Tale of the White Elephant
The inmates in County Jail called Reception Center West in Chino, the White Elephant. After finding you guilty The System didn’t know exactly what to do with you. It depended on what kind of criminal you were. If you were some kind of teeny-timer, for instance, a guy, who for some reason was relatively normal, i.e. not a career criminal, you could probably be counted on not to try to escape, and were in for a treat.
You could get sent to doing time in County Jail or outside in a camp in the mountains, building roads you didn’t know where-to, or fighting fires, but only if you were a low-risk prisoner.
To determine your destination, they needed to test you, to see how you ticked. Were you some innocent babe that just this once got caught having some illegal fun? Is that the story you’ve been handing the judge and the DA?
Or were you a true gangster, a law-breaker, a scoffer who laughed at the law because you’d copped the attitude that whatever the law said, it didn’t apply to you? Cutting every corner illegally? No respect for authority figures? Living the Thug Life? The latest Public Enemy Number One? You figure you’re a law unto yourself and don’t need any stinking badge, is that it?
For this kind of attitude they lock you up in a much safer place, one with a barbed wire, gun towers with a bird’s eye view of the yard, and a high wall.
So now I’m on a bus and heading up the Five North. We don’t need seatbelts on this bus, because we’re shackled to the seat with a chain and we’re shackled to each other with another chain. It’s like Ben Hur and the galley scene, but there’s no aqua-blue Mediterranean horizon and no burly drummer. The closest thing to an ocean is Seaworld and Mission Bay whizzing by on the left. It’s summer, and they’re flying Jolly Roger flags. After the dimness of the county jail, the sand and sun make me squint and feel happy. As weird as the destination is, it’s good to be out and see familiar places and the brighter side of things.
Compared to county jail, this is a field trip. Why, it’s in the same direction as Disneyland!
I glanced down when I felt the chain wrapped around both my wrists tighten where it was securely bolted to the floor, and the second one wrapped around my waist, like a hungry anaconda, continued to wrap around the men to my left and right, and all the men on my side of the bus. As varied as we were, I realized we were much the same. We were all grown men, wholly responsible for our present situation, and at the same time reluctant victims of Aretha’s Chain of Fools. It depressed me to think of the ramifications. The mental ones were bad enough, but the physical ones were more at hand.
“I pray I don’t have to pee, or anything more substantial.”
I looked up and swiveled my head around… no problem… no bathroom.
So most of the way north I did my best to recreate the drive to Disneyland my parents took me on when I was ten. This was because when I looked out the screened window at the dry golden hills of California rolling off in the distance, with dark scrub oaks in their cracks; they reminded me of turds sticking out of some alcoholic’s yellowed hepatitis ***. Maybe I was a little depressed even to imagine such an image. So, I’d go elsewhere instead.
I’d pretend I was in the back seat of my Dad’s Ford station wagon, my mom riding shotgun as only she could, breathing the fumes of their twin Marlboro’s as the carcinogenic clouds rushed past me and out through the open window in the back, reading the latest adventures of Donald Duck and Huey Dewey and Louie.
But then the Sheriff’s bus to Hell would run over some bump on the freeway and I’ll snap back like the elastic on my Haines, and see where I really was.
I was on a bus with a bunch of jolly good fellows, going nowhere we planned to go.
We were going to boarding school,
A college of hard knocks,
And jolly good felons,
Whatever the effort,
The time,
Or the cost.
Oh, ****! I was thinking in doggerel poetry. I knew I was getting nervous when the Orange County Sign rushed by like a brain-freeze from a frozen Margarita at Mimi’s.
That Somewhere Nasty I’ve Never Been To lies straight up ahead.
I had my doubts it was going to fun. Scary was more like it, as I wasn’t planning on being somebody’s ***** or dropping the soap either. Not me. No Can Do the Two-Man Rhumba. I’ll wear a sign in the shower if I have to, that says, “Hands Off” and paint artificial pimples all over my butt.
And everywhere else.
Well, we drop off a couple of kids to California Youth Authority, and some girls to a women’s lock up, and now we smell cow poo wherever we go. It’s getting real rural out here, lots of grass and cows, telephone poles, barbed wire fences, a couple of farmhouses, barns , weeds, mail boxes on weird angles, and not much else but sky sky sky.
And there it is, like a white mirage shimmering in the blue haze-cow-****-stinking distance, The White Elephant, home of the miraculous 60 day Observation, and my new accommodations, awaited with warm gun towers and sturdy open arms.
Tall white walls, glistening in the noon-day heat, reminded me of Chateaux D’If, in Marseilles harbor, the one from Count of Monte Christo. Had my picture taken there in 1972, while doing the old-school grand-tour thing. Edmund Dantes, when he was falsely imprisoned, found an old timer who taught him how to escape. In the end he became a rich dude. Maybe that will happen to me. Wonder if they have a library.
On the first day the bulls found out I’d been to college. One approached me in the yard right after they read us their Riot Act of Rules through a loud speaker. He was tall, wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, so we’ll call him Mr. Big.
“Can you type?” says Mr. Big, looking down at me.
I see myself in his glasses looking up, and since we’re standing outside in the yard, the tall white walls standing behind us look like we’re in the Foreign Legion. It’ summer, it’s hot, I’m sweating and uncomfortable, and the Algerian desert smells like camel poo. My imagination is starting to get to me. It’s the ultimate Conradian dilemma, like in Typhoon and Lord Jim where your imagination first gets to you, then f**** you. But as worried as I am, I keep it on the down-low.
“Sure.”
“We have a job for you.”
I wonder what kind of job it will be. Maybe they’ll have me stamping out license plates, like in the movies.
I ended up being the ducat clerk, a clerk who typed up where every one of those four hundred men would go every day. They would have to test, or take a physical, or take the dreaded test where you had to talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist or someone in charge of your brain, someone whose intent is to probe all your secrets and uncover your true nature.
To be continued…maybe.
©StevenHunley2018
https://youtu.be/yVPj-2M_CGM PUBLIC ENEMIES - music video(HD)