Pelican Bay

Our Greyhound bus broke down, so I spent six hours on the side of the road in the company of two gentelmen who had just been released from Pelican Bay and one beautiful lady who is a poker dealer at Ceasar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Pelican Bay is a "Level 4 Super-Max" prison. These guys had stories that made me cringe. I couldn't say a thing. I thought, "Mick, your stories are weak; these guys are real; they have walked the line between life and death. Mick, just shut up."


I shut up and listened. In Pelican Bay, they have taken away the weights. All those movies, where the prisoners are constantly pumping free weights, they're old and out-of-date.

"Why did they take away the weights?" I asked naively.

"Cuz people were gettin' killed."

"Oh," I added.

"And besides, the inmates were gettin' bigger than the guards."

But one of the twoguys was huge. "How did you get so big?" I asked him.

"Push-ups," he responded.

"Wow!" I offered, "so many muscles just from push-ups, how many push-ups per day?"

"About 1500."

"1500 push-ups a day!!!" I couldn't believe it.

"That's nothing. There's guys in there who do five or ten thousand push-ups a day."

"10,000 push-ups a day!?!?!?!?!?"

"Well, I gotta say, they're not real push-ups, sort of speed push-ups, not all the way up and down like my push-ups," and he demonstrated a deep push-up in perfect form.

"Still," I commented, "I can't believe people can do 10,00 push-ups a day."

"What else they gonna do?"