Straight Life - Art Pepper [81]
Once a week they'd have a horrible stew. Instead of potatoes, it had parsnips and turnips in it, just awful. But there would be a little bit of stew meat. So when the pot of stew came, the trustees and the people in the number two and three cells, the strongest or most popular people, would put up a rope at the end of the number three cell and say, "Deadline," so nobody from the back could walk up there. Then they'd take the pot into the number one cell, take out all the meat and put it on a tray, and they'd keep the bread, too. They'd eat all they wanted and send the remains to the back cells, and then they'd sell sandwiches, late at night, to the other guys for fifty cents apiece. Any little treat that came in special, like peanut butter, the trustees would hide and sell. There were vendors that came around selling cigarettes and books and candy, and when the candy man came the guys in the front would butt in the line and crowd back in and buy up all the candy. Later they'd sell it to the grasshoppers and the weaker, less known fiends for fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five cents a bar, when the candy was five cents a bar.
Sometimes, before he brings a new guy in, the guard will say, "Well, nothing better happen to this guy." That's the same as saying, "He's a rat." So when the rat comes in first they take his money and later on they get him. They make him sit on the floor in one of the back cells and put his legs up on the bottom bunk, and someone gets on the top bunk and jumps down on his knees and busts them backwards. They then kick him in the head. Blood comes out of his ears and eyes and nose and mouth, and he has to say, "Squeal, squeal. I'm a rat."
Two guys came in one time and they said, "There's these two rats that are going to come here soon. They turned .over on us and got us busted, and if we leave before they get here, really take care of them." Everybody said okay, and these guys were shipped out to max at the farm, Biscaluse Center. A couple of days later here come two more guys and they had the same names as the first two said had turned over on them, so before they could say anything the guys in the tank just beat them to death. Well, one guy died later in the county hospital. Right after that, another guy came in and said, "Did So-and-so and So-and-so come through here?" They said, "Yeah, we really took care of the two rats." But the new guy said, "They weren't the rats!" And it was the ones that had come through first that were the informers! They immediately sent word out to max and they got them out there, killed one of them and beat the other nearly to death. But the poor guys that weren't rats ... And there were many cases like that. If somebody didn't like you, they'd just make up a false jacket. There were always people who were hanging bum jackets, people who were weak or were jealous or had got burned by somebody or thought some guy had balled their old lady. So you were always afraid because you didn't know who was going to say what. Knowing yourself, that you were alright, had no meaning as far as those people went. Sometimes they'd just beat people up because there was nothing else to do.
I thought the army was bad. Now here I was in jail. The army was a warm place in comparison. I was lonesome; I wanted love; I was losing Patti; I wanted to cry. But there was no privacy at all in jail. There's eyes always watching. Even at night when you're trying to sleep there's people not sleeping; they're sick; they're watching. There's always lights on because of security. I wanted to pour my heart out to somebody; probably a lot of the people felt the same way, but you had to be strong