WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 6

It’s Roger’s first day at OSP and Doug Howell, a friend from the good old days at Amato’s, comes by his cell with a care package. Toothbrush, soap, cookies, the works. Then they go out on the yard and smoke some weed.

Everybody knows Howell’s story. He’s waiting outside the Hawthorne Pharmacy in an orange Mercury Cyclone while Morehead, his totally unreliable crime partner as it turns out, goes in to demand all their drugs and money.

But when Morehead reaches for the money, the old lady behind the counter starts banging the lid of the till on his hands, the pharmacist starts throwing bottles of pills at him – and  Morehead, understandably flustered and probably stoned as well,  comes running out the door and jumps into the back seat of the car.

The only problem being that by this time Howell has moved the orange Merc around the corner, and the car Morehead jumps into is green. By the time they get this all straightened out, the cops are on the way, and after a very short chase – west on Hawthorne and right on 12^th – they’re busted. Right in front of Amato’s, for crissake. Even Howell can laugh about it now.

“So I ask him what’s the story here on this weed?” says Roger. “Turns out he’s got this little girlfriend who brings it up every time she sees him in the visiting room. So I say, well look, can we run some other stuff too?”

And of course there’s always the guards, or cops as they call them, many of whom are more than willing to pack in the drugs. According to Roger, who’s probably as expert as anyone can get on the subject, as a general rule about ninety percent of the drugs in prison come in through the visitors room. Another ten percent or so is packed in by guards. But there are  endless ways to smuggle drugs into any prison.

At OSP they had the furniture truck, which made weekly deliveries to Portland from the prison workshop. Every week the guard and driver would stop at Obie’s, “The Buffett King” at 122^nd and Division, and while they were eating lunch someone would slip a package into a secret compartment under the chassis.

And it’s not just for the drugs or the money, although of course there’s that too. Imagine you’re twenty-three years old, looking at spending the next twenty-five in prison. You’ll be dead before you get out.

“All kinds of crazy things we did, you know, just out of boredom. I mean, what are you going to do? Sit there and stagnate? We’re constantly scheming on how to get drugs in.”

Every two weeks Cheryl and Roger’s grandmother Wanita would take the bus down from Portland and spend the day. Of course Cheryl never brought in any weed because she was with Wanita. She just wanted to see Roger.

“But then after two years I had to tell her, ‘Hey listen, we can’t both do this time. You need to stop coming down. You need to get on with your life. Write a letter every six months and let me know you’re okay.’ After a while I think she she saw it was the best thing, for her to move on.”

It wasn’t much after that, though, that Roger caught a huge  break. The Oregon Court of Appeals, determining after a careful reading of the statutes that Roger didn’t participate in the murder of Bruce Tucker after all, vacated his conviction and he was resentenced for manslaughter. Which meant he was now looking at a 12-year sentence – and with credit for the 714 days he’d already served (plus the help of a truly miraculous clerical error that counted it twice) he could be out in just four more years.

The smuggling, of course, continues unabated. By now Roger’s hooked up with Jimmy Spaise, another not-too-successful junkie and pharmacy robber. Spaise, who is frail and has a fused back due to a childhood bout with polio, has a sister Sandra who’s a call girl working in Alaska. Sandra starts bringing in dope on her monthly visits.

Meanwhile, Roger’s working at Central Freeze, which is the prison-run industrial site outside the walls where they process and freeze all the food needed to sustain the prison population.

Once a week they load everything onto a truck and bring it into the prison kitchen, and of course Roger’s sending in dope this way as well. Which is why Inez Guerrero, a short, somewhat dumpy robber who happens to be working in the kitchen, and is known as an escape artist. comes to Roger with his latest scheme.

First time Roger ever saw him, in fact, he was still a teenager, locked up overnight in the old Portland jail at Third and Oak for underage drinking. And there in the restroom, on the fifth floor of the old building, was Inez, along with a couple of confederates, trying to break a hole in the wall.

Which they eventually succeed in doing. Swinging down, hand over hand on fire escapes and storm gutters to street level. It would be at least a couple of months before they were caught again. They’re always caught again, of course. But escapes were just Inez’s thing.

Anyway, what Inez wants to know this time is whether Roger thinks there’s a way to smuggle a gun into OSP. Because if there is, his plan is to take over the visitors room and escape from there.

Now that his sentence had been cut, Roger isn’t interested in escaping himself. But he can certainly understand why Inez, who’s recently been sentenced as a career criminal to twenty years without parole, might be. So he comes up with a plan. But first, he says, they’ve got to test it.

So Roger melts down a five-gallon can of raspberries, drops in a 10-inch steel bar he’s found lying around somewhere, and then he freezes the raspberries back up again for shipment into the kitchen. And it works. No alarms, no nothing.

Now all they need is someone to deposit a handgun at some  convenient spot by Central Freeze. And they’re working on it – or at least Inez certainly is – when who should appear back at OSP but celebrity criminal Steve Kessler himself, who probably thinks he’s the main character in this story.

And who knows, maybe he is.