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July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
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I Spy: Now
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The CEO
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Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
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Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
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July 17, 2002
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The
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Zara Gelsey
Who's
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9/11 and
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Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
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Bush, Burqas
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July 16, 2002
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Faith-based
Capitalism in
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Kurt Nimmo
How My
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The Kashmir
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When
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The
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July 14, 2002
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I'll Never
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A Process
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Go Tell
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Lessons
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July 12, 2002
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A Tale
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Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
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Law vs.
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A Deep
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July
20, 2002
Augusta,
GA.
Coming
of Age in the Deep South
by T.W. Croft
Part Three
At the Sunrise
Inn
All of our friends and more would converge at
the Sunrise Inn on Saturday nights for Revolution 101 classes
that we held for the Augusta College (AC) students. Which consisted
of reading materials on the requisite scavenged phone line wooden
spool center table (before they started selling the knock-offs
at Ikea), all-night music on the turntable, and lectures on the
youth revolt, lasting about an hour, or until the pink or green
tab set in. Then, the kids were on their own, and the adventures
began.
I remember riding my Triumph 650 with
Sue and two others on the bike (four?), I think on mushrooms
that night, busting into a wedding reception, claiming to be
friends of the family and eating and drinking our brains out
until discovered. We pulled over on the way back when Sue had
a huge epiphany that, my god, there's four of us on this bike!
Bad karma! Sheeeiiittt! And got off and walked home. Goofy
things like that.
While the guys were always nervous about
getting drafted, I was evidently spared due to my bust in Chattsworth
(I had developed back-up plans to go to the Bahamas or Canada
if necessarythank you, Chattsworth).
The residents of Monte Sano were somewhat
inter-changeable. Raymond would move in, out, back in, and out
again. He had this closet with a blue light, where he organized
the most amazing little self-sufficiency cubicle, kind of like
a space capsule, where he would go when the trip got too heavy.
We discouraged Herb from moving in, although we'd would have
loved it if Phyllis had moved out of her mom's house. There was
some guy who crashed a few times, was always dressed in a greek
toga when he tripped, saying "peace brother", and watching
while we cleaned, cooked, constructed or whatever the next day
(or when we got around to it). That's when we arrived at the
decision that egalitarian distribution was not too good an idea,
no matter who said it (get a job, you bourgeois poser).
When Charlotte moved in to Monte Sano,
I came in from a certain kind of mental wilderness. I remember
thinking, this was my first (almost-adult) love. First, she had
a great body; I'd indulge in that young love like a morphine
addict in a pool of minced poppies. Second, she believed in me.
Third, she was funny as hell, and we were always laughing. While
I was fearful for her safety, she was fearless of her own.
She could be shades of Lauren Bacall
or mountain woman. A few years later when we rendezvoused in
Portland, she had this red and blue/green-flowered 1940s dress
that cut off right below her knees. Once, we were camping in
the mountains in Southern California at the beginning of the
fall. We had to break into an old summer cabin to escape a freak
cold front. While I was out walking the next day, looking for
wood for the fireplace, Charlotte was sitting on the stoop of
the house when a ranger drove by. She was sharpening an ax. She
looked at the ranger like, don't bother me, I'm sharpening an
ax. She told him we were watching the cabin for the Joneses.
He kept on driving. She was money.
Charlotte didn't get along with Frank
and some of the boys, although she loved Raymond and the Bryans
and a few of her friends who came over. Frank was always coming
in with a new theory of life and organizing. Frank would blurt
out, you know, Guerdjieff believed, that if we visualize the
police, and, you know, neutralize them with a, you know, sufi
jiujitsu spiritual trance in the fourth dimension, they will
reform themselves, he'd say, giggling his brains out on some
pharmaceutical. Oh shut up, Frank, Charlotte would say.
Herbie would always drop by with a deal we couldn't resist (usually
a bust); Char would laugh get real, Herb. McNamara was
always staring at her breastsfuckin' A, choice bazongas, my
man, he'd proclaim, thinking she didn't hear him; she'd walk
away. And so on. She held her own.
There we were, one glorious Saturday
night in January, 1972, my 21st birthday, crankin' "Who's
Next" to 10 (we won't get fooled again!), the party's
on, Charlotte by my side, a time of growth and independence,
changing the world, and maybe even changing Augusta. All the
gang was there. I was feelin' my oats. 21. On top of the hill,
Augusta, on top of the world. Just as I'm about to drift off
in brain marsh (a freakish and frightening place, and Lord only
knows why I went there; the two minutes of bliss were always
overruled by four hours of mental torture); a yell goes up. All
of a sudden, someone hollers PIGS!, It's Kent! and people
started bailing out the doors, windows, up the stairs and out
through the roof. Buck Kent is raiding. With the whole damned
army. Like field mice running from 78 hungry cats finally escaping
from the house of an old crazy dead woman, we flee.
So, these were the kinds of run-ins I
initially had with Buck. I usually made myself scarce. I don't
remember much about how it went down, but one day Kent planted
an ounce on Andy Best, loveable Andy the bass player. He was
railroaded through court and sent to prison for a year. Wrong
place, wrong time. Now they were starting to piss me off.
The Investigation
Then, some guy from Texas, Dan, I think,
showed up, a newcomer. He wasn't there long. After my legal travails
(later on that), he booked it back to Texas. But he and I started
planning an investigation that would take another three years
to come full circle. He had skills none of my other friends did.
Mainly, he could concentrate on something for more than 20 minutes.
We were gonna get these mother-fuckers. They were busting our
friends. Busting up our concerts. Busting in on pot parties.
And, as we found out, they were doing something much worse.
There was an even darker side to what
we called "Disgusta". There was a black dude named
Schoolboy who sold scag on Broad. Skanky guy, we'd cross the
street rather than walk by and get propositioned and hear his
jive. Downtown was already depressing enough in the early 70s.
It did have the one head shop for 120 miles, though. There was
a also a long-hair redneck biker named Bubba Holtzclaw, always
waiting for a big load coming in. Rip off artist, and like Schoolboy,
dangerous. Him and his low-life friends would try to break up
rallies. These assholes not only sold drugs on the street, they
had protection.
Turns out the police were supplying the
assholes. They were using Schoolboy and others to distribute
heroin. Dan and I met a former dealer in hiding one night. He
had actually been busted, his stuff confiscated, threatened to
never talk about what happened, given a plane ticket, and left
town. The dude wouldn't be a witness. We heard some verifying
tales from Allen Markwalter, a young Woody Allen-lookalike with
a jewish afro who dealt.
Now we had 'em. Fuckin' A! So,
we talked to Bill and Pat for hours one day under clouds of bourbon
and cigarettes. Bill couldn't print it---the paper wouldn't print
it. So, we would go to the FBI.
I remember being in an office with Dan,
an FBI guy in a suit, sitting behind a desk, smoking a camel.
We laid out the story. He seemed very interested. We had traced
a system that worked beautifully. The vice squad would move heroin
through a network of dealers in Augusta (and probably other towns).
But since they didn't arrest heroin and hard drug dealers, they
had to increase the arrests of the soft drugs users. They were
too stupid to catch people--no, Buck Kent and Sgt. Durland never,
ever scored or sold or copped out of their convertible. So, they
had to plant on people. Big time. Innocent kids. We told the
FBI stiff there were a lot of kids sitting in prison for nothing.
We thought, maybe justice does work in America.
Then, the FBI guy said "very interesting",
and actually got animated. He said he (and the Bureau) knew it
was happening. He got up and showed us a map of Augusta, which
bordered South Carolina. Across the river was an even more depressing
'burg, North Augusta. He said, the problem, boys, is that
these drugs aren't being trans-shipped across state lines.
Too bad. For us to act, there has to be interstate
shipment. We were stunned. How do you know? We said?
How do you know they don't sell it across the freakin' river?
How could they not be moving it across the river? Don't the
dealers cross the river? Baldfaced, he shrugged it off.
Sorry, boys.
We walked out, stood in the hot Georgia
sun. Baffled. I mean, baffled. The son of a bitch verified our
conspiracy theories. Fuck. What a cover-up. Why were the FBI
afraid to step in to this. What did we not know? So, we went
to talk to other people, to try to peel away some of the layers
from the smelly, rotten Vidalia onion. Tried again to talk to
Bill's paper. Nothing. The other newspaper. No. The ACLU. Sorry.
I was volunteering for the OEO at the time, and one of the activists
gave us a tip. Forget it.
Finally we made a mistake. We went to
James Beck, the chief of police. The stereotypical short fat
mean cop. We sat down in an office not 50 feet away from the
Vice Squad. He got fumed, said how dare you make unproven
accusations. Was gonna watch us. We left. Oh shit, we thought.
Later, we went to Sheriff Anderson. Now,
Anderson was an honest cop, for sure, we thought. He had bad-mouthed
the police. He sat there across the desk like he was gonna fall
asleep. Next?
(Uh, oh)
Then, for the next 12 months, Buck came
after me, big time. Karma, said Sue Week (Oh, Sheeeiittt!,
she said). McNamara warned me to not get too close to the fireyou're
getting' too negatori, man.
Buck had already announced his hard on
for me and my ilk. Even before I got to Monte Sano, I had lived
in a small apartment with Frank, as I mentioned earlier, where
we had plotted the overthrow of the establishment. I came home
to the apartment one day, and discovered my belongings on the
lawn, Buck and Durland in the narco-mobile in the front, smoking
cigarettes. A buddy of mine was in the flat, and explained that,
given his long hair and resemblance from behind, Buck had broken
in on him. When he asked where Preacher was, my buddy said, Disney
World. Buck pulled an ounce of pot out of his pocket, and said,
too bad, he had a little present for me. He proceeded to tear
up the room, looking for something I owned. Of course, I never
owned anything. Nothing. Nonetheless, Buck had the place torn
apart, had me evicted for the allegation of drug dealing. Threw
all our belongings on the front yard.
I came home to that. I was pissed off,
walked into the front yard and yelled at Buck. I walked into
the street and yelled at him. He got out, walked over to me with
Durland and a couple of suits with him, threw off my glasses,
and asked me to fight him "man to man". I laughed.
You had to be fucking kidding me, right, for me to believe
we could scrap without these baboons cracking my ass, and arresting
me on top of it? I ain't goin' down that damned dirt road. Stay
the fuck away from me, Buck. I yelled to the high heavens
at them as they were leaving, howling and growling.
This little incident happened even before
we started the investigation. After we started raking the muck,
Kent just simply wanted to bury me. I had adopted an alias (common
for the long-hairs at the time) of Preacher. While floating around
late at night I would carry a bible. When harassed by cops I
would whip out the book and start preaching to them. By the time
I got into it, the men in blue would let me out of the car, and
wish me luck (just get out). I'm not really sure how all this
came about. But as the heat got hotter, I needed as many feints
and diversions as possible.
I would get so paranoid sometimes about
the vice squad and their nefarious contacts that I even called
on the rank-and-file police occasionally. Once, I was watching
a house owned by a reporter friend of Bill Bryan, another old
three-story house with turrets. There was some young lady with
me at the time, and we were tripping. I heard sounds in the attic,
and we both flipped out. Assassins, I was sure. We called the
police, who were on the scene immediately. We put a chair in
the hallway, a cop took out his pistol, and, with a flashlight
from his car, he tried to open the hatch to the attic, standing
on the chair. The cop got scared as he and his buddy heard some
shuffling around. See, I said, standing behind a door so the
assassin's rifle couldn't get a lucky shot at me. He pops open
the hatch with the flashlight, we hold our breath in suspense,
and then, it happened. Four pounds of white shit fell down on
his face and down his clothes. Pigeon shit. Oops!
Getting
A Bit Rambunctious
When my Dad would get the most pissed
at us kids when I was young, he used to yell out, stop being
so goddamned rambunctious! Wow, we thought. That must
be an important word.
A guy named Ray moved in for awhile. He was a mental case, did
hard drugs and obsessed on early heavy metal. But he had a great
rap, and helped to articulate the kinder, gentler Augusta that
we envisioned. Pat Bryan really liked himkind of a radical chic
attraction thing.
But most of our political vision was
not too radical, in hindsight. We laid it out in our Sunrise
Manifesto: A community paper. A community radio station.
Free music in the park. Worker coops. A coffeehouse. Ecology.
Organized communes. And something about taking over the means
of production. Wahoo! Most of this not too earthshaking. And
yeah, we joined the struggle against the war. Some of us joined
the black boycott (Char and I being among the few, with the Reces).
And we joined the joyous campaign to overturn the right wing
Democratic Party in Georgia in 1972.
I have a picture of Bill Bryan and Rex
Larkin on the grounds of some podunk high school in 1972, kicking
back on the grass, drinking a beer. It was the 10th district
nominating convention of Georgia, held in a rural county under
a good old boy government. We had pulled together a coalition
of folks from the University at Athens (yes, there were students
who had a life beyond the Deltas and Bulldogs), labor from Augusta,
a black leadership group from a county south of Augusta where
they had won power to bring running water and plumbing to their
county, and vets against the war organized by Rex Larkin. Larkin
was the coolest of all the radicals in Augusta. I had grown up
with his younger brothers---they lived not too far from Phyllis---and
they had both turned rad; so, our former high school graduating
class now had at least four or five heads hanging out and raising
hell.
We pulled together a coalition to send
Chisholm, McGovern and McCarthy delegates to the Democratic convention
that year instead of Wallace, Lester Maddox, etc. Maddox, the
governor before Carter and Sanders, sold "chicken sticks"
(with, obviously, a darker meaning) at his chicken restaurant
in Underground Atlanta, and used to ride his bicycle backwards
at the Georgia Tech football games when I was thereour governor!
The party dicks tried to pull all kinds of legal maneuvers to
prevent the coalition participants from occupying the hall. But
the busses kept on coming.
A sheriff's deputy walked up to Bill
Bryan, who was sitting on the grass, drinking a can of Blue Ribbon.
When the cop said get rid of it, he chugged it. He was arrested.
The cop turned to Rex, who chugged his. They went to jail; we
bailed them out. As the voting proceeded, we camped out on the
grass with our picnic packed by Patricia. And mellowed. We won.
Change was spontaneous. Change was a blast.
Next, we pulled together a major peaceful
demonstration at the park. We had organized a number of great
concerts there, some of which were broken up by Buck and his
boys. Then, we got a connection to Ed Harris (not the actor,
the radical former Vet/writer who was married to Joan Baez).
He was traveling around the country, one of the many in those
days. He was heavy, man. People showed up from all over, sitting
and listening to Harris, who sat next to the ;gazebo.
Our crowd had grown pretty large, surrounding
Harris, sitting on the ground. Kent and the boys came by; we
ignored them. I had arranged a permit for a picnic that day,
and we were snacking away. The sun was out. Sky was blue. It
was the Spring of '72. Still the peak of the antiwar movement.
It was demonstration time.
We used the Supreme Court decision by
Justice Potter Stewart in Shuttles v Alabama (1969), granting
the streets and parks to the public in the U.S. as part of the
privileges, immunities, rights and liberties of citizens, as
our rallying cry to take back the public spaces (hey Kent,
it's the law!).
Rallies would spring up like crazy. Rallies
downtown. Rallies at the recruiting station. Rallies at the park.
Rallies at the newspaper. Music in the park now attracted 200-300.
It was getting downright rowdy.
Once three of our gang went to the black
college to announce one of our events, and to invite the students
(as we did at AC). Young black radicals surrounded us, and started
"honkeying" us. Well, we were throwing a rock and
roll thing in the park, it's pretty radical, man, do you want
to come? They trashed us, said we were playing a game with
the white racist pigs while blacks in Augusta were in poverty,
were repressed, and were occasionally shot. Yeah, but we have
long hairs with guitars! Hey, man, we're cool. I think we
found some small rock of common ground, like the boycott (and
hey bro, we like James Brown, too!) and backed our way out of
the campus, befluxxed at how the Panther wanna-bees wouldn't
come party for the cause.
Meanwhile, the real Panthers and black
militants were now in town. A young Panther recruit I hung with
told me about a showdown with police who surrounded a row house
that was rumored to be a weapons hide out. The brothers had picked
up the raid on a police-band radio, and stationed heavily-armed
guards on the rooftops, outnumbering and surrounding the police.
When the sergeant called out on a speaker-phone to come out of
the house, one of the brothers called out from the rooftop above
to look up. The cops would have been massacred. He said, Please
get in your cars and leave our neighborhood now. The cops
looked up at the roofs and windows surrounding them, asses puckering.
They got back in their cars and left. It was getting heavy.
Darlene and Laney found Kent and Durland crawling in the dirt
under their house one night, trying to catch them with drugs
and AWOL soldiers, I guess. They heard them, surprised them with
a bucket of cold water which they poured through a hatch in the
floorboard, and, then, shining flashlights, greeted them with
a pitch fork and pick ax and said, you assholes are trespassin';
next time you crawl under our house, you're gonna get your fat
asses irrigated! Kent and Durland, wet and covered in dirt
and mud and spider webs, had to crawl out from beneath the house
with Darlene's flashlight on them, and they beat a hasty retreat,
muttering something about payback. Y'all come back, now.
Ballsy women.
Then there was the day I walked in to
meet my probation officer, in the army green bowels of the probation
office behind the County Courthouse, Vern picked up the phone
and called for an officer to take me to jail. I didn't know what
the fuck I had done. Vern said he had heard from the Vice Squad
that I was consorting with known bad characters, I had missed
my last two meetings, I was slack on work, and my hair was too
long and I dressed like a bolshevik. What? Okay, I've been
slackin' a bit here or there. But my hair? My jeans? Good Sears
bell bottoms, sturdy cotton. No matter. He told the officers
to take me to the Richmond County Jail, no passing go. For long
hair. Christ almighty. So, I got my first real taste of the Augusta
Bed and Breakfast. A real dive. I still refused to cut my hair.
Fuck Vern. He let me out on the third day. My Dad, who had gone
to school with Vern, probably called and begged Vern to let me
out. But he definitely got my attention.
The Move
to Central
We were finally evicted from Monte Sano.
Charlotte and I moved down the road to a house of our own, close
by, on Central Avenue. Raymond and Herb moved to a small cottage
even closer to the Sunrise. Frank moved into a creepy loft by
himself, on the third floor of an old gothic Victorian house
owned by an ancient woman, god only knows what he was reading
in that dark place. But at least, we were all still in the same
area.
It was spring, turning to summer, 1972.
It was a very sweet time for Charlotte and I, like we were really
setting up house. We got a cat, fixed up the place, started cooking.
We started making plans for LEAVING, going to Oregon some day,
as my probation would be completed at the end of the year. It
would be two whole years. Time flies when you're having fun.
The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)
paid me to put together a community newspaper. We were to call
it the Sawannos, a native name for the Savannah River
that Frank dug up. It was gonna have everything in it we ever
wanted to say. The war. Politics. Police corruption. Racial justice.
Culture. Rock and roll. The spirit of the river. There were gonna
be a lot of contributors. Raymond was gonna do the art. We began
doing the layout.
Meanwhile, Buck and the boys, who had
never busted a single person in two-three raids at Monte Sano
Avenue, seemed to turn their attention elsewhere.
I found a job through Herb or somebody---with a freak from Florida
who was up doing cabinet installation. The job was out west on
the outskirts, in the boondocks. I enjoyed making money for once,
and getting out of town. I had a reason to work ---Char and the
pad. When he wasn't too spaced out, we did good work. He had
this funky old van, filled to the top with construction tools
and crap. He didn't seem quite trustworthy, but he had the contracts.
On July 17, 1972, Char, the dude and
I decided to take a day off and go out to the Savannah and go
"river tracking". It was gonna be a great day. The
paper was almost ready to go, after interminable delays. We had
decided to take Pat MacNamara because he was having some problems
with a bad trip that wouldn't go away. Like for months. He had
evidently gone to a rock festival in North Carolina and had taken
some bad acid, and never really returned. As a musician, Pat
was always high-strung. The strings broke. We packed some gear,
and headed for Pat's mom's house, where he was living.
Lava Lamps
and Water Bongs
As we pulled up to Pat's house, there
were three bubble tops, a police van and a vice car. Oh shit.
We pulled into the drive, concerned about Pat. A cop came up
and told us that Pat had been walking around the front yard in
the buff, singing and rappin' some shit about how fucked up life
was. Could we see him? No, cop said.
Then one of the vice boys walks up, says,
hey, it's the Preacher, makes us get out of our van. The vice
cop goes to his car, calls Buck. Buck says search the van. They
proceed to search the van. We go, good fuckin grief, we didn't
do anything, we were trying to help Pat. We had a rule, no
drugs in vehicles that I rode in. We don't have nothin!
But the dude starts looking kind of squirrelly. Right?
I whisper. There's nothing there, right? We stood and
watched for ten, fifteen minutes while these guys dump construction
shit all over the lawn. Meanwhile, Pat was in the back of a cop
car, continuing to flip out. Trial and tribulation going on here.
Then, a cop pulls out some seeds and some dead plants in pots.
Oh, Christ. The dude has hauled these dead plants--probably wild
rabbit tobacco--and shriveled seeds all the way from Florida,
too lazy to clean his van out. Buck and Durland pulled up in
the narc-mobile. Wonderful. They came swaggering over, and Buck
said, well, Preacher, what'cha got here, Durland doing a har
de har. I looked at it and said, I don't know Buck, this isn't
my vehicle.
Buck tells the pigs to pack us in a second
car, to our protestations, and, before we know it, we were under
arrest and headed downtown. We were processed into the "dug
out", basement pig sty that the Vice Squad uses for writing
up the crims. Durland squeezes his fat ass around a desk into
a chair, and proudly showed off, on the shelves around the room,
a bunch of lava lamps and water bongs that they have confiscated
in raids and drugs busts. He clicked off the lights and turned
on the lava lamps. The whole basement lit up, like we were in
a psychedelic cave. Wow, I'm impressed, I tell him.
Cool lava lamps, Durland. Charlotte started laughing. We
were actually scared to death. But our string finally ran out.
They transferred us to the Richmond County jail.
We were charged with conspiracy to possess
marijuana. Charlotte and the flaky asshole are held for a day
or so and are released. I'm held on $10,000 bail. Fuck.
Like Jubilation
T Cornpone on Reds
I ended up in a six-bed bunkroom with
a guy who's just gotten out of Reidsville, in southern Georgia
near the Florida line, in the Okeefenokee Swamp. He was getting
sent back. You remember Reidsville. The place where they filmed
the Burt Reynolds movie, The Longest Yard. The con--25
or so-started telling me all these horror stories, sending me
bad vibes.
Yep, you'll love the swamp, he'd say. Why there's this dog, ya see.
Big old mean bastard of a hound. When one of the stripes would
escape, the guards would wait a day or two to let the poor sucker
get lost in the swamp, ya see. If the farmers didn't kill the
sucker, they'd let the dog go. The dog would get a gold cap for
every con that he found.
I'd say, yeah? And he'd continueWell,
you should've seen that damned dog!! When he'd smile, his teeth
would blind ya! Har, har, har!!
Sweet guy. Like Jubilation T. Cornpone on a reds and crank
cocktail. He gave me shit for days, threatening to kick my ass,
or worse. He was a regular at Reidsville, and started his jail
career in the juveys at 13. He was really getting on my case,
trying to pick a fight. One day I told him about little green
pills that made you have hallucinations that were so bad they
would make you rip your own tongue out with your own hands. I
threatened to put a little green pill in his coffee when he wasn't
looking. He left me alone.
It was late July. Hot as hell. The Richmond
County jail was a horrible fucking dungeon. White guys on one
side. Black guys on the other. My girlfriend was terrified, but
kept a stiff upper lip, visiting often. My Dad and other friends
visited, but they were scared now. I was in for an inderminant
time. It felt like an eternity. My struggle in Augusta, for all
practical purposes, was over. My struggle for my life was on.
They cut my hair, a big thing at the time. Admittedly, though,
short hair was a plus in this place.
I remember we would have to put our shirts
on when the gospel singers from the Evangelical Tabernacle down
on Broad would come sing to us. They would preach, the five or
six, one or two geeky adults and the rest kids, and sing music,
accompanied by a 15-year old lanky buck-toothed kid who played
guitar. Oh my Lord, Walk with Thee! they'd sing, terribly
off-key, hoping to pick up converts for those who would ultimately
be released.
I read books. Tried to exercise. Tried
to watch some TV when we were allowed. Then I pissed off the
guards when I started organizing the prisoners. It was only a
short-term jail. But everything sucked. I mean, no library, no
exercise yard, no nothing. The place stank, the toilets overflowed,
the bunks were like concrete. And, oh yeah, one more thing. Keep
the fucking flies and roaches out of the food. I developed
a demands list of, oh, 10 points or so, and started distributing
it. Hardened crims would look at it and say, Yeah, how 'bout
that! What he said!
Meanwhile, I ran into a guy I had known
from the hill, who had been jailed before me. He told me they
were planning an escape attempt. Would I go with them?
I was facing a huge dilemma. If Kent
and Durland were successful, I would be facing a loss of my probation
time--a year and one-half--and would also be sentenced to a new
term if convicted. The time doubled up, so I'd face up to five
years in Reidsville. It was a given that rads like me would be
severely harassed by the guards and lifers there, or worse. I
was, to put it mildly, freaked. I would lie awake in the cell
at night imagining the escape route over the walls, through downtown,
and down and across the river. Then?
It seemed like days and days and daayyss
in the house. It was hot as a dead dog on an August Alabama highway.
I wanted to get out and fly away. Reading was my only escape.
The guards were always suspicious of books that relatives or
friends would drop off, and they were especially perplexed about
"Organizing for Prisoners' Rights" (rejecting) and
"Astral DoorwaysHow to Leave Your Body" (holding, for
a couple of days, while they pondered it).
Then I was told one day, out of the blue,
Come on Croft, you're going for a ride. I was getting
out--to go to Chattsworth to stand on charges I had revoked my
probation. Two deputies were to drive me. The day we left, the
temp had to be 105 degrees. I sat in the sweaty back seat as
we headed for Chattsworth. I rapped with the cops, who weren't
too interested in talking to me. I was elated. OUT, for at least
a while. GOD, didn't life look pretty outside.
Then, about a half-hour after we left,
heading northwest for the mountains, the clouds got black, a
summer thunder-storm was heading for us. Thrwwaccckkk! It was
lightning cracking near the ground, thunder as loud as a 747
slamming into the earth, winds blowing us all over the road,
and hail and raindrops the size of mutant toads from Chad. The
cops were flipped out. I loved it. I had never felt so free in
all my life. I didn't care if the car were blown off a cliff.
I sat back in the back seat and sucked it up. Blow, you mother-fucker,
blow.
They laughed when I told them if they
wanted to book a motel room for the night, I would stay, right
here in the back seat. After a few hours of what must have been
a storm of biblical proportions, they deposited me at the Chattsworth
County Hall, and high tailed it back to Disgusta.
A Much Nicer
Jail
It was much nicer at the Chattsworth
jail. First of all, the mountain weather was a relief, cool enough
to sleep at night. It only had four or five single bunk rooms,
and few people, and through the miniscule window, a great view
of the mountains. I gave it 2 and 1/2 stars. It was in the same
large county courthouse I had visited a year and half before,
in the middle of the town square. When they were kids, in 19
ought something, my Great Aunt Kate and Jentzie helped the masons
to build the old courthouse by carrying bricks to them when it
was under construction.
The only problem was this occasional
Saturday night drunk they would throw in the tank every few days,
who was evidently having woman problems. The one or two other
guys inside with me would have to shower the guy off because
he had tried to light his kerosene-drenched body on fire, "except
that the damned pigs stopped me, goddamned them". He'd then
pass out.
The jail had a radio someone left behind.
I could pick up this radio show from Nashville or Memphis. Country,
blue grass, amazing cross-over folk-blues would play day and
night. I remember a Moody Blues tune, The Music in Your Eyes.
It would come on every couple of hours. I listened and waited
for it to come around again.
Meanwhile, I received messages from my
friends that the jail-break had failed, that the three white
guys, including the guy I knew, were caught, and a black guy
from the other side was shot in the head and killed by the guards.
Kate visited. I explained what happened. Said look Aunt Kate,
I was a fuck up, and I'm sorry for everything I did to you, and
I know it was terrible for you. (Kate never let on that she had
been around a lot bigger fuck-ups, having hung on the reservations
for 30 years). But this time I'm innocent. I had tried to expose
the police for all sorts of bad stuff, and they set me up.
Kate was surprisingly supportive. She
didn't say much to me, but according to my Dad, she talked to
the judge, who used to, as a young lawyer, live in the Wright
Hotel and rent from Great Granddad Wright. I beg your pardon,
she must have sternly said, but if you jail my boy I'll sit
on you. She could and she would.
Then, one day, my Dad shows up. There
I was again, apologizing to my Dad. He realized I had been set
up. But he had news. I was off on the first plane possible to
Florida, where my mom lived, on $10,000 bond.
Click here
to conclude T.W. Croft's Augusta, GA
T.W. Croft
is the Director of the Heartland
Labor Capital Network. He can be reached at: t.w.croft@att.net
.
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