Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

The night before the first day of filming at San Quentin, I drove down from my hotel just north of San Francisco to a nearby Walmart on a mission to buy a pair of tan slacks. My director Stuart had advised me that visitors to the infamous California prison are forbidden from wearing blue jeans, since some of the inmates wore denim-blue outfits and the authorities didn’t want to mistake any visiting civilians for runaways and shoot them by mistake. In a way it was a helpful wake-up call – it focuses the mind knowing that you might get sniped for wearing the wrong colour trousers.

It had been an idea of obscure provenance – possibly I’d been watching one of those American reality series that all feature the word ‘Lock’ and a preposition in the title: Lock Up, Lockdown, Lock-in, Lock-out. They tend to be overheated, full of grainy footage, gravelly voiced narration and ramped-up danger. Or I may have been thinking it would be funny to see pale bespectacled me out of my element in a world that promised menace and high-octane masculinity – like me and Nazis but more so.

Over the years I’d also seen a couple of documentaries about prisons, Paul Hamann’s Fourteen Days in May, about a man on death row in Mississippi in the lead-up to his execution; and Liz Garbus’ and Jonathan Stack’s Oscar winner The Farm, about Angola State Penitentiary (its stand-out scene shows a man in full clown costume visiting the inmates on death row to cheer them up on Christmas Day). Neither of these films is very funny and in fact The Farm, from my recollection, is a tiny bit boring. But around that time an American friend, a TV Nation alum, recommended a work of participatory journalism by the American writer Ted Conover called Newjack. It recounted his months working undercover as a correctional officer at New York’s Sing Sing prison, and what came across was the bizarre sense of incarceration as a kind of cooperative endeavour in which the prisoners, in their way, had as much power as the guards. Instead of the usual view of prison as an us-and-them environment, in which the prisoners are beholden to the authorities’ goodwill as they attempt to get back to normal life, I began thinking of it as ‘normal life’. I saw the officers and inmates as settled in a routine, existing in a symbiosis that was respectful as well as predatory; brutal but in its own strange way mutually sustaining and even occasionally affectionate.

I mentioned the idea to my new executive producer, Nick Mirsky and series producer, Stuart Cabb. An AP was assigned. Over several months, calls went out to a long list of American prisons, and Stuart did a whistle-stop tour across the US of the five or so most promising possibilities, alighting on California’s legendary San Quentin as the best option.

The entire complex of San Quentin is more like a town than a prison – there are a vast number of outbuildings: a post office, a museum, a fire station, employee residences, all ringed by an outer perimeter fence. In a concentric ring within, sitting atop an outcrop overlooking the San Francisco Bay, is the maximum security prison, with its yards and playing fields, its vast hangar-like multi-level blocks with rows of metal tiers running up the sides, its dining halls and laundry facilities and chapel.

The four of us – me, Stuart, a sound recordist, and Laura the AP – arrived on a sunny morning in the summer of 2007. The day started, as would all subsequent days, with our passage through the ‘sally port’ – a little like the gate of a medieval fortress, though equipped with a metal detector. The gate opened out onto a large courtyard.

Our chaperone for the visit was the prison’s public relations officer, Lt Eric Messick. Knowledgeable and good-humoured, Lt Messick had done his time as a prison guard, and his confidence in his position there and his knowledge of prison life meant he took a relaxed attitude to what we could see. In general, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of leeway we had to film inside the prison. The only places that were off-limits to us were those related to execution – the roughly 700-strong Death Row, the execution chamber itself – and the area for those inmates deemed the biggest threats to officers (spookily named the ‘adjustment centre’). Nor could we request to speak to specific inmates by name. This last rule, apparently, stemmed from a legal prohibition known as the ‘Charles Manson law’. Manson had become so popular among ratings-hungry journalists that they had had to outlaw the practice.

On that first day we made our way to the Carson Section, San Quentin’s ‘hole’, for inmates who had assaulted other inmates or officers. The CO in charge, Officer Jaime Alejos, equipped us all with stab vests. ‘These guys have a tendency to either spear you or dart you,’ he said. ‘May as well protect your major organs.’

With its lofty ceiling and its three or four tiers stretching up one wall, Carson Section had an exalted feel, like the nave of a cathedral. But the crudeness of its infrastructure – pipes visible, everything bolted together and roughly painted – brought the place back down to earth and made it resemble something agricultural: a facility for livestock – which, I suppose, is what it is. The cell openings had bars, which in turn were covered with mesh grills. Behind them were shirtless men, their bald heads and moustaches just visible. As we processed down past the ground-floor cells, whoops and heckles were audible. I was conscious of being seen by a thousand eyes, and that the possessor of any single pair might take against me and dart me.

‘It’s all show,’ Officer Alejos said. ‘They’re gonna make all kinds of noise.’

‘Do you actually quite like dealing with them?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because most of the stuff that they say is amusing. It makes you laugh.’

Officer Alejos steered me towards a ‘frequent flyer’, a young man whose name he gave as Playboy Nolan – not, I suspect, the name he was christened with. Playboy looked to be twenty-five or so. Short, with narrow eyes and unnaturally pale skin, he was elf-like in his appearance – if elves went bad and shaved their heads and got tattoos written in grandiloquent script on their necks. He said he was in for three years for carjacking. It seemed a long time.

‘You used a weapon?’ I asked.

‘They said I had a weapon,’ he replied.

Alejos explained that Playboy had been sent to Carson for ‘gassing’ correctional officers – I knew this meant spraying them with effluent, but I needed more information.

‘You assaulted COs with what?’

‘Any kind of liquid substance you could put together.’

‘Faeces?’

Playboy looked confused. ‘He say faeces?’

‘Poopoo,’ Alejos clarified.

‘Nah. I ain’t goin’ that far.’

‘Urine?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Your own?’

‘It’s not nobody else’s! Heh heh! But sometimes I been in predicaments when I had nothin’ in my cell, and the only way to get my point across was to come up with some kind of combination . . . Five or six officers I gassed.’

‘Would you ever gas me?’ Alejos asked.

‘Nah!’

‘Why wouldn’t you gas Alejos?’ I asked.

‘I known him for a long time, so.’

From his body language, I could see Alejos took this as a compliment – the idea that he might be exempted from Playboy’s effusions of bodily waste. Greater love hath no man than this: that he should not spray his friend with some kind of combination of piss and poopoo.

‘You seem almost a little proud that he wouldn’t do that to you,’ I said.

‘No. I’ve known Playboy about seven years now. Since he was seventeen years old. I’ve seen him at his freakin’ worst. Unbelievable. You just want to go over there and hit him, tell him to shut up.’

‘And now I sense you have a pretty good rapport.’

‘Oh, we always had.’

‘This is calm for me right here,’ Playboy said.

This emotional flavour, an unlikely sense of camaraderie and paternalism in a place where one might expect to find only antagonism, set the tone for much of my visit to San Quentin: guards who found the shenanigans of their inmates diverting, who took a protective, almost teacherly, attitude towards their charges; and inmates who had evolved a grudging tolerance for the guards, allowing that for the most part they were just guys doing a job.

This was, on the one hand, tactical: it’s not in the interests of either party for inmates and guards to antagonize one another for no reason. The prisoners can retaliate; so can guards. But it also spoke to a deeper quality, something I tend to think was simply symptomatic of who we all are as people: our need to get along; the way in which physical proximity tends naturally to breed a certain comity, so that relationships that might seem at first to be utterly opposed are in fact more mixed up and complicated.

This turned out also to be true of that other archetype of brutality: the prison gangs.

A little like the porn world, its remoteness from the mainstream had brought out an unvarnished racial polarization at San Quentin. No shame attached to racism: it was just a fact of life. The inmates ganged together by colour – whites, blacks, and several groups of Hispanic prisoners: Norteños, from Northern California; Sureños from the South; and a third group called the Paisas who tended to be native Mexican, and for some reason struck me as the most approachable and least threatening.

The gangs appeared to exist largely for reasons of self-protection: you needed back-up in prison; otherwise you were vulnerable to extortion or sexual bondage. At one point I was told there was a possible exception for guys who are very bookish – that there was a certain leeway for those who are super-literate or super-religious to go their own way. Needless to say, if I do ever have to do time in San Quentin, I’d definitely be aiming for that loophole.

For those signed up to gangs, membership had its privileges but came at a price. Specifically, you had to observe the esoteric racial code: not sharing food or lodgings or anything of value with anyone of another race and being ready to knife any other gang member who does so.

At yard time, there were unofficial areas for different groups, demarcated with invisible boundaries. During our first week of filming, we found ourselves amongst a group of twelve or so skinheads, guys mostly in their twenties and thirties, several of them shirtless and heavily decorated with ink. ‘We’re the white guys,’ one said when I walked up. He was muscular, shaven-headed, with the ghost of a horseshoe moustache. He seemed to be the spokesman of the group.

I asked whether they were in a gang, and they began muttering and pointing to their tattoos. ‘BBH,’ said horseshoe-moustache man. ‘Barbarian Brotherhood’.

‘Do all the different races have different areas?’

‘Yeah. That’s like the black area over there, the Norteño area over there, white area over here. Indian area over there. We keep it segregated.’

‘How come?’

‘Keep a clear line, pretty much.’

‘We don’t want to programme with them,’ said another. ‘White power.’ Then he made a noise that sounded a little like a goose honking. Skronk! And then: ‘707!’ – referring, I think, to a Northern California area code. There were some more skronks! and some laughter before I carried on.

‘In the outside world people tend to rub along. Different races get along, more or less. How come inside it doesn’t work like that?’

‘For no confusion. So we don’t get confused. Between races and stuff. We just stay away from them.’

‘We just don’t want to live with them,’ goose-honk man said.

‘Is there someone in charge?’

‘No one’s going to say that.’

‘Why wouldn’t anyone say that?’

‘Cos then they’ll high-profile us and put us in the hole.’

‘Are most of you here on parole violations?’

‘At least fifty per cent of us are here because of meth. At least the white guys.’

Hovering on the edge of the group was a much younger-looking inmate, slight of build, with his top on. He looked lost. A nineteen-year-old, he explained he hadn’t gone to trial yet. He was here for a ninety-day observation, having picked up thirty-one charges related to a robbery. He was looking at a possible thirty-eight years.

‘How did you hook up with these guys?’ I asked.

‘He’s white,’ one said. ‘We take care of our own.’

Talking to the guys, I had the impression of something marginally more benign than you might expect from the term ‘prison gang’ – a mutual aid society, a family, a club, a support system of a brutal sort in a place in which to be alone was an invitation to be preyed upon. I’d also been pleasantly surprised by their willingness to entertain my questions. It should probably be mentioned that the Barbarian Brotherhood appears to be a very small gang – specific to an area of Northern California – and should not be confused with the far larger and more homicidal Aryan Brotherhood.

I had more questions about how it worked, but before I could ask them yard time was over. Like schoolchildren at the end of playtime, the Barbarian Brotherhood traipsed back to their cells.

A few days later, having come in at the crack of dawn to film inmates getting breakfast, I spied two of the Barbarian Brothers again. I joined them at their table for a bite of prison food.

We were seated in a vast and sonorous hall. It was early enough that it was still cold outside and the inmates all had their shirts on now, pyjama-like, billowy orange tops.

‘If you were black and you offered me a bite of that food I couldn’t take it,’ horseshoe-moustache man said.

‘Why?’

‘Just part of the rules, man. If you did, you’d get beat up.’

‘Who’d beat me up?’

He paused and then said: ‘Me.’ He laughed. He looked at his fellow gang member, who had tattoos of flayed skin up his neck. ‘This guy,’ he said.

‘You would really do that?’

‘Yep. We’d be out to gitcha. We’d tell you not to do it first. Then we’d have to gitcha.’

‘How?’

‘Probably just mob ya. Like two or three dudes would just attack you.’

‘How bad?’

‘Till the cops stop ’em.’

‘You really mean that?’

‘Yep.’

‘Why would you do that?’

This seemed to stump horseshoe-moustache man, or possibly he was tired of answering questions.

‘Tell him, Nick,’ he said to his friend.

‘It’s just how it is,’ Nick said.

We finished our food and I followed the two of them back to their cellblock, each of them carrying their brown-bag lunches. Inmates in general population, as they were, only got yard time twice a week – they would be cell-bound for the whole rest of the day. When I look at the sequence now, what strikes me is the strange contrast – after all the talk of violence and enforcement – of the warm embrace they give each other as they say goodbye and go off to their respective cells.

I met several other gang members during my San Quentin sojourn. All could recite the rules but, when asked for the reasoning behind them, none had much in the way of an explanation. ‘Politics,’ they would say when pushed. In time I came to my own conclusions: the importance of protection; a clinging to skin privilege in a place where people had so little to hang on to for status; the need to promote order in a world that was on the verge of being a Darwinian free-for-all. It was the brutal prison version of keeping peace.

One of the weirdest examples of the code of gangs came on the last day of filming. We’d been allowed into a yard for inmates in need of protection – mostly gang dropouts, trans inmates, and sex offenders. I spied a skinhead – bald, shirtless, tattooed – whom I’d spoken to once before. I asked why he dropped out.

‘It was a situation,’ he said. ‘They wanted me to stab my cellie, and I only had fifty-nine days left, just because he borrowed a black guy’s dominos.’

‘Why didn’t you do it?’ I asked.

‘Because my mother was gettin’ ready to pass away. And I wanted to get out and I only had fifty-nine days left.’

I had the impression it wasn’t so much the principle of stabbing the cellmate that bothered him; he mainly just didn’t want to add to his time.

In the end, the clearest statement I got on the place prison gangs occupied came from Playboy Nolan, he of the ‘gassing’.

I met up with him again, on a day when he got his yard time. Playboy, it turned out, was also a gang dropout, from an offshoot of Nuestra Familia called Northern Structure. For his protection he was kept away from other inmates, and his outdoor area consisted of a cage resembling a zoo enclosure – a ‘walk-alone’ – which he was allowed into for a couple of hours once a week. We shot him, awkwardly, through the bars. I asked why he’d dropped out and he gave the stock answer: ‘Basically because of the politics. I just don’t like being told what to do.’

‘There’s gang members on the bigger yard right now. If we put you in there right now, what would happen?’

‘Oh, there would be conflict. There would be a big, big fight out there. Big melee out there.’

‘They’d get you?’

‘I’d probably get them first.’

‘What do they do here?’

‘The whole point of being in a gang is to orchestrate unity as one, together. If I need food from someone? My white brother will give it to me. If I need security, back-up? My white brother will give it me. Drugs, they take care of for you. All that kind of stuff.’

Now, having left the gang, Playboy had a target on his back.

‘Do you worry when you get out that the gang might still be after you?’ I asked.

‘The threat is very high. When you drop out your name goes onto a list, called the Bad News List. And those people right there are supposed to be killed . . . It’s a list that’s written down from every single prison, from every person higher up . . . And the objective of the individuals on the streets is to control the drugs and the money and to kill these certain people.’

‘What was it that got you involved in the gang in the first place?’

‘My brother for one – he’s still affiliated to this day, right? But not only that. Me growing up on the streets, that acceptance feels good, you know? When someone says they love you – “oh right, I love you, I got your back” – it just made you feel good.’

‘They haven’t got your back any more.’

‘Nah, nah, nah, I got my own back. But it’s all right though. I be all right, I know that. I been alive this long. Who says I’m not going to live fifty more years?’

The experience of making the San Quentin film landed on me with the force of a revelation, reminding me, in its combination of the strange and the familiar, of a sculpture of the human body with the skin off and the organs on display. The violence, the tribalism, the lust – all of it was in full view, ugly and shocking, and at the same time, if I was honest, redolent of the darker recesses of my own soul. It was a world without hypocrisy, in which the depravity humans are capable of was laid bare, and which, for the same reason, could also surprise you with acts of tenderness, unlikely friendships, and small moments of connection.

Long afterwards, I tried to keep something of San Quentin with me – that sense of having seen through the veil and the knowledge that the restraints of civility are thin and fragile. Most of us will do what we have to when we need to survive.

The film got six million viewers when it went out. It was the most watched documentary of the year anywhere on the BBC. To be fair, I think there was something hopeless on BBC1, so in a sense the figures were altitude-assisted, our version of Bob Beamon’s epic long jump in Mexico City in 1968. Like Beamon, we never again came close to that number, setting ourselves up for a sense of failure whenever our ratings came in. Years later, I finally kissed goodbye to the heady heights of six million and accepted the lower slopes of 2 to 2.5 million as our natural home.

The bigger lesson, though, was that we were probably right not to worry overmuch about being funny. Other stories were suddenly possible – stories that looked at the psychology of criminals, the ecology of law-breakers and law-enforcers, their unacknowledged Janus quality as mirrors of each other, the chaos and violence of the agents of the state, and the paradoxical peace-keeping effect of the code of the streets.

Now, with the endorsement of six million and the confidence it brought, we had the licence to explore a darker kind of terrain. Having more or less escaped the shackles of ‘weirdness’, the production went on the hunt for stories that promised jeopardy and menace.