Stan Winger’s cell was seven feet long, five feet wide, and nine feet high. It was in the middle of the third tier and fairly quiet. Stan had a few books, but no other personal possessions. He swept the cell every morning and made up his bunk. Once a week he washed all the surfaces in the cell and rubbed them dry with an old tee shirt. He liked it as clean as he could get it, but he was not a clean freak. The men in C Block didn’t go to jobs or eat in the big dining hall or leave their cells for any reason except hospitalization. They were better off than the men in the Rehabilitation Center who were in strip cells. In C Block you had a toilet, a bunk, and your clothes. You had a broom to sweep with, and all the personal junk you could cram in. But you couldn’t leave, except to exercise once a day for an hour, or to shower twice a week.
C Block was for the inmates who needed, for one reason or another, to be off the main line. If a politician or a judge or a police officer was sent to prison he ended up here, among the snitches, the queens, the child molesters, and others, like Stan Winger, whose lives might be in danger. Stan was in here because the administration felt he would get into trouble on the main line for the creative arts program, which he had started.
Up in Oregon State pen there had been an arts program, and Stan had done quite a bit of painting. He liked to paint. More than writing, painting got you out of there. You could fall into the brush strokes, disappear, or you could get so turned on by the act of painting that your whole body felt a rosy sexual glow. Painting was great, and Stan meant to do some painting during his nickel bit. He complained and agitated and acted like a complete jerk by demanding that the administration get on with the business of rehabilitation. There had been a little gift shop in the visitor’s center, but it had lapsed under changing conditions. The shop had sold hobby work made by the cons, the woodwork and metalwork, the rings and earrings made from toothbrush handles, etc., and Stan decided that the gift shop should open again, only now also showing prison art. Plenty of the men were talented. They could sell their stuff and become rehabilitated. So Stan argued.
The program had been a big success. They had their first big art show, with the public invited, and a couple of newspapers and television stations gave them coverage. The show brought in several thousand dollars, although Stan himself sold nothing. But he was generally credited with bringing the money into the joint, and word spread that he was a pretty good guy. They began having regular shows, the gift shop was reopened, and Stan Winger developed a reputation not just as a good guy but a guy to know. A minor celebrity on the big yard.
His fellow convicts reacted by trying to get him to use the art shows to smuggle goods into the place. The administration reacted by trying to turn him into a snitch. Eventually he ended up in C Block for his own good. The irony was that the fine arts program went on without him, and was spreading to other prisons. Another irony was that he gave up painting and instead devoted himself to finally getting published as a writer. It was cheaper to write than to paint. Stan liked to paint with fresh oils. He loved the smell of them, and liked to apply the paint with a long thin palette knife, and that was expensive. But he could read and he could write. The library queen came around with the book cart three days a week, and Stan began cutting out the blank pages that books had in the front or back, padding, he assumed, to make the books look bigger and thereby justify a higher price. Stan needed the paper to write on. He already had several pencils, each lifted as the opportunity arose.
With paper being so scarce, Stan decided he’d do his composing in his mind, only transferring the words to paper when he was sure of them. He wasn’t just writing to pass the time. He had a plan. Fawcett Gold Medal Original Books. They were mysteries and suspense novels, usually hardboiled. An article in Writer’s Digest had informed Stan that Fawcett paid twenty-five hundred dollars for a Gold Medal Original. It had to be from fifty to seventy thousand words. And it had to be like all the other Gold Medal Originals, Stan assumed. He’d write one himself, and then this time, when he got out of the joint, there would be some money waiting for him. He wouldn’t have to turn right around and come back in.
Stan had only been on the bricks a total of eight days between prison terms, and he was determined that this should not happen again. The eight days had been very exciting, and a lot of fun, looking back, but insane. He and the two guys he met on the bus leaving Oregon State Prison teamed up for a bunch of robberies in Oregon, Nevada, and finally California. They were arrested after a high-speed chase through the Sacramento Valley, Stan and his two friends escaping in a CHP car and finally wrecking it just outside Manteca. Stan was knocked around a little by the police, but one of the guys, Tommy Sisk, was shot in the head and died that night. So Stan was ready, more than ready, to become a productive member of society. He’d do this by writing fast-paced pulp paperback novels. Once he learned the trick, he reasoned, he could turn them out like Toll House cookies.
It took him four months to write the first book. It was written in pencil on various sizes of paper in various conditions, a thick stash of messy-looking paper under his bunk. When the guards searched the cell they found it, of course, but they were kind-hearted and let him go on working. Technically, he had the right to write a book, but in actual fact he was at the mercy of the administration or any member of it, from the warden down to the lowest guard. But they kindly let him write his book, and for a while he was so deeply engrossed he actually forgot where he was and who. It all came back to him when he finished the thing and had to decide how to get it to the Fawcett Publishing Company in New York City. He was all but helpless. He had no way to get the thing typed, for one thing. Well, he’d skip the typing. He only chance was to con one of the guards, convince him that by smuggling this mess of paper out and mailing it to Fawcett, he’d be cutting himself into a lot of money. He picked the dumbest of the guards available and sang his song. It took a week, but the guy finally went for, promising to package and mail Stan’s manuscript to Fawcett in exchange for eight hundred dollars on the come. Now he had to hope the people at Fawcett would have the perception to read it.
After two months of waiting, Stan finally realized that the guard had not mailed the manuscript at all, just dumped it somewhere. He even got the guy to admit it. “You’re a daydreamer,” the guard said in defense of himself. Stan lay on his bunk for three days. It was the worst thing prison had ever done to him. It had killed his hope. He swore revenge.