Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (47 page)

To the unknowing the Folsom yard
would look peaceful and homogeneous, the convicts seeming to move as placidly
as cows in a pasture, but beneath the somnolence and the guards' hawk eyes were
deadly intrigues and murderous feuds. Men here had enemies they wanted to kill.
The hostility smoldered like hot coals beneath gray ashes. Very little was
needed to ignite a fire, maybe a glance, or a word someone
thought
they heard. Men maintained a
watchful eye for their enemies, and stayed in areas where their friends lounged
about.

When I approached Denis, Ebie,
Paul and Andy Pope, the conversation was about the death penalty. "How
many they got up there now?"

"I dunno. A hundred and
fifty maybe . . . something like that."

"And they add two or three
every month; right?"

"Yeah."

"Sometime down the line,
push is gonna come to shove. They gotta execute 'em faster than they arrive.
Otherwise they're gonna have thousands. What're they gonna do then - have some
kind of bloodbath?"

"I wouldn't doubt it for a
minute," Andy said. "In fact that's what I'd do to most of those
worthless assholes."

"Yeah, but you ain't
running for Governor. Say they executed thirty or forty fools in two or three
months. He'd ruin his political career."

"I wouldn't be so sure of
that," Andy said. "It might make him President."

Denis saw me coming and moved to
meet me. "You goin' down?"

He meant to the library where we
were both assigned. He was the law library clerk, a job I'd relinquished in
favor of being chief clerk with a private office in the rear, behind the free
librarian's outer office. Denis was my best friend. You may recall my
mentioning him earlier as the first resident drug dealer in Hollywood. He was
serving fifteen years to life, with first parole eligibility fourteen years and
nine months from the date he began the term.

The loudspeaker crackled and a
voice bellowed:
"The 8.30 line is going in!"

The tidal rhythm of pacing men
and superficial homogeneity began breaking apart. The greater mass began to
cluster around and funnel through the #5 building gate. It was the sole route
to the education department, hobby shop and hospital. Denis and I went the
other way, circling along a walkway in front of the granite chapel, which looks
more like a nineteenth-century power plant than a church. The Cat Man is
outside the chapel, his jacket pockets filled with scraps of food and a couple
of jars of milk. The cats are coming from around and beneath the building. One
or two convicts lean on a rail, like spectators at a zoo. From a cardboard
crate emerges Pinky, the patriarchal tomcat. His face is scarred and he is
missing patches of fur, emblems of batdes with other cats and the ground
squirrels that thrive on the steep hillsides and live in the spaces of the
granite retaining walls. The Cat Man feeds and cares for all of them. They are
his friends in a cold, friendless world. A few months earlier the cat
population exploded, and during the night two litters of kittens were taken
away. The Cat Man was so distraught that they put him in the psych ward for a few
days. Then he took Thorazine and fixed Pinky's meal separate from the others.

Denis and I pass through an
inspection post and go down the walkway to the library. It is a low building of
ocher plaster walls and gray roof, which rises and sags according to the
supporting beams underneath. Originally built as an engineer's shack, it had a
soft wood floor that became a plane of splinters; it was converted simply by
adding some free-standing bookcases in one room, and lining the walls with
shelves. Very little had changed since the library came into existence The
largest of the three rooms is the law section, which the Department of
Corrections wants to remove to help the Attorney General. As usual the law
library table is crowded with convicts. Piled before them are the red books of
codes, the cream-colored tomes of California Appeals Court decisions, the dark
brown of the federal appeals courts, plus folders and scratch paper. Quiet
prevails most of the time, although sometimes it gets loud when jailhouse lawyers
argue the law with vehemence. "Fool, you don't know nuthin'. Read
People versus Bilderbach,
62 Cal. 2d.
That
applies the
Wong Sun
doctrine to the State of California."

Folsom convicts fde 20,000
petitions a year. Twenty years earlier it was unheard of, and a convict seen
carrying legal papers received scornful derision. Law was seen as a secret
religion beyond comprehension by anyone except its high priests. To fight in
the courts one needed an expensive mouthpiece who knew the judges. It was Caryl
Chessman's twelve-year battle to stay out of the gas chamber that changed the
attitude of convicts. The ceaseless flow of petitions is Chessman's legacy. The
Irish Sweepstakes are a better gamble, but for some men it is their only hope,
no matter how faint, for resurrection.

Denis turns into the law
library. I go the other way, through the librarian's office to mine through
another door. I like the librarian. As usual, he is reading. At a nearby desk
is Dacy, who answers the phone. He is serving "all day," life without
possibility of parole. After a lifetime of petty crime, he made the big gamble,
a kidnaping for ransom. He has gallows humor about his situation. He knows I am
an aspiring writer and jokingly wants me to ghost his biography, to be called
How to Turn a Strange
Child into Money,
subtided:
My Thirty Years in California Prisons.
Alternately:
How to Lose Friends and
Alienate Parole Officers.
His humor has been missing lately; maybe there's
unfolding awareness of the true horror of his destiny.

I handle the library's clerical
work, which is more than most convicts do, but still it takes a mere two hours
a day. Nobody develops work habits in prison. I drink a cup of coffee. By 10
a.m.

I am finished and I go up to the
yard to jog my twenty-five laps around the infield. I want to finish before the
multitude begins jogging at the lunch hour, kicking up dust like a herd of
buffalo. Only one other man, Merkouris, is circling the base paths in a trot a
whde, walk a whde gait. Of medium height, with leonine white hair, he wears a
white T-shirt over his spreading waistline no matter what the weather. He is in
good shape for someone edging old age. Merkouris is a loner; he has no friends.
He disdains convicts and is disdained by them. He is a man who obviously worked
hard all his life and who possesses an inflexible, austere moral code alien to
the prison ethic. A first-term prisoner, he has already served about fifteen
years. In the early '50s he was the lead actor in one of LA's most publicized
murder trials. His former wife and her new husband, an ex-policeman, were found
shot to death in the premises of their small business. The dead man's brother
was a sergeant on the Los Angeles Police Department, which added petrol to the
blaze. In the courtroom Merkouris was strapped to a chair, gagged and put
inside a glass booth. He still claims his innocence. He says he was the victim
of the crime, that
she
had stolen all his money and shared it with her new
man. Merkouris would never commit another crime, assuming he committed the
first one, for he is no criminal and, in fact, despises criminals. He is lucky
not to have been murdered in Folsom, for he tells the authorities if he sees
anyone breaking the rules. I have nothing to say to him, and he would be
suspicious if I spoke to him.

The early lunch line is going
into the mess hall. I'm on the list and I go in to eat with a friend who is
being transferred to Chino the next morning. He has sixty days until parole and
has served nine years for robbing a Thrifty drugstore. He doesn't say it in so
many words, but he's afraid of going out. Another robbery conviction will bring
a habitual criminal judgment. Thirty-nine years old, having served a total of
fourteen yean in two terms, he wants to change his life. His fear is that he won't
fit, that so many years within the walls will have maimed him. He will have $60
and no friends except other ex-convicts or criminals. If he is unable to find a
niche in society, a place with a littleacceptance and self-respect, he will
return to the world where he does have friends and acceptance and respect, even
though it isn't what he really wants. He knows the probable result - the waste
of the rest of his life.

The after-lunch work whistle
goes off, exploding a cluster of blackbirds from a budding roof. Almost as if
it's a signal, half a dozen guards come from the adjustment center, leading a
trio of prisoners in khakis (out to court clothes), handcuffs and waistchains.
Their hair is too long for them to be Folsom convicts. Someone calls out. One man
turns, grins and gives a nod of recognition. The trio is being held in Folsom
for security while being tried for killing a Sutter County deputy sheriff.

Back in the library, I drink tea
and let time drift away in the trance in which prisoners learn to wrap
themselves. It shuts out reality and lets daydreams rise. I stare out a window
across the lower yard, the fences, the American River and the arid hills to the
white gauze clouds. Johnny Cash was lying; you can't hear any train from inside
Folsom Prison.

So the afternoon goes, emptily.
In Folsom a man becomes accustomed to the abbreviated day, so 2 p.m. is late,
and by 3 p.m. things are ready for lockup.

The lines of men begin gathering
even before the lockup whistle. At a signal they trudge into the various cell
houses, streaming up the steel stairs and along the tiers. The bars drop, the
gates are key-locked and a guard comes by with the mail. He calls your name,
you answer with your number. I don't expect him to stop; I never get any mad.
This afternoon, however, the guard says "Bunker." I respond:
"A20284." He puts an envelope on the bars. It is from the New York
literary agent, Armitage ("Mike") Watkins, who has agreed to read my
manuscripts. I've sent him my fifth attempt at a novel. Over the years I have
tried to write in various genres. This all began as a collaboration with Paul
Allen. He was to come up with the story and I was to write it. It was an
attempt to write like Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford; a short novel about a
con man junkie who thinks everyone in the world is a sucker. Allen quit on me
before we got very far so I finished it, making up the story, and sent it out.
Once again the agent wrote: "You are improving, but this still falls short
of our representing it. You might try someone else. We will hold the manuscript
until you send instructions." The agent knew the difficulties I faced
getting it out of the walls.

No, I wouldn't try another
agent. I hoped the novel I'd already started would make the grade.

Minutes later the cell house
filled with the sound of a rattle — a convict carries it ahead of a sergeant
and a correctional officer. When the convict passes, you stand up. The Sergeant
and the guard have clipboards. They mark each empty space — one makes a
positive count, the other a negative count, tallied by tier and total.

Fifteen minutes later the chow
unlock begins. It is the same routine as the morning, except that after the
mess hall it is back to the cell for another count. They count often in all
maximum security prisons. Whde still afternoon beyond the walls, the night
routine has started in Folsom. For a few years it seems excruciatingly slow,
but eventually it becomes preferred. Folsom convicts who are transferred to
camps dislike dormitory living. The cell house is so quiet that it is hard to
believe that the honeycomb of cages in this budding confine several hundred
men. Many stare at the small Sony they are now allowed to buy. The loudest
sound is of scattered typewriters, each with a different speed and rhythm, from
stdted uncertainty to an unbroken pulse, from petitions for writs of habeas
corpus to the Great American Novel. I am not the only Folsom convict who dreams
of redemption via the literary life, of making a lotus grow from the mud. I
doubt that I am the most talented. I will consider being deemed the most
determined. I had written over a hundred short stories and five full-length
novels without having a word in print under my own name, except in the Folsom
Prison
Observer
and
the San Quentin
News.

When the security bar is down
and the spike key has closed the steel bolt in the cell lock, I tuned out the
prison and immersed myself in books, reading them and writing them. I gave up
the typewriter. First drafts were in longhand. Every chapter I typed, making
changes as I go. If it was early, I usually read. It sounds absurd, I know, but
I never seemed to have enough time to get in my reading. I believe that anyone
who doesn't read remains dumb.

Even if they know how, failing
to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what
else they have or do.