Did I ever tell you about the time I visited Ronald Fouquet in the death cell at San Quentin?
It was one of the three or four most terrifying, chilling experiences of my life.
On the off-chance I missed hitting you with that one, I’ll tell you now, because this week I went to visit a girl I know, who got busted for dope that wasn’t even hers, and she’s in Sybil Brand at the moment, though she’ll get sprung in less than a month, and it brought back all those monstrous memories of Q and Fouquet.
It was about three years ago. My attorney, Barry Bernstein, who is a genuine heavyweight at the bar of justice, called me and asked me if I wanted to see Death Row at the joint. I said certainly, and how was he intending to slip me past the security at Quentin; in his pocket? And if that was a snide and convoluted way of commenting on my 5252 height, he could just go suck a tort.
But Barry had it all figured out. I was to dress very conservatively, bring a briefcase with legal pad and felt tips, and I would go in with him as his law clerk.
I accepted in a hot second.
We flew up to Oakland Airport early in the morning, and rented an Avis for the drive to Marin County. It was a brisk, snapping cool morning in September of 1970. The drive across from Richmond toward San Rafael was sweet and clear, with the forests and mountains just emerging from beneath a shroud of moist blue fog. Barry and I talked about the Fouquet case, which he had been involved with from the start of legal proceedings, and he filled me in with facts that cleared up holes in my memory of the newspaper reports I’d assiduously researched before the trip.
Ronald Fouquet (pronounced foo-KAY), in 1967, was already a loser. An oddjob janitorial maintenance man, unable to keep a steady gig, he was living with his common-law wife, Betty, and their five kids, several of whom were from Betty’s previous arrangement. For whatever reasons—the papers postulated earning bread and beans for five kids was more than Fouquet could handle, others felt it was an ingrained psychopathic reaction—over a period of three weeks, Ronald Fouquet beat to death his five-year-old stepson, Jeffrey. Betty Fouquet sat passively and watched it happen. When the child was dead, they took the body to Sand Canyon and threw it far out in the desert.
Returning home, they found that only one of the remaining children remembered Jeffrey. Six-year-old Jody. She kept asking where her little brother was. Ronald and Betty grew more concerned about Jody’s questions. They reasoned that as she grew older, her memories and curiosity would pose a dangerous situation. They decided to get rid of her, as well.
Over the next six or eight months they “reprogrammed” the little girl. They convinced her she was not named Jody, but was actually a little girl named Linda. They confused her as to her age. Was she five? Six? Seven? They hammered into her brain the story that Betty was not her mother, that her real Mother was out there somewhere, and one day they’d take her to that person. By 1969, feeling they had her so totally confused as to her real name, where she lived, who her parents were, that they could drive her up near Bakersfield in Kern County, and dump her, and get away with it. This is how they had it figured, the sonsabitches: she would be too confused to give the cops a story that could be checked. She’d be unable to get anyone to trace her back to them.
Driving around on that awful mission, they finally decided to leave her off on a freeway. They saw some lights in the distance that night, and told her to walk toward them, that her real Mother was there. Then they drove off.
The police found blonde little Jody, clinging to the hurricane fence in the center divider, trembling with fear, screaming for help. After difficulties, they managed to pry her loose. And after trying to make sense of her garbled story, it was released to the papers, and Jody’s picture was flashed nationwide. She was human-interest news. Who is this child? You may remember the stories.
Babysitters who had worked for the Fouquets saw the photos, and recognized Jody. They contacted the police who had, by this time, established from Jody that whatever her name was, and wherever she belonged, she had been premeditatedly abandoned. With the lead to Jody’s parents, the police arrested Ronald and Betty Fouquet and charged them with endangering the life of a child.
Relatives from Betty’s first liaison came to take care of the children, and started counting heads. Where was Jeffrey?
The story finally fell together, with Jody’s help, and Betty decided to fink on Ronald. She spilled the story, threw herself on the mercy of the court, and Ronald Fouquet was indicted and tried and convicted of Murder One. Murder in the first degree. He was remanded to the authorities, sent to San Quentin, and was on a direct line for the gas chamber.
There was, of course, the appeal.
Which Barry was handling.
Fouquet had been in Q for six months, on Death Row, as Barry and I motored toward him that sweet September morning.
Driving across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, I could see the dark and already ominous bulk of Quentin, sitting out on the southwest curve of a spit of land jutting into San Pablo Bay, almost directly across the channel from Point Molate and the U.S. Naval Fuel Depot located there. San Quentin is the postal address; they call it Tamal.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, in a hushed voice. “It looks like Bedlam.”
San Quentin is sunk to its knees in the earth, set apart like a pariah from even the tiniest town, elevation 32 feet above sea level. The waters of the Bay rush toward the black rocks and then, as if wary, at the last minute merely slide in like oil. Gulls wheel above it, but they never seem to light. Surely it was my imagination, but as we drove over the bridge the sun seemed to vanish behind gray clouds, and there was a sudden chill.
We drove up to the guard gate, were cleared through and were directed to the parking lot. We walked back up to the security booth, were checked out, our briefcases examined, and then, in company with several other visitors, mostly women, we followed a guard to the reception building.
Once inside, we were checked again, gave our names and Fouquet’s, and sat down on the benches to wait. The walls of the reception house were covered with paintings done by the inmates. They were for sale. None of them was particularly striking—a preponderance of pastoral scenes, clearly wish-fulfillment, and views of men behind bars—all were amateurish, save for a group by one man, working in charcoal, depicting perspective-rich impressions of life in a cell. They were similar in style to Munch in some cases, and in others, to the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz. They reminded me of the drawings I’d seen done by inmates of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. I did not look at them for very long.
Barry was talking to an officer of the guard, and I wandered up to pass the time. They were on opposite sides of a glass case containing jewelry made for sale by the cons, and when I looked up from the rings and pendants I was staring straight at the chest of the guard. He wore a tie tack with a little silver pig on it.
I turned around and assayed the other visitors.
Almost all were women, mainly black and chicana. They were not, for the most part, lavishly or colorfully dressed. They sat stoically, waiting for their men. One or two small groups had formed, but everyone talked in hushed tones.
It was not the happiest place I’ve ever visited.
Finally, we were called, and a guard came to take us to the maximum security section. Most of the visitors were seeing the cons in a large conversation room that let off the display/reception area…but we had to go into the penitentiary itself to see Fouquet.
We went out the front door, past neatly trimmed lawns and flowerbeds being tended by trusties, and followed the guard to a huge wooden door with an iron grate set into it. We were passed through into a tiny intermediate cubicle with a wood and iron door on the other side. Guards there frisked us again, and then we were passed through. We walked down a series of corridors and through another guarded door, and emerged into the central courtyard, the exercise yard, of San Quentin.
Shirley Jackson once wrote a book called THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. They made it into a film called The Haunting. It set forth the eerie proposition that there are houses that have been possessed by the evil spirits of the terrible acts that took place within their walls. Demon houses. As Richard Matheson called the one in his brilliant novel on the same theme, HELL HOUSE.
San Quentin is such a diseased house.
As I stepped out into the courtyard, the very weight of the cyclopean stones that formed Q’s structure seemed to lean over and press on me. I found it difficult to breathe. My chest hurt. Imprisoned in those stones and that ironwork were god knows how many years of pain and loneliness and brutality and evil that had seeped into the very pores of the prison, exuded by all the men who had lived and died there. I had been in jails before, many times, but this was something greater, more terrible. That place had a life of its own. It held, condemned within its borders, the raw naked hatred and violence of men for whom this was the living cloaca.
We walked slowly across the yard, and the most frightening thing that had ever happened to me happened without warning. It was a moment in which an entire area of thoughts I had never thought came thundering in on me.
I was dressed simply, wearing a long dress jacket of brown corduroy, dark slacks and a shirt with an open collar. Hardly flamboyant…for anyplace but San Quentin.
As we walked, the barred windows that filled one entire wall of a dorm to our left began to show men staring out. They hung on the bars and watched, and then they began to whistle.
I have heard a sound like that only once before in my life. At a concert for the Rolling Stones that was mostly young boys. It was not the high-pitched screaming of female groupies, but a lower, throatier moan, pierced by whistling.
That was the wave of sound that washed over me.
Never having had, or having even been approached to have, a homosexual liaison, and thus never having thought of myself as fair game for other men…I suddenly realized the horror and dismay experienced by women for whom a walk past a hardhat’s construction site is a degrading experience.
To those men, I was a sexual object, a potential catamite, what Hammett called a gunsel. My asshole was suddenly, for the first time in my life, something more than an orifice used to void my bowels. My mouth was being looked at in a very different way than ever before. I was frightened, and chilled, and wanted to turn and run.
But the leaning, pressing, diseased walls of San Quentin held me, at that moment, as firmly as they held Ronald Fouquet, waiting on Death Row for our arrival.