SKID ROW WRITER TURNS LIFE INTO ART

Wednesday is going to be a big day for J.B. Mackey and some of his financial backers on downtown’s Skid Row. That evening, Mackey and his wife and a few of their “wino friends” will be at the American Film Institute for a reading and analysis of Mackey’s screenplay, “Mac and Tanker.”

“They don’t have no money,” Mackey said. “This will be a big thing for them.”

It will be a big thing for Mackey, too, although the 48-year-old novice screenwriter doesn’t let on about it. For a guy who claims to have fought as a mercenary at age 17, who admits to having murdered four men, and who spent 12 years in San Quentin and Folsom prisons, what’s so frightening about having a script read?

“If it works, it works,” Mackey said. “If it don’t, it don’t.”

If it does work, Mackey said, nothing will change that much. If he sells his screenplay, he says he’ll just spend the money helping his Skid Row buddies or trying to expose what he sees as abuses in California’s prison system.

He says he doesn’t want to live in Beverly Hills--why should he? He and his wife, Linda, are comfortable in their cell-sized Skid Row hotel room. They have a bed to sleep on, though it’s only a single. They have a Styrofoam ice chest to keep perishables in. They cook on an electric griddle in the bathroom. They even have pet pigeons living on the roof outside--”Skid Row pigeons,” Mackey said with a laugh, “ragged like the rest of us.”

“I’m happy here,” the robust, red-faced Mackey said, tearing the filter off another Winston cigarette and lighting up. “It’s a clean hotel. You don’t have fights in here or killings. Nobody bothers you.”

Mackey said he and his wife moved to Los Angeles from Texas in January after he read a newspaper article about a Baltimore warehouse manager who applied to the American Film Institute Alumni Assn. Writers Workshop and sold his first screenplay in just a few months.

Mackey, who had been paroled from Folsom State Prison in 1977, said he was “making pretty good money” picking up beer cans and junk iron and doing yardwork around Odessa, Tex. But for the last few years, he has been trying to figure out what to do with those autobiographical short stories he wrote while cooling his heels “in the hole.” That newspaper article gave him the answer.

“I figured if this other guy could do it, I could do it,” Mackey said. “We packed the old van and I said, ‘Come on, we’re going to see (AFI Alumni Writers Workshop Director Willard Rogers).’ ”

Mackey said his van, a 1957 Ford, “burnt up” in San Bernardino and he sold it to a drunk for $100. By the time he reached Los Angeles, he had $7 left-- plus 40 handwritten pages of a story about a sociopathic child named Mac and his dog, Tanker.

“He (Mackey) just walked into the office and brought these pages in,” said Rogers, whose offices are in the Filmland Corporate Center in Culver City. “I read the story, and it was just fascinating. I showed him screenplay structure and gave him a script and said, ‘Why don’t you come back in a couple of months when it’s done?’

“That was on a Thursday. He came back Monday morning with 145 pages, handwritten, in screenplay structure. I said, ‘Well, I am going to stick with him through that.’ ”

Rogers said “Mac and Tanker” is one of the best first-draft screenplays he has ever read and that he is almost certain Mackey will see some money from it. In fact, Rogers has already circulated “Mac and Tanker” among some agents and says he expects Mackey to be signed by a major agency within the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, Mackey is hunkered down on Skid Row.

He says his friends on the street helped him collect the $50 he needed to apply to the AFI Alumni Writers program, and that he has been living on welfare, food stamps and whatever he can hustle since.

Rogers said he has deferred the remaining $275 of Mackey’s workshop costs, and Mackey said Rogers even loaned him the typewriter he used to peck out the last draft of “Mac and Tanker”--the version a group of actors will read Wednesday before an audience of about 100 film industry people at the institute.

The reading will be followed by an open analysis of the screenplay, which will be moderated by author Ray Bradbury.

Mackey, punching the air with his right index finger, said he types pretty fast for someone with only one hand. He lost the other hand five years ago, he said, when two Las Vegas hoods tracked him to Mesquite, Tex., and--as punishment for using marked cards in a poker game--sawed it off with a hacksaw blade.

“I’ll never gamble again,” Mackey said, unconsciously rubbing the shiny metal hook where his left hand used to be. “I’m through with it.”

“Mac and Tanker” is a harrowing psychological thriller about a boy in a poor white Southern family who is born insane. He grows up a loner, partnered with a vicious dog who becomes his accomplice in a series of cold-blooded murders. It is part “Bad Seed,” part “In Cold Blood,” part J.B. Mackey.

When he first talked about his story, Mackey denied that there were any autobiographical parallels. But when it was suggested that people reading the script might see a lot of anger coming out in the writing, he opened up.

“There’s a lot of me in that, I’ll admit it,” said Mackey, whose deeply lined face changes expressions with almost every sentence. “There’s a lot of what I used to be.

“I’m not that way now. I don’t know why I was what I was, lived like I did. When I think of all that, it’s like it was somebody else.”

Mackey said he never hurt anyone badly when he was a child, but he remembers being cruel. He said he lobbed marbles onto the head of his 90-year-old grandmother, just as the boy does in his script, and when he was 5, he tried to push her off the porch because she wouldn’t give him cookies.

When he was about 7, he said, he kept a rattlesnake as a pet and threatened to slip it into his grandparents’ bed when they told him to get rid of it. The snake eventually turned on him (“I slapped him and he bit me,” Mackey said), sending him to the hospital while the rattler slithered off into the Texas desert.

Mackey said he drew on his childhood a lot in telling the story of “Mac and Tanker,” including one bizarre incident where he went to a funeral parlor and rammed a pin into the corpse of a man who had died in an auto accident shortly after calling Mackey’s dog a mongrel.

“I remember my grandmother had to light candles in my room that night because I was having nightmares,” he said. “I always had nightmares.”

Mackey said he was raised by his grandparents because his mother, like the mother in his script, was a teen-ager. His father was in a Texas prison when J.B. was born. The family worked in the oil fields, “but they was country people, what you’d call white trash,” he said.

“When I was growing up, they didn’t have child psychologists or anything, and my people was backward. They didn’t know they was dealing with some kind of little monster. They was good people, they just didn’t know. They never did figure out there was something wrong with me.”

Mackey said he dropped out of school in the seventh grade and began working in the oil fields. That’s when he started getting into real trouble, he said. He drank a lot, fought a lot, stole a little. When he was 16, he said, he was arrested for burglary and given a choice by the judge of joining the military or going to prison. He said he joined the Marines but was quickly discharged as unfit.

A few months later, he said, he became a mercenary somewhere in Latin America. He said he didn’t know who or why he was fighting, but soon after he got there, he committed his first murder. As he tells it, he got mad at some deadbeat for refusing to pay a prostitute for her services and he took a machete to him.

“I was fined $200 and had to do six months in a roundhouse. There were about 75 men in there. We slept on these mounds of hay, and once a day they would feed everybody out of this big pot.”

Mackey said one of the other inmates tried to steal his cigarettes one night, so he plunged a sharpened spoon handle into the man’s throat and killed him. Then he stripped the shoes off the body and sold them to another prisoner.

“They (the guards) just ignored it,” Mackey said. “The guy was a troublemaker, so it didn’t matter.”

When Mackey returned to Texas, he said, he was constantly in trouble. He thought he was being picked up and questioned for nearly every murder that occurred, so he took a bus to Los Angeles, where he took up life on the streets. He said he used every ploy street hustlers use to survive, including prostitution.

“I’m not gay or nothing, but I was hustling homosexuals. I was working bars, hotels. I just got into that life because I was so restless, so lazy. I didn’t want to work.”

One of Mackey’s periodic customers was a 28-year-old South San Gabriel man named Earl Vincent Harding. Mackey said Harding was a masochist who paid him and his friends as much as $100 for an occasional beating. On Jan. 10, 1965, Mackey went with Harding to Harding’s house but instead of beating him, he stabbed him to death.

“I had been drinking, and I just went off my rocker,” Mackey said.

Mackey was arrested that night and eventually pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Mackey believes he should have been determined insane (“I stabbed the guy 189 times,” he said. “Does that sound like something a sane person does?”), but the court-appointed psychiatrists couldn’t agree. He was sentenced to six months to 10 years and sent to San Quentin.

“All they did (by finding him sane) was open the doors for me to kill again,” Mackey said. “I didn’t belong on the streets, that’s for sure. But I should have got treatment.”

Within two years, Mackey was suspected of several prison killings. He admitted to one--prompted, he says, by a homosexual advance-- and in 1967 was sentenced to five years to life for second degree murder. To avoid being given the death sentence, he agreed to undergo radical psychiatric treatment.

“They said they were either going to have to kill me or save me,” he said. “So they drilled for oil in my head.”

Mackey was sent to the medical facility at Vacaville where, in addition to electric shock therapy, he was given a fright drug without his consent and claims that he also underwent experimental brain surgery. He later sued the state prison system for “cruel and unusual treatment” and the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, agreed in an opinion that reversed lower court rulings against him.

The ruling effectively barred the prison system from using inmates for medical experimentation without their consent.

Mackey now credits that experimental treatment at Vacaville with making him safe and sane. He says that, with a couple of exceptions, he has been thinking clearly and responsibly ever since.

One of those slips, he said, occurred when he threatened a woman prison psychiatrist and had his parole date rescinded months before his scheduled release from San Quentin. In a court petition, Mackey claimed that he had been having a yearlong love affair with the psychiatrist and that she panicked because he wanted to continue seeing her on the outside.

Mackey doesn’t deny threatening the woman, but he says he didn’t mean it.

“She told (the parole board) I threatened to kill her,” he said. “What I said was, ‘I’m going to feed you to the sharks.’ I was mad at her, but hell, I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

A. Leonard Bjorklund, the attorney who fought the parole rescission for Mackey, says he called the psychiatrist to testify during those 1976 proceedings and that she denied the affair. Mackey, remembered by Bjorklund as a “well-liked guy who was always good with a story,” was transferred to the maximum security section at Folsom.

Mackey was released from Folsom in 1977 and eventually ended up back in Texas, where he met the woman he would marry, who was then a waitress at the Spur Cafe in Mackey’s hometown of Odessa.

In the meantime, Mackey has worked at a variety of odd jobs and said he has stayed clear of trouble . . . except for that poker game.

Mackey said he was working in a liquor store in a Las Vegas hotel, a job arranged for him by a former prison buddy, when he decided to try to make some quick money in one of those high-stakes games he knew was going on upstairs. He won $14,000, he said, but not legitimately.

“I was using a deck that I knew was marked. A buddy showed me how to read them, but I should have known those old boys (in the game) knew they was marked.”

Mackey managed to get out of town before the gamblers got to him the next day, and he and his wife had a three-month joy ride on the winnings. But the road ended in Mesquite, when two of his friends from Las Vegas showed up.

He said it was all very cordial, very professional. He remembers commenting on how good the men looked in their business suits. They told him not to take what they were about to do personally.

“One of the guys was a good friend--still is a good friend. He liked me. He said, ‘Instead of killing you, we’ll make an example of you. Which hand do you write with, J.B.?’ ”

Mackey smiled as he recalled getting away with a lie. He figured they were going to take his writing hand, so he said he wrote with his left. One guy grabbed his left arm and held onto it while the other sawed his hand off with a hacksaw.

Mackey said they talked to him the whole time, saying, “Don’t get weak now, Mackey, stay up with us.”

When the cutting ended, Mackey said he saw his hand fall into a bag. The two men then wrapped a tourniquet around his arm and dropped him off at his house. His wife drove him to the hospital.

“They was real nice, but they was coldblooded,” Mackey said, with a laugh that turned into a deep cigarette cough. “They’re good people, as far as I’m concerned. That was just their business. They had to do something.”

Now that he is in Los Angeles, just miles from where he killed Earl Vincent Harding 23 years ago, and facing a possible career as a screenwriter, Mackey looks back at his life as a script that somebody else wrote and somebody else acted.

“I don’t know why I was like I was,” he said. “Why would anybody be that cruel and not have any conscience about what I did? It’s stuff I just can’t answer. I believe people have a way to go and that’s the way they go.”

Mackey said Rogers has warned him that some of the people he may meet in Hollywood will make his prison buddies seem like priests.

“I hear about these people, but I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t feel money is important enough to hurt people for. In prison, there was a code, laws and a constitution (for inmates). You better live with it, or you’re in trouble.”

While Mackey waits for “Mac and Tanker” to be analyzed, he is working on a second script that is based on his prison experiences--with details about his slayings and his relationships with the psychiatrists, and with characters based on such real-life pals as Leo the Skull.

“Leo was my best friend, but he was really a psycho,” Mackey said. “He killed I don’t know how many guys. . . . He asked me to cell with him one day and I told him no. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because you’re crazy, that’s why.’

“He pulled a knife on me and stuck it at my throat. I said, ‘Leo, you kill me and you ain’t going to have a friend at all.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

“You meet some interesting people in there.”

Mackey has other stories. He said he recently finished writing a short story titled “Cardboard Condo,” about a night he spent recently sleeping in a box with friends downtown.

Mackey admits he is bitter about his prison experiences. He says there is a double standard of justice for the rich and poor “in the joint,” as there is outside. At the same time, he thinks that he’s had a guardian angel watching over him.

“People say to me, ‘Why in hell are you still alive?’

“I don’t know why I’m still alive. I’ve got sense enough to know that most people who’ve lived like me are dead. But I’m not dead. I’m just starting to live.”

SCENE FROM “MAC AND TANKER” by J.B. Mackey

Mac steps out toward the old woman, stopping behind the rocker. He stands quietly watching her then he puts his hands on the back of the rocker moving with the motion of the chair. Back and forth . . . pushing a little harder with each rocking motion. . . . Grannie’s eyes open, she blinks. She tries to look behind her.

GRANNIE

I know you there, I can feel you, boy. What are you doin’?

There is no answer. The chair rocks faster.

GRANNIE

(yelling)

I’m callin’ your Mammy, boy. Do you hear me?

MAC

Call ‘er, ol’ woman. They’ll not hear ya!

GRANNIE

Quit, boy, you’re pushin’ the rocker too hard.... You’re tryin’ to kill me. Edith, Louis, hep me!

Mac begins to laugh, Tanker to bark, running round and round the chair nipping at Grannie’s feet. All at once the chair tips forward and the old woman flies out into the air clawing, grabbing. She hits the ground. . . . Focus on Mac looking down at Grannie. One side of her head is submerged in a mud puddle. She does not move. Satisfied she’s dead, (Mac) turns and goes through the screen door.

MAC

(calmly)

Let’s git some cookies, boy, I’m hungry.