Every Prison Should Have a Man Cave Like This One
Chapter 1: Club 44
This is Chapter 1 of my series Club 44, my true story of having the world’s craziest prison job.
Prologue | Chapter 1: Club 44 | Chapter 2: Mr. President | Chapter 3: Big Tuna | Chapter 4: Cheeseburger | Chapter 5: Blowing Off Your Arm
Riding the bus that first day into Vandenberg was like arriving at prison all over again. All I knew was that whatever was about to happen was going to suck really, really bad.
The mood on the bus was light. Guys were talking and joking, the morning show was playing on the bus radio. But it was all white noise to me. My brain had switched into some kind of self preservation mode, an anesthetic to soften the blow of my impending torment.
It was an Air Force bus, driven by an Air Force driver. No prison employees were allowed on board. Entering the base through the security gates required some reason to be there; and while we had one, prison COs (Corrections Officers) didn’t. So in one sense it was like being free, being back in a world with normal humans; while in another, it was only doom that lay ahead. I was pretty spaced out, to say the least.
The bus made several stops, and at each, a group of our red-suited guys would get off and head to their jobs. It was a foggy day and I quickly became disoriented as the bus made turn after turn through the convoluted base. Then at one stop someone told me to get out, and I found myself standing on the tarmac with young USAF airmen milling about. Gray fog, strange people, lost, no sense of anything. My mind was completely blown out. I was a million miles from anything.
In my normal life I’d always been an aerospace nerd. I followed all the space missions, I attended rocket launches, I had VIP credentials for test flights and my home library was all books about military aircraft. As I stood there in my own literal and metaphorical fog, the atmosphere was suddenly ripped by a shearing roar. It snapped me out of my haze, to a degree. Whatever this savior reminder of the real world was, it couldn’t be seen through the fog.
“That’s a rocket,” said a voice. I turned and saw a smiling middle-aged man coming toward me in civilian work clothes and a cap indicating he was retired Air Force. He put out his hand. As no non-inmate had offered to shake my hand in weeks, I hesitated a moment as my brain shifted back into the gear of Being a Normal Person. “I’m Sammy,” he said. He found my name on his clipboard.
Sammy was our boss, part of the Civil Engineers on base, responsible for all the groundskeeping on Vandenberg’s ginormous fraction of California’s central coast. Soon I was in his pickup as he gave me the nickel tour. What we’d heard was an unarmed Minuteman III missile heading out toward Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. Vandenberg has a lot of missile silos left over from the cold war, and all the test firings are launched from there now. We had an intelligent and enjoyable chat about missiles and rockets and things, all the stuff he’d done in his career — surreal, given my previous couple of weeks. So far, this was hardly the horror I’d been led to expect.
“This is 44,” he said as he pulled up to a large metal building right under the approach to Vandenberg’s runways. It was named for its address, as were most of the buildings I’d come to know over the ensuing months. “Get off the bus here from now on. You’ll be on one of our mow teams.”
The doors opened to what could arguably be the world’s ultimate man cave. 44 was five thousand square feet of testosterone. In one corner was a big-screen TV surrounded by luxurious sofas. Across from it was a modest but well equipped workout area with benches and free weights. Another corner, surrounded by a chain link fence with a lock that we were allowed to access, was an incredible tool room, loaded with tens of thousands of dollars of every imaginable tool plus boxes of spares and extras, plus all manner of lawn equipment. In another corner was Sammy’s office, a framed building inside the warehouse. Parked all along the walls were our primary tools: top-of-the-line Kubota riding mowers. But dominating the huge space was the centerpiece: a gigantic mobile crane. It wasn’t ours and we weren’t supposed to use it, but we did enjoy climbing on it and checking it out.
We called our home Club 44.
Our guys were everywhere, all clad in the red FEDERAL INMATE overalls. A couple were tossing a football. Some were gathered around the coffee maker. Others had their lockers open and were organizing their gloves or helmets or whatever they’d need for the day. Most were on the sofas or sprawled in our black leather office recliners watching the TV. We had a season of Orange Is the New Black on DVD, and the guys were howling with laughter at all the gaffes in its Mayberry depiction of a federal prison camp.
A couple of the guys made yogurt, and they had an impressive assembly line consisting of various containers and an endless supply of milk, as we had our own dairy farm. You only need to start each batch with a tiny dab of culture from the previous batch, in the same way that San Francisco’s sourdough bread bakers draw from the same lump of starter yeast that’s been growing for a century. I inquired what the original culture had been, but nobody knew as it predated everyone currently there. The prevailing theory was that someone had athlete’s foot and stuck his toe in a glass of milk.
I soon learned that our two mow teams each consisted of five guys: two mowers, two weed whackers, and one blower. As low man on the totem pole, I’d start with a weed whacker. An Air Force airman was in charge of each team, and he would drive us around in a Ford Super Duty pulling the mowers on a trailer. They would show up half an hour or so after we got there — which allowed us time to have our coffee — Sammy would give them their mowing assignments for the day, and then we’d go out and work for two hours before lunch, and another two hours after lunch.
Barranca was the airman in charge of the team I wasn’t on. He was considered the more desirable to work for. Barranca’s thing was to drive to the job site and let the guys go, while he sat in the cab and smoked a fat one and played on his iPhone. His guys worked at their own pace, and Barranca drove them back to 44 whenever they reported they were done, which they would do whenever they felt like quitting.
Pinbeck was our airman. Pinbeck was about the size of a bowling pin, but had an astonishing drive and work ethic. He treated mowing Vandenberg like it was curing cancer. He was keenly aware of our needs, always making sure we had enough water, bathroom breaks, whatever. At every job site he worked alongside us; he was everything Barranca wasn’t. Unfortunately he was also terminally scatterbrained. He had the desire to accomplish so much more than his planning ability could keep up with. If Sammy told him to drop one guy off at another building to handle a quick request, Pinbeck would turn it into a half day of Rube Goldberg trips to the gas station, dropping off the trailer here, picking it up there, forgetting gas cans, going the long way around, and always squeezing in an extra trip to pick up more water for his guys. We loved him for his genuine thoughtfulness and effort, but it was often exasperating.
Fast forward a few months, to a day when my friend Trevor and I were driving our mowers on a huge field (by then I’d graduated to a mower). Sammy walked out and waved us both over and motioned for us to shut down the engines. We were two of the guys he knew he could trust, so he asked us “Why is it that Pinbeck’s team can’t accomplish half of what Barranca’s team does, but still takes you twice as long to do it?”
Trevor and I both had sons about Pinbeck’s age, and we knew the lad tried so hard every minute of every day. We couldn’t bring ourselves to throw him under the bus. We shrugged and said nothing, and Sammy let us go.
But not for long. Soon he motioned us over again and told us he didn’t buy our non-answer. What was the problem with Pinbeck? Reluctantly, we told him, qualifying it with everything positive we could think of to say about the guy. The fact is Pinbeck simply wasn’t cut out for logistics — even when the competing model was to do nothing other than smoke and fall asleep in the cab of the truck. The tiny brain — or shall we say, the still-developing brain — just couldn’t keep up with the titanic heart.
Privately, I always expected great things from Pinbeck, one day in the distant future. Or at least I did, until one day when he told me he’d finally found his spiritual home in groundskeeping.
Prologue | Chapter 1: Club 44 | Chapter 2: Mr. President | Chapter 3: Big Tuna | Chapter 4: Cheeseburger | Chapter 5: Blowing Off Your Arm
