Killer Haberdashery at the Mesa Jail

The Officer I turned myself in to eventually came to the holding cell and told me the Chandler jail was full and he was going to have to take me somewhere else. Since I seemed like a nice fella, he said he was going to take me to Mesa instead of Phoenix, because it would be more comfortable. I thanked him, and on the way to Mesa he cautioned me on how to behave when I got there. 

He said they were lazy in Mesa, and shipped people off to the Phoenix Matrix at the drop of a hat if they thought there might be hassles. He said if I had a cold or back ache or broken limb, just to keep it to myself because any malady was reason to send people into the Matrix. He told me to keep my eyes down and not speak unless spoken to. He didn't even cuff me until he was taking me out of the car in Mesa.

Once inside, he handed me over to some police academy dropouts and they deposited me in the drunk tank without ceremony or anal probe. The room was ten feet deep and twenty feet long with a full length window along the front. It was uninhabited except for a bread sack with an orange peel in it on the concrete bench along the back wall. I sat, presumably waiting to be processed into the general population. I was hungry and tired. There was no water or toilet, so I hoped not to be there long.

An eternity or an hour later, I heard voices down the hall and wondered if they were finally booking me in. by smashing the right side of my face against the glass, I thought I could see movement in the next room. Soon after, they brought in another prisoner. It was the doctor who had operated on my arm at St Luke's. Small world. He had beaten his wife.

There must've been a crime wave, because ten minutes later they brought in a couple of young Mexican guys and we could hear them yelling at another prisoner, just out of sight. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of said prisoner getting his ass kicked. It got quiet for a minute, then a guard unlocked our cage and stepped in, threatening to mace us if we didn't move to the far corner. He stepped back out and two others threw the beaten man in and slammed the door. He was a chubby little guy and his appearance didn't seem to warrant the ruckus we had been eavesdropping on. He sat on the bench and behaved. We all did.

There was another interminable wait. The smell of the orange rind had my stomach growling. I figured once their lunch rush was over, they would come process me in. There hadn't been a sound from the guard room, save an episode of the Jerry Springer Show on their black and white T.V. Before I could hear what was on next they came and got the other four and told them the wagon was there to take them to the Matrix. As the guard started to shut the cell, I sneezed and he told me I'd better come too.

They lined us up along a tall counter and frisked us, afterward conducting interviews about our general health. They handcuffed the chubby little guy to a stool in the back of the room. I was standing next to one of the Mexican kids. He was pretty fancy. He was wearing shiny pointy toed boots, a huge belt buckle, and a shirt with silver tips on the collar and about thirty pearl buttons down the front.

While the interviews were going on, a flunky walked behind us and dropped manacles, cuffs, and chains at our feet. Once he did that, he went behind the counter and got a pair of scissors and returned, obviously waiting for something. The guy sitting behind the bar called my name and told me to lift my shirt up to my chest and look away. The flunky came over, stuck four fingers of his left hand down the front of my pants and cut the button off. Then he sealed it in an evidence bag and gave it to his superior. He returned the scissors to their drawer, without mutilating anybody else's haberdashery.

How the fuck was I supposed to keep my pants up? They already took my belt in Chandler.

I remembered I wasn't supposed to ask questions, but I assumed my hay fever had already condemned me to Phoenix, if not Devil's Island. While holding my shorts up with one hand, I posited the natural query: “What was that for”? The pimply flatfoot just looked at me like I was stupid and told me my button could be fashioned into a weapon. He said if I got to the Matrix with that button I would be arrested for smuggling a deadly weapon into a penal institution. Then he turned to the set to catch the next segment of Maury Povich.

I told the Mexican guy with the fancy shirt that he was probably going to get ten years for that shit. He either didn't speak English, or had no sense of humor. It was pretty much a humorless bunch on both sides of the law in Mesa. Jails bad enough. Why not make the best of a bad situation?

The flunky ran chain under my armpits and around my chest and cuffed my hands to it. Then he manacled my ankles. Once he had done this to all but the chubby guy (Bryan), he returned us to the cell (except for Bryan) to wait for our driver to finish doing paperwork or taking a shit or whatever was holding him up.

I had to frog walk back to the cell to keep my pants from falling down, and once there, the orange smell made me hungry all over again. But it gave me an idea. I dumped the orange peels out and set about tying my front belt loops together to keep my britches on. This was harder than it sounded. My hands were trussed up to my chest like a tyrannosaurus, and I could only get within eight inches of my waist.

I had to twist the bag up as tight as I could and thread it through the loops at a distance. It was nearly impossible, and led to more than a few side cramps. Once it was through both loops, I still had to tie it tight. How the hell could I do that from eight inches away? I nearly gave up, then realized with a slipknot I could tie it within reach then pull it tight. The other criminals heckled me through this whole contortionist ordeal, warning me that I was probably going to be arrested. I reckoned I'd rather be arrested than pantless in a crowded jail cell. I hid my wonderbread belt with my shirt tail.

The flunky returned an eternity or two later and added waist chains in his bid for a B&D merit badge, linking us together with about a foot and a half of length between. Then he marched us, Cool Hand Luke style, out to our Paddy Wagon. He opened the back and we saw Bryan was already loaded up into his own private cage toward the front. They had some kind of fencing mask on him, I guess they didn't want him making faces and disrupting class.

The next acrobatic trick they had us perform was getting into the back of the truck. The first step was about a foot and a half high and we only had a foot of chain between our feet. So we had to turn and kind of hop sideways to get up there. If that sounds hard, remember I was also chained to jailbirds both in front and behind. One bad move and we were all going down in a heap. The guy in front of me started to go down and I shouldered him up and in and dove behind him onto my belly, dragging the guy behind me along for the ride. He wasn't happy, but he was all trussed up and couldn't do anything about it. At least I kept my pants on.

The ride wasn't so bad. It took forever. We stopped at several other jails and even the woman’s prison before reaching the Matrix. Everybody else was bitching about the wait, but I figured where I was going, I wasn't going to get any car rides for a couple of decades or so, so I made the best of it.

I'm a creative guy, but still haven't figured out how to make a deadly weapon from the button on a pair of cargo shorts. I just wasn't cut out for prison.

From the Mountains to the Barrio (part 1) Fugitive Recovery

Just over a year since my exile, and I found myself living at one of my favorite places on the whole planet. Big Cat Mountain was the place I had climbed with Lucky Tailor, passing the crosses of those who did not make it along the way. It's the place where The Professor and I saw the Woolly Saber Toothed Coyote. It was also the stomping grounds of the famous bandit El Gato and his legendary treasure. On the map of places sacred to me, this one is prominent.

My wife and I had traced the travels of Casteneda to this desert, and believed we had found the restaurant where he and Gorda worked, losing their personal importance. Losing one's personal importance isn't very good for a marriage. We were thinking about doing something different. She had already had to spend a few months in Key West to escape my folly. Then I had an encounter that brought me on board to her desire to move into town and leave my beautiful desert.



We lived in a trailer behind the restaurant, along with about four other trailers, all housing employees of the restaurant and other associated businesses like the general store and video rental. There was one wealthy retiree in the very back. I was Robert then, and the trailer behind us housed a guy named Robert as well and his wife. He washed dishes at a steakhouse down the road. His wife was a waitress with my wife at the Greek place where I cooked breakfast.



I was working stone on the side back then, as a lapidary, and incorporating the stone in sculpture and jewelry. On Tuesdays, I would hike through the lower Tucson Mountains along an old stage coach route into Tucson, where I would ply my wares. I had a route through the downtown where I left things on consignment and picked up money and custom orders each week. On my way home, I would cut through the town of South Tucson and purchase my grass for the week. I would return by hitch hiking the old Ajo Highway, rather than cross the remote mountain trails, populated by all manner of rattlesnake and large cat, at night. I would have my sales cases with me, and occasionally drummed up additional business from the people who gave me rides.



One of my best accounts in town was a new age shop. I had a place near the Mexican border where I was mining Selenite crystals with muddy inclusions. I worked these into wands and stone blades with cactus wood handles and leather trim.



On a fateful Monday, My wife was working, and I took Robert for a hike up Big Cat Mountain and told him about my history there and about El Gato. To my surprise, although he had lived behind the restaurant for over a year, he had not explored the area or hiked the desert at all. He had a banner day, and expressed that to me before he went to work that night. I went in to my house and smoked a joint and watched a couple of episodes of Doug on Nick at Night.



After resting from the morning's climb, and having lunch with the wife, I strapped my machete on and headed out to find some Cholla Cactus wood for the order I had to fill for the new age shop this week. I was maybe five steps from my front door when a white pickup came thundering into the lot and stopped nearest my trailer.



At first I assumed it was somebody I had hitched a ride with, coming to check out my stock. Maybe I was going to make a sale. Neither the wife or I socialized of even had any contact with people outside of the restaurant and the five trailers behind it. Then the door opened and had an insignia on it and the words “Fugitive Recovery”. Before I could even think a dude rolled out in a crazy movie sideways somersault and came up with a big freaking gun pointed at me. “Drop the weapon!” he shouted. He was maybe fifty feet away.



This was the early days of my fugitivity, when I never went to sleep without an escape plan. I was hyper paranoid anyway, and expecting something like this. Subsequently, I never carried weapons, for fear of going down in a hail of gunfire from some overzealous bounty hunter. I was confused. I said “I don't have any weapons!”.



He told me to lose the machete. I told him it was a tool, not a weapon, as I lowered it carefully to the ground. He charged me, and with his gun to my head he rushed me the twenty feet or so to my trailer and sandwiched my head between his pistol and the front door. He said “Robert Mortimer, you are under arrest for evading prosecution (so far so good, but Mortimer? I was Robert Weaver) in Kansas on a charge of burglarizing a pharmacy.”



Well shit, I have only just passed through Kansas. I delivered a few pounds of grass and mushrooms to a motel in Topeka, but certainly had not burglarized a pharmacy. I told him this, with his gun in my temple, leaving out the part about Topeka. “And who the hell is Mortimer? I am Robert Weaver!” “You better have ID”, he replied.



I yelled in to my wife to find my ID. She, of course, told me to get it myself. Still with a gun to my temple, I explained the situation. She soon appeared with my fake swap meet ID claiming I was Robert Weaver. The officer called in my fake social security number and it came up clean. Then he noticed my trailer number was one and he was looking for trailer two. He said “I need to use your house”, and lowered his gun and hastily entered my living room.



I followed. I had left a half ounce of pot in a baggie on the coffee table. As he walked past it to the opposing window, I reached down and batted it onto the floor. Without even turning around he said “I'm not even worried about that”. Then he noticed the number two on the door of the neighboring trailer and rushed off to terrorize the other Robert's wife. She took him to Robert's job where he was arrested for the pharmacy job in Kansas.



The next day she knocked on my door and told me Robert was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. I went to her trailer and he told me the story of how he was paid to lower himself from the skylight at a Kansas pharmacy and steal Dilautids, and he left fingerprints. He said our hike was the best thing that happened to him since he fled and that ultimately it was his wife who turned him in. “It's always a woman that gets you caught” he warned me (although he didn't know how close to his situation I was). He gave me his reclining heated massage chair. I loved that chair. His wife immediately moved in with a wealthy retiree she had been cleaning house for.



I couldn't live there anymore, of course. The wife would have her way and we would eventually move back to the city.

The Last Time I Saw Mike West

I had probably the worse job of my fugitive career at the time. I was kitchen manager for a pizza outfit with dancing mechanical apes. They knew three songs. People would put tokens in the jukebox and the apes would perform “Achey Brakey Heart” all day long.

It was probably the worse job of my life.

Ensnared in polyester, I stank of chicken grease. The sourness of the fryers associated with newly popular buffalo wings just ruined the pizza business. The singing apes didn't help much either. Old grease replaced the wholesome, bready aroma pizzerias had hitherto been associated with. The boss, one-fifth owner and a refugee from another singing monkey joint, likewise swathed in old poly blends, never swiveled from his office chair to visit my kitchen. I didn't blame him.

Beside me, was a staff of five young Latinos who let me know right away I wouldn't last if I wasn't part of their street crew. I had no idea what they were talking about. I briefly entertained the notion that they were breakdancers, but dismissed it. I still had too much Indiana Boy on me.

They were punks, and I told them that often. Their villainous exploits tormenting the homeless disgusted me. Likewise, they didn't respect my authority, and I rarely knew where to find them. It mattered little. I could better crank out our standard crap for the little Achey Breaky bastards we served without their assistance. They abandoned me to my fate and hid in the prep room and parking lot. I was well stocked, and the lot was clean. Jabba the manager, lights out with his Salem Slim Lights in his rayon office, didn't want to get involved. I didn't either. I was trying to talk the wife into letting me take a flaky art gig I had been offered, so why rock the boat.

When I saw the state of Dave and Mike's hobo camp, I was sure it was these guys.

I seethed, biding my time until I could quit and worrying about Dave and Mike and the others from the hole in the mountain. Before closing time, this kid Diego had told a story about leaning out of his buddies car and beating bums with a bat as they tried to run away.

When I clocked out, he was nowhere to be seen. I left by the back door and found Diego and pals in the shadows around the corner. Diego was leaning on a broom. I asked to see it, and took him out at the knees, continuing to beat the hell out of him as his friends stood there with their mouths open. I dropped the broom and walked to my car without looking back. I fought the urge to run for fear of acting like prey. I made sure nobody followed me home.

For some reason I went to work the next day. I fully expected to get jumped. Diego was a no show. Everybody stayed in the prep room longer than usual without carrying anything out. My nerves were shot. Finally Diego's best bud came out with trays of dough. I had a knife and bowl of flour nearby and wouldn't hesitate to use them. He smiled at me and said “Man, you really fucked old boy up! He won't be messing with you anymore”.

Just when I thought it was all okay, I got the call to go see the boss. He said he heard I hit one of his employees with a mop handle. I told him it was just a broom. He said he had filed a police report. I told him what I thought of Billy Ray Cyrus. We were on the same page regarding my career in mechanical dancing monkey pizza.

I didn't worry about the cops. I used a throwaway name to get the job. One I hadn't used anywhere else. They wouldn't look for me.

I didn't see Mike again for a year or better to learn how their camp was destroyed. By then, the wife and I, baby in tow, were blowing town in the wee hours of the morning. The Social Security people had sent letters informing us that we had ten days to explain why our names and numbers didn't match their records. Thankful for the warning, we collected our next paychecks and got in the wind to find a new town and new identities. I stopped to pick up a hitch hiker north of the city and it turned out to be Mike.

He said it was the cops who smashed their hobo village. He said a few people had gotten arrested but he and Dave lit out and moved to the Days Inn for a while. Apparently the old man in California died and his heirs weren't as tolerant to squatters. I've never felt bad about beating Diego.

Mike said Dave had gone to stay with neglected daughters in Texas and he had been attracting attention so he was moving on. We let him off in Casa Grande, where he had promise of a job. We got as far as Phoenix and the wife and baby were fussy from the car so we decided we were home.

Cleaning up the car at the motel, I found Mike West's flannel on the back seat floor with his social security card and birth certificate. He was just a little shorter than me, a little darker hair, a little older, but he had the necessary brown eyes. I just happened to be in need of a new identity and the Universe provided one. Mike West. My Quest. It was a sign that everything would be okay and I was right where I needed to be. I wondered how long it would last. I wondered how long I would be Mike. I wondered how long the wife would put up with this shit. A week? A month? A year?

We checked in to The Parkview as Mr. and Mrs. West. Within twenty four hours I was managing a downtown pizzeria. We baked our wings and wore cotton shirts and I thrived a while in the ape free atmosphere.

The Day I Met Mike West

I had been checking out the mountains east of Tucson, just before Big Cat Mountain, and noticed a geological peculiarity. It looked like one of the small mountains had been quarried. The next day, I visited that mountain and met Mike West.

I parked at the bottom of a hill, and hiked up the dirt road that led to the declivity. You couldn't see what was ahead until you crested a hill and I didn't want to drive onto somebodies mine claim.

Once I popped past the incline, I saw a flat area a couple of hundred feet to a side, set at the bottom of a quarry of a black marble looking stone. I later learned the stone was quarried for a large downtown office building.

There was smoke, from the lean remnants of a central camp fire. Dotted around the fire were the coolest huts I had ever seen. They were built of fieldstone, maybe a foot thick. They were about three feet high and then a tarp over saplings made up the roof.

I didn't see any movement and so called "Haloo in camp"! I had never seen any shit so organized before and didn't want to appear the scoundrel. I might like this crew. I wanted to see what it was about.

A wizened older fella came out of the first hooch and squinted at me. The desert sun had eaten a hole in his nose. He had long whiskers and long hair. Some of the original color remained, but you'd be hard pressed to name it. He walked over and I stuck out my hand before I saw him good. "Dave! How the fuck have you been"?

I met Dave in Glenwood Springs Colorado. He was a train tramp. In that town, was a community of travelers. Dave helped show me the ropes. He moved on before I did. People got killed riding the trains back then. Probably a lot more than you know. I had worried about him in the years since we drank good stouts and smoked good ganja while hiding in the tall grass at a siding.

What a small, small, world.

He invited me into his hooch, which was remarkably cool, maybe twenty or thirty degrees, and introduced me to his roomate Mike. Mike had brown hair styled like that of a scarecrow, tufting out from under a flopped down boonie hat. We shook hands and he was just a few inches shorter, a few years older, and a few pounds lighter. He had brown eyes. Of course I wasn't thinking like that at the time
.
I bought a sack from Mike that day, and we talked at length about the Arizona Sonora Desert. They said they could get me on as a landscaper with their crew, but I told them I had my own gig. I was glad I parked the Mazda down the hill.

They told me the mountain was owned by an elderly guy in Santa Barbara. He was in a nursing home, and nobody watched his land. They said the cops never came, because it was private property.

I visited every payday, with a sack of hambourguesas, and scored a sack of sexy mexy from Mike. Dave got a hat and his nose got better. They invited me to stay. I blamed my wife for needing an indoor home. A fugitive can't take chances like that. I was jealous. I wanted to live there so bad, but eventually I would not be able to stand to the scrutiny. The mountain was too close to town not to bring prying eyes.

This continued for four or five months. Then one week I finally drove the Protege all the way up and found a scene of devastation. The hooches, down to the stone walls, were rubble. Smoke still rose from the lean remnants of a fire. The pantry was levelled. Canned goods lay stomped and squished. Nothing remained.
I left in tears, that something so beautiful had been destroyed. Were my friends safe? There were children. I had an idea who was behind this. They would pay.

A.K.A. Bill the Sailor and One Eyed Peter

I sat with my back to the one way mirror in the interrogation room. Across from me were two of the biggest criminals I had ever been face to face with. On the left, was the one they all called Sarge. The one on my right had the nickname “Jump Street” because he looked younger than his age and often worked undercover.

These two would go on to rob hundreds of accused drug dealers. Sarge rose in rank, enjoying the support of crooked politicians and attorneys. Jump Street was wise enough to use his resume to get out of town before their playhouse collapsed under formal charges, disbandment, and restitution.I think Sarge mows lawns now, and answers phones for somebody.

But at this time they were young, barely older than my twenty five years, and allowed to do as they would. The town had once been known for the corruption of it's police. Many from that era were retired, or soon to do so, and there was a new generation of gangsters with badges aspiring to fill their shoes. The hysteria of The War On Drugs was at it's pinnacle and provided the perfect opportunity for bribes, “forfeitures”, and outright theft. H.W. Was President and Dave had just been elected mayor.

They had me sign a Miranda statement, and were collecting my personal information. Sarge did most of the talking. Jump Street left the room a few times and returned with evidence bags, file folders, and the occasional supervisory agent. One detective, I had known as an outlaw biker and had no idea he was Drug Task Force. It turns out, he had investigated almost every unsolved murder in the previous decade. Many of the victims (women) had ties with law enforcement or politicians through either their jobs or personal relationships. That's a different story though, and for somebody else to tell.

We got to the part where Sarge asked me if I had any aliases or nicknames. Seeing a chance to have some fun, I answered in the affirmative. “Some people call me Redbeard” I told him. “Any others?” he asked, “Sure”, I replied, and really got into it. I told him how in elementary school, I wrote a series of short stories wherein I had super powers and used the name Barno and it had stuck among the boys I grew up with. Then I started playing word games with my names as he listed them. I was born with the name Todd Stuart Christian, so I gave him that one next.

Then I said Stuart Christian, Chris Stuart, Chris Barnes, Stuart Barnes, etc. I went on like this for awhile; enough that he had to turn the sheet over and keep writing. I was able to keep up the charade halfway through a second page before I began running out of ideas. I decided to give up the game. “Lefty”, I said, and couldn't believe it when he wrote it down and didn't even look up.

“Well”, I thought to myself, “might as well see how far I could go with it”. “Bill the Sailor”. I glanced over at Jump Street, who was taking notes as well. Neither of them looked up, both had paused to wait for the next name. I imagined them running all those names through some database and wondered what they would find. I was amazed they were still buying it and had to suppress the giggles.

“One Eyed Peter.”

Sarge wrote it, but Jump Street put his pencil down and whispered to his partner. Sarge looked out the top of his eyes at me and said, perfectly deadpan, “You're yanking my chain aren't you”. Unable to contain it anymore, the laughter burst out of me while they sat there looking at me stone faced.

Sarge asked me if I was on LSD “right now”. “Oh god no”, I responded, “That would be awful”. “Then why are you laughing and joking” he wanted to know, “Most people aren't very happy where you are right now”. “I'm just trying to make the best of a bad situation”, I told him honestly, “You have your job to do and I have mine”.

I figure one day it will all bite me in the ass. Some cop somewhere will run my numbers and all those bogus aliases will show up along with a warrant for Bill the Sailor or ol' One Eyed Peter and I'd better have a good alibi.