I had an opium habit, but suffered so from the jacket that I forgot all about the hop—another proof to me that the habit is mostly mental.
Cochrane came at eight o’clock the next morning. I denied having hop and out came the jacket. All that day I was only half conscious, dopey. I don’t think I suffered as much as on the previous day. Some time in the night they released me, and I lay on the floor in a stupor. I don’t know how long. Toward morning my mind cleared and I felt that another day would finish me. I decided I would send for Captain Murphy after they put me back in the jacket and ask him to take me down to the bank of the canal where I worked so I could dig up the hop from its plant and give it to him. I was liked by the “cons” and knew he would go with me personally, so my friends could see him triumphing over me. At the canal, instead of giving him hop I intended to throw my arms around him and drag him to the bottom, where we would both “cease from troubling.”
The fourth morning Cochrane said: “You’re a damn fool; better give up your hop. You can’t finish out the day.” I waited for him to put me in. He held up the “bag” in front of me. I was sitting on the floor. “Get up,” he said. I didn’t; I couldn’t; I was too weak. With a gesture of disgust he threw the jacket out the door into the corridor. Motioning to a couple of trusty prisoners, he said: “Take him away.” They helped me to my cell and into my bunk. I lay there half dead, but victorious. My cellmate came at noon and slipped me a jolt of hop. I took it and felt better. He had not even thrown it away as I asked. “I knew you wouldn’t squawk,” he said, “so I held on to it.”
My three months passed quickly enough and I was released, still feeling the effects of the jacket. When I got out I held up my hand and swore I would never make another friend or do another decent thing. I borrowed a gun and got money. I returned to Folsom by stealth and flooded the place with hop. I went about the country for months with but one thing in my mind, a sort of vicious hatred of everybody and everything. As much as possible I shunned even my own kind—thieves.
Then back to San Francisco again where I fell into a stool-pigeon trap. Captain “Steve” Bunner, who now chases policemen, was then a very plain, plain-clothes “dick,” chasing burglars and stick-ups. He arrested me. He says I tried to shoot him but that he bears me no malice. I say he got me a twenty-five year sentence, and I bear him no malice; and to-day, while we are not exactly bosom friends, we certainly are not enemies. I had no money to take an appeal from this stiff sentence, but an attorney came and volunteered his services, saying: “I was in the district attorney’s office when you were sent to Folsom and I know you got jobbed. I’ll take your case for nothing.”
While waiting on appeal the great earthquake and fire occurred. All the records in my case were destroyed. I could not be sent to prison, and the attorney could not get me out, so I became a permanent fixture in the county jail.
The old Broadway county jail was a stout structure and resisted the quake, but was fire-swept and abandoned. When the fire threatened, all prisoners were removed to Alcatraz Island and later to the branch jail at Ingleside. I was there over six years and the things that happened there during that time would fill a book.
During the graft prosecution that followed the fire, Ingleside housed the mayor, the political boss of San Francisco, and many of the supervisors. A looting banker was there, many strikebreakers indicted for the murder of union men during the car strike, and soldiers for wantonly shooting down citizens while the city burned. Jack Johnson, the colored heavyweight champion, was with us for thirty days for speeding.
Money was plentiful in the jail. The grocer came every day, and we all got enough to eat. The political boss bought many books and founded a library. He also got a big phonograph that was kept going all day and far into the night. I was “appointed” jail librarian, and at once catalogued the books and installed them in an empty cell.
The jail was a cross between a political headquarters and an industrial plant. The political prisoners did politics, and the prisoners whose records were burned in the fire turned to industry.