3
AMONG THE
CONDEMNED

THE SUPERINTENDENT OF THE PRESTON SCHOOL of Industry threatened to quit if I was returned to his institution, or so I was told by the man who drove me from the LA County Jail to the prison for youthful offenders in the town of Lancaster. It was on the edge of the vast Mojave Desert but still in the county of Los Angeles. Built during World War II as a training base for Canadian fliers, it was now operated by the California Department of Corrections. They’d built a double fence topped with rolled barbed wire around the buildings. Every hundred yards was a gun tower on stilts. Presto! A prison.

Except for a couple dozen skilled inmate workers brought from San Quentin or Folsom (surgical nurse, expert stenographer/typist for the associate warden, and so forth), the convicts of Lancaster were between eighteen and twenty-five. Ninety percent of those were between eighteen and twenty-one. When the transporting officer removed my chains in Receiving and Release, I was fifteen years old.

While I was being processed, a sergeant arrived to take me to the captain. Wearing white overalls and then walking across the prison with the sergeant, I felt self-conscious. Heads turned to scan the newcomer. One or two knew me from other places and called out, “Hey, Bunker! What’s up?”

Inside the Custody Office, which was somewhat reminiscent of an urban newspaper’s city room, was a door with frosted glass and “L. S. NELSON, Captain” stenciled on it. The captain commanded all uniformed personnel. Nelson was in his thirties and had red hair. Later, when the red was mixed with sand and he was warden of San Quentin, everyone called him Red Nelson. He was one of the legendary wardens, a man known to be hard but fair. He had a strong jaw and sunburned face. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator-style dark glasses. He wore them for the tough impression they conveyed. As he leaned back in his swivel chair and webbed his fingers behind his neck, there was the vaguest hint of a sneer in his voice. “Shit! You don’t look like a holy terror to me. You’re too light in the butt to be that tough. You’ll be lucky if somebody around here doesn’t break you down like a shotgun.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Me, either. But I thought I’d tell you how it is. You’ve made a little name for yourself in those kiddie joints. This isn’t a kiddie joint. This is a prison. Start any shit here and you’ll swear the whole world fell on you. I’ll stomp your brains out. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I wanna do my time and get out as soon as I can.” My words were true, but I also resented the threat. Everywhere I’d been—military school, juvenile hall, reform school, nuthouse—they all had promised to break me. All had inflicted severe physical and emotional pain on me, but here I was. If going into the general population had been less important to me, I would have dumped his desk over on him and taken the ass kicking—so he would know that I wasn’t intimidated by his words.

“Okay, Bunker . . . hit the yard. Any trouble, I’ll bury you so deep in segregation they’ll have to pump in the air.” He dismissed me with a jerk of the thumb. I turned and the waiting sergeant opened the door.

Assigned to Dorm #3, I was making up my bunk when buddies of mine from reform school and juvenile hall began streaming in, grinning and horse-playing. Someone jumped on me and I bumped into a bunk that skidded loudly across the floor.

“Take that horseplay outside,” yelled the dorm guard from his desk. We went outside down the road to the handball courts. Ahead of us was a crowd. We came up from behind. In the center stood two young Chicanos, lean as hawks; each had a big knife. One of them I recognized from reform school without remembering his name. Off to the side was the object of their dispute, a petite white queen called Forever Amber. She was wringing her hands together. The Chicano I recognized gestured to the other, plainly signaling “come on . . . come on. . . .” His denim jacket was wrapped around his forearm. Both wore white T-shirts.

What then happened bore no resemblance to a movie knife fight. They came at each other like two roosters in a cockfight, leaping high and flailing, stabbing and being stabbed. The one without the jacket took a blow that opened his forearm to the bone. Then he stabbed back. His long shiv penetrated the other’s white T-shirt and sank to the hilt. Both grunted, but neither gave way. In seconds, both were cut to pieces. The one with the jacket suddenly muttered, “Dirty sonofabitch. . . .” He sank to his knees and fell forward on his face, his knife falling from his dying fingers while his blood spread in a pool soaking the dry, hard earth.

The other Chicano turned and walked away, blood spraying from his mouth. It reminded me of a blowing whale. Forever Amber ran after him, still mincing and all femininelike. About fifty yards down the road, the “winner” suddenly stopped, coughed up a glob of blood, and fell. He tried to rise but stopped on his knees, his head down. Several convicts rushed forward and carried him to the hospital, but they returned thumbs down. He, too, had died.

It took a while after “lights out” for the dorm to settle for the night. Silhouettes in skivvies moved through the shadows to the washroom and latrine. They carried their toothbrushes in their teeth or in their hands, with towels wrapped around their necks. Down the dorm, two figures seated on adjacent bunks put their heads together as they whispered. Sudden laughter. The guard grunted, “Knock it off down there.” Silence.

I was on my back, fully dressed except for my shoes, and I pulled a towel over my eyes. I had no enemies; no need for caution. Coughing. Bedsprings squeaking, the shhh-shhh of slippers moving along the aisle. The dorm windows were empty frames, holes in the wall really, the shape of windows. The double fences with rolled barbed wire, the lights, and the gun towers made window security superfluous. The desert wind that rose at every dusk was hot and hard tonight. It made the rolled barbed wire vibrate and the chain-link fence roll along its length, like an ocean wave rolling along the beach. In my mind, I saw the swift and deadly knife over and over, each moment almost frozen in time. I now recognized death. It had been delivered by the right hand, half sideways and half upward in a motion that looked defensive rather than attacking. The other guy was left-handed—or at least he had his knife in the left hand. He had it extended and was slicing at his opponent’s face. When his left arm was extended, the soft spot just under the left side of the ribs was exposed. It was there his opponent’s knife sank to the hilt. It must have cut a heart valve.

Bang! He was dead. With a snap of the fingers! He was history, too. That night after the lights were out, I lay on my upper bunk, listening to the night sounds, creaking bedsprings, wordless whispers, and choked laughter—and I thought about those two dead young Chicanos. They had died fighting over a sissy and pure machismo. To many in the world, my behavior was chaos for the sake of chaos. You probably could have gotten good odds that I would not live into my sixth decade, much less reach my seventh. Now I’d seen a double killing and it was a serious shock. Although I made no conscious decision and my behavior would continue to be wild and erratic, thereafter I always had something that stopped me on the brink of the precipice. I would never and have never gone mano a mano with knives. I wanted real victory, not a Pyrrhic version.

 

FOR THREE MONTHS I MANAGED to avoid the hole, and I had just two fistfights. One was with an Indian named Andy Lowe, whom I’d known since juvenile hall. We were in the dorm, body punching. Body punching is a bare-knuckle boxing match except no punches are aimed at the head. Andy could whip me when we were young, but no longer. When he tensed to punch, I rammed my left jab in his chest, stopping him so I could pivot away. He was missing every time he punched. He didn’t appear to be angry, so when a fist slammed against my head I thought it was a slip. Such things do happen.

Then two more bony fists thudded into my face—and there was no “sorry.” When he tried again, instead of putting the jab in his chest, I rammed it into his nose. The fight was on.

Someone yelled, “The Man!” We immediately broke apart and the spectators dispersed to their bunks. The guard sensed something amiss but was unable to decide what it was.

The other fight was with a Chicano, Ghost de Fresno. I’d once had a fight with his younger brother in Preston. Ghost took up the cudgel. Cottages that had once been bachelor officers’ quarters for the Canadian air force were now privileged housing, three to each cottage, and that was where we went to fight. Although I was getting the best of it, I could feel my stamina fast slipping away. That was always my weakness. Luckily someone again yelled, “The Man!” I dived under a bunk, but Ghost tried to get away. The cottages were out-of-bounds unless assigned. He was taken to the holding cell for investigation. They never found out who had been his opponent. Because there had been several inmates stabbed since the double killing, they didn’t want to risk returning Ghost to the general population. At twenty-one, he was older than average, plus he had been committed by the Superior Court after a valid conviction, so he could be transferred to San Quentin. And that is what happened. They put him on a bus and sent him north, which was fine with me.

Because I had nobody to send me twelve dollars a month, the amount then allowed for cigarettes and other amenities, I had to find some sort of income. I went into the home brew business. Each gallon required a pound of sugar, a pinch of yeast, and any of several things for mash to ferment: tomato puree, crushed oranges or orange juice, raisins, prunes, even chopped-up potatoes. Mixed together, they start to ferment immediately. You have a drink that tastes like beer and wine poured together that has about 20 percent alcohol. Yeast and sugar were bought from a thieving culinary worker, despite the facts that the free cooks watched closely and that the bread all came out flat. The difficult part of the whole process was finding places to hide the brew while it fermented. It was bulky and it smelled. It could not be airtight because the fermenting process made it swell. I used one hiding place that I would use again: the fire extinguishers. Each was fitted with a rubber line sewn from an inner tube by a convict in the tailor shop. Each would hold about four gallons. A quart of brew cost five packs of Camels, and customers ordered ahead of time. In about a month I had five fire extinguishers continually fermenting, and I was rich by prison standards. Actually, all I had was a whole lot of tobacco, although it would buy whatever else was for sale within the fences.

Three months went by. I’d never gone a single month without going to the hole since my first day in juvenile hall. My bubbling fire extinguishers were everywhere—on the Quonset hut gym wall, two in the dormitory, one in the library, one in the hospital corridor. I spent my time either gathering the ingredients, mixing the concoction, and putting it up or taking it down and wholesaling it by the gallon. It made time go faster.

Then one day, a library wastebasket caught on fire. The librarian reached for the fire extinguisher and got a foul-smelling home brew. Captain Nelson was red-hot. He told the library clerks to snitch or ride the bus to San Quentin. One of them snitched me off. After count but before dinner release, two guards came to the dormitory door, spoke to the guard, and came down the center aisle between the sagging cots. I knew they wanted me the moment they came in, although I waited for the crooked finger to make it official.

I grabbed a jacket, a pack of cigarettes and matches, and the book I was reading, Gone With the Wind. I knew I was going to the holding cell. It wasn’t the hole. The holding cell was where you went until the disciplinary hearing. It was five in the afternoon. The lights would be on until ten-thirty or eleven. What was I supposed to do all night? Read Gone With the Wind, that’s what.

At ten the next morning, I was taken to a disciplinary hearing. Captain Nelson was the hearing officer. I’d been hoping for the associate warden, who shared the duty. If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck. Half a dozen other young inmates were standing in a line, also pending disciplinary court. The guard took me past them, tapped on the door, and opened it a few inches to peer inside. He must have gotten the nod, for he opened the door wide for me to enter.

Capt. L. S. “Red” Nelson was behind the desk. It was our first conversation since my arrival. I’d seen him on the yard a couple of times, and I veered away to avoid his sight.

“Here you are, Bunker. I knew I’d see you. I see you went into wine making.”

I said nothing. What was there to say? Moreover, I had no wish to gossip with Captain Nelson even in the best of times.

“. . . think you’re a tough guy,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t be a pimple on those guys’ asses.” He was talking about Alcatraz, where he’d worked before coming to the California Department of Corrections. He told me about being locked in a cell with six other guards while three badass bank robbers from Oklahoma and Kentucky emptied a .45 into the cell. Nelson had survived without a wound. This had somehow made him fearless.

“Anyway,” he said after he finished his reminiscences, “You’re charged with D twelve fifteen, inmate behavior. On or about September twenty-third, you put four gallons of homemade alcoholic beverage in the library fire extinguisher. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty. Nobody caught me with any home brew.”

“We don’t have to. Both library clerks said it was yours. So I find you guilty. You are sentenced to ten days’ isolation, plus I’m raising your custody to maximum and putting you in administrative segregation. Review your status in six months.”

Six months! In segregation. It was lockup twenty-three hours a day. The difference between isolation and segregation was that segregation had some privileges—books and canteen and other trivial things that become important when there is nothing else. I could handle it, but six months was out of proportion to my little transgression. Making home brew was minor in the scheme of things. Segregation was long-term lockup for stabbing someone or trying to escape.

Nelson was looking at me with a sneer, as if to say, “You don’t like it, punk?” I restrained the urge to turn his desk over. He waved me out. The guard opened the door for me. “One to isolation,” Nelson said to the guard in the hallway.

The guard in the hallway had me sit down as they prepared the lockup order.

The buzzer sounded and the guard beckoned the next inmate. When he came out, the inside guard announced, “Thirty days’ loss of privileges.”

The buzzer sounded again. The hallway guard turned to open the door for inmate number three. In the moment that the guard’s back was turned I stood up and walked out until I made the corner and turned. I expected a voice to yell, “Hold it, Bunker!” Nobody said anything.

Outside the Custody Office, I headed for the big Quonset hut gymnasium where I knew a knife was stashed. It was too small to be called a shiv. The blade was only two inches long, and it had a round point. It would cut but not stab at all.

After picking up the knife, I went toward the library, planning to attack one or both of those who had ratted on me. Five guards with night sticks came around the corner as the public-address system began calling me for a visit. That was absurd. I never got visits.

I would never reach the library, but I would play the hand out. I turned the corner between dormitories and headed for the yard. Close behind me came the crunch of footsteps on gravel. I started to turn and was instantly hit by a tackle worthy of an NFL linebacker. I was on my back and he was on top of me. He grabbed at the knife and got the blade. I jerked it away and sliced his palm open. Something hit me in the head; it was a sharp blow. I thought it was a rock. When it came again, I saw it was the fat sergeant’s sap.

Guards piled on, snatching, punching kicking. Around them a circle of inmates had formed. Someone yelled, “Get off him, you cowardly—”

“Not here! Not here!” yelled a voice of authority, wanting no witnesses.

They dragged me by the legs, my back scraping on gravel and asphalt, across the prison to “the block,” a small building of ten cells used as the hole. Once inside, they went crazy. I was lucky there were ten, for they encouraged one another as they each rained kicks and punches down on me, getting in one another’s way. Three would have been better for them. I coiled my knees high, my forearms covering my face. They cursed and stomped. An attack on one was an attack on all. Kill a convict and nobody got angry, but assaulting a guard was sacrilege.

One guard made a mistake. When he bent over, looking for a place to put his fist in my face, it brought him closer. I lunged up with both feet, uncoiling my body for added force, and hit him flush in the face. It sat him down.

They grabbed my legs, one on each, two more grabbed my upper body, and they lifted me high and slammed me down on the concrete floor. It made me cry out. “Again,” someone said. They did it several times.

Finally, they tore off my clothes and dumped me in an empty cell. One paused to leave me with the comment: “I’ll bet you won’t assault another officer.”

My retort was silent but true: I’ve just begun to fight.

Without a mirror, I had to use my fingers to assess the damage. There was a big lump on the back of my head where it had hit the floor. My scalp had a gash from the sap. Blood ran down my cheeks and neck and caked on my shoulders and chest. It had been a savage beating, but not as bad as at Pacific Colony. All things considered, I was in good shape—and not ready to quit.

An hour or so later, an inmate was mopping the walkway outside the cells. I had him give me the mop. I put the handle in the bars and snapped it off in the middle, took off the mop head, and bent the frame prongs out so it vaguely resembled a pick or a mattock. Then I reached around the bars and stuffed splinters of wood in the big lock.

Soon a guard peeked around the corner. “You don’t quit, do you?”

“Not yet.”

He gave a “tsk-tsk” and shook his head. Then I heard him making a phone call but could not make out what he said. Half an hour later, he peeked around the corner again. “The captain’s on his way and he’s got something for you.”

I heard the outer door open and Captain Nelson’s voice. He and a small-boned sergeant named Sparling came around the corner. Both of them had gas masks around their necks. Captain Nelson had a tank strapped to his back and a wand-sprayer in his hand. It looked as if he were going to spray plants with insecticide. “Hand it over, Bunker.”

“Come and get it.”

“Okay.” He smiled and pulled the gas mask over his face. Sergeant Sparling did the same. The captain raised the wand and sent forth a wet spray. What the . . .

When spray touched my bare skin, I felt on fire, as if the spray were gasoline set afire. I later learned it was liquid tear gas. At the time, I thought it was killing me. I threw away the mop handle, rolled on the floor, and tried to run up the wall. I behaved like a fly hit with bug spray. My eyes burned and ran. It was terrible. Inmates in nearby cells were screaming their torment.

Nobody could be left for more than a few minutes in such a concentration of tear gas. They started to unlock the cell, but the wood splinters in the lock stopped them. It was hard for them to see from behind the gas masks. By the time they got the door open, the worst of the gas had settled. It still burned, but far less.

“Raise your hands and back out,” Captain Nelson said. He stood to one side of the gate, the sergeant to the other.

I backed out with my hands up. As soon as I cleared the gate, I reached out with my right hand and pulled the sergeant’s mask off and punched him with my left hand. Down he went.

Captain Nelson jumped on my back, trying to choke me down, but I managed to lunge and spin around and slam him into the bars.

The sergeant scrambled up and ran outdoors where a squad of guards without gas masks was waiting. Meanwhile, Captain Nelson and I were throwing punches in the corridor outside the cells, both of us running snot from our noses and tears from our eyes. His gas mask was askew, and he looked ridiculous.

A herd of guards cursed me with the tear gas burning their eyes. They dragged me outdoors. Behind us the other convicts were yelling for respite. I was naked in the burning desert sun. I stood under a gun tower and they took up positions surrounding me at a distance of ten feet or so. The asphalt was so hot that I had to dance from foot to foot. It must have been a weird sight, a naked fifteen-year-old dancing in front of guards with watering eyes. Before he left, Captain Nelson had someone get me a towel to stand on. I had a tan over most of my body, so I didn’t burn—but my ass had never been exposed to the sun, much less the afternoon desert sun.

An hour or so later a station wagon pulled up. A lieutenant got out and handed me a set of khakis. When I was dressed, they handcuffed me, put me in the screened-off backseat, and drove me out the back gate. I asked where we were going. They wouldn’t tell me, but when they took a right turn instead of a left I knew we were heading toward the LA County Jail.

 

THE LA COUNTY JAIL was on the tenth through fourteenth floor in the Hall of Justice at the corner of Broadway and Temple Street. When the correctional lieutenant handed me over to the booking officer, he gave him a sheet of paper. The report said that I had been arrested under Section 4500 of the California Penal Code. Section 4500 states that any inmate serving a life sentence who commits an assault liable to cause great bodily harm is to be sentenced to the gas chamber. There was no alternative. The life sentence, according to California Supreme Court decisions, also includes indeterminate sentences—one year to life or five years to life. Actually, I came under Section 4500, subsection B. The subsection wasn’t mentioned on the papers. The booking officer asked me how old I was. I told him I was nineteen. With a shrug, he assigned me to “10-A-l,” also known as “high power.” It was the special security tank for men facing the gas chamber, cop killers and notorious murders.

Most prisoners are moved in groups or sometimes sent places in the jail on their own, but high power inmates are moved under escort one at a time. Being in high power gives one a certain cachet in the topsy-turvy world of underworld values. It usually takes from eight to twelve hours to get through the booking process. In groups, everyone has to wait for all the others to finish each step of the procedures before moving on. I was moved ahead of everyone else. First the booking office, next to the Bertillion Room, where they took mug photos and several sets of fingerprints. Copies were sent to Sacramento and to the FBI in Washington. I was showered, sprayed with DDT (this was before Silent Spring), and given jail denim to dress in. A medical technician had me “skin it back and squeeze it down” to see if I had gonorrhea. He quickly looked at my bruises, then pronounced me fit. After gathering a blanket and a mattress cover, inside of which was an aluminum cup and spoon, a deputy led me through the maze of the jail to the tenth floor next to the Attorney Room, where high power was located by itself. During the walk, we passed walls of bars, inside of which were walkways outside cells. The jail was crowded. Most cells had four or five occupants. Even the tank trusty in the first cell had three. The cell gates were open, and the men were out on the runway, walking or playing cards. As I went by one tank someone said, “Who’d he kill? He’s just a kid.”

The tanks were racially segregated for the most part. One exception was the “queens’” tank. With towels wrapped like turbans around their heads, jail shirt tails tied at the bottom like blouses, makeup ingeniously concocted from God knows what, jeans rolled up and skin-tight, they were all flamboyant parodies of women. Spotting me, as I walked with the guard along the length of their tank, they hurried along beside us: “Put him in here, Deputy! We won’t hurt him.”

The deputy snorted and quipped, “All we’d find is his shoelaces.”

“What’s your name, honey?”

I didn’t reply.

“Who’d you kill, kid?”

“If you go to the joint, I’ll be your woman—and kill anybody that fucks with you.”

I said nothing. It was a loser to exchange quips with queens; their tongues were too sharp, their wit too biting. Needless to say, I had no worries about anyone fucking me. I was no white-bread white boy. If someone said something wrong or even looked wrong, my challenge would be quick, and if the response was less than swift apology, I would attack forthwith without further words.

When we were past the queens’ tank, we continued through a maze of steel stairs and bars, past pale green tile walls, past white tanks, black tanks, Mexican tanks. We came to a tank with a nearly empty runway. A bridge game was in progress on the floor, a folded blanket serving as a table. The escorting deputy handed the tank deputy my booking papers and a name tag that went into a slot on a board. “You’re in Cell Six,” he said, beckoning me toward the gate into the tank. He had to first unlock the steel door of a control panel beside the gate. “Fish on the line!” He yelled. “Cell Six.”

He unlocked the tank gate and pulled it open, and I stepped inside. The bridge players looked up; a few heads appeared in open cell doors to look me over. One was black. Everyone was segregated in the jail except fruiters and killers. That seemed to have some irony.

I walked down the tier. It was narrow and I had to step across the bridge game, excusing myself as I did so. I reached Cell Six. It already had two men on the two bunks. I’d known the jail was crowded, but somehow I had expected that each man on trial for his life would have a cell to himself. I hesitated. “Come on in,” said the man on the top bunk. He was small and muscular, in his late thirties, with gray sideburns. The man seated on the bottom bunk wore a tank top undershirt that bulged at the gut. He looked to be Italian.

From the front the jailer shook a lever that made all the cell gates vibrate loudly. “Grab a hole, A-One! Grab a hole!”

The card game broke up. The two or three other men out on the runway made for their cells. The tier started to clear. I stepped inside. I had some fear. I was being locked in a cell with two grown men facing trial on the most serious felonies imaginable. From the front the jailer yelled, “Watch the gates! Coming closed!” All the cell gates slammed shut with a horrendous crash of steel on steel.

Throughout the jail, gates were vibrating and slamming shut. It was a general lockup. The heavyset man on the bottom bunk moved over. “Sit on down. How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” I lied.

He shook his head and grunted. His name, I would learn, was Johnny Cicerone, and he was a real Mob guy, or the LA version thereof. The Mob, I would learn, has little enclaves around Southern California, but it doesn’t carry the power here that it wields in the East. Johnny controlled a bookmaking operation in several factories and the general hospital; plus he was the muscle for the Sica brothers, Joe and Freddy; Jimmy the Weasel Fratianno; and Dominic Brooklier, the capo de regime on the West Coast. Legend had it that they made their bones taking out Bugsy Siegel.

“How’d you get in high power?” asked the smaller man, whose name was Gordon D’Arcy. “Who’d they say you killed?” (In jail or prison, I would learn, you never ask anyone what he did but, rather, what the authorities alleged he did. That way you could answer without admitting anything.)

“Nobody. I stabbed a bull in Lancaster.” I kept silent about how superficial it was.

“Stabbed a hack! Damn!” His surprise was evident. He gestured toward my bruised and battered face. “Looks like they fucked you up.”

“Yeah, they danced on me a little. It’s no big thing.” The stoicism valued in the underworld was already part of me. Never snivel. Try to laugh, no matter what.

D’Arcy grinned. In the upcoming days I learned that he was a professional armed robber facing a life sentence for kidnap/robbery. It was a technical kidnap: he’d moved a supermarket manager from produce to the rear office to open the safe. Moving someone from room to room triggered the “Little Lindbergh” law. If the victim had suffered any injury, D’Arcy would have faced the gas chamber. As it was, he only faced life if convicted. The victim said he could identify D’Arcy solely by his eyes. The perpetrator had worn a ski mask over his entire face, so the defense attorney put five men in identical clothes and ski masks and paraded them in front of the witness and jury. The witness instantly pointed to D’Arcy. He screamed, then fainted. The jury deliberated in less than three hours before finding him guilty. Now he was on appeal.

Cicerone riffled a deck of playing cards. “C’mon, Gordon, lemme get my money back.”

“Get your ass up here and get whipped.”

Cicerone grabbed a pencil and a tablet already marked with the scores of previous games. “Go ahead and stretch out on my bunk,” he said to me. “We don’t eat for about half an hour or so.”

“Thanks. Say, where do I sleep?”

“There’s a mattress under there.” He pointed under the bottom bunk. “We pull it out at night. You’re lucky you’re not in some other tank where they’ve got five to a cell.”

I pulled out the mattress. It was more of a pad than a mattress, and it was coated with a sheen from hundreds of sweating bodies. I was too tired to put on the clean mattress cover they’d given me. I pushed the mattress back under the bottom bunk and stretched out on the bunk. It was like a little cave. What a day—and it wasn’t over yet. What was going to happen? No doubt they would take me to court in a few days and rule me unfit to be tried as a juvenile. Then I would begin the process of trial in the Superior Court. What then? I’d personally known one young man, Bob Pate, who had tried to escape from Lancaster. He had been a Juvenile Court commitment, and they had brought him here. He was eighteen or nineteen, and they had given him six months. I would turn sixteen in four months. Would a judge send me to San Quentin? One thing, at least I’d be an adult in the eyes of the law.

While I mused, I heard the gate at the front of the tank and a rattle as metal bowls and coffee cans and other things were pushed inside. A khaki-clad trusty soon appeared outside the bars. He counted out nine slices of bread and put them on the bars. After him came another trusty carrying a huge water can with a long spout.

D’Arcy jumped down off the bed and grabbed several cups that he put on the floor inside the bars. The trusty hesitated until D’Arcy gave him a quarter. He then filled all of them and continued down the tier. Everything was cheaper back then.

My cell mates ended their game to drink the hot beverage. A sweet tea with a taste I’ll never forget, it was served every night.

“Chow time!” bellowed a voice at the front. I heard the click-clack of a gate being opened at the rear. An obese Asian shuffled past in slippers. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Yama shit or somethin’ like that,” Cicerone said. “He’s been here since forty-five . . . or maybe forty-six. Sentenced to death for being a traitor.”

“A traitor? What happened?”

“You tell him,” Cicerone said, motioning to D’Arcy.

“He’s an American citizen. He joined the Japanese army in either Japan or in the Philippines. He was in on the Bataan Death March. I don’t think they’ll top him. He’ll get a reversal or a commutation or something.”

“Motherfucker deserves a gassing,” Cicerone said. “If anybody does.”

When the fat Japanese-American came back, another gate opened and another man came by. He was Lloyd Sampsell and he nodded to D’Arcy while going by. They knew each other from the Big Yard in San Quentin. Sampsell was one of the “Yacht Bandits,” so-named because after they took off big payroll robberies they would sail up and down the California coast on a yacht. He had escaped from prison and killed either a security guard or an officer in a robbery and was sentenced to die. He had been brought from death row for some kind of court hearing.

The next man was also headed for death row. He was big, with a hawk nose that had been broken more than once. He was Caryl Chessman, the Red Light Bandit. I’d heard about him. He was supposed to be very smart. A detective once compared me to him. He passed and returned to his cell. Next was a small man with a sharp ferret face and scar tissue that stretched the flesh around his right eye. I was standing at the bars. He did a double take and stopped when he saw me. “God damn! Who’re you?”

I recognized the underlying message. My face turned fiery.

“Move it, Cook!” yelled the guard up front.

Cook winked at me and continued to the front for his food. When he came back, I was at the rear of the cell, sitting on the toilet. He was looking for me. When he saw me, he blew a kiss. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t care who he was. I jumped up. “Fuck you! You fuckin’ punk motherfucker.”

“Aww, baby, don’t be so mean.”

“Get in your cell, Cook!” yelled the jailer again. “Grab a hole!”

When Cook was gone, I asked my cell partners, “Who’s that motherfucker?”

“Billy Cook,” D’Arcy said. “He killed a family in Missouri and dumped them down a well. Then he killed some other people while he was coming west. They caught him in Mexico and threw him back across the border. He killed some guy that picked him up here in California. He got sentenced to death yesterday.”

I vaguely remembered hearing about the case. “He’s got an eye that won’t close, right?”

“Yep. When they nabbed him, they didn’t know if he was awake or asleep because of that eye.”

“Front section . . . comin’ open!” yelled the jailer. “Watch the gates!”

The gates of all the other cells began to vibrate; then they came open.

“Come on,” D’Arcy said.

I followed him and Cicerone onto the runway where about a score of men were lining up at the front while khaki trusties scooped spaghetti with a red sauce into a combination plate and bowl. It had the width of a plate and sides like a bowl.

“How come we come out together and those other guys come out one at a time?”

“They’re full-fledged monsters. We’re only half-monsters.”

“The ones already sentenced to die, they keep them apart—or if they think they might cause trouble.”

The cells were left open while we ate; then we were locked up while trusties swept and mopped the run. When the floor was dry, the gates in the front section were opened again. D’Arcy took a folded blanket and spread it outside the cell doorway and plopped down two decks of Bee playing cards. Other prisoners gathered and sat down on the runway around the blanket. “You in?” D’Arcy asked Cicerone.

“Uh-uh. My lawyer’s comin’ tonight. I gotta write some shit down for him.”

It was a poker game. Lowball, where the lowest hand wins and the best is ace through five. It is also, as I would learn over time, the poker game that requires the most skill to play well. Lying on the bottom bunk, I watched the game without being in anyone’s way.

After dinner, the jail was quieter, though never silent. On the walkway outside the tank, little bells dinged and little red lights flashed. These were signals for “prowlers,” the guards who walked on quiet feet along the tanks. Cicerone was called out. While he was gone, the game broke up for count. We had to line up on the runway in ranks of three, so the two jailers walking along outside could count us by threes. “Count’s clear!” yelled a deputy when he reached the end.

“Want some tea?” D’Arcy said.

“Yeah. But I’d rather have a cigarette.”

“You don’t have any cigarettes? Here.” He dumped several from a pack of Camels and handed them to me. I hesitated, as I wanted no obligations. It was one of the primary unwritten rules of jail and prison: don’t get obligated. “Go ahead,” he insisted, so I kept the cigarettes.

“Have any money?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Family?”

I shook my head.

He shook his head. “It’s a tough life if you don’t have nobody.”

He took a roll of toilet paper, unrolled and loosely rerolled a bunch of it, then tucked the bottom up through the hole in the middle, put it on the rim of the toilet bowl, and set it afire. It burned in a cone, like a burner, and lasted long enough to make a metal cup of hot tea. He poured half into another cup and handed it to me. It was good, especially with a cigarette. He told me about Johnny Cicerone. The so-called gangster squad of the LAPD was after him. He was collecting a $2,000 debt from a “wanna-be” who had stiffed him. In the course of the collection, he had slapped the guy and taken him to a cocktail lounge in a bowling alley on Vermont that the debtor owned. That was where the money was. Cicerone had gotten paid, but the LAPD was trying to bury him. Because Cicerone had slapped the stiff with a pistol they had charged him with kidnap/robbery with intended violence. It was the same offense that had gotten Caryl Chessman on death row. Even if a death sentence was unlikely, a life sentence was not. . . .

“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.

D’Arcy indicated that he had no idea. (A couple of years later, I would discover that Cicerone had plea-bargained to something else and served about three years in Soledad.)

The front gate opened and Cicerone came down the tank and into the cell. “Any tea left?”

“Yeah. I saved you a cup. Gotta heat it.”

From elsewhere in the jail, through the walls came the vibration of the gates as they slammed shut.

A minute later, our deputy yelled, “Grab a hole, A-One!”

The men on the runway headed for their cells. One of them stopped at our gate. “Here,” he said, handing me a folded note. “Cook sent it.”

I opened the note, reading only a few words before I threw it in the toilet. He would see me when the tank went to showers. D’Arcy and Cicerone were looking at me with sympathy. “He’s a sicko,” D’Arcy said.

“Yeah.” I half-hoped that my cell partners would help me, even though I knew it unlikely. They had just met me and had their own very serious troubles. Their sympathy ended with sympathy, not intervention. Besides, in the cage he who cannot stand alone must certainly fall.

“Fuck him,” I said.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m not gonna let him fuck me . . . and I’m not gonna run to the Man. When do we shower?”

“Tomorrow.”

“He wants to see me in the shower.”

“Jesus.”

“Got any old blades and a toothbrush?”

“In the milk carton.” Cicerone glanced over at a milk carton on the shelf at the rear. It had one side cut away so it served as a box for odds and ends as well. Old rusted razor blades, pencil stubs, a toothbrush whose bristles had been used to clean something besides teeth. Using the flame from half a book of matches, I set the toothbrush on fire. When it was soft I twisted off the bristles and lit more matches, and when it was burning and soft I blew out the matches and pushed half a razor blade into the plastic, squeezing the plastic around it. I’d seen a Chicano in juvenile hall open a guy’s back from shoulder to hip with one slice. A hundred and twenty-five stitches. As deadly weapons go, it wasn’t much, but it was the best I could devise under the circumstances. My cell partners watched me with impassive faces. Only when Cicerone patted me on the back and said, “You’ve got guts, youngster,” did I know positively that they were on my side.

Despite total exhaustion, I found it hard to sleep that first night in the county jail. High power was an outside tank. It had the wall of bars, beyond which was the jailer’s walkway—but then there were small windows, through which came the sounds of the city at night, autos and streetcars on Broadway ten floors below. The streetcars rang two bells before moving from each stop. The sound stirred the same inchoate feelings as a train whistle in the night. Why was I so different? Was I crazy? I didn’t think so, despite my sometimes seemingly insane behavior. There seemed to be a fore-ordained chain of cause and effect. In the morning I planned to attack a maniac who had killed at least seven times. What else could I do? Call out for a deputy? Yes, they would protect me this time, but the stigma of cowardice and being a stool pigeon, which is how my peers would see it, would haunt me forever. It would invite open season on me. I did have one advantage. He would never expect me to attack without warning, not the skinny little kid he saw. He would assume his string of bodies would paralyze me.

Despite the storms in my mind, my exhaustion was so complete that I fell fast asleep.

 

IN THE MORNING, BEFORE GOING to the showers, we had to strip our mattresses, fold up the covers and blankets, and line up all our personal property on the floor against the cell wall. We were only allowed to wear underwear and shoes and carry a towel. While we were showering, a dozen deputies would search the tank for contraband. I folded my towel around the toothbrush handle, confident it would pass unnoticed as I went through the gate in the crowd.

Several deputies passed our cell. The gates of the rear section popped open. The men already sentenced to die went first. Billy Cook looked at me and winked as he passed. I was expressionless although my stomach felt hollow.

Seconds later, a jailer called, “Bunker, property slip and jumper!” In those days, before riveted wristbands, we carried property slips for identification and, because jail prisoners kept their civilian shirts, a denim jumper stamped LA COUNTY JAIL was required when out of the tank. I pulled on my pants and the denim jumper. I couldn’t take the toothbrush with me.

“Give it here,” D’Arcy said.

I handed it to him.

“Cell Six! Coming open! Watch the gate!” yelled the jailer.

The gate vibrated and popped open. I walked down the tier, past the faces behind the bars. Where was I going? Had somebody snitched that there was going to be trouble?

An escort waited. “Where’m I going?” I asked.

“Bertillion Room.”

Bertillion Room? That was where mug photos and fingerprints were taken. Bertillion was the nineteenth-century man who had used skull and bone measurements to identify criminals, a useless procedure that was replaced by fingerprinting. The name remained. What did they want me for?

It was for a thumbprint for a youth authority detainer. That took but a minute; then the deputy escorted me back through the jail. Billy Cook was on my mind. If showers were over, it would be another week until we confronted each other. Anything could happen in a week. He might be moved to death row at San Quentin. He had already been sentenced.

We came to a corner. Straight ahead was the route to the tank. The deputy turned; we were heading for the shower room. Showers were still in progress.

The dice had thrown me snake eyes. My stomach sank. For a moment I wanted to blurt out: “I’ve got trouble with Billy Cook.” I couldn’t do it. Whatever happened . . . let it happen.

We turned another corner. A score of deputies filled the corridor outside an open grille gate, beyond which were a short hall and a room full of benches and steam. The showers were beyond that.

“Here’s Bunker,” the escort said to the tank jailer. “Back from Bertillion.”

“Go on; get wet,” the jailer said, gesturing to me for emphasis.

The shower room beyond was almost empty. There were a few vague figures in the steam, men who had already finished and were drying themselves. The benches were full of underwear and shoes. Everyone was in the showers—where it was really steamy.

D’Arcy appeared. “Here.” He handed me a towel. I could feel the toothbrush inside the folds. “He’s in the back of the first row.”

I clenched the meager weapon through the towel. Fear tried to sap my strength. Shutting it off, I set my mind on frenzy.

Without undressing, I headed for the archway with the steam pouring forth. Inside were several waist-high partitions. Down each were half a dozen showerheads. Two or more naked men shared each shower, some soaping while others rinsed. As I squeezed along the wall, avoiding naked bodies, I stared into the thick steam, holding the toothbrush tight and ignoring the water wetting my pant legs.

Alone in the last shower, he had shampoo in his hair and his face was turned up into the stream of water. His skinny little white body was pitted with acne, his arms covered with blue jailhouse tattoos. He was two steps away, and I hesitated for one moment. When he turned his head, the white shampoo foam rolling down, his eyes were open and he saw me. His eyes widened, and he started to smile; then he saw the weapon, or something in my face. He turned to reach for a towel that had been thrown across the half-wall separating the rows of showers. I was sure it held a weapon. He would have gotten it if he hadn’t slipped on the wet floor. One foot shot out, and he went down on one knee.

Before he could recover, I pounced, swinging the toothbrush handle with the protruding razor blade. It got him high on the back, near where the neck begins, and sliced down about six inches before his movement carried him out of the blade’s arc. I chopped again, this time so hard that the razor blade snapped and flew away. His ducking plus the force of the blow threw him on his knees with his back to me. He was naked. I was fully clothed. Killer or not, at the moment Billy Cook was at my mercy and he was yelling for help. Naked prisoners were rushing to get out. I jumped on his back, grabbed his hair from the rear, and slammed my fist against the side of his head. Pain shot up my arm, but his cry made it worthwhile. I was soaked with water and blood.

Someone came up behind me. Fingers dug into both cheeks and my eyes and tore me loose, gouging out flesh as I was hauled back. I saw the olive green of uniform legs.

The deputies dragged me out of the shower room and moved me through the maze of the jail, passing all the curious eyes behind bars. They opened a steel door and pushed me into a room with three smaller doors of solid green steel.

“Strip ’em off,” was the order. Half a dozen deputies stood around me, young, strong ex-marines. They vibrated with the desire to dance on me. I followed the order.

When I was naked, someone threw me a pair of cotton long Johns and I put them on. Another deputy handed me a round cardboard container, a quart of water. One of the three doors was open. The windowless room was eight foot square and had solid-steel walls and concrete floor. In a corner was a hole for body waste. The room had no furnishings. Someone said, “Five days,” and I understood that was how long I was to be here. Five days. I stepped inside and the door slammed shut, steel crashing on steel. I was in the blackness of the grave. From outside a key banged on the steel. “When you hear that, you answer up. If you don’t answer and we have to open the door, you’d better be dead, because if you’re not dead, or damn near it, you’ll wish you were. Got it?”

I heard muffled laughter, then an outer door closed and I was alone. Would I go crazy? What difference would it make? I’d simply be crazy by myself in the blackness. Nobody would care. Imagine the darkness of the blind in an eight-by-eight steel-walled cage. What would you do?

You meditate on everything you know. You sing all the songs you might recall in whole or in part. You jack off—rough sex on the concrete floor. You think about God—is there one or many—and why does he allow so much pain and injustice if he is the Joe Goss? My mother said God was real; everyone accepted him without question. I, too, had assumed that God was real—until I really thought about the facts in support or against. Maybe there was something spiritual in the universe, but God seemed to have stopped paying attention a few centuries ago.

I heard noises through the walls and floors, many gates crashing shut. Dinging bells signaled “prowlers.” I had no idea what the various signals meant.

Once a day they unlocked the door, exchanging the cardboard container of water and leaving six slices of white bread. Bread and water. On the third day they inserted a paper plate piled high with macaroni. My stomach had shriveled and my appetite had dwindled. It was a huge ration—so I ate about a third and put the rest inside the six slices of bread. I made big fat sandwiches. I wrapped them in toilet paper. One for tonight, two for tomorrow. Then I figured I would have one day left.

A little later I heard a scratching sound. When I reached out for the sandwiches, my hand touched the greasy body of a rat. Yoooo! I leaped up and almost fainted from the sudden rush of blood.

Goddamned rats had come up through the shithole. No wonder they survived. Some suckers in India worshiped them. I’d read that in a National Geographic somewhere along the line.

I found the sandwiches. The rat had torn through the toilet paper and gnawed a good hunk out of one of them. I tore off the part he’d bitten and threw it down the hole. Then I ate all the rest. Fuck a rat. He had his chance. He got no second shot.

The gouges on my face from the deputy’s fingernails scabbed over. So did my busted scalp. One thing I had to say: I could take a beating with the best of them. I thought of Billy Cook crying like a bitch as I kicked his ass. “He won’t fuck with me no more, what you bet?” I said, then brayed laughter like a jackass into the blackness.

It was time to do push-ups. Several times a day, I did four sets of twenty-five. I spent a lot of time masturbating. Jesus Christ, I screwed many a goddess of the silver screen in the privacy of my mind. At other times I played a game with a button torn from my long Johns. I threw it against a wall at an angle so it would bounce. Then I would make a ritualized search, using one finger, poking it down every few inches rather than sweeping the floor with my hand. That would have been too easy.

Six or seven times a day the outer door opened and, a few seconds later, a heavy key clanged against the door. “All right in here!” I called back, and the outer door closed, leaving me alone.

 

THE FIVE DAYS SEEMED AN ETERNITY when 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 had been 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 ventilators between condemned 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 away and 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. He had slaughtered a family of five, including children, and dumped them down a well.

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 that of D’Arcy. “Hey! Wait a second,” he said.

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

“Bunker! 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 said 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 me) 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 disappeared 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. Poker isn’t chess, 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 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. In lowball more than any other poker game, how one plays a hand depends on his position relative to the dealer. Raised bets and reraises 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 thirty or forty dollars has scant importance to a man facing “natural life” in San Quentin, D’Arcy 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.

D’Arcy was gone about half an hour. I’d played three or four small hands, winning one, and was just about even when he 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. 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 reraising 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 his having a pat hand to 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 had 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 poker game in jail, where all one could draw was twelve dollars 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 thirty dollars.

When I was up to eighteen dollars, 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 facedown. “What the fuck do you think you’re doin’?” Sol, sixty pounds heavier than D’Arcy, 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 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. Matthews 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 paper; 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 authorities. 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 authorities had a detainer on me. I knew all of this was going to happen, as I had been 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 sheriff’s 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 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 thirties or forties; 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. He 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.

Al Matthews came to see me. I had no money, but he said he would handle my preliminary hearing and have it expedited to the Superior Court. There he would seek to be appointed by the judge in lieu of the public defender’s office. He said he could try to waive a jury trial and have the case tried in front of the judge without the jury.

It was just as Matthews planned. He made no attempt to refute the charges, although the victim said he had a few stitches and didn’t even miss a day of work. What Matthews did was to reverse things and put on trial what they had done to me. He showed the mug photo taken of me when I was booked into the county jail. Then a guard who had quit the Department of Corrections gave graphic testimony about how they had stomped me. The judge found me guilty, but what had been done was planted in his mind. A date for a probation hearing and sentencing was set. Al Matthews moved the judge to appoint Dr. Marcel Frym of the Hacker Clinic to examine me and file a report. The judge granted the motion.

Dr. Frym, an Austrian Jew with jowls that vibrated and an accent that reeked of intelligence, came to see me. In Vienna he had been a defense lawyer who had studied under Freud. Frym was a renowned expert on the criminal mind. In Vienna, which operated under the inquisitorial system, based on the Napoleonic Code, rather than the adversarial system used by nations under England’s sway, the accused’s mental condition was extremely relevant. The charge of the public prosecutor was not to convict but to find and present the truth to the judge. The philosophical underpinning is finding truth, not defeating an adversary. All questions must be answered. There is no Fifth Amendment. The defendant must answer the questions. The tangled mind is also part of the search. America’s law is an outgrowth of trial by combat, with lawyers as champions and judges making sure the rules of combat are followed. Each system has its virtues and its flaws, but I do think the Napoleonic Code more efficient and fairer, and as a result it produces more truth. As for justice, who knows what that is? I have violated many laws, but if there was a god of justice I am unsure what would happen if he put what I did on one end of the scale and what was done to me on the other. At the sentencing the judge suspended proceedings and placed me on five years’ probation, with the first ninety days to be served in the county jail. A condition of the probation was that I undergo psychiatric treatment under Dr. Frym at the Hacker Clinic in Beverly Hills.

Hip, hip, hooray! In spring I would walk from the Hall of Justice onto Broadway. I would be free, and we would see what was writ on life’s next page. I wasn’t about to start fretting over liabilities, real or fancied, societal or psychological. I lived in the momentary impulse.

A day or two after my sentencing, while I was waiting for the sheriff’s department to classify me, word came from the booking office: “Chessman’s down from the row for a hearing.” The news excited the ex-cons and professional criminals in the tank. His quixotic battle through the courts, which had just started, added to his already-substantial underworld legend. His book, Cell 2455, Death Row, had not been published yet, but he was already famous, or infamous, in San Quentin and Folsom and in all of the Southern California newspapers. Within the hour, a deputy came down the tier, pushing a handcart on which were several cardboard boxes, Chessman’s legal materials. He had “orders” from the Court, and the sheriff’s department got heightened blood pressure when a Court ordered them to do anything. He had been sentenced to the gas chamber for a series of small-time robberies and sexual assaults along Mulholland Drive. Dubbed the Red Light Bandit because victims were pulled over with a red light. It was probably just red cellophane over the spotlight that many cars had back then. He claimed, and most criminals believed, that the LAPD had framed him or at least messed with the evidence while knowing he was innocent. He had been a thorn in their side for many years. He had once heisted illegal casinos and bordellos that the sheriff’s department let operate in the hills above Sunset Strip. It did seem unlikely that someone who did that would turn around and commit nickel-and-dime robberies and vicious rapes. I believed him innocent. Had I thought otherwise, I would never have talked to him. My moral code didn’t allow fraternization with rapists and child molesters.

Chessman had been called down for a hearing on the veracity of the trial transcript, the document used by the California Supreme Court—and all subsequent courts—to determine exactly what went on moment by moment in the long trial, where he had represented himself. Al Matthews was appointed as his adviser. The court reporter had used shorthand, not a machine, which was immaterial as long as he prepared the transcript. Alas, he died partway through the job and Chessman complained that the reporter who took over made errors critical to the appeal. That one issue would keep Chessman alive a dozen years, but he never got another trial. Back then, a direct appeal to the California Supreme Court took about a year to eighteen months between the judgment and the cyanide, sometimes less. At two years, Chessman was already beating the averages.

The crimes he supposedly committed went as follows: A car with a red light pulled up to a parked couple looking out at the clusters of lights in the bowl of the San Fernando Valley. A figure got out. He came over to the car. He had a gun. He robbed them and then made them perform sexually. In viewing the situation, I couldn’t imagine getting it up if I was either victim or criminal. When I robbed a bank, my penis usually shriveled up nearly out of sight.

I was told, never having personally read the transcript, that Chessmen put himself on death row when he asked a female victim in Camarillo some kind of ignorant question that opened the door to damning testimony. With a decent trial attorney he would have gotten life, which in those days made you eligible for parole in seven years. I never heard of anyone with a first-degree murder conviction doing less than fourteen, but he had no murder and many with comparable crimes did a dime. In those days and in most places around the world, ten years is a long time to serve in prison, but nowadays, at least here, ten years is the sentence for misdemeanors, or what should be misdemeanors.

I thought they had deliberately manufactured a case against Chessman, something I don’t believe now. He was guilty. He did it even though it still seems illogical. His legacy to the justice system is that he is considered the “jailhouse lawyer.” Before Chessman, a convict carrying legal documents around the yard was either a dingbat or a con man selling lies to fools. Some prisoners once forged a Supreme Court opinion and sold copies on the yard for a carton of cigarettes each—although that was after Chessman. The truth is that far fewer would be imprisoned and/or executed if everyone had one-fourth of the prosecution’s resources. We say our system is the best—by what criteria? Do we free the innocent and punish the guilty better than others? We do all right unless the guilty are rich, as nobody manages to punish the rich very much. Thank God the poor commit so many more crimes.

Chessman seemed to swagger when he walked, but actually his stride was the result of an injury in childhood. His hawklike nose had been broken; now he had a bent beak. He looked tough but not menacing. I could hear him unpacking the boxes of papers.

Sampsell: “Chess, you get your typewriter?”

“They got it. They gotta look it over. You know how that goes?”

“Sure do.”

Chessman: “Say, next door.”

That was me. “What’s up?”

“What’d they say you did?”

“They say I stabbed a guard in Lancaster.”

“Oh yeah! I heard about you. You beat the fuck outta Billy Cook, right?”

“I did the best I could.”

“He deserved it . . . fuckin’ turd. . . .”

I heard the thud from the heel of a hand hitting the wall, and Sampsell’s voice, softer than usual, said, “Hey, Bunk.”

“Yeah.”

His hand appeared, reaching out between the bars and in front of the corner of my cell. He had a kite folded tight. (A “kite” is an unofficial note between convicts.) I reached out and took it.

“For Chess,” he said.

I pounded on Chessman’s wall. “Hey!”

“Yeah.”

“Reach out.”

I handed the note to Chessman. I have no idea what it said, but within a minute Chessman called, “Yeah, Lloyd, that’s a good idea! I’ll tell him when I see him! You got any smokes over there?”

“Sure. Hey, Bunk.”

“Yeah.”

“Take a couple packs and pass this along.”

It was a carton of Camels with one pack missing. I took two and passed the rest to Chessman. Being accepted by men sentenced to die was bizarrely gratifying. In this dark world there is nothing more Promethean than attacking a guard. The powers that be take worse umbrage than merely having an eagle eat the transgressor’s liver. When I said I’d stabbed a guard, the image conveyed to listeners was far different from the reality.

“You like to read?” Chessman once asked me.

“Oh, yeah. I’d rather read than eat.”

“Me too. Maybe for a little while. Anyway . . . here. Pass ’em along if you’re not interested.”

Around the bars he passed two paperback books, Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan. I remembered reading Jack London’s Iron Heel in the Preston School of Industry. It had stood out. I immediately began to read the tale of Wolf Larsen, who lived by beating and stomping and clubbing his way past any who opposed him, except for his brother, who was more feared, and more fearsome, than he. Their ships prowled the Pacific. When the tank lights went out, I said, “What a great fuckin’ book.”

“The Sea-Wolf?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jack London was great. They love him in Russia.”

“In Russia!”

“Yeah. He was a communist . . . or at least some kind of socialist. He was also a way-out racist. It seems almost a paradox . . . a racist commie. Weird, huh?”

“Who’s your favorite writer?” I asked.

“You mean this week. That’s how much it changes. You’ll get to read a lot of books in the joint.”

“I’m not going to the joint.” For a moment I thought he’d forgotten what I’d told him about the probation and jail sentence.

“Oh, not this time, but you went to juvenile hall at ten, reform school at thirteen, and at sixteen you’ve been convicted as an adult. Someday you’re going to prison. I just hope you don’t wind up next door to me.”

“I’m next door right now.”

“I mean next door on death row.”

The Death House. I saw Cagney’s sniveling shadow as he was dragged to the electric chair. It was a time when executions were so common that nobody kept count, but it seemed all too possible to me—far more back then than now. Murder is perhaps the easiest serious felony to get away with. Only the most stupid and the most impulsive are apprehended and convicted. Only a fraction of the poorest and most ignorant are among those who go to the Death House. Fear of the death penalty would not make me hesitate one second now that I’m old and harmless, my fires of id burned down to ashes. But back when my rage and defiance always burned near explosion, I was afraid of the gas chamber.

“It scares me,” I told Chessman.

“Shit, it scares me, too. How about you, Lloyd?”

“Yeah,” Sampsell said laconically. “But it’s too late now.”

“You got a chance at reversal?” Chessman asked.

Sampsell’s reply was a laugh.

“Me, I think I’ve got a shot. How can I have a fair appeal without the right transcript? They hired this reporter after the other one died . . . and where he couldn’t decipher the shorthand, he asked the fuckin’ prosecutor to clarify what was said.”

“The prosecutor! How could he do that?”

“Because the judge said he could.”

“Fricke?”

“The one and only.”

“Does he ever get reversed?”

“I’ve never seem him reversed. Fricke’s California Criminal Law is the numero-uno textbook. How can they reverse the guy that wrote the book they learned from?”

I listened to them in the jail night after night, two men who would both be put to death in the small green octagonal chamber where the cyanide pellets were dipped into acid beneath the chair. They reminisced about the legends of San Quentin. They told me about Bob Wells, a black man who was on death row for knocking a Folsom guard’s eye out with a spittoon. Wells had started with a car theft and parlayed it all the way to death row. Chessman told me, “In the joint the best thing is to avoid trouble if you can . . . but if you get jammed and you gotta take somebody out, if you want to avoid the gas chamber or life make sure you stick him in the front—not in the back. In the front you can make a case for self-defense. Another thing: don’t ever go over to his cell house or his job. You’ll be out-of-bounds . . . where you’re not supposed to be.”

Theirs was good advice for 1950. Twenty years later it was impossible to be convicted of a prison murder without at least one guard as eyewitness. In the fifties, most convicts felt such helpless defeat that they usually confessed after a few days, or weeks, or even months, in the dungeon, which was what they called a certain row of cells in Folsom’s #5 Building. Nobody even thought a convict might have the right to a lawyer. Bob Wells only ever saw his lawyer in the courtroom.

Another piece of advice I remembered from Sampsell: “Two guys are the perfect robbery mob. With one guy, you know you won’t get snitched on . . . but one guy can only watch one person while getting the money. With two guys, one covers the room and the other sacks it up. One guy can cover a lot of people. And if somebody snitches, there’s no doubt who it was. . . .”

I listened and remembered, but without saying so, I was not inclined to armed robbery. Indeed, I had no plans to be a criminal. Neither did I make a vow to God, or anyone else, that I would not be one. I was going to be penniless when the gate opened. All my friendships had been born in one cage or another, juvenile hall, reform school, jail. Whatever happened, I would keep on. Solid convicts would say, “When it gets too tough for everybody else, it’s just the way I like it.” That’s an expression I’ve used often in my life.

 

ABOUT A WEEK AFTER MY SENTENCING, the jail bureaucracy transferred me to the Wayside Honor Rancho, where I lived in a dorm and worked pushing a Georgia buggy full of pig feces during the day. Nothing known to man smells worse than pig feces. All evening and on weekends, I played lowball poker. An old dope fiend confidence man taught me how to hand muck (palm cards) and deal from the bottom of the deck. Over the years I found that when I could cheat I didn’t need to, because I was a better poker player than that. When the other players were so good that cheating would have helped, they were also so good that they, too, knew the moves. Nothing illegal was seen, but there were telltale ways of holding one’s hand or framing the deck. The primary thing was being able to spot a card mechanic. When I did, I would give him the signal known to con men around the world, a clenched fist on the table. It signals he must play it on the up and up. A flat palm means go ahead and work. There are also standard signals for con men who play the Match and the Strap and for boosters and till tappers and other members of the vanishing breed of professional thieves who go back at least as far as Elizabethan England.

At Wayside Honor Rancho, which was the county farm, I slept next to a young pimp named J.M. He wore extremely thick glasses and had a sharp mind. Every Sunday one of his whores brought him enough pot for a few joints. After the evening count, we sat outside the dorm and got high. My poker game suffered when I was high on grass. J.M. was serving thirty days for drunk driving and a string of unpaid parking tickets. He came in after me and went out before me. As he was rolling up his gear for the bus ride to downtown Los Angeles, which was where prisoners were released, he wrote out a telephone number and told me to get in touch with him when I got out. A Jewish bookie named Hymie Miller, an associate of Los Angeles’s preeminent mobster of the era, Mickey Cohen, likewise took a shine to me. Miller could be contacted through a cocktail lounge in Burbank that was owned by the Sica brothers, both notorious LA gangsters of that time.

During my sojourn on the county farm, I got into one fistfight. It happened during the poker game, although I cannot recall what precipitated it. The opponent was a big man, and what added to that was fat. He was boisterous and arrogant, traits that have always grated on me. We were playing with a cot as the card table, six of us—one seated at each end of the bunk and two along each side. He was straight across from me. Whatever the dispute, he slammed down his cards, said something like “fuckin’ little punk,” and started to rise. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, but he must have been nearly fifty years old. Before he got all the way to his feet, I dove across the cot and crashed into him, one hand trying to tear his testicles through his pants, my teeth looking for an ear or nose to bite off.

Those things were unnecessary, for my body toppled him back and down into the metal side rail of the adjacent bunk. My hundred and fifty pounds came down on top of him.

He screamed. The others pulled me off him. I’d broken his shoulder. They took him away to the general hospital, and I never saw him again. His name, however, was Jack Whalen, and those who know about the gangster days in Los Angeles, of Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, the Shannon brothers (who were born the Shaman brothers), and others, know that Jack Whalen was the most feared hit man and thug in the LA underworld. I didn’t know that until after I had broken his shoulder.

Needless to say, nobody else caused me any trouble during the rest of my time at the Wayside Honor Rancho. The days dwindled down, eight, seven, six, five. I would be a free man soon.