A Brush With Prison

In the early 1970s I moved to the East Texas town of Tyler and spent a winter working construction.  I'd been rattling around the South and West  working various jobs, but no place had prepared me for Texas.  The people there seemed half-wild, more violent than any I had ever seen, rough, quarrelsome, and dangerous, but at the same time the most neighborly and helpful people I'd ever encountered.  And it seemed like every third person I met had spent time in prison.  People were always swapping prison stories as well as tales about harrowing encounters with police on the streets of Texas.  It soon became clear that not only were people  prone to crazy behaviors that got them into trouble, but the Texas authorities had a particularly punitive attitude as well.  They often locked people away for much of their lives for minor offenses.  They particularly seemed to regard any drug offense as virtually on a scale with manslaughter, and many a poor Texan -- or visitor to the state --  was destined to languish  for many years in the dungeons of the Lone Star state for possessing even a trivial amount of marijuana.  And it was a particularly bad kind of prison experience, with the type of guards who would work prisoners to the point of sunstroke in the fields, then catch snakes to dump on their prostrate forms to "make sure thet boy ain't a-fakin'."  I came to think of a stint in the Texas prison system as being the equivalent of  exile to Siberia -- only really hot instead of really cold.

After a few months, I decided it was time to push on from Texas and keep travelling.  I gave my two weeks notice to the construction boss.  During my last week, I kept having a strange feeling that Texas was going to reach out and snatch at me before I departed.  On my final night, my friend Orville and I went over to the neighboring town of Longview to shoot some pool, and on the way back, as I was driving along a country road, Orville said, "Hey, Cecil, I got this-here joint in my pocket, I'm scared I'm gonna lose it.  How about stickin' it in your snap-flap shirt pocket and hold onto it for me."  I was happy to oblige a friend.  But hardly had I gotten the joint into my pocket and the snap closed when  my rearview mirror erupted in flashing blue lights.  "Oh, no," I thought, "Texas wants my soul."  I soon found out I was being stopped by a  Smith County  deputy sheriff, who turned out to be almost a caricature of a burly, bullying Southern rural cop.  "Just exactly what do you think you're doing out here on my county road with a taillight missing and out-of-state plates, son?" he said.  The way he said it, such behavior sounded like the essence of evil.  Unable to find anymore crimes, he issued me a citation -- but there was a hitch.  Since I my license plates were from out of state, I would have to post an appearance bond.  He directed me to a seat in his squad car and drove to a police station.  Orville followed in my car.  "What happens if I don't have enough money to post the bond?" I asked him.  "Then we put your ass in jail until you do have enough," he answered.  "And if we do that, we're going to search you and your car from stem to stern."  

The bond turned out to be $50.  By turning out our pockets, Orville and I came up with $48.60.   My heart sank.  Somehow, karma was catching up to me.  Standing there in the police station under close scrutiny with the joint in my shirt pocket, I saw my life stretching before me in my new residence, Huntsville State Prison.  "Wait!"  said Orville, "I forgot my emergency buck!"  turned out he always carried a dollar in a hidden pocket of his wallet -- hidden so that he wouldn't spend it except in an emergency.  Still, we were forty cents short. 

"Look like you come up short, boy," said the sheriff's deputy.  "Just give me one minute!" said Orville and ran desperately outside.  I could see him through the window, combing the car for loose change.  In less than a minute he came running back into the station: He'd found forty-two cents down under the seats.  I was saved!  I could go on with my life.  Orville and I even had two cents to split.

"Man!" said Orville when we were back driving toward home.  "That's like what happened to Johnny Belknap."

"Who's Johnny Belknap?"

"Oh, he's an ol' boy who sells a lot of marijuana around here.  Matter of fact, he's about the biggest dealer hereabouts.  Sells hundreds of pounds of the stuff every week.  And do the cops hate him!  He makes fun of 'em.  He sells the stuff right under their noses and they can't catch him.  Won't nobody turn on him, so they have to catch him with some weed on him to make a case.  They've been trying to for years and he's always clean.  One time he got stopped for going forty miles an hour in a thirty-five zone, and within about a minute he was surrounded by every kind of different cop car you can imagine.  They tore his car up searching it.  Finally they found one old dried-up loosely-rolled joint.  A deputy sheriff came over to the car grinnin' and holding that joint in his fist and stuck his hand under Johnny's face and said, "We've got you now, you son-of-a-bitch!"  And he opened his fist to display the joint, and just as he did, a little puff of breeze unrolled that old joint and blew every bit of the marijuana away.  Johnny liked to have died from laughing.  So did everybody else when the word got out."

"Nice story, Orville," I said.  "Sounds like 'ol Johnny and me kept our scalps by about the same margin."