On The Road

            Sometimes the nuttiest plans are mom than just

hilarious. Dick Nelson invited me along on an elaborate

plan to get back on the road that required a ridiculous

number of captives to cooperate together. Back then, there

were fewer sellouts and snitches than now, but still plenty

too many. Nelson told me all the details, and it had almost

zero chance of succeeding. I gracefully declined, but

wished them all the luck.

            The plan began the following morning before work

or chow. Nelson and a huge, weighty black friend

each crawled into one of the I0 feet long laundry bags that

are collected from each floor of the six story cell house we

suffered in. The run man, Mr. Danzinger, dragged them

both down two flights of stairs to the big pile on the loading

dock Nelson and Pugh lay in those tied-shut laundry socks

motionless, for an hour while 320 captives and countless

guards stepped past them to chow and back. Eventually,

Blackwell, a trustee, drove up in his Cushman. Run men

were called to help load his vehicle up with the twelve huge

laundry socks. He drove back out the two east gates, waved

at the cops, and backed up into the laundry.

            One would expect that the trustee prison would

have a high concentration of sellouts and opportunists, but

somehow they seem to have been asleep or absent when

Nelson and Pugh crawled out of their sacks of blue

jean/blue shirt laundry already dressed in trustee whites.

Nelson and Pugh walked casually through the busy,

captive-packed laundry, exited the other end, and

proceeded up the dirt road towards the dairy barns and

chicken houses. Soon as they got the farthest between

groups of prying eyes, they ducked into the weeds and

throw off their conspicuous white jeans and shirts.

Underneath they wore blue jeans and shirts with no prison

stenciling on them. From the thick weeds they crossed,

hopped another fence, and then disappeared into the thick

bush on the other side.

            Nelson was the mastermind, though Pugh was

quite intelligent himself. Most prison escapes come in only

three varieties once the captives manage to get on the road.

They stick their thumbs out and a cop picks them up; they

head straight to mom's house where the cops are waiting to

pick them up, or; they leave a trail of crime that the cops

follow straight to them to pick them up. Nelson and Pugh

were an exception, kind of Captives who manage to escape

seem to do so in pairs, as if they need to draw strength

and confidence from each other. Worse, they tend to stick

together even after they get clear, which makes it easier for

them to get spotted and captured.

            Nelson and Pugh were double easy to spot, being

Caucasian and Negro, which never fails to spark the

curiosity of everyone who sees them together. They stuck

together for 110 miles; the distance from McAushwitz

prison to Oklahoma City, without getting caught. This is an

amazing feat, because I know they had to have travelled on

the roads, because they are not the type of people to have

the where with all to, or stamina to, stay in the bush that

long. Even more astonishing is that the cops, through their

eager media tools, announced no stolen cars, no

kidnappings, not even a robbery between these cities that

they attributed to Nelson and Pugh. They had not had any

reliable sighting along the 110 mile stretch, either, yet the

pair arrived in Oklahoma City in much too short a time than

would take from honest hiking.

            After making a shaky, delicate, complex plan work

when it should have failed miserably, and after successfully

dodging all cop eyes and suspicious citizens for two solid

days and 110 miles, what did they do? They burglarized

some poor Schmoe's house, setting off the neighbor's dog,

which attracted the attention needed for someone to call the

cops. When Nelson and Pugh were captured, they were

noted to be very busy in the kitchen, raiding the

refrigerator.

            For years afterwards, I chastised myself over this

inability of mine to trust the competence of captives. They seldom seem to exhibit good sense, much less the amount

of competence it takes to escape the daily torture and

harassment of the prison keepers. If I had had just a little

more faith in my fellow captives and friends, I could have

been on the road years earlier, possibly soon enough to

keep the cop-criminals from destroying the DNA they stole

that enabled them to lie-up a conviction onto me and set the

killer loose. That cur has been on the road much too long.

On the Road, Chapter Two

            Claude Dennis, a soon-to-be-famous cop-killer,

came up to my sewing machine and began asking some

funny questions. He had a screwy plan that hinged on the

specific gravity of natural gas in air. He wanted to leam

how big of a balloon he would have to make to float

himself over the wall. Previously, he had proposed

hijacking the cement truck and crashing through both east

gates. That plan had a higher probability of working, since

natural gas does not float in air. I told him this. He did not

want to believe it. He gave me a chemistry book and asked

me to crunch the numbers over night It was an interesting

problem. and good practice, I worked on it for two hours,

figuring it in different ways, and still came up with the

same answer: no amount of natural gas will lift a man over

the wall. I told Dennis, showing my work He took it and

the book to figure it himself Next morning, he told me,

"Yes, it will work, when the outside temperature is under

40 degrees. He did not show his work, if any, and I didn't

ask for it. Dennis was a country boy, and it's doubtful he

knew enough about chemistry to make such a

determination, but he was very sharp to know that outside

air is denser when cold and more likely to lift warmer

gases.

            A few days later, the point of his inquiry became

clear. He had subtly invited me to escape with him, and my

turning down or disproving his violent and outrageous

scenarios was my refusal of that invitation. It turned out

that he, Lancaster, Pease, Mumbutu, Garrison, and possibly

others were working on a real escape plan that would work.

For weeks they had cleverly labored. Tools had been stolen

from maintenance, particularly a sledgehammer and a

chisel. A never used lock had been broken off a basement

window and replaced with their own lock. Garrison would

pretend to answer the office phone and have the supervisor,

Mr. Scott, write out passes to the visitation room. The visits

would be fictitious, enabling the chosen captives to duck

down into the basement to chip away at the barriers in the

tunnel that led under the wall to the steam plant. It was

hard. They spent days smashing and chipping two massive

bars out so they could squeeze through to the other end 100

yards away. The heat was almost unbearable. It boiled off

the tattered fiberglass insulation on the pipes. The air barely

circulated at all due to the last repair calling for only a six

by six inch "window" in the slab of concrete sealing the far

end. The darkness was almost as stifling as the hot, still air.

They took turns for weeks on the far slab, pounding and

pounding on it with the sledgehammer. The others began

talking about it being impossible to remove. This prompted

Garrison and Mumbutu to go see for themselves. Garrison

slammed it until he was covered with sweat and gasping.

While he rested and pointed the flashlight, Mumbutu

pounded it until he had to rest. Garrison took over again. At

his fifth turn with the sledgehammer, Garrison gasped,

            "Maybe Mike (Lancaster) is right/ this thing could be too

thick m the bottom."

"Fuck that shit," replied Mumbutu. He snatched up

the sledgehammer and proceeded to pound on the slab a

series of rapid, furious blows the like of which Garrison

had never before seen. At the end of it, the hammer

punched a hole in the crater they had made over the weeks

of hard work, and stuck. They pulled it out, shined the light

in, and laughed together at the insane thought they'd had of

giving up.

            Over the next two hours, they were able to enlarge

the hole enough for the largest member, Membutu to fit

through. Garrison did the mean. Only a fence to scale, and

they would be on the road. Garrison and Mumbutu cleaned

up, returned to the garment factory and told their co-

conspirators to be ready to go the next day, soon as the 2pm

count numbers were sent up front.

            That day, at 6pm, the kops began acting strangely.

The after-count un-lock was delayed. They counted again.

The doors stayed locked. The members of the escape team

began to work through the verbal grapevine. They

eventually uncovered the fact that the kops were missing

Dennis and Lancaster. 

            It turned out that these two captives were not team

players. At chow, they had vanished down the rabbit hole.

Their absence had caused the kops to search everywhere.

The kops naturally checked the utility tunnel and found the

destruction and highway to freedom.

            Dennis must have been a closet psychopath. He

gave me plenty of hints of this, but I always give people the

benefit of the doubt. His complaint was that the sheriff had

stolen his house. His crime was shooting some apparently

innocent person off his bulldozer as he attacked that house.

I didn't know Lancaster, but those who did said he had no

real reason to escape, and that Dennis subverted his

thinking,

            Over the next five days, they went on a tear; the

kind the media loved to vend to the gullible public as

representative of all persons branded "criminal" or

"convicted felon!" by the state. Cops love it too, because a

terrorized public is easy for them to extort. The same for

politicians. Dennis and Lancaster began attacking a nearby

farmhouse. They tied some people up, stole food, guns and

a truck. They got untied and called the cops. The cops set

up roadblocks and called for its army of citizens to help.

Truckers, cabbies, security guards, prison guards, virtually

everyone with a radio, car and eyes began looking for this

truck and calling in tips to the cops and media news-

stalkers. They were spotted, according to the media, as far

away from Southeastern Oklahoma a§ Mississippi. Then,

for no reason, the media claimed they turned around and

came back to Oklahoma. Somehow suspicious, Dennis

stopped the truck, climbed to the top of a hill and saw a

police roadblock for them. Using the stolen rifle, he killed

two highway patrol cops and wounded a third. The media

must have had an inexperienced camera man in with the

cops, and an editor who was asleep. They violated their

own guidelines and flashed, once, a five second tape of this

wounded cop sitting on the road, holding his arm and

bawling like a baby as he waits for the ambulance to arrive.

            Dennis had blasted their way through the cop's roadblock

and vanished. The news-squawkers went into an even more

intense feeding-frenzy, demanding that some government

leaders stand up before their cameras and answer to their

viewers exactly how they are going to save the frightened

masses from these evil men. Or maybe they wanted to take

advantage of the crisis for their next bid for re-election.

Either way, the most memorable of them to step into the

warm glow of the TV lights was Governor Boren, who

proclaimed the attack to be, "The darkest day in Oklahoma

history!"

            Thousands of cops poured in from all over, each

one competing fiercely with each other to be the hero who

bags Dennis and Lancaster. Thousands of citizens with

guns had been shooed away so that the cops could work

their magic in private. Citizens pointed cops at the city and

environs of Wolverton with multiple sightings of the

murderous pair. A virtual stampede of cops saturated the

area. A lucky cop spotted them in broad daylight. Dennis

drove madly about the suburbs trying to out run the cop as

he chased and blabbered on his radio for more cops to help

chase them. Lancaster smoked this cop off their tail with

the rifle. A large fleet of cop cars chased them, but not too

closely. Dennis took the rifle and made Lancaster drive.

Dennis kept the cops off long enough for the TV news-

chasers to get in the cops' way. Finally the cops managed

m blow out the fires from long distance. Dennis ran out of

bullets. Lancaster crashed the truck into a ditch. The cops

closed off the neighborhood to all non-cops. The horde of

them crept up to the truck, pumping in hundreds of slugs

and thousands of pellets. They pulled the blood soaked

corpses out for the media ghouls to photograph. Late

arriving cops were allowed to empty their weapons into the

corpses too, just so they could vent their rage and truthfully

say they had shot the two cop killers.

            The pictures that made it into the heavily edited

 state steered media were of two tarp covered lumps on the

road. The uncensored cop-made pictures are of two bullet-

riddled corpses in pools of blood lying on the road. They

are used in cop training centers along with news paper

clippings that tell the story of the glorious victory of the

cops in the case of two vicious felons who, very briefly,

managed to escape prison and get back on the road.