He’d not only stabbed his wife to death but had cut her to shreds.

Peter Kuper

If a murder, anybody might have done it. Burglary or pocket-picking wanted 'prenticeship. Not so murder. We were all of us up to that.

— Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend

WERNER

Werner was probably the one person most pissed-off to be in the downtown jail. Not that any of us were all that happy about it. But as a tank for violent criminals and repeat offenders, about a third murderers, 6D was a lot calmer, more respectful environment than those gladiator schools full of little rat-pack gangbangers, hop-head hip-hops, and white trash hard-ons. But Werner had already graduated from the shitstorm of local jail and court appearances and had gotten comfortable up at Folsom. A good cell with a solid “woodpile” cellmate, good job on the paint crew, and dues paid in a strong clique. Ready to kick back and relax for the minimum 27 years they keep you around for when you pump 13 9mm rounds into the already ugly face of some nameless asshole who tried renegotiating a drug deal at the very last minute. (When I found out it had been a Smith Model 39 like the one I used to carry, I asked Werner why the unusual restraint of not kicking off the 14th rpund. He said, “I always keep one cap until I reload. In case something weird comes up.”)

But they'd subpoenaed Werner back down to court in San Diego as a witness in another (fairly similar) murder. So instead of the good chow, fine facilities, and monastic tranquility of the joint, Werner is sitting here in the filth, noise, and furor of SDJ, eating Duffyburgers and spending whole days cuffed and caged in packed, airless tiger cages waiting to testify in a trial being dragged out for weeks. As a friendly witness, by the way. You can imagine how helpful he was to the young attorney who hauled his ass down to the county shithole. But he didn’t whine; he’d already learned how to do time. He read a lot. Had great taste in books too. He had friends on the outs to bring him Ross Thomas and James Ellroy and Andrew Vachss and would kick them down to me when he’d finished them. A good head on him, but not a lot of warmth.

One day a younger guy in our cell was sniveling about his case. He was a lop and wouldn’t have even been in 6D except that he’d not only stabbed his wife to death during an amphetamine-augmented argument but had cut her to shreds and let the kids see what was left.

It was giving fits to his public defender, who was also mine. (Michael Popkins — highly recommended if you’ve cut somebody to pieces and are broke.) “Look,” he was saying for about the fifth time, “if I’d been a straight-out murderer, would I have warned her off like the witness heard?”

Werner leaned over his bunk, very chilly eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses over a paperback of The Last Good Kiss, and said, “I’m a straight-out murderer and that’s what I did.” That shut the kid up for a while. He didn’t beat the beef on his wife, by the way — although Popkins got the other wife-killer in our cell completely off and didn’t do bad by me either. The lop twit ended up getting a hideous spider tattoo on his arm, half bragging that when you’re going down for 27 years, you don’t have to look your best. Lop logic. But I got a kick out of the comment, and it must have showed because Werner, not exactly Mr. Share & Care, told me another one the next time everyone else was in the dayroom watching MTV.

What he said was, “He was just a halfass doctor in Normal Heights, barely turning the nut. We picked him out and told him the tale; He’d write script for us for two, maybe three years, then the state board would hip up and jerk his pharmaceuticals license. But by then he’d be rich and have an office in La Jolla and could keep on treating rich old ladies, just not write any drugs. He went for it and did just fine. Part of the deal was that we’d send him people for cross-tops, Dexamils, black beauties, Dilaudid, that kind of shit, and he’d charge them an office visit and kick us down a roll of pills for each one. Fat city for an old quack like him, and we were doing fine for almost two years. Then I got popped for some dirty glassware and spent three months in El Cajon before I could get it all dismissed. And while I was in there, my old lady was going to see the old shit to keep herself speeded, and he was taking it out of her ass. She was just a bag whore, really. But the wildest hump of all time with about an eighth of tweak in her.

“I found out about it when I was still in El Cajon, and as soon as I hit the outs, we fell by La Jolla to see old 'Doc Savage’ to let him know I knew. This was after I slapped shit out of the old lady and she corroborated. Beat her down pretty good, actually. She had priors for that kind of shit. So the Doc is scared and starts crying and offers me a shitload of rolls of brand-name crank to let him slide. Some Percodans too. I played it real heavy, like, did he think he could buy my wife’s honor with a handful of pills? and like that. He just sputters like a fish and sits there holding the rolls.

Then I let him down, say, ‘Hell, reach me those rolls. I’m just a bag whore at heart.’ He about slips off the chair in his own sweat.

“Then we say let’s try it out. The doc is saying, like, would he try to give us beat stuff? But we kind of insist, tell him I'm celebrating hitting the streets. We spoon up a few of the pills and slam it, and it’s pretty righteous after only getting high twice in three months in El Cajon. Then it’s the doc’s turn, and he hates it but knows it’s an offer he can't refuse. So he ties up and slams and knows right off it’s a hotshot. We put Windex in the spoon. Propylene glycol — killer stuff, very fast and hard to trace. He didn’t hang long, didn’t even get the fit out of his arm. My partner was blowing him kisses when he did the final fade, but I just smoked a Camel and watched him die. By the time they put his death with all those bogus scripts, the AMA must have been having shit fits, but there was almost no investigation. Barely made the papers.”

The first convicted murderer I ever got to know was a nice old "Mr. Rogers" guy in his 60s. He’d come home and found his younger wife screwing a neighbor on the kitchen table and killed them both on the spot. I could vaguely relate to that, and it gave me my first glimpse of something everyone who works in corrections knows — most murderers are the nicest, most cooperative, least dangerous of inmates. Your model prisoners. By now I’m of the opinion that most murderers could be released with almost no harm to society. The statistical chances of a killer killing a second time are minimal —- less than the chances of a person killing the first time. People have an irrational dread of death, and it spills over to the killers themselves. They are the ultimate villains. No detective story can succeed without one. We like to think it’s because they’re monsters and we don’t understand them. I think it’s because we understand them all too well and our intense interest, like our obsession with sex crimes, carries a heavy taint of identification. Maybe even envy. It is contra-instinctual to think of killers as better people than burglars, but after meeting quite a few murderers and spending way too much time living in the same room with young gang banger thieves, it's obvious to me that a lot of the car boosters and crib crackers are total sociopaths, committed to lifetime crime and quite dangerous to citizens, while most killers are very little risk to anyone at all. I'm not sure this can be extrapolated to anything, and I'm very sure it won’t ever figure in criminal law or sentencing structure.

MARVIN

I’d been in solitary for more than three weeks (for flunking a personality test) when they ran out of cells and started doubling us up. You know you’re in a mismanaged jail when you’re crowded in solitary. They put Marvin in with me; he was a big, tough “independent” black from the 30th and Imperial free-fire zone. He and two buddies were being punished for a failed coup d’6tat in the high-power tank, 7B. The cops had responded to a bloody riot in the tank in standard fashion, by installing the heaviest guy they could get as tank captain and letting him get away with extortion and brutality as long as he kept order. The guy had the sallow, freckled complexion that blacks for some reason call “red," so he was Skyline Big Red, a Piru Blood. If he’d been a Crip, I guess they’d have had to call him Big Blue.

Marvin and company had jumped Big Red all at once and called for everyone else to join in. Nobody did and they lost the fight, then got exiled, first to solitary in El Cajon, then downtown. One of Marvin’s chums had jumped on Red’s back and gotten smashed against the stair treads and injured. Since Marvin was more than six feet tall and an extremely solid 200 pounds, and since his friends were just as big and just as combat-ready as he was, I got really curious about what Red looked like. As it happened, I met him later up at Chino, where he had quickly grabbed another power position. He was about six foot seven, close to 300 pounds, with that proportionate look, like Magic Johnson or Lonnie Shelton. Big hands, light movement. An enforcer, and a nasty piece of work from any perspective.

Marvin’s rap about the powers and general rottenness of Big Red led out to the streets and to mentions of several people the monster had killed and never even gotten arrested behind it. The criminal as both disease and cure.

Marvin was as good company as it comes. He looked scary enough to do Republican campaign commercials but turned out to be humorous, well mannered, and articulate. A street gentleman. Ill-advised enough to try to pay off a car by selling a little rock cocaine (what Nancy Reagan and TV reporters call ‘‘crack”). After six days in the Blue Room together, we were running out of jokes and beefs and superficial chatter. Almost as soon as we started to get into more personal kinds of discussion, he told me about a woman he’d killed.

”! was living down....” He mentioned a corner that meant nothing to me, then said, "You know where’s a rock house called Mom’s? Right across there.” I knew the place. I don’t pride myself on my knowledge of the 30th and Imperial area, but I could never forget a drug house called “Mom’s.”

“I had this white freak. Thing is, she really was. I mean, everybody calls bitches freaks, but she was a for-real freak. Crazy for it. She’d smoke a little rock but mostly liked tweakin’. She was slinging a little, but only to friends, so no problem there. And she wasn’t sprung; she’d speed for three days on the weekends, then sleep for four days. And she’d remember to eat, keep clean. So it wasn’t dogging her any, wasn’t hurting her looks, you know?

"You know how a bitch get behind rock, speed, that kind of shit. I mean, I love it, you love it, but them freaks, they fall off. Why them more than men? Weaker-minded, I guess. Do any motherfucking thing, though. You know, right? Broke her neck, was about it, I guess.

"I said yeah, but not exactly. I’ve had them act like it before. When I was a lot younger there was times I was afraid I was damaging somebody.

"Afraid of it, digging it. Dime’s worth of difference. You see that, doncha? I mean, did you stop?”

Well, no. In fact, I’d gotten even wilder. And now that he mentioned it, I remembered something else, something that made sense out of a poem I once wrote. Something like a frustration that we hump them with all we got and it doesn’t DO anything. We shoot our wad and they’re still ready for more. There’s a kind of search for something — some sort of finality, maybe — that’s always frustrated.

I asked Marvin if he’d thought of what it would be like to be fucked to death. He thought about it then let out his booming laugh, “Only way to go, Pops. Only motherfuckin’ way to go.”

One reason killers are more human is because most people kill out of passion, and anybody could do it. It might take a major asshole to make a living by mugging or burglary or clouting cars, but until you walk in and find your wife on the kitchen table, you really don’t know how you’re going to take it. And probably shouldn't pass too harsh a moral judgment on the guy whose first response involves the carving knife. It’s really less a matter of morals than of conditioning. So don’t be too quick to deny that you’d do somebody if you had current tabs on your Double 0 license. Don't ask yourself “If,” ask “Who?” Get a little further out, try “How?” And even then, you’d be off the mark. It wouldn’t be some old enemy or relative, it’d be that obdurate cop, that asshole in the BMW, the smug bureaucrat, the kid who slipped your daughter the dope, the dingus, and the clap. It would probably be a momentary situation, a flash-flare of feeling. But maybe not; maybe you could spot out somebody who could do with some killing, nurse the grudge, and wait the right time. Or maybe you could even objectively decide who needs to be weeded out, then do it. In which case, you're the real murderer, not us normal tools of emotional katzenjammer.

CHIEF

He’s a very stout kid, a high school wrestler with enough Indian blood to get called “Chief.” For real, apparently, not like every other punk you meet in the slam who’s half Apache or related to the Mob. He worked some scam in Descanso to get some pot, then smuggled it right through the absurdly overprotective security at El Cajon by swallowing it in balloons. One broke as he was retrieving it, but nobody turned down the weed. If anyone complained that the buds smelled like shit, the Chief would say, “Yeah, but it’s really good shit.”

Having even a quarter of bud gave the Chief pull with the tank trustys that lasted for months. He used his influence to hand-pick cellmates, every one of them young, built like fireplugs, and completely nuts. They’d sleep all day, then put their mattresses on the cell floor and wrestle all night. You could hear them screaming and pouncing off upper racks and slamming each other into the steel walls. Half the time they had black eyes, cracked ribs, and limps. A great bunch of guys, frisky and loyal as boxer pups — good guys to be tight with if things started looking edgy.

But the Chief had a more serious side than his playmates and used to like to talk after chow, sitting on the toilet beside my bunk while we’d bullshit like freshmen. Like the majority of guys who confess these damned killings to me, he led up to it and said he’d never told anyone about it before.

It started out as a picnic in an old avocado grove out by Spring Valley. Just a couple of high school buddies with their girls, a few racks of Bud, and a few twists of bud. Sitting and sipping, picking and grinning. They heard the cars pull up on the road above but didn’t pay much attention. It’s a popular party place and lovers’ lane, with lots of old fire rings and piles of empties.

“They took us totally by surprise, brother,” he told me. “One minute we’re kicking, digging some guitar, next minute there’s all these big assholes running around kicking shit out of everybody.

“There were about eight of the assholes, maybe five of us. And they all had big flunkin' bats and clubs and attitudes. Way it looks, that was their thing, drive around looking for people lounging, then move in and fuck them off. I saw a guy slam an aluminum softball bat down on my partner’s head, so I jumped up and started running over there. Then I heard my chick scream and turned around.... Man, she’d been on her hands and knees and some surf Nazi motherfucker in black leather just slammed this two-by-four wrapped with barbed wire right down on her back. Fucked her all up — it still hurts when she walks sometimes. She was like 16, 17. I got way pissed, headed for that fucker — he’s standing there grinning telling me to come on and get it. There was chicks screaming everywhere and people getting boxed out and butchered up big time.

“But these shitheads picked the wrong boys to fuck with that time. Everybody there was a starter for [an East County high school] and into rasslin’ and The Arts. That asshole with the two-by-four was pretty surprised when he hit me twice on the forearms and I kept coming in. I fired in like coming off the line and shivered him right across the nose, smashed it flat. Pussyfucker didn’t even get in a punch, just went down, and I was doing a number on him with my boots; then I saw another guy swinging a bat and jumped on him from behind and ended up sitting on his back and slugging his head with a rock I picked up somewhere. I could see what was happening, and the home team was turning things around. But the punks took off running, and we heard a car start up and spin out so we ran up to the road, and there was a Charger hauling ass out and two guys crawling into a VW van. Stupid shits hadn’t even parked it facing out. They were turning it around when about four of us ran up to the van.

"I threw an elbow through the driver’s window, and my partner snatched open the motor compartment and grabbed the coil wire off. They were scared shitless, couldn’t start the van, couldn’t get out and run. They were holding the door knobs down, freaking out.

“We rocked the van back and forth. I was a little drunk but fired up on adrenaline and pure hate. We were howling like savages, red in the face — a major war party, brother. We just turned the van over on its side and were kicking it and beating it and screaming for blood. One of our guys saw gas running out, so he flicked his Bic and the whole van caught fire.

“One of the dudes finally climbed out the top door and tried to run. Right. I’ll never forget it. He was down, out, all fucked up in about ten seconds, but that wasn’t even enough for me. My blood was up like I never remember, and we kept kicking him and stomping him. I stomped his head about three times, and it gave this ugly crack and got weirdshaped. I kept kicking in his face, which was like just a big, wet red blob by then.

There were four of us just pulverizing him. I remember stomping his head and seeing this, like, white jelly stuff oozing out. And I remember thinking, “Man, we’re killing this son of bitch.” That got me even hotter, and I ran over to the van, looking inside for the other asshole. I don’t know what happened to him. If he stayed in the van, he died too. I know that much.

“Then one of our friends came up out of the trees, looking pretty messed up. I mean, none of us was in the best shape;

I had almost no skin on my forearms at all, and later I found out they broke three of my ribs, but this guy looked BAD. He was in the hospital a week. My girlfriend was in for two days. The girls were coming up, crying and shit. When they saw what was going down, they really flipped. Somebody mentioned the cops My partner grabbed my shoulders and looked right in my face and said, ‘Chief, we’d better burn rubber.’ I could see it that way. We got the girls in the cars and bailed.

“A few days later three of us drove back out there and looked around. You could see where there’d been a fire and how it had gone out into the groves a little. Maybe had been put out. No sign of the van, no sign of nothing. Nothing in the papers. But I'm telling you what — I think one of those assholes got crispy crittered in the van, and I definitely killed that one dude. No doubt in my mind.”

They say the murderer kills himself over and over, while the suicide kills everybody else all at once. And killing does seem to drop hints of those for whom the bell tolls, intimations of mortality I remember an old black guy they hauled into the "old man's tank" in the Seattle jail. A derelict wino; Fred Sanford with bloodstains, rags, and a heavy coat of filth. He was ecstatic. Kept chuckling, "I finally did it. All these years I finally did it." What he did was walk up to his worst enemy — another old black rummy who was passed out against an alley wall — and stick an old pawnshop .32 in his ear and pull the trigger. He chortled and crowed about it all night. By morning he was depressed, bragging about his victory but in flat tones. One of the other inmates told me that the pair had been fighting for years but were inseparable. With his nemesis deari the old guy was pretty much alone it the world. By the time he came to trial, he was shriveled and shrunker, practically catatonic.

LITTLE CHINO

I first met Little Chino in a punishment cell. He’d been rolled up at Descanso for starting a riot, and I was being persecuted for leading a populist insurrection. He’d worked a piece of wire loose from an outlet box and hidden it inside his gums, so in about a half hour he had every square inch of the cell engraved with either “Otay.” ‘Little Chino,” or the usual inscrutable gangbanger hieroglyphs. Forget the poverty, drugs, race, and all that — guy;; join gangs so they’ll have something can scribble on walls. He explained all the ramifications of the little rune to me, but somehow my attention wandered, remember it had a "3” in a ”C,” for trece, that arbitrary “13/14” nonsense any Mexican gangster in California will kill or die over. Forget the graffiti, even they join gangs so a bunch of 19-year-old hard-ons can draw a line and fight the guy on the other side of it.

He was with the Otay Locos, the younger generation of Otay delinquents.

The older guys were all in the Yatos. Otay is not a place where people come up with catchy names. They make up for it by designing trick logos and plastering them on the whole rest of the world. Though barely out of his teens, Little Chino is a founding member, a real OG. He's a cute little fucker too — open-faced, pig-tailed, bright-eyed, and burrheaded. Nobody at all to mess with, though. He reminded me of some pint-sized Cambodian gangsters I met in the Seattle jail. About four feet tall, cuter than chipmunks. Hard to believe they blew away those 34 souls down at the Wah Mee gambling club. Little Chino had a sense of humor too. Once he heard me jabbering away in Spanish to some wetbacks from Oaxaca in on heroin busts and asked me, “Do you have a little Mexican in you?” I said no and he gave it a beat then asked, "Do you want to?”

One thing I liked about the kid was that although he was 100 percent gangster and always wore his jail shirts buttoned only at the top and his pants pulled up high, & la cholo, he talked like a normal — not that soft, insinuating barrio slur those lowrider twerps think is so damn understated and cool. Understatement ill-becomes a guy with $3000 worth of hydraulics in his car to make it dance around at stop lights and a teardrop tattooed on his eye. He chattered at me nonstop tor three days and didn’t even get on my nerves too bad. He talked a lot about doing amphetamines — God knows what he’d be like tweaked. I couldn’t resist mentioning the jailhouse legend that people who write their name on the wall come back. He thought about that and decided it was uncool to have graffiti-ized the walls, which gave him an excuse to scurry around obliterating everything. He had even engraved the stainless steel toilet bowl somehow.

Anyway, his story started out with no more than meeting a nice chick at a quince anos party, taking her to his garage hidey-hole, firing them both up with a bunch of crank, and fucking her brains out for a few days, nonstop. (Which just shows about what chance anybody has of making kids stop doing speed.) He said, “The girls all love Little Chino because he gives them a good ride.”

But later, dehydrated, wrung out, and coming down from the run, he drops the girl off at her house down near (a little too near) San Ysidro and is almost back home, in fact actually back on Otay turf when... “Booyah, here’s Chula Vista.”

A whole carload of the hated Chula Vista gang, in fact, all of them very well aware of who Little Chino is and just tickled to get their hands on him, outnumbered and helpless. Well, not all that helpless.

“Man, I saw those vatos getting out of the car, and I thought, ’I’m not the one, homey.’ I was too tired to run, so I waited till one big guy walked up to me and Booyah! I kicked him right in the huevos." I later heard the same story from one of the Chula Vista guys, and though it was a lot different, it’s pretty obvious Little Chino put up a fight like a tiger. “But,” he said, “it wasn’t happening. I got beat down bad.” Which is ail in the game. What pissed him was the driver, a sort of Chula Juana warlord.

“He shouldn’t have done that shit, you know? No need. They want to sock me up, okay. But dissing me out like that was squash.” The guy had Little Chino stretched out over the car hood and flogged him with a radio antenna. Still not the worst, though. “I could’ve hung with that too. But not that other shit.” Namely dropping Chino’s chinos and pantomiming sodomizing him. “That’s what did it. I mean, I’m gonna take that shit? He disgraced me on my own set, man. I didn’t have no choice.”

“So after I got it back together, I started asking questions. Like, who is this guy? Where does he live? I even asked a few Chula Vista guys. After I beat them a little bit. Maybe not enough. I don’t know. I find out he’s got this chick in National City, he’s always kicking up there with

her. So one day he’s lying up with her and Booyah! the door opens and I come in and say, ‘Remember me? I remember you.’ She’s yelling and he tries to get to a gun, but I’ve got a gun too and he can’t get around. I walk up on the bed, kick toe sheets off. The girl is Mexican, no ’English, no clothes, very cherry. Crying. I pulled her over to the table, and two of the guys hold her down on it, and I drop my pants. The guy is going apeshit, but what can he do? I grab her hair and turn her face to the guy and ask him, who's it going to be, her or him? He can’t say it, just stares at me, calling me all kinds of chingamadres. I say, ‘Her or you, Carnal?’ He says, ‘Let her go.’ I say, 'Good choice. Like a fuckin’ man.’ Then I shoot him right in the face. How you like me now?

“It wasn’t that cool, you know. I don’t tell people about it much. But I had to do it. He disgraced me in my own hood, you understand that. You don't let a thing like that go by. I had no choice. The girl either; she witnessed the whole thing.”

If you’re asking yourself why people tell me these things, I'm way ahead of you. I can only surmise that, while out here, I am generally seen as a criminally crazed, irresponsible fuckup; inside, I get perceived as an older, wiser, educated guy — fair, trustworthy, and a caring leader type. Or maybe it’s just because they sense that I'll sit still for it.

BRAD

Brad was my favorite entertainment at Susanville. He had an open and undefended nature, a wry sense of humor, a good strong laugh, and tales of the Orange County waste age that just went on and on. A hell of a guy, even a poet. He used to write biker/tweaker/peckerwood epics that sounded like Robert Service meeting Guns N’ Roses at a benefit for Easy Riders. Laureate of methedrine and muscle cars. Hardened cons snapped his poems up for whatever “stuff” they could get together. Somehow it didn’t surprise me when one night he wanted to tell me something he’d never mentioned to anybody before.

“Dave sawed off both barrels and made a nice wood pistol handle for it; you know the type I mean?” I knew the type he meant. I used to have one, but with high-tech Pachmeyr grips and a custom-sewn leather shoulder holster. The cops got it. But anybody with any time down knows the piece — every other biker in the slam has one tattooed on his biceps so you’re looking down the barrels, a big hairy fist on the trigger. The gun is a status symbol (not to mention magic wand and psychic light-sabre toy); the tattoo is folk art.

"He had 12-gauge, high-velocity shells loaded with special stainless steel shot. I forget what they’re called; they’re way bigger than buckshot, like quarter-inch bearings. You have to stack them up just right in the shell, three to a layer, each layer staggered for maximum fit. A rugged deal for tough customers.” No doubt perfect for Brad and his pals up in Orange County, where there’s a lot of young guys into white pride and a lot more every day who aren’t white. Old-time Middle America and Little Saigon are just a few blocks apart, and it’s been known to get wild, wild West.

“Once we got into a little squabble with some Vietnamese in one of those stupid blacked-out Toyota pimpmobiles they drive. As soon as I flipped the fecal finger, they cut us off, jumped out, and came up to the windows waving nunchucks and doing all kinds of Kung Fool moves — looked like an audition for a Bruce Lee flick. Dave was driving his El Camino with the whole nine yards of boss 428. We could have just dozed the works right off the street, but he just started laughing, rolled down the window, and pointed that shorty at them. Said, ‘Welcome to the West, gookoids.’ I cracked up. They smoked so much rubber getting long, we could hardly see ’em go.”

But even with all the opportunities for mayhem in Huntington Beach and Westminster, Brad and Dave’s major moment waited until they were down in East San Diego on some bare-wires errand. They’d parked in an alley behind a card room, and when they came out of a house without the ephedrine they’d g'one in after, the first thing they saw was the door of the El Camino open and a pair of legs sticking out the door. Legs they assumed were connected to hands fiddling around with the state-of-the-art CD player.

“I froze for a minute. I mean, how many times have you wanted to actually catch them in the act? I couldn’t believe our luck. I started taking off my belt, but Dave grabbed my arm and pointed to the tailgate. We snuck up real quiet. I could hear shit-for-brains screwing around with the wires. Dave unlocked the canopy, and I helped him ease the hatch open. He reached inside and came out with the sawed-off. Then we stepped around by the door and he said, ‘Freeze. Miami Vice.’ The toad just exploded out of the seat. I saw something metal in his hand and started to yell, then the biggest sound in the world hits me in the head like a drag race commercial, and the guy flies apart into two pieces. And the door blows off the Camino and skips down the street a few yards.

“The toad’s legs are laying on the street, and his arms and head are back inside the truck. There’s nothing else left of him. I couldn’t believe the stink. There were, like, wet clouds of this gut-churning stench all around us. I’ve never smelled anything like that in my life. Not just bowels, all kinds of these, like, alien stinks. I was almost deaf and felt like puking right there, but Dave hauled the arms and head part out, pushed me into the truck, then jumped in himself.

Lame-o hadn’t been after the stereo after all, he’d been trying to clout the whole rig. So there we were, tweaked out, adrenaline rushing, half panicked, and trying to rewire a nigger-rigged ignition in the dark. It caught and Dave burned out of the alley and towards the 94 ramp. We were screaming down the street with the wind blitzing in where the door used to be. My teeth were clenched so hard I was getting a Charlie horse in my jaw. We got about six blocks when it hit me and I started yelling, The door, Dave! The door!’ He said, ‘We’ll sweat it later,’ but I said, 'The cops — the numbers — the fugging fingerprints, for Crissakes.’ He didn’t say anything, just did a highway patrol turn and headed back. That’s when I got REALLY scared shitless. We’d just fired off a cannon and decorated the alley with spade guts. Somebody HAD to be paying attention.

“But nooooo. We pulled up and Dave jumped out, grabbed the door, and stuffed it in so that most of it was in my face and lap, then looked at the Toad McNuggets on the street and said, ‘Fucker needs to work on his freeze.’ Then he put down the hammer until we were way gone. I got to sit there with a door splattered with chunks of meat in my lap until we found a place we could pull in and put the door back on with duct tape. Duct tape is righteous; if God had it, he could’ve built the world in four days. We looked a little less suspicious with the door back on, and we made it back to Dave’s place in Laguna with no problem. I was half-sick the whole way, then I couldn’t seem to get clean or get that stink out of my nose for a week.

“We never heard anything in the L.A. papers about some guy getting chopped and channeled in Dago. And we never talked about it. Sometimes we’d be at the drags or a car show looking at some really butch set of wheels, and I’d say, ‘Dave’s got something would blow the doors off that.’ And he’d give me a little look. Once he said I was an auto accessory before the fact. Dave’s a joker. And when I get around him, I get into it too.”

What always seems to get people about these stories (beyond even their casual nature) is that there are so many people killed without the killers being known or punished — and without being reported. To me, they go beyond being unsolved, lack even the dignity of being undetected. They are uncognizant killings; body-bag disposal situations in which anonymous people are transferred from one void to another. They are only a few among many. When urban homicide officials find a teen-aged black car thief or barrio gang punk dead in an alley, they don't react by getting tense, calling in Kojak, putting out all-points bulletins, and dragging nets. Would you? For that matter, when you hear about some little Crip getting greased in a drive-by, do you excitedly follow the story, hoping for justice? To me, it is interesting to note that all of these stories are being told in jail, by men being punished for other crimes entirely. Often silly crimes, followed by arrests for making stupid mistakes. Many of them people of a quality you are surprised to find in the lockup. I wondered about that sometimes, even while I was sorting out the odd vectors of my own guilt, my own wars of pardon. Even as I looked around most times and wondered what the hell I was doing here.

BUZZ

I first noticed Buzz when the El Cajon “Rambo squad” brought him into the tank late one night, put him in one of the “three-man” cells with about seven Crips, and told them he was a slob and a snitch and that nobody would take it too hard if anything unhealthy happened to him. No way the bangers thought Buzz was a Blood — he was almost white and carried himself like an athlete or fighting dog. There was only the word of some particularly shitty cops that he was a snitch, but they didn’t care — it was a free shot, and gangsters are the ultimate in cheap-shot artists. It’s been speculated that “Crip” stands for “Cowards Run in Packs.” Watch all the Godfather movies and Sesame Street-for-white-boys programs like In Living Color that you want to — the mob ethic is cowardice and bullying and you know it.

I always thought that using inmates to “hit” other inmates was the single most corrupt thing a jailer could do. Nothing really erases the thin line any more emphatically than urging criminals to commit a felony assault on an imprisoned victim. But I came to be even more outraged that the inmates would do it. I used to speak out against it, asking why snitching someone to the cops is such a mortal sin but beating him for them is fun and games. Everybody agreed with that, all right. And everybody was right and ready to pound anybody the cops tossed into their cage with a “Fuck me off” sign on them. Most criminals are worse than people who don’t play by your rules; they don’t play by their own rules.

Buzz came in double-cuffed, with his face scuffed up from El Cajon wall therapy. He didn’t impress me as being too alarmed at being shoved into a cell full of riled-up Crips, something I would have found extremely alarming and would have reacted to by belting one of the cops and taking my chances with them. He was relaxed and looking around with his bright-eyed gaze of a curious kid testing the limits. They slammed the steel door on him and walked off laughing. I would pay a lot to see what happened in the next five minutes, because when they came back an hour later and opened the door, Buzz was the only one left in working order. I was impressed. The cops were bummed. The Crips were unavailable for comment.

I didn’t get to know Buzz until months later, when we met at Chino and spent six weeks in the same barracks while having our futures sorted out by the strange point system corrections uses to pigeonhole their bumper crop of baddies. He was the best company I’ve ever had; extremely intelligent, totally relaxed, funny, wise, and very dedicated to instructing younger guys in building their bodies and reflexes. His “yellow” complexion, blue eyes, wolf-like cheekbones, and wide leonine brow gave him a resemblance to the villain in the Van Damme movie Cyborg, which tickled a few of the kids. It turned out his father was a karate instructor and Bruce Lee disciple who had drilled him in fighting forms as soon as he could walk. He was going to be the next predominant champ, bigger than Chuck Norris. But in a weird form of adolescent rebellion, Buzz told his old man to stick his karate and became a kick boxer. Also a computer analyst, but that just didn’t seem to have the same thrills as his “real” occupation, the one that paid for his new Corvette and collection of unusual automatic weapons.

Buzz was an enforcer. A situation as volatile as San Diego County — with its world-class speed cuisine, wetback and heroin influx, and insatiable maw for rock coke cookies — breeds a certain number of squabbles that don’t present very well in small claims court, and there are guys who know that grabbing some beefburgers from Gold’s Gym and paying them off in steroids is not an effective scare tactic for experienced wiseguys. Buff isn’t necessarily bad. The wise move is to get Buzz to drop by and restore respect, using whatever methods, measures, and machinery the situation calls for. He once told me, when discussing the TV image of his profession, “Hired muscle runs about a dollar a pound. I’m hired attitude.”

Not a bad life, really. More adventure and creative problem solving than programming, a good way to stay in shape, meet a lot of interesting people and fuck them off, opportunities for high-performance driving on public thoroughfares, lots of really strange pussy.

Buzz told me he met his wife (a 19-year-old of black-Filipino mix and the wickedest-looking fox I’ve ever seen) at an apartment where he was doing some security consulting that involved kicking two guys’ guts out and having an earnest talk with their boss while holding a pistol muzzle several inches down his throat. Suddenly Miss Tigress Congeniality Runner-Up walked into the room, sheet-creased and naked, and said, “Hey, motherfucker, I could get some sleep if you pricks could kill each other quiet.” Buzz was in love. He just reached out and grabbed her and said, “Hey, you’d better come with me” and swept her off her feet right there in the bedroom. His business contact too — who had to lay there on the floor with his hands behind his head and listen to what must have been a pretty histrionic encounter between Buzz and the psycho little spitfire that had been his girl up until the moment she saw Buzz.

They were inseparable for months after that, until Buzz got his ass in a sling over one of those ethereal conspiracy indictments the DEA lawyers are so fond of and ended up in Chino and later on his way to Donovan. Apparently she never visited or wrote him, just took off somewhere in his Corvette, about the only thing that ruffled his normally ultra-relaxed cool.

One day he was coaching some of us on dips while we were waiting in the 100-yard main chow line. People listen to Buzz because he can outperform the big guys with big slabs of muscle. His tips have supercharged my ability to do dips, butterflies, and pull-ups. A skinhead with a Supreme White Power tattoo was whining about not being able to dip like Buzz said because of a knife wound (healed, but still pretty red and swollen) in his right pectoral. Buzz snorted at that and lifted his arm to show his left triceps. Buzz never posed, but when he hit a stance like that to show an isolated muscle, it was like looking at a composite model for heroic Greek marbles. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a wide, ugly scar that jagged down the muscle to the rotator cuff, “That tore all the way to the bone two years ago — the hardest injury to ever come back from. And I was dipping two dozen four months later. It’s completely recovered now, totally operational.” The burrhead supreme shut up and bore down on dipping Buzz-style. I was the only one who asked him how you go about tearing a triceps to the bone.

He gave a sheepish grin and said, ”Awww, it was this thing Chuck Norris did, jumping up and kicking through the windshield of a moving car. I heard about it, and it really knocked me out. Norris always had this real dramatic flair, you know. But like some kid trying to ‘Do it like Air Jordan’ or something, I had to give it a try. Took me four years to get the chance to hurt myself. This asshole was trying to split from a parking garage, so I jumped down a floor and waited for him to come. I probably could have got to him before he got into the car. And I absolutely could have stopped him with a gun when he came gunning down the ramp at me. But no, not bullet-proof Buzzy. It was a Porsche 924 too. I pulled the Norris move perfect; up, laid-out, full-force to the windshield with my heel, feet stacked, using the car’s speed. I went in further faster than I thought I would. Killed the fucker, all right, but... you’re not going to believe this... I caught the windshield wiper, and that little steel sliver slid right in and slit my arm like a needle in a vein. Can you handle that? Then I was sort of trapped halfway through a windshield with a damaged arm, bleeding like a motherfucker, and all sorts of shooting and sirens. Fucking Porsches, anyway.”

Buzz is out now, working with computers. No sign of the Super Vixen (or the ’Vette). It’s good to see him making it, out of trouble. But when he moves or stretches or grabs a mosquito out of the air and dashes it to death on a wall four feet away, it seems like some kind of waste.

I tend to trust Buzz a lot more than most guys I know from the joint. But I once paid a quarter a swat to sledge an old car to raise funds to buy panties for cheerleaders or something, and I got the impression that putting anything, much less your body, through a windshield is not done. They’re made like Ofeos with slo-mo stickum in the middle. So I checked into it a bit. All I found out is that Chuck Norris did, in fact, do the trick — on That’s Incredible, not in a movie. And I firmly believe that anything Norris could do, Buzz can do. In fact, if I needed a one-man army to wipe out a bunch of heavily armed assholes, I’d call Buzz, not Chuck. No doubt about that at all.

“You ever kill anyone?" really isn’t even the question. It’s “You ever murdered anyone?" Killing is ugly but isn't always a sin. It’s a part of life, like borning and dying: for everything a season. You can come back from the wars and pick up your plow and live your life. People did it for centuries. But murder marks anyone with a conscience or soul, puts them in a special fraternity. A lot of guys back from Nam felt murder on their heads, and that's what the Nam trauma was all about, not the acute lack of heroic bronzes and -ticker-tape parades. That's probably why the punk thing came up, why the whole 70s generation was such a bunch of wannabes, why the current style is such a strange blend of vitriolic fervor and vague apathy. Maybe even why the gangs and why all the kids running around in black wearing bones and skulls and knives. A bunch of young men missed out being on something major, missed the fraternity rush. You’ve got boys out there imitating men by putting on the mask of murder. Anyway, everybody's been copping to these killings for me, so it’s my turn, right? Okay, 12 years ago in Colorado Springs, when I ran a rock magazine and dealt drugs (a combination they really shouldn't allow), I did it cold blooded, and for petty reasons — inexcusable. Even if that guy was a punk and a puke and a snitch. It wasn’t colorful enough to bore you with, though. All I did was put his name in the paper.