Cast the First Stone (28 page)

But that wasn’t the way it turned out, which only made the difference you didn’t allow for so much the same as all the other differences in the past which you had not allowed for which were the same old differences. The way it turned out was that one of the fellows hanged himself in the hole one night and the other got life and waited for a year to hang himself, and Tommy Tucker was transferred out to the prison farm and his natural life commuted to take effect within ninety days. But after sixty days he couldn’t stand the farm any longer, after having stood the prison for nine years, so he ran away. He was away a week and was caught and brought back and his pardon revoked, so he hanged himself too, making it a grand slam. And then none of them held any malice or animosity against one another, nor did anything they had ever done any longer matter for the grass rooting in their rotten hearts was certainly no less greener, as Omar might have said, than grass rooting in the hearts of saints.

We were transferred back into the 2-6 dormitory late that year.

One night Chump said, “Kiss me, Jimmy.”

I said. “My mother’s coming over to see me next w r eek, Chump, and I don’t want to kiss you until after she comes because I want to kiss her. you see. and it’ll take a full week to get my mouth clean now from kissing you before.”

He went for his knife and I thought for a moment it was going to be on. But he put the knife away and went down to the front end of the dormitory and walked back and forth for hours and that night when he came back to bed he said. “I’m through. Jimmy. I still love you but you ask me to take toe much.”

After that he let his beard grow long and his uniform get dirty and baggy and he gave away all his nylon underwear and silk pajamas and began wearing the state-issue drawers again and sleeping in them and looking like hell. And still I didn’t get anything out of it.

It was about then that they installed an improved motion-picture machine in the chapel, and that Christmas most of us saw the first decent movie we had seen in years. After that we saw a picture each Saturday. The idle companies went in the morning and the working companies in the afternoon. The honor men went at night.

Another year was gone. The things they brought they took away. The things they left I didn’t want, such as the shame and the self-contempt and the feeling of being a convict at last. They left a great weariness also. I was getting very tired and disgusted.

19

A
ROUND THE FIRST
of the year we got a number of newcomers who were drawing disability compensation from the Veterans Administration. We already had quite a few old-timers drawing pensions of one kind or another from the first world war. We even had a couple of grandpappys drawing pensions from the Spanish American War. And there were a number of crippled vets in our company who’d been in prison several years and didn’t know before then that they could draw disability compensation for injuries sustained in civilian life. When they found out from the newcomers they, too, could get on the government gravy train they rushed over to the deputy’s office and sent in applications. It wasn’t long before we had more than fifty vets in our company drawing pensions of from twenty to one hundred and fifty dollars monthly.

It was comical how some of those vets got fleeced out of their money. Wives who hadn’t visited them since their imprisonment began coming around regularly on visiting days. Those who didn’t have wives were tricked into long-distance affairs with other convict’s sisters or mothers or aunts or cousins or sweethearts—and even in some cases with other convict’s wives. A convict would tell the vet about the woman—his sister or mother or friend—and then help the vet smuggle a letter out to her. The next thing you knew the woman had a pass from the welfare department to visit the vet. and before you knew what was happening the vet was sending her his monthly check. In some instances the vets never even saw the women and just knew them through secret correspondence. But that didn’t stop them from giving those women their money.

One of the convict nurses in the hospital had a rather pretty sister who used to come over to the chapel on Sundays with the outside visitors. He’d point her out to the vets on his sucker list and the next Sunday he’d have her smile at them. That was all that was needed. He promoted seven vets at the same time. Then one Sunday she didn’t show up and the following week all seven suckers got letters from her stating that she had become ill suddenly and had to have an expensive operation and didn’t know where she was going to get the money to pay for it. She got more than two thousand dollars from those guys. Shortly afterward the nurse got a pardon.

The officials did all they could to stop this racket but the vets went over to the deputy’s office and swore out affidavits that these women were their wives, in many instances women they’d never seen. You couldn’t blame them much. They’d been going along for years, forgotten, woman-starved, and friendless. Month after month the money piled up in the front office. They couldn’t spend it. They were lonely and frustrated. Suddenly they found themselves with five hundred or a thousand dollars to their credit. They were ripe for plucking by the first woman to say, “I love you,” or for that matter by anyone—man, woman, or child—who wrote in from the outside on some scented stationery with an enclosed picture of a pretty girl. It didn’t make any difference whether the picture had been bought from some cheap studio or whether the woman ever existed. They believed that these women, whose pictures were enclosed in these perfumed letters, were interested in them because that was what they wanted to believe. One guy had a picture of a well-known movie actress inscribed, “For my darling Ronnie, with all my love, Yvonne.” It hung at the head of his bunk and he sent Yvonne eighty-five bucks every month. Several guys tried to tell him who the dame was but he didn’t believe them. We got a great laugh out of it.

The colored boys really preened themselves. They went in for purple lounging robes and sky-blue silk pajamas and yellow socks and long, tan, pointed shoes; buying not one pair, but two and three. One colored boy named Sanders bought eight pairs of shoes, five tan and three black, for which he paid about twenty dollars a pair. The warden called him out to his office and asked him what he wanted with so many pairs of shoes.

“I wants a pair for each day in the week and two for Sunday,” he grinned. The warden told him that he didn’t have that many pairs of shoes himself. “That’s all right,” Sanders said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll buy you a pair next ordering-day.”

But I could understand what he meant. Outside they say clothes make the man, but in prison it’s shoes that make the convict.

Another colored boy called Fofo, who was drawing a hundred and twenty dollars monthly, discovered he had over three thousand dollars to his credit. He’d been in about four years then and hadn’t had a visit in all that time. All of a sudden he sent to Alabama for his wife, whom he hadn’t seen since he went into the army at the beginning of the war, and had her set up housekeeping in the city. Then he got the ugliest, blackest fag in prison and set up housekeeping for himself inside. The officials did all they could to save some of his money for him. They stopped him from ordering anything from the outside and cut down his commissary order to fifty cents a week. But they didn’t think to stop him from ordering newspapers and magazines because they all knew old Fofo couldn’t read. So he’d get the paper and magazine men to give him cash for money orders, four dollars in cash for a five-dollar slip. One day it was discovered that he had sent in cashier’s slips for over four hundred dollars worth of papers and magazines. In three months they had him. He was stone-broke. The warden froze his compensation so he couldn’t touch it. His fag hit him over the head with a hockey stick. They transferred the fag to the girl-boy company on 5-4. The last he heard of his wife she was living with another man. But he was a good-natured old boy and he didn’t let it worry him a bit.

The honor men who clerked in the cashier’s office did a booming business selling cash for money transfers. The standard rate was four for five. Some of those convicts got pads of cashier’s slips and wrote out money transfers like bank checks. That money out in the front office didn’t seem real. A convict would write out a fifty-dollar money-transfer slip without batting an eye, and then turn around and squawk like hell about having to part with a dollar greenback for something he really needed.

Our day guard, Captain Tom, got his. I had to give him credit. He had those convicts buying him shoes and gloves and underwear and bathrobes and blankets, anything which he could use that they were allowed to order. He must have gotten more than a dozen pairs of shoes. I never knew how he got all that loot out through the front gates, but he managed somehow.

During the Christmas week we had been issued safety razors, and for a time we received one blade each week.

Then some guy decided to cut his wrists and they stopped issuing the blades. We had the razors without the blades. That gave Captain Tom the idea of starting a retail-drugstore business in the dormitory. He began bringing in all sorts of toilet articles which he sold for fantastic prices—lotions and creams and shaving creams and razor blades, tooth paste and soap and talcum powder and shaving brushes, cold creams and vaseline and rouge and mascara. The items which were more strictly prohibited, of course, were the highest-priced. Polack Paul handled the stuff for him. In a short time Polack Paul had four lockboxes of cosmetics and junk, and was doing a rushing business all over the institution.

There was so much money in the dormitory everybody wanted to run a game. They weren’t satisfied any more with just Blocker and me running the only game. There were a lot of disputes and arguments and agitation. It got to the place where the gamekeepers had to get up in the morning, before the lights came on, and spread their blankets on the tables to reserve their space. The tables were covered from end to end of the dormitory with guys running games. Some guys made a racket of putting down their blankets and then selling the space later in the day. There were a number of fights and if someone moved somebody else’s blanket it always resulted in a fight. It got to be such a problem that Tom called me down to his desk one day.

“Jim, these fellows who can’t get to run a game keep writing out to the warden and over to the deputy, telling them about the gambling that’s going on up here,” he said. “I don’t want to stop the gambling but they’re going to take me off this company and put me somewhere else if it keeps on like this.” He laughed deprecatingly. “You know, I don’t want to get on one of those working companies, Jim. It’d kill me doing all that marching and climbing, up and down those stairs, with my heart.” Tom spoke in that confidential whisper one usually associates with the ward politician.

“Well take up our game for awhile if you say so,” I offered.

“Naw, I don’t want you to do that,” he said. “I just don’t want this thing to get out of hand and get the brass-ass down on me.” I could understand what he meant. All he had to do all day was sit up there in his padded chair and snooze and take us to the dining room and back. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “You get the best fellows down there, the ones who can bank a game and pay off, and we’ll give them each a day to run a game. We’ll just let chances go around, then nobody’ll have a beef. Now I’ll tell you how we’ll work it. We’ll let them have four games a day and no more; two games for the white fellows, and two for the colored.” About a third of the convicts in the dormitories at that time were colored. “The white fellows can have one poker game and one blackjack game, or whatever else they want to play except dice; I don’t want any dice games. And the colored fellows can have one poker game and one skin game.”

“Okay, Tom, I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“And listen, Jim, tell them that it will cost them a buck a day for each game, and you collect it for me.” He winked.

“Okay, Tom,” I said grinning, and started away.

“Wait a minute, Jim,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about taking a day for myself. I’ll tell you what well do. You pick me out four good fellows, two white and two colored, and I’ll take Wednesdays and bank all the games and split fifty-fifty with the dealers. Pick me out some good boys who know their stuff. I’ll tell you, you run the poker game for me, Jim, and get Blocker to run a blackjack game for me. Then you and Blocker take a day for yourself. You get a couple of good colored boys to run the colored games for me, and a couple to run the colored games for you; some good boys who know how to keep their mouths shut and make a buck for themselves. That’ll give you a day and me a day and they can split up the days that are left.”

“That ought to do it, Tom,” I said. “I’ll straighten it out.”

And that was the way we ran it. It made me a sort of boss of the gambling racket for I had to give out the days and collect the tribute. Blocker and I took Sundays, which were the best gambling days since we were locked in from dinner on. We picked out fellows who had money and gave them Saturdays, Fridays and Thursdays, which were the next best days, respectively. We only allowed one game to each banker or each combine. Tom had Wednesdays. We gave the rats Mondays and Tuesdays, which were the dullest days, to keep them quiet.

There must have been four or five thousand dollars in cash in the dormitory at that time. It couldn’t have been any secret from the officials, with all the rats we had in the dormitory, but they didn’t bother us. Perhaps they thought it was all for the best. Those convicts had too much good old government money right through there to sit on it and not gamble, and by having the gambling controlled we kept the fights and disputes down to a minimum.

It worked perfectly. The only thing about it, if you got reckless in your game and took a heavy loss you’d have to wait a week, until you put down your game again, to get it back. Captain Tom was the only real winner. The rest of us would play back our winnings in the other games during the week. But Tom went to stashersville with his; when he got that green in his pocket it was long-gone from that joint.