in a youth-filled institution is mostly based on physical strength—the tough guy has all the respect in the joint.
Not being a big guy, I could never impress anyone with a display of physical strength. But at sixteen, with almost five years of jail time behind me, I had all the cunning and knowledge needed to maneuver myself around any situation I didn’t want to be involved in. Trouble was, I always wanted to be part of the power. So what I lacked in size, I made up for in daring. I was game for anything and saw everything that went on. I knew where all the knives were, how to score contraband, who the under-cover punks were, who to trust and who not to trust. I was smart enough not to step on the toes of anyone who might bite me.
It was important to me to hang around with the guys who had been successful and enjoyed luxuries on the outside. Their conversation was like a school for me. I was a good listener. I realized a lot of their talk was filled with exaggeration or fantasy, but they were still talking about a world I had never known. Cars, girls, school dances, parties, nice clothes and being able to come and go as they pleased. I built an imaginary world of my own from their conversations. I envied every guy who had had a pleasant experience on the outside, and tried in my imagination to substitute myself for them when they talked about it. I envied their letters and pictures from wives and girlfriends. I enjoyed sharing their plans for release and the promises of good things from their parents and friends when they got home. At the same time, I was aware that I could not relate a single moment of similar joys and dreams, unless of course I counted that day when I was eight years old and my mother took me in her arms—the day she returned home from prison.
Those were my smothered feelings. On the outside I projected arrogance and disdain for rules and regulations. I strove to prove myself to the others to be a person who had experienced everything, was afraid of nothing and could get by with anything. For a while I would actually believe I really didn’t care about all that I’d missed. But then in a moment of reality, I’d be aware of never having kissed a girl. I was in reform school before I’d reached puberty. The only climax I’d ever had was from jacking-off or sticking some punk in the butt. Having a wet dream wasn’t even possible for me; I’d never had the real thing so I had to finish any dream I started by hand. Still, between the stories of others and my own imagination, I had strong sexual urges, urges that got me in trouble several times. A prison psychiatrist labeled me as having homosexual tendencies. So I was supposed to be some kind of a freak. But, hey, I just went for sex the only way it had ever been taught to me. I didn’t have any respect for a joint punk then and I don’t now.
A lot of stories go around about forced sodomy and oral copulation in prisons and reform schools. There is some of it happening; I mean, out-and-out rape. I experienced it and I’m still ashamed to cop to it. Most of the sex is by mutual agreement, but however it comes down, those things are printed in a convict’s prison record and are with him for the rest of his life. I lost a possible parole date once by getting involved with a punk. I was accused of holding a razor blade to the kid’s throat while I screwed him in the ass. Truth was, the guy was an undercover queer and wanted a dick in his ass, and I didn’t mind doing it to him. We both agreed that if we got caught, he could say I forced him. We got caught. I was not only listed as a homosexual, but one with assaultive tendencies. That kid knew I didn’t force him, and I knew it, but I got the reputation and before long I did put a razor to a kid’s throat. If you keep pushing something off on a person, pretty soon that person stops fighting the reputation and becomes everything he is accused of being. It has proven itself out over the years. You start to think, “Fuck them. If that’s what they think I am, and I have to bear that cross, I got nothin’ to lose in being all they think I am.”
On a car-theft beef, an average kid with the average things—family, home, school, job—is usually cut loose by the parole board in a year or eighteen months. I did three years and two months in four different institutions: The National Training School for Boys in Washington, DC, Natural Bridge Honor Camp, the Federal Reformatory at Petersburg, Virginia and the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. It seems none of the good of these places rubbed off on me, only the bad. My heroes weren’t the movie stars or the headline-making sports figures, but the guys who got away with the biggest bank heist; the Al Capones, the Mickey Cohens, all the mobsters who defied the system that was keeping me locked up.
When I was at Chillicothe I met Frank Costello. When I walked down the halls with him or sat at the same table for meals, I probably experienced the same sensation an honest kid would get out of being with Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle: admiration bordering on worship. To me, if Costello did something, right or wrong, that was the way it was supposed to be. One morning Costello and I were seated at the same table for breakfast. He was reading the morning newspaper and a new guard walked over to him and started to take the paper, saying, “You read in your cell or the library.” Costello removed the guard’s hand from his paper and replied, “Sonny, when I’m at home it’s my habit to read the newspaper while eating my breakfast. The government has made this place my home for a while. You’re here to see that I stay, not to tell me where and when I can’t read.” The guard hesitated for an instant, then looked around the dining room, left our table and started hassling one of the younger guys on some infraction. Anyone without the status of Costello would have been on his way to the hole after confronting a guard that way. Yeah, I admired Frank Costello, and I listened to and believed everything he said.
In May of 1954 I was finally paroled. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I was legitimately on the streets since I was twelve years old.
The parole stipulated that I return to McMechen and live with the same aunt and uncle who had taken care of me while my mother was in prison. I loved them for giving me my chance on the outside. It was through their efforts, not Mom’s, that I ever got released at all.
I doubt that the average person could ever relate to the sense of freedom I felt. It was more like a dream than something good really happening to me. Each morning—no, not just each morning, but each breath was like being born again. I wanted to sing, dance and shout, “Hey, I’m free, I’m out, I’m one of you!” Hell, I didn’t want to ever go to sleep. Being awake, so as not to miss a single thing that was going on in my new world, was too important. When I did go to sleep, waking up and being able to lie in bed was a treat. The smell of breakfast being cooked by my aunt, with my choice of anything I wanted, instead of powdered eggs or soggy pancakes, was as rewarding as being a millionaire. One of my biggest pleasures was just walking—in the city, in the country, going anywhere or going nowhere. Just appreciating that there were no fences, no boundaries. Being able to watch people and hear them laugh, seeing children playing in the park, looking at pretty girls in short skirts and tight sweaters. Above all, no one was demanding that I do this or that. I didn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to see if “the man” was coming, or if a bunch of inmates were up to something that I ought to check out. I was my own person. The feeling was so pure, and it was so wonderful to be free, that if someone had said to me then, “You’ll be back in jail one of these days,” I’d have bet my life the person didn’t know what he was talking about.
Still, with all the joys of being free, it wasn’t long before I realized that there is more to life in the free world than just walking around taking in the sights, especially when seven of perhaps the most important years in a person’s lifetime have been spent in reform schools. In jail I was glib and aggressive and knew everything that happened from the hole to the chapel, but out on the streets I couldn’t even hold a decent conversation with my aunt and uncle, let alone a stranger. All I knew was jail. I couldn’t talk about what school I’d graduated from, or even gone to. There weren’t any yesterdays or last months that I could refer to without exposing my past. For employment, I had to look for jobs no one else wanted. I did janitor and busboy work, weeded gardens and worked in a service station or two. I even shoveled shit and fed the horses oats at Wheeling Downs.
When it came to girls, my heart throbbed and I ached with desire but I couldn’t think of the proper things to say. I didn’t know the first thing about finesse, so I’d revert to some of the
