over others. After exchanging several letters, Linda frequently visited Mike, and she became his bride in a prison ceremony at San Quentin on June 12, 1979. She was twenty, Mike twenty-four. Conjugal visits could take place every ninety days. There were not many, because Mike soon got out, and Linda picked him up at the gates. Mike’s braggadocio and Manson-mind-control personality drained Linda’s spirit like a vampire and transformed Linda from a recreational drug user to a hard-core, intravenous existence. He taught her shoplifting skills and induced her to turn tricks to support their habit.
CHAPTER 6
I dropped eighteen-month-old Joseph at Little Joe and Helen’s house. I wasn’t worried about Joseph enduring any sexual abuse from Little Joe—he’d never bothered my brothers—and I knew Helen would be a good caretaker. So with the money Mike had sent me, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, to join Mike, Linda, and the trucker.
Salvation on Death Row Page 4