by Shorty Rossi
The only guys who didn’t come back were those that wanted to be educated. They were the only ones that gave me any hope. The rest of the guys became institutionalized. There were guys who opted to stay in prison rather than deal with parole. They’d willingly do their full sentences so they wouldn’t have to face the real world. Then there were the guys who’d go back out on the streets and get on parole, but they couldn’t make it. They were starving. They had to hustle for everything. Then they’d have that one thought: “Why don’t I go back to jail? It’s easier there.” We’d see them again. Jail became their comfort zone. Jail was all they knew. They didn’t like change. They didn’t like struggling, and in jail, they got fed three meals, the rules were clear, they had a job, and everything was structured, predictable. They always had someplace to sleep, a couple of girls on the side, and instant camaraderie. Jail was actually easier than having to be responsible for your own life. There were a lot of guys who just threw up their hands and surrendered.
It was the last thing I wanted to happen to me, but Folsom functioned like a warehouse. The system wasn’t focused on reform. It was focused on trying to keep people alive, controlled, and with minimal violence during the day. My cat sanctuary at DeWitt seemed a million miles away. Those easy moments in the hammock, with Zsa Zsa on my stomach, both of us asleep, those were long gone.
There was nothing for me to accomplish at Folsom. They offered high school programs but I’d already finished my GED. I asked to work for the PIA, the prison industry authority, (where they make all the state license plates), but the factory was in a different section of the building. To get to it, you had to cross eight different security perimeters, and prison officials still had some note on some damn piece of paper that said, “Flight Risk.” They would not let me leave my unit to work.
There were guys in Folsom doing life, who had no chance of ever setting foot on free ground, and they’d let them work PIA, but not me. By now, I knew I only had about five years left on my sentence if I did good time and I certainly wasn’t gonna do nothing to extend my stay. Once I was turned down for a PIA job, I felt hopeless. I couldn’t take a step without an entourage of black asses in my face. I couldn’t work a job to kill the time. I couldn’t take the limited classes that were offered. I gave up on the system. There was no way to create meaning for myself, so I settled for making myself comfortable instead. I surrendered to the monotonous routine of prison life: meals, count, sleep, meals, count, sleep.
Breakfast was served at 6:30 in the morning. It was usually SOS, shit on a shingle, or gravy on a piece of meat. Some days, they served hotcakes or French toast, but I couldn’t stand nothing with syrup on it. Thank God, they didn’t force you to go. I hated getting up that early, so I mostly opted to sleep in until 8 a.m. and make instant coffee or Top Ramen noodles with my stinger, a slim metal rod that plugged into the wall, heated up, and brought water to a boil. Microwaves and hot plates were illegal. Stingers were the only option. You could buy them through the canteen, which was the commissary, but they’d run you about fifteen dollars. When guys couldn’t afford to buy one, they’d take two square pieces of metal, put a piece of rubber in between them, and screw those together. They’d then attach a positive and a negative wire that they soldered onto the metal. It would get rusted and be dangerous. Guys would get zapped. End up in the hospital. Not everybody was bright enough to be messing with electricity.
Meals were the equivalent of herding cattle. It took two or three hours to feed everybody in a constant flow, an assembly line of guys coming and going all the time. You only had five or six minutes to eat. Once the guards said you were done, you were done, whether or not you still had food on your plate. Breakfast and dinnertime ran this way. Lunch was bagged. They’d slap some form of meat between two pieces of bread, toss in a piece of fruit, juice or milk, and maybe a small bag of potato chips. Lunch was meant to be carried with you to your job. Not that I had one.
There were few meals that were worth the trouble. Hamburgers I liked, but most of the time, I went to chow hall just for the ice cream. I wouldn’t touch the rest of the food. I lived off junk food from the commissary: canned chili, canned tuna, canned oysters, Top Ramen noodles, potato chips, and popcorn. Money got to me through friends or family on the outside. Janet, Uncle D., who was back out of prison, and my roll dog from the projects, Jerry, would send me a quarterly package when he was out of jail. Quarterly packages were like care packages kids get sent at camp. We were allowed a set amount of stuff per package, so many Ramen noodles, so many cigarettes and cigars. Most of my quarterly packages were made up of cigars. Other than that, I smoked Swisher Sweets, ’cause that’s what they sold at the commissary.
For those guys who didn’t have friends or family sending them things, there were actually companies they could pay to send them a quarterly package. The companies mailed magazines or catalogs to inmates. Their entire customer base was in prison, and they were making millions. They sold radios, Walkmans, or TVs. They had setups with the prisons to actually debit inmates’ prison accounts, so we never even had to write them a check or arrange for our family to do so. There was a whole industry that catered only to inmates. It was disturbing, but as long as there is a dollar bill flying around, somebody will grab it.
Since at first I wasn’t able to have a job, I had to rely on gifts from somebody on the outside. Janet or Jerry or Uncle D. would send me somewhere between $20 and $200, and if I budgeted right, I’d only spend about $50 at the commissary every month. I could make those gifts last. It’s not like having a job would have made me rich. Prison jobs only paid ten cents or fifteen cents an hour. At the max, guys made fifty cents an hour at their job. So a $15 stinger, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money, was actually very expensive. Cigarettes were better than all the money in the world. You could always wheel and deal and negotiate if you had cigarettes. (I have no idea what those guys are doing, now that they’ve banned cigarettes in the prisons. I have no idea how they function. It would be like waking up tomorrow and finding out that there is no more cash in the world.)
You had to bribe the guys in the laundry to make sure you got your own stuff back. Everyone was issued a set of clothes. Our uniform was white T-shirts, white boxers, white socks, and PIA jeans and jean shirts, both of which were actually sewn by prisoners. Everybody had a jacket ’cause it did get cold. That was your basic. You had two or three of each piece, and each cell had metal compartment-like shelves with four different sections to split with your cellie. That’s where you stored your stuff. Most guys had cardboard boxes slid underneath their bunks for extra storage, but if you were lucky, you could snatch a milk crate from the kitchen. I had five of those. Those were luxury, and illegal. Every couple of days, you’d trade your dirty laundry for clean basics. Sometimes, you would get crappy stuff back instead of your own clothes.
Since I am Little, I was allowed to have outside people send me special things. Janet would send me Levi’s jeans and I’d have the guys in the sewing shop cut them down to size. For the price of a few packs, of course. Janet had to send me T-shirts and shoes ’cause they don’t make prison shoes that small. So everything I owned was from the streets, and not from prison. I never wanted to lose my things, so I always made sure I paid someone to wash them personally.
Every transaction, every move I made, had to be thought out. How will I get my clothes back? How will I get the best bed? Who will be my cellie? When the new mattresses arrived, the desk clerk, an inmate, was in charge of handing them out. Now, those mattresses get old fast and they’re only so thick to begin with. Most guys had two or three mattresses stacked on top of each other, but when the new ones came in the door, those were the ones in demand. There were five hundred beds and only two hundred new mattresses. Everything had a price.
The corrections officers just looked the other way. Maybe some didn’t know what was going on, but most just turned a blind eye. There were certainly crooked corrections officers who had their hands in drugs
, but they weren’t gonna lose their pensions over a mattress or laundry.
At 4:30 p.m., no matter where we were, we had to head back to our cells for count. Count is a statewide activity. Every inmate in every prison in California goes into lockdown every single day at 4:30 p.m. You can set your watch by it. The corrections officers go cell to cell and literally count to see if anyone is missing. In Four Building, it was a process that normally took half an hour, but you’d be surprised at the uneducated people trying to do math. Four or five times a month, some stupid guard couldn’t count past two hundred, and we’d all have to sit for two hours, even though no one was actually missing.
In the bigger buildings, count took much longer. One building was five stories high and held over three thousand prisoners. They had thirty or forty officers patrolling their tiers at any given time. Four Building had twelve guards, or less, walking the tiers. Our officers were around so much we knew them all by name. I was very clear on who liked me and who didn’t. Half of the officers didn’t like me ’cause I had a smart-ass mouth.
Sometimes, on a Sunday night, a group of guys would grab a table and cover it with Saran Wrap. We’d use our stingers to cook noodles and chili, then crush bags of potato chips and dump everything onto the table, cover it with mayonnaise and mustard, and mix that slop together. That was a community dinner with your friends. It was called the spread.
We’d all gather around and watch Unsolved Mysteries. Every so often, we’d see one of our guys profiled. One night, we were watching, and this old dude, a white guy, comes up on the screen. He had chopped up his girlfriend and put her in an ice chest. That guy lived six cells away from me. He’d been locked up so long, none of us knew why he was even there. He was a model inmate, and ’cause he was housed in Four Building, we all assumed he couldn’t be that bad a guy. But cutting up a woman and putting her into an ice chest and storing her in a freezer for five years … that seemed pretty bad to me. The next time I walked past his cell, I looked at him very differently. “You still got that freezer?” He didn’t even flinch, but said, “They aired it again, huh?” I guess he’d seen his story on Unsolved Mysteries before. Despite what he’d done, he struck me as a guy who would never do nothing wrong again. Of course, he’d never get that chance. He was in for life.
With nothing but time on my hands, I was devouring books. I checked out a copy of My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin, and I became his biggest fan. Reading about his rough childhood, his alcoholic dad, his crazy mother, how broke he’d been as a kid. That he went on to become such a huge, international superstar only to be exiled. Man, Charlie had lived. He brought entertainment and laughter to everyone, all over the world.
I was so impressed by the fact that he’d cofounded United Artists, a film distribution company, with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. They were actors, and they wanted more control over their careers and their projects. They took the power away from the old Hollywood system. Charlie even built his own studio. He was totally independent at a time when all the other actors were owned. That took some balls.
I was blown away when I read that he was accused of “un-American activities” and was labeled a communist. And that J. Edgar Hoover instructed the FBI to keep extensive secret files on him, and eventually kicked him out of America. Well, kept him from reentering the country after he went to his own damn film premiere in London. This man, who was so loved and had basically been an ambassador for America ’cause of his movies, ended up exiled to Switzerland. It was so insulting it seemed unbelievable.
I’d never really looked up to anyone in my life, especially not an actor or celebrity, but I truly admired Chaplin. I respected that Charlie was a determined man. He was gonna get his way, no matter what. He had opinions that were controversial and he was punished for holding his views. His views started some shit. He was ostracized. He never listened to anyone else about how to be successful. I was inspired by his life. I did my best to get ahold of his movies if they made their way behind bars.
His book stuck with me. It changed my whole attitude, and reminded me how productive and useful I’d felt at the Youth Authority. I knew I had more to offer to the world, and I didn’t have to sit behind bars, twiddling my thumbs for five years, just biding my time.
It didn’t cross my mind to become an entertainer. Entertainment was Chaplin’s business, but it wouldn’t be mine. I just wanted to be successful. I was still determined to be a lawyer or a corporate guy, but I knew, if I actually wanted to accomplish something in life, I had to start making those changes now.
To plan who I was gonna become, I needed to know where I’d come from. My friend Tony and I were interested in our Italian heritage, in learning more about our culture, even the language. Tony was one of my few white friends in Folsom. He wasn’t an Aryan or a Nazi—I never would have tolerated a racist—but it was still hard for us to be friends, since he had to run with the white guys, and I was technically still a Blood. I found out we could register for an independent study class and use it to research our family trees. What was my bloodline, and could it explain how I’d ended up where I was?
In order to even start a family tree, I needed to talk to family. Janet didn’t know much. Linda and I weren’t in touch anymore, and to complicate matters further, Dad had told all our relatives on both sides of the family that I was away on a secret mission for the CIA. He was so embarrassed by my imprisonment that he made up a covert midget operation for the USA. Like I was a fucking spy. Seemed to me, the most noticeable thing in a foreign country would be a midget running around wreaking havoc, but Dad’s side of the family seemed to believe it. I’d never spent much time with them in the first place, and I was gone for so long. They had no way of knowing anything I was doing, except what they heard out of Dad’s mouth. Truth wasn’t his specialty.
Then Janet called the prison and had them notify me that Nonnie died. I was devastated to hear about Nonnie. I loved her. Not being able to go to her funeral was a crushing loss. She was my family. I was still resentful about Mom and Dad putting her in a home. She’d been so good to me. I had to write about how wonderful this Little woman was to me. So I typed up her eulogy and Fed-Exed it to my great-aunt Wanda, who was handling the funeral arrangements. In prison, when you send something by Federal Express, you can’t fill nothing out on the address label. You just give the mailroom a voucher, and they fill it out with a return shipping label from Folsom Prison. Needless to say, my aunt figured out I wasn’t working for the CIA, but she kept her mouth shut. When the priest read the part of my letter that said, “Things are out of my hands, and I’m sorry I cannot be there,” I imagine she made sure not to look at Dad.
Aunt Wanda was another woman I dearly loved, so now that she knew the truth, I reached out to her and asked questions I wasn’t supposed to ask. I wrote to other long-lost relatives, and the letters that came back … they let some things slip. It was Wanda who first leaked the truth. She told me about my paternal granddad. That he hadn’t been dead for my entire childhood. That he had, in fact, only died recently. She also told me he’d been locked up for domestic abuse. He must have been a brutal, vicious, violent man, ’cause back then, no Texas husband ever got locked away for beating his wife. Wife-beating was basically considered a privilege of marriage in those days. Then a cousin told me that my great-grandfather had been arrested in New York more than once. He didn’t know the charges. Then, the big bomb dropped. I got a letter back that said, “Well, your dad was arrested too.”
Wait? What? Dad was arrested? For what? When? Did he serve time? What jail? Nobody seemed to know the details, and I sure as hell couldn’t call Mom up and ask her. I thought back and realized that Dad’s arrest may have had something to do with his trouble at Lockheed. Something so bad had happened that he was fired. He had to go to court, and he’d done that community service in the park, but after that, we’d moved to Texas and I’d run away and never found out what had really happened. Linda and Janet were already out
of the house, so they didn’t know, and Mom and Dad never said nothing about Lockheed again.
So there it was. Turns out, I was a fourth-generation jailbird. All the men in Dad’s family had been arrested. Me, Dad, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. Had I heard a word about this when I was a kid? Hell, no. Had Dad bothered to mention it when I was arrested? No, again. Another family secret. This was my history. I was just carrying on the family fucking tradition. My cousin laughed when I told him what I’d discovered. He said, “It may have been a tradition but you’re the one who made it huge.” My ancestors may have been in jail, but none of them had done ten years behind bars. I’d taken it to the next level. Unfortunately, the legacy didn’t end with me. My nephews landed in jail too. For a night or two, nothing major, but still, it made me think about what it would take to stop the cycle. Maybe there’s a Rossi temper, and we all just inherit it. Maybe it’s the Rossi legacy to land in jail. Maybe it’s a curse.
Researching Dad’s side of the family and the history of beatings, abuse, and arrests was disheartening. It felt like fate had been in charge the whole time and I was just along for the ride. At least on Mom’s branch of the tree there were entertainers, and nobody landed in jail. It gave me some hope that at least fifty percent of me had her genes. I didn’t have to succumb to fate or genetics. I could choose another way.
It was as if by thinking those new thoughts, life shifted to test my resolve. Fate, the fickle bitch, presented me with an opportunity. She made me the Slumlord of Folsom.