November 24, 2002

• Charley, then and now…

  At left is my Charley, AKA Chuck, AKA Studd, 1973, tokin up in the basement apartment we shared just off C Street on 11th Avenue in Anchorage. 

  Before I met him, Charley had been in jail, the Palmer jail, sometimes called the Honor Farm, for six years.  Minimum security was putting it mildly for that jail.  All a man had to do to escape was walk two or three miles out to the highway and hitch a ride.  There were no uniforms, no fences.  These men went out on search and rescue callouts, and fought forest fires.  During the state fair, they set up a table in the crafts fair and sold the things they made in the shop.  They helped the boys at the Turning Point Boys’ Ranch in their fundraising projects.

  At the time, only a very small number of inmates could be housed in the State Jail, formerly a federal jail, in downtown Anchorage.  Then, as now, most Alaskan inmates whose corrections classification required maximum security were shipped Outside, to Arizona, Illinois, or California.  The state has opened several new jails since then, but it never is enough.  The latest statistics I could find, for Dec. 31, 2000, said that 826 of 3,583 Alaskan inmates were then housed Outside, most of them in Arizona.  The lucky ones like Charley and the others at Palmer, who are not considered serious escape or violence risks, get to stay in Alaska, where there is some chance of family contact during their incarceration.

  Charley was president of the jail’s Jaycee chapter, and had held more than one office with the inmate council.  He was involved in sobriety groups.  As with most of the other inmates there, Charley’s crime had been alcohol-related, meaning he had been drunk at the time it was committed.  He had been arrested and convicted of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and two counts of burglary not in a dwelling.  When I met Charley, he was so strongly anti-booze that he would go to parties and lecture the drinkers there.  The mere mention of drinking in casual conversation could set off a rant.  I felt he took it to extremes, but he felt the extreme stance was justified.

  This afternoon, I was over at Charley’s cabin and I interviewed him about the details, refreshing my memory of the many times I heard this story in our years together.  He had stopped by here yesterday while Greyfox and I were in Wasilla.  He dropped off some books and took a few, as usual, and was looking for some stuff he needed.  Today I found his stuff and took it to him.  It seemed like a good time to get my story straight for this blog.  It was good that I asked, because I had one essential fact wrong, right at the start.  I thought he knew the desk clerk at the hotel, but that wasn’t it.

  He got the key to the hotel room from a hooker who said she had had it for a while.  It wasn’t a master, just a room key, with a big plastic tag showing the room number.  He was led to believe that there would be a quantity of drugs in the room.  At the time, Charley was driving a cab in Anchorage.  He had grown up first in Texas, then when he was about ten or twelve he and his little brother came to Alaska with their mother and step-father.  They homesteaded here in the Mat-Su Valley, then as teenagers the boys moved with their mother to Anchorage.  After high school, Chuck studied electronics and petrochemical instrumentation.  He worked in an oil refinery and was part owner of a TV/radio repair business before he started driving a cab.  By the late sixties, he was involved in those things most of the cabbies were involved in:  booze, drugs, hookers, gambling, and whatever else came along.

  He cased the room, determined that the guest was out, and entered with his key.  He took a look around, saw an Alaska State Trooper’s “Smoky Bear” hat on the dresser and a 12ga. shotgun leaning in a corner.  He thought, “this isn’t right.”  Just then, the door opened, and a trooper, “four feet across and eight feet tall,” walked in.  (Charley is a great storyteller.  You should see and hear his version.  The gestures and facial expressions are all part of the experience.)  Charley picked up the trooper’s gun, cocked back the hammer, and said to the big man, “Don’t do anything we’ll both regret.”

  Charley says he was shaking as he held the gun.  He thinks he and the trooper were equally scared.  The trooper was in town to testify at a trial, and assumed that Charley was a hit man come to kill him.  He had the trooper assume the position, took his side arm and patted him down.  Then he had him lie on the bed.  Using the trooper’s handcuffs, Charley cuffed his hands behind his back and then rolled him up in the blankets and left.

  He went to a place out on the Kenai Peninsula and was tracked down by Rudy… last name Rudolf, I forget the rest.  Charley introduced us once when we met at some public event.  He and Rudy, the State Trooper “bird dog”, were good friends.  There had been the briefest of armed standoffs when Rudy caught up with Charley.  Unlike when Charley had burglarized the hotel room, he was sober when Rudy showed up and he listened to reason when Rudy explained what kind of shit would come down on his head were Chuck to shoot him.

  At trial, he was sentenced to ten years on the armed robbery (stealing the trooper’s gun), one year on the assault (cuffing and blanketing the trooper), and two years on each count of burglary.  They were to run concurrently, so ten years was what he was supposed to do.  After six, he got out on parole for the last four years of the sentence.  A year or so into his parole, it was shifted from supervised to unsupervised, which meant  it was about the same as not being on parole at all, except that if he had gotten into any more trouble, he would have had his armed robbery sentence to finish out.  With me, he stayed out of trouble.

  He didn’t stay off booze forever, however.  It was the oddest thing.  He was working at Sheep Creek Lodge near here, a couple of years after we moved out here from Anchorage.  Our relationship was strained, for reasons I’ll go into in more detail than anyone needs to know, when I get to that.  There was a custom at the lodge of the “after shifter”, a free drink at the end of the workday.  Charley had been refusing drinks and taking tokens, “wooden nickels” to give to friends or trade for dope, until the management decided that they would give no more tokens for after shifters.  To keep from “losing” it, Charley took a drink.  You know, don’t you, that for an alcoholic there is no such thing as one drink?  He had the good sense not to come home in that condition, but his slurred speech made it obvious when he phoned to say he’d see me in the morning.

  That did it for me and we split entirely for a while.  There was some time in there that he was drunk more than he was sober.  Now, he is sober a lot more of the time than he is drunk.  If he would just remember not to come around here when he’s drunk, I wouldn’t have a single complaint against the man.  He’s the best friend I could possibly have.  We are soulmates, and I’ll get into that some more as I go along, too.  He told me today that he’s gotten to a place where he is, “happy where I’m at.”  He still talks about moving to Chicken, and I hope that he does, because that will establish a base far off the beaten track, a place that I could duck out to when the fit hits the shan.

  This afternoon, I asked him if he thought it was a set-up: the hooker, the room key, the trooper.  He won’t speculate.  He agrees with me that it is plausible.  I asked him if he knew of anyone with the clout and a possible motive for wanting to shake up the testifying trooper, or get him killed, and in the process make some trouble for Chuck.  He said he knew one man who might.  He won’t name him.  He told me more today than ever before.  I know better than to pressure him to divulge a secret.  That was one of the reasons we broke up.  He couldn’t handle my not keeping secrets.  On my side, I couldn’t handle his not keeping promises.  Now that we’re not under the same roof, it’s easier to accept each other as we are, and we’re friends.

  

  • 9:05 pm
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