I had no idea if it had been done when the Sheriff's Department bus arrived at Atascadero, dropping a couple off, picking some up. For the next several days we traversed the highways of Central California, stopping at county jads to pick up prisoners wanted in Los Angeles, and deliver others wanted in San Luis Obispo or Monterey or Bakersfield. When we reached the bus unloading yard of the Los Angeles Central Jail, it was past midnight. LAPD buses and vans were disgorging young black men by the score, and by the hundreds through the night. The air was filled with anger's ozone. The police wielded nightsticks, poking and prodding anil slapping them in their palms whde yelling, "Move it! Move on in!" I did not know it at the time, but it was the first night of the Watts riot. While I was being booked, notice came that bail had been posted. The critical moment would be when I was at the last stage of release, when the booking clerk called me to the window to check my armband and compare my fingerprints.
"When the door buzzes, push out," said the deputy.
The gray paint was worn off where coundess thousands of hands had pushed through ahead of me. The door buzzed, I pushed and the door opened. Mickey was waiting outside, and dawn was coming up over the City of Angels. We went forthwith to a motel on 7th Street where she had rented a room. We watched the Watts riot on the tube. Thank God I wasn't in jad when the thousands of angry young blacks were dragged in.
Chapter 13
Stuck in Folsom Prison
A Summer of Love in San Francisco, '67, '68 or '69 — I'm not sure which, for I was stuck in Folsom Prison and had lost all track of time. Even then, California had prisons the way General Motors has cars — in a range of models and styles and performance. It had them with ramps for the geriatric thief in a wheelchair doing a sentence as an habitual criminal, and medical facilities for the sick and the crazy. It had tough prisons for the predator, and soft facilities for the weak who cannot make it in other prisons. Some were ancient and some so modern that the paint color was chosen by psychologists. There was just one designated "maximum custody," and that was Folsom, postmarked Represa.
Twenty miles east of Sacramento in the belly of Gold Rush territory, Folsom covers 400 acres, though the walled area is smaller. It has just three walls. The fourth, across a yard made by flattening a hilltop, is a gorge through which the American River millraces and foams. One fool convict made himself into a human submarine complete with breathing tube and weighted pockets, but misjudged his buoyancy and sank to the bottom and drowned. The chances of reaching the river are small, for the lower yard is bordered with double fences topped by concertina wire and watched by towers with machine guns. A maximum custody prisoner isn't allowed near the lower yard. To get that far means another gun tower and another fence topped with concertina.
The surrounding countryside was peeled bare in the mad search for gold. It never fully recovered, an early environmental disaster. The one view from the prison is across the river to a rolling land of sunburned scrub, hills that have a two-week fling of green each spring before returning to the usual desolate landscape. When a prison was proposed for the site in 1864, a doctor doubted that it was a healthy location. That convinced the legislature to order construction. By 1880 enough buddings were ready to receive the first prisoners. Soon the convicts took over the work, hewing the granite that still makes up much of the prison's incoherent architecture, one which is so strange that sometimes huge granite blocks fade seandessly into poured concrete in the same wall. It is a weird symbiosis.
Folsom's history is blood-spattered and brutal. Straitjackets, bread and water and tricing up by the thumbs were standard punishments well into the twentieth century. Hangings were common. Ninety-one men were topped on Folsom's gallows until California went to the gas chamber and first used it in San Quentin.
Folsom has had bloodbath breaks, the largest led by "Red Shirt" Gordon in 1903. (He was called "Redshirt" because incorrigibles were made visible to the gun towers in that color.) He and a dozen more rushed the Captain's Office, stabbing a guard to death who tried to stop them. Gordon's group took several hostages, including the Warden and his nephew, the Captain and two turnkeys. On their way out of the prison they stopped at the armory and helped themselves to an arsenal of weapons. In the open countryside a few broke away from the main band and were captured. A hastily formed posse, including some militia, overtook the main band. The fugitives made a stand. Two troopers were killed and several citizens wounded. The prisoners left one dead. The rest got away. Six were never recaptured. Of those who were caught, two were hanged; the others were eventually released to become upright citizens.
Folsom's bloodiest day was on Thanksgiving in 1927. Armed with a revolver and knives, six convicts planned to take over an indoor area adjacent to the administration building and kidnap the Warden. They took the first area but couldn't locate a crucial key. Frustrated, they turned back and tried to go through a different gate, one leading not outside the prison but to a lesser security area. A guard saw them coming and slammed the gate. He was shot in the leg. A second shot missed him but killed a convict gate tender. The now berserk escapees were trapped in the inner prison. They rushed to the recreation hall where 1,000 men were watching a movie, the last movie shown until Mr Smith Goes to Washington a dozen years later. They hacked a guard to death at the door, took others hostage and sought refuge in the multitude. The militia, complete with machine guns, came from Sacramento and a thirty-six-hour siege ensued. Ten prisoners were killed and half a dozen more wounded before the desperadoes surrendered. They were quickly tried and hanged.
Their execution failed as a deterrent. Ten years later another group tried to use a warden as their ticket to freedom. It was a Sunday and Warden Larkin was holding interviews at the Captain's Office. A long line of prisoners waited outside, beyond a wire fence and under what is now #16 gun tower. Seven of the waiting men had knives on their bodies and more than interviews on their minds. One had previously broken out of the Kansas penitentiary. Another was serving time for smuggling pistols into San Quentin where they were used to kidnap the entire parole board.
When the gate was opened to let other prisoners out, the seven rushed in. Their audacity kept tower guards from seeing what was before their very eyes. The convicts quickly overpowered Warden Larkin and Captain Bill (The Pig) Ryan, who demanded the nickname. A couple of convicts wanted to stab Ryan, but the leader called them off. A wire noose was thrown around the Warden's neck. Two guards rushed in to attempt a rescue with their lead "canes": they were stabbed and driven off. One died.
In a tight group with the Warden and Captain in the middle, the prisoners went outside. The Warden ordered the guard at the closest gun tower to send down a rifle. Guards were standing at a distance, unable to move. One guard in a different tower saw his chance and pulled the trigger. He killed two convicts with two shots. Then other gun towers started shooting while the remaining frenzied prisoners began stabbing the hostages from all angles until more guards ran forward and caned them down.
Warden Larkin died of his wounds. The convicts who survived the rifles played opening night at the gas chamber. Ryan survived and was still Folsom's Associate Warden when I arrived.
This holocaust prompted the legislature to pass a law that no convict is to be allowed to escape through the use of hostages. Guards are forbidden by law to heed orders from the Warden, or anyone else, in such circumstances. In 1961 a church choir was making an appearance at the Folsom chapel. It included several young women. They were taken hostage by three prisoners, all of whom I knew quite well. An intervening convict was stabbed to death (he got a posthumous pardon). But the gates of Folsom remained shut. Every convict knows the law and knows it will be enforced. It is one of the first things they are told on arrival.
Unlike all county jails and most prisons, Folsom comes awake quiedy, without clanging bells or buzzers. The cell house surrounds the five-tiered cell block like a large box holding a smaller one. Coundess baby sparrows, pigeons and blackbirds in crevices and eave
s have been crying raucously for hours, but convicts sleep until cell tenders are heard ramming huge keys into locks, a hard sound, each twist wrenched with an exquisite pause: 'cla . . . ck, cla . . . ck . . ."
Folsom's cells have the same dimensions as San Quentin's: eleven or twelve feet long, four and a half feet wide. As in San Quentin, I had a table just wide enough to support a typewriter with a pde of manuscript paper beside it. I'd finished my third unpublished novel and was now embarking on my fourth. This time in prison I had nobody outside. If I'd been murdered and buried underneath the cell house, nobody in the world would have asked what had become of me. Esquire magazine had done a large piece on the New York literary world, which included literary agents. I wrote to the agent Armitage Watkins, whose mother was one of New York's first literary agents and had represented many well known writers of an earlier era. I didn't think someone who was red hot would be interested, but from the literary quality of his clients, I thought he might at least read my manuscripts. I said that I had no money for a reading fee, and I would pay the postage by selling a pint of blood. Would he read what I had? He wrote back and said he would. I sent him two novels. He sent them back, saying I had some talent and that he would like to read anything else I wrote in the future. I was already writing another, and so I continued.
The sudden sound followed by the ragged volley of myriad cell gates indicated that the tier above had been opened and another day at Folsom had begun. Trash began cascading down as the convicts above trudged along the tier toward the center stairway. What was being opened was "behind the screen," the close custody section of #1 building. My tier was next. I pulled up the blankets without really making the bed. While buttoning my shirt, I was kicking trash toward the front of the cell, to be pushed out when the security bar went up. Nobody would care, I thought. Not about one day. A convict known fondly as "The Flea" (the public address system would call: "Flea, report to . . .") sleeps in his clothes in inches of tobacco grounds on grime-coated bedding with trash a foot deep on the floor. Once a month or so the guards clean him out. The Flea complains that they are taking his "personal" property. My half-made bed won't offend anyone's sensibilities in Folsom as it might in one of the new, showcase prisons.
Through the cell bars, two indoor fences, a set of larger bars on a narrow window, and yet another layer of wire, I can dimly see the granite block retaining wall at the base of a steep hill, on top of which is another fence with barbed wire and a gun tower, while out of sight beyond that is another wall with more gun towers.
Crash. The ban go up. I push the gate open and carry my shoes onto the tier. Cons are going by. Of the thirty men on this tier, at least half are doing life sentences or have been deemed habitual criminals. All five tiers have the same ratio. Joe Morgan, a name that California convicts should recognize from legend, likes to rib me that I'm the only guy doing a second-degree burglary who is "behind the screen."
Indio goes by with a barely perceptible limp, a quick smile of greeting and a pat on the arm. He spent several years on Death Row for killing a freeman in San Quentin who harassed him. He was already serving a term stretching to infinity and he wished, and still wishes, to be left alone. He leaves others alone.
A tall Muslim goes past with a permanently stern countenance. His partner waits for him at the end of the tier. Like all black Muslims, he is quiet and reserved, dresses neatly and follows a moral code John Calvin would approve. He, too, was on the row, but I do not know his crime and it would be an intrusion to ask.
Jerry O'Brien is struggling from his cell under the burden of half a dozen paintings for the spring art show. He paints twelve hours a day and is rapidly becoming good. It is a running joke that he is destined to become "The Painter of Folsom," like "The Birdman of Alcatraz," by the time he finishes his sentence. He killed a Torrance police officer in a robbery shootout (he was shot down years earlier while unarmed and on his hands and knees) and became the object of a vast manhunt. Captured in Utah and returned to Los Angeles, he was sentenced to die. On a penalty retrial, he represented himself and won a life sentence: no small feat for a layman. Yet his agony has just begun. Twenty-five or thirty years in prison is to execution like cancer to a heart attack, although a young man could serve twenty-five years and have a good life thereafter. Tall and gaunt, Jerry seems always in a hurry, which is unusual for Folsom, where everything is very slow. He hasn't slipped into the zombie-like trance necessary to carry such a load of time. Occasionally his eyes glaze as viscerally he realizes that Folsom is his universe, and the earliest parole he can hope for is decades hence. Even that cannot be expected.
Two young guards at tier's end are covered by a rifleman on the catwalk ten feet away beyond the two fences. All three are drowsy. The midnight to 8 a.m. shift is exhausting in its dullness. The guards sit screening mad and listening to sdence broken by clunking steam pipes.
The mess hall is a separate budding older than the cell house. It is joined to the latter by a solid steel door, so there is no need to go outside in order to eat. The arrangement of buddings is not for convict convenience, but because of the fog that sometimes blankets everything.
In the Michelin guide to California prisons, Folsom's food gets three and a half stars, although the quality has gone down in recent years since Pig Ryan retired. He thought the best way to keep convicts peaceful was to fatten them up. A man with a full belly is usually peaceful. San Quentin has the worst food in the prison system, but nothing compares in gastronomic horror with the Los Angeles Central Jad, where it is literally impossible to eat for days at a time. I lost forty pounds there between April and September. The curious aspect is that the Sheriff's Department spends a lot of money on jail food.
Convicts in Folsom eat quietly in a relaxed atmosphere. The tables are four-man setups bolted to the floor and with stools attached to them. Tables must be used in order, but not filled up. Most men have regular eating partners. I usually ate with two friends, but one was in the hospital and the other had gotten off maximum custody and changed cell houses. It left a gap. The convict world is so intimate, so totally without privacy, that in the beginning one aches to be alone. Time erodes that need until at last the opposite attitude dominates, so one doesn't like to be alone.
That morning I ate quietly, anxious to get to the yard. The route out is through the cell house with its perpetually gray light — another thing to which one becomes accustomed. Cells on the bottom tier are the same as all the others, and yet men there have different personalities. Men will build the semblance of a world wherever they are and whatever the conditions. In Folsom there were no rigid rules about cell decoration. Elsewhere, especially in the newer prisons, every cell was identical and had no decorations. But in Folsom it was said: "whatever you get to the cell is yours, including the Warden's carpet." It was an exaggeration tinctured with truth. Here's a cell stacked high with boxes of Colgate toothpaste, tubes of shaving cream, cans of pipe tobacco, boxes of candy bars, donuts and cigars — a whole canteen neatly on display. Sadly, all the containers are empty, a kind of pop art. Here's another cell so immaculate that the man takes off his shoes before he enters and doesn't sit on the bunk until time to go to bed.
Another cell has dolls and a pink qudt bedspread. Some are as bare and unkempt as a furnished room. One has photos of Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Huey Newton.
I turned through a short, wide tunnel, following men through an open gate into the yard. Beside the gate is a granite gatehouse, a checkpoint with coffee pot. Guards are lounging around. They have recendy been issued nightsticks, although Orwellian nomenclature now calls them "batons." (A club by any other name hurts just the same.) Resurrection of the practice of guards carrying weapons (the lead-tipped canes went to the museum in 1940) came after guards were killed in various prisons, although not yet in Folsom. San Quentin had a serious riot a year earlier, and racial wars had erupted in Tracy, Soledad and San Quentin.
In the bright morning light, I stop and look around. I don't wa
nt to stumble upon one of my few enemies. He might think it was a sneak attack and retaliate. The yard is mainly a square, though part of it wraps around #1 budding to a handball court, weightlifting area, two outdoor television sets and a marble ring. Marbles are gambled on like pool.
The square is somewhat larger than a medium-sized Softball field, an easy comparison because a softball diamond takes up 80 percent of the space. Foul balls off the left field line crash into the domino tables and the pitted asphalt basketball court in front of #1 budding. Out in deep field sits #16 tower, overlooking the yard and a fence with a gate outside the custody office. In #16 sits a guard called Tuesday Slim, and legend or myth says he is a champion marksman who can hit a sucker's heel at 150 yards. An additional four gun towers overlook the yard from various positions. They are not to guard the prison's perimeter; they are to keep order within the walls. None has a shot longer than fifty yards.
Most convicts are already at work, up the hill at the license plate factory, or down the hill the other way, but a couple of hundred numbered men still remain on the yard. Some pace back and forth along the left field line of the softball field. Other individuals, or groups, lounge against the adjustment center wall to bask in the warmth of the morning sun. The motorcycle clique is together.
Most blacks are around the basketball court and #1 building wall, more insular than they once were as racial troubles from other prisons and the streets creep into Folsom. But there is less tension here than in prisons for younger convicts. Too many men in Folsom have known each other since childhood. Motor (short for Motormouth) Buford is on his back in the middle of the basketball court, stamping his heels into the asphalt as he rolls from side to side, babbling and laughing too frantically for anyone to understand more than a fraction of what he's saying - but he makes them smile nonetheless. He has no enemies and many friends. He picked up a life sentence for killing Sheik Thompson, the most hated and most unbelievable man I've ever known. Sheik was some kind of throwback. If ever the term "animal" fit a human being, it had to be Sheik. When I first went to San Quentin, Sheik worked outside the walls at the rock quarry, making little ones from big ones. It was a mile from the walls, up a gentle grade — but still a grade. He jogged under a wooden yoke. When that got too easy, he put a 100-pound convict on his shoulders. He never weighed more than 170 pounds, yet on Labor Day, when San Quentin once held a track and field meet in the morning and a boxing card in the afternoon, Sheik would run the 440, 880 and mile in the morning. After lunch he would fight for the middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight tides. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but I cannot recall his ever being stopped. Sheik had no ears. They had been chewed off in a legendary fight. He and Albert Johnson, another black, had gotten into a fight behind #1 building. Three gun towers began shooting at them (California is the only prison system in America that shoots unarmed prisoners to break up fistfights the way you would use a water hose to separate fighting dogs) with 30.30s and 30.06s. Many shots were fired. They were hit several times apiece but kept fighting, kicking, biting, punching. Albert Johnson was hit in the testicles. He bit off Sheik's ears and swallowed them. Later, when the public address system asked for blood donors not one convict would give Sheik a drop. Albert Johnson had plenty of donors.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 37