Pantano was being transferred too, and on the following morning the two of us were chained together and taken out to the prison van. A bunch of inmates were gathered at the fence to watch us. I spotted John among them, and he saluted me with a raised fist.
I wouldn’t see him again for four years.
I saw Van Meter a lot sooner than that. Not long after I got to M City, as it was known to everybody there, another few guys were transferred from Pendleton and he was one of them. He hadn’t been there a week when we crossed paths in the yard and got into it on the spot, rolling on the ground and trying to strangle each other. We both got a week in the hole. Then we were assigned to separate cell blocks and rarely saw each again. Whenever we did, we pretended not to.
Somebody once said that stone walls do not a prison make, but as Fat Charley pointed out, you throw in a few dozen armed guards and a general lack of the social amenities and by Jesus you’ve got something.
Most of the unpleasant things about imprisonment are fairly obvious, but, believe me, if you’ve never been inside the walls you can’t begin to imagine the boredom. The days plod one after the other like prisoners on a chain. You can see time going by on a calendar, you can see it in the change of seasons. You can feel the time passing. But you’re doing the same things day after day, and so there’s nothing to distinguish one day from another. Red used to say he’d been sentenced to only one day in prison, but the catch was that the day would be twenty-five years long.
One way to break the monotony of prison routine is to refuse to cooperate with its rules. Refuse often enough and strongly enough and they label you an incorrigible. At M City the incorrigibles were called Red Shirts, and not only was I one of them, I was the youngest and the best known, if I do say so myself. We went out of our way to make things tough for the hacks and didn’t care that they could make things even tougher for us. The worst punishment they could give you was a beating and a stretch in solitary. They’d hit you with radiator hoses or some thick book like a catalog or a dictionary so as not to mark you up too badly in case you died on them and some outside doctor should happen to examine your remains. At M City just the threat of a beating was enough to keep most cons in line, and for most of the guys who ever went to the hole one trip was enough.
That’s how it was for my old partner Earl. He’d been in solitary at M City only once—he got two days for talking during a silent period and then arguing with the guard who wrote him up—and he told me he’d do whatever it took to keep from ever going into the hole again. That’s when I realized how much the beating at the Kokomo jailhouse had taken out of him. He was trying to be a Good Convict and make an early parole. I can’t deny that Earl was a disappointment to me at M City, but he’d been a loyal partner and that counts for plenty, and so I always stuck up for him if he got in a scrape with other convicts. Besides, he was Mary’s brother.
Speaking of Mary, I’d exchanged one or two letters with her while I was at Pendleton and she continued to write to me after I went to M City. She came to visit me and Earl as often as she could, which was only every six weeks or so, since she had to take a day off from her job, plus scrape up the dough for the long bus trip and a hotel room for the night. Her mother had kicked out her bum husband Burke and filed for divorce, and money was tighter than ever. On every visit she brought me goodies of some kind she baked herself. But every now and then when she’d show up, Earl would have to tell her I couldn’t see her because I was in the hole, and she’d be furious with the prison.
My mother and father had also often driven up from Indianapolis during my first year in the pen. Then they moved to a farm a few miles outside of Leipsic, Ohio, which was even farther from M City than Indytown was. After they made the trip twice in a row only to find out I was in solitary both times, I persuaded them not to come anymore. I told my mother to settle for writing me letters, and she did, twice a week without fail.
The only other visitor I had was Pearl Elliott. She came to see me and Earl every two weeks and always saw to it that neither of us was short of money for cigarettes and stuff. The Side Pocket was turning a steady dollar and her trade in license plates and phony documents was going well, and so she’d quit doing driving jobs, figuring they weren’t worth the risk anymore.
It didn’t take long for Earl to realize I was the main reason Pearl came to visit. He told me he’d never seen her look so down in the mouth as whenever he had to tell her I was in the hole.
The hole—oh man. I got put in the hole more often than anybody else and I did the longest stretches. Name a rule and I broke it.
Those solitary confinement cells felt like coffins in comparison to the regular six-by-nine cages in the main cell houses. The only way a guy my size could lie down was curled up, which is how you would’ve done it anyway, to try to keep warm, because you were naked and without a blanket. There was a low-watt bulb in a steel-mesh recess in the ceiling and they kept it turned on twelve hours a day. The other twelve hours you were in darkness as black as a tar pit. There was a tapered hole in the concrete floor for you to do your business in. That hole in the floor is what you never forget about solitary confinement at M City. Each time you went in the hole the stink seared your throat and made your eyes water. After a few days you’d almost get used to it. Then the next time you got sent to the hole the stench seemed worse than before.
They gave you a small half loaf of bread and a quart of water a day, shoving it in through a little gate at the foot of the cell door. Rather than eat the bread, some of us would use it for a pillow. A lot of people would be surprised at how long you can go without food, and how easily. Once you get past the first few days, you even stop being hungry. It’s mostly a matter of will. You will yourself not to break, no matter what.
There were two main tricks to doing time in the hole. One was to occupy your mind with some particular thing the whole time you were in there—naming the players on every major league team, trying to remember the exact detail of some house you’d lived in, things like that. The other, which was harder to do but often more effective, was to think of nothing at all, to go into a kind of trance for as much of the time as you could. There were occasional distractions of course, mainly the cockroaches and the rats that came up out of the waste hole to get at your bread after the light went out.
I’d been to the hole a half-dozen times before I managed to catch a rat. The bastard bit me good before I crushed it to death and my hand swelled up like I was wearing a winter glove. I thought I’d get the plague or some god-awful thing, but after a week the hand didn’t hurt anymore, and a week after that it was almost back to normal size. Anyhow, the day after I got the rat, when the guard opened the little gate to pass in my bread and water, I said Here’s a snack for you, pal, and shoved the thing out through the gate. Its eyes were bugging out and its bloody mouth was open and full of blue gut. Judging by the sound, I’d say if the hack didn’t puke he came close to it.
That was your trump card, see—showing them you could take anything they dished out. Each trip to the hole was another chance to show them you could take it better than they ever could.
My longest lockups were for trying to escape. M City had a rep as a tough joint to break out of. I saw guys try all sorts of ways but only twice did anybody make it beyond the walls. In the first case three guys busted out and a few days later were spotted running into a cornfield. The cops set the field on fire and drove them out and recaptured them, one with half his face burned off. In the second instance two cons went over the wall and were found in some hick burg three days later. They were breaking into a hardware store in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when a pair of cops showed up. They tried to run for it and the cops shot them dead. The cons were still in their prison grays. After each of those breaks, M City of course made changes to prevent the same sort from being repeated.
My first attempt was really dopey. I hid in a truckload of laundry. They laughed at me for a fool when they checked the truck at the gate an
d found me. I got a beating and a week in the hole.
The next time, Joe Pantano and Russell Clark were with me. We jumped two guards outside the tin shop, gagged them and wired their hands behind them, and then Russell and I put on their uniforms and led Pantano toward the administration building like we were escorting a prisoner. We were halfway there when one of the hacks we’d trussed up came running in his underwear, squealing through the gag like a pig at slaughtering time, his hands still behind him. We kept on walking and the guards on the wall yelled for us to halt and bam-bam, here came the warning shots. One of the bullets ricocheted off the walkway and hit Pantano in the throat, and he went down. They yelled to put our hands up or they’d blow our heads off. We stood there with our hands up high while the guards came running and Pantano lay there quivering with his hands at his bloody neck, making gargling noises for about a half-minute before he died.
They hauled me and Russell off to the guardhouse and beat each of us in turn and clapped us in solitary for two weeks. There was talk that the warden was going to try to get us charged with murder, saying we were responsible for Pantano’s death, but nothing came of it.
I didn’t get another chance at escape until a bunch of inmates tried to pull a work strike. This was around the time of the stock market crash, when guys in suits were jumping out of thirty-story windows because they couldn’t bear to go on living without being rich. The hacks went charging into the strikers with their clubs swinging, and in the midst of the brawl Russell and I snuck away and made it to the roof of one of the factory buildings. We figured we could jump from building to building until we got to the wall. But as we ran across the first rooftop we were spotted by the tower guards and bam, a round glanced off a chimney near my head and a brick fragment hit me in the eyeball and turned it red as a tomato for a month. A hack with a bullhorn said to drop down on our bellies or we were dead.
We got another beating and another stretch in the hole, except this time Russell managed to break loose of the guards holding him against the wall and he gave them a fight to remember. He broke one hack’s arm and knocked out another’s front teeth and nearly throttled another before the whole crew came running in and pinned him down. The day captain of the guards—a huge liver-lipped bastard named Albert Evans who weighed nearly three hundred pounds—then banged on Russell so bad I thought he’d killed him. Russ didn’t regain consciousness for two days.
Evans had given me my worst beatings too. The inmates called him Big Bertha behind his back, but Russell and I called him that to his face. Russell swore he was going to settle Evans’s hash, but I said not unless he beat me to him.
A word about Russell. He was always a tough number, one of the toughest at M City. Today…well, let’s say he’s changed, but I’ll get to that later.
He was a little older than me and nearly as tall. He had thick black hair and was impressively strong. He was doing a twenty-year stretch for bank robbery. He said he grew up in Detroit and joined the Marines when he was a kid, but some sergeant kept getting on his back and he’d had to clobber the bastard—and accidentally blinded him in one eye while he was at it. He did six months in the brig and got booted with a dishonorable discharge. He had a job in a car plant for a while, but it wasn’t long before he’d had enough of working for wages and being bossed around by fools, so he took up the gun and went into business for himself.
He had a longtime girlfriend named Opal Long who lived in Chicago and often came to see him at M City on visiting days. Her family name was Wilson but she’d got married young to a guy called Long and kept his name when they divorced. I saw her for the first time when Russ and I were seated next to each other in the visiting room one time and he was talking to Opal through the grill while I talked to Mary. She was a big hefty girl with darker red hair than Mary’s and one of the best smiles I’ve ever seen. It was also Russell’s first look at Mary, and after the visit he said he was surprised a guy as homely as Earl Northern could have such a pretty sister. I said I thought Opal had a pretty face too. He said yes she did, even though she was never going to be mistaken for a calendar girl, not with her build. He sometimes called her Mack, short for Mack Truck. In days to come, he’d now and then grab that ample ass of hers with both hands and say how much he liked a woman with some meat on her. She loved it when he did that, and she’d laugh along with the rest of us and wag her big behind like a happy dog.
A couple like Russ and Opal is one more example of how funny life can be. Russell’s a good-looking guy who could have his pick of gorgeous girls, and yet he’s been with Opal ever since I’ve known him. As far as I know, he’s never cheated on her and I’m not saying that to cover for a pal. Now he’s doing life and isn’t likely to get paroled anytime soon, if ever, and I hear she still comes to visit him every week. No doubt she’ll wait for him as long as it takes.
Which by the way Mary did not. Wait, I mean. While I was in M City she got married. I hadn’t had a letter from her in more than a month and hadn’t seen her for almost two, and I was getting worried. Then one Sunday she showed up to tell me she’d married some guy named Dale Kinder.
All I could think to say at that moment was Dale?—what the hell kind of name for a guy is Dale?
To make it even more unreal, the Dale guy’s father was an Indianapolis police sergeant. The wedding had taken place two weeks earlier and she’d already given the news to Earl in a letter, but she’d asked him not to say anything about it to me because she wanted to tell me herself.
I won’t deny the news hit me hard. She was wearing a blue dress and her hair was shorter and lighter than the last time I’d seen it. She looked so gorgeous I could hardly breathe. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much she meant to me.
She wanted me to know she’d married Kinder because he’d asked her to and she didn’t want to wither on the vine, as she put it, and which, at the rate I was going, was what would happen to her before I ever got paroled.
I didn’t say it, but I had to wonder how much her decision had been influenced by the fact that her little sister had already been married four years—never mind that her hubby hadn’t been around for the past three-and-a-half. At sixteen Margo had got hitched to some strong-arm who a few months later went to prison on a ten-year jolt. Jesus, those Northern girls could pick them.
Mary said I’d never given her cause to think she should wait for me. Oh sure, I’d said I loved her, but that’s not the same as asking somebody to wait.
I said yeah, when she was right she was right.
What did I expect her to do, she said, a girl has to watch out for herself.
I told her I understood and no hard feelings, and I wished her the best of luck. I really thought I’d never see her again. When I got back to the cell house I threw up.
The next break I tried was with a skeleton key I’d made on the sly in the welding shop. It was month after month of trial and error on my cell door lock, of constantly reshaping the key and trying it on the lock again. Then one night I put my arm through the bars and tried the key for the millionth time and…clunk…the lock opened.
Oh baby, I heard Russell whisper from his adjoining cell.
I relocked the door and hid the key in a corner crevice of the cell, and the next day Russ and I talked things over with Red and Fat Charley and some of the other guys in our bunch.
There were a few hardcases at M City who rarely got in fights or caused any trouble but who everybody knew you didn’t chivvy with, and Red and Charley were prime examples. Charley was from Ohio. He was in his early forties and looked like everybody’s favorite uncle—short and round and with the sociability of a born salesman. He was missing the tip of his left index finger and had a habit of keeping that hand half-closed to hide the mutilation. We’d been friends for months before I ever noticed it. When I asked what happened he was reluctant to say, so I took off my shoes and socks and showed him my toes. Born that way, I said. He smiled and said all right and told me he lost the fingertip because o
f the first girl he ever fell in love with. He was sixteen and she was beautiful but cold of heart and he knew it but he couldn’t help himself. She was constantly demanding that he prove his love, getting him into bad fights over her and so on. One day she said if he’d cut off his finger she would be his forever. So he went and got a straight razor and did it right in front of her.
She was, to use Fat Charley’s word, aghast. She called him crazy and refused to ever see him again. The story he gave his mother was that the finger got caught in a machine at the bottling plant where he worked after school. He’d had his share of women since then, had even been married for a few years to a nice woman whose face he could no longer envision, and he’d enjoyed them all, but he had never again fallen so profoundly in love.
Lucky for you, I said.
Lucky for me, he said, the wench didn’t ask for my peter.
In addition to looking harmless and well intentioned, he spoke like a college professor, and it tickled all of us that once upon a time he’d been an insurance salesman. One day when he was giving his routine spiel to a prospect, telling him about the importance of having insurance because as much as we hate to think about it life is awful short and even worse it can come to an unexpectedly abrupt end and so on and so forth, it struck him that everything he was saying was true except for the part about needing insurance. Fat Charley said he suddenly saw his own life as so unspeakably dull he felt like he was committing slow suicide. He asked the customer to excuse him a moment and then slipped out the back door and got in his car and left. A week later he was running hooch for a bootlegging bunch in Cleveland. Shortly after that he made the jump to what he called the exhilarating trade of the brigand. He was in the third year of a ten-to-twenty for bank robbery and said his only regret was having been caught.
Handsome Harry Page 6