Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (9 page)

The
five days seemed eternity when I was facing them, but when they were finished
they were nothing. When the door opened and I stepped out, the light made me
turn my eyes away. I was dizzy and fell against a wall when I started putting
on my pants.

"Hurry
up," said a deputy. "Unless you wanna go back in there until you're
ready." "No, boss, I'm ready."

When we got back to the high power tank, I was assigned to
one of the rear cells. In fact it was Billy Cook's cell. He had gone to the Death
House at San Quentin the night before. I would never see him again, but in a
couple of years I would talk to him through the ventalators between Death Row
and the hole two nights before his execution. The cells were back to back with
a service alley of pipes and conduits between them. The night before the
execution they would take him down to the overnight condemned cell. I yelled at
him, "Hey, Cook, you baby killing motherfucker! How long can you hold your
breath? Ha, ha, ha . . ." In my youth my heart was hardened to my enemies.
Billy Cook was one I found despicable even without my personal grudge. The
family of five he had slaughtered included children.

When the jailer told me they were putting me in the back for
protection," I protested with vehemence: "I don't need any protection."
The reply was, "We're protecting them from you."

  It
was a lie, but it soothed my indignation. As I walked down the runway to the
rear section, one of the faces that looked out between bars was D'Arcy.
"Hey! Wait a second," he said.

I stopped, ignoring the yelling deputy as D'Arcy went to the
pillowslip hanging from a hook where he kept commissary. He pulled forth a few
candy bars and a couple of packs of Camels.

"Hunker!
Move it!" yelled the deputy from the gate, banging his key on the bars for
emphasis. I held up a hand so he'd know I wasn't ignoring him.

"One
second, boss."

 D'Arcy handed me the cigarettes and candy. "You
sure nailed that fucker."

"Bunker!
Move it!"

"You better go."

"What's he gonna do? Put me in jail?"
Despite my bravado, I headed toward the cell I could hear being opened. As I
walked past other cells, the faces seemed friendly and approving. Before
stepping in, I noticed that I was next door to Lloyd Sampsell. He nodded, but
his face was inscrutable. I stepped into the cell. "Watch the gate!"
yelled the deputy. It began to shake. "Comin' closed!" It crashed
shut.

"Hey, Lloyd," called D'Arcy down the tier.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"Look after my pal down there."

"Oh yeah! Anybody'd nail that piece of shit is
aces with me," Sampsell yelled back; then to me in a conversational tone:
"Hey, Bunker, you got smokes over there?"

"Yeah. D'Arcy gave me some."

"You need anything, you lemme know. Okay."

"I need something to read."

"Whaddya like?"

"I dunno. Whatever."

"I got a whole bunch. You might like
Knock On Any Door."

I remembered the movie with Humphrey Bogart. If a book
became a movie, it was probably pretty good, or so my logic went at the time.
"Send it over," I said.

Sampsell handed the fat, worn
paperback through the bars. Before I could get into it, the morning cleanup
finished and the cells in the front were unlocked: The accused kidnappers and
murderers and other notorious criminals (but apparently less notorious than
Sampsell or myself) were allowed to roam the runway outside the cells. The daily
routine was for D'Arcy to bring out a gray blanket and spread it on the floor
outside Sampsell's cell so the perpetual poker game could crank up. On
Wednesday, the day that the money man delivered the allotment of cash that
could be drawn from a prisoner's account, there were more players than room —
but as the week passed the losers were gone and the game
got down to the
four or five best players: D'Arcy and Sampsell and Cicerone were always left.
D'Arcy had no money on account, nor any visitors. He lived on the poker game.
Sampsell played with his hands through the bars. The others sat cross-legged on
the floor, or leaned on elbow and rump. The game was lowball, of course. It
isn't a chess game where the inferior player never wins a game. In the short
run the neophyte may be dealt unbeatable hands and sweep all before him, but
over several hours, or days, the hands even up. The skilled player will
minimize what he loses on losing hands, and maximize those he wins. It could be
said that he who says "I bet" is a winner, and he who says "I
call" is a loser.

Day after day, ten hours of each of them, I watched the game
through the bars. D'Arcy sat to Sampsell's left, right by the corner of my
cell, and he began to flash his cards to me. He showed me if he bluffed (not
often) and got away with it. The bluff, he told me, was really an advertisement
to promote getting called when he had a powerhouse hand. It was nice to bluff
successfully, but getting caught was also useful. If you never bluffed, you
never got called when you had a good hand. More than any other poker game, how
one plays a hand depends on their position relative to the dealer. Raised bets
and re-raises are frequent before the draw, and although there is a wager after
the draw, and sometimes it is raised, an axiom of lowball is that all the
action is before the draw. D'Arcy gave me another poker axiom: be easy to
bluff, for it is far cheaper to make a mistake and throw a hand away, than to
"keep someone honest" and call.

One afternoon they summoned D'Arcy to the Attorney Room.

The
other players moaned because he was the big winner and they weren't going to
recoup their losses with him gone. On impulse and because winning $30 or $40
has scant importance to a man facing "natural life" in San Quentin,
he gave me a wad of money and told me to play for him.

With a pounding heart, I reached through the bars and picked
up the five cards spinning across the blanket toward me. I was both excited and
scared. I wanted to win. Even more, I didn't want to. lose D'Arcy's money. He
was gone about half an hour. I'd played three or four small hands, winning one.
I was just about

 even when D'Arcy came in the gate — and I was
involved in a big pot with an old man named Sol, who was awaiting trial for
killing his business partner. The main evidence was plenty of motive: the
partner was stealing from the company and sleeping with Sol's wife. The hand
started with my having a pat eight, five, ace, deuce, trey. That's a good hand,
especially pat. I was ahead of Sol. I raised the pot. Sol raised behind me. I
called his bet. The dealer asked how many cards I wanted. If I stayed pat
without re-raising Sol's raise, he would know that I had either an eight or a
nine. With a seven or better I would have surely raised him again before the
draw. His raise of my raise indicated the likelihood of him having a pat hand
too, maybe an eight, maybe even a nine, but very possibly a seven or better.
Should I throw away the eight and hope for a seven, a six or a four, or even
the joker? If I knew he was going to draw a card, I would surely stand on the
eight. I didn't know that. "One," I said, holding up one finger. The
card came across the blanket. I covered it without looking.

"One card," Sol said, turning over the queen
that he discarded.
Damn,
I cursed in my mind;
he had outplayed me, made me break my hand and chance.

I looked at what I'd drawn. A five. I had a five
already. Now I had a pair of them, and a shitty hand. "I check," I
said. By then, D'Arcy had arrived and was standing next to my cell.

"Ten dollars," Sol said.

It was a big bet in a jailhouse poker game where all
one could draw was $12 a week. Yet somehow, intuitively or perhaps with ESP,
for which I have been subsequently tested and found to have under the Duke
University standards established by their famous experiments, I knew Sol was
bluffing. He bluffed all the time anyway. Even though I was sure he was
bluffing, I could not call the bet. I had a pair, a big pair. I might have
called with a jack, or even a queen — but a
pair\
I couldn't call with a pair. He couldn't have a bigger pair. Then I remembered
something D'Arcy had done once.

"I raise," I said.
"All I have here." I started counting out the money D'Arcy had left
me. It was about $30. When I was up to
$18, Sol threw his cards away as if they were on fire.
"Fuckin' kid sandbagged me! Checked and raised!"

To check then let someone else bet and then raise, is the
coldest trap in poker. Some card parlors don't allow players to check and
raise. If someone checks to me and then raises, I throw my hand in without
thought unless I have a real powerhouse.

"Can I see?" D'Arcy asked. Sure. It was his money.
I handed him my cards while I dragged in the substantial pot. I was aglow
inside.

D'Arcy looked at the cards without changing expression.

"Lemme see, too," Sol said.

"No, no," D'Arcy said. "You gotta pay."
He winked at me and threw the cards on the blanket.

Sol reached for the cards. D'Arcy, who was standing, stepped
on
Sol's
hand, pinning it and the cards to the blanket.

"Hey . . . what the fuck!" Sol said, pulling his
hand free, but leaving the cards face down. "What the fuck do you think
you're doin'?" Sol was sixty pounds heavier than D'Arcy. He coiled to get
to his feet.

"If you stand up, I'm gonna try to cut your head
off," D'Arcy said, his usual congenial good manners replaced by the rattle
of a sidewinder.

Sol folded back on his rump and raised both hands in
surrender. He was intimidated and chose to put a humorous face on things.
"I'll bet he had a six," Sol said. "Did he?"

D'Arcy winked, as if confirming Sol's supposition. Then he
took off his denim jumper and sat down to play and conversation resumed.

"Who was it? Matthews?" Al Matthews was
the
criminal defense lawyer of choice. He had been the chief trial attorney of the
public defender's office, and had recently gone into private practice. He was
"hot" with those who knew how to
select a lawyer for a criminal trial. At this point he had never lost a client
to the gas chamber, and he had represented a lot of indigent capital defendants
in Los Angeles.

"Yeah Matthews," D'Arcy said. Then grunted and
turned a thumb down in the classic Roman gesture.

Meanwhile the cards came skidding across the blanket.

"What's that mean?" Sampsell asked.

"They revoked my stay."

"You'll be traveling."

"It'll take a few days for the papers, then I'll
catch the train. What the fuck, they eat better up there." He picked up
his cards and glanced quickly. Someone else opened; D'Arcy threw the cards
away. Then he glanced over his shoulder at me behind the bars. "He's gonna
call you down in a couple of days. You tell the deputy you want to see
him?"

Before Al Matthews called me to the Attorney Room,
whoever did such things had me taken to the Juvenile Court with Judge A.A.
Scott presiding. A little over three years earlier Scott had committed me to
the Youth Authority. The People of California were petitioning the court to
have me tried as an adult. It was not contested. I had no attorney and I cannot
remember being asked to say anything. I might as well have been a passenger on
a train. The journey took ten minutes, and when it was over, they took me to a
department of the Municipal Court and filed a complaint charging me not with
Section 4500, but with 245 Penal Code, Assault with Intent to do great bodily
harm. A date for a preliminary hearing was set. Bail was set at $20,000. Of
course bail was unattainable while the Youth Authority had a detainer on me. I
knew all of this was going to happen. I was learning something about court
procedures from the men around me. I wondered if the change in the complaint
might get me placed in another tank, but there seemed to be minimal communication
between the Sheriffs Department, which ran the jail, and the courts. There were
routine procedures for routine things — releases and court appearances — but
nobody would notify the jail about this difference. The court had no reason to
know I was in "high power."

I was
learning other things, too. When the poker game broke up for meals, or count,
or at lights out, there was always a lot of conversation from cell to cell.
D'Arcy was too far away, but Sampsell was next door. He told me about heisting
the payroll at Lockheed sometime back in the '30s or '40s, I don't remember
which. He had an analytical mind and a slight country twang. He got
excited when he
told his heart-stopping adventures in crime and recalled legendary tales of San
Quentin, including his own escape from inside the walls of Folsom. I heard
other stories, too, of crazy Bugsy Siegel, who disliked being called Bugsy
although he let some people call him that because they didn't care how crazy he
was. I learned that behind bars it was good to have the reputation of being as
violent as anyone but not crazy, not unpredictable. You didn't want fear, for
fear can make even a coward dangerous. In a world without civil process or
appeal to established authority, one needed others to think they had the
ability to protect themselves and their interests.