Leonard Hystad beams. A photographer is standing on his bed shooting pictures of his cellmate, his ”pard,” his fellow thief, Jim Fogle.
”Damn, Jim,” he says, ”Who ever thought you`d be a celebrity?”
Fogle began inauspiciously: auto thefts, burglaries, armed robberies, and other crimes and misdemeanors. At 53, he has spent a cumulative 35 years at San Quentin, Soledad and a confusing string of less-notorious prisons.
But Fogle wrote an unpublished novel, ”Drugstore Cowboy,” which was made into a movie about four addicts whose lives revolve around pursuing and ingesting drugs. Starring Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch, the film opened last month and the critics approved. Since then, reporters have plodded like soldier ants to the desolate 513-acre maximum-security prison in Walla Walla, Wash., to meet the author.
Hystad thinks his old friend deserves the break. ”Anyone that`s ever stole with Jim and run up and down the road with him will talk well of him,” he says eagerly.
As the photo session continues, Hystad obligingly stays out of the way. With the photographer on one narrow bed and Fogle on the other, there is no place to sit except on a piece of plywood covering the stainless steel toilet. Hystad lights there briefly, then saunters to the narrow walkway outside the cell.
Hystad and Fogle share No. 8, one in the row upon row of cages in the gloomy, echoing cellblock. The heat is suffocating. The cell walls are unadorned except for an ersatz sampler on the wall reading, ”Away, sweet away.” Hystad has knotted a red bandanna around the light bulb, but a guard tells him to take it off. At the head of his bed, Fogle has crammed a narrow table and a typewriter.
Tall, balding, with rounded shoulders and a paunch, Fogle isn`t much on making eye contact. But he`s affable and answers questions patiently. Patience, he says, is a trait he learned in prison. He has little gray in his light brown hair or his small, neatly clipped mustache. He`s is dressed for this occasion in a striped shirt and blue jeans that have never seen daylight. ”One guy borrowed me his shoes. Another guy borrowed me his shirt,” Fogle explains, slightly embarrassed.
He doesn`t look like a gun-wielding robber. ”If somebody told me this was my uncle and he`s an accountant or an electrician, I would have thoroughly believed it,” says Dillon, who visited Fogle in preparation for his role.
”He`s so straight in some ways, and so intelligent and so personable.”
”Drugstore Cowboy” isn`t an autobiographical novel, but in this sense Fogle resembles his protagonist, Bob Hughes, a cagey but innocent-looking thief. ”His smile was quite pleasant and hid the time he had spent in reform schools, correctional institutions and penitentiaries,” Fogle wrote. ”His clear blue eyes, unlined face and white teeth said nothing of the many years he injected narcotics into his bloodstream. His quiet demeanor belied the stimulant runs of the past.”
”Drugstore Cowboy” wouldn`t inspire anyone to a life of crime, but neither is it a denunciation of drugs or addicts. Instead, it illuminates the addict`s world. ”Most people don`t know how they`re going to feel from one minute to the next,” the character Hughes says at one point. ”The dope fiend has a pretty good idea. He just has to look at the labels on the little bottles.”
”I had enough sense to realize that I wasn`t going to write something pro-drug that was ever going to go anywhere,” Fogle says. ”But I`ve looked at writers, and a good writer is one that everybody sees from his own perspective. . . The broad spectrum, that`s what you want. . . There is no position taken. You just tell the story.”
Fogle started writing after reading a lot of novels in prison and concluding that he could do better. One of his first short stories was about a convict who gets a series of unbearable cellmates. When one dies in the night, he props up the corpse for head counts and performs the dead man`s duties, all to avoid a new roommate. ”The culmination is, he says, `That stinking corpse made parole on my good behavior,` ” Fogle says. The convict winds up in a mental hospital.
Fogel`s first novel, ”Satan`s Sandbox,” was about a prison trio: a hardened convict, a transvestite and a young drunk driver. In the early `70s, he sent it to Tom Gaddis, author of ”The Birdman of Alcatraz,” who forwarded it to Dan Yost, a journalist and aspiring filmmaker. Yost and Fogle teamed up. ”He wanted to write, but he didn`t have no stories. I had stories, but I didn`t know how to write,” Fogle says.
Yost says he contributed ”more than an editing job and less than a collaboration.” He tried to sell ”Satan`s Sandbox” as a novel or screenplay, and got a few nibbles but no sale.
Meanwhile, Fogle weaved in and out of prison and corresponded with Yost. In a letter written in prison, dated ”Friday Night late, January 9, 1976,”
Fogle described a new project: ”I am now about a third of the way through a novel that I have real big hopes for, Infact, if this one don`t sell right off the bat, I`m through, I`ll never get off in this trick bag again, `smile`
. . . I don`t know Dan why I feel this way, but I really do feel were going to have a winner in this next one.”
Fogle told Yost that the story had good characters, humor and realism, but he worried that the public might find the topic, drugstore burglaries, less appealing than bank or jewelry heists.
”However, my characters don`t do nothing but hit drugstores, and they hit them repeatedly bam, bam, bam, and they never hit one in the same manner, and this is all they talk about, think about, and all they ever hope to do, that and shoot dope, I myself, have never read anything at all quite like it, and if nothing else a guy might just make a text book out of it and get some pharmacy board to declare it required reading for all drugstore owners, Hell, there`s about a hundred thousand copies right there. `smile.` ”
Eventually, Yost gave the novel to director Gus Van Sant, who won a 1987 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for his film, ”Mala Noche.” Van Sant persuaded Avenue Pictures to back ”Drugstore Cowboy.” By the time Van Sant approached Fogle, the author was back in prison in Walla Walla, far away from pop-cultural trends.
”He brought Matt Dillon here once,” Fogle says. ”I had never heard of Matt Dillon. I though they were talking about `Gunsmoke` at first.” Fogle got $12,000 for the screen rights.
The film was screened for the entire prison population. ”The first time, I was a little nervous and I was sweating like a dog,” Fogle says. ”They kept telling me about how great it was and I was seeing the same thing that I wrote, and it didn`t relly impress me that much. . . But the second time, I really liked it.”
Killing wouldn`t pay
Fogle based the story on his friends. Bob Hughes is the susperstitious yet pragmatic captain of the team. His crew includes his wife, Dianne, more committed to drugs than to her husband, and Rick and Nadine, a couple taking instruction in drug use and crime. Rick is portrayed as a slack-jawed buffoon, which Fogle says takes license with his creation. In the book, Rick is the observer who ultimately will tell the story.
Bob tries to kick drugs in the book, although his reasons are more practical than philosophical. The same was true of the real ”Bob,” currently serving a 25-year sentence in another prison. ”He`d tell me, `Man, let`s go sign up on the methadone program and then we can keep everything we steal. We won`t have to pay for all this dope.`. . . He`d go do that and then he`d have two habits going; he`d have that (methadone) habit going and this drugstore habit going, too. And it`d really pile up on us. He didn`t really have a lot of sense, but he was a good guy,” Fogle says.
In the movie, Bob`s wife won`t even consider giving up drugs. The real Dianne shares that attitude and still uses after serving a long prison sentence. While the real Bob has seen the movie and likes it, Fogle says he hasn`t heard from Dianne. ”She went on down the road,” he says. ”She`s still going. I been thinking about writing her. I don`t think she`s too much for writing.”
Fogle may be skilled at fiction, but he doesn`t seem to understand the language of conventional values. He`s proud, for example, that he never hurt anyone in all his years of crime, and explains:
”I don`t want to shoot nobody. . . `Cause you shoot somebody, you put yourself out of business. It`s going to cost you a fortune for legal fees, you`re going to have to leave that town, you got hassles you can`t even think of. I never was prepared up enough to be able to go in and kill people and think I could get away with it. I`m in there trying to con `em out of their stuff with a gun. You know what I mean?”
Term runs to 2001
Fogle and Hystad still talk about drugstores the way other men talk about memorable one-night stands. ”It was great in the `50s and `60s,” Hystad says. ”That`s when things were wide open, like bird`s nests on the ground.” Then security systems got more sophisticated. ”The `70s were tough,” he laments. ”The `80s were real tough. God knows where the `90s are going.”
Prison life used to be easier, Fogle says. ”They left you up to your own means. You could entertain yourself. Now, they`re watching you 24 hours a day. It`s not so violent a place. . . The good thing was, there was lots of narcotics. You didn`t have to stay in your cell. They fed really good. All that`s deteriorated now.”
Fogle`s term runs through 2001. The last time he came up for parole, the board was unsympathetic. ”They call us career criminals. The cold part is, I`ve kinda, well, I have finally straightened up. I`m not really into drugs . . . I just want to go out and get a job,” he says.
Fogle has no wife, no children, only his 75-year-old mother to enjoy his recent success. She`s pleased and astonished, but she didn`t like the movie.
”I don`t think she really understood it,” he says. ”She`s sick of narcotics, anyway.”
Fogle had wives in the past. ”I usually get married every time I get out,” he explains. During one marriage, he had his longest drug-free spell-about a year-although he says he drank heavily. After he got into a fight with his boss, he says, ”I kind of blew it. I went and sacked the local drugstore. I had been looking at it anyway.”
A talented machinist, Fogle has put years into building the prison that houses him. His guards praise his abilities and say Fogle is a nice, peaceable inmate. But he was always too restless to stay with a job on the outside.
`Tied up inside`
Growing up in a blue-collar household in Olympia, Wash., Fogle was a problem child. ”I was so tied up inside, I could never really do anything,” he says. ”I couldn`t relax, I couldn`t stand still. Narcotics was it for me because it was the only time that I could relax and be like other people.”
He went to reform school at 12 for stealing cars. ”Every time I wanted to go somewhere, I`d steal somebody`s car and go. They`d pick me up, throw me in reform school, and it would just go on and on.” In the mid-`50s, when he was serving time at McNeil Island for auto theft, fellow inmates taught him to use drugs.
At the time, nasal inhalers loaded with methamphetamine were sold over the counter. Prison guards would buy the tubes for about 50 cents and sell them to the inmates for $5. The inmates would inject the drug. ”All the convicts loved it,” he remembers. ”It`s a hell of a euphoric trip. You stay up for days and you can work, just slave at any little demeaning thing and just love it.”
A cellmate told Fogle about burglarizing pharmacies. Fogle memorized the names of the drugs of choice. At first, he was mostly interested in profit potential. ”That`s what catches a kid`s interest,” he says. ”Kids, they don`t want to get high . . . When you make (drugs) worth something, you make people want to clutch it and hold it and say, `I got something here.`. . . And that`s why kids get into it, they get into it to sell it. And then pretty soon, they say, `This is worth so much, it must be awful good. I`ll try taking some.` And that`s how I got into it, too.”
Fogle`s first drugstore burglary was in 1963 in suburban Los Angeles. His memory of the break-in is almost photographic. ”It was bad because I just made a humungous score. It was like going to the track and winning every race. You`ve got a winner here and you`re never going to look back. I spent the rest of my life not looking back.”
Fogle upped the ante by holding up jewelry stores, mostly to cover legal bills, he says. Soon, his crimes had multiplied past counting. On his last outing, Fogle and a few friends broke into a drugstore in Wisconsin but tripped the alarm. Fogle`s partner told him the building was surrounded by police.
”I didn`t want to come and do this time,” Fogle says. ”I didn`t want to kick. I said, `Man, just let `em shoot me. I don`t care what they do, man.` I just come running right out and they started shooting, blohm, blohm, blohm. I ran across this parking lot. . . I tripped in this ditch. They slid right up on me.” His accomplice was killed.
”Drugstore Cowboy” leaves the fate of its protagonist unresolved, but Fogle offers little hope that Hughes` reform would succeed. ”It is futile,” he says. ”What difference does it make? What difference does it make what he does, you know? Really, you know? They don`t really need that big a work force, I don`t think.”
”What are you going to do with the people?” he resumes. ”You ain`t going to stop `em. You might stop `em using coke, but you`re leaving a vacuum there. They`re going to find something else if it`s got to be gasoline. Down in these Third World countries, there`s little kids running around sniffing gasoline. You going to take all the gasoline up? They`re talking about now that the fourth drive of man is to feel good, the pursuit of happiness. And some people don`t feel as good as other people.”
But Fogle offers a more optimistic assessment of his own chances for getting straight. ”My ex-wife would say, `He`ll never change.` I don`t think that`s honest. I think I probably will. I don`t think I`ll go back to drugs. Well, you can`t say that. But I don`t want to. I`ll say that. That`s honest. I don`t think I will. . . I don`t got no veins anyway.”
