Straight Life - Art Pepper [153]
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