The Firehouse Journals

Introduction

Nobody wants a lawyer on their yard. That’s what Sweet Tuesday told me a few days after I hit Easy Yard. She’s my prison counselor, so it’s probably a lie. Everything in prison is a lie. But it had a certain ring of truth, a plausibility that made it believable. Lawyers are a major pain in the ass, especially in prison.

Anyway, that’s supposedly how I wound up in the Wasco State Prison Firehouse after only a couple of weeks on Easy Yard. One moment I’m in my orange clown suit walking through the Cattle Chute to Easy Yard and the next thing I’m out the gate in my blues, walking across the parking lot to the Firehouse, my new home for the duration of my sentence of sixty-four months.

Why I got shot through Easy Yard so fast, I’ll probably never know. Like I said, everything in prison is a lie. You never get the straight story. Everything has a spin, a twist, on it. The Warden lies, the Fire Captains lie, the Knuckle Draggers lie, the Free Staff lies, your bunky lies, the other prisoners lie, everyone lies in prison. That’s just the way it is.

So as you read this book, keep this in mind: This is a work of fiction. Except for the parts that are true. At least that’s what I told the Goon Squad when they pulled me out of The Hole to interrogate me about this book.

Catching a Chain to Wasco

The yard at the Santa Barbara County Jail Farm is a triangular piece of asphalt covering an area the size of a basketball court between two of the dorm buildings, the perimeter of which I walked for miles and miles every day I had yard time. If there was no fog, I could see the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands in the near distance through the chain link fence. Because of the way the coastline bends in Santa Barbara, you think you are looking West towards the ocean, but in fact you are looking South. It’s easy to lose your sense of direction in California.

I was on the Farm for three months awaiting sentencing. When I returned from court for the last time, I was sent to Cell E-8 in the Tanks, an eighteen bunk holding cell inside the main jail. It has three group cells with six bunks each, as well as a toilet and a sink inside each group cell. Each group cell opens-up into a Day Room where there are tables, seats, a television, two showers and a telephone, all surrounded by more steel bars. From across the corridor, thin window slits would lighten and darken. It was the only way to tell if it was day or night.

I was escorted to the Tanks by two CO’s who pushed me into the sally port, a small passageway between two sets of iron barred doors. The inner door opened, I stepped into the Tank, and the CO’s immediately left, leaving me standing there facing a dozen inmates, all of whom were staring at me. One of them walked up to me and immediately introduced himself as River, my new bunky. He told me it was my lucky day. There was an open bunk in his group cell, up on top under a florescent light which was always on. Well, it’s a whole lot better than sleeping in a boat out in the Day Room. He pointed to a stack of plastic bins in the corner. A few days ago, all of those were full. It really sucked. Nobody wanted the boaters to use their toilets and sinks. It nearly cracked off.

One of the CO’s from the Farm brought me my stuff a few hours later. He dumped it on the table in the Day Room and had me sign a piece of paper. I saw that all of my instant coffee was gone, except for half a jar. River knew all about this phenomenon. This shit happens because you ride the jail bus to and from the courthouse with twenty to thirty inmates and there are always other Farmers in the courtrooms watching what happens. As soon as a Farmer is sentenced to mainline, all the guys who were in the courtroom know his stuff is fair pickings.

Why? How do they know?

Because everyone knows you are not going back to the Farm after being sentenced to state prison. So they can get into your property and take whatever they want. He looked on from his rack as I unpacked my property into a metal drawer under my bunk, thinking that he was right. The guy I was chained to on the bus ride back was a Farmer I vaguely knew and he asked me what happened. I told him I got five years, four months. He just said Wow. They broke you off, and that was it.

While still sitting on his rack watching, River said You made some friends on the Farm.

What makes you say that?

You got most of your stuff. Your homies looked after you, bro. Most of the time, nothing comes over from the Farm. This was a big plus in River’s world, which was now my world. Be good to your homies and they will be good to you. Most of the time, anyway.

So I sat in the Tanks with River, watching inmates come and go every day for over a month. He made a chess set out of tissue paper and I bought a checker game through the commissary. We must have played hundreds of games on that board. All through Christmas and New Years I just sat in the Tanks waiting to catch my chain to Wasco.

River told me all about it, the long ride from jail to prison in a Grey Ghost, explaining it to me while we sat in the Day Room, playing yet another game of chess. He was trying to execute the Sicilian Defense to my opening move and was lost in total concentration. To get lost in concentration is how inmates leave this place for a few moments of transitory happiness. Go somewhere else in your mind and try to stay there as long as possible. The look on his face changed ever so slightly as River came back to our grim surroundings, played his gambit and continued with our conversation. Back in the day, they were all battleship grey with paint left-over from World War II. You could always spot a prison bus, and people just called them Grey Ghosts. Now they’re painted to blend-in with Greyhound buses so people won’t notice how many of them are out on the highway. But the name stuck. That’s how it is in prison. Nothing really changes.

River was like me, waiting to catch his chain to Wasco. This was his third term. He had violated parole, again, so he was being sent back for nine more months of correction and rehabilitation. His paperwork had not been processed by his Parole Officer, so he had been languishing in this cell for months. I can’t wait to hit mainline he would say. Why am I grinnin’? Because I’m hanging with my homies! He went on and on, extolling all of the increased benefits of mainline over county, how it was a major bump up for the inmate, but it also had its dark side. He didn’t elaborate much on that point.

As soon as your feet hit the ground at Wasco, you’re doing half time. So the sooner you get there, the sooner you leave, he said over and over. County days were not as valuable as Wasco days, a fact widely circulated in the Tank as I found that quite a few of us held one-way tickets for the Grey Ghost ride to Wasco. River was knowledgeable on the subject of sentencing credits and made it quite clear that I would start doing third time as soon as my feet hit the ground at a Fire Camp somewhere up in the mountains of California.

You just got to get through training as fast as possible he told me. They train all the Fire Camp inmates at Susanville or Jamestown, so that’s where you’ll go after a few months at Wasco. But you don’t get any third time until your feet hit the ground at Fire Camp, so you got to get to Fire Camp fast. I just looked on as he continued explaining the intricacies of incarceration in these facilities. Find out who the clerk is. He’s an inmate, but he keeps the list. Take care of him and he’ll move your name up the list.

I paid close attention to these and other survival tips until around midnight a few days after New Year’s, when a female CO walked outside my cell, yelled my name, told me to be ready to go in a few minutes, and stuffed a piece of paper between the bars. I had been sleeping on my rack, a towel over my eyes to block the constant overhead light and rolled-up tissue paper in my ears to block the ever-present screaming, yelling and clanging from inside the jail. But I heard her, along with River and he got up as I dressed and packed-up my stuff.

You can’t take much with you on the Grey Ghost to Wasco. Ten envelopes with stamps attached, a writing pad without cardboard backing, a golf pencil, two books, and the piece of paper hand-delivered by the CO. That’s about it, so as is the jailhouse custom, I gave away all of my coffee, toothpaste, deodorant, checker set and food items to River, my bunky and the undisputed co-chess champion of the world.

River opened the paperwork. It’s your body receipt from county to mainline. The state now owns you. The CO’s here are just the deliverymen. He handed it back to me and I bundled it up with all my other stuff so I could carry everything in one hand. I shook his hand with my other, telling him to be sure to call my wife Nina in the morning when the phone was turned on. He said he would as he scurried back to his rack and I walked out into the Day Room for the last time. This was one place I was not going to miss.

I sat alone out in the Day Room as everyone else slept, waiting for the CO while seated on the stainless-steel seat welded to the stainless-steel table upon which River and I had passed so much time. I got ready to take the next jump, the plan Nina and I discussed during our daily telephone calls. The first jump was to Wasco. From there, the second jump would be to fire camp training. The third jump would be to Fire Camp. The final jump would be home, and that is what we talked about, the day we would be together. We were both going through the worst experience of our lives and those daily telephone calls were our only link to sanity.

River had warned me that there were no telephones in Reception at Wasco. You just sit there until they classify you. Once you get classified, they send you to wherever you’re gonna’ be for the next few years. He told me that I would be in limbo for several months, with no phones, no mail, nothing. Just sitting in Reception until they decide what to do with me. We arranged that after I caught my chain, River would call Nina the next morning to let her know I was gone.

When I first got hooked-up four months earlier, all of my street clothes were placed in a bag at the county jail with my booking number on it. Nina was able to retrieve my watch, wallet and wedding ring from county, but they would not give her any of my street clothes. These were in a brown bag with my name and number written on it, the only other personal items going to Wasco with me.

Actually, I was anxious to get going. River’s comprehensive explanations of sentencing credits was not lost on me. When your feet hit the ground at Wasco, you start earning half-time credits, which means for every day served without incident, an extra day of good time credit is deducted from your sentence. This means you only do half your time, which in my case meant thirty two months as opposed to sixty four months of straight time. In county, it takes two days to earn one day of good-time credit, so the sooner I got to Wasco, the sooner I was going home. River had made this all very clear to me.

I was eligible for half-time because I was a Non, a non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual felon. Anyone else, except for lifers and guys on death row, serve 85% of their sentence. But Non’s only do half-time. Because of the explosion in the prison population since the eighties, most of the inmates doing time are Nons. As a Non, the theory is if you obey the rules and don’t get into any trouble, you’re already halfway to the house.

My plan was to get to Wasco, get qualified for Fire Camp, get shot out to Susanville or Jamestown for fire fighter training, and get to a Fire Camp as quickly as possible where I would try to work as a clerk. Like River said, once my feet were on the ground at Fire Camp, I would get two days of good time credit for every day served, meaning I would only have to serve a third of my remaining sentence and get home all the earlier. Anyway, that was the plan that I formulated with River during our chess games.

One of the qualifications for Fire Camp is to run two miles in twenty minutes, something I felt I could do and was one of the reasons why I had been walking like a demon at the Farm, trying to get into shape. River told me that he knew a guy who had been to Jamestown a few years back and his hustle was to run the time trials for inmates trying to get to fire camp. He would slip-on their numbered jersey, run the track, qualify, and then give them their jersey back so they could get signed-off. For his efforts, he was paid with coffee, cigarettes, and whatever else he could get. This was his hustle, and River made it clear that everyone needs a hustle when they hit mainline. It’s the only way to survive.

He knew a lot about Jamestown and all of the perks that go with an assignment to Fire Camp: No fences, better food and less fighting among the inmates. He also told me that it took a long time to get trained at Jamestown because riots were always cracking-off between the Whites and the Blacks, a state of affairs which resulted in continuous lock-downs and which required everyone to sleep with their boots on.

Why would you sleep in your boots? I asked one day as I pondered yet another chess move.

Because when a two hundred and fifty pound Crip is coming at you with a shank in the middle of the night, there’s no time to put on your boots.

I was fifty four years old, so if I could not pass the physical fitness requirements for fire camp, my back-up plan was to get transferred to the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, the nearest state prison to my home. Nina, my wife of over thirty two years, had been driving back and forth to Santa Barbara for visits every Saturday and Sunday, which meant five hours of driving a day for each one hour visit. The Men’s Colony is less than an hour away from our home, so visiting would be much easier for her and lower the stress level.

Stress. It never leaves you. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning and see you are in a cell until you fall asleep that night in the same place, it is all around you, in you and part of you. It’s the opposite of falling asleep and having a nightmare. It’s waking up and living in a nightmare every day. So it is all about surviving not only the physical threats, but also surviving the unyielding, continuous mental stress. River said that everything would be better once I hit mainline. Things chill. Better food, better visits, the ability to receive packages every three months, and a host of other lifestyle improvements he had personally experienced. Wow, I can hardly wait.

River also told me that I had to get into a car.

What the hell is a car? I asked River, not knowing all of the jailhouse slang and laboring under this disability. The more experienced inmates, which meant River and pretty much everyone except me, were always throwing-out terms and figures of speech which meant nothing to me but were universally known to everyone else. This is the lot in life of a first termer.

In prison, you have to get into a car. It’s the group of Woods from the same town.

I was not affiliated with any gang, and I’m White, so that put me automatically into the Pecker Woods, which is basically a group of White inmates who are not gang affiliated. River explained that within the Woods, the cars are organized by county. Since I lived in San Luis Obispo County, River told me that was my car in the Woods and that I should jump into that car as soon as I hit mainline.

The significance of being in a car is that you are obligated to share your stuff with other car members in need. So if one of my Wood car members did not have any deodorant, or needed some coffee, I was obligated to share mine with him, and vice-versa. Everybody in the car look-outs for their fellow car members. So when it cracks off, you best get with your car, said River. It’s prison rules, so don’t mess up or else you’ll get broken-off.

While I was thinking about all this, a CO came back to the holding cell to get me. I grabbed my stuff and walked out of the Tank for the last time and down a long corridor to a concrete holding cell where five inmates were milling around, all of us waiting to catch our chain to Wasco. I recognized a Wood from the Farm, so we started talking about our sentences and where we thought we might eventually wind-up. He was a street kid doing ten years because of a fight over an iPod in a back alley off State Street in Santa Barbara. He told me he was going to line-up with the Aryan Brotherhood once he hit mainline. I asked iPod if he believed in what they stood for and he said No, but you have to line-up with some gang, so why not the baddest? I told him I was going to go with the Woods and he told me that was a smart choice for an OG like me.

I asked What? and he said You know, original gangsta. It’s what guys like you are called inside. River had not mentioned this honorific and I was intrigued. iPod told me that OG status was achieved at 45 years of age and meant you were no longer required to join in when a riot cracked off. It’s a form of respect for someone who has lived so long under these abysmal conditions. You still have to be true to your race, but you don’t have to take flight on a rival gang member if it cracks off. iPod said rival gang members would leave me alone because I was not a threat to them. I thought it strange that River never mentioned any of this to me. So much for sleeping with my boots on.

I found all of this information to be very helpful and asked him how he knew so much about prisons. iPod said I was born in prison.

Bullshit was my reply. He said he was born in Chino Women’s Prison, conceived in the Visiting Room, and his mom was now doing life in Chowchilla for killing some Mexican Mafia members who forgot to pay their meth bill. I asked him if he was able to communicate with her and he said they could not write letters back and forth because the Knuckle Draggers would figure it out and there would be blow-back. From the way he said it, I concluded that Knuckle Draggers and blow-back were things to be avoided.

He asked me if I was taking anything in with me. I said Just this stuff, pointing to my meager collection of papers, books and a golf pencil.

iPod said No, I mean are you taking anything in with you? From my look he could tell that I had no idea what he was talking about. I’m bringing in a clavo, he said in a hushed voice. There’s no way I’m going in without something to trade. Anyway, things always go better with coke. He grinned at his humor.

We all sat in the holding cell for a couple more hours until the metal door rolled opened and we were led down another corridor in a single-file line and told to strip. There were several CO’s standing around, all wearing blue latex gloves and generally scowling at us. We prisoners got naked and the CO’s looked in our mouths, our ears, up our assess, everywhere. I guess that clavo was way up there because they didn’t find it when iPod bent over and coughed. They gave us white paper jump suits, white paper slippers, and told us to get dressed. One by one, we walked over to a footstool and kneeled on it.

A CO put shackles around our ankles and then we all lined-up again to be waist chained together and handcuffed. We shuffled out of the jail in our paper jump suits and paper slippers, into the cold January night dragging our chains, and then into the Grey Ghost for the ride to Wasco. One by one in a single file connected with the chains around our waists and ankles, we walked into the back of the bus and took our seats, trying to twist and turn into some semblance of a comfortable position. Once we were all seated, the driver locked the cage door, sealing us in the back of the bus.

Behind me I heard a round being chambered into a shotgun. If that doesn’t pucker you up, nothing will. A man’s voice shouted out All right, you muthafuckas, listen up. Anybody moves or tries to pull any kind of shit will get his head blown off. So don’t fuck around. This was the gunner speaking, the guy in a cage in the very back of the bus with a shotgun pointed at my head. This was going to be one bus ride I would never forget, no matter how hard I tried.

We all sat motionless in our seats until an inmate in a red jumpsuit, all gaffled up, was led into the bus by two CO’s and put into a single-seat cage near the front of the bus. The guy started screaming in Spanish and yelling hysterically, sticking his foot between the cage and the door so the CO’s could not shut it. He then began laughing like a maniac, switched to English and started calling the CO’s punks and bitches, the two words you never say inside jail to anybody, no matter what. All the while he was thrashing about, twisting and turning on the metal seat, kicking with his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs, and generally working himself up into a hysterical fit.

One of the CO’s pulled the wire mesh door open and began slugging the guy in the face and body, yelling Shut the fuck up, all while he was beating this inmate whose hands and feet were shackled. The other CO pulled out his taser and zapped the inmate. The inmate kept yelling and screaming gibberish, his whole body in a spasm from the 5,000 volts of electricity being pumped into him by the taser, and all the while the CO kept pounding on him with bare fists until he was bloody but quiet. The CO yanked him out of his seat, pulled up on his hands behind his back, and frog marched his limp body off the bus.

The driver, who had been sitting in the driver’s seat watching all of this, turned to the CO and asked him how they were going to write this up. The CO said He fell off the bus. At this, my cellie iPod, who was chained to me and sitting right behind me whispered under his breath I bet a lot of guys fall off this bus. When the Grey Ghost finally pulled out of the jail without mister crazy red jump suit dude, I felt a sense of relief as one part of this descent into hell was finally over and I was moving closer to eventually going home.

The bus traveled north on Highway 101 along the Gaviota Coast. I was sitting on the left-hand side and could see the reflection of the moon on the Pacific Ocean. This was the first time I had seen the moon in four months and I just kept staring out over the ocean, thinking what the hell happened to put me in a chain gang on a Grey Ghost to Wasco with a gunner itching to blow my head off with a loaded shotgun.

As we rolled up the coast, we drove through Atascadero and past the off-ramp that leads to my home. I wanted to jump out and walk. We kept driving north through Paso Robles, and I could see the coffee house my wife and I had bought a year ago, a place where we had so many good memories. Now I just looked at it in the passing darkness, knowing I would not see it again for a very long time. There go the memories.

We traveled east on Highway 46 until it split with Highway 41 at the intersection in Choalame where James Dean died driving his Porsche back in 1955. We stayed on Highway 46 and it was then up through the hills and down into the Central Valley, mile after mile, until iPod whispered There it is.

He’d seen it before, just like everyone else on this Grey Ghost except me. Off in the distance was a half-dome of yellowish light which grew larger until we cleared a grove of nut trees and saw the source. It was Wasco, all lit up by high-intensity sodium vapor lights mounted in banks on hundred foot high stanchions. Coming out of the total darkness into this blaze of light made my eyes hard to focus and I was able to make out only vague outlines of towers far across the vacant landscape between the road and the yellow glow of the prison. The Grey Ghost slowed and made a right turn down a country road, keeping the hellish glow of Wasco to my right. We drove past a group of low-lying buildings, turning right again onto the prison grounds. The street sign read Justice Avenue.

iPod saw the road sign and in a whisper said That’s who’s in here. Just us.

The sun had not yet risen, but you would not know it from the way the place was lit-up. Everything was as bright as day. On my right rose an electric fence topped with concertina razor wire. We followed its arc, which slowly curved between blue-roofed guard towers every few hundred yards. Inside the wire was another wire, and then there were row upon row of huge concrete block buildings. On my left were a bunch of industrial buildings, one of which, unbeknownst to me, was the Wasco State Prison Firehouse, sitting directly opposite the Sally Port. I would come to know it well.

iPod and His Clavo

Most people don’t pay much attention to prisons. I know I didn’t. I didn’t even know there was a difference between a jail and a prison, and I was a business lawyer for nearly thirty years. I’d watch the evening TV news, see someone convicted of a crime, and that was it. The story was over. Like most things in life, it’s not important until it happens to you. Well, here I was, sitting in a line of Grey Ghosts outside a prison, waiting to go through Reception, and it all became very important.

We moved in the slow line and I looked intently out my window for any clues on how this place worked. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Electric fences, concrete cell blocks, guard towers, metal buildings, all glaring in sharp detail under the light towers. We finally drove into the Sally Port, a big fenced-in box with two sliding gates and a guard shack. The driver cut the engine and I could hear the gunner behind me opening his hatch. And then we just sat there until a CO who was wearing a different uniform than the ones I had seen at county stepped into the front of the bus and began reading to himself from a clipboard.

That’s a Knuckle Dragger whispered iPod. Those guys will fuck you up, so be cool.

I just kept my eyes pointing forward with a blank expression on my face as the Knuckle Dragger lifted his pen and started to tick each of us off his list. A few minutes later, the driver and gunner walked up into the front of the bus and we drove into the prison as the inner gate slid open before us.

Next stop, Reception said iPod, who was now speaking a little louder since a shotgun was no longer pointed at the back of his head.

It sounds like you are going to a nice wedding or a big party. What it meant to me was that I was being received as a state prisoner and was no longer a county prisoner. My half-time officially began as soon as the state signed my body receipt. That amazed me. There is actually such a document in this day and age, a body receipt, a pink slip for a human being, which the prison signs to accept your body into its custody and puts the original into your Central File, or C-File. It documents the transfer of title to a human being from the county to the prison, which now effectively owns you, and it is the starting point for the creation of your official prison file. River had warned me about C-Files: If it isn’t in your C-File, it never happened was how he summed it all up.

My reception process began by arriving at a circular building in the middle of the prison, with a big sign in block letters over a set of doors: Reception and Receiving.

The bus driver finally killed the engine and we sat in the bus for about half an hour as the driver and the gunner went inside with their paperwork. They came back out with a Knuckle Dragger, the first one I had seen close-up. He looked a little older than me, stood a few inches shorter than me, had a white handlebar moustache with white mutton chop sideburns, and wore suspenders to keep his pants up under his massively protruding belly. The top of his head was shaved and round, his belly was round, and he weighed well north of 250 pounds.

Under my breath, I said to no one in particular He looks like a snowman.

iPod whispered back Yeah, Frosty the Snowman. This got a few laughs.

Frosty looked up from his paperwork, yelled Shut the fuck up and went back to studying his clipboard.

I thought that the name Frosty fit him well. In county, the CO’s routinely called inmates names like dumb shit, dumbo, stupid, fatso, four eyes, zit face, dopey, etc. You get the idea. I suppose it is all part of the dehumanizing process. Well, turnabout is fair play. Not that I would call them these names to their faces as it would be an automatic roll up, but connecting the guards to these farcical names always gave me a small amount of mental payback and a little psychic enjoyment, both of which are remarkably rare commodities inside prison.

Frosty had a can of pepper spray strapped to one leg of his green uniform and a bunch of manacles hanging from his belt. He stood at the front of the bus and told us to get up and walk out in single file. Like we had a choice in the matter.

It was freezing cold and I could see my breath in the pre-dawn air as I inched closer to the door, shuffling along with all of my other Grey Ghost travelers. Frosty stood at the door with a pile of paperwork attached to his clipboard. As we each stepped off the bus, he compared our faces to the pictures on one sheet of his paperwork, checking each one off. We all lined up and then we stood there for about half an hour, freezing in our paper jump suits, while Frosty walked in and out of Reception, looking confused and checking some discrepancy in his paperwork. He was probably looking for mister crazy red jump suit dude, the guy who mysteriously fell off the bus only a few hours ago, but what now seemed to me like a former life.

We were all standing there, shaking with cold, when Frosty told us to line up and kneel on a metal bench. Our leg shackles were removed, we stood up and the waist chains and handcuffs were taken off, upon which we were told to turn and face the wall and not move. Great. More cold. This lasted another half hour. At least the chains were off and I could rub my arms for warmth.

We were finally led into the Reception building by Frosty. We went through the first set of double doors and Frosty told us all to stop before going through the next set. He started yelling at us at the top of his voice and I had a hard time understanding anything he said. It was like he was reciting something he had memorized. What I got was that gangs are not allowed in prison, that we had better check ourselves if we had any thoughts of gang bangin’ in his house, we better check our homies if they started acting up, that he wasn’t going to put up with anybody’s shit, and if anybody didn’t like what he had to say, step forward, man up, and he would roll them up into The Hole for a few months.

Everybody just stood there, still shivering from the cold outside, staring at Frosty while he went on and on with his rant. When he was done, he led us through the second set of doors where we were enveloped by the warm air of Reception.

The first thing I saw was a large circular center area surrounded by a chest-high laminated counter top, behind which about a dozen Knuckle Draggers were standing around talking to each other. Against the outside walls were half a dozen holding cells with the names of counties printed over them. As I followed my line into Reception, I noticed