Straight Life - Art Pepper [152]
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