Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (21 page)

Tick
Tock Turns the Clock,
'52,
'53, '54, '55

I survived my late teenage years in San Quentin.
Joseph Welch squelched Joe McCarthy (such matters were unnoticed in the prison
universe) and Willie Mays made the miracle catch on Vic Wertz's towering drive
to the deepest part of the polo grounds (that did get attention, for betting on
baseball was a big thing at the time) and when I crossed the Big Yard, many
convicts said hello or nodded or otherwise indicated recognition.

I lived two lives, one in the cell from 4.30 p.m. to 8
a.m., the other in the Big Yard and elsewhere behind the walls. In those days
convicts had the run of the inside of the prison. Each morning when the cell
gate opened, I sallied forth to find adventure. Just before I arrived, the jute
mill had burned to the ground, leaving the prison short of jobs. I was one of
300 who were unassigned. Being without a job was virtually a waiver of parole
consideration, but I'd been in too much trouble to get a parole even if I
worked seven days a week in three jobs. The parole board had a written policy
of not even considering parole if the inmate had any disciplinary infraction
with six months. In '54, I had just gotten out of segregation for a brawl where
my jaw was sliced from temple to lip (goddamn it bled copiously), so I had no
imminent chance for parole.

I
gambled on all sporting events, except the horses. The tote board is too hard
to beat, and who knows what a horse will do — or what the trainer will want him
to do in a particular race? No, no, not the horses. I bet on boxing matches
(the easiest except when two black heavyweights were involved), college and
professional football, and major league baseball (the hardest), and sometimes a
Pacific Coast League game if it was being broadcast and I needed something to
listen to on the earphones in the cell. By '54 I had gone through being a bully
and a tough guy. Bullies and tough guys have high mortality rates; sometimes
they can scare the wrong person. My friends were numerous, in a variety of
"tips," as they were then called. Now they would be called "sets."
Most of the troublemakers and tough guys were friends of mine, but by '54 I was
drifting away from them toward the real professional thieves and confidence
men. They had respect but avoided trouble by staying within their group. They
had the good prison jobs with various fringe benefits. Paul Allen, for example,
was assigned to the kitchen - but he was the Death Row cook. The condemned, who
were far fewer and more quickly executed back then, were fed much better than
the mainline convicts, or at least far greater care was taken with the
preparation. The Death Row cook, as a fringe benefit, was allowed to make steak
and egg sandwiches for friends or for sale. Another buddy worked in the
laundry, so he provided
bonaroo
clothes,
jeans and shirts starched and pressed. Best of all was the dental office. Back
then, convicts did the teeth cleaning and simple fillings. Extractions were by
the dentist. Jimmy Posten, a baby-faced safecracker, was the chief dentist's
assistant. Jimmy ran his own dental practice during the lunch hour. Using the
gold salvaged from extractions, he took impressions for bridgework and crowns,
treatments not provided by the institution. He accumulated hundreds of cartons
of cigarettes and a considerable cache of US currency, which was contraband. I would
visit him at work a couple times a week. Once I arrived as he was splitting up
a pound of marijuana. By the late '60s nearly all prisons were flooded with all
varieties of drugs. It was even possible to maintain a "habit" while
doing time, but back in the early '50s, real drugs were rare. Getting high was
limited to home brew, nutmeg (it will get you high about three hours after you
take a spoonful) and Wyamine inhalers, which had some kind of amphetamine
mixture, items a guard could purchase and carry in his lunch box. A Wyamine
inhaler cost 59 cents at Thrifty, and sold for $5 on the yard. It was a rare
coup to get a pound of weed. I felt a member of the elite when Jimmy put a bag
aside for me.

By '54, I had retired from my brief boxing career:
three wins and three losses in six bouts through late '52 and '53. I maintained
a locker box with hand wraps, mouthpiece and boxing shoes, and I frequently
went to the gym during the day to work out or visit friends assigned to the
gym, which covered the long top floor of the Old Industrial Building and was
divided into sections: boxing, weightlifting, wrestling, plus a handball court
and a room with a couple of ping-pong tables and TV sets. Each section had a
private office, a "spot" as it was called, for the two or three
convicts assigned to it.

The boxing room had the look and smell of all boxing
gyms — a mix of blood, sweat and leather. Posters of Bay Area fights were on
the walls, and tall mirrors for shadow boxing. Activity was regulated by the
boxing cycle of three minutes' work, one minute rest. A timer automatically
rang a bell on that sequence. When it started, speed bags rattled like machine
guns, and the heavy punching bags thudded loud and jumped on their chains.
Fighters grunted and exhaled as they threw a punch. This automatically
tightened stomach muscles at the moment of their greatest vulnerability: when
their arm was extended away from their body.

There were two boxing rings, one for shadow boxing and
teaching, the other for actual boxing, or sparring with another fighter. When
the bell rang again, everything stopped. The fighters replenished their wind
and the trainers admonished and instructed.

A convict ran the boxing department, issued the
training gear and decided who would fight on the various boxing cards held
several times a year. The convict who had the job had to be both diplomatic and
tough.

If the gym was boring, I might visit the barber shop,
which was then in Shiv Alley. It had about twenty-five barber chairs, five for
blacks. Two friends of mine, Don "Saso" Anderson and "Ma"

Barker had a chair in the corner. When they got out,
they robbed a bank in Reno, and Saso accidentally shot Ma in the chest. For
hours they drove through the woods. Ma refused to see a doctor and died.

At 4 p.m. the Big Yard filled as convicts trudged up
the worn concrete stairs from industries, the furniture factory and Navy
Cleaning Plant. When 4,000 voices were caught in the canyon formed by the
immense cell houses, they made a roar like the sea.

When the whistles blew, lines were formed outside each
cell house. To indicate that someone was, or had been, a close friend, the
common phrase was: "I lined up with him." Blacks were segregated in
the lineup and mess halls. I had many friendships and was welcomed in several
tips, including that of Joe Morgan, who had been transferred from Folsom while
awaiting release on parole. Two decades later he would be the
caudillo
of the Mexican Mafia, but even in '54 he
was legend. It added to my status that his entourage saved a place in line for
me. Of all the men I would meet in the next two decades, Joe Morgan was the
toughest by far. When I say the toughest, I do not necessarily mean he could
beat up anyone in a fight. Joe only had one leg below the knee. The other had been
shot off by the LAPD in East LA when he was eighteen. He was still pretty good
with his fists, but his true toughness was inside his heart and brain. No
matter what happened, Joe took it without a whimper, and frequently managed to
laugh. I will talk of him later. When all the lines had filed inside, the Big
Yard was empty and the cell house tiers packed, the lockup bell sounded. The
security bars were raised, everyone pulled a cell gate open, stepped inside and
closed it. In an instant the tiers were cleared of convicts and the security
bars dropped down.

Along each tier walked two guards, each using a hand
counter - click click, click click, click, click click — and at the end they
compared their count and called out to a sergeant on the cell house phone:
"D Section, first tier, forty-six, second tier, forty-nine, third tier
fifty-one ..."

The Sergeant called the count to the Control Room
Sergeant, who had a wall-sized board with tags in slots for every cell, every
hospital bed, and even tags for the morgue, for if some died, the body was
counted until taken away. The count was phoned to Sacramento, the final tally
keeper of how many men were in San Quentin. Unless there was a problem, the
whole process, from lockup to all clear, took twelve to fifteen minutes. The
most common problem was for one cell house to be missing a body, while another
cell house had an extra. The all clear bell didn't ring until that was
straightened out. If someone was really missing, it was a couple of hours
before the chow unlock started. That was infrequent, although over time I saw
several escapes, and near escapes, from inside the walls. More common than an
actual escape attempt was someone hiding out because he was afraid of someone,
or in debt. They were always found and put in the hole; it was a way of getting
locked up without going to the Man and asking for protection, which carried
permanent stigma on one's manhood.

Following the evening meal, usually a few minutes
after 6 p.m., those on night unlocks were checked off lists: night gym, school,
choir practice. The rest were locked up for the night.

I preferred the cell. If I lacked the mental powers of
Jack London's Star Rover, I had the printed page to guide me through myriad
eras and countless lives. I conquered Eastern Europe with Genghis Khan, and
stood with the Spartans against the Persians in a place called Thermopylae and,
thanks to Emil Ludwig, watched Napoleon's hubris destroy the Grand Army in the
snows of Russia. Bruce Catton escorted me through the American Civil War.
Although I'd been a voracious reader since the age of seven, I had no
discretion, nor sense of literary value. A book was a book until Louise Wallis
ordered me a subscription of the Sunday
New York
Times.
It arrived the following Thursday, so fat it barely went through
the bars. It took two evenings to read, even though I skimmed most of it. The
Book Review
got most of my attention, and although
the new books were unavoidable, reviews and columns talked about other writers
and other books — Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, John dos Passos, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway. The library shelves did have
The Titan, The Genius
and
An American Tragedy.
Of Thomas Wolfe, I first read
You Can't

Go Home Again,
and the words were a prose symphony unlike anything
I'd read before. Wolfe's descriptions of America, of the old Penn Station that
"captured time," or the prose poem where he describes the nation from
a perch on the continental divide moved me to an ache near tears.

My library day was Saturday. We were allowed to have
five books checked out at one time. I tried to read all five in seven nights,
so I could get five more. I was no speed reader, but I had six hours every
night and half an hour in the morning. Sometimes if I was entranced, as with
The Sea Wolf,
I came back to the cell after
breakfast.

I
read fiction and non-fiction. Psychology books were in great demand. It was an
era when a criminal act was
prima facie
evidence of psychological abnormality. Group therapy was gathering momentum.
Advanced penologists saw the ideal prison as really a hospital, and wanted all
terms to be from one day to life, depending on when the individual was
"cured." In some cases, and I was among them, the parole board
specified psychotherapy. The idea that poverty was a breeding ground was never
discussed. I assumed that something was wrong. Imagine turning twenty in a gray
rock prison after a childhood in schools for crime. Only a true cretin would
not wonder why. Was I simply bad? I'd certainly done bad things, and a few that
made me feel terrible to recall, and God knows that terrible things had been
done to me — in the name of society or somebody. I'd suffered beatings and
torture in a state hospital. I'd had a fire hose turned on me through bars when
I was thirteen, and spent the night on the wet concrete so I caught pneumonia.
It was beyond estimation how many punches and kicks I'd gotten from authority
figures over my brief life. Had I declared war on society, or had society
declared war on me? The authorities wondered if I was crazy, and so did I. Not
in the normal sense; I had no delusions or hallucinations. I satisfied the
classic criterion for what was then called the criminal psychopath (now called
sociopath): a person who talked sane but behaved insane. It was insane to take
on the whole world even if the world started it. In the argot of shrinks, I had
an id-permeated ego and a stunted superego, which is something like conscience,
or a governor on a car that keeps it from going too fast. The literature said
there was no treatment, although it was common for burnout to occur around age
forty. My hope was to use intelligence to govern my impulses. I knew that some
sociopaths are very successful, and I knew that smart people don't commit
street crimes. Nobody had a Beverly Hills mansion from cracking safes. I vowed
that I would be as smart as I could be when I walked out of San Quentin's
walls. I would suck up all available knowledge. I planned never to commit
another felony, but when Goose Goslow told me how to peel a safe open, or make
a device that would allow me to drill a floor safe, which is a tough safe to
crack, I also sucked up that knowledge, just as I wrote down words I didn't
know and later looked them up in a Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary
that Louise Wallis sent me.