No Mercy for Dogs Part VII

Image by Titanium22 You can read all previous parts of No Mercy for Dogs here.

If Cerralvo had not been exactly what I had expected, neither was the Ramos compound.

In place of the gleaming gaudiness on display at some of the other narco-castles we had passed on our drive, a cold functionality ruled behind the Hammer’s walls. A neat gravel parking area encompassed the section immediately past the gate. I saw about a dozen vehicles, all clean and in good shape but none of which that would have impressed the casual onlooker. The main house was beyond that, a simple one-story box of perhaps 2500 square feet. Aside from the elaborate solar array that covered every square inch of rooftop space, this could have been any house in town. About a hundred feet from this was an open pavilion under which sat seven washing machines. Large oak trees were trimmed so that an incredible array of clotheslines could be strung around this point.

Enough garments to clothe an army were hanging on these, my first clue as to just how many people depended upon the Hammer for their well-being. The south wall of the perimeter was made up of businesses which opened up on the main thoroughfare to the rest of town, and included a tortilleria, a carpenter’s shop, an electrician’s shop and parts supply warehouse, an auto repair shop, and on the corner, yet another of the ubiquitous depositos. The various portions of the family that operated each store lived in homes built on top of each showroom, each of which was draped in its own extensive solar array. A much larger tractor-trailer repair shop occupied the entire northern wall, though I could not see this from where we had parked. All told, the perimeter wall enclosed a rectangular space of perhaps 500 by 700 meters.

Most of that interior was parkland, which was fed by a system of hoses leading to yet another windmill/well array, only this one was supplemented by an automatic pump for days when the wind was playing hookie. The Ramos clan kept geese, ducks, dogs, cats, and a cantankerous potbellied pig poignantly named Vicente Fox Quesada in a barn on the east side of the complex. The geese were particularly mean bastards, I was soon to learn, and we would all have our revenge for nipped-at-ankles when we ate them at Christmas time.

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Hunter?

Image by philld“Hunter,” a guard called to me from the gate of a San Quentin condemned men exercise yard.

Placing a set of dumbbells down onto off-white concrete, I walked over, and asked, “What’s up?”

“You’ve got a medical escort,” the guard said evenly.

Shaking my head. “I didn’t make an appointment and my name wasn’t called this morning. Think you have the wrong guy.”

The guard went away, and I went back to my workout, but the guard reappeared, and said, “No, it’s you. Cuff up for your appointment.”

“Tell them I refused,” I answered and started to turn away.

“You can’t refuse this appointment.”

Turning back, I studied the guard intently, and said slowly, “If I’m going to the hole just tell me and I’ll cuff up. But don’t insult my intelligence with the medical appointment fairy tale. If it’s a medical appointment, I’m not going, and if you really want me, you’ll have to call an extraction team.”

Nodding, the guard admitted softly, “You’re going to the hole.”

“All right.” Pulling off my workout gloves, I turned around for handcuffs.

Marched into my housing unit, shoved in a cage, I asked the guard, “Since I went along with the program, can you tell me why I’m going to the hole?”

“I really don’t know.”

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Streets Of San Francisco

Image by Saopaulo1 I caught myself today just about to say “Don’t you think it is funny when white people end up in the Mission and don’t know how to handle themselves?”

The Mission is diverse and full of lots of amazing things. Everything that goes on is supported by the neighborhood without much outside help. A store closes down and it gets filled right away by something, and the result is people walking down the street without having to think “Oh… why are there two storefronts in a row shuttered up?”

The negative things associated with our hood aren’t very common. I have always felt the need to defend the hood.

Then I saw a bunch of people walking around with their strollers, sitting outside with their young children at bars, and trying to figure out which restaurant “where you can sit outside” they were trying to find.  When I asked them whether they were talking about one of the new local places that opened up - like the Local’s Corner, or whatever it is called, which I have never gone to - they never mentioned “the place that serves really good tacos”.

I’m pretty sure that they were thinking of El Metate and after pointing it out to them, they scattered away like tourists.

I caught myself today just about to say “Don’t you think it is funny when white people end up in the Mission and don’t know how to handle themselves?” Then I realized that I am white, but understood what it was like to be part of the environment instead of being treated like a real person.

I never had much of a problem walking around and being a nice guy. And what I do ends up working for me most of the time.

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No Mercy for Dogs Part VI

Image by Apsu09 You can read all previous parts of No Mercy for Dogs here.

It would be highly illogical of me to say that Cerralvo was not what I expected, because aside from the tourist traps of the Riviera Maya, I had never stepped foot in a Mexican town. Even still, it was not what I had expected.

I had traveled Europe a few times, and all over the United States. Everything I knew about people had taught me that when human beings grouped together, they were supposed to do so in certain predictable ways. My economics courses had instilled in me the belief that the hard realities of supply and demand would normally force every segment of the socio-economic ladder into their proper places. This sorting out process was supposed to be synonymous with balance, and a sign of a healthy free-market economy. Cerralvo would not fit neatly into any Econ 101 textbook, because it is absolutely, fundamentally broken.

To start with, most federal tax dollars (the ones normal people actually pay, I mean, which is not as common as you would expect) are spent in the capital, attempting to placate 25 million residents. The Distrito Federal occupies roughly 570 square miles of terrain in the southern portion of Mexico, but represents about a quarter of national voters, so you can see how this imbalanced state has come to exist. What monies that are actually sent to the provinces tend to get smaller and smaller as you radiate outward from the DF, with most of that going to the large cities. Cerralvo is a little less than 1000 kilometers from the seat of political power, so you can imagine that very few of the federal breadcrumbs ever land on local tables. Even in theory, that would represent a pretty wretched state of affairs. It gets worse when reality intrudes its ugly head into the picture. It is conservatively estimated (by government sources, who, let us say, are not terribly objective in this matter) that roughly 40% of all tax revenue is stolen or misappropriated by crooked politicians in Mexico.  When you drop the perspective down from a national level to that of small-town politics, that number doubles.

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Graff

Image by Ildar SagdejevFinishing our workout on the San Quentin condemned men exercise yard, I shook hands with Bobby, my iron driving partner. Making our way to the outdoor shower, we took turns under the water while the other looked out to make certain no one was coming with evil intent. Toweling off, I quickly dressed and bounced to the gate when my name was called. Cuffed, I headed up to my cell on the fifth tier. Cell door keyed shut behind me, cuffs unlocked and removed, I stripped off my workout clothes, threw them in a bucket full of soapy water and then changed into clean clothing. Flipping on my idiot box for the one o’clock movie coming on in a few minutes, I started scrubbing clothes, rinsing them off in my sink and hanging them to dry on a clothesline while half-listening to the end of Geraldo.

“Pulling over a car straddling lanes on the freeway is how we caught Graff,” I heard over my TV’s speaker. “The patrol officer found a dead body in the passenger’s seat of the car.”

Turning, focusing on the screen, I saw a lieutenant in the California Highway Patrol sitting in a chair. Geraldo was over about one minute later, seemed the show was about how routine traffic stop searches can lead to felony arrests for serious crimes.

I knew a Graff; he was a Death Row prisoner on the exercise yard I had just left minutes ago. Can’t say I knew him well, he was one of those quiet guys who hit the yard, worked out by themselves, kept to themselves, faded into the background.

The next day on the exercise yard, I pulled Graff aside and said softly, “I caught the last few minutes of Geraldo yesterday. Just want to give you a head’s up that they said something about you getting busted for straddling lanes.”

“All right,” Graff murmured.

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BMXing in the Park

While sitting in the serene rose garden of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, one would not expect to stumble upon an extreme sports treasure. In the thick growth of redwoods across from the De Young, there is a hidden treasure. A massive trail of jumps, banks and burns runs the length of Fulton stretching over 5 blocks. It has been created from years of work compressing dirt and mud to the point it is concrete-hard and transplanting trees to to keep the proper structure of the track.

The other evening, a friend and I were lucky enough to stumble across this fantastic structure and met a local biker who was taking a rest as the day’s light dwindled. When we asked who built this fantastic structure he said he didn’t know specifically who built it but that it was some BMXers who wanted a track, and they maintain it. I was so struck by this that I decided to head to the park the next day to check it out.

While examining severely deep trenches and wide ravines swaying back and forth through under the shady canopy of the trees, I was lucky enough to meet two gentleman who have, over the past two years, maintained and built out this incredible bike park. The gentlemen in question performed a few jumps for Segway tourists and a few dirt bikers passing by, and then showed me around the track.

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No Mercy for Dogs Part V

You can read all previous parts of No Mercy for Dogs here.

I finished the southern wall of cabin one two days after my first visit to Senora Castillo’s deposito. There was still a large hole needing to be filled with a window, but now the block went all of the way up to where the roofline would one day be, and I was pleased. As I took a break to appreciate my handiwork, I noticed that Blackie was standing up facing the city, and had his ears cocked at a curious angle. I couldn’t see or hear anything at first, but within a few seconds I began to detect a faint bass line approaching. Thinking that perhaps El Smiley might be returning to pick me up, I retrieved my knife from where I had secured it under my cot and slid it into my back pocket.

By the time I had returned to the front of the ranch, a discernible dust cloud had developed on the prairie, and within seconds a silver late model BMW 3-Series coupe slid to a stop in front of the gate. The windows were down, and I couldn’t see how the driver still had intact eardrums given the decibel level of the music pouring out of them. The car was parked at such an angle that the sun was reflecting off of the glass windshield, so I couldn’t tell how many passengers were inside. Whoever it was, they seemed content to merely watch me for a time. Having no other options, I returned the gaze.

After perhaps two minutes of this, the music clicked off, and a short man with a neat beard stepped out. He was wearing a suit of all things, an expensive double-vented three-button affair sans a tie. His boots were what drew your attention, some sort of pointy-toed cowboy affair, done up in electric blue ostrich skin. They were stupendous, the sort of thing a Mexican rock star might wear. He approached the gate at a comfortable pace, and vaulted the fence with such ease that I could tell this was a man very much aware of his physical abilities. His smile was broad, his teeth white. Still, there was something just slightly off about him, like seeing a very good counterfeit copy of the Mona Lisa; you couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong, but you knew that something was out of place. As he approached, his eyes flicked over to the now completed wall of the cabin.

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Dawg

Image by Frank Vincentz“Hunter, you have a visit,” squawked over loudspeaker of the San Quentin Death Row housing unit. I waited impatiently by my cell bars with my best set of state blues. The guard finally showed, searched, cuffed, and escorted me downstairs. Once we cleared the housing unit door and walked out into the sunshine, my escort took off my handcuffs and we strolled down the upper San Quentin yard along the chow hall wall following twenty feet or so behind another condemned man also going to visiting.

“Escort, escort,” my guard called out, and the mainline prisoners were supposed to back off on the other side of yellow lines to give us a clear path.

“Hunter! Head Hunter!” scores of prisoners were yelling. “Stranger danger!  Bad things gonna happen to you!”

“Are they talking to you?” the guard escorting me asked.

“I’m Hunter, but I don’t know why they would be after me,” I replied a bit nervously.

“If they swarm us,” the guard said off-handedly but seriously, “I’m pulling my baton and handing you my flashlight. But we’re not making a stand, we’re running toward gun coverage.” He gestured to the wall post. “Stay close to me.”

I nodded and kept walking through the threats.

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Hostile Indifference

Image by Robert KnappMany of you are coming to know Thomas Bartlett Whitaker through his riveting series “No Mercy For Dogs,” which he began writing for Bay Area Butchers in March of this year (read parts I-IV here, here, here, and here). If you’ve been reading the serial then you know the story is about his life on the run in Mexico after committing the crime for which he now resides on death row.

After his sentencing, at the urging of his father, Thomas started the blog Minutes Before Six to explore and attempt to understand the reasons for his actions.  With the help of friends and family, Thomas discovered that he had a talent for writing and established an audience.  He started to use the forum to share the reality of living out a death sentence.

Here is an early passage from Minutes Before Six on his loss of freedom and adjustment to Death Row:

“It was my day to go to rec last, so I asked who I would be going out with. The guard told me there was an odd number of recs left, so I would be going out alone. I’ve been feeling a little crazy and alone lately, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out by myself, but in the end I decided the cold air would do me some good. At around 8 PM I bundled up, and pretty soon they came to handcuff me and take me downstairs. I don’t really remember what I was thinking about when I first got out there. Something typically fragmentary, no doubt. I was walking around the perimeter of the yard, my mind off wandering about wherever it is my mind goes most of the time, when the overhead light burnt out. Suddenly, the sickly sodium vapor yellow was gone, and there was nothing but night sky above me. I couldn’t even see the metal grates or mesh, only the sky. I had not seen a star in almost three years, until that moment. I just stood there, staring upward, my mouth hanging stupidly open. You are never alone in the dark in prison. There is always an overhead light, or a searchlight, or something, always in your face. I wish I could put into words how it felt to stand there, with the cold breeze on my face, and the stars twinkling their light down from the cosmos. I wondered about which stars they were. Did they still burn, or had they imploded and collapsed a million years ago? For some reason, the inexplicable desire to get closer to them overcame me, and I started climbing the bars, my bad arm and all, until I had my face pressed against the grate above me. I tell you this in retrospect, because I do not remember getting myself up there. I don’t know how my cheeks got wet. After a few centuries, or a few minutes, I know not which, the picket officer finally noticed that the light was out. She popped the gates, and came outside, and did a double take when she saw me two stories up. I reluctantly came down, and shuffled over to the bars separating us.  “Whitaker, what the hell were you doing up there?” She looked concerned, because in a year on Death Row, I’ve never caught a case for anything… I didn’t really know what to say. I think something awkward tumbled out about the stars, but it didn’t make much sense, so I just shrugged. She must have noticed the look on my face, though, because she herself looked up, and then back down at me, and if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn there was a moment of understanding…”

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No Mercy for Dogs Part IV

You can read parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.

In an essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett wrote that habit substitutes the boredom of living for the suffering of being. That statement ranks pretty high on the list of things I know to be demonstrably true about being human, but is also somewhat incomplete. Under normal circumstances, mowing the lawn on Saturday mornings or leaving for work at exactly 8:15 might take some of the edge off a creeping sensation of pointlessness or abject failure, but no amount of routine can ever completely cover up the misery of having become something that you cannot explain. It is easy to dismiss greeting card metaphors for the heart as being merely collections of trite nonsense, but I was discovering that the heart really could hurt in physical terms as well as emotional ones. Pushed hard enough, it really can break.

Deprived of any direction or guidance, my life fell into a steady routine, beginning sometime around daybreak when the chickens began to flutter about. I still didn’t know which of them was “the King,” and the royal court didn’t seem inclined towards spilling the secret. Aside from the frenzied excitement, which greeted my dumping of dried corn on the ground, they didn’t seem overly interested in paying me much mind. The three horses eventually started to grace me with their presence, and I discovered quickly that this was solely because their trough was empty. Filling it was a hassle, as the hose from the well only reached about 1/10th of the way to the trough. As I fumed about bad estate logistics, I filled painters bucket after bucket and lugged them 100 yards into the back section of the ranch. I distracted myself by calculating the weight of each trip: a gallon of water equals 8 pounds, times 6 gallons per bucket, times 29 trips… Once I had satisfied them, they went back to ignoring me. The army of cats never stopped disregarding me, being cats. Only Blackie paid me any attention, and he did so to a degree that seemed to indicate he was attempting to make up for the inhospitality of his fellow animals. 

This was both reassuring and humorous, but also a little annoying. After my frigid morning shower, he was waiting for me outside the cabin door. When I started mixing concrete, he was trying to bite the water as it rushed out of the hose. When I set my plumb lines, he bit them and ran off with them; when I laid a new line of block, he would try to climb on top of them. Actually, I was coming to understand that Blackie had a sort of pathological compulsion about climbing on top of things, and this included the wall surrounding the well. When I saw him stumbling around on top of it, one slip from a very long and fatal drop, I stopped working on the cabins and added about two feet of height to the partition. He didn’t look pleased by this development. Those of us born without great intelligence seldom notice or appreciate the things other people do for us.

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Days After

Image by Daniel R. BlumeSongbirds trilling an early morning symphony awakened me on San Quentin’s Death Row, a ray of sunlight reached my eyes and I felt light and easy, disconnected from death.

Late last night around eleven, a sergeant had been speared in the chest with a sharpened bunk brace while walking the tiers during a security check. All night long investigators had been taking photos, measurements, collecting evidence, but now the cellblock was eerily quiet.

Rising from the steel sleep rack in my four by ten foot cell that the walls pushed so tightly together, I slipped on gym shorts, running shoes, washed my face in the sink bolted to the back wall, and then started stretching out. Pulling on my headphones, I cranked Led Zep to full and started running in place, rocking to the deep beat “…whole lotta love…gotta whole lotta love…”

Forty minutes later, I shut it down, checked my pulse while pulling off my headphones. The condemned man housing unit was still strangely quiet. No food carts banging around, preparing trays for breakfast. Filling my hot pot, plugging in the power cord, I switched on my idiot box, settled onto my bunk and watched the local news. After a couple of minutes, I added instant coffee to boiling water, sipped caffeine, and watched as an exterior shot of San Quentin filled the screen. The newsie read some copy about a sergeant murdered in a Death Row housing unit.

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