Free Death Row Breakout by Edward Bunker

anklets would bang against the anklebone at each stride.
    Into the doorway they hustled me. Ahead was a gate of steel straps from an earlier time. Beyond was a twenty-foot tunnel with a high, round ceiling and benches bolted along each wall. Near the other end was a solid steel door on each side. One went into the Visiting Room, the other to Receiving and Release. Next to the Receiving and Release door was a urinal and a tiny hand-rinse sink. Everyone walking in and out of San Quentin passed through the East Sally Port. At that point, I was the only convict inside the tunnel, although every convict who worked outside the walls went in and out through this tunnel.
    “Hold it,” a guard said, putting his arm in front of me. The Sergeant opened the Receiving and Release door and stuck his head inside. A moment later he pulled back and motioned. “Siddown, Cameron,” he said. Then the other escort said, “There’s three dressouts in there. About halfway finished.”
    So I sat down to wait – and thought of other times. Years ago a black revolutionary, who was also a
cause celebre
among the far left and young Blacks, George Jackson by name, came out here on a visit. He had many visitors, and many rumors swirled around him. He was awaiting trial for allegedly killing a guard. When he was returned to the adjustment center, he produced a gun, chaos ensued and, before it was over, two guards, two convicts and George were dead. The media outcry began, “How’d he get the gun?”
    He must have gotten it on the visit, but how had he gotten it into the adjustment center? He was frisked when he came out of the visiting room, and was under a guard’s eyes until the escorts arrived to take him back. He sat where I was sitting now, on the bench. It was pretty much accepted, fantastic as it seemed, that the pistol was concealed in his Afro, fashionable at the time.
    I don’t think so.
    Earlier that day, it was said, a black convict who worked in the personnel snack bar passed through and stopped to piss. He took the pistol wrapped in a bandanna, and pushed it up under the sink. He then continued on his business.
    When George came out of the visiting room, he was told by an old, white-haired guard, to sit down while escorts were summoned by phone. George sat, then motioned that he had to piss. The old guard was five feet from the enclosed urinal, but he could see George’s head and, down below, his legs from the knees to his feet. He couldn’t see George’s hands or waist. George moved the bandanna and its contents into his waistband.
    When the escorts arrived, George was seated on the bench and the old guard told them, “I frisked him already.”
    So they motioned for him to come along, and walked him the fifty yards across the plaza to the adjustment center.
    After all these years nobody has figured out how he got the pistol. I wish I knew the truth.
    The R&R door opened and four parolees appeared. All wore khaki pants, sport shirt and windbreaker. Each windbreaker was a different color. I’d been in a cell adjacent to one of them. He looked at me and turned his head away as they passed by. He was afraid to speak to me. I said nothing and watched them step out of the Sally Port into the sunlight of freedom.
    I was then out of the other Sally Port door and into San Quentin. Beyond the door was a moderately-good-sized plaza. On one side were the chapels, Catholic and Protestant, and on the other, the Adjustment Center, a newer three story building that held the troublemakers on its bottom two floors – and Condemned Row #2 on the third. A handful of convicts loitered by the fishpond outside the chapels. One or two I knew by sight but not by name.
    They walked me down a road past the Quonset hut library across from the education building. One guard walked whilst waving convicts away with a hand signal and the admonishment: “Dead man walking.” A second guard followed me and, on a walkway along the North Cell-House, a rifleman