Cast the First Stone (29 page)

On top of which he sold all the tobacco and merchandise he took out of the games. None of the gamekeepers paid the winners in cash if they could help it; everyone wanted to hang on to his cash. So they would go to Tom and get as much merchandise as they needed and give him the cash to hold for them until they could redeem it with more merchandise, which few ever did. At one time Tom had so much tobacco and merchandise he had to store it in the lockbox where the porters usually kept their mops and buckets and soap and stuff. This was no shoe box, either. It was four feet wide and eight feet long and five feet deep, big enough to bury a half-dozen convicts in. Tom had it filled with Bull Durham tobacco, tooth paste, soap, and such. He lost half of the tobacco because that on the bottom got wet once, and molded.

The deputy warden got his, too. Every time a convict came to court, the deputy would plank some kind of subscription list in his face. The convict would sign for a dollar, or five, without even knowing what it was for, or without caring, for that matter. It was better to toss away a few dollars than go to the hole.

And we got ours, too. Blocker and Candy and Signifier and myself. But we’d chump it off like all the others. It was catching. There was so much no one thought of saving any of it—not until Captain Tom began draining the dormitory, anyway. One day Blocker and I did some calculating on Tom and we figured that he was taking about a hundred dollars weekly out of the dormitory.

Blocker went up for a hearing by the parole board that May and was granted a parole to take effect on the first of June. That was the quickest parole I’d ever heard of. He had looked for a flop because of his reformatory record. That was what first called my attention to the fact that a convict’s record didn’t mean a damn thing when he went before that board. The second-and third-timers made parole just as quick, if not actually quicker, than the first-timers. There must have been a reason for this, but I never discovered what it was.

I certainly hated to see Blocker go. I was glad, though. But I knew how much I was going to miss him. All down the line he had been solid with me, on the high spots and in the dumps, in trouble and smooth sailing. We had been flush together, broke together. He had always been on my side, right or wrong, and not once since I had first met him in September, almost four years ago, had a harsh word passed between us. In all that time we had never been separated. What had been his had been mine and what had been mine had been his. He had never given me a word of advice other than, “take it easy,” nor a word of censure; and the times he had made suggestions had been all for my own good. I certainly did hate to see him go.

We hadn’t expected him to make parole so we hadn’t saved for it. We had made good money but we had frittered it away. When the time came for him to leave we had about one hundred and twenty dollars in cash and I had thirty-five dollars to my credit in the front office. He had six dollars in earnings and the ten dollars they’d give him on leaving. That made a total of one hundred and seventy-one dollars. I told him to take it all and signed the thirty-five dollars over to him. He could use it better than me. He had a whole bag of such clothing as underwear, pajamas, bathrobes and shoes which we had taken in from our games.

“Well, kid, I certainly wish you were going out with me,” he said that morning before they called him.

“I wish so, myself,” I said.

“Is there anything you want me to do for you, kid?”

“Nope, I’m okay. Just keep out of trouble.”

“I’ll write to you,” he said, “and if I get lucky I’ll send you some dough.”

“You needn’t bother,” I said. “There’s plenty here.”

“I’ll write you, anyway, kid,” he said.

“I won’t look for it,” I said. “So if you don’t, I won’t be disappointed.”

They called him then. “Well, don’t shoot no blanks, kid,” he said.

“I’ll try not to.”

We shook hands.

“When you get out look me up around Akron or Detroit. Just ask someone where’s the biggest crap game and I’ll be there.”

“I will,” I said. “I hope you’re in the money.”

“Never give a sucker a break, kid,” he said with that crooked, wolfish grin. “Never give a sucker a break.”

I grinned back at him. He went down the aisle. At the stairs he turned. I threw up my hand and he went out. I certainly did miss him. He was one swell fellow.

After he had gone our games went to pot. I began losing, while dealing. That had never happened to me before. Candy couldn’t win, either. And Signifier couldn’t gamble; he liked to signify too much.

They had said I couldn’t gamble without Blocker. They had said he was holding me up and without him I would blow like a burst balloon. It was true. After he left I couldn’t win. I tried hard enough. But luck had turned its back on me. Or maybe it was just that I had lost confidence. I lost steadily from that time on and if I hadn’t had the take from all four games I would have been stony in a week. Maybe I was trying too hard. I’d sit in those games and chew up cigarette holders as if they were matchsticks. I chewed a ten-inch holder down to a nub in a single day. And not once did I leave a game winner. It troubled me. For a time I wanted to win so badly it became an obsession. After that I quit studying. I dropped my law course. I stored away my books on psychology. All I wanted was to just once win a pile in one of those lousy games. It was slowly killing me.

The movies which we saw on Saturdays helped. According to the statement which the warden gave to the press, the motion-picture projector had been purchased from our amusement fund, whatever that was, and had cost ten thousand dollars, with an additional seventeen hundred dollars for the screen. But the way we figured it was that the warden had some money on hand at the time which couldn’t be explained, and he was being investigated again. Anyway, we were glad to have them, and whether eleven thousand, seven hundred dollars for the projector and screen was cheap or expensive, we never settled. But we conceded that the business was worth it, no matter what it had cost, so long as it had cost someone else.

Visibility in the chapel was very good as the seats were steeply graduated, like an indoor arena. However we were a little cramped for knee space. But we put up with that. We didn’t even kick about it very much; just enough to appear normal. If we hadn’t kicked about some feature of the pictures the officials would have sworn we were cooking up a riot or a break or something. And we liked the pictures too much to kick about them. We really went for the pictures.

For a time the company that sold them the projector sent in an operator each week to run it, but soon a couple of smart convicts had learned how to operate it and the civilian wasn’t needed any longer. Those convicts could learn anything and everything but how to stay out of prison. As the
Prison Times
put it, in a slightly different way: “A convict will pay a million dollars for freedom if he has it, and then turn around and gamble his million-dollar freedom against fifteen dollars in a drugstore cash register.”

Anyway, we went for those pictures. They were some good pictures, too. Some solid good pictures. All of them were good. There never was a bad picture shown in that prison until the novelty of seeing them had worn off. If we had been the movie-going public that year every last picture would have been a box-office hit. A lot of the convicts used to stay in their cells in preference to going to the baseball games. The blind convicts never went. But for the pictures the blind convicts sat down front. The only convicts who stayed away from the pictures were dead convicts.

We liked everything about the pictures, the stories and the scenery and the action and the dialogue and all. But it was women’s voices that got the closest to us. Those and the songs. We were song-starved and we were always woman-hungry. When a woman began to speak on the screen you could see us leaning forward in a solid wave.

It was about then that I began to pity myself, and next to looking out a window at the women in the street, pitying yourself will kill you quicker than arguing with a gun if you’re a convict. I lived a part in every single picture and when they’d end I’d be brimming full of self-pity. My God, how I could pity myself. I often cried at sentimental scenes; all of us tough, lousy, low convicts cried at sentimental scenes. We sat up there and blubbered like a bunch of kids. But it was good for us, it gave us a chance to cry out all those tears we had been saving for so long, trying to be so awful goddamned tough and take it like a man. “He can take it,” they would say, as if the son of a bitch had won the Congressional medal or a Rhodes Scholarship. What the hell of it? Who the hell ever gave a damn if a convict could take it or not? And if he could take it, what the hell could he get out of taking it besides a bloody head or death? And for what? “He can take it!” Goddamned right, he can take it all right, I used to think. It was good to see the movies and get a chance to cry.

We lived in those pictures. My God, how we lived in those pictures. And what did we get from them? Plenty, I supposed. Plenty of tears and self-pity, anyway.

They helped us, though. They helped us a lot. They made us softer, more human. They gave us a certain perspective that many of us had lost. Oh, they did a lot for us, morally, spiritually, emotionally. But they hurt us too. You had to leave all that beautiful make-believe and come back to the cells and dormitories, back to the rooted, immovable, eternal prison of stone and steel. You had to come back to the gutless, stale, callous convicts. Worst of all you had to come back to yourself.

20

O
H, BUT THOSE
officials were good to us that year. We had baked ham and candied yams and lemonade on the Fourth of July. We swilled our lemonade and called for more. By then the new industrial building had been completed and most of the mills had moved into it. The new 10&11 cell block had also been completed and filled. Built onto the end of this block and isolated by a wall of tool-proof steel, was the new 12 block which housed death row and the redshirt desperadoes.

The prison school was reopened and a young redheaded graduate student from the state university came in and took charge of it. There were eight grades in the school this time and special courses in “business and commerce” and “shorthand.” It was an excellent school and the young university student who had charge of it was an excellent young man. Everything was excellent that summer.

A boxing tournament called the Stonewall-Gloves Bouts was scheduled for Labor Day and all the convicts who thought they could box signed up for the elimination series.

A gym was rigged up in the basement of the Protestant chapel and a big ex-pub called Bull Doggie was appointed the head trainer and referee. Bull Doggie was serving life, and was also wanted in New York for murder, but he knew the fighting game. He had for his assistant Frankie Kane, a reformed redshirter. For two months they worked with the stonewall glovers, classifying them according to weight divisions, eliminating the duds, and grading them according to ability. Those who made the grade went into training. They were given special grub and excused from all other duties. A temporary ring was built down in a corner of the ball diamond and a couple of homemade punching bags were hung underneath the grandstand. The glovers did their road work around the diamond in the morning and punched the bags or worked out in the ring during the afternoons.

For the rest of us a recreational program was instituted. The program was arranged so that every company went down to the ball diamond two afternoons each week. We took calisthenics and afterward played softball. Two young physical-education students from the state university directed the program. It was a big thing. The school companies had Mondays and Thursdays, the idle companies Tuesdays and Fridays, and the working companies Wednesdays and Saturdays. Our movie hour was changed from Saturday mornings to Saturday afternoons. The diamond had been cleared and the two softball diamonds had been laid out. The outfield grass was cut and the infields remade with new earth brought in from the outside.

At one o’clock the band would assemble on the yard and we’d come out of the cells and dormitories and line up behind them. Then the band would break into a march and lead the procession down toward the diamond, followed by company after company, the convicts swinging their shoulders and keeping time. There’s a rhythm in a lock-stepping line similar to that of a chorus line, and when the convicts wanted to they could march in matchless unison; hands, arms, shoulders, legs and feet swinging in rhythmic precision. It was a parade. Hep…Hep…kick out your right foot, kick ‘im in the belly if he don’t keep step…Hep…They came up with that old pappy jive.

We passed the new brick industrial building, looming to our left, huge and bulldogging. We passed the powerhouse to our right, with its tall brick chimney and finger of gray smoke against the white-clouded sky. We smelt the stink of burning garbage; over the band’s brassy blare heard the screaming whistle of a train passing outside. If we had looked we could have seen the walls, rooted and immovable, enclosing the scene, chill and ancient and un-thawed by the sun’s warm rays. But we didn’t look at the walls as we went down to the diamond to play Softball. We made as if we didn’t know that they were there. We weren’t convicts doing twenty-eight thousand goddamned years; we were cadets marching around the stadium before an Army-Navy game, we were Shriners parading down Hollywood Boulevard.

“AwwwwwwwWWWWWWWW, it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing…” That’s the way we chirped it.

Oh, we had a time. The ball game fever swept the prison like natural elevens, and although we convicts in 2-6 were supposed to be crippled, we were in the thick of it. We went into it heart, body and soul. We talked Softball, dreamed softball, ate softball, slept softball. It was in our blood like the red corpuscles.

When word had first come out that we would have softball that summer Captain Tom brought in a half-dozen softballs and took us back of the old wooden dormitory, down by the death house, so we could practice. We cleared away some of the rocks and made a make-shift diamond. Tom wanted us to have a team that would make a showing, at least, so we really practiced in earnest. Since I was the boss of the gambling racket in the dormitory I inherited managership of the team. That was the way our minds worked. They made me the catcher, too, but that was because we couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Second base was my love.