Straight Life (45 page)

Some people who run up a big debt aren't lucky enough to have a mother like that, so if they can't pay they get killed right out in front. And that's where the loaners come in. They loan cigarettes or cash money. You can't hide too many cigarettes but you can hide cash. There are people that have five or six hundred dollars stashed in their cells, and they lend it out.

The little drugs, that's cigarettes; heroin you get with cash unless you have access to an outfit. You can get a taste for carrying an outfit from one block to another. But if somebody wants to buy some stuff he'll go to a money loaner. If the loaner gives him twenty dollars he has to give back thirty. The big moneylender has a guard running for him. The guard takes the money out and mails it to the guy's family or to whoever he's getting the dope from, or he drops it someplace. There's a million different ways you can get money in and out. But people who don't have anybody on the outside are in trouble if they get in debt to the loan sharks and can't pay because then they have to face the collector.

The loan shark can't do anything violent because he has too much money stashed away. He can't afford to be suspected so he has a collector, a guy that's real tough and hasn't any fear. The loan shark tells him, "So-and-so owes me so much." If the collector collects it, he gets a certain percentage. So he goes to the borrower, puts a shank on him, and tells him he's dead unless he gets the cash or the cigarettes within a certain amount of time. If he doesn't get the money, the collector has to stab him. He has to kill him if it's a big enough debt-to preserve his reputation. In order to make people fear him, the collector has to do a certain number of stabbings.

And then there's ordinary borrowing. Say somebody borrows three packs of cigarettes from you, which is nothing, and he doesn't pay you back. Well, you have to go to the guy and make him pay because if you don't, word gets around that you didn't collect and then everybody burns you. Everybody runs all over you unless you show that you're strong. People have been killed for one or two packs of cigarettes because the person that did the lending had to collect for the sake of his reputation. During all the time I was in San Quentin I rarely borrowed or loaned cigarettes and then only with people I knew real well. I never played even one game of dominoes.

As I said, nearly everyone was in some kind of group. The whites and the Mexicans were all broken up into little splinter groups. A Mexican might have a cousin that lives a couple of blocks away; maybe one guy lives in Monte Via and the cousin lives in White Fence. These guys will be in separate groups that fight each other, plus all the other Mexican groups, plus all the white groups, plus all the blacks. The whites were the same: you had the white armed robber clique, you had the white dopefiend-armed robber clique.

. There's one white group. that does stick together. It's the Nazi party. It's a very small group. They spend their time plotting what black guy is the most obnoxious, the ugliest, or the most popular, or the one that they might fear the most, and then they start a small but severe campaign. You couldn't reach a person's bed through the bars with your arms, so they might get a stick with a wire on the end of it and put it underneath their coats, and they'd use that device to put notes on the guy's bunk. They'd do this for a long time. They'd drop off a piece of paper with a little drawing showing a black guy laying on the floor with a knife sticking out of him, and they'd draw red blood on it and put Nazi marks all over the paper. They'd say, "We are watching. You will die at such-and-such a time." They'd make up little poems. They'd keep this up until the guy was really panicked, and then they'd stab him and throw him off the fifth tier. And then they'd start on another one. This is the kind of place you were living in.

You had to hand it to the blacks and the Indians. The Indians stuck together completely. All they did was play basketball. Every minute. They wouldn't hold any jobs. They wouldn't go along with any program. No matter what kind of weather it was, if they weren't playing basketball they were huddled together in some corner of the basketball court.

The blacks had total solidarity. That's where they get their power. It's the same way they get their power on the streets now and the reason they're so strong. They talk about "my people" and all this nonsense, which to me is utter nonsense because they don't feel it; they don't believe it, most of them, but at least they do it; and it makes a weak position a strong position and a smallness in numbers turns to their advantage. In the daytime they go down into the yard and gather and do calisthenics, training for the war to overthrow the white race. They line up and do these outrageous things, chant and make strange African noises: "Kill them all! Kill the whites! Cut them to ribbons! Destroy their women!" And everybody stands around and hates them, wants to kill them. They're generating fear. They're going through these strenuous wartime calisthenics openly in the yard. They do it in the morning and in the afternoon. For a while they'd gather by the laundry. There was a big laundry with corrugated tin walls. They'd stand against this and face the rising sun and the preacher would run them through these little routines; to me, and I was watching, I felt that it was all geared to make the rest of us fear them. And it worked. The guards would be on their walkways and they'd get orders from the captain to shake the Muslims up a little, so they'd shoot over their heads with their rifles and hit the laundry walls. Now and then they'd hit one of them in the shoulder or the leg, and that would break them up for a while. They'd have to change their position.

Most people had to go through a shakedown. But if the blacks were shook down they'd holler, "Prejudice!" And they wouldn't have to submit. They didn't have to scrub floors or do anything they didn't feel was dignified, and there's hardly anything that's dignified if you're a prisoner. Anything that had to do with cleaning, anything that had to do with laundry, anything that had to do with sweeping, mopping. So the whites and the Mexicans did all the cleaning and scrubbing.

The younger blacks coming up have a lot of nerve. They're getting to the point where they're so intent upon being strong that, just like they do in sports and like they do in music, they spend every second trying to be strong and fearless. It has become an obsession now with them. They will give their lives to show that they're not cowards as they were always thought to be in the past.

There's lots of black people in prison that don't want any violence. They don't want to have anything to do with all these hate groups. They don't want it but they have to be a part of it at least outwardly; they have to make those noises because if they don't they'll be set upon by their group. The musicians would have to act the part even though they didn't feel it. I'm talking about some of the black musicians. And because they were a little smarter than the run of the mill black in the joint, they in some cases developed into leaders.

There was this one guy I'd know in Detroit; he was a drummer. I'd been to his house, we'd copped together, we'd been friends. After about a year in San Quentin I ran into him. He was a warm guy, but he'd had occasion to have a couple of fights and he had a scar on his face that made him look mean. And he was smart. He'd studied the Muslim religion and learned all the little sayings, and he became a preacher. I asked him, "Where have you been?" While we talked he kept looking around because he didn't want the blacks to see him talking to me. They're not supposed to have any communication with whites unless they have to, to gain some other end. And they can't shake hands. They can't touch them. He said he'd been in the adjustment center. And he said he had something going. He said, "I know it's hard in here. We're friends, and I'm in a position where I can help you. When you see me, don't talk to me unless I nod that it's okay." I didn't know what was happening at the time, but later he told me he was a preacher and the blacks were continually giving him things, goodies, although the guards would continually harass him.

So I saw this guy one day and he motioned to me; he was alone. He said, "I'll meet you here later." He named a time. I was there, and he appeared with a big sack behind his back. He looked around and set the sack down. He talked off, away from me, and he said, "Well, I've really got it made right now if I can stay out of the adjustment center." He said, "Whenever any stuff comes in, I get it, and I'll lay it on you. But we got to be really careful because if the blacks ever saw me messing with you it would be all over for me. I'm going to leave now. Pick up this bag." In the bag there's cigarettes and coffee and a new razor and razor blades and perfume and aftershave that cost a lot of money, that the blacks gave him. He just laid this stuff on me, and this happened several times.

In the county jail there wasn't any TV, and in San Quentin in the South Block and the East Block there was nothing like that, but in the North Block they had a TV and we used to watch movies and all the sporting events. When we watched the boxing if there were two black boxers, it wasn't so bad, but if there was a Mexican and a black or, God forbid, a white and a black, it was just unbelievable the hatred that came out.

The Mexicans are quiet people. They're clannish, they're secretive, and they don't believe in infringing on other people's rights or annoying them. You can sit in a room full of Mexicans watching a thing like that and nothing will be said. So everything would have been fine but the blacks would get together in a group to aggravate everybody else.

See, the whites and the Mexicans, they sit wherever there's a seat, but the black guys all sit together. So, if you're sitting on a bench with a couple of blacks and there's no room for another person, well, some black guy will just come up and, "Heeey, baby! Saaay, home boy!" There's not enough room for him to sit but this guy sitting next to you says to the new guy, "Heeey, baby! Come on up here, blood!" And they'll just sit right on you. Either you can stay there and have them pushing you off the bench, being so loud and obnoxious that you can't enjoy anything, or you can fight with them and try to kill them, or else you can move. And that's what the white guy does or the Mexican. He moves. All you want to do is enjoy what you came to see, the TV. These blacks don't come to see TV: they come to get together. Any black guy will tell you that if he's honest. They come to annoy everybody else. Everyone in prison is consumed with resentment and hatred, and I guess the most convenient target for your anger is some other race of people. Maybe that's what these blacks were doing, assaulting us with noise, disrupting everything. You have to move. And then they look around, like, "Hey, boy, what's wrong?" There's nothing you can do, and they know that.

The fight starts on TV, and they start yelling: "Hey, brothah! Look at that brothah up theah! Git that white boy!" Whatever the white guy is, he's no good. The black guy is the greatest. Baseball, the same thing. They don't care about teams. All they care about is the black brothers and "blood" and all this, man. They've got their reasons, but why do they have to take their hate out on us, whites and Mexicans who have been discriminated against, raised just as badly or worse than they were? We're suffering just as much. We've been sentenced to prison. We're away from our loved ones.

As I said, the nonblacks are quieter about their anger, but after a while they can't stand it so they start in, too, raving, "Get that jigaboo! Kill that black punk!" And the Mexicans and whites join together because Mexicans in prison hate the blacks regardless of what they try to do with black power and brown power. They scream and rage in Spanish, and so much hatred gets going that the tension becomes unbearable and you can't enjoy any sporting event-football, basketball. The movies are even worse, with the blacks talking loud, making obscene remarks about the white women on the screen. It might be a beautiful love story but, "Boy, I'd sure like to have some of that! I bet she'd like to suck on this big, black cock of mine! After she had some of my big joy stick she wouldn't want any white man ever!"

Of course there are black guys that haven't succumbed to this thing. The blacks that were friends of mine, they'd look over at me when this happened and shake their heads: "What can you do?" A lot of times you'd see them just walk away and lock up in their cells because they couldn't stand to see this. But when the black guy gets up to leave, the others will say, "Saaay, where you goin', jack?" So a lot of them, in order to survive in prison, have to placate these maniacs, hang out with them, laugh, and, "Yeah, baby!"

You've worked to get into an honor block so you can do the time a little better, and now you get to watch TV, and there's something you want to see, but you cannot watch it. They will not let you watch it. So you lock up in your cell and you're thinking, "I wish I could kill all those people! I wish I could drop a bomb in the midst of them!" Your guts are churning; it aches. No wonder you get ulcers. And you can hear them in your cell, no matter where it is, fourth tier, fifth tier, you can't shut them out.

When I think of prison now the worst part used to be not having sex, being locked away from the good things, just not being free. But now, when I think about it, the thing that hits me first and is the most horrible part of it is to be locked up in an area where you have to listen to that hatred and that holler- ing-"Git that white boy!" "Kill that nigger!"-over and over and over, and you can't get away from it. I couldn't go to jail again. I just couldn't. I think I would have to kill myself rather than go through that again.

(Ann Christos) Art saved my honor. When Art was in San Quentin, some black dude came by the beach house, and he ended up in San Quentin. All of a sudden I get a letter from him asking me to write to him, and I was very naive. Art used to tell me, "You're like an open window." I said, "Sure, what's a letter?" Then Art wrote to me saying that this guy was going around saying that I was his "white ho." But Art said, "I straightened him out." And I never got another letter. Art knew me and he knew that this guy was just flashin'. Nobody had ever went to any lengths to protect my honor before, and it meant a lot to me.