Straight Life - Art Pepper [165]
Mr. Williams was a good person. A lot of times the six of us, the convicts that worked in the paymaster's office, we'd do little things that were illegal. We'd steal a steak from the ODR, the officers' dining room, or we'd take the food out of the trash cans from the gas chamber or get a cheeseburger or a chocolate malt illicitly from the snack bar. We'd hide this stuff in the toilet in the back of the office. We'd eat in there or cook the steak in there, and sometimes Mr. Williams would catch us; he wouldn't come all the way in but I'd know he smelled the food. And he'd give us a pass. We knew that he knew, but he never busted us for any of these things-and these were beefs that go against you as far as getting in an honor block, or they can take away your movie privileges. If you get too many they can cancel your board appearance.
Sometimes I'd be playing music in the yard on a weekend, and I'd look over, and there would be Mr. Williams, standing unobtrusively against the wall listening. I'd catch his eye, and he'd nod at me, and then the next day at work he'd say, "Yeah, I heard you yesterday. You were smokin', man." Every now and then he'd give me a message from somebody. "Sonny Stitt says to say hello." Mr. Williams had mentioned that I worked for him in San Quentin, and Sonny had said, "Give him my best and tell him to get out here and start blowin'!" He'd boost my spirits like that, so I knew he was for me, but he was cool enough to know that you can't be a righteous convict and make it in San Quentin if you have any association with a guard, which is what he was. It wouldn't be good for your reputation. He realized that, and I think that's why he was so aloof. I think he would have liked to have really been friends.
There was a guy that came into the paymaster's office all the time, Sergeant Metzger or Metzler, a big, square-headed guy. He had a Will Rogers air and he was real kindly looking, but I had strange feelings about him. I got weird vibes. One day after he left I mentioned it to this cat that worked in the office. "Who is that guy, man? I just can't figure him out, that Sergeant Metzger." He said, "Oh, man, you've never heard of him?" He went over to the pay book, where there was a printout with all the guards' names, and he said, "Look at this." By Metzger's name there were all these extra figures-"$175.00; $175.00." I looked under the code and it said, "death house duty." That was the gas chamber. He told me, "He's the guy that has worked every execution for the last twenty years, him and another guard that they pick at random."
They had two slots leading into the gas chamber and they had two guards, Sergeant Metzger and another guy. Each guard had a pellet of cyanide like a large jelly bean. On a nod from the deathwatch lieutenant, when the victim was all strapped in with the hood on and ready, at that nod they both dropped their pellets. The pellets go down little ramps and fall into pots which are out of the guards' eyesight. One contains water and one contains acid. In the pot that has the water nothing happens, but in the other pot the acid eats away the coating on the pellet and the gas is released and kills the person. The guards don't know which of them is responsible, but this guy had been doing it for twenty