kind of conversation sent the girls packing instead of impressing them.
The first girl I ever made it with I ended up marrying. I’d worked all day at the race track and had stopped by a card room in Steubenville to see if I could run my day’s wages into a small fortune. After a couple of hours at the poker table, I had a pretty healthy pile of money in front of me. The cocktail waitress and some of the other girls were giving me and my roll some attention. Across from me, looking over the shoulder of a coal miner, was this pretty girl who gave me an occasional smile but wasn’t putting on the hustle like some of the other girls were. When I cashed in I was a big winner. I would have shared my winnings with any of those girls for a night in the sack, but a certain pride in not wanting to be some whore’s trick helped me walk right by the obvious advances and single out the pretty girl I’d noticed on the other side of the table.
She had come into the place with her coal-miner father. Since he was still wrapped up in the poker game, I had no problem getting a few words in with her. She told me she worked as a waitress in a cafeteria at McMechen. We didn’t make it together that night, but after visiting her at her job and dating a couple of times, we were in love.
She may not have been the most beautiful girl in the world but to me she was Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor and Lana Turner all rolled up in one. She was a healthy, smooth-skinned Irish girl who stirred things in me I’d never experienced. I didn’t get her cherry, but she damn sure got mine. The first time we made it together, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Beyond concentrating on the sex act, all I could think of was, “Wow, it’s happening, I’m really making it witji a girl.” I trembled with excitement and anticipation; so much so, I came before my prick touched her box. But that didn’t kill anything for me, and when I got inside her—our arms around each other, her smooth soft body in contact with mine—I really didn’t care if I ever took another breath. I was in heaven and I wanted to stay. She whispered, “I love you,” and goose bumps tingled all over my body. I was loving someone and she was returning my love. A huge void was being filled. For the first time in my life, I felt I could conquer the world.
We were married in January of 1955. It was a good life and I enjoyed the role of going off to work every morning and coming home to my wife. She was a super girl who didn’t make any demands but we were both just a couple of kids. We didn’t know how to budget our income. We were constantly broke and neither of us had the maturity to sit down and make plans based on what we were earning. Being broke and wanting things can build up a lot of pressure. That pressure grows even greater when you haven’t got the money to pay routine bills, like rent, gas, lights and transportation. Sometimes we couldn’t even buy groceries. It’s too bad I didn’t know how to handle it. Trouble was, all I knew was reform schools, stealing and not trusting anyone. The patience, the willingness to struggle and earn that normal life demands wasn’t part of my make up.
I started looking for ways to get things in a hurry. With all my jail-house connections, getting back into crime was no problem. My wife also had a little bit of the outlaw tendency in her nature, so she didn’t try to restrain me—not that she could have.
The larceny consisted of small time burglaries and several stolen cars. One theft was at the request of an older gangster friend: the deal was for me to steal a late model Cadillac and deliver it to an acquaintance of his in Florida. My friend put enough dollars in my hand to pay the expenses and the other guy would pay me five hundred when I got there. I stole the car and drove it to Florida. The guy at the other end took it all right, gave me a hundred, and told me to get fucked. Naturally I was pissed, but took the hundred and left. I lay low for a few hours and then doubled back and restole the Cadillac. Not to drive it, just to keep the guy from feeling too chesty about burning me. After a while I abandoned the car and returned home. By the time I got back word was out the gangster was looking for me. So far the law wasn’t on my back, but I didn’t want to come face to face with either of the two guys involved in the car deal.
My wife had been wanting to head to California even before we were married. My promise to take her there might have been the only reason she married me. No, that isn’t true, but now that someone was out there waiting to even things up with me, we both wanted to leave town. I stole a ’51 Mercury and we loaded in all our worldly possessions, but we still had plenty of room in the car when we headed for the land of opportunity. The trip west was a leisurely one. We’d stop in some town or city that interested us and I’d hustle for anything I could, or case a place to burglarize. If I got money, great. If not, we’d load whatever I had taken into the Mercury and sell the goods along the way.
By the time we got to Los Angeles we had a few dollars and a few items to set up housekeeping. We rented an inexpensive place to live. My wife was in the early months of pregnancy, so I went looking for honest employment and the next few weeks saw me with a variety of jobs. With the jobs, and some thievery, we weren’t enjoying great luxury but things weren’t too bad for us. I had gotten used to the Mercury and felt like I was the legal owner. So much so that when they arrested me in it for car theft, I gave the arresting officer a lot of shit. Because the car had been stolen in another state, the FBI took over the case. They gave me that old song and dance about coming clean on everything to clear up the books and said they would show leniency. I’m no longer sure if I voluntarily told them about the car in Florida or if they tricked me into telling them. Anyway, I did get a hell of a break when I went to court for the stolen Mercury. Mostly because of my wife’s pregnancy, the judge put me on the streets with five years’ probation. I still had the other charge in Florida to face. If I’d had the guts to show up in court on that charge I might have gotten another break, but I was afraid to be too trusting of the courts. Instead I hit the road as a fugitive.
I put my wife through a lot of shit for the next four months. Why she stuck with me, I don’t know. We traveled a lot of miles, and we stole a lot of things to keep from being hungry or for travel money. She was getting close to having the baby and I didn’t know how that could be handled on the run, so I shipped her back to Los Angeles where my mom was now living and could look after her.
Not long after sending my wife to Los Angeles I was arrested in Indianapolis. You would think I’d had enough of that city, but there I was again in the same county jail where I had started. It was easier and less expensive for the court to revoke the five years’ probation than to prosecute me on the other theft, so I was returned to California and sentenced to the Federal Penitentiary at Terminal Island, San Pedro. I was twenty-one years old—no longer a juvenile delinquent. But looking back, I was never a juvenile anything, only an inmate in some reformatory. Now that I was twenty-one, it seemed only appropriate that I start my adult life in a prison with the big guys.
Terminal Island was a paradise compared to the institutions I had been in as a youth offender. The guards were there strictly for security and weren’t continually hassling the convicts. And the cons themselves did their own time, without trying to run anybody else’s life. It was a whole lot easier doing time with men instead of a bunch of kids who were always trying to play macho. It was so good, I didn’t create any problems. Escape wasn’t even on my mind. It was my intention to do my time like a saint and earn an early release. I sincerely thought that when I got on the streets again I would never do anything to put myself back in jail. I thought of those months with my wife, the thrills and warmth her body had given me, the new baby and all the pleasures the free world afforded me, and I realized what a goddamn fool I was for wasting my life being locked up.
Those first few months I went about doing my time with a positive attitude toward becoming a straight person. My wife wrote to me almost daily and came to visit as often as she could. I marveled at our new son during our visits and knew that I would break my ass to give him a better childhood than I had gone through.
But!—and it seems like in my life there has always been a “but”—before the baby was a year old, she stopped visiting. Her letters ceased without even a “Dear John.” My mother brought the news. “Your wife has moved out of the house and is living with some truck
