Crossing the yard of the joint. Q. San Quentin, September 1970. I was playing the role of legal clerk to my friend and attorney, Barry Bernstein; the only way I could get onto Death Row, to observe convicted child murderer Ronald Fouquet.
Crossing the yard, with the eyes of hundreds of cons on me. But not merely curious the way strangers in Milford, Pennsylvania, a small resort town, had been curious and disdainful when I’d walked into the best restaurant in the town in 1966, wearing long hair. Not with animosity, the way an audience of fans stared at me when I accepted their award for a piece of work that had been butchered, and told them they were idiots. No, I was being stared at the way women wearing pasties and G-strings are looked at in a thousand tank strip joints; the way secretaries on their way to lunch are looked at by high-steel workers and riveters; the way gorgeous young girls fresh off the bus from Shawnee, Kansas, are looked at by the sleek sharks at the private clubs when they come in, wide-eyed and ready, on the arms of junior studio executives who’ve seen them having a BLT on rye at the commissary. I was meat, and I was being examined and whistled at and taught an ugly lesson.
If anyone ever asked me at what moment in my life I perceived even dimly how awful it must be for women most of the time, I would tell them that was the moment. See yourself naked and bent over in the eyes of three hundred degraded human beings, and it is the death of sexism.
“Come on, let’s move it,” I said to the guard who was chaperoning us across the exercise yard to the building that housed the maximum security section and Death Row.
He gave me a nasty, knowing smile. For maybe the millionth time since I was first arrested, at the age of ten in Painesville, Ohio, for stealing comic character pins from boxes of Kellogg’s Pep, I realized I didn’t much like cops.
At the same pace, without hurrying, the three of us went around the bulk of the main dormitory, thank god out of sight of the faces in the barred windows, the hands wrapped around iron.
Stones. Dark, weathered stones, striated with lines of shadow and black rock as colorless as old blood. Huge stones, set one atop the other, descending into the ground and rising up around us. There was no sky, no Earth beneath us, just the weight of the imponderable stones.
Approaching the high wall with the heavy door set into it, the blind multi-faceted eye of the wire-screened window in it, was a sequence from Hitchcock: that series of trucking shots (not “tracking shots,” which are something else entirely) approaching a supposedly deserted house, closer and closer, the hand-held camera rolling and bobbing, the tension building because you know something terrible waits on the other side of the door.
That building screamed with silent pain.
The guard reached the door, knocked, and the door was opened from inside. We stepped over a low sill, and the door was slammed and barred behind us. We were in twilight, and to my right was a green door of metal. It could have been painted wood. I think it was metal. There were rivet studs.
The inside guard who’d opened the door saw me staring at the green slab. “That’s the gas chamber,” he said. He said it with the disenfranchised pride of a slattern holding up her thalidomide baby, knowing it was being taken away at the end of the week.
Barry asked if we could see inside the chamber. The guard who’d walked us over said we’d have to check that out with Warden Nelson. I was just as glad he didn’t push it; I remembered having been taken on a tour of Ohio State Penitentiary back in the Forties. The little green room where they kept that splendid piece of American furniture, the electric chair, had turned up in vagrant nightmares for twenty years.
It was time to see Fouquet, however.
We were taken up in a cramped, tight little elevator, gut-to-back with two guards. I saw no slim, trim, hardbelly turnkeys at Q. All I saw were men who liked their sweets and starches.
The elevator ground to a stop on the second or third floor. It’s been three years, some details are blurred.
We emerged onto a metal-floored landing with identical doors on either side. One of the guards was wearing taps on his shoes; he made little clattering sounds as he walked to the door on our left and rapped on the window. Some details stick.
As we waited for the door to be opened to the cell block on our left, the other guard indicated the door on our right. “Sirhan Sirhan is in there,” he said. “All alone in a cell by himself.”
“How come by himself?” I asked.
The guard looked at me. It was a look that suggested I might be suffering from tertiary stupid. “If we put him in with the other cons they’d tear him to pieces in a day. He’s too important. We can’t take a chance.”
Then the door on the left opened, and we went in.
As the door was being locked behind us, I looked around. We were in a corridor painted a pastel color. Light green. To our left were floor-to-ceiling bars, battleship gray, and several feet beyond the wall of bars a second floor-to-ceiling barred wall. In the space between sat a guard at a desk, reading a paperback. Beyond the second wall of bars was a cell block with an exercise area that separated cells running down both sides of the block. Several men were walking around in the tank, and they stopped and stared at Barry and myself as we waited for the guard in charge to talk to us. There were remarks and more whistles.
But this time, for what reason I can’t say, there was none of the gut-tightening feeling I’d experienced in the yard. The men back there in the channel were something alien. There was a feeling about them, a look, a presence, that removed them from any identification with the human race. It was like looking at great languid subsea creatures propelling themselves through dark waters in an aquarium. I stared back at them.
On our right were rooms. One of them was the office. The guard responsible for the section came out and shook our hands, checked our passes. “Welcome to Death Row,” he said, cheerily. I could see him standing at a crossroads, at midnight, swinging a dead cat by the tail.
“Bring Fouquet out,” he said to the guard at the desk inside the dead-space. The guard made a tent of his paperback, got off his ass reluctantly, and went to the inner barred wall. I didn’t see if he released the door of one of the cells in the block, or if Fouquet was one of the men walking in the exercise area, but I suspect the former, because of what Fouquet said later.
The guard in charge walked us down the corridor to a tiny open-fronted booth about the double-width of a phone booth, in which they’d placed three chairs and a small table. We sat and waited for the condemned man to appear. Barry winked at me, as if to say, “Well, I told you I’d get you onto Death Row, how do you like the entertainment so far?” It was a wink of camaraderie, and I didn’t have the heart—nor would it have been prudent with guards all around the booth—to tell Barry how my guts were churning. (As tough as I like to think I am, and during moments of violence or danger or blood I’ve found I stay calm and functional, it’s always been my feeling that to be a good lawyer—and take it from me, Bernstein is tops—one must be capable of an uncommon coldness of soul at times; so cold that passersby would get frostbite if they touched your hand. Barry’s got that ability, which is perhaps why he’s so damned good at what he does; but I decided he had turned himself off, emotionally, the way the surgeons in M*A*S*H turned themselves off to slaughter. I could never be an attorney.)
I looked around the little booth. On the floor by the back wall was a cockroach. It had been stomped. A big one, it had left a messy corpse. Some details stick.
Then they brought Fouquet in.
I must be careful of what I now report. I heard things in that booth with Fouquet that I may not repeat. Though at the time I saw him he’d only been on Death Row six months, it has been three years since, and Fouquet’s appeal hearing occurred just this past July 23rd. Because of the outcome of that hearing—which I’ll tell you shortly—it would be in the nature of possibly prejudicing the man’s rights, were I to repeat what he said.
But I can pass along impressions, for what they’re worth.
He began talking almost before he sat down. A high-pitched, utterly terrified recitation of the terrors he was experiencing in the Death Row cell. He had not been out of his cell in months. He had demanded, and been granted, the right to take his exercise when everyone else was locked away. And when they were out in the tank, he was locked away so they couldn’t get at him.
And why did “they” want to get at him?
He pointed to a huge shaggy man with the face of a Newcastle coalman. He called him, I believe, Jonah Something. He told us Jonah was scheduled for the cyanide sleep for having stomped a cop to death. It seems Jonah was salivating for an opportunity to penetrate Fouquet’s virginal ass. Fouquet seemed less frightened of the gas chamber than of Jonah’s depredations. He talked at great length of the horror of it, imparting in almost poetic terms his fear of the man and his penis. At one point (he said)…in the dead of night…as he lay on his rack…he could sense Jonah’s prick out there, across the exercise tank, like a great blind snake, risen up, poised to strike.
He begged Barry to get the Warden to have his cell designation changed to the empty block across the way, where Sirhan sat alone and thought of whatever it is Presidential Assassins think about. Barry said he would try.
Then they got down to the grounds for appeal. Like most death cell inmates, like much of the population of any big joint, Fouquet had become a jailhouse lawyer. He had read and re-read the transcripts of his trial. He went over in exhaustive detail with Barry, minute by minute, what this witness had said that was inaccurate, what the prosecuting attorney had concluded that was wrong, where his wife Betty had lied to throw the blame on him alone. It went on and on.
And all the while, the cons stared at us from thirty feet away through two walls of bars. The death penalty had not been revoked at that time. They were all scheduled to die within the foreseeable future.
My impression of Fouquet, as he talked—sallow, yellow-skinned, parchment face, beady little eyes, the look of the cracker about him—was one of total amorality. The court had judged him guilty, and I tried desperately not to make any value-judgments of my own, but I must admit that Ronald Fouquet left me with the feeling that, in isolated cases, the death penalty is not altogether a cruel and unusual prize to be won by some men for certain special deeds of evil.
Because of the visiting rules, we were required to stay in that booth for an hour or two—all sense of time’s passage distorts in jail—I have no recollection of how long we actually spent with the man—and when there was nothing left to discuss about the case, Fouquet regaled us with stories of his fellow prisoners. He told the cheery tale of how two brothers who were in for murder had taken a dislike to another con in the cell block of Death Row, and had beaten him so badly with a three-legged stool from one of the cells that the man was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to live.
And there was more talk of Jonah. Fouquet could not mention the man’s name without swallowing dry with horror.
Finally, our time was up, and we watched as Fouquet was taken back to the Row, and locked in his cell.
We stopped to talk to the guard in charge, and Barry said, “Fouquet is frightened of one of the cons.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, that’s Jonah,” the guard said, walking to a big board on one wall of the office. The board was laid out to duplicate the order of ranking of cells just beyond the bars, and a photo of each con was in a slot below the cell number. He tapped the photo of Jonah. “This one.”
Barry and I were stunned. The guards knew all about it. “Well, if you know what’s going on,” Barry said, “why don’t you do something about it?”
“Do what?” he replied. “Look: we can’t move him, and we can’t stop them. If they want to, they can do whatever they want in there before we can stop them.” He mentioned the beating of the con by the brothers. “What’ll have to happen is one day Jonah will get to Fouquet, and he’ll either give him his ass…or get killed.”
Nothing further was said about it.
We were waiting for a chaperon to come over from the main building, and Barry passed the time exchanging pleasantries with the guards. I said nothing. I merely watched and listened.
And realized again that the guards, like the cons, were in prison. They were all locked away together. And the difference between them was only the uniform.
Finally, our escort arrived, we left Death Row, and went back to the car. Driving back across the bridge, toward Oakland and the plane to return us to Los Angeles, I didn’t say much to Barry beyond one comment.
“He’ll be lucky if they deny his appeal and kill him.”
Barry glanced at me, a little surprised. “Why?”
“There are worse ways to live than dying.”
Barry didn’t answer. He just gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.
Ronald Fouquet’s appeal hearing was held on July 23rd, 1973. The judgment of Murder One was reversed. He is subject to retrial. Instead, Fouquet pleaded guilty to Murder in the Second Degree, a crime that commands fifteen years to life by California law. He is now in San Luis Obispo Men’s Colony.
On a 15-to-Life, the prisoner is eligible for parole in three years. Ronald Fouquet has already served three years in San Quentin. That time is credited to his account.
Right now, at this moment, Ronald Fouquet, who pleaded guilty to beating to death a five-year-old child and warping the mind of another child under the age of ten, that Ronald Fouquet is eligible for parole.
There are worse ways to live than dying.