Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (22 page)

She wrote me, not every week, nor even every month,
and when she wrote it was liable to be several partial letters she had started
but not finished. She jammed them in an envelope and sent them together. She
wrote well, and her wisdom affected me. We could lose our misery by concern for
someone else. She wrote me from on board the
Queen
Mary,
and from San Tropez, describing the unique blue of the
Mediterranean. By now I felt a strong filial bond with Louise. She told me that
I was destined for a wonderful life, and she would do everything to help me
help myself. I had no idea what I wanted except I had both a rage to experience
life and a pervasive craving for knowledge. Faust's deal would have tempted me:
give me knowledge and take my soul, for knowledge was God anyway. On one
occasion I avoided stabbing someone who deserved it because I had dreams for
the outside that she had given me.

One night in '53, the spring broke the same way it had
in the holding cell. Again I put the mattress on the floor. As San Quentin's
cells are only four and a half feet wide and eleven feet long, the mattress up
against the cell gate certainly left me visible to passing guards. In fact my
pillow was resting against the bars. I was wearing my earphones, listening to a
soft music program sponsored by American Airlines. It blotted out the coughs
and curses and flushing toilets, the rude noise of a dark cell house.

The next thing I knew, a "bull" as all
guards were called, was shaking me through the bars. Flashlights were playing
on me. Two guards were on the tier, one with a clipboard, which meant they were
checking cell by cell, that they had counted, recounted and were now looking
for where the body was missing.

They were angry, accusing me of obstructing the count.
I tried to show them the broken bed. It made no impression. I finally told them
I didn't want to hear "Socratic dialogues or the orations of Cicero."

They departed and I went back to sleep.

In the morning, fastened within the clothespin
attached to the bars for such things, was a pass typed in red:
Disciplinary Court, 8.00 a.m.
After breakfast, I
reported to the custody office where a few others were awaiting disciplinary
court. Usually it was the Captain or the Associate Warden, but this morning it
was the second watch lieutenant, A.J. Campbell, who had the blotchy red face
and the blue nose of an alcoholic. He was known both for his vitriolic temper
and his fear of convicts. He had never been seen on the yard. He was in a real
bad mood this morning. I was charged with messing up the count and using
profanity to the officer who tried to counsel me. I pleaded not guilty,
explained about the bed spring and repeated my statement about Socrates and
Cicero. I was surprised that I'd been written up. At the very worst, I thought
I might get thirty days' loss of privileges. Instead, Campbell said he was
referring the matter to the full disciplinary committee and putting me in
isolation.

Isolation! The shelf. Indignation welled up, and when
he looked up and sneered and said something about Cicero, indignation
overwhelmed my good sense. I grabbed the edge of the desk and lifted. It began
to tilt, drawers ran out onto the floor. He began to yell for help. One more
heave and over it went. Campbell managed to slide back and jump up, but he was
screaming in fear. "Help! Help!"

The escort guard leaped on my back with a choke hold.
Other guards came from everywhere. Oh God! What had I done?

The journey to isolation was across the Big Yard,
through steel doors across the North Cell House rotunda, through another gate
of heavy mesh and a steel door into another rotunda. To the right was the green
steel door to the overnight condemned cells, where those being executed in the
morning were taken the night before. To the left was the elevator to isolation
and Death Row.

I expected the elevator to stop between floors for an
ass-kicking. It was standard procedure following an assault on a guard. None
was forthcoming. The three guards with me thought what
I'd
done
was funny.

When the elevator stopped, we stepped onto a landing
outside another mesh gate and a steel door. The mesh gate could only be
unlocked from the outside, the steel door from the inside.
A
face appeared at an observation window, followed by
the door opening. "Ah, Bunker, you haven't been here in a few
months," said Officer Zekonis, nicknamed "Dipper Shaker" from
the way he leveled the ladle when passing out food.

The escort guards waited while I danced through the
routine of stripping naked for a search. We were in the front service area.
Through a set of bars covered with wire, I could look down Death Row. Some of
the doomed men, fat from too much food, pale from too little sun, were outside
their cells. I recognized two of them, Caryl Chessman and Bob Wells. Neither
was sentenced to die for murder, although Bob Wells had killed a man in a
prison knife fight. He was a prison legend long before I went to juvenile hall.
The San Francisco
Chronicle
had run a feature
article saying he was the toughest man in San Quentin. He was to die for
slugging a guard with a spittoon and knocking out his eye. He was sentenced
under Section 4500, California Penal Code. The jury had had no idea that once
they found him guilty of the assault, the death sentence was mandatory. Bob had
been on Death Row for several years. Walter Winchell had come to his aid
"coast to coast and
all
the ships at sea ..."

Chessman I knew vaguely from my previous sojourn in
isolation.

They were pacing the range outside the cells. As they
got close to the front, Chessman recognized me and stopped. "Hey, Bunker,
they got you again."

"Looks like it."

"Yeah," Zekonis
chimed. "He turned Campbell's desk over on him."

Bob Wells: "Say what? A.J.
Campbell!" He burst into laughter and showed a gap where several teeth
were missing, broken off it the gum with a club.

Chessman: "That was a
baadd
idea."

"I wasn't thinking very
clearly."

"I guess not."

"Knock it off,
Bunker," admonished an escort. He said nothing to the men behind the mesh
screen and bars. What could he say to men awaiting a trip to the gas chamber?

Wearing white undershorts, I
was escorted down the other tier, passing cells where men looked out, a couple
of them nodding at me as I went by. Lined up on the floor next to the outer
wall of bars were the folded mattresses. They were taken away at 8 a.m. and
returned at 8 p.m. A year or two before I arrived, Warden Clinton Duffy had
stopped the practice of making prisoners in isolation stand on "the
spot," an eighteen-inch circle painted red, from 8 in the morning to the afternoon
count. Talk was forbidden then; and still is now.

Zekonis stopped at an empty
cell and turned the key; then signaled the bull up front to pull the security
bar. After I dragged the mattress onto the tier, the gate closed and the
security bar dropped. Here I was again. Damn!

I expected the disciplinary
committee, usually chaired by the Captain or Associate Warden, to give me
twenty-nine days in isolation (all that was allowed) and assign me to
segregation for six months or so. Captain Nelson and Associate Warden Walter
Dunbar were in Sacramento for the day; the Business Manager chaired the
committee. They gave me ten days, which would pin me back on the yard the
following Monday. I anticipated that release very much as I would anticipate a
release to society, except I had no idea when that would be.

All we were allowed in
isolation was a comb, toothbrush and a Gideon bible, which I studied whenever I
was in the hole, not in search of God, but for the secular wisdom within its
pages, such as, "Speaketh not to fools, for they despise knowledge."
And, "It
is better to live in
one small corner of the attic than in a wide house with a brawling woman."

Thursday morning, Captain Nelson and Associate Warden
Dunbar came along the tier. They were commuting isolation sentences. That
afternoon, everyone was released except a black convict who'd been caught with
a shiv — and me. I asked Zekonis what was going on. He explained: "Santo,
Perkins and Barbara Graham are going to be executed tomorrow. They want Barbara
downstairs in one of the overnight cells. Santo and Perkins are coming over
here ... up front."

California law required that those about to die by
cyanide gas had to be moved away from the other condemned prisoners the night
before the execution. Downstairs were two overnight condemned cells, side by
side. The so-called "last mile" was more like five steps. Next to the
first cell was a steel door painted San Quentin's ubiquitous green. Three feet
beyond was the door into the octagon-shaped gas chamber, also green. Barbara
Graham, the junkie whore sentenced with Santo and Perkins, had been transferred
from California's only women's prison eight or nine months earlier. She'd been
held in the prison hospital those nine months, teasing convicts through a
window strip. At count time, when the prison was locked down, she was moved to
one of the cells downstairs.

From up front, I could hear Santo and Perkins being
moved into the first two cells; the security bar went up, the resonance of
steel on steel as the tier gate opened and shut, the loud
click-CLACK
as the big key turned the cell lock.
Voices, a scattered word or phrase: ". . . open telephone ... all night .
. . attorney governor ..."

The security bar dropped, the outer gate clanged shut
and the voices were more distant. I could faintly hear the elevator, and I was
pretty sure no guards would hear me.

"Hey, Santo! Jack Santo," I called.
"Emmett Perkins."

"Yeah. Who's that?"

"A convict who thinks you motherfuckers are dog
shit!"

"Fuck you, asshole!" one yelled, and the
other added, "Fuckin' punk."

"Tell me that tomorrow afternoon ... ha, ha, ha
..." I really despised them. In addition to the murder of an old woman in
Burbank, who supposedly had a stash of cash from a bookmaker son, for which all
three were sentenced to die, Santo and Perkins had murdered a small town grocer
and his five children, stuffing the bodies in the trunk. The grocer had been
carrying his money from Nevada City to Stockton or Sacramento. The slaughter of
innocent children made me sick. I knew armed robbers who killed when someone
reached for a gun or tried to jump them, and although society would judge them,
I would not. It was life's first law, to survive. They paid their money and
took their chances. This was a slaughter of the innocent - for perhaps $2,000.
Jesus. "
You Motherfuckers deserve to die!"
I yelled, and within seconds heard keys jangling and the squeak of crepe soles
on the polished concrete. I was supine on the floor with the Gideon bible when
the guard on the gun walk looked in and kept going. He must have thought The
bellow came from Santo or Perkins up front. They had more to scream about than
me. The other guy, he with the stabbing, was in one of the last three cells;
they had soundproof doors about three feet in front of the cell bars. For some
reason they left me about ten or twelve cells from the front.

The gun bull came back and went around the rear. He
also covered Death Row.

"Hey, convict!" Jack Santo called in a
softer voice.

It had to be for me. "Yeah," I said.
"Whaddya want?"

"You're a convict, huh."

"I'm not an inmate, that's for goddamn
sure."

"Then why don't you do your own time?"

I
looked out and saw the gun bull in front of my cell. I dared not answer.
Talking would get me another five days. As if to emphasize my danger, the gun
bull nodded knowingly and shook an admonishing finger. Fuck Jack Santo. Telling
him what I thought wasn't worth five more days in isolation. I did, however,
think
about his admonishment to do my own time. It
was the number one rule for a convict doing time. It meant what it said: mind
your own business, worry about your own crime, your own time, your own
punishment. See nothing; hear nothing and, above all, say nothing. If Christ
could not find one to throw a stone in a crowd of average citizens, where in a
universe of criminals could one be found? Let them die by themselves. Still,
they gave thieves a bad name.

A dinging bell announced the elevator, and a moment
later there was the rattle of the food cart. Even with just two of us, Zekonis
shook the dipper level and laughed when I shook my head. Other guards scooped
up all the dipper would hold and dumped it on the paper plate. What the hell
did they care how much spaghetti a convict got? I knew better than to complain.

When Zekonis handed me the plate, he said,
"Chessman says hello."

"Thanks, Zeke." I'd learned that it was
better to have even a mangy old dog for a friend than an enemy, a piece of
convict proverb with efficacy.

I saved a cup of spaghetti and a slice of bread. It
tasted better cold and late at night. On the yard, I ate meagerly, but up here
with nothing else to do and meals the mark of passing time, I was hungry most
of the time.