Men In Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary

Excerpt from The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley

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In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley’s pieces appeared in the book, including the one here, “Robbery.”

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, I met Smoky after I had written a newspaper column about Men in Exile and and he had reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, I encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley.He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves. The book is available through nestuccaspitpress.com and Amazon.

Robbery

Have you ever read a newspaper account of a robbery and wondered what it was really like? The following is a true story—even to the grapes. The robbery occurred in a small town in Oregon at approximately 3:15 p.m. on a Saturday, September 22, 1968. In March of 1969, I got ten years for it. I got busted because the man at the store remembered me and described the gun to the police. When I was arrested elsewhere for forgery, I still had the gun in my possession.

The story is written with very little regard for the standards of English usage. The tense changes; the mood changes. It is written in the style stories are told on the yard, the style, with reflections, that I’ve listened to, spoken to, spoken in, and sometimes even thought in during the past ten years.

So we’re just driving around on Saturday afternoon, minding our own business, looking for someone to rob. We only got a couple dollars and don’t feel like working; besides, free money’s easier to spend. We drive past this country store situated at a crossroads and I tell my partner to go back and we’ll have a look at it. He goes in and buys a pack of cigarettes, then comes out and draws me a map of the joint and tells me about the people inside. You see, I never go into a place until the cameras roll. That way I stand very little chance of being identified. If people only see you once they’re less apt to remember you, especially if when they see you that once you’re holding an automatic on them. It sort of takes their eyes off your face if you know what I mean.

Anyway, my partner runs the joint down to me and I decide we’ll take it. I get to make this decision because I’m the one who puts himself out front; I’m the stick man. I gamble my life against a couple hundred dollars (that’s all you’ll usually get out of a mom and pop store). My partner’s just wheels and his life isn’t on the line.

I can gamble my life because, you see, my life ain’t worth but maybe a couple hundred dollars. I’ve just finished serving thirty months for the feds and I’ve only been out thirty days. I got no job because I quit it; I got no family because I left them; I got no friends except the guys I’ve done time with all my life and most of them are behind bars some place or other. You see, four days after I left the feds I really wanted to go banging on the front gate, crying “let me back in where my friends are.” But I was a tough bandit and tough bandits don’t do that. That would be really foolish. Tough bandits pull some chicken-shit caper and go back talking big shit.

Now this store is situated on a crossroads and the man who built it built it to be robbed. All four roads lead to a highway. A quarter mile to the west is an old graveyard with several exits and a quarter mile past that is a freeway. About half a mile to the east is a highway. To the south is the city and to the north a maze of country roads that my partner and I grew up on, roads we know better than the bulls possibly can.

So we drive into the city and rip off a new Ford. We park that behind a warehouse on the highway to the east. We make another trip and steal a Plymouth. This is one of the most exciting parts of the game, writing the script. It’s got to be just right because, you see, every time I rob someone I’m playing to a camera. I’m on stage, the center of attraction; and I wouldn’t want anyone to think I didn’t know my business.

So here’s the plan. My partner drives up beside the store and lets me out; then he parks out front, keeping the motor running. He can’t look to conspicuous because there’s a gas station across the street and a lot of traffic on the roads. I’ll go in, take care of business in less than four minutes and calmly walk out. The door on the passenger side is left ajar with the window rolled down so all I have to do is pull the door open; by the time I’m in the seat we’re down the road. We drive off calmly and slowly so as not to attract attention.

If by the time we get to the graveyard there’s one behind us we wheel in, change to the pickup and away we go. If there’s someone behind us (anyone might remember a Plymouth driving into a graveyard) we circle back to the Ford, drive right past the store again and then change to the pickup. It’s all very simple, smooth. We each know our part and are ready for action.

One more question. What if there’s trouble while I’m inside? If my partner hears my pistol speak a single word he splits. If hears it bark twice he comes to help me. Now, he can recognize my pistol’s voice just like a good hunter can recognize his hound. And if I ever bust a cap I’ll bust two. If I don’t pull the trigger twice it means I can’t and if he hears another piece go off and mine don’t answer, it means my trigger-pullin’ days are over.

The curtain rises, the cameras roll and the absurd drama opens.

I’m wearing a black sweat shirt (you can tell I’m a bad guy) and blue jeans and my piece is tucked in my belt. I walk in the door and glance around. There’s a young girl running one register and an old lady piling her purchases on the counter. She’ll be here awhile. That’s good; she’ll keep the kid busy. I don’t like to mess around with broads, especially young ones. You never know what they’re gonna do. Young guys are bad, too; sometimes they like to play hero. The best type of person to rob is a middle-aged man. An old man or woman has the “all my life I’ve worked for what I’ve got and no punk’s takin’ it away” attitude. A middle-aged man knows he’ll get it all back from the insurance company with interest and he’s usually pretty calm.

I see my middle-aged man back in the meat department and I know he’ll come up to ring up my stuff.

Here’s where things get a little ridiculous. I forgot my bag. Now, I can’t go back out and get it; my partner will think I’m losing my touch. So I go over to the produce counter and put a few grapes in the bottom of a paper sack. I carry the bag to the end register. There are four registers and I figure I’ll get the butcher to clean out the first then march him down the row—pickin’ greenbacks.

The man sees me and starts over. I’ve got my back to him, pretending I’m looking at some small stuff on the shelves.

He says, “Yes, sir?”

Quartering away from him, I place the grape sack on the produce scales and say, “There’s about a pound of grapes there—and all your money.” And I pull my piece.

The guy knows the game; he’s been robbed before, he’s watched a lot of television. Anyway, he puts up his hands and stretches.

Very calmly I tell him, “Put ’em down and open the register.”

Now he’s the butcher and he’s got an apron on with a whole lot of knives in it. He sees me looking at them and very politely asks me if I should get rid of them. I smile and tell him no. Then I sneer and tell him again that I want that register opened—now!

He flips the little bar on the side that opens the till. I point my piece to the bag and he begins filling it. I notice he starts with the ones and works up, and that he’s working pretty slow. It’s amazing how lazy some of these storekeepers get nowadays.

So I says, “This thing makes a big hole and I don’t want to have to shoot you.” That’s just what he needed. He even lifts the till drawer and throws in a couple of twenties. Then he looks at me questioningly.

“Spare the change,” I tell him. “Let’s go next door.” And I motion with my power piece.

This is where the guy gets real smart. Now he don’t know any more than I do what the young broad’s gonna do when I drive up on her. So he decides he ain’t gonna let me get the next door. But he knows better than to rush me. So he goes into an act. He puts one hand over his heart and starts taking deep breaths and gasping.

“I gotta bad heart,” he says.

“Just calm down. I ain’t gonna shoot ya.”

And he says, “ooooooooooo” and falls to the floor, banging his arm on the scales as he goes. I mean, he really did a good job of acting. I can respect him for it and so I don’t get mad. I just look down at him, say thank you and walk out. As I reach the door I put my gun in the bag and calmly walk to the car. I don’t look behind me; that’s my partner’s job. He’s watching my back and he’s got a thirty-eight in his lap to help him pay attention. I open the door and we’re off.

We make the switch at the graveyard. It takes a couple minutes to start the pickup, but that’s all right; I need the time to puke. You see, I gotta be so calm and sure and debonair in the store and the tension builds so much that by the time I can relax a little my gut just goes wild.

We change shirts and drive off. The grocer must have got to a phone pretty quick because by the time we get to the freeway there’s a state bull pulled across the access. My partner looks at me and I nod. We don’t have to say anything. There’s only one cop in the car and we’ll play bluff or bulldog. If he lets us through, we go; if not, I kill him. Or he kills me—it doesn’t make much difference.

We drive onto the access. Now, we’re in an old rattletrap Chevy pickup with a rifle and a shotgun in the rack overhead. You can tell by looking at the rig that it can’t do over forty. And if we’d jut robbed somebody we sure as hell wouldn’t be driving calmly up to a cop. Did I say calmly? I’m clutching a nine-mm. automatic in my hand, holding it between my legs and I’m tense as a truck spring.

The man pulls out of our way and we drive off into the sunset, counting easy money and eating seedless grapes.

Love, Peace and Slot-Machine Coffee (Lost Oregon Writing)

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What follows is one of my favorite pieces of Oregon writing, from an anthology of creative writing from Oregon State Penitentiary inmates published in 1973 (see information below). I included it in my 2009 anthology Citadel of the Spirit and recently decided to take up a new project somewhat related to it: publishing the memoir of another contributor from that project, Smoky Epley. Before passing away in 2013, we became friends and I encouraged him to write up his life story of crime and incarceration. He did and completed it shortly before he died. At some point in the near future, I will publish his book, titled Auto, here on the blog and in e-book form. It’s truly quite remarkable and deserves an audience.

From “Love, Peace and Slot-machine Coffee,” an essay by Larry D.B. Smith, an inmate at Oregon State Penitentiary. The essay appeared in Men In Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary, edited by Faith G. Norris and Sharon J. Springer and published by Oregon State University Press in 1973. The anthology was a result of Norris, a professor of English at Oregon State, teaching creative writing classes inside the prison and discovering significant interest and talent there.

Three years ago, when I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic church, I was only vaguely aware of monasteries, monks, and the like. I had read stories that glamorized some of the monks of olden days, such a Friar Tuck of Robin Hood fame, but the reality of actually knowing a monk in a personal way was to come later. It came to me in prison, and when I was able to appreciate it most.

I had experienced a number of misfortunes, or so I thought. Things had not gone exactly the way I felt they should have gone. In spite of having worked very hard to earn the privilege of educational release, I had been denied this privilege. I met with similar denials when asking custody reduction, and again when asking for an early parole hearing. Reasons given by the authorities were not very well substantiated, and it seemed that the denials had been arbitrary. I was pretty bitter, and my studies were suffering from it. My visitors were too. The very person who had encouraged me to further my education now saw that there was a chance that it could boomerang and destroy everything that had been built up so carefully.

Unbeknownst to me, he spoke to one of the monks at a nearby abbey about me. Brother Francis sent word: did I care to correspond with him? He would like to have a “pen-pal.” Sure, why not? Letters from outside are always welcomed and Brother Francis offering to exchange letters was the beginning of a friendship. I didn’t realize just how great a friendship it would become until we exchanged several letters and I naively asked when he would be coming to see me on a visiting day. I was unaware that monks never leave the monastery for friendship visits, and rarely for any other reason, medical and church business excluded, of course.

The next letter I got was one that mirrored his frustration of having to break it to me that visits between us just weren’t in the cards, until I could visit him there. It is considered a distraction from the monks’ purpose to fully serving and thinking of God to go into the outside world. When they go into the Brotherhood, they renounce everything worldly for the cloistered life.

I’ll never forget Brother Francis’ words, “The chances for my coming to see you are quite slim. However, in the unlikely event that I should obtain permission from the Abbot, perhaps you should know what you will be meeting. I’m five feet one inch small, fifty-eight years young, with a map completely hidden behind a big beard and a perpetual smile on my face, and a funny-bone that causes me to laugh almost too much.” That proved to be an apt description.

The following Saturday, a friend of mine went to the Abbot and explained why he felt Brother Francis’ trip here would be justified. The Abbot felt the same, apparently, for he granted the necessary dispensation that permitted my friend to bring Brother Francis here. By the time we had to say goodbye, I felt that I had known this remarkable man all my life, and it was a reluctant parting when I learned that the trip could not be repeated.

Brother Francis and I began our conversation by comparing our respective circumstances. It was amazing to me that, here, I have so many liberties which I take for granted, while at the abbey, he was restricted beyond the average person’s comprehension. My few restrictions seemed to be pretty inconsequential by the time I learned that he had been in the monastery more than forty years—since he was seventeen—and had made only this one trip outside for a friendship visit in all that time. The only other trips outside had been to the optician’s, and to make the trip from Massachusetts to New Mexico, where a new colony was formed, then from New Mexico to Oregon.

Until about three years ago, the Brothers were not permitted to speak to each other except in the event that their work or safety depended upon necessary conversation. They could speak to the Abbot or any of their spiritual leaders when they sought advice or had a problem, but sign language was used otherwise. Then the silent system was relaxed. Even now, I learned, there is not an excess of talking, and the little talk there is is not useless chatter that we in the outer world are accustomed to. However, we chattered like two squirrels for over an hour.

Brother Francis asked if I might not like to share some coffee with him. The visiting room has a coffee machine, from which visitors and the inmates may purchase coffee (or a passable imitation) for a dime. I said yes, that would be nice. He asked me if I would show him how to operate the machine and then it began to dawn on me just how far out of touch with the outside world this man has been for forty years. We sat and sipped coffee and I remarked that this coffee must leave a lot to be desired, compared to monastery coffee. He said yes, “slot-machine” coffee could stand some improvement.

Later, in his next letter to me, he said, “I must agree with you that your slot-machine coffee isn’t the best, but I enjoyed that cup with you more than any I’ve had in quite some time.” Since that day, I’ve had a couple of cups with my friend who brought Brother Francis to the prison and another friend, and it even tasted better to me.

Brother Francis explained why the abbey coffee has better flavor: “It’s prepared by people, for people, not by a machine. People prepare things with love for people they love, while machines have no love for people; all they love is money.” That’s about as good a comparison as anyone could have given. If you don’t put a dime in the machine, it won’t give you a thing. The one we have occasionally has the option of taking the dime and thumbing its mechanized nose at the waiting customer. You can kick it, cuss it, or go sit down and cool off with a Coke, but it won’t give up the dime, and it won’t give up a cup of coffee.

In my discussion with Brother Francis, I talked about my college classes and the hobbies I like, and he told me of his woodcarvings. The proceeds from the sale of his carvings are shared with a T.V. program he likes, one of the few authorized programs they watch. I felt that he would have little trouble selling his carvings with such a noble cause profiting from it.

It was beautiful visit, and I was reluctant to end it so soon, but I knew within myself that somehow it had served a greater purpose than merely a social visit. It had brought me to a better understanding of myself. I realized that my disappointments were self-imposed, and in seeing and touching and talking with this wonderful example of selflessness, I found myself leaving the visiting room surrounded by an aura of calm that was new to me. It was not so strange, however, since it came Special Delivery, with brotherly love, from someone who cared enough to send His very best, Brother Francis.