Monkeyshines
chapter eleven a

Prison was a concentrated dose of the street. Every religious, political and ethnic group was represented. A French philosopher has suggested that the real function of prisons has always been to inventory and study the population of the society they serve. He said prisons were so expensive, they'd have disappeared if they served no useful purpose, and they'd never been cost-effective as crime control or even for suppressing political dissent.
I met an army major doing time for selling tanks out of the side door at the Pentagon to a customer from the middle east. I met a rapist who claimed forty seven victims. At 5 pm, when the secretaries gathered at the bus stop twelve floors down on the street, he'd climb up to the windows, hang from the bars, and ogle like a geek at those secretaries. This Chicano fellow claimed that he raped Anglo women as a kind of guerilla warfare. This rapist, Florio, was a casual friend of mine in there, but we all knew he was sick.
I was in L.A. County Jail, the old building. Prisoners served one year sentences or less, or were bound for other state or federal prisons. New prisoners mingled in unsorted bunches pending transfer. I began my five year sentence--1822 days. The first days were by far the hardest. Sanity was a mosquito that had slipped inside my netting where it buzzed noisily.
I was treated with more respect than most prisoners my age. When asked, "What are you in for?" I could say, "Smuggling." That was far more prestigious than car theft or burglary. I quickly learned to maximize the scope of my criminal deeds. Up to a point. The guy in the cell next to me had sexually assaulted and dismembered a little girl.
One Chicano was serving a year for threatening, while drunk in a tavern, to shoot the president. Another was a heroin dealer who said he'd run a million dollars worth of junk through his arm. He shared a cell with Florio, the rapist. They were partners in a general store they ran from their cell. They sold wham-whams, zoo-zoos, apples, pies, oranges, grass, smack, cards (rental only), cigarettes (the basic measure of wealth in prison), etc. They were very successful.
There were mostly Chicanos and Blacks in that L.A. County Jail. I did share a cell for a time with an old Chinese man. He squatted inscrutably in the corner and spoke little English. He'd arranged for payments to his family before he strapped the kilos of heroin on his legs for the flight to L.A.
My first accommodation was a mattress on the floor of a two-man cell that already held two other guys. My head rested at the base of the commode. It was most unhygienic but safer than lying with my head by the bars. With seniority came a bunk. I sold my first one for a dollar and stayed on the floor. Eventually, I kept a bunk and a cellmate. I shared my home sweet home with a gigantic Black Muslim boxer from Boston who said park the car like this: "Pahk the Cah." He called himself Alex Kennedy.
He told me casually, "White people ah the devil, man."
"I'm not the devil, man," I said, but Kennedy figured he could hardly trust me to admit to such a charge.
My brown eyes were in my favor. It was the blue-eyed devils he distrusted most. Kennedy always wanted to box with me, and he made me crazy, punching me in the shoulder, real hard, and saying, "C'mon, devil, let's box."
One night, I crept out of my bunk, and put a razor blade tight against his jugular vein. I whispered to him as he awoke, "If you keep fucking with me, I'll cut your throat, I promise."
It was pretty scary for us both. He screamed at me for a while, but by then we knew we were going to be friends, and even now I miss him.
‘New fish’ going into prison were watched for signs. If they tolerated abuse, they got it. Some cons advised new fish to punch hell out of the first guy who talked to them and never accept gifts. My second day inside, two young Black guys came to my cell with lovey-dovey phrases and sexual intentions. During the ensuing punch-up, I mutilated their shirts. As we fought, a guard called one of them for a visit. A torn up shirt was a trip to the hole (segregation), so the guy called for the visit said, "Give me your shirt, man."
"Here," I said, tearing the front off my shirt and handing it to him. We didn't have much to do with each other after that.
After three weeks, Kennedy and I became cell block trustees. We got food from kitchen trustees and dispensed it to the other prisoners in our cellblock, one tier at a time. Once a guy raced out of his cell and tried to get chow out of turn. My position demanded that I do something. (Was it Oscar Wilde who said position and positioning were everything in life?) I told the guy to go back to his cell and wait his turn. He told me to go fuck myself. I grabbed his tray and slammed it down on the metal shelf that ran along the bars.
I shouted, "Listen, you son of a bitch, there's no way I can let this happen, and you know it."
"You and me, man, in my cell, later," he said ominously.
This upset me, and I lost my temper.
"Fuck you and your cell later, let's do it right here, now."
I advanced on him, livid with rage and adrenalin. He fled. We got along after that. He’d been wrong, and he and everyone else knew it, and I never pimped him about it.
While a trustee, I gained some small economic success. Previously I could only sell my single pork chop for a quarter. Now Kennedy and I had left-overs in quantity. All the mashed potatoes and gravy we could eat. (What a super tranquilizer a large glob of mashed potatoes and gravy was for me.)
While I was tranquilized on potatoes, my card sense got good, and I challenged Slim at Tonk. Slim was a tall, skinny Black dude (dude was the most common synonym for man or guy, except among the Chicanos who said esse, pronounced essay). Slim had been waiting eight months for trial on a check fraud charge, and he was a terrific card player. His standing in the community came from this. He was the card champ. He came in broke; couldn't even make bail. Now he had a wad of winnings. I was broke. I got a stake selling pork chops and had a lucky streak. I won all Slim's money in a six hour game of Tonk. I felt lousy for Slim, but it sure felt good to beat the champ. To soothe my conscience, I loaned him money.
I was called out of the cellblock one day, given my street clothes, chained up hand and foot, and delivered to Lompoc FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) on the Santa Barbara peninsula. Near Travers Air Force base. (Prisoners at Lompoc assembled components for NASA's missile program at Travers.) It was a medium security prison. My first view of it saw the guard towers, barbed wire, guns - all that prison junk.
Then I saw the growing things everywhere and smelled the Eucalyptus that perfumed the air. The weather was terrific. One day a fog came in suddenly as everyone walked to work. The whistle blew, signaling emergency lock-up and count. Thirteen guys were missing. Some ran home, some ran away from home.
My first Lompoc friend was Chico Vasquez, a skinny Hawaiian bank robber. We arrived together from L.A. He said he’d robbed 14 banks, and he was a little nuts. He said he’d had shock treatment at the prison in Springfield, but he was a friend to me.
We went to the chow hall that first day, loaded our trays and sat at a table that had a dirty tray left on it. I moved it to an empty table. While Chico and I got water, a gorilla put the dirty tray back on our table. I put the dirty tray back on the gorilla's table while he got water. Chico and I went for napkins, and got back to find the dirty tray on our table again. The gorilla was at home as I carried the dirty tray toward him, and a friend sat with him. The friend got up quickly and intercepted me. He said there'd be a fight if I put the tray back on his table again, but that a fight would be a bad idea. Nearly everyone in the room knew fighting in the chow hall was called inciting to riot, punishable by up to five years. I didn't know this.
"Can you find another way to go?" the gorilla's friend asked in a respectful voice. The gorilla was half in his chair, half getting up to fight. His eyes bulged.
"I don't work here," I said. Then, more loudly, "This is not my tray, and I don't work here."
I threw the tray on the floor between the gorilla and me with great care, so it traveled at just the right speed to just the right place, so everyone could see this as a cooperative, closing statement on my part rather than as an escalation. The gorilla sat down and I retreated to my table. The guards did not react.
Chico's Hawaiian friends knew the gorilla, and some weeks later Chico said the gorilla had planned to kill me to soothe his pride. Chico said he had his friends put out the word that if the gorilla killed me, Chico would kill him. Would Chico have killed him? I couldn't say. Chico never asked me for anything, though, and I never caught him lying. I believed he might kill that gorilla, if he felt like it. There were days when Chico carried a deep, animosity around inside him. On those days, he wore a black glove on one hand. He called it his low-rider glove. Everyone knew to give him extra room on those days. I thought it was a nice piece of poetry, and tremendously good manners on Chico's part.
We stayed first in a dorm called A&O (Admission and Orientation), a veritable country club. The roomy showers had tiled floors and walls, we got good soap and plenty of hot water. In L.A. County, once a week, a million guys all showered at the same time. During that five minute pig wash operation, people were especially vulnerable to stabbings and beatings.
In Lompoc, we had fresh air, too. In the six weeks I was in L.A., everyone in our cellblock stood on the roof one Thursday for fifteen minutes of sun and fresh air. That was the only time.
The guards at Lompoc seemed less mean. One karate dwarf seemed to enjoy provoking inmates, but mostly the guards seemed to be working stiffs. One homosexual guard seemed to be living a pretty nervous life waiting for the inevitable exposure. New guards were much like new inmates. They stumbled along until they found a niche.
I moved to J-block, and Chico went to K-block where the Hawaiians were concentrated. J-block was the hip neighborhood, dopers and college types lived there with draft evaders, chemists, astrologers, professors, Jews and Gypsies. Home at last. Even our guard was a pleasant fellow who put on a virtuoso performance during a two-day riot.
The riot started over a punk. A punk, or sissy, was a male who took a submissive role in sex. A Hawaiian sold a punk to a Black. The punk loved the Hawaiian and refused to transfer. The Black was embarrassed and got violent with the punk, precipitating a dispute with the Hawaiian over the terms of the sale. Sides formed on the question, and a riot was held.
I was doing my job cleaning the warden's office, and reading the scraps of paper I found there, when the siren screamed. I looked out the window and saw guards scrambling out of the administration building, fumbling with their helmets and clubs. I felt sorry for one older, balding guard. He was forty pounds overweight, and his face reddened and his eyes got all screwed up as he puffed toward the fray. He looked like he wished he had some other kind of job just then.
As the riot progressed, more and more guards arrived. Eventually, they pushed the prisoners out of the recreation yard and back into the main building. They funneled them from there down the central corridor leading to the cell blocks. Prisoners ran a gauntlet of boots, clubs and fists from the yard door to their cell block gates. Rioter and non-rioter alike streaked for the safety of their cells.
Then came lock-up, which could last hours or days, depending on how long the prisoners screamed, threw stuff through the bars, started fires, etc. J-block was cool. A couple bottles were broken, and there was a little yelling, but quiet came to us long before it reached the rest of the joint. Our guard spent hours going from cell to cell with coffee, sugar, books, hot water, and doing errands.
Prisoners saw it as obvious that being a guard was a crummy job. Some guards seemed to hide from this judgment. They were considered cold-assed, triple-zero hacks. They seemed to peck at everyone and got pecked a lot in return. The basic prison wisdom was, "What goes around comes around." The main philosophical view was existentialist. "What it is, Jim?" "It is what it is, Jim; that's what it is."
Scandal rocked J-block with the conversion of Papa Two Bulls, an Indian who squired one of the more polished sissies. Two Bulls and his sissy were seen one night making out in the shower. It wasn't clear who was taking the dominant role, so some people started thinking Two Bulls might be a girl sometimes. It profoundly disturbed the Indian community. Two Bulls had been one of their leading citizens, but because of the shower incident, he was sharply reduced in rank.
The debate on the issue caused me to reflect on the research done with monkeys. In the wild, they demonstrated very little homosexuality. In the hyper-structured society of cage life, however, monkeys screwed the lock on the door, light fixtures, and other monkeys in ever more innovative ways. I didn't see much difference between monkeys and humans. In Kipling's Jungle Book, monkeys were called the Bandar-Log.
"Mowgli," said Baloo the Bear, "Thou hast been talking with the Bandar-Log, the Monkey People, the people without a law, the people who eat everything. That is a great shame."
"They had pity on me. No one else cared," said Mowgli.
"They lied. They have always lied," said Baloo. "Listen, man-cub, I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the people of the Jungle - except the monkey folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcaste. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend they are a great people about to do great affairs. But the falling of a nut or a twig turns their minds and all is forgotten. We of the Jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkey drinks, we do not hunt where they hunt, we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-Log until today?"
"No," said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now that Baloo was finished.
"The Jungle People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw filth and nuts on our heads. The Monkey People are forbidden," said Baloo, "forbidden to the Jungle People. Remember."
"Forbidden," said Bagheera the Black Panther, "But I still think Baloo should have warned you about them."
They were always going to have a leader and laws and customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories would not hold over from day to day, and so they compromised things by saying, "What the Bandar-Log think now, the jungle will think later." This comforted them a great deal.
So did humans appear to me. Lost in the day-to-day struggle for attention and gratification.
There was a psychology experiment that crystalized the matter for me: a great pile of bananas was set in the path of a group of foraging chimps. Ordinarily, these chimps spent their days collecting and roughly sharing adequate supplies of food. When they encountered the massive surplus, they went berserk. They had a banana rush, and many bananas were destroyed and many monkeys were hurt in the process. I try to beware of this tendency in myself and others.
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Trying to find security and show greatness through domination and control of others is Monkeyshine #1.
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Back in J-block, I was a problem for the Classification and Parole department because I was on transfer status. I was bound for a prison in Minnesota, near Grandma's house. Mom moved back there after she and my dad divorced. I could be transferred anytime, so classification was a waste of time. I got a job washing dishes, but I didn't like being up to my armpits in soapy water with everybody's dirty dishes and leftover food scraps in it. It was hot and it stank. Twice I put forks in the garbage disposal, and they reassigned me to mopping the chow hall floor. This was only boring at first, but then the chow hall goon followed me every step of the way, pointing to spots I missed, and telling me to hurry up, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. In a fit of frustration, I threw my mop across the room, glared at the guard, and said, "I'll do my five years in the hole, I'm all mopped out."
It hadn't occurred to me that the prison had reasons of their own for not wanting me in their hole for five years. It was a small hole. And it was usually almost full. The hole was called segregation, or I-block at Lompoc, for Isolation block. Like most holes, it was an empty concrete box. Sometimes I was put in segregation naked. One hole I was in during the winter had an open window. I couldn't reach it to close it, so I froze. The hole could be a private chapel, a psychedelic experience, or a madhouse. Instead of going to the hole after throwing my mop, I got a new job assignment, cleaning the warden's office. A cushy job. Amazing.
I learned more astrology at Lompoc, from a stoner Elf, named Jeff Munoz. And I learned how to chant. Fifty guys sat in a circle on the ground in the recreation yard and practiced chanting to levitate a gun tower. It didn't work that day. Musicians, magicians, ministers, scholars, jugglers and clowns all together created an aura of love and peace there in the prison. We watched the 1968 Democratic National (Bandar-Log) Convention in Chicago on TV. There were criminals in prison, to be sure, but it wasn't simply a matter of whether one was a prisoner or a guard.
An acid chemist was serving a year for destruction of evidence. He was accorded the respect due an alchemist/priest. He was arrested on a very weak charge, as no sales or drugs were in evidence. The narcs vacuumed his pockets, and said, "The dust on this piece of paper is going to have marijuana in it, and it will be enough to put you away."
Axel, the chemist, looked at the dust, smiled, and blew the dust onto the narc and the floor. He got a year for that, a criminal record, permanent exposure to narcs needing a collar, political excommunication, humiliation, great pressure on his family, and possibly a sudden violent death and dehumanization in the prison system. Fair? Useful?
Axel's bust reminded me of a near miss I’d had driving in San Clemente, CA, with two philosophy professors from the University of California at Irvine. I'd been an ‘usher’ for them at a lecture given that day by Bruce Franklin, a serious out-of-the-closet communist, who'd recently seen an armed showdown between a group of workers and the Oakland police where the police had backed off. The Irvine philosophy department thought Franklin might have something to say that American students ought to hear. Afterwards, as I was driven home, we passed a police car that was hiding in a shadow. One of us paid too much attention to it. This acted like a signal to the cop. He caught up to us and pulled us over. We stood by the car while he searched it. He came out of the car with a seed and an exultant look on his face.
"Marijuana seed looks like to me. You fella’s are in trouble. Possession of marijuana's a serious offense."
He put the seed on the fender of the car, took out a pocket knife, and seemed to try to slice into that seed. Well, a marijuana seed is as hard as a BB. ZING! It shot into the dark. The policeman's face fell.
I said, "Well, there goes the evidence."
If there was a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, my smart-ass comment was it, but the cop was truly empty-handed and had to let us go. No harm came from my indiscreet and provocative comment, except possibly to the next guy this policeman stopped.