WHEN I HAD SERVED FOUR YEARS in San Quentin, Louise Wallis hired an attorney recommended by Jesse Unruh, known as “Big Daddy” in California politics. The attorney talked to people in Sacramento about getting me a parole. In four years I had been to the hole half a dozen times and I had two score disciplinary reports. It was a far worse record than most convicts’, but far better than one would have expected from my history. I’d been in several altercations, but only a couple had come to the attention of the officials. Besides being sliced from temple to lip by a cell partner I’d been bullying, I was stabbed in the left lung by a queen protecting his joker. I never saw him coming. On another occasion I was suspected of having stabbed another convict. The victim refused to identify me, so the captain let me out of the hole. He warned that he was watching and one slip would get me a year in the hole followed by a transfer to Folsom.
Nothing I’d done was really serious, considering how impulsive and explosive I had been at eighteen when I started walking the Big Yard. Had I not had Louise Wallis writing me from the Queen Mary and Saint-Tropez, describing the unusual blue of the sea, telling me what a good life I could have, I might well have escalated my war against authority—the war the world declared on me when I was four years old. Every place I went authority told me, “We will break you here.” They said it in juvenile hall, in various reform schools, and in the reformatory at Lancaster. I cannot recount how many beating I’d had—at least a score, three of which were really savage. Tear gas was shot in my eyes through the bars; fire hoses had skidded me across the floors and slammed me into walls. I’d spent a week naked in utter blackness on bread and water when I was fifteen. When I was in Pacific Colony, at thirteen, I was fastened by a long canvas harness to a hundred-pound concrete block wrapped in blanket. I dragged it up and down a corridor covered with paraffin wax for twelve hours a day. I fought back and they punched and stomped me until my face looked like hamburger—and a doctor with an accent did nothing. The hospital did say I wasn’t crazy and returned me to reform school. They could make me scream and cry out for mercy, but as soon as I recuperated, I always rebelled again. They expelled me from reform school; I was too disruptive.
In San Quentin, however, they said they would kill me if I stabbed a guard and would kick my brains in if I even took a punch at one. I also knew that I would not be expelled from here. Without Louise Wallis and the hopes and dreams she represented, I might have ignored their threats and escalated my rebellion. I hadn’t cared. Now I did care. I wanted out. I had more going for me than anyone I knew. I even managed to have six months’ clean conduct when I went to the parole board. Although I didn’t know it for years, the prison psychiatrist recommended against my parole. But Mrs. Hal Wallis had more influence. In February, the adult authorities fixed my term at seven years, with twenty-seven months on parole. That meant I had six months to go, assuming I could stay out of trouble.
MEMORIAL DAY. LIKE ALL DAYS, it was announced long before dawn by the raucous clutch of birds, pigeons, and sparrows in the outside eaves of the cell house. No rooster ever crowed earlier or louder, although convicts slept through it. Then came the early unlock, guards letting out men who went to work before the main line. On weekdays I was on early unlock. During my last year and a half I worked on the early laundry crew, but not today. This was a holiday.
I woke up when the convict key men began unlocking the cells. Using huge spike keys, they could hit each lock while walking fast—clack, clack, clack, the sound grew louder as the key man came closer on another tier, then receded as he passed, and grew loud again as one came down the next tier.
The convict tier tender then was pouring hot water through the cell bars into gallon cans placed next to the gate. The cells had only cold water, and the toilets used water from the bay.
From my cell I could see through the outer bars. It was sunny and bright out, but nevertheless, I took a jacket. It was always wise to take a jacket when leaving the cell in San Quentin. San Francisco might be sunny and bright while the Big Yard was windy and cold.
A bell sounded, followed like punctuation by the ragged volley of the fifth-tier convicts exiting their cells and slamming their gates shut. A torrent of trash poured past as men kicked it off the tiers above. Every so often, the falling newspapers and other effluvia had an instant coffee or peanut butter jar wrapped in them that exploded as it hit the concrete, sending splinters of glass flying. A voice called out, “If I knew who did that, I’d fuck you up . . . punk!” Nobody responded. It would be another fifteen minutes before the unlock worked its way down to the second tier. That was when I got up and got dressed. I crossed off another day on the calendar. I had sixty-some remaining; I cannot now recall exactly how many.
As it was Memorial Day, there would be a boxing card on the lower yard in the afternoon. I hadn’t boxed in two years, but my former trainer, Frank Littlejohn, had asked me to substitute for someone he trained because he was afraid the man would take too bad a beating. Why not? It was only three rounds. I pulled a box from beneath the bed and extracted sweat- and bloodstained Ace bandages that I used for hand wraps, plus my mouthpiece and boxing shoes. It was a wonder they didn’t have spiders in them considering how long they had been in the shoe box.
As soon as the tramp of feet receded above, another security bar was raised and another tier of convicts came out with another deluge of trash. I gathered what I was taking to the Big Yard. In addition to the boxing equipment, I put a loose carton of cigarettes inside my shirt to pay a gambling debt. The goddamned Yankees had lost the night before. What was the adage of my childhood, never bet against Joe Louis, Notre Dame, or the New York Yankees? Bullshit! I picked up a book I was returning to my friend Leon Gaultney: Science and Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski, the fountainhead of general semantics. Frankly, it had too many examples in mathematical equations, which turned off my brain as if by a light switch. I thought semantics was an important discipline in understanding reality, but I preferred the books of S. I. Hayakawa and Wendell Johnson.
I debated carrying out the pages of the new book to show Jimmy and Paul and Leon—but decided that I was packing too much already. I would have to carry what I took all day.
I was waiting when the second tier was released. I stepped out, closed my cell gate, and waited until the bar went down. Some cell thieves lately had been running in and out of cells to grab things if the occupant walked away before the security bar went down.
The nearly two thousand convicts in the four sections of the South Cell House walked to the center stairway that led down to the rotunda and the steel doors into the mess hall. As usual, the food was barely edible. The menu proved that between the word and the reality lies the chasm. I could eat this one breakfast, oatmeal and a hard cinnamon roll with peanut butter. The roll softened in the tepid coffee. I got the food down and went out into the yard.
The Big Yard was already full. The South Cell House ate last. Exiting the mess hall door, I plunged through a wall of sound made by four thousand numbered men, all convicted felons imprisoned for murder, robbery, rape, arson, burglary, selling drugs, buying drugs, buying and selling stolen merchandise, all the crimes set forth in the California Penal Code. The crowd was thickest near the mess hall door, for although a guard told everyone exiting to move out, they tended to go ten feet and stop to light up cigarettes and greet friend. As I squeezed through I was sure to say, “Excuse me . . . excuse me,” if I brushed against or bumped someone. Convicts may have the foulest mouths in the world, but unlike the images set forth in movies and television, they are better than New Yorkers about certain amenities. Among the numbered men there were always a few with paranoid streaks. One young black bully straight from the ’hood not only failed to excuse himself but also said, “Get outta the way, fool,” to a very skinny white guy who was being held in California for Utah, where he had already killed another convict. The “fool” brooded for nearly a month and then walked up behind the bully as he sat eating in the mess hall. The knife paralyzed the bully from the neck down. He was a bully no more. The prison adages include: Everybody bleeds; anybody can kill you. Where anyone can get a big knife, good manners are the rule of the day—even if they are accompanied by vulgarity. Think about it.
Beyond the packed crowd there was more room. I circled the yard counterclockwise, looking for my friends. First I headed for the inmate canteen. Only convicts actually in the canteen line, a row of windows reminiscent of those at the racetrack, could cross the red “deadline” thirty feet away. Above was a gun rail with a rifleman, looking down on the crowd. I saw many men I knew, but none of those I was seeking at the moment. I was both confident and watchful, for while I had many friends, I also had my share of enemies. I didn’t want to come upon them unexpectedly; they might think I was trying to make a sneak attack.
Outside the gates to the East Cell House I saw San Quentin’s two pairs of bookmakers. Sullivan and O’Rourke were the Irish book; Globe and Joe Cocko were the Chicano book. Each pair had a green sport page from the Chronicle, checking race results from the Eastern tracks. Waiting nearby were the horse-players. Most of them were compulsive horseplayers, and some were quite good. They had lots of time to study the charts.
I walked between the East Cell House wall and the domino tables. The games were hot and heavy, the sound of plastic dominoes loud as they were slammed to the tables. Double six went down first.
The next player had six three. He slammed it down. “That’s fifteen.”
“Goin’ behind the house for the change,” said the next man, playing six two on the six.
Each game was owned by a convict who took a cut, collecting from the losers and paying the winners. I knew how to play, but not well enough to gamble. It had been too expensive becoming a first-class poker player to now get involved in dominoes. These were some of the best domino players in the world. They played from breakfast unlock to afternoon lockup. They even played in the rain, holding newspapers over their heads if they lacked rain gear.
The East Cell House wall intersected with the North Cell House rotunda door. The yard outside the North Cell House was first to catch the warming rays of morning sun. The Big Yard was usually cold in the morning. The concrete seemed to hold the night’s chill until the sun was high. Most blacks congregated in that area. Although each race tended to congregate with their own, there was little overt racial tension or hostility. That would change in the decade ahead.
I wasn’t looking for him, but I spotted Leon Gaultney standing with two other blacks, one being Rudy Thomas, the prison’s lightweight champion. Rudy had the skills to be a world champion. Alas, he was a junkie. Also standing there was the heavyweight champion, Frank, who was doing time for killing a man with a single punch. He and I were civil to each other. He had once threatened to break my jaw, and I had said that I would stab him in the back. I was bluffing, confident he would back off, which he did.
Rudy Thomas and I were friends, but I think he suspected all whites of being racists at some level. True enough, if it came to a race war, I was white and I would fight, but I didn’t think anyone was better or worse than anyone else because of race.
Then there was Leon. Leon Gaultney. Over my life I’ve had an unusual number of close friends. American men seldom have really close male friends, the kind that can be called brother. I’ve had at least a dozen, or twice that, and scores who were partners. Leon was among the top half-dozen, and for a while he was my very best friend. I don’t recall how we met. During my first year or so I would have been too self-conscious to have a black man as a running partner. I had several black friends, guys I’d known from juvenile hall through reform school and now, in San Quentin—but they were not running partners. I did not walk the yard with them. Now, however, I had enough recognition and status, despite being just twenty-one, that nobody would think anything, and even if they did, they wouldn’t say anything. Moreover, through me, Leon developed friendship and respect from many white convicts of high status. Jimmy Posten had gotten Leon a job in the dental clinic. The chief dentist would not sign a job change for anyone without Jimmy’s giving a nod. Leon was the only black to work there. It wasn’t because of racism; it was because you get your friends the good jobs.
Leon was precisely six feet tall and weighed 175 pounds. He was average-looking and never wore starched and pressed bonaroo clothes. It was when he talked that one saw how unique he was. All traces of the common black accent had been effaced in favor of precise enunciation. He told me that he had studied Clifton Webb and Sydney Poitier for their speech and practiced by reading James Baldwin and others aloud. In the three years Leon had already served, he had taught himself Spanish well enough to translate Shakespeare back and forth. He had also become fairly fluent in French and Italian and was currently studying Arabic. The only decoration in his monkish cell was a pencil sketch of Albert Einstein. Leon was the most intelligent man I’d met in prison. Few of those I’d known in reform school could be called intelligent. It wasn’t the breadth or the depth of his knowledge that was so impressive. I’m sure I was more widely read. He seldom read fiction, whereas I believe that nothing explores the depths and darkness of the human mind better than great novels and even an average novel can throw a beam of light into an unknown crevice. Dostoyevski makes you understand the thoughts of gamblers, murders, and others better than any psychologist who ever lived, Freud included.
As I walked up, I nodded to Frank and Rudy and patted Leon on the back. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I saw your name on the boxing card,” Rudy said.
I nodded. “Yeah. Frank talked me into it. He said Tino Prieto would hurt Rooster.”
“When’s the last time you had the gloves on?”
“I dunno. I guess about a year ago.”
Rudy shook his head and looked to the sky. “He might hurt you, too. He’s old and he’s got a little gut, but he had about thirty, thirty-five professional fights. Look at his face.”
“I know . . . but fuck it, you know what I mean. I’ve got about ten or fifteen pounds on him. He’s really a lightweight.”
“He’s in good shape and you damn sure ain’t in good shape.”
“Too late now.”
Leon interrupted. “Let’s go. Littlejohn wants to see you in the gym.”
It was just after 9:00 A.M. The yard gate had just been opened so convicts could go down the concrete stairs to the lower yard. The first fight wouldn’t be until 1:00. Mine was the third bout. I wouldn’t answer the bell until at least 1:30.
I nodded, then said to Rudy, “Are they gonna bring that lightweight in from Sacramento?” Frankie Goldstein, a fight manager who often came to San Quentin for fight cards, to referee and simultaneously see if there was any talent in the prison, was supposed to bring a lightweight contender to box an exhibition with Rudy, who had gone through everyone who would get in the ring with him. I had sparred with him in the gym when I had secret ambitions to be a great white hope. I had never landed a clean punch. And when he hit me, I seldom saw it coming.
“Supposed to bring him in. We’ll see.”
I gestured good-bye to big Frank; he nodded impassively in response.
Leon and I walked away. “When you get done this afternoon,” he said, “I’ve got something to get high on.”
“Let’s do it now. What is it?”
“Hey, I’m not gonna get you loaded and then send you into the ring. You’d get beat to death and wouldn’t even know it.”
“So it’s better that way.”
“Not if you get your brain scrambled. Sometimes one terrible ass kicking will do it.”
“I see you’ve got a lot of confidence in me.”
“I think Jimmy Barry set you up . . . over that thing last year.”
“That thing last year” was a fight between Leon and Jimmy. It happened after I’d gotten to know Leon but before we were partners. I’d been working out, shadowboxing in front of a full-length mirror, when someone said a real fight was in progress. I had to be a spectator. It was happening in the handball court at the other end of the gym. When I got there, Leon and Jimmy were fighting. Jimmy was twenty years older and twenty pounds lighter than Leon; plus Leon was a good amateur light heavyweight. Jimmy, however, had been a top-ranked welterweight. He was the matchmaker; he ran the boxing department. He also had a bad name and a rat jacket. Good convicts shunned him as much as possible, but it was hard to do so completely because of his position. He controlled the boxing department. He distributed all equipment. Nobody was assigned a locker or issued boxing shoes and mouthpiece except through him. He made the matches, deciding who was to fight whom.
About a dozen convicts had been standing outside the handball court watching the fight. Leon was forcing the action, trying to come in behind a jab and hook to the body—but Jimmy was slipping the jab and blocking the hook. Neither was doing any damage until Leon barreled in with his shoulder and rammed Jimmy back against the wall. That brought a gasp as he fought to retrieve expelled air. Without warning, from the sidelines, Jimmy’s “kid” sprang upon Leon’s back and tried to stab him in the face or eye with a ballpoint pen.
“Get him off me!” Leon yelled.
To my great shame, I hesitated. Leon and I were not as close as we would become, but we were friendly. Moreover, he was a solid convict and Jimmy Barry was a reputed stool pigeon. Yet he was white and Leon was black. Race made me pause for ten seconds. Then I moved toward the door into the handball court, yelling, “Get off him!” Jimmy Barry was looking at me over Leon’s shoulder. Before I could get through the door, someone else pulled them apart, and some other convict called out, “The Man’s coming!” Everything broke up before the patrolling guard arrived. He could feel the electricity or ozone but had no idea what had happened. Everyone broke around him as if he were a rock in a river. Befuddlement was written on his face. En route to the yard, I found myself walking with Leon. “Thanks,” he said. He was holding a handkerchief to his cheek. It was bleeding slightly from the puncture wound by the ballpoint. Was there a note of sarcasm? Maybe he hadn’t known that I was among the spectators. That was immaterial. What mattered to me was that I had failed to behave as my own values dictated.
The fight in the handball court had occurred more than a year earlier. It was since then that Leon and I had become close friends. He was respected by white convicts. Whites were still about 70 percent of the prison population. There was little racial tension. If there was an altercation between convicts of different races, it only involved them and, perhaps, their close friends. Leon also had status with many young blacks, especially those from Oakland and San Francisco.
The months passed. I went to the parole board and got a parole date. A few weeks after that, I got in an altercation with two of San Quentin’s toughest black convicts: Spotlight Johnson and Dollomite Lawson. Either one could have whipped me without much difficulty. Both were squat, powerful men—and ugly as sin. In the LA County Jail, the deputies would put Dollomite in a tank to “straighten things up.” He had rammed one man’s head into the bars and killed him. Spotlight lived in the East Cell House, but I did not know what tier. Dollomite lived on the fourth tier of the South Call House. He would not expect me to be out of the cell first. He would go out to the yard so he and his partner could brace me together. Instead I would stick Dollomite the moment he stepped out of the cell. He would never think about the early unlock. He was a stupid, illiterate brute. Alas, he was a very tough stupid, illiterate brute. In a primal milieu to which he was perfectly adapted. But I knew my way, too.
Through the evening I dwelled on the problem, sometimes enraged, sometimes aching inside because it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. It would cost me at least six or seven more years even if I didn’t kill him. He wasn’t worth it.
At 10:15, convicts started returning from night activities. As their feet sounded on the steel stairs, some went past my cell.
Leon appeared and stopped. “Somebody said you had words with big head and his pal. Is it over?”
I hesitated. I wanted to tell him everything and seek his help, yet my own code, personal and perverted as it may have been, said that I would take care of my own trouble. I said, “It’s not quite over.” And as soon as the words were in the air, I felt guilty.
A guard at the end of the tier raised the security bar. Convicts who were waiting stepped into their cells. Leon was alone on the tier.
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“I’m going there, boss,” Leon said. “See you in the morning,” he said to me.
Soon began, the clack-clack-clack of each cell being locked, and the softer click-click-click of the guards pressing the counters they carried.
It seemed that I was awake the entire night, but I must have slept a little, for when the guard tapped the bars and shone his flashlight on my face, it awakened me. “Bunker . . . early unlock.”
“I got it.”
Ten minutes later the security bar went up and the guard unlocked my gate. As I stepped out, a couple of other figures were on the tier.
It was summer and already daylight when the laundry foreman took his washing machine crew across the Big Yard, empty save for a few seagulls and pigeons. The washing machine crew was all white, the tumbler (huge machines that wrung out excess water by spinning at high speed) crew was all black, and the drying machine crew was Chicano. Each had to cooperate with the others to get their bonaroos done. The steam presses were divided evenly. The con boss was black.
As soon as we entered the building, I went to my stash and got my knife. It was sixteen inches overall, its handle wrapped in electrician’s tape. It had the Arkansas toothpick shape, a sharp point that widened a lot. I carried it over behind a huge washing machine where my rubber boots waited beneath a bench. The shiv went down the side of my big rubber boot.
All morning, I watched the clock. At 7:44, I told the foreman that I was going up to sick call.
It was a bright morning and a very long walk across the lower yard, up the stairs into the Big Yard. The first convicts from the West and North Cell Houses were beginning to exit the mess halls. As I went into the South Cell House and up the stairway, the fifth tier was coming down. Good. Dollomite was still in his cell. On the third tier, I turned to walk in front of the cells. Ahead of me was Leon, standing in front of Dollomite’s cell. Leon saw me and gestured with his hand down beside his leg: go back.
I stopped and stepped back. A minute later Leon came toward me. “C’mon,” he said, leading me down the stairs.
“What’s up?” I asked. I was mentally ready and, being ready, resented being called off.
“It’s settled,” Leon said. “They really don’t want trouble. They’re running a game on Fingers, too. And they think you’re crazy . . . and being known as slightly crazy is an advantage around here.”
Leon had saved my parole date and probably saved me from an additional sentence for assault or even murder. It was a great debt made even greater by my earlier hesitance in helping him. He was really my friend. (I must insert parenthetically, especially to convicts who read this, that such a friendship would never had started in San Quentin after the early part of the 1960s, when the race wars began.)
BUT TODAY WAS MEMORIAL DAY and I was being paroled in the first week of August. As Leon and I walked toward the gym, the ’Frisco Flash, a skinny little character, arrived and beckoned Leon to the side. The conversation was brief.
Leon came back shaking his head. “I fucked up. I shouldn’t have given it to him.”
“Given him what?”
“Some pot and pills. He was selling them for me. You know Walt and Country and Duane, don’t you?”
“Yeah . . . all my life.”
“They got some reds from him and claimed they were bogus. They burned him.”
“Let me talk to ’em.”
“I don’t want any profit, but I would like my investment back.”
“No problem. I’ll take care of it.” I thought it would be no problem. All three were friends with some obligation to me. I changed the subject: “Littlejohn will need somebody to work my corner with him. Are you up to it?”
“Sure. I’ll stop the blood.”
“I love your confidence. Keep the towel ready in case I’m getting killed.”
We went up the stairway to the top floor of the Old Industrial Building. It was where the gallows had been when they hanged the condemned in California. The first floor was divided into maintenance shops, and part of the second floor was the Catholic chapel. Two other floors were empty space, with the gym on top. It was built at the bottom of a hill at the edge of the lower yard. Until recently, to reach it one had to walk down the alley past the doorways into the maintenance shops and then trudge up five flights of stairs affixed to the outside of the building. After Popeye Jackson (later killed on the streets of San Francisco) hit somebody with a hatchet and an older guard had a heart attack running up the stairs, a bridge-ramp was built from the top of the hill to a gym door. This made it easier to control pedestrian traffic in and out of the gym; plus the guards could get there faster.
Paapke, the three-hundred-pound Hawaiian guard, was at the ramp entrance, checking ID cards against a list. Knowing me, he waved me through without checking.
The boxing department was quiet. The bell that ran in a three-minute, one-minute sequence had been turned off. The constant staccato sound of speed bags was missing, as well as the splat of hard punches landing on the heavy bag. Conversations were unusually soft as the gladiators got ready for battle and the trainers hovered about with help and advice. The payoff for fighting was two photos taken during each bout. Frank Littlejohn was supposed to be there with his two champions, Rudy Thomas and Frank.
“Hey, we meet again,” Leon said to Rudy and Frank. Then to me: “I’m gone. I’ll see you when you get down there.”
I nodded and asked Rudy, “Where’s Littlejohn?”
Rudy indicated the doorway to the matchmaker’s office at one corner of the boxing section. It was an indoor shack with a glass-windowed office and a back room with a window where gear was passed in and out. It was also a private space where nobody could see what was going on. As I headed in that direction, I saw Country Fitzgerald and Duane Patillo come through the door. Country was a known con man who would chastise a sucker unmercifully. He had gotten the drugs from the ’Frisco Flash. Duane was the muscle if muscle was needed, a real tough white boy out of Compton, and Walt was an all-around coconspirator with them.
I veered to intercept them. They stopped, faces affable. We were friends. “Hey, that stuff you got from the ’Frisco Flash. That belonged to my friend Leon. He doesn’t want whatever you said you’d pay, but just what he had invested. And you don’t have to pay right now if you haven’t got it. Put a day on yourselves.”
“Oh, man, it didn’t belong to the Flash?”
I assured them that it did not.
“We don’t have it right now.”
“When can you get it?”
“Probably next week.”
That seemed reasonable to me, and I was sure Leon would agree. It was more a question of saving face than the value involved. “I’ll tell him,” I said.
AS IS COMMON IN THE BAY AREA at the beginning of summer, the morning fog burned away and the afternoon was bright and warm. Forty-two hundred convicts were in the lower yard. Boxing was a big thing in San Quentin. Several contenders had come from behind the walls. Whenever champions were in the Bay area, they visited San Quentin. The walls of the boxing department had their signed photos: Archie Moore, Bobo Olson, Rocky Marciano. Most of the forty-two hundred stood in the outfield and around the ring, but free-world visitors and a score of important convicts sat in ringside folding chairs.
Today there were to be eight bouts, three preliminaries and five for prison championship in the various weight divisions. I was in the third preliminary, supposedly welterweight. Actually, I weighed a few pounds more, around 150 pounds, and my opponent was actually a lightweight, weighing in at 137.
The first bout was a pair of featherweights having their first fight in the ring. True, they had boxed many rounds in the gym; trainers had drummed into them what to do—but as they caught the electricity generated by the crowd, they forgot what they should do. They circled cautiously, hands high, sort of dancing. One extended a tentative jab; the other swung a right hand that landed. Both began swinging like windmills, heads down, arms flailing, very little landing with much effect. The convicts loved it. They yelled and clapped and bent over with laugher. The decision was a draw.
I paid little heed to the second bout. I was getting loose, warming up, moving around. A sudden mass bellow went forth ringside. I turned to look. One of the fighters was sitting on the ring floor, one hand holding a bottom rope. He was trying to use it to get to his feet.
The referee stepped forward, waving both arms over his head. The bout was over. “In one minute and nine seconds of the first round . . .”
Littlejohn was lacing on my gloves, pulling them up tight. God, they gave a headache. If I have to be punched, I much prefer a bare fist to a boxing glove.
The knockout victim came past me, his legs still wobbly, his eyes glazed, his manager in his ear: “Goddammit! I told you to watch out for that overhead right.”
Leon went up the stairs to the ring apron and held the ropes apart so I could slip between them. I went to the resin box and did a little dance so the soles of my shoes scraped the resin. It kept my feet from slipping on the canvas. When I turned away, my opponent was waiting to use the resin box. I was bigger and younger, but on his face were etched forty-two professional fights, mostly around Tijuana. I was already uptight. Now my stomach churned, too.
Back in the corner, Littlejohn told me, “Stay away; move on him. Use the jab. You’ve got a good jab.”
Frankie Carter, the referee, motioned us to the center of the ring. “You know the rules. Break when I tell you. Protect yourself at all times. . . .” While the referee gave the standard instructions, I looked at my opponent, not with the intimidating glare now popular in many sports. Rather, I was looking him over. He was shorter than me, stockier, with thinning black hair. His arms were short, the biceps strong but not remarkable. His forearms reminded me of Popeye. He was covered with blue India ink tattoos, ugly and forever. They were a brand.
While standing there I was conscious of the sun’s heat on my bare shoulders.
We went back to our corners. The bell rang and the fight was on, three rounds, each round of three minutes’ duration. Because I was in such poor condition I planned to take it easy in the first round, jab and keep away. If he pressed me, I would hold and conserve wind and energy. That was my plan.
I circled, stuck out a jab—and got hit flush in the left eye with a hard overhand right. It made lights explode in my brain. Oh shit! I reached to grab and he hit me with an uppercut body punch that almost lifted my feet from the canvas. Ooof! I realized I was in serious trouble. I managed to clinch and pin his arms. When the referee said, “Break,” I ignored the order. He had to pry me loose.
Somehow I got through round one. I was happy when the bell rang. When I flopped on the stool, panting, I looked across the ring. My opponent was standing as he talked to his trainer. Was he grinning?
“Jab him!” Littlejohn kept saying. “Use your reach to keep him away. Box his ass. Move and stick . . . move and stick . . . How’s your gas?”
“Okay . . . so far.”
The referee came over. “Seconds out.”
Leon wet my mouthpiece and stuck it back in my mouth.
The bell rang. The second round was better than the first. My legs felt better and I was able to move, move, move—and when my opponent got overanxious, I stopped and stuck a jab in his face. I stuck out a jab, came in behind it, and hooked him hard in the stomach. His “ooof” said I’d hurt him. I was dancing like Fred Astaire.
I was winning the round until the last thirty seconds. All of a sudden, like air going from a balloon, I ran out of gas. My legs became lead. He came at me and I meant to slip the punch and move away. My legs refused the command. They got crossed up and I tripped myself, stumbling and almost going down. He hit me in the rib cage under the heart. It hurt. Next came two punches in the face, both of which sent coruscating lights to my brain. Instinctively I grabbed for him. My extended arms let him punch over the top. Another flashing light. Damn!
The bell rang. Thank God. Where’s the corner?
“. . . doin’ good,” Leon said, taking my mouthpiece.
Littlejohn rubbed my legs. “Do what you were doin’. Jab and grab. Jab and grab.” Even as he spoke, I remembered that jab and grab was how Joey Maxim beat Sugar Ray Robinson on a sweltering New York night in Yankee Stadium. Robinson won every round until the thirteenth, then he quit in the corner from exhaustion and dehydration. He’d lost over twenty pounds in the thirteen rounds. Why did I think of that? Who knows.
The bell rang.
I remember little of the third round, except that it took three hours. The referee would have stopped it except that I kept coming forward—and Tino Prieto kept hitting me until he got arm-weary. One time when I stood in the middle of the ring, half bent over, somewhat like a bull awaiting the final thrust, I heard Littlejohn yelling, “The jab! Use your jab!”
I stepped back, looked over my shoulder, and said quite loudly, “Hey, Frank, I would if I could. I can’t!”
Littlejohn closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. Leon grinned.
The convicts at ringside laughed once more. I tucked my chin against my shoulder and kept my right hand high, my elbow in tight, and walked into Prieto’s punches, moving my head from side to side. Every so often I’d throw a haymaker left hook that landed just once, and even that was up high where it mussed his hair and nothing more. Anyone who hasn’t been there can imagine how long it takes for a three-minute round.
When the final bell sounded., four thousand convicts were jumping up and down and screaming. I barely made my stool.
“Get up. Wave!” Littlejohn said.
“Are you crazy? You might have to carry me outta this fuckin’ ring. If I ever put on another pair of boxing gloves—”
“We have a split verdict,” said the announcer. “Referee Frankie Carter scores it twenty-nine to twenty-eight for the blue corner. The two judges, Willy Hermosillo and Frank Washington, score it twenty-nine to twenty-nine. The fight is a draw by majority vote.”
A draw! A draw! Unbelievable. I was so surprised and excited that I overcame my exhaustion and stood up. I managed to wave to the crowd and embrace Tino Prieto. He looked bewildered and returned my hug without enthusiasm. Later, I looked at the scorecards. Two judges had scored the first round even, ten points to ten points; they gave me the second round by ten points to nine points and Prieto the third round by the same ten to nine.
When I came down the steps from the ring, Rudy Thomas was grinning. “I didn’t know you could box that good,” he said.
“Desperation,” I said. “And I’ll never put on another set of boxing gloves, believe me.”
Later, in the gym, my opponent came out of the shower. I was combing my hair at a sink, and he had to pass behind me. Our eyes caught in the reflection. “Good fight,” he said.
“You, too, man.”
“I’m kinda glad I didn’t win.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Now I don’t have to worry if you’re going to stab me.”
“Oh, man, I wouldn’t do that.”
“I know it.” He grinned, one tooth missing, and went his way.
I finished combing my hair, aching all over and thinking about what he’d said. Was it paranoid? Sure it was, yet it was also an admonition to me. I’d deliberately established a reputation for being a little crazy. The purpose was to warn others away, as the skunk’s white stripe does. But if someone thought I might stab him over a boxing match it might defeat its purpose. If someone thought me that crazy and we had words, he might stab me in a preemptive move. All I hoped was that it didn’t happen in the next two months. After that I would be back on the streets of Los Angeles.
Later, during the main count lockup, I bent over to straighten my bunk and a bolt of pain shot out from my ribs. When I came out on unlock for the evening meal, I asked the cell house sergeant to call me through to the hospital. The convict nurse on duty poked the rib and I winced. He thought it was cracked, but that wasn’t enough to call for the medical officer of the day to come inside the walls. However, an older convict was experiencing a heavy chest pain and streaks of pain down his left arm. A possible heart attack was enough to bring the medical officer of the day. It took an hour before he arrived in shorts and sweatshirt. Thank God the convict with chest pains wasn’t having a heart attack. When the doctor got to me and found that I’d gotten the injuries in the boxing ring, he muttered something about ignorance—but he ordered an X ray and found a hairline crack. It hadn’t separated. As long as it was immobilized, it would heal. This was accomplished by a sheet of white adhesive covered by Ace bandage around my torso. When a guard escorted me back to the cell house it was about ten-thirty. I had to wait at the Sergeant’s Office to be checked in, while around me convicts streamed in from night unlocks. They climbed the stairs and stood in front of their cells for lockup.
Walt came in, saw me, and came over. “Damn, man, your eye . . .”
“I’ve had worse. It’ll be all healed when I walk out the gate.”
“How much you got left?”
“Sixty-two days and a getup. You get that business straight with Leon?”
There was something in his voice that contradicted his words. “Hey,” I said. “All he wants is what he invested.”
“Yeah, well, uhhh, we talked it over. We’re gonna give that nigger what we think he’s got comin’. If he don’t like it, fuck him in the ass.”
The words were slaps across my face. Each one pumped more red into my brain. I nearly choked and had to clear my throat. Meanwhile the lockup bell rang and convicts still far from their cells began to scurry. I managed to choke out: “I don’t know what he wants . . . but lemme say this: if it ain’t right and there’s some trouble, I’m backin’ that nigger . . . all the way to the gas chamber if necessary. You think about it; I’ll see you tomorrow.”
A guard appeared at the section door and put his flashlight beam on us. “Lockup. Move it.”
“I’m waiting to check in,” I said.
Walt disappeared up the stairway to his tier.
They counted me at the Sergeant’s Office. When the count cleared, a guard escorted me to my cell.
It was a bad, sleepless night. I can’t imagine that many readers will have spent a night thinking they may have to kill someone with a knife—or be killed the same way—when the sun comes up. It is not conducive to peaceful sleep or any sleep, although I might have dozed for a moment or two during the night. My cracked rib throbbed; plus my swollen eye was nearly closed. I counted my remaining days in San Quentin. Sixty-one. Was I crazy, letting my mouth get me into another shitstorm? I could have been more diplomatic. I didn’t have to throw down a threat the first thing. Still, he’d been an asshole, referring to Leon as a nigger. There were plenty of niggers around, loud, gross, ignorant—and plenty of white niggers, too. Come to think of it, Walt was illiterate and ignorant. A convict comic had handed Walt a book of matches, offering a carton of Camels if he could read the ad on its face. Walt looked, threw the matchbook down, and said, “Fuck you!” He probably hated Leon doubly because Leon was so well educated.
No matter. They’d made their declaration; so had I, although I was now tormented with misgivings. I wanted to go home. I hadn’t realized what I had going for me when I first met Mrs. Hal Wallis. Now she signed her letters “Mom,” and I felt that she was Mom. She wanted to open doors for me; she wanted me to help myself. She’d arranged a job at the McKinley Home for Boys. It was on Riverside Drive and Woodman. It would become a giant shopping mall, anchored by two department stores, but that was two decades away. Now it was a still-rustic home for boys. Louise Wallis was their foremost benefactor—and mine. Because of her I had a chance to fulfill my dreams—or at least I had a chance until morning. This seemed like a repeat of a few weeks earlier when Leon had interceded for me. He’d saved my ass, one way or another, from getting my brains kicked in or being charged with a felony for sticking one or both of my enemies. How could I have gotten into almost the same situation? It was because I had originally spoken to them and told Leon it was okay. I’d put myself in the middle, and I was responsible. I still felt guilt for not instantly pulling Jimmy Barry’s punk off Leon, and I felt a debt because he had saved my parole by getting between me and the dynamic duo of Spotlight and Dollomite. God, they were ugly.
This time I wouldn’t let Leon down, no doubt of that—but goddamn I wanted to get out. I’d been too quick with my retort. Why did I have to declare myself when Walt told me how they intended to pay—or not pay? I could have played it off and gone off to plan something instead of this gunfight at the O.K. Corral kind of confrontation. I should have at least gone to see Leon before threatening to kill people. For a smart guy I was sure dumb sometimes. Still there was no way back without putting my tail between my legs.
At least I had behaved so I could look in the mirror. Mine was a macho world, with some rules that belonged in the Code of Chivalry. Fuck it. Whatever happened, happened. The first birds were beginning to chirp. Soon enough the early-morning unlocks would start.
I was waiting fully dressed when the flashlight beam probed the cell and the silhouette called softly, “Bunker.”
“Got it, boss.”
Ten minutes later, I stepped onto the tier and closed the cell gate. Down the tier another figure was dressing. I headed for the stairway to the South Dining Room. As I entered, instead of grabbing a tray and getting in line, I walked up the center aisle, circled behind the steam tables, and entered the main kitchen. Other convicts assigned to food service were coming to work, going through the kitchen to a locker room where they changed into white kitchen clothes or at least a white jumper. Instead of entering the locker room, I went down a corridor through double doors into the vegetable room. The vegetable crew, eight Chicanos, was peeling potatoes that they threw into huge pans of water. They looked up without expression as I passed through and opened the rear door onto the loading dock behind the kitchen. The kitchen had its own yard with weights. It had a wall on one side. The wall overlooked the lower yard on its other side. The gun bull with the carbine watched both. He had a route he patrolled that took him away from the kitchen yard. The other side of the kitchen yard had a fence, beyond which was a yard for the West Honor Unit, where convicts could come and go from their cells from 6:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M. Leon’s cell was on the fifth tier at the rear. He’d moved to the honor unit a couple of weeks earlier. I’d helped him carry his gear.
A couple of convicts wearing high boots, heavy rubber aprons, and thick gloves were using steam hoses to clean garbage cans. I feigned interest in that until the gun bull turned his back to walk the other way. Then I scrambled over the fence. It rattled loudly, but the gun bull never heard it.
Across the honor unit yard to the big steel doors into the building rotunda. I pulled one door enough to make sure it was unlocked. I hesitated to pull it open. Across the rotunda, just within the cell house itself, was the small Sergeant’s Office. During the day convicts came and went freely, but maybe he would notice someone entering at this time of morning. The sun was up because it was summer, but the main line had not yet begun the breakfast unlock.
As I debated what to do, the rotunda door was pushed open from the other side. Three convicts came out. “Where’s the bull?” I asked.
“He’s up on the tiers,” one replied.
I slipped inside, crossed the rotunda, and walked the length of the cell house under the second tier overhang. At the rear stairs I went up two at a time. When I reached the top. I swung around the corner. Leon lived half a dozen cells down the tier. The gate was open and Country was leaning against the door frame. What was going on? I was only three or four steps away, the cells being four and a half feet wide. Seeing Country surprised me. I stopped. My face must have taken on a weird expression that the human animal assumes in such situations. My mind had been locked into stabbing this man, but I had no knife. I’d planned to get it after I talked to Leon.
Country started with surprise. “Bunk! You live here now?”
“Naw. I’m still in the garbage can.”
Leon came to the doorway. “What’s up?” He was wearing white shorts and T-shirt; his hair stood up like watch springs, which would have made me laugh at another time.
“I wanted to see you,” I said.
“Wait a minute until I roll this joint.” He had an open magazine on the top bunk. On top of the magazine was an aluminum foil bag of Topper, a rough tobacco that was once issued to California convicts. The situation looked more convivial than confrontational. Leon finished rolling the joint and handed it to Country.
“I gotta go,” Country said. “See you.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Country walked away.
“What brings you here this time of day?” Leon asked.
I quickly told Leon what had happened, what Walt had said and what I had said, and that it was at the last lockup last night.
“Country showed up when they opened up this morning. He asked me what I’d lost and kicked it out. No hassle.” Leon held up some U.S. currency. “What do you think?”
“Who knows? Walt couldn’t have sent word since I talked to him. He’s still in his cell right now.”
Leon looked puzzled. “I’ll bet Walt was just talking for himself, y’know what I mean? And I don’t think he expected your reaction. He was just fat-mouthing.” Leon grinned. “He didn’t know you were deadly serious.”
“I guess. You got enough to give me a joint?”
“Of course.”
As I waited, I decided that Leon was right. Country had intended to pay all along. I had spent an unnecessarily sleepless night working myself up to murderous violence. I felt as if a ton of weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I wouldn’t lose my parole and spend a couple of years in segregation.
I never talked to Walt again. Years later when he was dead (in a wreck after a highway patrol chase), I learned that he had managed to send word to Country by a convict nurse who came up on the tier to deliver medication to another convict. The nurse got off duty at midnight and lived in the West Honor Unit in a cell next to Country’s. They had planned to stiff Leon. They never thought I would get involved, because they were white and friends of mine. Besides that, all three were pretty tough. Duane, by himself, could punch me out very quickly in a fistfight. But they also thought I was crazy—and having trouble with a knife-wielding maniac wasn’t what they planned. What I did for a black friend in the mid-fifties is something I would never have even considered a decade later. Back when I did it a few would mutter, “Nigger lover,” but not loud enough for me to hear. That would end it. But when the race wars were in full swing, it would have been like a Tutsi having a Hutu friend, or vice versa. By the time Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, racial estrangement was absolute in San Quentin. And it remains almost the same three decades later.