Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (46 page)

Unlike all county jails and most
prisons, Folsom comes awake quiedy, without clanging bells or buzzers. The cell
house surrounds the five-tiered cell block like a large box holding a smaller
one. Coundess baby sparrows, pigeons and blackbirds in crevices and eaves have
been crying raucously for hours, but convicts sleep until cell tenders are
heard ramming huge keys into locks, a hard sound, each twist wrenched with an
exquisite pause: 'cla . . . ck, cla . . . ck . . ."

Folsom's cells have the same
dimensions as San Quentin's: eleven or twelve feet long, four and a half feet
wide. As in San Quentin, I had a table just wide enough to support a typewriter
with a pde of manuscript paper beside it. I'd finished my third unpublished
novel and was now embarking on my fourth. This time in prison I had nobody
outside. If I'd been murdered and buried underneath the cell house, nobody in
the world would have asked what had become of me.
Esquire
magazine had done a large piece
on the New York literary world, which included literary agents. I wrote to the
agent Armitage Watkins, whose mother was one of New York's first literary
agents and had represented many well known writers of an earlier era. I didn't
think someone who was red hot would be interested, but from the literary
quality of his clients, I thought he might at least read my manuscripts. I said
that I had no money for a reading fee, and I would pay the postage by selling a
pint of blood. Would he read what I had? He wrote back and said he would. I
sent him two novels. He sent them back, saying I had some talent and that he
would like to read anything else I wrote in the future. I was already writing
another, and so I continued.

The sudden sound followed by the
ragged volley of myriad cell gates indicated that the tier above had been
opened and another day at Folsom had begun. Trash began cascading down as the
convicts above trudged along the tier toward the center stairway. What was
being opened was "behind the screen," the close custody section of #1
building. My tier was next. I pulled up the blankets without really making the
bed. While buttoning my shirt, I was kicking trash toward the front of the
cell, to be pushed out when the security bar went up. Nobody would care, I
thought. Not about one day. A convict known fondly as "The Flea" (the
public address system would call: "Flea, report to . . .") sleeps in
his clothes in inches of tobacco grounds on grime-coated bedding with trash a
foot deep on the floor. Once a month or so the guards clean him out. The Flea
complains that they are taking his "personal" property. My half-made
bed won't offend anyone's sensibilities in Folsom as it might in one of the
new, showcase prisons.

Through the cell bars, two
indoor fences, a set of larger bars on a narrow window, and yet another layer
of wire, I can dimly see the granite block retaining wall at the base of a
steep hill, on top of which is another fence with barbed wire and a gun tower,
while out of sight beyond that is another wall with more gun towers.

Crash. The ban go up. I push the
gate open and carry my shoes onto the tier. Cons are going by. Of the thirty
men on this tier, at least half are doing life sentences or have been deemed
habitual criminals. All five tiers have the same ratio. Joe Morgan, a name that
California convicts should recognize from legend, likes to rib me that I'm the
only guy doing a second-degree burglary who is "behind the screen."

Indio goes by with a barely
perceptible limp, a quick smile of greeting and a pat on the arm. He spent
several years on Death Row for killing a freeman in San Quentin who harassed
him. He was already serving a term stretching to infinity and he wished, and
still wishes, to be left alone. He leaves others alone.

A tall Muslim goes past with a
permanently stern countenance. His partner waits for him at the end of the
tier. Like all black Muslims, he is quiet and reserved, dresses neatly and
follows a moral code John Calvin would approve. He, too, was on the row, but I
do not know his crime and it would be an intrusion to ask.

Jerry O'Brien is struggling from
his cell under the burden of half a dozen paintings for the spring art show. He
paints twelve hours a day and is rapidly becoming good. It is a running joke
that he is destined to become "The Painter of Folsom," like "The
Birdman of Alcatraz," by the time he finishes his sentence. He killed a
Torrance police officer in a robbery shootout (he was shot down years earlier
while unarmed and on his hands and knees) and became the object of a vast
manhunt. Captured in Utah and returned to Los Angeles, he was sentenced to die.
On a penalty retrial, he represented himself and won a life sentence: no small
feat for a layman. Yet his agony has just begun. Twenty-five or thirty years in
prison is to execution like cancer to a heart attack, although a young man
could serve twenty-five years and have a good life thereafter. Tall and gaunt,
Jerry seems always in a hurry, which is unusual for Folsom, where everything is
very slow. He hasn't slipped into the zombie-like trance necessary to carry
such a load of time. Occasionally his eyes glaze as viscerally he realizes that
Folsom is his universe, and the earliest parole he can hope for is decades
hence. Even that cannot be expected.

Two young guards at tier's end
are covered by a rifleman on the catwalk ten feet away beyond the two fences.
All three are drowsy. The midnight to 8 a.m. shift is exhausting in its
dullness. The guards sit screening mad and listening to sdence broken by
clunking steam pipes.

The mess hall is a separate
budding older than the cell house. It is joined to the latter by a solid steel
door, so there is no need to go outside in order to eat. The arrangement of
buddings is not for convict convenience, but because of the fog that sometimes
blankets everything.

In the Michelin guide to
California prisons, Folsom's food gets three and a half stars, although the
quality has gone down in recent years since Pig Ryan retired. He thought the
best way to keep convicts peaceful was to fatten them up. A man with a full
belly is usually peaceful. San Quentin has the worst food in the prison system,
but nothing compares in gastronomic horror with the Los Angeles Central Jad,
where it is literally impossible to eat for days at a time. I lost forty pounds
there between April and September. The curious aspect is that the Sheriff's
Department spends a lot of money on jail food.

Convicts in Folsom eat quietly
in a relaxed atmosphere. The tables are four-man setups bolted to the floor and
with stools attached to them. Tables must be used in order, but not filled up.
Most men have regular eating partners. I usually ate with two friends, but one
was in the hospital and the other had gotten off maximum custody and changed
cell houses. It left a gap. The convict world is so intimate, so totally
without privacy, that in the beginning one aches to be alone. Time erodes that
need until at last the opposite attitude dominates, so one doesn't like to be
alone.

That morning I ate quietly,
anxious to get to the yard. The route out is through the cell house with its
perpetually gray light — another thing to which one becomes accustomed. Cells
on the bottom tier are the same as all the others, and yet men there have
different personalities. Men will build the semblance of a world wherever they
are and whatever the conditions. In Folsom there were no rigid rules about cell
decoration. Elsewhere, especially in the newer prisons, every cell was
identical and had no decorations. But in Folsom it was said: "whatever you
get to the cell is yours, including the Warden's carpet." It was an
exaggeration tinctured with truth. Here's a cell stacked high with boxes of
Colgate toothpaste, tubes of shaving cream, cans of pipe tobacco, boxes of
candy bars, donuts and cigars — a whole canteen neatly on display. Sadly, all
the containers are empty, a kind of pop art. Here's another cell so immaculate
that the man takes off his shoes before he enters and doesn't sit on the bunk
until time to go to bed.

Another cell has dolls and a
pink qudt bedspread. Some are as bare and unkempt as a furnished room. One has
photos of Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Huey Newton.

I turned through a short, wide
tunnel, following men through an open gate into the yard. Beside the gate is a
granite gatehouse, a checkpoint with coffee pot. Guards are lounging around.
They have recendy been issued nightsticks, although Orwellian nomenclature now
calls them "batons." (A club by any other name hurts just the same.)
Resurrection of the practice of guards carrying weapons (the lead-tipped canes
went to the museum in 1940) came after guards were killed in various prisons,
although not yet in Folsom. San Quentin had a serious riot a year earlier, and
racial wars had erupted in Tracy, Soledad and San Quentin.

In the bright morning light, I
stop and look around. I don't want to stumble upon one of my few enemies. He
might think it was a sneak attack and retaliate. The yard is mainly a square,
though part of it wraps around #1 budding to a handball court, weightlifting
area, two outdoor television sets and a marble ring. Marbles are gambled on
like pool.

The square is somewhat larger
than
a
medium-sized
Softball
field, an easy comparison
because a softball diamond takes up 80 percent of the space. Foul balls off the
left field line crash into the domino tables and the pitted asphalt basketball
court in front of #1 budding. Out in deep field sits #16 tower, overlooking the
yard and a fence with a gate outside the custody office. In #16 sits a guard
called Tuesday Slim, and legend or myth says he is a champion marksman who can
hit a sucker's heel at 150 yards. An additional four gun towers overlook the
yard from various positions. They are not to guard the prison's perimeter; they
are to keep order within the walls. None has a shot longer than fifty yards.

Most convicts are already at
work, up the hill at the license plate factory, or down the hill the other way,
but a couple of hundred numbered men still remain on the yard. Some pace back
and forth along the left field line of the softball field. Other individuals,
or groups, lounge against the adjustment center wall to bask in the warmth of
the morning sun. The motorcycle clique is together.

Most blacks are around the
basketball court and #1 building wall, more insular than they once were as
racial troubles from other prisons and the streets creep into Folsom. But there
is less tension here than in prisons for younger convicts. Too many men in
Folsom have known each other since childhood. Motor (short for Motormouth)
Buford is on his back in the middle of the basketball court, stamping his heels
into the asphalt as he rolls from side to side, babbling and laughing too frantically
for anyone to understand more than a fraction of what he's saying - but he
makes them smile nonetheless. He has no enemies and many friends. He picked up
a life sentence for killing Sheik Thompson, the most hated and most
unbelievable man I've ever known. Sheik was some kind of throwback. If ever the
term "animal" fit a human being, it had to be Sheik. When I first
went to San Quentin, Sheik worked outside the walls at the rock quarry, making
little ones from big ones. It was a mile from the walls, up a gentle grade —
but still a grade. He jogged under a wooden yoke. When that got too easy, he
put a 100-pound convict on his shoulders. He never weighed more than 170
pounds, yet on Labor Day, when San Quentin once held a track and field meet in
the morning and a boxing card in the afternoon, Sheik would run the 440, 880
and mile in the morning. After lunch he would fight for the middleweight, light
heavyweight and heavyweight tides. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but I
cannot recall his ever being stopped. Sheik had no ears. They had been chewed
off in a legendary fight. He and Albert Johnson, another black, had gotten into
a fight behind #1 building. Three gun towers began shooting at them (California
is the only prison system in America that shoots unarmed prisoners to break up
fistfights the way you would use a water hose to separate fighting dogs) with
30.30s and 30.06s. Many shots were fired. They were hit several times apiece
but kept fighting, kicking, biting, punching. Albert Johnson was hit in the
testicles. He bit off Sheik's ears and swallowed them. Later, when the public
address system asked for blood donors not one convict would give Sheik a drop.
Albert Johnson had plenty of donors.

The abiding hatred for Sheik was
not for his animal physical abilities; it was a response to his animal
attitude. Every word he spoke was a challenge radiant with rage. He was
homosexual and an informer and once put a prisoner on Death Row. The prisoner
got off without being executed, but ever after carried the nickname Death Row
Jefferson. At slight provocation Sheik would spit on another prisoner, a truly
awfid insult in a world where machismo reigns. When Motor and Slim finally
killed him, they were marched across the yard from the custody office to the adjustment
center just when all Folsom's convicts were lined up to go in for lockup and
count. Every one of them clapped and cheered. Motor got life, Slim was
sentenced to die, but Motor was seen in South Central in the '90s, and Slim was
not executed.