The Great Escape from Alcatraz
- Jere Folgert
- Jul 23, 2017
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 31, 2025
It was late October of 1936, a time when the world was a jagged shard of broken promises, and the air of San Francisco was thick with the pre-Halloween chill. Gregorio "Hardneck" Petrov wasn't a murderer; no, not by the letter of the law. He was a garlic farmer—a man whose soul was so interwoven with the pungent, cruciferous earth that he practically exuded allicin.
His world had curdled not just into a prison cell, but into Alcatraz, "The Rock"—a fortress of despair built on a foundation of unforgiving basalt and pure, undiluted existential dread. Greg's crime, the one that landed him here, was a tragicomic-grotesque echo of a greater societal malaise: the theft of his prized two hundred pounds of hardneck garlic.
The thief was Mildred Fitzhugh, a woman whose weathered face, now in the moonlight, didn't just embody moral transgression; it was a living, breathing tableau of rot and avarice. Her kleptomania, a relentless, parasitic urge, was driven by a deeper, unspoken desperation - the rot beneath the glittering surface. She’d zeroed in on his crop, his 'Montana Mammoth,' the bulbs so white, they seemed to glow with a spectral, internal light.
Greg found her staggering away in cheap, blood-red cowgirl boots, the stolen, silken garlic scapes trailing from her burlap sack like a ghostly bridal train. Her grin wasn't victory; it was the rictus of the damned. He gave chase, a primal surge of garlic-fueled rage and betrayal. It was a chase through the moonlit fields, each breath misting like the soul of a desperate man, a desperate man whose sole treasure had been plundered.
"The moment he saw her fall, the moment the rock claimed her, it was not anger he felt, but the terrifying freedom of the truly lost. He had chased his passion until it became a corpse."
Mildred stumbled over a loose, granite stone. Her fall was a symphony of sickening, gory finality: a 'KAB-CRUNCH' that seemed to echo through the very bedrock of the state. Her head struck a jagged piece of quartz, and the world fell silent. Blood, a thick, iron-smelling river, instantly began to pool around the pristine white garlic bulbs that spilled from her torn sack. Greg tried to lift her—a reflex of failed decency—and found his hands, shirt, and shoes instantly slicked with the horrific, warm residue of her shattered life. It was a death born of petty theft and a love so absolute it had turned monstrous, a crime worthy of Dostoevsky's dark, philosophical pen.
His path led him to Alcatraz, where the scent of garlic was replaced by the metallic tang of confinement, shame, and three-day-old fish. His cellmate, "Razor" Rick, was a study in Kafkaesque dread. Rick didn't just carve profanity into soap; he carved intricate, unsettling religious iconography mixed with unsettling anatomical diagrams, staring at Greg with a gaze that, yes, did occasionally glow in the dim, unholy light—a physiological anomaly caused by a lifetime of bad canned prison spinach and a profound lack of basic humanity.
The Alcatraz sensory assault was real: the clang, the coughs, the despair. But it was the constant, unseen surveillance that truly broke a man. On his first night, he met a man perpetually teetering on a psychotic, Shakespearean edge of madness. Greg was surprisingly nimble; the decades spent bending, harvesting, and wrestling with stubborn hardneck roots had given him a wiry strength and a survival instinct as sharp as the tips of his beloved scapes.
He found solace, not just in the dusty library, but in the paranoia it fostered. Was the incessant, wheezing cackling from the vacant cell next door an old woman's spirit, or was it just the rusted gate hinges? Did the guards’ mocking laughter truly contain a coded message?
Salvation arrived, a dark, opportunistic angel, in the form of "Birdseed" Benny. Benny was the prison's black marketeer, a gaunt, wiry man whose eyes darted like the very birds he was nicknamed after. Greg traded his entire worldly stash—his cache of risque photographs (smuggled in via a modified enema kit—don't ask) and a single, crumpled pack of Luckies—for a seed catalog.
His choice was, naturally, Garlic. One pound of hardneck seed garlic, specifically from GROeat Garlic Farm in Montana. The irony was exquisite. Pornography, cleverly disguised as religious pamphlets and smuggled within hollowed-out loaves of rye, became the currency. Greg now owned thirty-six plump, ivory cloves—his secret, buoyant path to freedom.
The planting was a brutal, clandestine affair. He chose the most forgotten corner of the yard, near the old, corroded drainpipe—a place where the earth was often damp and smelled of fresh water and forgotten sins. He nurtured them, shielding them from the gossiping wind and Rick's truly unsettling, phosphorescent stare.
The Halloween harvest was a miracle, a verdant, shocking explosion. The garlic scapes—the flowering stalks—rose tall, strong, and startlingly buoyant, their cores as stiff as bamboo. They were perfect.
The escape became a manic, obsessive frenzy. Nights were dedicated to weaving. Stolen thread from prison uniforms, scavenged twine, even his own shoelaces, all went into the construction of the monstrous garlic-scape raft. It was a brutal, gory effort; his hands were bloody from the razor-sharp scapes, the fibers cutting deep into his palms, leaving him perpetually scented with a terrifyingly strong, musky garlic perfume. The guards, seeing a man weaving a strange, botanical nest, dismissed it as the final stage of an inmate's descent into madness.
Halloween Night. A thick, unnatural fog, smelling of salt and something faintly sulphurous, rolled in off the Bay. Greg, a man now seasoned with utter desperation, shoved his Garlic-Scape-Raft into the churning, midnight waters.
The escape, a desperate echo of a man escaping his own soul, was a near-fatal affair. A flock of gulls, mistaking him for a floating buffet, attacked with Hitchcockian ferocity. Greg, in a moment of crazed inspiration, fashioned a Garlic-Scape-Flail—a knot of braided scapes weighted with a pilfered soap bar. He spun it wildly. The resulting cloud of pungent alicin gas was so potent it sent the birds retreating in a horrified, coughing, projectile-vomiting frenzy. Just as he caught his breath, the waters erupted. The creature wasn't a fish; it was a grotesque, mutated amalgamation of fish, eel, and the deep-sea pollution of decades of war. It was a monster —a Brine-Mutant with eyes like polished black pebbles and a maw ull of razor-sharp, decaying teeth. It lunged, snapping its jaws inches from his leg. Greg swung the Flail, a move that would define his freedom. The creature recoiled, not from the blow, but from the sheer, olfactory terror of the garlic, its black eyes narrowing in pure, existential hatred. Then, the fog. Thick, eerie, and whispering. It wasn't natural. The air grew heavy with the stench of decay and regret. Coherent, maddening voices swirled around him—the drowned, the mad, the executed, the ghosts of Alcatraz reaching out to drag him back to the judgment of The Rock. He paddled blind, driven only by the memory of the clean, earthy smell of his hardneck crop.
He pressed on, his muscles screaming a silent protest. He broke through the fog just as the first sickly, pre-dawn light stained the eastern sky. The mainland—jagged rocks, crashing waves—was a final, brutal gauntlet. With a last, inhuman push, the Garlic-Scape-Raft, a testament to GROeat Garlic’s colossal garlic, surged onto the shore.
Greg collapsed, his body trembling, his skin scraped raw and bleeding, his face covered in a mixture of seawater, sweat, and dried blood. He lay on the rocks, tasting the sweet, metallic tang of liberty.
He stood up, dusted off the debris of his dramatic, psychotic journey, and walked toward his new life. The first rays of dawn touched the wounds on his hands. His escape—a tale of a simple man driven to monstrous ingenuity by a love for a simple, pungent root—would indeed be retold.
It was the Great Scape, and the Great Escape from Alcatraz.
He was free. And he smelled awful.
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This fictional story was writting by Jere Folgert. GroEat Garlic Farm is a small, family-owned and operated farm located in Bozeman, Montana. The farm was started by Mr. Jere Folgert, who is passionate about growing high-quality garlic. The farm uses sustainable practices, such as cover cropping and crop rotation, to protect the environment.
