Escape from Alcatraz (24 page)

After lunch came sick call. Ailing inmates lined up at the lieutenant’s desk where a medical technical assistant—the MTA to the convicts—listened to a recital of symptoms and passed out aspirin. If the MTA, unlicensed to practice medicine, decided an illness required a more professional diagnosis, he sent the sick convict to the hospital upstairs to await a checkup next morning by the doctor on his daily, roughly half-hour visit from the city. Another cell count after sick call, then the lieutenant rang the workers out to the shops.

Early that afternoon, his second day on The Rock, Morris had a caller—the classification and parole officer, the man who assesses a newcomer’s abilities and probable behavior pattern. He also receives the inmate’s requests for visitors and correspondents, for approval of the prison bureau director after an FBI investigation. (Even a lawyer must obtain the director’s permission to consult an inmate client.)

“After you’re here three months, you will be permitted two visitors a month,” he informed Morris. “Neither can be a former inmate of another prison.”

“Kind of sets a limit,” said Morris.

“I’d like the names now of the two people you’ll want to visit you.”

“Can’t think of any.”

“Members of your immediate family?”

“No family.”

“Relatives?”

“No relatives.”

The officer hastily checked a document. “Sorry. A girl? Some friend?”

“Mister, you just said I couldn’t see my friends.”

“How about correspondents? You can send out two letters a week, receive seven.”

“Same rules?”

The officer nodded.

“Outgoing mail carries an Alcatraz postmark?”

“Of course,” said the officer.

“Check me off that list, too,” Morris said.

Later the associate warden dropped by, to spell out the house rules: discipline is strict, but never inhumane; good behavior begets good time, and good time means a shortened term … a lecture in deportment that Morris listened to with courteous interest.

During the interview the associate warden, who kept glancing with patent fascination at an item on the file sheet, finally remarked: “Morris, you’re pretty smart—smarter than most. It’s got you out of other places, but let me give you some friendly advice: all it’ll get you here is the loss of your good time—maybe more time added. If you’re as bright as it says here, you’ll understand what I mean. Give us no trouble, we’ll give you none. Okay?”

He reached out his hand. Morris gave him a level look, said “Okay,” and shook. The associate warden left.

The item that had held such fascination was: I.Q. 133. Not a genius, 140 I.Q., but a convict of superior intelligence.

Next forenoon, Saturday, a guard came along and said, “Shower. Take your dirty socks.” He moved down the tier instructing the other newcomers in the ritual of the twice-weekly shower.

The officer in the basement shower room directed each to a bin that bore his number. “Drop your socks in there. You can pick them up next shower day.”

“Pick ’em up where?” asked a convict.

“Out of the bin.”

“When’s next shower day?”

“Tuesday, 3
P.M.
”

“What about our other stuff?”

“You dump that in Tuesdays, pick it up Tuesdays. Pillow case,
one
sheet, towel, three pairs of socks, underwear, shirt, pants if they need it. Saturdays, turn in the other three pairs of socks. Clear?”

“Our stuff won’t get mixed up?”

“You come straight here from college? Look.” The guard grabbed the inmate’s towel. “See that number? Everything’s got your number on, except socks, and they don’t matter—they’re all the same size.”

“When do we shave?”

“You’ll get blades tonight.” The officer gestured toward the row of showers. “Get to it.”

This was a movie weekend, and half the general population saw it during recreation period that Saturday afternoon, the other half on Sunday afternoon. Morris was in the Saturday matinee crowd, which gathered, as always in any mass movement of prisoners, in groups. Morris descended the spiral staircase from his tier, marched with his unit down Broadway toward the main entrance, turned right, went past the prisoners’ side of the visitors’ room, through a gate at the southeast corner of the cellhouse, up a stairway to the chapel, a room about 50 by 100 feet. A screen stood at one end, a projection booth at the other. A guard stood sentry at the door, and a guard in the east gun gallery, manned for the movies and chapel services, kept watch through a window from the second level of his cage. The movie was
Pork Chop Hill,
about the Korean War.

After lockup that Saturday—5
P.M.
on weekends—guards passed out two razor blades to each inmate, a week’s supply. Morris could now whip up a lather with the cold water in the old-fashioned mug with its round cake of soap and enjoy a shave. Conditions had indeed improved on The Rock: no guard stood over him in a suicide watch.

Sunday came to Alcatraz as early, and as abruptly, as any other day: the wake-up blast at 6
A.M.
Morris climbed out of bed, remembered it was Sunday, climbed back in. He had been told that Catholics could eat after the nine o’clock Mass. Later he joined a dozen other Catholic convicts on the escorted march to the chapel, which had been transformed from a movie theater by the simple process of rolling up the screen, revealing the altar. The rows of folding chairs now served as pews, and just beyond the front row was the rail where communicants partook of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The convicts, cheeks scrubbed and shaven, comb streaks in their hair, sat with rapt faces as the priest celebrated the ancient, solemnly beautiful liturgy. The guard near the door watched with the indifference of an usher who has seen the show innumerable times, his eye darting toward the cluster of worshipers at every movement, a genuflection or sign of the cross.

Afterward, only a few headed for the mess hall, the others returning to their cells. Morris fell in with the breakfast group, but was halted by the guard who had shepherded them to the chapel. “Back to your cell,” he ordered. “I didn’t see you take any of that bread up there. Regulations.” Only those who received Communion and its bread, or host, which required a three-hour fast, had the privilege of breakfast after Mass. Morris, like his mother not too devout, had apparently forgotten about this reason for a belated breakfast.

Other cell doors clattered open and about the same number of inmates tramped upstairs for the nondenominational Protestant service. By now Catholic and Protestant chaplains both came over every Sunday, instead of alternate weeks.

That afternoon Morris went out to the yard for the two-hour recreation period. A few convicts loped around its borders, like boxers in training; teams played softball with a Big League intensity, but here a ball over the fence was out, not a home run. Other prisoners leaped about at handball, bumping into outfielders. Cliques stood apart, chatting. Bridge experts sat at a few card tables along the foot of the counterfeit bleachers, but a casual observer would not have guessed the same. Their cards were dominoes with playing-card markings instead of dots, the dealer shuffling them as in dominoes and each player setting up his hand on the table in front of him. The men bought the domino cards, and a ditty bag to hold them, out of shop earnings. (Prisons ban regular playing cards because they are usually made of celluloid which the convicts can grind up and use as an explosive.)

The day was clear, and the view from the top steps spectacular, but a chill wind blew off the ocean through the Golden Gate. Morris, clad only in his light prison garb, retreated to a protected spot near the cellhouse door and, out of the wind, soaked up the warm winter sun. He noted most of the prisoners wore snug peacoats and caps and made inquiry. “You got to ask for them,” said a convict. “A jacket, too, to wear around the cell. Navy sends over the peacoats.”

He discovered that Alcatraz had three seasons: winter, summer, and October. Only in October was the weather invariable—golden, balmy days, the sky a deep blue. Winter and summer were variable—rain, wind, or fog, on occasion a day with none of these, a day of sparkling beauty. Summer differed from winter in the absence of rain. Every afternoon, with the regularity of a railroad schedule, the trade winds whipped in through the Gate and on most days, especially in summer, they brought along a thick, wet fog. “Hell,” said the convict, “summer’s about the coldest time of the year here. The bulls on outside patrol wear heavy overcoats in July and August.” Morris put in a request for a peacoat, cap, and jacket; also a raincoat.

On his twelfth day, Morris was assigned a household job, cleaning vegetables in the receiving room of the kitchen basement. This took him out of quarantine into a more permanent living room, as Warden Johnston once called the inmates’ cells. He moved into Cell No. 138 on the bottom row of outside B Block, across from the deserted A Block.

Next door lived Allen Clayton West, a thirty-year-old native of New York City who had picked up a slight southern accent during years in Georgia and considered himself more of a Georgian than a New Yorker. He was stocky, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, with a complexion a little on the swarthy side, perhaps from exposure to the southern sun in convertibles with the top down, and in the fields of Georgia state prison farms. He had acquired many cars but never by purchase, and as a consequence had served three prison-farm terms before he finally drove one across the Georgia line, a federal rap that eventually landed him on The Rock. Here his deep tan began to fade. He was now serving ten years for car theft. Like Morris, he was addicted to tattoos and sported one on the back of each finger of both hands. Unlike Morris, he was a compulsive chatterer, and that was likely the reason that Morris did not cotton to his neighbor right off. West played an accordion, a big one with a big dark case that stood against the rear wall.

Several weeks later Morris won a sort of promotion, to library messenger in the mornings, janitor in the afternoons. On his morning rounds, delivering books and magazines to cells, he had an opportunity to observe inmate living habits. Some cells had a monastic bareness; some held a pack-rat clutter; others had a barracks look, with pinup-calendar nudes; still others resembled a college dormitory, with books on a rear shelf, homework on the table; some were studios—walls hung with originals, a partly finished landscape on the bed; a guitar or horn indicated a musician.

Eventually, he was assigned to an industrial job and on that first morning as they moved out of their cells, West said, “Got yourself a payin’ job, eh? What’d you draw?”

“Brush shop.”

“Glove maker myself,” said West. “I’ll show you the brush-shop line when we get out.” In the yard he pointed to one of three painted yellow strips. “Yours. Be seein’ you, boy.”

Once all the workers were assembled, the lieutenant called, “Glove shop!” A guard-foreman nodded to his crew on a line, and the lieutenant made a count as they marched out a gate at the far corner. “Tailor shop!” Finally, “Brush shop!” Morris stepped through the gate of the high-walled yard, followed by a convict from the South labeled the Green Lizard. They descended a steep flight of steps in the Cliffside to a landing midway, passed through a Snitch Box, then down another flight to a road, bordered on the bay side by the cyclone fence. While they were in the yard, armed guards in the gun boxes on the wall peered down at them with a sort of languid interest. From the moment they emerged from the yard, until they reached the shop building, other eyes watched their progress from the lofty gun tower back up the road and the tower on the factory roof. The eyes of the road tower guard were not strictly on the men every moment this particular morning, for suddenly rifle fire rattled menacingly.

“Somebody make it to the water?” Morris asked.

“No siren,” said the Green Lizard. “Must be a log goin’ by on the tide. They take potshots at anything driftin’ by, case it’s a con makin’ like a log. Target practice. Also a kind of a reminder to us goin’ down this lonesome road, pal.”

They were counted into the shop, then every half hour thereafter. Men worked at lathes fashioning the wood parts for the pushbrooms; others glued on the fibers; still others screwed in handles. Alcatraz’s factories then numbered three, turning out these brooms; a variety of work gloves, plain cottons to welder’s gloves; and in the tailor shop, the convicts’ own gray-and-white trousers, the nickel-gray trousers for the guards’ uniforms, blue dungarees for the Navy, and white pants for Army cooks and bakers and orderlies in the Veterans Administration hospitals.

The pay rate was based on group piecework, which averaged, depending on skill, from $12 to $70 a month per man for a six-and-a-half-hour day and five-day week, the highest wage going to the tailors. The prisoners could send their earnings home or buy art supplies, selected magazines, musical instruments, chess sets, domino cards, law books, and, a little later under the next warden, even knitting and crocheting needles and yarn. Shop work also earned a prisoner “good time” on a graduating scale that, at the start of the fifth year, reached a peak of five days off his sentence for every month of employment. This was in addition to the statutory ten days off for every thirty days served as a model prisoner. Attempts to escape, or infractions of rules that put a convict in the Treatment Unit, could mean the loss of good time on both scores. The fact that a convict will feign a fight in the yard or commit some minor offense to be sent to TU as a sort of vacation from routine, at a cost of good time and all privileges, seems a graphic indication of the depressing monotony.

(In this society of Rock felons, an ex-guard says, TU also represents a status symbol: a sojourn there bestows a tough-guy stature, a con who would not turn stoolie. Top status goes to the man who had made the Hole, and even that has its own strata, defined by the length of solitary confinement. Stroud, who spent more than half his life in solitary, attained a peak of inmate respect at Alcatraz. In the isolation block when he was in residence there, the other prisoners manifested their sentiments by bluntly calling to a guard, “Hey, Jones, get me a drink of water,” but invariably addressing the Birdman as “Mr. Stroud.”)