CHAPTER 14

 

Riots were nothing new. I’d been in eight of them last time I did time. Nine, if you count the one I came into when I hit quarantine my first day. That riot was over but I sure suffered through the consequences! Lyndon Johnson was president during my first stretch and he came on the tube one night and said the government had done some kind of study and it was their opinion that Pendleton was the single worst joint in the U.S. We were having a riot a month then, seemed like. When the president made that announcement on TV, every single inmate stood up and cheered like we’d won the championship of the NFL.

This was Manny’s first riot, but I told him to hang with me and he’d be all right.

“The thing to do,” I told him, “is stay out of the way of the crazies. There’s guys go nuts, times like these. A guy can get killed just standing around picking his nose the wrong way. Maintain a low profile, that’s the key to staying alive.”

That was good advice for all the time, not just during a riot. Time after time, I seen guys come in and start breaking bad right from the git-go. You could tell they was actually scared and that’s why they were trying to act like Charles Bronson, but it was the wrong thing to do. You draw too much attention in the joint, your ticket’s gonna get punched. Don’t matter how big you are or even how bad you might actually be. There’s always somebody bigger and badder. Or littler and badder. I found that out myself, didn’t I? Somebody got a razor blade to your throat it don’t matter if you’re eleven feet tall.

If you’re smart, you get in the habit of fading into the woodwork. Blend, baby, blend! Anybody stands out, they might as well write MAJOR DUMBASS in red crayon on their back. There’s too many dudes in here can’t wait to establish a reputation and the only thing that impresses a con is taking somebody out, whacking them. You get to loud-talking folks, acting tough, you just put your whole front on the line. You got to keep it up. Really, you got to act badder and badder and sooner or later somebody’s going to front you and then you better come through, kill his ass or it’s your own. It’s not smart to break bad, not unless you are the baddest dude ever lived for real. Tough guys in here, really tough guys, they see an act like that they know there’s not much else there. Quiet guys, guys that don’t say much, keep to themselves, now there’s a mystery about them most people don’t want to fuck with. They might just be quiet little punks scared to death...or, they might be the nastiest motherfuckers on the block. Nobody knows and nobody wants to especially find out. That old saying about “don’t judge a book by the cover”—that got started in a joint somewhere, I’d bet money on it.

There’s one thing for sure started in some joint somewhere. High fives. I see guys on the street high- and low-fiving each other and I got to smile. Guys in the joint, old-timers, know where that came from. It came from not trusting any other motherfucker. You meet a guy, you sure as hell aren’t going to shake his hand. Do that, put your hand in another guy’s hand and all he has to do is yank you toward him, put a shank in your gut. An old-timer told me that at chow one day. He claimed he was doing time in Chino back in the early fifties when they started doing it, couple of white guys who’d had a fight and then decided to bury the hatchet. The brothers saw it, picked it up and now everybody thinks it started as a black thing. They think it’s a sports thing!

We were over in the barber school when this riot broke out. The whistle blew and the phone in Mr. Dillsie’s office rang at the same time. and we all knew some shit was going down even though when a bunch of us ran to the window we couldn’t see anything.

Mr. Dillsie came out, his face as white as an Eskimo’s ass and give the guard on duty the high sign. Jonesy, the guard that day, came running over and they stood together talking low so nobody could hear them and then Jonesy says, “Okay, men. There’s been some trouble over at the hospital and everybody has to go back to the cells.” He started lining us up, barber students on one side, inmates that were there for a haircut on another. Mr. Dillsie was running around gathering all the straight razors that had been checked out to put away in the cabinet which was heavily locked at all times. That was a joke—they had three big Yale locks on the razor cabinet, like that meant something, when three-fourths of the guys in here were B&E guys, could open a Yale in about six seconds flat, if they took their time and worked with their eyes closed and were dead drunk, a lot faster happen they were on top of their game. I guess the locks made Dillsie feel secure.

They got us back to K Dorm, all of us barber students except one lived there and the one that didn’t, a guy we all called Sniffles because his nose was always running. We found out later Sniffles never made it to J Block where he lived, as both he and Jonesy got stabbed, him dead and Jonesy cut bad enough to miss three months of work when it was all over. I’da been Jonesy, I wouldn’t have come back.

In K we were all right. Looking out the window we could see the riot escalate until there were inmates all over the yard between us and the chow hall. First thing they did was bring down the American flag from the big flagpole out in the center of the yard and replace it with a professional looking Jolly Roger. Some talented seamstress must have sewn it in craft class—it was a beaut. Corny, but it got all of us and we all cheered when we seen it go up, busting with pride like we’d done something major like win World War II or something.

“You guys know what this means, don’t you?” said Dusty. Me, him and Manny were all clustered at one of the end windows watching the merriment below.

“No food,” he said. “Nobody’s going to the chow hall until they get this thing shut down.”

“What if they don’t?” Manny said. “What if this goes on for a week?”

“Then we don’t eat for a week.”

He was right. The first thing the warden did in a riot was cut off the food supply. They figured if the rioters got hungry enough they’d cave in and go back to their cells. Like they couldn’t just go over and take over the chow hall and get their own. That was the first fucking place took over every riot I ever seen. The only ones a shutdown hurt were the ones like us, locked up. We weren’t too bad off though. Not with Dusty the loan shark. He had about six weeks’ worth of Oreos alone, plus potato chips, candy, stuff like that. It’d wipe out his stash, we were on lockdown very long but the main thing is we weren’t about to starve. We might get shanked by our friends for the food but we wouldn’t die hungry.

“Fuck!”

“What?” Both Dusty and I both responded to Manny.

“We’re gonna miss the movie.”

He was right. This was Friday and we always got a movie on Saturday morning. And for once, they had one scheduled that wasn’t forty years old and didn’t have John Wayne in it. Somehow, in a bureaucratic mixup they’d scheduled “Shane” with Alan Ladd. The fact that it was only about twenty years old made it like a sneak preview, compared to the turkeys we usually got.

Right then, something happened that made us forget our disappointment. Smoke. From the chow hall. First, someone yelled “Smoke!” which we could all see plainly and then fire itself appeared inside the windows. They were burning the tables. And probably anything else combustible they could find, piling it in the dining area and setting it ablaze.

“This is getting serious,” Dusty said, and I knew what he meant. Once guys started burning stuff they wouldn’t stop. If they got the idea to start on the cellhouses we were in deep doodoo. Below us was one of the worst cellblocks in here and there was no doubt in my mind it’d be one of the next places to go. And we were locked in.

Or so we thought.

“It gets hinky, I can get us out,” Dusty said. He said it in a low voice like he didn’t want anyone else to hear what he said.

Turns out, Dusty had a key would open the barred door. Bought it for a hundred green years ago from another inmate who’d somehow copped a wax impression from the master key that unlocked all the cells and had a duplicate made up over at the metal shop. Dusty said they changed the locks and the civilian who’d come in to make it had laid it down for a couple of minutes. There were several copies around here and there. Dusty’s was the only one in K and nobody knew he had it. Except us. Now.

“Keep your mouths shut,” he said, saying it more for Manny’s benefit than mine. “I ain’t gonna use it unless we start going up in smoke and they don’t want to let us out.”

The reason he bought it, he said, was he always had an idea in the back of his mind he might make a break sometime. So far, he hadn’t figured out just how to bring that off other than to get out of the dorm some night. He was pretty sure he could get past a couple of the front gates with it as well but beyond that he wasn’t sure. There was no way it’d fit the main door.

Right now the fire seemed to be going pretty good over at the chow hall. There were inmates running around all over the place. Not a single guard was in sight. They must have gotten them all out. So far nobody, inmate or guard, had come up to K Dorm, let us know what was going on and everybody had a theory. The best one was that the inmates had taken over the entire institution and were holding fifteen guards hostage and the governor was on his way. State troopers and the National Guard were lined up elbow to elbow on the walls and were preparing to lob tear gas into all the cell houses and shoot every single prisoner the minute the governor gave the word. There was no way this could be confirmed from where we were in K since the only view was of the other side of the institution across the quad, the chow hall, hospital, library, the top of the roof of the auto and metal shops and a few other small buildings and offices. You couldn’t see the walls or the towers from where we were; they were all behind our building where there weren’t any windows.

“You’re an idiot,” I said to the guy who came up with this theory, a weightlifter everybody called Clark Gable on account of the way his ears stuck out. I said it smiling. He was a mountain of muscles. “If they’ve taken over the joint how come we’re still stuck in here? All I see out there are thirty guys running around like squirrels.” It was true. For all the havoc they were creating over at the chow hall it looked like a small band of guys were doing all the destruction. Especially considering they had over two thousand of us locked up in here. It didn’t look like any major riot, not like some I’d been in when every asshole in the place was out loose and running around.

Just when it looked like our friendly argument was going to develop into something unhealthy for yours truly, we heard a lot of yelling downstairs and then people running up the stairs. We all ran to the front. Across the way, the blacks were doing the same. In just seconds, there were fifteen, twenty guys outside our doors and they had hacksaws. The place went nuts.

Dusty grabbed me and Manny and pulled us aside.

“They get those doors open, the best thing to do is stay put. This riot is like every other fucking riot. Sooner or later the hacks will take the place back over and everyone who’s out of their cell or dorm is either going to get shot or clubbed in the face or gassed and the ones that don’t are going to the hole. Stay here and let these buttholes have their fun.”

“He’s right,” I said to Manny. “The Man doesn’t like it when this kind of shit happens. You don’t want to be on the list when it’s all over. Just stay up here when everybody goes out. We’ll play some cards.”

Good idea, except it didn’t work out that way. Almost the very instant the bars on the doors were sawed through somebody started setting fire to the mattresses in the back of the dorm.

“Oh, shit,” we all said at the same time. Now we had to leave whether we wanted to or not, or else end up as Crispy Critters. We saw one of the arsonists come running up to the front, hollering and waving a rolled-up newspaper that was on fire, touching it to every pillow and blanket he ran by. It was ol’ Clark Gable, the simple fuck, and I think I remember seeing his sheet when I worked in I.D. Arson. Just ‘plying his trade. Smoke was rolling up behind him. He must have done a good job. We could already see the flames and our eyes were watering, not to mention we were hacking out pieces of lung with every breath. The door went down and guys were trampling each other trying to get out.

“Wait!”

Both Manny and I had started toward the gang that was killing themselves getting out of the dorm. We looked back at Dusty.

“Where you going?”

I looked at Manny, then back at Dusty and said, “Why, just out to stroll around the grounds. We figured that was better than getting toasted like a marshmallow.”

“You guys got shanks?”

That was dumb. When I realized what I was about to do I hit the side of my head with an open palm. “Yeah, you’re right, Dusty. Damn!”

Quickly, I ran down what we were talking about to Manny. “It ain’t the hacks we got to worry about right now. It’s other inmates. Half these bozos turn into sharks, this kind of shit goes down. Sharks that smell blood and go wacko. Some of these guys will cut you just because you’re standing next to them or you look like their ex-wife.” I looked closely at him, squinting my eyes. “Especially you, Manny. You for sure look like somebody’s ex. I was you, I’d carry a bazooka.”

Dusty ran over to his bunk and grabbed his pillow and began to rip the stitching. “Here!” He ran back over and pushed something in our hands. Laundry pins. One for each of us. Laundry pins are big brass pins they use to fasten the large canvas sacks they use for laundry. They look like Baby Huey’s diaper pin and when you bend them out they make about a foot-and-a-half-long shank. It’s the favorite weapon for most of us, next to a filed-down spoon. They only let you have one eating utensil, a soup spoon, that you keep with you all the time. No knives or forks. You carry your spoon with you everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. Lots of guys hone down the handle on the concrete cell floors, sharpen it, and it makes a great weapon. Of course, you get caught with it it’s a week in the hole, so you try and cop an extra one, one that’s for show and tell, just your regular spoon and one you’ve made into a shank that you keep hidden.

There were lots of weapons in K Dorm. More than in the other cell houses because to get into K in the first place you had to have a squeaky clean record. That meant they considered us less dangerous and less likely to be armed, so we didn’t catch near as many shakedowns as the rest of the population.

I had such a spoon, taped inside one of the hollow legs of my bunk. I ran and got it as well. You couldn’t have too many weapons during a riot. Then we booked. Everybody else had already cleared out and coming down the stairs we saw they’d set fire to the cell house below us as well. There was no way the building would burn itself—it was solid concrete—but the danger was smoke inhalation.

We went outside, moved toward the middle of the compound between K and the chow hall. Guys were running everywhere, screaming and laughing and yelling and just going ape shit in general.

“Stick together, guys,” Dusty said and Manny and I shook our heads in agreement.

“Let’s find out what’s going down,” Manny said and Dusty reached out and grabbed the arm of a guy we knew, Baker, and yelled, “What’s the situation, man?”

He ran it down for us.

It seems it all started over at the infirmary. “Big Alice” one of the weight-lifting drag queens was there to get her finger looked at—she’d got it caught in a drill press over at the metal shop. When she asked for something for the pain the cheezy little Third World doctor just laughed and so Big Alice grabbed him and broke his arm. Then all hell broke loose, according to Baker.

It might have all ended there if the hack on duty had been around, but it turns out he was AWOL, having slipped over to the officer’s mess to grab a quick sandwich. Guards aren’t supposed to do that, leave their duty station, but they all did. When he came back, Alice and some of the other inmate patients grabbed him and threw him in a closet with the doc. They took his sandwich too, Baker said. We all laughed at that.

From there it just escalated, he said. Two other hacks were walking by on their way to the front gate when one of them must have noticed something wrong at the hospital and decided to investigate. His buddy went on up to the gate and it was him that sounded the alarm, probably when he couldn’t raise his partner on the walkie-talkie. His partner couldn’t have called in as he was dead. By the time he walked into the hospital Big Alice and the rest of the cons there had broken into one of the drug cabinets and were all high as loons. They decided to get the guard high too and shot him full of Demerol only they gave him a little bit more than what would be a safe dosage. He died happy, Baker said, and we all got another grin out of that.

From what we could figure from what Baker told us, it most likely could have ended right there, but our lame-brain Warden, Mr. Coffey, pushed the panic button and hit the whistle, ordered all the inmates locked down, and for the officers to come back up front until they could figure out exactly what was going on. That was a guess on our part, but it fit with what Baker told us. Coffey was a weasel from the git-go, always pulled boneheaded stunts like that. He blew their only chance to contain things before it became a riot. All he would have had to do was send about six of the biggest hacks with tear gas and the whole thing would have been history. Instead, he wasted enough time trying to make a decision that Alice and the hospital inmates recruited some others out in the yard, and it blew sky high when the barber school guard Jonesy and Sniffles got shanked going into J. The inmates there grabbed Jonesy’s keys and let out the whole damned block and then the shit was in the fire. There was about fifty inmates locked up that all of a sudden weren’t and they ran over to the chow hall and started grabbing officers’ steaks out of the reefer and cooking them. Naturally, it wasn’t long before they started burning down the place, which we’d seen from our window at K earlier.

We looked around, dozens of guys running here and there, bunch of fucking baboons and Dusty said, “Don’t much look like the movies, does it?” he said it to Manny.

No shit. In the movies, they have a riot, they make the convicts look like the Teamsters Union. Organized like nobody’s business. Movie riots in the joint always have committees with lists of demands and all this strategy. Real riots aren’t anything like that. Everybody’s just shittin’ and gittin’, trying to grab all the goodies they can from each other, from the commissary, the chow hall, wherever, and guys go nuts trying to shank each other. Only people usually hurt are inmates. Usually by other inmates. I bet the doc and the guard over at the hospital were completely forgotten by Alice and the others who were probably over at the commissary breaking down the wire cage to get at the cookie stash. Only reason the guards hadn’t moved in yet was we had us a warden believed all that movie crap, was no doubt waiting for the Convict Committee to show up with their Twenty Demands. Like we didn’t have but one demand. Let us the fuck out! Not much chance of that happening.

What they’d do is let us burn everything down, kill each other, and then early the next morning come in with the guns and dogs and shoot a few more of us. Most of us wouldn’t be in any shape to resist. Twenty guys, for instance, would be working on making some quick applejack to get drunk on while they had the chance. In fact, that sounded like a good idea to us.

“Fire’s probably burned down in K by now,” Dusty said. “Let’s get our asses over to the chow hall and pick up some peaches and stuff and get loaded.”

We booked over to what was left of the chow hall and sure enough there was a whole gang of guys loading up on fruit. We each loaded up a big bagful and headed back over to K.

The way you made applejack was to scrub down the commode until it was squeaky clean, then you dumped a bunch of fruit and sugar and yeast in the water and let it set, three, four days until it started to ferment. You skimmed off the fruit that was pretty ripe by then and drank what was left. Some good shit, made you insane it was so good. Only place you could brew applejack was if you were in a cell. In the dorms, no way. There was only two toilets for about fifty guys and there was always a few pitched a bitch if you was to even hint you were gonna be using their crapper for that long. Besides, in a dorm was a boatful of snitches would rat you out long before it was done and you’d end up in the hole and back in a cell house after they let you out.

We didn’t figure we had three or four days to let the stuff brew naturally like it was supposed to, so Dusty said let’s go over to the hospital and get some rubbing alcohol to speed things up.

There was a mob over there must have had the same idea as we did. “Let’s split up,” Dusty said, when we saw two dozen guys with the same idea. “Everybody take a room and look for anything has alcohol in it. Grab as much as you can carry, and we’ll meet back at the front door.”

It was a good plan and we took off, each a different direction. I went straight for the back of the building seeing as how most guys were looking in the front offices. I figured if there was any alcohol up there they’d have found it by now and if there was any left in the building it would be toward the back.

The first room I went into wasn’t nothing but some kind of linen storage room. It only took five seconds to see they didn’t keep anything but sheets and pillowcases and stuff like that in there, so I ran out and down the hall to the very last room. Nobody’d been there as the door was still locked. A good sign. If the room was locked it meant there was something worth stealing there.

The door went down easy. I only had to hit it twice and the whole door jamb splintered and I was in. I’d hit the mother lode. Up against the far wall was a long glass cabinet and I could see it was loaded with drugs and medication. Where the drugs were, the alcohol would be too and I was gonna load up with pills and stuff. If I could hide ‘em good enough, I’d be rich when this all blew over. Plus, I had it in mind to get a little high myself.

I didn’t mess around with the locks on the cabinets, just picked up a bedpan was sitting on a counter and started bashing in glass. I went up and down the entire row of cabinets and busted out all the glass. I was looking around for a bag or something to put the bottles in when I heard something over by the door. I whirled around, sure it was one of the hacks—I was busted! I wish it had of been a guard. It was Frick, my old pal from the city lockup in Fort Wayne.

“Hey, chump,” he said. “I been lookin’ for you.”

He had a shank in his hand looked like a regular knife, not a homemade job like most. I wondered how he’d come to have a weapon like that.