by Rick Reilly
He took us into Angola’s lethal-injection chamber. Death was so present in that room, on you like a fog, that it immediately brought Hop Sing’s cookies about two-thirds up. It was a cinder-block room, maybe ten feet by fifteen feet, with the killing table laid out like a crucifix. There were six belts up and down the length of the table and more belts for the arms and hands. There was even a small pillow for the man’s head. After all, what if he gets a stiff neck? There was a little square hole that led into another room, where the doctors dispense the sodium thiopental. This way they don’t have to see the man they’re killing. All of this is watched from a room with about twelve chairs through one-way glass.
“It takes about a minute and a half for the drugs to kill the man,” Cain said. “They usually take two breaths and they’re gone. And then it’s another four minutes for the heart to stop. But sometimes they’ll surprise you. One ol’ boy took his two breaths and we thought he was dead. And then, all of a sudden, he rose up and said ‘Wow!’”
The warden holds their hand through the whole process. (“Now, if it was an electric chair, I wouldn’t do that,” he said.) Once the juice is flowing, he tells the man he has about ninety seconds and would he like to say one last thing? One man said, “Yeah, tell my lawyer he’s fired.”
I asked Cain if he’s for the death penalty.
He tilted his ball cap back on his head and thumbed his rosy chin awhile and said, “Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned is it’s all about the jury and your lawyers. O.J. proved that money gets you off. You know the inmate who served you the cookies? He’s done worse than what some of the men who died here have done, but it’s all about the jury. The older I get, the less I know for sure.”
I asked about the red phone on the wall.
“That’s for the governor,” he said. “There’s a code word he’s got to use. That way we don’t get any tricks. One time it was ‘Exodus.’”
They use a generator so protesters can’t cut the power. At one point, we heard an odd noise and Cain said, “That’s the governor on the generator.” And it made me think that sound could make for a terribly awkward moment some grisly day. The doomed man would be about to get the lethal dose when he’d hear an odd noise.
Doomed Inmate: What was that?
Warden: Oh, that was just the governor.
Doomed Inmate: The governor! Am I pardoned?!?
Warden: Oh, sorry. No, no. I meant the governor on the generator. My bad. OK, boys, hit it.
I could see TLC starting to turn white, so I asked if maybe we could get some fresh air. On the way out, yet another murderer, about fifty-five, was holding a taped-up box.
“Warden, can I borrow your knife?” the man said to Cain.
“Sure!” Cain said, happily handing over his gleaming six-inch pocketknife.
Inside my brain, I remarked, “Good Jesus!”
But the convict simply took the knife, opened the box, and handed it back to the warden.
I really needed a drink.
The next day was the biggie—the prison rodeo/craft fair—and if this isn’t the weirdest craft show a person can go to, it’ll do until one comes along.
First of all, how many craft fairs do you go to where, at the entry gate, they check under your car with a mirror, check in your trunk, and shine a flashlight on your floorboards? Inside was even stranger. Women with handbags were discussing clasps with guys who may have shot women in cold blood. Parents were putting their toddlers on ponies, to be led around a horse ring by grizzled men who may have fondled toddlers.
Sure was nice stuff, though. TLC and I bought two gorgeous oak rockers and a table from a guy doing life for armed robberies. We paid, get this, $200. Just before I gave him the cash, though, I took TLC aside and said, “Yeah, but what if this guy never ships them?” And she looked at me for a second and said, “Where’s he gonna go?”
Good point.
Inside the rodeo arena made my collar a little itchy, too. There was a whole stanchion of medium-security convicts who were kept separate from the rest of the crowd by a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence, like jackals at a zoo. The competing convicts were in a kind of holding pen, too, just above the bull chutes. They wore jeans and old-fashioned wide-striped black-and-white prison uniforms, à la O Brother Where Art Thou? There were plenty of guards, but still no guns. Every time a convict cowboy was introduced they added his hometown, which always drew whistles and hoots of joy. I couldn’t quite understand that. “Lexington! Whoo-hoo! That’s our rapist! Go get ’em, Lexington!!”
One thing I now know about a prison rodeo, there will be blood, and it flowed from the first minute. The first event was Bust Out and eight bulls came flying out of their chutes with eight wildly clueless convicts trying to hang on. Most didn’t. Immediately, out of chute 2, a convict fell hard and then, to our horror, had his head stomped on by the bull who’d just come out of chute 3. Honestly, it couldn’t have taken ten seconds. Then, in the madness of thirty-two hooves stamping and flying and kicking and bodies flying hither and yon, two convicts came out and tried to drag the poor guy off. They looked like soldiers trying to pull a buddy out of Vietcong fire. They finally got him into an ambulance, bound for a hospital in New Orleans. This was bad. The guy was too smashed up for the prison hospital. As the ambulance pulled out, I noticed the eyes on some of the convict cowboys get huge, followed by swallows, followed by quickly turning back to the action to steel themselves. I’ve seen that same look at professional bull-riding events. Fear strikes deep, whether there’s a number on your back or not.
Pinball was nearly as mad as Bust Out. The bull came out and, much to his great delight, found eight convicts in front of him, standing inexplicably steadfast in hula hoops. He snorted. They didn’t move. He pawed the dirt. They didn’t move. He drooled. They forgot to breathe. He looked like a tornado happening upon a trailer park.
He began with the man closest to him, who wouldn’t leave his hoop and therefore took a vicious blow into the gut and out of the contest. Then the bull aimed itself at a second man, who—the image of Man No. 1 fresh in his mind—picked the hoop up around his midsection and ran. Nice idea, but disqualified nonetheless. The third man, no idiot, ran for his life and got gored anyway. Man No. 4 was either one of the bravest men I’ve ever seen or dumber than a sockful of nails. He took a hit and still wouldn’t leave his hoop. Perhaps he misunderstood the rules, but he just formed himself into a little ball and kept getting butted by the bull, who got in four big licks before the clowns dragged the poor bastard off. Seeing that, Men 5 through 7 ran like hell when the bull merely looked at them. That left Man No. 8, Otis Strother. The bull never bothered Mr. Strother. I’m not sure the bull knew Mr. Strother even existed. Strother did nothing more than convince his size 12s not to leave their immediate vicinity. The moment No. 7 ran, Strother sprinted off right behind him, arms raised, joyous and free. The exhausted bull seemed glad to be shooed back to the pen, like a fat man at the end of All You Can Eat Night.
The Wild Cow Milking was won by a team led by probably the best cowboy in the prison, a fiercely blue-eyed convict named Dan Cook, forty, who was so handsome it was shocking, and who stared at you so intently you had to take a half-step back. If ever a man looked like a killer, it was Dan Cook. His face was covered in dirt and his ribs wrapped in tape. He was in Year 19 of a 125-year sentence for murder and robbery and seemed happy with it. “I belong here,” he said, staring a hole right through me. “I hurt innocent people. I belong in here, not out there. What I did was senseless.”
OK, then! Everybody’s happy! Gotta go!
I looked up to see Q-Tip trying to ride a renegade bronco in the Wild Horse Race. He couldn’t and twisted his knee doing it—had to be helped off—yet he refused to be seen by the doctors. “Too much money left out there,” he said.
There must’ve been fifteen or twenty guys like that, aching and bleeding, but not leaving. I couldn’t help watching one of them—a crew-cut, big-eared, skinny-as-a-2-iron
kid who was doubled over in pain. His buddy was leaning over him, trying to get him to go to the ambulance, but the kid kept shaking his head. He was a twenty-two-year-old lifer from Louisiana—James Turner—who got himself kicked in Wild Cow Milking, then got stomped in the chest and legs in the bull dogging. “Why not get in the ambulance?” I asked him. I had to put my ear next to his mouth to hear him gasp the answer. “Trying to send my mom some money. (Inhale.) She got no place to live. (Spit.) She’s just going from home to home. People’s houses. (Inhale.) She’s goin’ blind. (Gasp. Pause.) My dad died last year. (Wince.) I gotta.”
He’d wind up with $230 for the day. And two cracked ribs.
The crowd’s favorite event was Guts ’n’ Glory, which is like nothing anybody’s invented this side of the Aztecs. This is the deal where fifty convicts get in the ring and try to get the nerve up to snatch the $500 chip fastened between the bull’s horns. The bull was part furious, part panicked to be hunted by them. A bull cornered is not a pretty thing. It flipped at least five convicts in the air and flat-out ran over the haircuts of ten more. They chased that bull from one end of the ring to the other. They’d have it cornered and the bull would finally have no choice but to just come rip-snorting through them like a bowling ball through pins.
But then came Edward (ET) Trotter, thirty-eight, the best chip snatcher in all of Louisiana. Trotter’s technique is the soundest and absolutely stupidest of all. He lets the bull run over him. But instead of covering his face and body as he’s being trampled, ET reaches up, grabs hold of the rope, and snatches the chip as the beast drags him along under him. And this is exactly what ET did. He got three feet in front of the bull, challenging it to charge, and when it did, started backpedaling as fast as he could until the bull overtook him. As he fell, he grabbed the rope between his horns and hung on. The bull was head-butting him along the ground, dirt was filling ET’s mouth and eyes, and yet his left hand was holding the rope while the right was loosening the chip. And he got it! When the bull was finally rid of him, ET stood up, raised his red right hand, and showed the crowd the chip.
“Man, that was a strong bull—strong and young,” ET said, bloody and dirty and proud. “I just knew I couldn’t panic. When he hit me, I made sure I was in the right spot to grab, but it [the chip] was tied on really tight. I really had to pull on it!” I looked at his left hand and there was a three-inch flap of skin laid open by the rope. Just to repeat: The man purposely let a bull run over him so that—while being trampled—he could reach up and grab a chip off its forehead. Who does that? ET does that. He not only won the $500 but Warden Cain gave him another $100 for bravery.
And yet even ET won’t do bull poker. “Now that’s suicide.”
Speaking of which, this is the way the draw went down for it:
Seat 1: Robert (Rocky) Stewart, twenty-nine, in for murder from Natchitoches, La. Bull poker didn’t seem to scare him any. “My mom asked why I’d compete in somethin’ so dangerous and I tole her, ‘Mom, I’m gonna die in Angola. The only rushes I’m gonna get are the ones I go after.’”
Seat 2: Q-Tip, bum knee and all.
Seat 3: Leonard Favre, thirty-nine, Bay St. Louis, Miss. In his three career attempts at bull poker he’d been tossed around like lunch meat three times. “One time a bull slung me way up in the air,” Favre said. “That was a rush! Mostly, though, it feels like gettin’ hit by a dang car.”
Seat 4: Mathew Nightingale, from north San Francisco, twenty-seven, a two-time bull poker winner. One year his sisters came to watch and left crying. Now nobody comes for him. Good thing. His back would be to the chute.
The four started putting in their mouthpieces and flak jackets, which were allowed for this event only. They were led out to the little red card table and red chairs. Each man was handed oversize novelty cards, about eight inches high, mostly kings and aces. Didn’t matter. Cards are to bull poker what plot is to porn. As they waited for the bull to come out of the chute, the announcer said, “Only the lady who does their laundry knows how scared they are.”
They sat absolutely stiff. They didn’t even blink. The crowd held its breath. The chute opened. The bull exploded out and bee-lined straight for Nightingale. Favre only had time to say, “Here he co—” when the bull blew up Nightingale like a roman candle. It hit Nightingale so hard that he went flying straight through the table and straight through Favre. EMTs untangled the two of them and pulled them out, leaving Rocky and Q-Tip sitting like stones in their chairs, sans table.
I asked Favre what happened. “I can’t remember,” he said with a thousand-mile look in his eyes. “What happened? Something hit me in the head. I …? Do you …? I can’t remember.”
Later, Nightingale would remember too well. “That was a new bull. Never seen it before. I looked at the guy across from me [Q-Tip] and I heard, ‘Here—’ and then I got hit. I never had a chance to even brace. I never been hit by a bull that hard. I went flying into the other guy, Leonard. Hit him really hard with my elbow. It musta knocked me eight to ten feet. I started to panic ’cause I couldn’t breathe. That’s a little scary.”
OK, so maybe back to the chute isn’t the best seat.
In the midst of all that, the other two men sat in their chairs. Didn’t move. Men being launched right in front of their eyes and they hardly flinched.
Rocky mumbled: “It’s just me and you, Tip.” Q-Tip didn’t say a word. Maybe he was thinking about his bed. The bull circled back around, stopped about fifty feet away, and just stared at the two men, holding their cards. Rocky’s back was mostly to the bull and Q-Tip’s front was mostly to it. The bull must’ve thought what we all thought, which was: “Those idiots are still sitting there?”
The bull dug up the dirt a few times, lowered his head, and came straight for Rocky, who wouldn’t budge. “I began to prepare for the hit,” Rocky said, “’cause I figured I was right in his line.” And it seemed like the bull was going to knock Rocky clear to Biloxi, but at the last second, it veered, missed Rocky by not more than three inches, and smashed right into Q-Tip—and through Q-Tip—pitching him chair over hat five or six feet.
It was just a second before Rocky finally sprung from his chair, the victor. Maybe he couldn’t believe it as much as the crowd couldn’t believe it. He’d been spared for no rhyme or reason. He won simply because he hadn’t chickened out, as any right-thinking man would have. He knew he was going to be walloped by a 2,000-pound bull running full speed and yet he didn’t run. It’d be like sitting on the Dan Ryan Expressway and waiting to be hit by a Toyota Tundra.
He sprinted to the prisoners’ pen, waving to the crowd, acknowledging the raucous roars of approval, like a gladiator leaving behind a floor of dead lions.
“I never thought about running, not once,” Rocky said triumphantly. “You gotta push it to the edge. No limits. You sacrifice and take the lick to win. It hurts a little while, but not for long.”
All of which begged this question: Rocky Stewart was in Angola in the first place for shooting a twenty-one-year-old girl named Wendi Long in the back of the head, twice, after she slapped his face after what he called “rough sex.” So getting smashed by a bull only “hurts a little while,” but getting slapped by a 120-pound girl hurts enough to fire two bullets into her skull?
It was all befuddling to Wendi Long’s dad, Luke. He was amazed to hear of Rocky’s heroics, amazed to hear about the silver belt buckle, amazed to hear about the money he won.
“He raped and murdered Wendi, lied about it, and dumped her body on the side of the road,” Luke Long said from his home in Coushatta, La. “We were months looking for her. When we found her, she was just a skeleton. There was no DNA evidence to prove the rape, so we couldn’t go for a death penalty. He [the district attorney] said he’d do hard labor. I pictured him out there in chains, busting rocks. I didn’t know that someone who raped and murdered an innocent person would get to ride in a rodeo. That don’t sound like hard labor to me.”
Guess who’s not coming
to the banquet?
4
The Three-Mile Golf Hole
If I told you that you could take a 19 on a single golf hole and it would take you five hours to finish that golf hole and at the end of it, you would be so happy you would French-kiss a fat man, would you believe me?
If not, then you’ve never been to Socorro, New Mexico, a patch of cactus and rattlers an hour south of Albuquerque. Socorro is famous for two things: (1) the world’s only three-mile-long golf hole, and (2) blowing stuff up.
They do both on Mt. Socorro, and it has slightly more explosions than Fallujah. It’s the home of New Mexico Tech, which conducts antiterrorist demolition research for the Department of Defense. They build fake factories, stores, and schools and then blow them to Bejesus and back, using every assortment of letter, car, and backpack bomb you can dream up. The ground in town is constantly trembling. Someday, the gas station is going to blow up in Socorro and nobody’s going to notice for three days.
One day a year and one day only, they stop the bombing and do something a little more dangerous. They play a one-hole golf tournament from the 7,243-foot top of Mt. Socorro to the thirty-foot hole at the bottom. And I mean straight down the mountain. So straight down the mountain that every year somebody has to be carried off the face, unless they come off in a chopper, which has happened a few times. Those are the lucky ones. Others go sliding down the shale, land in cactus, cut themselves on jagged rock, tumble down rock faces, and collapse of heat exhaustion under the pitiless New Mexico sun. Still, it’s more fun than the British Open.
It’s called the the Elfego Baca Golf Shoot. It’s one hole—over 5,300 yards long—it takes half a day to play it, and by the time you’re done, the thing you will most want to shoot is yourself, for ever agreeing to do the stupid thing.
Naturally, I signed up.
Elfego Baca was a nineteen-year-old Socorro sheriff who single-handedly took on a mob of desperadoes back in 1884. He chased them down, got trapped, held himself up in an abandoned adobe house for two days, waited for the mob to fire off all their 4,000 rounds, then came out and arrested them. Four thousand wasted shots? That’s what a golf tournament is, right?