Lately I’ve been thinking about the time I spent five months in the county jail for possession of one ounce of cannabis. Fresh out of high school, it was my first offense of any kind, but I guess I needed to be taught a lesson I would never forget. Here’s a piece I wrote about the experience. The names have been changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty.
When I entered my guilty plea, the public defender arranged a two-week stay in the imposition of my sentence to give me time to get things in order and prepare myself mentally and emotionally for jail. But the judge made a special point of telling me that if I was late turning myself in at 5:00 p.m. two Fridays from then, I would be considered an escapee and would face an additional year and a day of imprisonment—which meant I would go straight to a state prison; one year is the maximum county jail sentence in California.
Maybe I should have taken a look at the municipal complex in Santa Ana a few days before I was scheduled to begin my sentence. I just didn’t think it was necessary. I had seen the huge, square, three-story gray concrete edifice of the Orange County Main Jail before. And it was scary looking. The only windows in the building were these long, narrow slots—just large enough to let in a little light. Since I knew where the building was, how could I possibly get lost? I just didn’t take into account that we would hit heavy rush-hour traffic on the way to downtown Santa Ana, and I would arrive within minutes of my deadline in a rush, not knowing how to get inside the building. My sister Maureen was driving her black-and-white ’56 Ford sedan—which my friends and I always called her cop car. I sat in the front passenger seat and my mother and little sister Janet rode in the back. There were no parking spaces anywhere, so I said goodbye and dashed out of the car in heavy traffic.
The wilting-hot summer sun blazed down as I ran up and down the side of the gray concrete building, searching for an entrance. I couldn’t see one anywhere. What if I’m late? What if I get sent to state prison for a year just because I can’t find the damn door to the jail? I ran along a sidewalk leading into an open area between the buildings in the municipal complex. By this time, I was breathing hard and sweating, in a complete panic. And I was already five minutes late. I finally spotted a sheriff’s deputy. Almost in tears, I practically threw myself at his feet.
“Excuse me, could you help me?” I asked. “I was supposed to start serving a sentence at 5:30. I got here on time, but I don’t know where to go . . . I can’t figure out how to get inside.” He looked at me in amazement, then he explained how to get to the door where prisoners turned themselves in.
It’s funny. In some ways I expected the cops to be waiting at the door for me with handcuffs ready. It wasn’t like that at all. Inside the iron door was a small room where perhaps a dozen men sat in chairs along the side. Most of them were weekenders. They’d been sentenced to serve ten weekends in jail so they could work at their regular jobs during the week. They would turn themselves in each Friday night and spend Saturday and Sunday engaged in various menial projects like picking up trash along the freeway or hoeing weeds in public places. At that time, the courts never gave weekend sentences or work furloughs to people who’d been convicted of drug charges; they were afraid the men might try to smuggle drugs into prison.
I was surprised there weren’t any deputies around. We all sat around waiting for someone to open the iron door at the end of the room and take us inside. But nothing happened. I sat there for more than an hour. Some of the other men asked me what I was charged with and how long my sentence was. When I told them I’d be in for five months, they all said I should get out of there right now and head for Mexico or someplace. None of them could imagine serving five months in jail—even though most of them would be spending each weekend there for a couple of months or more. But I think they rightly saw that you cross an invisible line when you become a regular inmate. Weekenders all go in together and never really become part of the inmate population.
I didn’t know what to expect. I had stopped to say goodbye to my good friends Mac and Robert earlier in the day. They seemed genuinely upset that I was going into jail. It was like they hadn’t really thought about it until that moment. Jail is a fearful place to people who have never been there—a great unknown conjuring up frightening images of unspeakable humiliations and tortures: muggings, rapes, razor slashings, murder, and who knows what else? All your friends have ideas and suggestions about what to do to survive in jail. “I’d start screaming like a maniac so everyone would think I was crazy and leave me alone.” “I’d crap in my pants if someone tried to rape me, and then they’d be too disgusted to go through with it.” Or the best one I heard: “The first chance you get, attack the biggest meanest guy in the jail, so eveyone’ll know you’re too tough to mess with.” He was right about one thing: no one would ever mess with you again—because you’d be dead.
* * *
I waited in the room at the main jail for a couple of hours before a guard finally called my name and let me inside, but that was just the beginning. I was put into a holding cell with some Mexican farm workers who had obviously been picked up on immigration charges. They were still dressed in their field clothes and one wore an old straw cowboy hat with a small leather tassel in the back. They didn’t speak English. From there I was finally led to another holding cell to wait my turn to be processed, fingerprinted, and issued jail clothes. I struck up a conversation with another prisoner. He seemed friendly enough, and before I was led away, he said: “Be sure to tell them you want to go to O Tank.”
I was photographed and fingerprinted and had to turn in all my belongings, including my clothes. The guards took me to a shower room where I washed up, and then they sprayed a whitish liquid—some DDT-laced lice-killing concoction—onto my hair, armpits, and pubic area. It burned, but they wouldn’t let me wash it off. I had to leave it on and get dressed in the clothes they issue me: white boxer shorts, denim jeans, and a dark blue sweatshirt with “Orange County Main Jail” stenciled in the back with bright yellow paint. They also gave me white athletic socks and flip-flops to wear on my feet.
A guard took me to a storage room to pick up a thin rolled up mattress, a blanket and sheet, and a pillow to take to my cell. As I was walking there, I asked him, “Would it be okay if I stayed in O Tank?”
He frowned. “Oh, you’re just going to sit on your duff, huh?” he said. I shrugged. I didn’t know what he was getting at. By this time, it was almost midnight. I’d been at the jail for more than six hours. I was spaced out and exhausted, and I just wanted to sleep. A few minutes later, we entered the cellblock containing O Tank and P Tank. A call went up immediately: “Man walking . . . Man walking!” I found out this was how prisoners spread the word that a guard was coming, so if anyone was doing anything illegal, they would have time to stop. When the guard left, they’d shout: “Man got a hat . . . Man got a hat!” And everyone knew the coast was clear.
The cellblock looked like a set from a classic prison movie: two tiers of cells—P Tank above and O Tank below—with a bulletproof-glass-enclosed catwalk where the guards would walk past, right across from P Tank. The only thing missing was a machinegun turret. But at the Orange County Main Jail, none of the guards carried firearms. They were too afraid an inmate might get hold of a gun if any were around.
I followed the guard down the iron stairs and stood in front of Cell 2 in O Tank. Three prisoners sat around a long metal table inside, permanently attached to the bare concrete floor. Behind it was a sink, a toilet without a seat (or any kind of enclosure), and an open-fronted shower stall. To the right, in a different section of the cell, I saw six flat metal bunks, at least two of which had people sleeping in them.
The men at the table were rough looking. Although most of them were probably not more than four or five years older than me, they had the pallid, dull-eyed look of longtime inmates. They glared menacingly at the guard but seemed oblivious to me. I wondered why they weren’t in bed sleeping; it was well past midnight. It turned out that in O Tank it didn’t matter what time of day it was—no one worked; no one left the tank except for the twice a day walk to the mess hall and back for breakfast and dinner. O Tank inmates didn’t get lunch. And the lights were always on; they were just dimmed a little at night.
I later found out I’d been the butt of a little prison joke. O Tank was a punishment area where inmates were sent if they refused to work, wouldn’t obey the guards, or were serious troublemakers. None of the cells in O Tank had televisions, and the prisoners were not allowed to have playing cards or even books, with the exception of the Holy Bible, which most inmates just used to make tattoos. They would tear out a few pages at a time, burn them in a tin ashtray, and mix the dark ashes in water to get the printer’s ink from the paper. They would then take the fuzz off the end of a pipe-cleaner, sharpen it to a point on a matchbook cover, dip it in the ink, and poke it repeatedly deep into someone’s flesh to get the ink under their skin—an incredibly painful process. But I’d learn all about that later.
As I stood in front of the cell, a guard up on the catwalk operated the controls and the cell door slid open automatically and then shut behind me with a great clang as I walked inside.
It’s an odd moment entering a jail cell full of strangers—like all the fear and awkwardness of being the new kid in school multiplied a thousand times. For someone like me, who had never done time, it was horrifying.
I carried my bedding inside and laid it on the only open bunk. One of the prisoners who had been sitting at the table suddenly appeared behind me, and I jumped for an instant, but he was just going past to get something from his bunk. He pulled a deck of cards from under his pillow. This was contraband in O Tank, but sometimes the prisoners would make deals with the trustees (prisoners who worked in the jail) to slip them some playing cards along with the commissary items people ordered each week if they had money in their prison account. They usually paid for contraband (or lost wagers) with packs of cigarettes, the unofficial coin of the realm in most jails.
“Wanna play cards?” he asked.
I shrugged. “What kind?”
“Hearts.”
“I’ve never played it,” I said. “I don’t know how.”
“It’s easy,” he said. “Come on.”
I was too tired and scared to say no, so I followed him out to the table and sat down next to a tall thin Mexican called Cruz. The man with the cards, Eldon, sat across the table from me, and another man called Wayne sat beside him. Eldon carefully explained the rules of Hearts to me—about how the object of the game is to avoid getting points and that each card in the Hearts suit is worth one point and the Queen of Spades (nicknamed “the bitch”) is worth 13 points. If I got her, he said, I’d be done for—unless I could “shoot the moon” successfully. If one person manages to get every point card, everyone else automatically receives 26 points each, he told me.
I stared blankly at him, and he repeated the whole thing again . . . and again. I was still in a daze about being in jail and was physically exhausted; I couldn’t focus my mind. Eldon shook his head finally and said we should just start playing. Wayne smirked. I’m sure he sensed some easy pickings. We were betting packs of cigarettes—which was odd for me, because I didn’t smoke. And it was all done on credit. If I lost, I’d have to order cigarettes from the commissary using the ten or twelve dollars in my account—all the money I’d had in my wallet when I was booked into the jail.
I played a few hands and got behind, which only encouraged everyone to up the ante. There was so much riding on the final hand, I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough money to pay for all the cigarettes. I felt sick. I didn’t know what these guys would do to someone who tried to welch on a bet. And I kept getting more and more Hearts. Then I got the Queen of Spades. And then it suddenly dawned on everyone—lastly on me—that I had taken all the points. I’d shot the moon successfully without even knowing it.
Everyone was stunned. Eldon stared at me and suddenly started laughing. “Shit, we’ll probably find out his dad’s a riverboat gambler in New Orleans,” he said.
Cruz slapped me on the shoulder. “Way to go, Slick,” he said, laughing. (The nickname “Slick” stuck with me after that for the rest of the time I spent in jail.) I glanced at Wayne, but he wasn’t laughing. He stared sullenly at me with a blank face that chilled me. I looked away and laughed along with Cruz and Eldon.
Cruz was the oldest prisoner in the cell—probably at least twenty-six with black slicked-back hair, a moustache, and dark, melancholy eyes. He wore the sleeves of his dark blue prison sweatshirt pulled up, revealing several crude jail tattoos. The inside of his left forearm had a side-view sketch of a long skinny lion with the words “Krazy Kool Kat” written underneath. He had a sad personal story—as do most prison inmates if you scratch beneath the surface. He was born to an illegal immigrant mother in a small Texas border town but had been living in Santa Ana for a few years. He met a woman from Mexico, and they married and had a daughter together. Then she became pregnant again. He was working nights at a factory at this time but then got laid off. Desperate for cash, a friend told him he could make decent money transporting stolen goods. He set him up with a band of thieves operating from Los Angeles. Cruz would pick up the items—furniture, televisions, and appliances mostly—from the back of stores and warehouses in Los Angeles and drop them off at a warehouse in Santa Ana. In most cases, the storeowners or employees were in on the theft, and they were looking to collect insurance. Someone else set everything up, and Cruz knew nothing about the business.
One night, a police squad car pulled Cruz over enroute to Santa Ana, and he couldn’t explain why he had stolen property in his van. He ended up in the main jail and spent months as an unsentenced inmate before he was convicted. He couldn’t afford bail, and the judge wouldn’t let him out on his own recognizance because Cruz had originally come from out of state and was considered a flight risk.
Cruz called a friend to send a message to his wife. She was still an illegal immigrant; they had never gone through the process of trying to get her a green card. She never visited him because she feared being arrested by INS agents and deported to Mexico. And she only sent one letter, but that was months later after he had been sentenced to one year in the county jail, and it had no return address. She said she was moving to another city where she had a chance to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family, but she couldn’t tell him where she was. She enclosed a snapshot of his tiny daughter and his infant son, who Cruz had never seen. He always kept the picture on the wall beside his bunk.
The thing I remember most about Cruz was his singing voice. Late at night, he’d lay in his bunk singing beautiful mournful ballads in Spanish. His voice was so mellow and pure, no one ever told him to stop singing. Sometimes when I lay awake in my bunk at night listening to him sing, I’d find myself weeping.
Eldon had a moustache and dark shoulder-length hair and always wore a blue bandanna tied in the back to form a headband. He seemed to be the one in charge in the cell, perhaps because he’d done more time than anyone else—for burglary, car theft, drugs: he’d even been charged with manslaughter once but had plead guilty to a lesser charge. I later found out that his older brother and his brother’s fiancé were the ones whose deaths he had caused. Apparently, he had insisted on driving them someplace when he was so stoned on liquor and Seconal he could barely walk. He was in a terrible accident that killed them both, but he was barely injured. He would carry the guilt for the rest of his life. He had a small laminated card with a picture of his brother on one side and the fiancé on the other.
Then there was Wayne—the scariest person in O Tank. He was short and stocky with medium-length light-brown hair that he combed back behind his ears. He had done a couple of tours in Viet Nam and enjoyed the violence and destruction, but he had gotten in some kind of trouble and been busted out of the army. He was serving a nine-month sentence for selling drugs. Wayne had been at Theo Lacy—a branch jail—for several months but was sent back to the main jail because he was considered too dangerous. He was the prime instigator in a planned prisoner uprising. One of the inmates at Lacy who worked at the police pistol range had been stealing ammunition for several months to get gunpowder so Wayne could make a bomb. Another inmate who worked at the dog pound adjacent to Lacy had somehow gotten hold of a handgun he kept stashed inside a barrel of dry dog food at the pound.
Lacy jail at that time was laid out with four glass-fronted barracks arrayed in a semi-circle facing a central control booth, which was also glass-fronted so that the guards could see into every barracks night and day. But usually only one guard sat there at night, and sometimes he would read a book or even doze off, so guard coverage was light. Wayne was going to sneak out in the middle of the night and place a gunpowder bomb against the control booth. There was a guard Wayne particularly hated. He planned to wait outside with the pistol and shoot the guard dead as he came fleeing from the control booth after the explosion.
I was surprised by Wayne’s glee as he told me the story. The odd thing is that this plan had nothing to do with escaping from jail or anything that even remotely made any sense. Anyone could escape from Lacy. It was then a minimum-security prison. All an inmate had to do was jump over the chain-link fence out back and run along the bed of the Santa Ana River. Of course, they usually got caught, which meant they would automatically get a year and a day added to their sentence and go straight to a state prison. And they would be considered “rabbits” by the prison system and forever after would only be housed in maximum-security facilities. That’s what kept most people from running. But none of that mattered in Wayne’s plan; it was all about mayhem and revenge and had no other purpose.
The whole thing collapsed when a guard found the pistol at the dog pound. A massive follow-up search at Lacy unearthed a bag of gunpowder hidden in Barracks C, and Wayne was the prime suspect. He was the “house mouse” in that barracks—an inmate whose sole duty is to keep a barracks clean and well maintained; it’s considered a plum job. The guards all knew Wayne was involved in whatever destructive act had been planned, but they couldn’t prove it. No matter how they tried to break him, he stayed mum. But they knew how dangerous he was, so they quickly whisked him away to O Tank to serve out the rest of his sentence.
A couple of weeks into my jail time, I got into a brief scuffle with Wayne. I can’t even remember what started it—probably a joke that went bad. He suddenly made a lightning-fast commando move on me, sweeping my legs out from under me with his foot and throwing me hard onto the concrete floor. And he was on me instantly in a death hold, his legs holding my torso from behind and squeezing my lungs, his hands gripping my throat firmly. He seemed as strong as a wild animal—like a grizzly bear or a lion. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t inhale or exhale. It was a strange sensation, like being paralyzed from the neck down. It didn’t hurt. I lay there completely detached from my body, watching myself die. Just before I blacked out, I heard Eldon say, “Let him go . . . NOW!”
It’s always weird coming to after being unconscious. I didn’t know where I was for a couple of minutes as I lay on the floor staring up at the neon lights. I heard Wayne laughing.
“We was just kidding around,” he said. “I was showing him how to off people without making a sound, like in Nam.”
Eldon stood over me. “You okay, Slick?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m okay.” He reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.
I was amazed Wayne had backed off. I guess even he realized that with someone like Eldon, who didn’t care if he lived or died, there was no telling what he might do if he snapped.
Two other people also lived in Cell 2 for part of the time I was there. I had so little contact with them I can’t remember their names. One was only serving thirty days and as far as I know slept the entire time he was there. The other was a short guy with a beard who had once tried to commit suicide when he was on LSD. He had so many deep, ghastly razor scars up and down his arm it made me cringe to look at him. I can’t imagine how he had survived. The guards gave him Thorazine, an anti-psychotic drug, every day, and he rarely spoke.
My days spent in O Tank all seemed to run together, because there was no break between them—no real difference between night and day. Sometimes we’d go two or three days at a time without sleeping, playing cards when we had them or trying to play chess in our minds without a board or chess pieces when we didn’t. Other times we might sleep for a couple of days, just getting up to walk to the mess hall. This was how to break up the routine. This was the way to make time pass. That was the worst part: time moved so slowly.
It was unbearable for me at first. I’d been such an outdoor person my whole life. Now I had to spend every minute of every day in a bleak, depressing place with no sunshine or fresh air—just the constant glare of neon lights, bright during the day, dim at night, but never dark. The only windows to the outside in the entire jail were thin, horizontal slots. But they were only on the upper level of our cellblock, behind the guards’ catwalk. In O Tank we saw only solid concrete walls.
At five in the morning each day they herded us into a vestibule at the top of the stairs before taking us to the mess hall. I always paused to gaze out the window toward the street far below, where a bail bonds sign gleamed perpetually through the mist. I remember enviously watching a wino stagger down the street just before dawn one morning and thinking that he had far more freedom than me.
When we were all gathered in the vestibule, the thick iron door would buzz loudly, then open to let us into the long hallway. “Single file! Hands in your pockets!” a guard would bark, and we’d all line up along the institution-green wall and wait to be escorted to the mess hall.
Privacy is the first casualty in jail. I never had a moment alone the entire time I was at the main jail. Everything is wide open. The toilet stands just three or four feet from the table where everyone sits, and there is no partition. The single-stall shower has no curtain. Any modesty a person might feel has to die quickly. A guard walking along the catwalk can see everything going on in a cell, but it doesn’t really give a prisoner much if any protection. A lot can happen outside the scrutiny of the guards. But it does add to the humiliation and dehumanization of being a prisoner.
I started pacing back and forth in the cell within a couple of days of being there, which really bugged the others, especially Wayne. And I had a small calendar I was using to check off my time served. One day Eldon saw me looking at my calendar, and he shook his head.
“You gotta stop that, man,” he said. “It’ll drive you crazy. You’re pulling hard time. It don’t make time go by any faster. It makes it a hundred times worse. You should just relax, do your time, don’t think about it. You’ll be out of here before you know it.” I finally took his advice and threw away my calendar.
Some of the guards seemed to delight in humiliating us. The worst was a guy we called Cutter. He was always doing shakedowns in O Tank, pulling people’s bunks apart and dumping all their belongings on the floor. He’d frequently come into our cells with three or four other guards and put us through a strip search. We’d have to take off all our clothes and stand in a line in front of the cell as they searched through our hair, our armpits, and every other potential hiding place. As a final humiliation, each of us would have to bend over and spread our butt cheeks apart as a guard shined a flashlight up our anuses. I don’t know what they expected to find there.
Cutter was a burly man in his thirties with a close-cropped flattop haircut. He would strut around the cell like a Marine Corps drill instructor, often going too close to each prisoner in the line, invading his personal space, daring him to strike out. He also had an annoying habit when he worked early mornings of suddenly turning on the cell lights to full strength at 4:00 a.m. and opening and closing the cell doors again and again and again until every man in every cell was up and dressed. It was the rudest of awakenings.
One morning when Cutter was doing that, Wayne said someone ought to stick his arm in the door so Cutter would get in trouble. I glanced at Eldon and saw him staring blankly at the door as it slid back and forth—wham . . . wham . . . wham! I grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t do it, man,” I said. “Please . . . don’t do it.”
He looked up, surprised, then smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
* * *
O Tank was the strangest place I’ve ever seen. It had its own code, its own rituals—even its own language. One expression I liked was the way the prisoners would say “radio” instead of “shut up.” “Hey, radio that shit!” they’d yell if someone was being too loud or saying something they didn’t like.
Every so often, the police would raid several of the local bridges frequented by homeless winos, called “grapes” by the inmates. They would end up in P Tank, drying out before being sent on to Theo Lacy or to the Honor Farm. Some of them suffered from serious delirium tremens as they went without alcohol and would cry out and moan or talk to imaginary people in the middle of the night. This infuriated the other prisoners, who would shout: “Radio, grape!”
* * *
Every Saturday inmates could have short visits with their friends or family. The guards would herd us down to the visiting room if someone came to see us, and we would each sit in a little stall with a glass partition separating the prisoner from the visitor. I remember the first time my mom and my sisters came to visit me they just started talking, and I couldn’t hear a word. I finally tapped on the glass and pointed to the telephone receiver we each had to use. I didn’t get many visitors outside of my family. For the most part, I was forgotten. Three or four people I knew came for a single visit shortly after I began my sentence, but they were not close friends and I think had come more out of curiosity than anything else. I wrote back and forth a few times with a girl I knew, but her letters soon petered out. It’s hard, especially for a young person, to keep interested in someone when they’re locked away in jail. But my friend Hollis visited me a couple of times later, and Jeff sent me some postcards he’d made with pictures of trained hawks on front, and I stuck them on the wall beside my bunk.
* * *
I barely missed being sent to the hole one night. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it—probably just boredom and frustration—but suddenly everyone was throwing stuff out of their cells up and down O Tank. Torn mattresses with their stuffing hanging out, blankets, pillows, clothes, toilet paper, garbage—everything they could get their hands on. Wayne started to tear his mattress apart with his bare hands, but Eldon stopped him.
“Hey, I don’t want to go to the hole,” said Eldon. “I’ve been there enough times already, and I don’t like it.” That was enough to stop us. As the other O Tank prisoners continued their destructive rampage, we reversed the process in our cell, cleaning up the floor, making our bunks, putting everything neatly back in its place. Soon, the whole cell row was a shambles—except our cell and the space in front of it. The first guard who came by on the catwalk was aghast. He called for backup, and when they arrived, one of the guards got on the loudspeaker: “Roll it up,” he said. “You’re all going to the hole . . . except Cell 2.”
The prisoners rolled up the remnants of their bedding and headed up the stairs where even more guards had arrived to take them in tow. And we didn’t see any of them for the next five days—the standard minimum time spent in the hole. It’s a miserable place—a series of small one-man cells with only a toilet inside: no seat, no bunk, no bedding. And it can get cold in there, lying on the bare concrete floor. The prisoners don’t even get to go to the mess hall to eat. These guys from O Tank had it worse than most, though, because the jail didn’t have enough cells in the hole to accommodate them all. The guards had to put five or six of them in each one-man cell.
* * *
One day Wayne expounded his long-term vision and philosophy to me. He was a survivalist long before it had a name. He dreamed of gathering a tribe of misfits and going off to live in some remote mountains, apart from society, existing on whatever they could scrape together, kill, or steal in the wilderness. Of course, this involved having a full complement of various guns and other high-tech weaponry in case the government ever came after them. He happened to ask me if I was a hunter, and I said yes. But I usually hunt with falcons, not guns, I told him. His eyes lit up. He wanted to know everything about the birds. How I caught them. How I trained them. What kinds of game they could take. After a few days of this, he started trying to talk me into joining his group in the mountains—although at this time he was the sole member. He told me everything he’d been thinking about for years, speaking with all the zeal of a prophet. He had a vision he was sure would catch fire and eventually spread across the world. And I could be a major part of it—me and my falcons.
I had mixed feelings about suddenly becoming Wayne’s new best friend. On the one hand, there might be less chance he would flip out and kill me while I was in jail. But on the other hand, who’d want to be hooked up with this nut case? I tried to stay noncommittal, but he was always there, talking in detail about the great things we’d be able to accomplish. Eldon and Cruz overheard some of this a few times. They’d look at me from behind Wayne’s back and smirk.
Some bad things started happening a short time later. Cutter had taken a strong dislike to Eldon, and he did everything he could to get to him. One day when he was going through a cigar box where Eldon kept a few of his belongings, he squirted a tube of shaving cream all over the inside. We didn’t see him do it, because we were all lined up naked facing the other way for a skin search, but he was the only one who went back there. Another time, Cutter was searching through our bunks and saw the picture of Eldon’s brother stuck on the wall. He pulled it off and looked at it.
“What the hell is this?” he said. “A goddamn pinup?”
I could sense Eldon tensing without even seeing him.
“It’s mine,” I lied. “It’s my brother. His wife’s on the back.”
I was a nonentity to Cutter. He barely knew I existed, so he let it go. He just turned the picture over to look at the other side then tossed it on the bunk. I’m sure he never realized how close he came to having his head slammed into the concrete wall by Eldon.
But that wasn’t the end of the troubles between Cutter and Eldon. One day when we were lined up for another skin search, Eldon made a crack about Cutter under his breath, and we all laughed for a second.
Cutter rose up in Eldon’s face. “What’s the joke, huh? You got something to say to me?” They glared at each other eye-to-eye, just inches apart. Eldon kept silent. “I didn’t think so,” said Cutter. “Well, turn around and spread ‘em.”
Eldon bent over and spread his buttocks, and just as Cutter knelt down behind him with his flashlight, he broke wind right in his face. Cutter shot up in a fury, beet-red and shaking with anger. “Roll it up, you bastard! You’re going to the hole!” he shouted.
“What for?” said Eldon.
“Contraband,” said Cutter as he pulled a deck of cards from his own pocket and slammed it on the floor.
Eldon calmly got dressed and gathered his bedding together. “Could you take care of my stuff for me?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said and watched as he walked up the stairs in front of Cutter. A moment later, he went through the heavy iron door, and it slammed shut behind him. I picked up the cigar box he left on my bed and looked inside. It held a razor, an old toothbrush, a couple of packs of cigarettes, and a laminated plastic picture of his brother and his fiancé.
* * *
A rumor swept through the jail a few days later that Eldon had jumped a guard and then been beaten severely by some other guards. He would be in the hole for at least two more weeks. I immediately thought of Cutter, but no, it turned out that Twiggy was the guard Eldon attacked. (The prisoners had nicknamed him Twiggy after the famous English fashion model because he was so thin.) That surprised me. Twiggy was one of the more amiable guards at the main jail. I couldn’t imagine what set Eldon off.
A couple of weeks later I heard Eldon was out of the hole but wouldn’t be coming back to O Tank. He’d had his hair cut short and was now a trustee living in a ward on another floor. I was stunned. Later that day during dinner at the mess hall, an O Tank prisoner sitting across from me started talking about Eldon, saying he was a snitch. I shot up instantly, knocking my tray off the edge of the table with a clatter.
“That’s fucking bullshit!” I said. Everyone at the surrounding tables stopped eating and stared as I stood there. “He’d never snitch!”
The man backed off. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong. I just think it’s strange he punches out a guard one day and now he’s a trustee.”
To have a “snitch jacket”—the stigma of having given information to police or guards—is a virtual death sentence for a prisoner. It’s a brand that follows a person to any prison across the country where he may serve time someday, and there’s no way to erase it. That’s why I had to stop that rumor before it started. But I still wanted to find out what happened. I wanted to see Eldon somehow and talk with him about it.
The next morning, I wrote a note to the guard on duty saying I wanted to transfer out of O Tank and become a trustee. The funny thing is I had written several notes like that before, beginning with my first day in O Tank, when I said I’d made a mistake. I didn’t know what O Tank was. I wanted to work. I wanted to go to Lacy or to the honor farm. All my letters had been ignored. But this time was different. Within an hour, the guard called me out of my cell to talk about my transfer.
“So, you’re ready to work?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “The sooner the better.” A short time later I was back in Cell 2 rolling up my bedding. Wayne came up to me.
“What is this?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“I’m getting the hell out of here,” I said. “I’m going to be a trustee. I’m hoping maybe I can get transferred to Lacy after that.”
He was astounded. “Why the hell would you want to do that?” he said. “They’re all a bunch of assholes at Lacy.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just can’t stand never getting to go outside. I really hate this place. I want some fresh air and sunshine. I want to be able to see birds again, you know?”
“Yeah, I know that’s important to you,” he said, frowning. “But you’re making a big mistake.”
I ignored him as I pulled my hawk pictures down from the wall and gathered together my toothbrush and razor and Eldon’s cigar box.
“Well, don’t forget, Slick,” said Wayne. “We got to get together again on the streets when we’re both out of here. I got big plans.”
“I’ll definitely keep in touch,” I said. “See you around.” I turned and saw Cruz sitting at the table where I’d first seen him. “I hope everything works out okay for you, Cruz,” I said. “And I hope I see you again sometime.” He stood up and embraced me. “I hope so, too,” he said.
And with that I was out of it. After more than two months I walked up the stairs and out of O Tank and never saw the place (or Wayne) again.
* * *
Eldon did a double take when he saw me walk into the mess hall for the first time in my new trustee sweatshirt. We were both gold shirts now, which meant we were trustees who worked only on the first floor. His group was just getting up to leave as I was lining up for food. I barely recognized him at first without his long hair and bandanna. They’d given him a buzz cut before letting him be a trustee. Only prisoners in O Tank or in the cells for unsentenced inmates could have long hair at the county jail. The barber did the same to me, although my hair had been nowhere near as long as Eldon’s. The guard took me downstairs to the barbershop—a cell with a barber’s chair inside—and asked the inmate who worked there to cut my hair.
“He’s from O Tank,” the guard said. The haircutter winked at him and pulled out the electric clippers. He switched the power on and buzzed it across my head like he was mowing a lawn—the shortest haircut I’ve ever had.
After that the guard took me to get my bedding and my trustee sweatshirt and showed me where I’d be staying, in an open ward instead of a cell. It was still a sterile place with a door the guards locked at night, but we had a little more freedom. When we got off work, we could hang around a large common area and watch television, play cards, read, or talk to other prisoners.
I finally got to see Eldon that evening after work. (I was a custodian mopping the holding cells and hallways on the first floor and doing other menial work.) His face looked like it had been roughed up. Although it was mostly healed, he still had a few faded bruises and scabs. He also had a huge bandage on his right thumb. He’d already had a badly infected thumb for a few weeks in O Tank, but it looked worse now. We sat at a table together in the common area.
“So, you beat up Twiggy?” I said.
He smiled. “I feel bad about that,” he said. “Too bad you weren’t there to stop me.” We both laughed. He told me how tense he was after two or three days in the hole, and then his infected thumb flared up again. He showed it to the guards, and they arranged to take him downstairs later so the medic could examine it. Twiggy was one of the guards who took him out of his cell, and he gave Eldon a little shove as he walked past him.
“I snapped,” said Eldon. “I just turned around and tackled him, and we both went to the ground.” The other two guards were on him instantly, but Eldon was in such a rage, they couldn’t budge him off Twiggy—until one of them grabbed hold of his infected thumb and squeezed with all his might. Eldon nearly feinted from the pain. As soon as they got him off Twiggy, they beat him senseless and threw him back into the hole.
“You know, Twiggy didn't press charges or anything," said Eldon. "He came back later and apologized . . . said he was out of line. Can you believe that? If it’d been Cutter . . . I don’t know.”
Eldon told me he had to see his probation officer a couple of days after that, and the man laid it out straight for him. He had never before had to violate the probation of someone currently serving time, but he was about to do it with Eldon—which would mean he would immediately start serving the state-prison sentence that had been suspended as part of the terms of his probation. But he offered him one final chance. If Eldon would stop being such an incorrigible rebel—if he would cut his hair, become a trustee, and try to become a more productive, positive member of the inmate population—his probation would not be violated. And Eldon agreed, which, for him, was an amazing act of contrition. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the fact that Twiggy apologized to him. He was impressed by that and felt bad that he had attacked him.
The next day brought a surprise: Cruz showed up in the trustee common area. He had transferred from O Tank. “Wayne was driving me crazy,” he said. “He wanted me to join his damn army and go live in the hills someplace.” We all laughed. It was great having the three of us back together again. And after spending a couple of months in O Tank, this place seemed like a holiday resort. I’ll never forget how great it was being able to take a can of trash outside to a dumpster for the first time. I couldn’t see much. It was in a small asphalt-covered area with a thirty-foot wall blocking my view. But I was out in the fresh air and sunshine, and for the first time in weeks I felt alive. And the guards let us go up to a fenced-in exercise area on top of the jail a couple of days a week. There we could play shuffleboard and other games or just lay in the sun relaxing. At the time, it seemed as good as being on a cruise ship.
After three weeks of being a trustee, I found out I was being transferred to Theo Lacy in a couple of days. Suddenly I had mixed feelings. This was something I’d been wanting for the entire time I’d been in jail. But now, when I finally had a chance to go there, I felt conflicted. I had friends now. I felt reasonably comfortable with my environment. But now, once again I’d be going off into the unknown.
I told Eldon and Cruz that evening. “That’s great,” said Eldon. “That’s what you wanted all along,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, wistfully.
“Hey, you’ll do fine,” he said.
“That’s right, Slick,” said Cruz. “You don’t want to be in this damn place anymore.”
But it was sad. We’d become like a family. I knew that if someone attacked me, Eldon and Cruz—and Wayne, too, for that matter—would throw themselves into the fray to help me, against the most hopeless odds. And I felt the same way. We all knew that instinctively. You don’t see that kind of devotion in day-to-day life. I suppose it’s the kind of camaraderie soldiers experience in combat. I would have died for those guys in a heartbeat back then. Hell, I’d do it now. Only I’m sure Eldon is long dead. And Wayne’s probably a whacked-out survivalist in the mountains of Idaho someplace with his own squad of trained killers. Cruz might have made it. I like to think he’s sitting on a porch someplace singing to his grandkids.
The night before I left, the three of us got together. Eldon had somehow got hold of a bottle of raisin jack some guys working in the kitchen had made. It was awful. We mixed it with water but it still scorched my throat and left me with a killer headache the next day. We laughed like giddy children that night until tears streamed down our cheeks, and it was good. It was the best. And then it was lights out. And then it was time for breakfast. And then I was climbing aboard another sheriff’s bus with wire-mesh-covered windows and driving away from the main jail. And once again in my life I was leaving friends who I knew I’d never see again.
From left to right, Gene Sparling, Bobby Harrison, and Tim Gallagher at Bayou de View, shortly after their Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting on February 27, 2004.
