Straight Life (37 page)

I got sentenced to two to twenty years in a state prison, and I waited for the chain. You go back to the tank and you wait two, three, four weeks. Then they call out your name and take you to Chino, which is a guidance center in Chino, California. At Chino, they run you through all kinds of physical and mental tests. At that time they were checking your skull, the width of it, and the width of your eye slits and where they were placed and the width of the strands of your hair because they believed that criminals' noses went off to one side and they thought they could tell something by the formation of your facial features.

At the guidance center, they determine where to send you. They can leave you in Chino proper, where you get nice visits with picnic lunches. They can send you to a camp. They can send you to Soledad, which was a vocational type place. They can send you to CMC, California Men's Colony. They can send you to Vacaville, a medical type prison. Or else they can send you to San Quentin or Folsom. Folsom is for the real old guys that are hopeless, completely hopeless. Quentin is for the ones that are too violent to go to any other prison, people that have been busted several times for things like robbery with violence and murder. And where do you think they sent me? To San Quentin.

Your name comes out on a list. They post lists for all the different prisons. I saw my name under San Quentin, and I couldn't believe it. Everybody had told me, "Oh, man, they'll just take you across the street to Chino. You'll have visits with your family. You wear your own clothes on the weekend, nice shoes." And they sent me to San Quentin. Not only was I not eligible for the N number program, I was also not eligible for Chino or Soledad or Vacaville or camp! Probably if I'd been older, they would have sent me to Folsom, which is the graveyard. So that was the treatment I received, and as I look back and try to figure out why this happened, I remember Sergeant Sanchez and I remember his words: "Before we're through with you, if you're able to think or reflect, you'll just continually regret the fact that you wouldn't cop out on these people and cooperate with us."

15

San Quentin

1961

FOUR WEEKS after seeing my name appear on the list I was on the "Grey Goose." That's that horrible, horrible grey bus you see going by with prisoners in it. They put you in white flying suits with elastic around the ankles. They put handcuffs on you and run leg irons all the way through the bus, and you've got two guards with rifles, and there you go. And all these guys were, like, "Heeeey, baby, heeeey, jack, uuuuuhh, is Louie still up there? That suckah. Boy, when he see me drive up there again he'll say, 'Boy, there's that suckah again, man!' " The only people besides me that seemed dazed or surprised were a couple of murderers, killed their wives or something. They called my name, put these clothes on me, I got on the bus, and we headed north.

We stopped at Soledad and they put us in a wing for people that stay overnight. There's a school there and a lot of shops-welding, machine, electric shops. They classify people as to age and priors and some of the younger people go to Soledad because they feel there's still a chance for them to be trained, so when they get out they can be successful in something. The people in Soledad aren't branded as hardened criminals but they are; they're just on the way up.

They have tunnels through the cell blocks. We walked through one of them to the mess hall. There were a bunch of guys hanging out in the tunnel, and it all reminded me of being a jazz soloist in Stan Kenton's band because you've got these flying suits on and you're going to San Quentin and that makes you more of a criminal than the people that are there. It gives you status. The guys look up to you because that's their world.

They kept us segregated in the mess hall. We had guards guarding us, but guys would make signs to us or nod, things like that, so we strutted. It's your last little moment of glory before you get to San Quentin because there's no glory there. So you strut and look mean. We ate and we spent the night. Guys would come to the cell, sneak into the block: "Hey, So-and-so says to say hello. Need some cigarettes? Anything you want?" All of a sudden you find yourself in a world where everybody takes care of you. The convicts take care of you because they like you. The people that have it feel good sharing it with someone-if you're right. That's the only criteria. If you're right, not a rat. If you're a regular; if you're righteous people; if you haven't hurt anyone; if you haven't been rank to people; if you haven't balled some guy's old lady when he went away. The word filters through.

A couple of cats snuck up to my cell. It happened that they'd got some smack in, but they couldn't get at it. They were hoping we'd be there in the morning. A cat was going to bring an outfit and a taste to make the bus ride nice. He was just going to lay this stuff on me. If he got busted, he'd get another ten or fifteen years. I'd never met the guy, never seen him before. He was a friend of a guy I'd known on the street and he'd been told that I was jam-up people. I was really impressed. I thought, "What wonderful people, man!" And they were all Mexicans. They were all Mexicans. They were beautiful, man.

I guess the blacks were good to their people, but I started forming a dislike for them in jail because I thought, "Here I am, a guy that played jazz, had black friends. Why wouldn't they talk to me, help me out? Because I'm white? I'm not a Mexican. The Mexicans help me." They liked me, and anybody that likes you, man, you like them. People that don't like you, pretty soon you don't like them.

As it turned out, they woke us up before it was even light, and we left too soon to get loaded. And as we left I saw this guy. He made a motion. He spread his hands: "It's too early. There's nothing I can do." And then he gave me a sign, a fist movement going down from his chest. "Hora le pues." It means, "You're a friend. Don't worry about anything." Not like the blacks' sign-that raised fist that excluded me.

We rode to the town of Richmond and then across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. As you start across the bridge you see San Quentin on your left with water all around it. Soledad looks like a big trade school or a college. San Quentin looks like a prison. It was a greyish cement color, beaten by the winds and the sea and the fog. Doom emanated from it. I've always been a fan of Sherlock Holmes; it had that feel, like it should be on the moors. I got nervous, so I looked around at the guys. I figured these cats had really been around. They were cool. I figured I'd draw strength from their reactions. I looked, and everyone was the same. They were all quiet, and they had the weirdest looks in their eyes, guys that had been there. I saw fear in their eyes. I'd heard a lot of stories I'd tried to dismiss from my mind, but I saw these guys and they weren't joking and kidding as they had when we left the county jail and when we approached Soledad. All that had changed, and everything was stripped to just the realization of where we were going, where we would soon be.

We turned off the highway and into the litle town where the prison employees lived. We pulled up to the prison, and a couple of guys on the bus called out, "Hey!" to the trustee at the gate, but he just shook his head. We went through the gate. We went through another gate. We got out of the bus. There were a few trustees who were working outside the prison, gardeners, things like that, and a few of the guys from the bus knew them and called out, "Hey! Hello!" But it was real quiet and dead.

It was late afternoon. We gave our names; they checked us off. We went through a little interrogation, and finally they took us through the last gate into the prison itself. I looked to my right and saw a chapel, and on my left I saw the prison within the prison. San Quentin is like a city. People who can't make it in the city get put in jail. The guys were talking, "That's the adjustment center. If you really fuck up that's where you go"

We walked straight ahead, past the clothing room, an ancient place that looked like it was from the 1800s. Instead of stopping us there, they said, "We'd better give them dinner. It's getting late." We walked into the upper yard, "the big yard" it's called; it's world famous. I'd heard about it when I was a kid, seen movies of it, and I said, "My God, here I am in this yard." As we walked into the yard, a guy said, "Look to the right." I saw a little, red light bulb. "That goes on when someone's getting gassed."

A few of us had to go to the bathroom. They walked us into a huge bathroom right off the upper yard. It was next to the north dining section. I went in there to take a piss; I happened to look up and I saw a walkway and a guard on it holding a .30-06 rifle. He's got his finger on the trigger, and the rifle is pointed at us. And I noticed that everywhere I looked, indoors and out, there was a walkway a storey above us. The guards get their ammunition and guns from the tower and then they walk around the entire prison on these walkways-mess hall, cell blocks, everything. And there's no way you can get to them, but anywhere you're at, they can be there in a moment a storey above you with a gun. I had to marvel at whoever planned the prison. It was perfect.

We walked out into this huge yard and saw all the people in line waiting to eat. We're in these white jumpsuits. Everybody else was in blue. When I was there, there were six thousand people in a prison that was made to hold fifteen hundred. Can you imagine looking into this mass of people? And everybody's watching us. The most evil-looking people I'd ever seen. Some guys are looking us over to see who they can get for a punk-who they're going to drive on with a shank to tell them they're going to fuck them in the ass, or if some guy's a rat, they're going to kill him, or who they're going to rob.

The mess hall was filled. There might have been two thousand people sitting there when we walked in. Everybody eats facing the same direction. We walked to the front of the mess hall and all the way through the serving line, and all those eyes were on us. I saw people with part of their chins blown away or an eye gone. Hideous people, little white sissies, spooks' punks, with all kinds of jackets on to protect them if they got shanked. It was a sea of faces and not one smile. Just looks. Evil, cold, penetrating looks. I thought, "Is this what I'm going to do for two to twenty years?"

We walked to the mess line, and the guys serving food gave us the same cold looks. It was like a comedy. It reminded me of when I was a kid looking in the mirror practicing mean looks after a Frankenstein or Dracula movie. I would see a face. A guy would nod. And I'd see that the guy looked familiar, but there was no smile, and I felt that the whole world was against me. We got the food; I couldn't eat; I was too scared. Then they got us up and marched us to the South Block.

The South Block is the biggest, longest, five-tiered cell block in the world. We waited. We heard names being called out. Now, I may not always have acted it, but I'm fairly intelligent. I can spell. And even though during those periods of time when I was dealing with criminals I tried to make myself sound like one of the guys by saying "ain't" and purposely making my English bad, I did speak well at one time. So when I heard these guards read off the lists of names, they sounded like complete morons to me. They'd mispronounce things and say things over and over to make sure they hadn't fucked up. If it were coming from my side it would have been alright. I would have thought they were hep, that that's the way to be, that they made up for it in other things. But coming from the guards it really seemed funny.

They got us in our cells. As you face the cell, on the left are metal beds; small, steel-ribbed metal bunks, one on top of the other. You can pull them up against the wall, and they hook with a chain. On the right is a space just big enough for one person to stand and walk to the back of the cell. There was a toilet directly behind the bottom bunk. When you sat on the toilet your knees touched the bunk. The guy's laying there with his head right at your knees when you're trying to take a shit. When you piss your ass is at his head. The toilets had no seat over the top. They were white porcelain. They were square. They were set up on a block of cement, so when you sat on the toilet your feet didn't touch the ground and you had to hold your knees up with your hands to try to shit. Right next to the toilet was an old washbasin, discolored and rusty, and there was no hot water. If you know San Francisco, it gets cold there. You'd wake up in the morning, and the water would be so cold it hurt. The plumbing system is so ancient that at certain times of the year when the tide drops the toilets wouldn't flush for days at a time. In order to flush the toilet they gave you a five gallon tomato can, and you had to use it to pour water in the toilet. But the can didn't fit into the washbasin enough to fill it, so you might be an hour pouring until finally something happened, and a turd might go down. It always stank. All those toilets, cell after cell after cell. You'd get a wooden board to cover the toilet so it wouldn't smell so bad. There were two of us. Neither of us had ever been to this place before, and we just looked at each other, and we looked at this fucking thing.

It was evening. We still had our flying suits on. I'd let this guy have the bottom bunk. He was scared, really sad. He was a Mexican kid, thin; he had all the tattoos. When I first saw him I thought he'd been in prison before, and I guess he had-Youth Authority or something-because in the crook of his right arm he had a black panther with red blood on its claws. Sometimes the eyes are red, too. That was the usual thing the young gunsels would have done in places like Tracy and Preston. He reminded me of those kids that hang out on the corner in East L.A., real cocky and confident because they've got all their friends. Now here he was without his gang. All of a sudden he's alone with me in a cell in San Quentin. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what to say. I felt as bad as he did.

I got up on my bunk and just sat there. Then I happened to look out of the cell and I saw these hands coming up over the floor of the walkway in front of the cell! I see these arms, and I think, "How can anybody come up over the bottom?" As I watch, a guy climbs up. He looks all over. He's holding a can about three inches wide and a foot long, and it has a little handle on it. I see that it's something that would fit through the bars. Another hand appears over the side, and a second guy climbs up. They both look loaded to me but not loaded from stuff. They're giggling and all that. The first guy was a white guy with curly, sandy hair, freckle-faced, a nice-looking guy in a rugged sort of way. Blue eyes. He had the look of someone who'd just stolen a dime out of the church box. He had a little shit-eating grin on his face. The other guy had black, curly hair. He was one of those white, white Mexicans with milky skin, not a mark on him, not a blemish, doubly handsome. He looked like one of those old Spaniards. They were both wearing the prison blues. The first guy was clean but rumpled and relaxed looking. This other cat was all starched, his shirt collar; everything fit perfect. His pants were a different color than the ordinary blues. Later on I found out that these were blues made from the old material, which everybody wanted. They had been bleached out so they were very light and real pretty.