The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (27 page)

When Bucklew’s weight reached 190 pounds, he was able to force himself through the hole behind his toilet. He struck a match and discovered the chamber was five feet wide, six stories high, and filled with pipes and wires. Bucklew had worked at his father’s television repair shop as a youngster and had spent summers installing antennas. He was used to climbing and he soon found a pipe that was big enough for him to shinny up. It was a difficult climb, but when he reached the top and managed to strike another match, he found the ceiling covered by a row of bars to prevent anyone from cutting through to the roof. He climbed down, slipped back through the hole into his cell, and sealed the entry to his secret passage with marshmallow goo.

The next day, Bucklew traded marijuana for six pieces of a hacksaw blade. That night he squeezed into the chamber again, climbed the pipe, and, hand-overhand like a child dangling from monkey bars, made his way across the bars on the ceiling until he was hanging directly under an air vent that led out onto the roof. Bucklew tried to use one of the hacksaw blades to cut the ceiling bars, but it was impossible for him to cut with one hand while holding onto a bar with his other. If he lost his grip, he would fall seventy feet. Disappointed, he returned to his cell.

All the next day, Bucklew puzzled over how he could support himself under the air vent long enough to saw through the ceiling bars. By late afternoon, he had a solution. He stole a steel roller from a law library typewriter and took an inch-wide strong canvas belt from a wire gurney that was hanging in his cellblock. He sewed two loops on the end of the belt, tucked the roller in his
pants, and crawled through the opening in his cell wall. This time when Bucklew reached the air vent in the ceiling, he flipped the canvas belt over several bars and slipped the steel roller through the loops. The contraption looked like a trapeze. He put one leg through and shifted his weight on the roller. It held. Now, he could cut through the ceiling bars.

Bucklew decided to only cut for thirty minutes each night in case guards happened by his cell during a surprise check. Each morning he marked his progress on a calendar in his cell. “I kept a running total on the calendar in plain sight. I knew the guards wouldn’t figure it out.”

Bucklew calculated that it would take him one week to cut through the bars, but when he finished, he discovered there was another row of bars inside the air vent itself that he would have to cut, and these were much thicker than the first row. There was another problem. Even after he cut the bars, Bucklew was going to be too big to get through the air vent. He would have to lose even more weight. For more than a month, Bucklew had only been eating sardines, crackers, and half an orange. Now, he cut his diet to the half orange and four crackers per day.

Bucklew figured he could cut through the second set of bars by August 10, 1976, a good night for an escape because there was no moon. By August 8, he had sawed through one bar and halfway through the next. He was right on schedule. All he needed was two more days, but on August 9, Hurricane Belle hit Trenton, knocking out the spotlights in the prison yard. Bucklew decided to take advantage of the hurricane and leave early. He put a papier-mâché face partway under the covers on his bunk, bunched them up to simulate a body beneath them, and then slid the toilet out of the way. Just as he was about to crawl out of his cell, Bucklew stopped, went over to the calendar on his wall, and wrote “Goodbye!”

He slipped into the chamber, climbed the pipe,
made his way to the air vent, and began sawing the final bar. Rain pelted against the vent, and wind made its louvers chatter like hands clapping. Bucklew cut for several minutes and then began pushing against the bar trying to break it, but it refused to budge. He sawed some more and was able to bend the bar this time, but it still wouldn’t crack. He tried to push himself through the opening, but he was too big. He began pulling down on the bar with all his weight and strength and it broke suddenly, causing Bucklew to fall. Luckily, his leg caught the canvas belt on his trapeze, leaving him hanging upside down like a circus performer. Bucklew swung himself upright and began crawling into the air vent. His head passed through without difficulty, but his shoulders and chest were too big for the opening. “I had to go,” he recalled. “It was too late to turn back.” With a great push, he forced his chest through the vent, scraping the skin, and within minutes he was on the slate roof in the rain. As he started across, he slipped on the slate and almost slid off. He removed his shoes for better traction and proceeded slowly to the edge, where he used his typewriter ribbon rope, woven of thirty-eight ribbons each fifty feet long, to lower himself to the prison yard.

Bucklew assumed correctly that the guards had organized foot patrols to compensate for the blacked-out spotlight. He slipped a shank from his pants. “I would have killed anyone who tried to stop me,” he said, “and I’m certain they would have killed me just as quickly.”

Bucklew raced across the yard to the “Death House,” so called because it was where convicts were executed. It was a one-story structure built close to the stone wall that circled the prison. Once he climbed onto the Death House roof, there would only be a seven-foot wall between him and freedom. But there was still an obstacle in his way. A guard tower loomed directly over the Death House, and when Bucklew reached the top of the prison wall, he would be on the same eye level as the guard inside the tower. The guard would have to be
blind not to see him. “I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of killing this guy first,” Bucklew said. “I figured this guy was trained to reach for his shotgun, and if he did that, he’d be mine because I could crash into the tower and grab the gun as he was swinging it around. But if this hack was smart enough to pull out his pistol, he’d kill me first.”

As Bucklew climbed onto the Death House roof and started up the outer wall, he suddenly realized that it was raining so hard that he couldn’t see the tower guard. He couldn’t even tell if a guard was in the tower. “I snapped. If I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me.”

Bucklew jumped down from the wall and ran as fast as he could across the wet grass outside the penitentiary. It was several hours before anyone knew he had escaped, and he wasn’t recaptured for a full year.

“I swear to Christ, I have never felt like I did when I hit that ground,” Bucklew said, as he added a few more onions to his spaghetti sauce in the officers’ mess. “Give me a motorcycle and I will go as fast as it can possibly go. I’ve flown airplanes that way too. I like the feeling and sensation of speed. I like the feeling of making it with a woman who is right on that same point with you, so you come together. And there is no feeling like having a big pile of money, or listening to a hard rock band after doing two or three tabs of good acid.

“But none of those feelings or even all of them combined can touch the feeling of real live freedom. It’s something you only understand when they have taken it and suddenly you reclaim it. I felt like I suddenly got my whole life back.”

Bucklew’s escape was so ingenious that even the prison officials in Trenton whom he embarrassed paid him a certain amount of grudging respect. They also wondered what Bucklew could have accomplished had he chosen to be law-abiding. The judge who sentenced him had made a similar observation in Bucklew’s record. Bucklew appeared to be a natural leader, the judge
wrote, yet he had chosen to squander his abilities. Bucklew didn’t see it that way.

“I don’t respect the law,” he explained, “because laws are for people who are weak and need them. If someone comes into my house and takes something, I’m not going to call a cop, I’m going to deal with it, and if I’m not man enough to get it back, then that guy has a right to take whatever he wants because I don’t really deserve to own it. That’s how society should be. If justice needs to be applied, I will apply it, and the reason that I have a right to apply it is because I have the power to do it. Having the power gives me permission.”

Bucklew paused and then said, “When I was little, I was taught to question authority, and I always have. I’m not about to accept what you tell me unless I want to. When you’re a kid, everyone thinks that’s great, but when you grow up, you are supposed to become a sheep and follow blindly. Now if a psychologist was sitting here, he’d tell you I’m immature and my development isn’t right. He’d say I had grasped something as a child and never risen above it. Well, excuse me, but as a child I was taught not to be a stool pigeon. Don’t tattletale on other kids. I was taught if someone hits you, you hit them back, and if they even think about hitting you again, you make them never want to see you again. That is what John Wayne always did and everyone in the country thought John Wayne was right. So you tell me—what changed? Who switched the rules? When did these things I was taught as a kid suddenly become the wrong thing to do? I might die in prison, but I’m not going to become an upstanding member of your society, because in order to do that I would have to become a stool pigeon and always run to the cops, a coward afraid to settle my own problems without hiring a lawyer, and a shitbag who blindly follows every goofy guy who gets elected to the White House.”

Six other inmates joined Bucklew at this Sunday spaghetti dinner. The conversation centered on guards
and how much they hated them. As I listened, I realized that it was not much different from the conversations that I had heard among guards at Benny’s, only the guards had talked about how loathsome the convicts were.

“You gotta understand most of these hacks were the guys in high school who everyone picked on—you know, the buttheads who got a jock put on their head in gym class,” one inmate explained. “That’s why they’re hacks, because they are still trying to prove their manhood, and they think by coming in here and acting tough they are real men. Most would shit if you got in their face.”

Someone mentioned that Carl Bowles had been fired as the hospital gardener and, just as quickly, an inmate made a crack about “Mrs. Bowles,” but no one laughed and the room was quiet for several seconds. It wasn’t smart to talk about another convict behind his back, especially Bowles.

By three o’clock, everyone except Bucklew had gone into the auditorium to watch a rock concert taped the night before off MTV.

“When I was little, maybe four or five,” Bucklew said as he cleaned the tables, “I would wait at the door for Pops to come home. I had my cowboy hat on, my boots on, and my gun on, and he’d come in and I’d give him a gun and this guy would say, ‘Draw!’ Now, obviously a twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-old man is going to beat this five-year-old kid to the draw, but what amazed me was that every day, every single day, when he beat me to the draw, he made me put my hands up and turn around and face the wall. Then he would shoot me in the back. Every single fucking day we’d do this, and one day, I reared up on him and I said, ‘What’s the sense of facing the wall? You are going to shoot me anyway.’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe today I won’t.’ So I turned around and he shot me in the back and he did that every day after that Never once did he not shoot me.

“I thought about it a long time,” Bucklew said, “and finally I decided there was a message there. When he came home from work, I shouldn’t have been waiting for him. I should have been hiding behind the door or behind the couch. I should have shot him as soon as he came in. Fuck giving him a gun and fuck giving him a chance. You see, I think Pops was trying to teach me something. In life, you can play by someone else’s rules or you can play by your own, and if you play by someone else’s rules you are going to get fucked every time because they were designed for them, not you. Yeah, that’s what old Pops was saying, and it may sound like a stupid point, but I think he was right.”

The sound of a woman’s voice singing about the love of Jesus Christ drifted through center hall early one Sunday morning. Lieutenant Michael Sandels decided to leave the operations desk in the lieutenant’s office and see how many inmates were attending the eight
A.M
. service in the prison chapel. He found about fifty convicts sitting in the wooden pews listening to the lead female vocalist for a Mexican evangelical band from Texas that was touring several prisons. Fifty was a big crowd for Sunday morning. The only religious services that attracted more were the followers of Islam and members of the Moorish Science Temple. They sometimes had as many as one hundred when they met during the week. Most guards didn’t consider the Moors, as they were known, a religious sect even though its members were officially recognized as such by the bureau. Nearly all the Moors at Leavenworth were members of the D.C. Blacks gang, and most officials saw the church as a front for gang activity despite protests from its members.

There were other denominations at the Hot House besides the Moors, the Muslims, and the Protestants inside the Chapel. A Roman Catholic mass had been held Saturday night. There were a handful of Jews, Rastafarians,
and Native Americans at Leavenworth too. Two chaplains, one a Protestant, the other a Muslim, were in charge of religious programs, but both had only been there a few months and hadn’t settled in yet.

While attendance on Sunday was usually small, there was a group of about ten men who met regularly for Bible school in the chapel’s back room. They addressed each other as “Brother” and spent an hour studying scripture under the tutelage of a Native American inmate from the Black Hills of South Dakota who had converted to Christianity. There was one black, another Native American, and six or seven white inmates in the group. These Christians were conspicuous because they were the only men of different races in Leavenworth who ate their meals together, always first bowing their heads in prayer.

Other inmates always segregated themselves in the huge dining room. Blacks ate at the tables along the south wall, dividing themselves according to whether they came from Washington, D.C., California, New York, or somewhere else. The Aryan Brotherhood and various neo-Nazi groups sat along the west wall, as far away as possible from the front doors, located on the east side of the dining room, where prison officials stood mainline. The north half of the room was for other whites and five tables in the far northeastern corner were for the prison’s outcasts. This is where the dozen or so Native Americans at Leavenworth sat, along with the blatant homosexuals, inmates who were mentally disturbed, and the Christian Brothers. No one paid much attention to the Christians at the Hot House and it was rare that one of them got into trouble. “I think our fellow prisoners leave us alone because we mind our own business,” said one. “Most men get into trouble because they smoke dope, get drunk, chase whores, or gamble. It’s like in the outside world. If you hang out in church, you’re a lot less likely to get mugged than if you are getting stoned at three
A.M
. in a biker bar in the red-light
district.” Then, he offered another comment. “Just because you are a Christian doesn’t mean you aren’t going to defend yourself or stick up for someone. There is lots of bloodshed in the Bible. Of course that is something most of us try to avoid.”