Death Row Breakout

by Edward Bunker

  “Eddie, chill on that yelling or I’ll have to shut the tier down.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’m just keepin’ up morale.”

  “You start trial in a couple weeks, don’t you?”

  “Uh huh… in white man’s court…”

  “You never know what a jury will do. After all, the trial is in San Francisco… very liberal.”

  “We both know that the verdict will be guilty. Say, how come a brother like you works in a prison?”

  “I’ve got a family, and it’s a civil service job with benefits.”

  “So you don’t mind helpin’ whitey keep his boot on the black man’s neck.”

  “I don’t see it that way. Most of the brothers are in here for preying on black folks… including you.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I looked in your file. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you rob a black man’s liquor store?”

  “Yeah, I did. I was nineteen years old and I didn’t know any better. I wouldn’t do it now – and I damn sure wouldn’t sit and watch black men in a cage.”

  “I’d rather watch than be watched… and my kids won’t ever be on welfare.”

  “That’s good. I give that to you even if the Man has you brainwashed with his bullshit.”

  “Thanks, Eddie, even if Chairman Mao has you brainwashed into that communist bullshit.”

  Sylvester tapped his key on the cell bars as a goodbye and went about his routine patrol.

  Nobody on the tier knew about the pistol. He’d withheld the information for more than one reason. He was certain that none of them would tell the Man, but it was possible that one or more might confide to someone he trusted absolutely, and that someone might confide to someone else, and someone might want a parole more than a good name among his comrades. He’d been stung more than once by trusting some piece of garbage that he thought was solid. He hoped there was no betrayal this time, and he was trying to make sure there wouldn’t be. Still, the fuse was already ignited and he would have to be very careful before things exploded. The plan was fantastic, but John Dillinger had escaped with a soap gun blackened with shoe polish.

  He kneeled in the narrow space next to the bunk and extended his arms for another set of fingertip push-ups. This time he increased the tally to twenty-five. Oh, God, his forearms and fingers ached when he was through. He stood up and shook his arms to loosen them. Good. Should he answer mail or read a book? Every mail call brought a stack of letters. This morning he didn’t feel like it. A pistol meant for him was inside the walls. The initial exultation was now tinged with something like fear. No, it wasn’t fear.

  From the front came the click-clack of the locking device being turned, followed by a key turning a cell lock. Bartlett, one of two white convicts on the tier, was coming out to shower and exercise for an hour, which consisted of walking up and down the tier, one man at a time. Men on this half of the bottom never went to the small yard. They were in super maximum custody. Those on the second floor, a mixed bag of convicts, went outside. The top floor did not. It was Condemned Row #2. Bartlett resided in the first cell, and the shower was next to that, so a guard standing outside the grille could look in at an angle, or through a small observation window in the wall. Bartlett was forty something, which made him an old timer in a world where the average age was twenty-three. Crime and prison were games for young men. He was awaiting trial for bribing a guard to bring him drugs.

  Reading didn’t work. His mind refused to concentrate. Other thoughts pushed out the words, and the page might as well have been in Sanskrit. Maybe he could write a letter. He picked up the pile of letters he needed to answer. He received as much mail as everyone else put together, much of it religious, Christians wanting to save his soul by leading him to Christ. He discarded most of them after a paragraph or two. Some contained religious tracts, or a stamped envelope. Others sent him a few dollars. The prison censors confiscated any letter sympathetic to revolution, although a few got through proclaiming power to the people, the catchphrase of the moment. He knew there were sympathizers out there. Whenever they went to court in San Francisco, the streets nearby and the building corridors were flooded with erstwhile warriors, and the lawyers forwarded letters that arrived from around the world. The prison could open letters for contraband, but could not read nor interfere with anything written from a lawyer.

  The news that reached Eddie deep in the bowels of San Quentin was a distortion of reality, so he really believed revolution was underway. The bombs exploding on university campuses, American cities burning in the hot summers, these were all he saw from his worm’s eye view, just enough to support his delusion that Amerika was being overthrown by the colored peoples inside and outside.

  Paul Johnson, his sixteen-year-old brother, called “Boo” by both Eddie and Catherine, the oldest sibling, had been first in the visiting room. He was seated at the long table with the chin-high partition for almost an hour, looking at the entrance door whenever it started to open. The visiting room was half full, there was a buzz of conversation, and still no Eddie. It always took them a long time to deliver Eddie. He needed two guards for escorts, and they were not always available because of other duties, or so he had been told when he made enquiries.

  Finally, he came through the door. Boo smiled. His big brother managed to swagger even in handcuffs. He sat down on the bench across from Boo. “What’s shakin’, Boo?”

  “Nuttin’ but the trees,” Paul Johnson replied. “How you doin’?”

  “Tryin’ to stay strong in the belly of the beast.” “If anybody can, you can. Your book is doing good?”

  “Yeah… but they edited it and made it less revolutionary than I wanted it, y’know what I mean?”

  “I can dig it. When I read it, I thought, Man, this is my brother, but it ain’t all of Eddie.”

  “I’m starting another one… not letters, but what I really wanna say about overthrowing this fascist mess that runs things and keeps colored people down on the bottom. Whoever controls the means of production controls everything.

  “I’m not a bona fide Marxist scholar. I’ve been reading what I can get for about five or six years – and I know a few things. I’m a follower of Chairman Mao. You know what he said…?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “He said to be scared of the dragon when the prison gates open.”

  Paul nodded. “Oh yeah! I know where he’s comin’ from.”

  “You get that book I recommended?”

  “Which one? You tell me to read so many.”

  “The one by Debray, about urban guerrilla war?”

  “The book store ordered it for me.”

  “Did Jimmy C call you?”

  “The day after he got out. He’ll be in the courtroom for you.”

  Eddie nodded with a smile on his face.

  “That’s not the trial, is it?”

  “Just for hearing motions.”

  “How long you goin’ to let this show trial go on?”

  “Next week. All the world’s media will be there.”

  “I know,” Paul leaned closer and lowered his voice, simultaneously brushing his mouth so nobody could read his lips if they were trying. “I’m ready to make that move for you and whoever is with you. I got a fuckin’ arsenal of guns.”

  “Where’d you get ’em?”

  “Better you don’t know.”

  “You didn’t tell my lawyer? I don’t want her around when things go down.”

  “No. Hell no! Like I know about givin’ her some cover. She don’t need to know. We got to figure a way for her to stay home that day.”

  “I’m tellin’ Willy to be ready. You don’t have a signal I can give him?”

  “Man, when he checks me out in the audience, he’ll know to be ready, ‘cause the shit is comin’ down any minute.”

  “You’re more than a kid brother,” Eddie said slowly, nodding his head for further affirmation. “You done become a comrade.”
>
  “Come on with that, Big Brother.”

  “We gonna change things a little bit, a little, little bit, and when we fall, we leave our sword for someone to pick up.”

  When Paul stood up to leave, the correctional officer phoned the Yard Office and asked for two escorts. Paul went out and raising a clenched fist, “Power to the People,” he said, looking back – but he was a foot from the visiting room guard, at the exit door.

  Eddie went the other way, into an alcove about three feet long; then there was a solid steel door with a permanently fogged observation window. He knocked, still in handcuffs, and the old guard working between the gates peered through the window and unlocked the door. He was along in between the gates, but at the front exit gate were two or three guards behind steel straps that served as bars. Along both side-walls were benches bolted to the walls. Often it was empty, or nearly so, which is how he found it. The old guard motioned with a forefinger toward the bench on the other side of the corridor. It was next to a small pissoir. It ended at the knees and the shoulders. It only had a urinal. This was an all-male prison.

  The old guard looked through the small window to the Garden Beautiful inside the prison. The escorts were ten seconds away. “C’mon, Eddie. Your bodyguards are here.”

  He stood up wearing handcuffs, as the old guard opened the inner steel door and one of the escorts stuck his head in. “Ready, Eddie?” his reply was a nod and a step through the heavy steel gate into the bright warm sunlight. He momentarily closed his eyes and mentally photographed the scene and the sensations.

  “Move on, Eddie,” the lead escort said from behind.

  He walked head up, chest out, conscious that convicts were watching him from the second and third floor windows of the Adjustment Center – and from the crowd outside the chapel off to the right beyond the fishpond. He remembered some convict stealing a baby alligator from the education building and dropping it in the fishpond. Albert, the homicidal maniac (he wiped out his family) assigned to care for the fishpond went out of his mind. Convicts stayed away from the fishpond for a week. Albert was eyeing everyone suspiciously – and nobody wanted to be Albert’s chief suspect, and probably the ‘gator’s dessert. The memory was funny and Eddie choked back a laugh. The guards would think he was laughing at them.

  The Adjustment Center was a three-storey building on the left. The door was at the far end. The Adjustment Center was next to a redwood structure reminiscent of a smallish hot dog stand or coffee shop. It was the Yard Office, with glass walls so that people outside could look into the lieutenant’s office at the rear. The building that preceded this one had a back room notorious for the out-of-sight beatings that frequently occurred there.

  As often happened when Eddie returned from a visit, a white convict, about forty years old and elderly for prison, was seated with a book on a window ledge across the asphalt road from the Yard Office. He always looked up, watching Eddie cross the last thirty yards to the Adjustment Center door. They looked at each other and both gave the slight nod of acknowledgement. They reached the Adjustment Center door and an escort pushed the bell.

  “Who’s that convict back there?”

  “Which one?”

  “That white guy who is always reading right there?”

  “That’s Jimmy Farr. Yard Office Clerk.”

  The AC door opened and Eddie was ushered in. Now he had to strip for a skin search.

  The shadows moving across the concrete floor could tell the approximate time of day. When the shadows crossed a crack in the concrete, the food cart was due. When the front gate opened, Eddie began doing four sets of twenty-five push-ups, as the food cart moved from cell to cell. Eddie finished both the push-ups and the meal by the time the cart reached the last cage and came back to the front on the way out. It would go to the cages on the other side, where the militant whites and chicanos were locked up next to each other. There were no hostilities between them. Many knew each other from the vast interlocked barrios of East Los Angeles where they lived side-by-side. They even wore identical tattoos from the same street gangs: White Fence, Hazard, El Hoyo Mara, Tortilla Flats, Clanton, Temple Street and dozens more. Lately they follow the blacks in the formation of a super-gang that superseded all the others.

  He could hear the unique sound of spoons scraping the last scraps of food. Scott called out, “Hey, Eddie, wha’s up, man? Was that youngblood come to see you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Willy Easter was far down the tier. “Scott,” he said, “ask Eddie if ‘blood had a message for me.”

  “Tell him yeah. Everything is all right,” Eddie called.

  “I heard him,” said Willy. “I’ll run it by him tomorrow when I get out to shower.”

  “Tell him that’s cool,” Eddie called.

  “Eddie says that’s cool,” Scott relayed.

  “Right on! Right on! Right on!” he said excitedly, imagining his moment a few days away. Someone in an adjacent cell would have heard him snorting and grunting as he shadowboxed with the same slippery grace as when he danced. He’d come through the gate at age twenty, having been caught taking someone’s El Dorado by looking mean and asking for it. Now he remembered and grinned. He sure did put white folks off their feed.

  Willy heard the front gate open one cell away. He looked between the bars and saw the young bull (what the old timer convicts called them) coming in with the “clicker” to count the bodies one by one, and distribute an armload of mail.

  “Hey, Eddie!” Willy yelled, “you got another bag of mail on the way.”

  Willy got one letter, from his lawyer, and the other cells got from none to four. Eddie had thirteen letters and everyone thought it was hilarious.

  Except Spotlight Edison in the last cell; #17. “I’ll be a dirty motherfucker,” he cursed vehemently. “You got fifty bitches writing you goat mail. Me, I ain’t got shit. If they killed and buried me under this big greasy motherfucker, ain’t nobody would ever ask one damn question about where I was.”

  “Quit snivelin’, punk,” Eddie retorted. “You’re with me in the revolution.”

  “Revolution! Shit! They got us buried in this fucker. They wanna send us to the gas chamber… especially you, Eddie.”

  “Leave me alone. I’m reading my mail.”

  “You get anything from Angel?” That was the nickname both had given to the beautiful young black woman who had appeared frequently in the courtroom; always smiling at Eddie.

  His answer was a grunt. He was immersed in Angel’s words:

  “…had never seen a black man in chains until I saw you stand in front of that white judge, white district attorney, white lawyers, white cops, and almost all white people in the audience. You stood tall and proud as a king, or Jesus. I wanted to stand beside you and face the world as one. Rest assured that you will have support on the next appearance. Power to the People. A…”

  He read it twice and put it over his face, savoring her odor. Although he would never admit it to anyone, he had never made love to a woman. There had been a gangbang on a stupid girl who had ventured down the wrong alley in the neighborhood to get drugs, but Eddie’s reaction was disgust rather than arousal. He stopped the others and, in fact, helped the girl straighten her clothes before taking her almost home. He didn’t go to the door for obvious reasons.

  From the front came the sound of the cell control box being opened and a door opening, “Exercise, one hour, McGinnis!”

  “That be me, boss man. Comin’ on out.”

  The cell gate slid shut, followed by the rattle of the control panel and the spraying shower water. Eddie had heard it all.

  With the background sound of the shower, he finished going through his mail. When the shower stopped, McGinnis appeared outside the gate. “Hey now, Eddie.”

  “Wha’s up, homes?”

  “I need a favor. An important one. I need you to call me as a witness. I need to see someone in court.”

  “Can you tell me what’s so important?”


  “I gotta get to the pay phone in the bullpen and call my old lady. She done got herself knocked up and thinks I’ll hate the baby. She’s planning on getting an abortion. We ain’t married, so they won’t let her visit me. Fuck all that. They be killin’ too many black babies all around the world.”

  “Yeah. No bullshit about that.”

  Later, the guard rattled the cell gate from the control box in front and called out, “Shower and exercise, Johnson!”

  “Rack it. Comin’ out.”

  The cell gate slid out on rollers. He stepped onto the tier, wearing shorts, shower thongs and a towel draped around his neck. He swaggered along the cells, giving each some salute or wink. At Willy’s gate he stopped and leaned close to the bars, ignoring the guard who immediately called for him to keep moving.

  “Add McGinnis to the list,” he told Easter.

  “Ahh, man, I dunno if I can.”

  “You can. Just do it. If the lawyer won’t go for it, you tell the judge that it is necessary.”

  The guard began banging the bars of the front gate.

  He went into the first cell, which had been converted to a shower. He disappeared into the steam rolling out.

  *

  It was Willy Dupree’s trial day. Eddie was being taken to court with him as a potential witness. All hell had broken loose the day before, when the smuggled pistol had been discovered by a white prisoner on garbage detail. Seeing it as a sure ticket out of prison, the con turned it into the first bull in sight, not knowing that it had been Eddie’s ticket out of jail.

  He’d told Willy to look for Paul’s signal. If this was the day they would be breaking out he did not want them to leave him behind in the holding cell.

  The security in the move to the courthouse was extraordinarily tight. Scott was coming to court, too. He was Willy’s alibi.

  When the motorcade left the prison, a bystander might have thought that the Governor or the President was passing through. Two police cars with lights and sirens blaring led the way followed by three cars filled with armed guards with screened off back seats, each of the three carrying one prisoner. Bringing up the rear was another carload of guards and a roving motorcycle that kept other cars from passing or cutting in. When the convoy reached the courthouse, it was met by a crowd of boisterous protestors, some carrying signs, all loud and pugnacious, cheering loudly as each prisoner was taken from the vehicle and hustled into the building.