Mr Blue E-Book

Edward Bunker

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 777

Beschreibung

Winner of the Macallan Gold Dagger 2000 for non-fiction Edward Bunker's life is beyond the imaginings of most fiction writers. He was born in Hollywood, California, the son of a stagehand and Busby Berkeley chorus girl, whose early divorce propelled him into a series of boarding homes and military schools. From the age of five he repeatedly ran away, roaming the city streets at night. A proud character, combined with an IQ of 152, resulted in a series of altercations with the authorities. He became the youngest ever inmate of San Quentin at the age of seventeen, and there he learned survival skills and faced down the toughest prisoners in the system. He was befriended by Mrs Louise Wallis, a former star of the silent screen and wife of movie mogul, Hal Wallis, who produced films starring Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. She introduced Bunker to her circle of friends, including Jack Dempsey, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley and William Randolph Hearst, whose guest he was at San Simeon. A parole violation resulted in a spell crossing America as a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list. His eventual capture led to Folsom prison. Encouraged by the example of Dostoevsky, Cervantes and Caryl Chessman, and by the kindness of Mrs Wallis, he determined to write his way out of prison. Bunker's first published novel, No Beast So Fierce, viewed by many including Quentin Tarantino as the finest crime novel ever written, changed his fortunes. It was filmed as Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. He published three other novels, The Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue and Dog Eat Dog, (all published by No Exit) in his lifetime, admired by writers as diverse as William Styron and James Ellroy, and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers after his death in 2005. Bunker appeared in a score of films, most notably his legendary role as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs. This blistering narrative is a memoir like no other.

Leseprobe

Winner of the Macallan Gold Dagger 2000 for non-fiction

Edward Bunker’s life was beyond the imaginings of most fiction writers. He was born in Hollywood, California, the son of a stagehand and Busby Berkeley chorus girl, whose early divorce propelled him into a series of boarding homes and military schools. From the age of five he repeatedly ran away, roaming the city streets at night. A proud character, combined with an IQ of 152, resulted in a series of altercations with the authorities. He became the youngest ever inmate of San Quentin at the age of seventeen, and there he learned survival skills and faced down the toughest prisoners in the system. He was befriended by Mrs Louise Wallis, a former star of the silent screen and wife of movie mogul, Hal Wallis, who produced films starring Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. She introduced Bunker to her circle of friends, including Jack Dempsey, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley and William Randolph Hearst, whose guest he was at San Simeon.

A parole violation resulted in a spell crossing America as a fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted list. His eventual capture led to Folsom prison. Encouraged by the example of Dostoevsky, Cervantes and Caryl Chessman, and by the kindness of Mrs Wallis, he determined to write his way out of prison. Bunker’s first published novel, No Beast So Fierce, viewed by many including Quentin Tarantino as the finest crime novel ever written, changed his fortunes. It was filmed as Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. He has written three other novels, The Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue and Dog Eat Dog, (all published by No Exit) admired by writers as diverse as William Styron and James Ellroy. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Runaway Train, and has appeared in a score of films, most notably his legendary role as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs. This blistering narrative is a memoir like no other.

Edward Bunker, Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, was the author of No Beast So Fierce, Little Boy Blue, Dog Eat Dog, The Animal Factory and his autobiography, Mr Blue, all published by No Exit. He was co-screenwriter of the Oscar nominated movie, The Runaway Train, and appeared in over 30 feature films, including Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, the film of his book No Beast So Fierce. Edward Bunker died in 2005 and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers. Along with some short stories published as Death Row Breakout.

‘Integrity, craftsmanship and moral passion…an artist with a unique and compelling voice’– William Styron

‘Edward Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics: novels about criminals, written by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint.’–James Ellroy

‘At 40 Eddie Bunker was a hardened criminal with a substantial prison record. Twenty-five years later, he was hailed by his peers as America’s greatest living crimewriter’–Independent

EDWARD BUNKER

Mr Blue

Memoirs of a Renegade

www.noexit.co.uk

To my son. I dealt him better cards than I had. I hope he plays them better than I did.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

1. No Heaven, No Hell

2. State Raised in California

3. Among the Condemned

4. Whores, Hearst and Hollywood’s Angel

5. Night Train to San Quentin

6. Tick Tock Turns the Clock ’52, ’53, ’54, ’55

7. Awaiting Parole

8. The Land of Milk and Honey

9. The Run

10. The Shit Hits the Fan

11. On the Lam

12. Adjudged Criminally Insane

13. Stuck in Folsom Prison

14. Prison Race War

Afterword: Paris, Just Before Spring

Copyright

1

No Heaven, No Hell

In March of 1933, Southern California suddenly began to rock and roll to a sound from deep within the ground. Bric-à-brac danced on mantels and shattered on floors. Windows cracked and cascaded onto sidewalks. Lath and plaster houses screeched and they bent this way and that, much like a box of matches. Brick buildings stood rigid until overwhelmed by the vibrations; then fell into a pile of rubble and a cloud of dust. The Long Beach Civic Auditorium collapsed with many killed. I was later told that I was conceived at the moment of the earthquake and born on New Year’s Eve, 1933, in Hollywood’s Cedar of Lebanon hospital. Los Angeles was under a torrential deluge, with palm trees and houses floating down its canyons.

When I was five, I’d heard my mother proclaim that earthquake and storm were omens, for I was trouble from the start, beginning with colic. At two, I disappeared from a family picnic in Griffith Park. Two hundred men hunted the brush for half the night. At three I somehow managed to demolish a neighbor’s back yard incinerator with a claw hammer. At four I pillaged another neighbor’s Good Humor truck and had an ice-cream party for several neighborhood dogs. A week later I tried to help clean up the back yard by burning a pile of eucalyptus leaves that were piled beside the neighbor’s garage. Soon the night was burning bright and fire engine sirens sounded loud. Only one garage wall was fire-blackened.

I remember the ice-cream caper and fire, but the other things I was told. My first clear memories are of my parents screaming at each other and the police arriving to “keep the peace.” When my father left, I followed him to the driveway. I was crying and wanted to go with him but he pushed me away and drove off with a screech of tires.

We lived on Lexington Avenue just east of Paramount Studios. The first word I could read was Hollywoodland. My mother was a chorus girl in vaudeville and Busby Berkeley movie musicals. My father was a stagehand and sometimes grip.

I don’t remember the divorce proceedings, but part of the result was my being placed in a boarding home. Overnight I went from being a pampered only child to being the youngest among a dozen or more. I first learned about theft in this boarding home. Somebody stole candy that my father had brought me. It was hard then for me to conceive the idea of theft.

I ran away for the first time when I was five. One rainy Sunday morning while the household slept late, I put on a raincoat and rubbers and went out the back door. Two blocks away I hid in the crawlspace of an old frame house that sat high off the ground and was surrounded by trees. It was dry and out of the rain and I could peer out at the world. The family dog quickly found me, but preferred being hugged and petted to raising the alarm. I stayed there until darkness came, the rain stopped and a cold wind came up. Even in LA a December night can be cold for a five-year-old. I came out, walked half a block and was spotted by one of those hunting for me. My parents were worried, of course, but not in a panic. They were already familiar with my propensity for trouble.

The couple who ran the foster home asked my father to come and take me away. He tried another boarding home, and when that failed he tried a military school, Mount Lowe in Altadena. I lasted two months. Then it was another boarding home, also in Altadena, in a 5,000 square foot house with an acre of grounds. That was my first meeting with Mrs Bosco, whom I remember fondly. I seemed to get along okay although I used to hide under a bed in the dorm so I could read. My father had built a small bookcase for me. He then bought a ten-volume set of Junior Classics, children’s versions of famous tales such as TheManwithoutaCountry,Pandora’sBox and DamonandPythias. I learned to read with these books.

Mrs Bosco closed the boarding home after I had been there for a few months. The next stop was Page Military School, on Cochran and San Vicente in West Los Angeles. The parents of the prospective cadets were shown bright, classy dorms with cubicles but the majority of cadets lived in less sumptuous quarters. At Page I had measles and mumps and my first official recognition as a troublemaker destined for a bad end. I became a thief. A boy whose name and face are long forgotten took me along to prowl the other dorms in the wee hours as he searched pants hanging on hooks or across chair backs. When someone rolled over, we froze, our hearts beating wildly. The cubicles were shoulder high, so we could duck our heads and be out of sight. We had to run once when a boy woke up and challenged us: “Hey, what’re you doing?” As we ran, behind us we heard the scream: “Thief! Thief!” It was a great adrenalin rush.

One night a group of us sneaked from the dorm into the big kitchen and used a meat cleaver to hack the padlock off a walk-in freezer. We pillaged all the cookies and ice-cream. Soon after reveille we were apprehended. I was unjustly deemed the ringleader and disciplined accordingly. Thereafter I was marked for special treatment by the cadet officers. My few friends were the other outcasts and troublemakers. My single legitimate accomplishment at Page was discovering that I could spell better than almost everyone else. Even amidst the chaos of my young life, I’d mastered syllables and phonetics. And because I could sound out words, I could read precociously – and soon voraciously.

On Friday afternoons nearly every cadet went home for the weekend. One weekend I went to see my father, the next to my mother’s. She now worked as a coffee shop waitress. On Sunday mornings I followed the common habit of most American children of the era and went to the matinée at a neighborhood movie theater. It showed double features. One Sunday between the two movies, I learned that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Earlier, my father had declared: “If those slant-eyed bastards start trouble, we’ll send the US Navy over and sink their rinky-dink islands.” Dad was attuned with the era where nigger appeared in the prose of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and others. Dad disliked niggers,spies,wops and the English with “their goddamn king.” He liked France and Native Americans and claimed that we Bunkers had Indian blood. I was never convinced. Claiming Indian blood today has become somewhat chic. Our family had been around the Great Lakes from midway through the eighteenth century, and when my father reached his sixties he had high cheekbones and wrinkled leather skin and looked like an Indian. Indeed, as I get older, I am sometimes asked if I have Indian blood.

At Page Military School, things got worse. Cadet officers made my life miserable, so on one bright California morning, another cadet and I jumped the back fence and headed toward the Hollywood Hills three miles away. They were green, speckled with a few red-tiled roofs. We hitchhiked over the hills and spent the night in the shell of a wrecked automobile beside a two-lane highway, watching the giant trucks rumble past. Since then that highway has become a ten-lane Interstate freeway.

After shivering through the night and being hungry when the sun came up, my companion said he was going to go back. I bid him goodbye and started walking beside a railroad right of way between the highway and endless orange groves. I came upon a trainload of olive drab, US Army trucks that waited on a siding. As I walked along there was a rolling crash as it got underway. Grabbing a rail, I climbed aboard. The hundreds of army trucks were unlocked so I got in one and watched the landscape flash past as the train headed north.

Early that evening I climbed off in the outskirts of Sacramento, 400 miles from where I started. I was getting hungry and the shadows were lengthening. I started walking. I figured I would go into town, see a movie. When it let out, I would find something to eat and somewhere to sleep. Outside of Sacramento, on a bank of the American River full of abundant greenery, I smelt food cooking. It was a hobo encampment called a Hooverville, shacks made of corrugated tin and cardboard.

The hoboes took me in, but one got scared and stopped a sheriff’s car. Deputies raided the encampment and took me away.

Page Military School refused to take me back. My father was near tears over what to do with me, until we heard that Mrs Bosco had opened a new home for a score of boys, from age five through high school. She had leased a 25,000 square foot mansion on four acres on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. It was called Mayfair. The house still exists as part of Ambassador College. Back then such huge mansions were unsaleable white elephants.

“Mayfair” was affixed to a brass plate on the gatepost of a house worthy of an archduke: but a nine-year-old is unimpressed by such things. The boys were pretty much relegated to four bedrooms on the second floor of the north wing over the kitchen. The school classroom, which had once been the music room, led off the vast entrance hall, which had a grand staircase. We attended school five days a week and there was no such thing as summer vacation. The teacher, a stern woman given to lace-collared dresses fastened with cameos, had a penchant for punishment. She’d grab an ear and give it a twist, or rap our knuckles with a ruler. Already I had a problem with authority. Once she grabbed my ear. I slapped her hand away and abruptly stood up. Startled, she flinched backwards, tripped over a chair and fell on her rump, legs up. She cried out as if being murdered. Mr Hawkins, the black handyman, ran in and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. He dragged me to Mrs Bosco, who sent for my father. When he arrived, the fire in his eye made me want to run. Mrs Bosco brushed the incident away with a few words. What she really wanted was for my father to read the report on the IQ test we had taken a week earlier. He was hesitant. Did he want to know if his son was crazy? I watched him scan the report; then he read it slowly, his flushed anger becoming a frown of confusion. He looked up and shook his head.

“That’s a lot of why he’s trouble,” Mrs Bosco said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a mistake?”

“I’m sure.”

My father grunted and half chuckled. “Who would have thought it?”

Thought what? He later told me the report put my mental age at eighteen, my IQ at 152. Until then I’d always thought I was average, or perhaps a little below average, in those abilities given by God. I’d certainly never been the brightest in any class – except for the spelling, which seemed like more of a trick than an indicator of intelligence. Since then, no matter how chaotic or nihilistic my existence happened to be, I tried to hone the natural abilities they said I had. The result might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I continued to go home on weekends, although by now my mother lived in San Pedro with a new husband – so instead of switching over every weekend, I spent three of the four with my father. Whichever one I visited, on Sunday afternoon I would say goodbye, ostensibly returning straight away to Mayfair. I never went straight back. Instead I roamed the city. I might rent a little battery-powered boat in Echo Park, or go to movies in downtown Los Angeles. If I visited my mother in San Pedro, I detoured to Long Beach where the amusement pier was in full swing.

Late in the evening, I rode a big red Pacific Electric streetcar back to Pasadena, where I had to walk about a mile to Orange Grove Avenue and Mayfair. I went up the rear drive. At one end I could climb a slender tree and scramble onto a balcony. Directly across from the balcony door was the room I shared with two other boys. Nobody ever missed me or noticed when I arrived as long as I was on hand Monday morning.

One Sunday night when I crossed the balcony, turned the doorknob and pushed, the door opened a few inches then stopped. Something was blocking it from the other side. Leaning against it hard, I managed to force the upper part open enough to squeeze through, and stepped on what seemed to be a body next to the door. Crouching, I felt around the blackness and touched a face. A bolt of fear shot through me. The face was cold. It was the face of death. I think I let out a cry, but nobody heard me.

Not wanting my after-midnight arrival to be discovered, I undressed and climbed into bed. Lying there, I knew I couldn’t ignore the situation. Not wanting to step on the body in the darkness, I went through the bathroom to the next bedroom, where four boys slept, and from there into the hallway. I woke up Mrs Bosco and told her what I’d found.

She put on her robe and brought a flashlight. She took me to my room and told me to go to bed; then locked the door. I went to bed and managed to fall into a light sleep, although I woke when I heard muffled voices and saw light under the door.

A few minutes later, I heard the key unlock the bedroom. In the morning the body was gone. It belonged to Frankie Dell, a pale, frail boy who was a severe hemophiliac with a rheumatic heart. He had simply collapsed and died in the hallway. He might even have been going for help.

Mrs Bosco’s was the only home I ever liked as a child. She treated me more like a teenager than a nine-year-old. During weeknights I was allowed to go alone into downtown Pasadena. I went to a movie, of course. I learned geography from the two big maps affixed to the wall in my room: Europe, including the Mediterranean and North Africa, was on one map, the Pacific plus Asia on the other. I had pins of various colors to mark battles, troops and the front lines of the war that was going on. Finding the Solomon Islands to mark Guadalcanal took my eye to Australia and New Zealand. The star on the map told me that Canberra was the capital.

Mr Hawkins, the black handyman whose apartment was over the immense garage, had once been a prizefighter and he taught me how to throw a left jab. The jab I learned wreaked havoc on the nose of Buckley the home bully. We started to fight in the upstairs hall. I backed up, one step at a time, along the length of the long second floor hallway. I stuck a jab in his nose whenever he seemed coiled to charge. One of Mrs Bosco’s pretty daughters, a USC co-ed, came out of her room and broke it up. Buckley had two rapidly swelling eyes and a bloody nose but I was unmarked. About the same time, I learned the value of the Sunday punch, which was simply to strike first. In reform school I would study experts on the Sunday punch and hone my own ability. It is a useless skill in boardrooms and business meetings. It will not get you the girl. Most middle-and upper-class white men go through life without ever having a single fistfight, but where I spent youth and young manhood it is a useful skill, especially when I wasn’t given strength, speed or stamina. My reflexes were mediocre. I do, however, take a good punch without falling. I have beaten bigger, stronger men, who were faster and in better shape, including a US Marine karate instructor, simply by punching first and continuing to punch with both hands before they ever got started. Occasionally, someone overcame that first onslaught and beat my ass, but not often. In later years I learned to pace my attack so a few punches accomplished what took many wild ones long ago. On the chin and most go down, and once down they should never be allowed to get up and continue. But I’ve digressed. Back to my childhood in Mayfair on Orange Grove Avenue, nicknamed King’s Row because of the many great mansions, including the famed Wrigley mansion.

One Sunday night in December, it was past midnight when I got off the streetcar on Fair Oaks and Colorado in downtown Pasadena and began my walk. The last street was a narrow lane with tiny frame houses for servants that ran parallel to Orange Grove a block away. The lane and tiny houses are long gone, but back then they were fronted by huge trees that overhung the street. A lighted Christmas tree was in one house window, and a candle in another. They calmed my fear at walking through the shadows where wind and moonlight made weird moving shapes. It was enough to make an imaginative nine-year-old whistle his way through the dark.

I turned into the rear gate of Mayfair. Up the slope loomed the dark outline of the great house set among tall pines that suited its Bavarian hunting chalet architecture. The house had once belonged to an American general who had apparently invested heavily in Germany after World War I. I found the certificates between the walls. I was now familiar with the great house as I circled to the slender tree next to the balcony.

The tree actually grew three feet from the balcony, but as I climbed, my weight bent it over and I disembarked by throwing both arms over the rail and pulling my legs away from the tree. It snapped back straight and erect.

On the balcony I always felt a pang of anxiety: had someone locked the balcony door? Nobody ever had, so far, although I was prepared to break the glass and reach inside if it ever became necessary. Nobody would know who, or why; it might even go unnoticed for days. No need for that on this night. The door opened as usual.

The hall was totally dark, again as usual. Immediately I smelt something I couldn’t recognize. It was definite but not overpowering. I reached for the room door. It opened. I went in.

The room was pitch black. From memory I crossed the darkness to my bed in the corner. It was gone. Where was my bed?

I reached out, feeling for the bed next to mine. Nothing.

My heartbeat jumped. I was scared. I went to the door and flipped the light switch.

Nothing.

I felt along the wall. Empty space. Something weird was going on. I wanted to yell, but that would expose my post-midnight arrival. With my fingers touching the wall, I moved to the door. Before reaching it, my shoes crunched on broken glass.

My heart raced. What was happening? No rational possibility came to mind. I knew better than magic or the supernatural, but the idea was inescapable for a moment. Just then, in the blackness, something brushed against the calf of my leg, triggering instant terror. I jumped up in the air, came down and tore open the door. I can’t remember crossing the hall to the balcony. In the darkness I climbed on the rail and jumped for the tree. It was three or four feet out but I got both hands on it and it bent away from the balcony, pulling my upper body with it. My feet were still on the balustrade. For a moment I was a human bridge; then my feet came free.

The limb I held snapped with a loud crack. I fell through snapping limbs that grabbed and scratched me finally landing flat on my back.

Every bit of air was smashed out of my lungs. I knew I was going to die. I could not breathe. But even while dying, I drew up my legs and rolled over to rise. I wanted distance from the huge mansion. I wasn’t thinking. I was running on automatic fear.

When the first tiny breath kicked in, I was limping across the parking area toward the shrubbery. There was an acre of greenery, much of it half wild, right here – and I knew every inch of it. I hit the wall of shrubbery with both hands folded over my face. I ploughed through with the branches tearing at my clothes and face.

I veered right, behind the garage, and hit the ground in a space beneath a giant elm whose branches swept the ground. We had put a flattened cardboard box in there, as boys do. Exhaustion modified my fear. It was crazy. I knew there were no ghosts. (Years later, while I was telling this story, a listener said “I’ll bet it was a cat’s tail that brushed your leg.” I think he was right. Mrs Bosco had a black kitchen cat that roamed the house and brushed against legs. What else could it have been? I spent the night in that space beneath the tree, sometimes shivering with the chill, sometimes dozing off for a few minutes.

By first light my entire body ached. My back really hurt, and would turn into the largest black and blue mark I’ve ever seen.

I dozed and came alert to the sound of rattling garbage cans. Mr Hawkins was hoisting them onto the back of a pickup tuck. He was working in the space beside the garage where the cans were kept.

“Mr Hawkins,” I called.

He stopped work and peered, closing one eye to focus the other one. “Is that you?” he asked. He knew me better than the other boys. Beside the jab, he taught me how to tie a Windsor necktie knot. He may have been poor, but he dressed sharp when he had his day off.

I stepped out of the shrubbery, but kept the edge of the garage between myself and the house. “What’s going on, Mr Hawkins?”

“You ain’ seen Mizz Bosco yet?”

“No.”

“She called your daddy Sunday afternoon. He said you’d be here las’ night ’bout six. She’s been worried sick.”

“What happened? Where is everybody?”

“We had a fire in the attic late Saturday … early Sunday ’fore it was light. Look there.” He pointed at the roof. Sure enough, there was a hole about four feet across. Its edges were charred black from fire.

“It was the wiring,” he said. “They moved the beds to the school auditorium over yonder.” He gestured with a finger. “It’s just until she can get all the boys picked up.”

A maroon 1940 Lincoln Continental flashed into sight. It went past us around the circular drive and pulled up at the mansion’s front door. The car stopped and Mrs Bosco came down the walk to greet the couple who emerged.

“That be Billy Palmer’s folks,” Mr Hawkins said. “Gotta get those bags.” He pulled off his work gloves and abandoned the garbage cans to head toward the house. I backed up into the bushes.

A few minutes later, Mrs Bosco and Mr Hawkins came into view. They were heading right toward my hiding place. I backed farther into the bushes, tripping and landing on my butt. That galvanized me. I got up, turned and ran. Mr Hawkins called my name. I was rapidly adding distance between us.

I leaped over the wrought-iron front fence and ran across the wide boulevard, then crossed a lawn and went down a driveway to a back yard the size of a baseball diamond. Several people in white – I would think of the scene years later when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald – were playing croquet. I flew past. One or two looked up; the others saw nothing.

By noon, I got off a big red streetcar at the Pacific Electric Terminal on 6th and Main Streets in downtown Los Angeles. The sidewalks teemed. Uniforms of all the armed services were abundant. There was a long line outside the Burbank, the burlesque theater on Main Street. Two blocks away was Broadway where the marquees of the movie palaces flashed bright in the gray December light. I would have gone to a movie, for movies always let me forget my troubles for a few hours, but I knew that this was a school day and the truant officers routinely patrolled the downtown movie houses for school truants.

On Hill Street near 5th was Pacific Electric’s subway terminal. The streetcars left for the sprawling western communities and the San Fernando Valley to the northwest through a long tunnel in the hillside and came out on Glendale Boulevard. I took a streetcar to Hollywood where my father worked backstage at Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a variety review with chorus girls and comics in a theater on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard. I was familiar with the area. I wanted to be where I knew my way around.

Hollywood Boulevard was new, bright and crowded. Thirty years earlier it had been a bean field. Now servicemen were everywhere. They came from training camps and military bases all over Southern California. They were drawn to Hollywood and Vine, and especially to the Hollywood Canteen, where they might just dance with Hedy Lamarr or Joan Leslie, or stroll the boulevard and see if their feet fit the imprint of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Sid Grauman had built three great palaces to honor the movies. The downtown Million Dollar theater was the first, but when he realized the city’s wealth was moving west he built two on Hollywood Boulevard, the Chinese and Egyptian. It had a long walk from the box office to the lobby that was lined with images of Ancient Egypt and giant kitsch statues of Rameses II and Nefertiti, or somebody with a head like an animal. That first night on my latest runaway, I went to the plush Hawaiian, farther east on the boulevard, which was showing the original Mummy with Boris Karloff and a new sequel, TheMummyReturns. That scared away my troubles for a few hours.

When I came out, a cold wind had risen. No rain was falling, but the sidewalk and street were dark where the rain had come down while I was inside. I turned up Gower. The Hollywood Hills started a block north of the theater. Beyond Franklin Avenue was Whitley Heights. It was “old” Hollywood and looked as if it belonged in Naples or Capri. Once fashionable enough for Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin and Ramon Novarro, in the war years it was still nice, although since then it has lost favor as Hollywood’s surrounding streets became infested with poverty and poverty’s handmaidens, crime, drugs and prostitution.

Rain began to fall. I tried to find shelter from the wind. Heading for where my father worked, I walked along Franklin and turned back down Ivar. The marquee had been turned off and the box office was closed. I went down the alley beside the building to the stage entrance. I didn’t know the old man on the door, but he knew my father and remembered me from an earlier visit. “We were working the Mayan downtown. It was Abie’sIrishRose … or maybe SongofNorway.”

I remembered Abie’sIrishRose at the Mayan, but not the old man. It was immaterial; he motioned me to come in. I shook my head.

“When’s curtain?”

“Ten fifty-two … ’bout half an hour.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Here’s your dad now. Hey, Ed!”

My father, wearing the white bib overalls of a stagehand, was crossing backstage. He turned his head, saw me and hardened his expression. As he walked over, his jaw muscles pulsing, I wanted to turn and run. I was sure he wouldn’t show his anger here, but I knew the fury of his exasperation. He was never mean, but frustration sometimes overcame him. He looked at me: “Just like a bad penny,” he said.

What did that mean? Bad penny? I’d never heard the phrase and had no idea what it meant. Still, the tension of the situation imprinted it on my memory so that years later I remembered this moment whenever I heard the phrase.

My father took his keys from his pocket, “Go wait in the car,” he said. “It’s around the corner on Franklin.”

I took the keys and went out. His car, a ’37 Plymouth with the first streamlined ship as hood ornament, was easy to find. The white stood out in an era when dark colors, especially Henry Ford’s black, still dominated. On the windshield was a decal “A,” which meant the car was allowed the basic ration of four gallons of gas a week. Gas coupons were issued and handed over in the gas station. Stealing and selling them would become my first monetary crime.

I unlocked the car and got in to wait, listening to the rain hit the roof, watching it bounce on the ground. It was hypnotic, soothing, and I must have dozed off. I hadn’t really slept the night before. I closed my eyes with cars parked all around. When I opened them again, the other cars were gone and my father was knocking on the window.

I opened the door lock and slid over to make room. I was wary, for although my father was generous and loving, once or twice he had lost his temper and cuffed me around, yelling: “What in God’s name is wrong with you? You can’t do what you do. You’ll … you’ll end up—” his anguish stifled his words. His torment never rose to anything near abuse, but it made me feel terrible to upset him and I invariably promised reform.

This time he avoided looking at me as he pulled out and headed for the Cahuenga Pass. The Hollywood Freeway was almost a decade in the future. As he drove, he grunted and shook his head, reacting to the turmoil in his mind. I thought we were going to the residential hotel where he lived, but he drove past that intersection and went up into the hills. The clouds were breaking up, allowing a little moonlight to come through. Soon we were at the summit, looking down on Lake Hollywood, which was really a water reservoir. It overlooked the western half of the City of Angels, a sprawl of glittering lights with patches of darkness in between. In another ten years, the lights would fill all the LA Basin to the sea – and deep into the desert going the other way.

My father shut off the engine and gave a long, agonized sigh. He visibly sagged. “What do I do now? Mrs Bosco is closed down. She didn’t have a permit for those two crazies upstairs.”

Mrs Bosco had kept two truly demented boys, or young men up there. No doubt she had been handsomely paid to keep them out of sight. One I remember was just slightly gaunt and freckled. The other, named Max, had thick black hair and heavy black facial hair. Max used to come down to unload the station wagon when Mrs Bosco returned from buying provisions. He was strong. He was obsessed with rending his clothes: they hung in rags across his torso, and in strips down his legs. He would rip up a new pair of Levi’s if he was goaded. All you had to do was stare at him and tell him, “Max, bad boy! Bad boy, Max!” and he would start passionately rending his clothes.

She had no permit for these two. And the fire had illuminated their presence to the authorities. Even if she managed to finance roof repair, she was closed down. It was the only place I’d gotten along, even marginally.

I wanted to say, “Let me stay with you,” but the words were choked back. What I wanted was impossible and only agitated him when I brought it up. His standard reply was that he had to work nights; there was nobody to look after me and I was too young to look after myself.

He turned and looked at me closely. “Are you crazy?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“You sure act crazy sometimes. I thought everything was great with Mrs Bosco—”

“It is great, Pop.”

“No it isn’t … not when I find you’ve been roaming the city all night. You’re nine years old, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m sorry, Pop.” It was true; my sorrow for his anguish was painful.

“You say that, but … it only gets worse … Sometimes I think about starting the car with the garage door closed.”

I knew what that meant, and from some source within me came a Catholic canon: “If you do that, you’ll go to hell, won’t you?”

Even in his despair, he swelled with scorn. “No, I won’t. There’s no hell … and no heaven either. Life is here. Reward is here. Pain is here. I don’t know very much … but that much I know for sure.” He paused, then added: “You’ll remember this won’t you?” He held my arm above the elbow and stared at me.

I nodded. “I’ll remember, Pop.”

I have remembered, and although I’ve searched everywhere for a refutation, the facts of existence affirm the dismal truth of his declaration. The only way to deny it is to make a leap of faith across the chasm of reality. That I cannot do. Whatever else I’ve done, flagrantly and repeatedly and without apology, violating every rule that blocked whatever it was I wanted, I have tried to sift kernels of truth from tons of chaff bullshit. Truth is the distilled meaning of facts, for any truth refuted by a fact becomes a fallacy.

I am an apostle of Francis Bacon, the messiah of scientific objectivity, which leads inexorably to secular humanism and relativism, and contradicts the notions of kneeling in prayer before one totem or another, be it a cross, golden calf, totem pole or African fertility god with a giant phallus.

2

State Raised in California

Eva Schwartz, neé Bunker, was my father’s only sibling. Two years older than her brother, she married Charles Schwartz, who wasn’t Jewish despite the name. He owned a small movie theater in Toledo, beside Lake Erie, where my fur trading ancestors settled in the eighteenth century. “Bunker” is Anglicized French from the original Bon Couer, or “Good Heart.” Childless herself, she had raised a cousin’s daughter. When her husband died, Aunt Eva moved west to take care of her brother’s son. For the first time I could remember, I had a home. It was a tiny bungalow they rented in Atwater Village, an area between Glendale and the LA River. I had a dog, a small tricolor bitch of mongrel pedigree, and a girlfriend, a blonde named Dorothy who lived next door. I showed her mine and she showed me hers. Her father owned a cocktail lounge on Fletcher Drive near the gigantic Van de Kamp bakery. The dog, named Babe, was my best friend and constant companion. Every day in the fierce summer of ’43, we trudged a mile or so along the concrete-lined riverbank, and crossed a footbridge into Griffith Park where there was a huge public swimming pool. Nearby were several stables where a horse could be rented and ridden though the miles of trails in the park. Off Riverside Drive was a big steakhouse owned by Victor McLaglen, the only actor who both won an Academy Award (as best actor, in TheInformer) and fought Jack Dempsey.

I was an habitual wanderer by then. I always wanted to see what was over the next hill or down the road around the next corner. Sometimes I went north beside the river into Burbank, sometimes south beside the railroad tracks. In Burbank I climbed the fence into Warner Brothers’ back lot and played among permanent sets of island lagoons and jungle villages. My dog always waited outside the fence until hell froze or I returned. We also explored Lockheed, easily bypassing the ring of anti-aircraft gun emplacements. Once the Army bivouacked several thousand soldiers in part of Griffith Park. Rows of tents, lines of olive green trucks. They disappeared as magically as they appeared.

The railroad tracks ran between the factories, shops and Van de Kamp. A pottery factory there was later declared a major environmental hazard and fenced off for years. Several times I climbed over the sagging fence to see if I could find adventure on the other side. I played in a mound of white powder that might have been asbestos. It never seemed to bother me; it would be decades before anyone declared asbestos dangerous.

Along the street nearest the railroad tracks were little houses. About a mile from there the single lane of tracks entered the main railroad freight yards and became dozens of tracks. This area was across the tracks in terms of status, and bohemian in lifestyle. The impish and precocious little Irish girl named Dorothy lived there with her hard drinking, heavy-smoking mother. Whenever I arrived Dorothy’s mom had a cigarette in her mouth and a glass of beer close by. At least she wasn’t drinking from the bottle. It was far different from my aunt’s stern Calvinistic demeanor and demands. Dorothy’s mom once mentioned how rationing made it hard to get gas. After she had said that I remembered a cigar box full of clipped gas coupons in a Texaco gas station close to the Gateway Theater on San Fernando road. The Gateway was where I saw CitizenKane. Walking home the following Saturday afternoon I stopped at the Texaco for a Coke. I watched the attendant clip the coupons from a customer’s ration book, carry them past me and put them in a cigar box on the desk in the office. The Irish girl’s mother would pay a dollar apiece for gas coupons. A dollar would buy a cheeseburger, milkshake and a ticket into a first run movie theater downtown. The following Saturday afternoon, I delivered far more coupons than she could pay for. She gave me $10 and, during the next few days, sold the rest to her friends. I made $40, which is what a unionized stagehand earned for a week’s work. It was my first successful money caper.

This period of my life was happy for me. Alas, it was disillusioning for my aunt. She was totally unable to rein me in. I was the neighborhood hellion, but I was a well-spoken hellion. In quick succession I was caught shoplifting from the local Woolworth, then seen throwing a rock through a window (to impress Dorothy). Although we got away, they caught my dog and traced me through his collar, and I was eventually caught by a gas station attendant stealing from the cigar box of gas ration coupons. I was spanked and put to bed, and I promised my father and God that I would change my ways and be a good boy. I was sincere.

Of course I always felt different the next day, or forgot my promise. I woke up in a new world every morning. When summer ended, I went to school for the first time – the Atwater Avenue Elementary school. Because they had no transcripts and because I’d been in three military schools and half a dozen boarding homes in five years, they tested me. Despite the chaos of my childhood, I scored two full years ahead of my age group in reading skill, although I was below average in mathematics. I don’t know any more about math now than I did then. I think my weakness in math was because it must be taught in sequence: one thing laid a foundation for the next. My peripatetic life had not been conducive to that.

The principal split the difference and put me two semesters ahead of my age. I would go to middle school the next semester, a couple of weeks after I turned eleven.

A month after school started, however, my aunt and father sat me down and solemnly told me that the house we were renting was being sold. We had to move, but because of the war they could find nothing. I would have to go to another foster home or military school. I was devastated, but I agreed to go if my father promised to remove me if I disliked it. Dislike was a certainty, decided even before he delivered me to the Southern California Military Academy on Signal Hill in Long Beach. The rules forbade visits for a month. The commandant wanted newcomers to get over homesickness before they could go home for weekends.

My father said he would visit as soon as the month passed. I counted the days.

The fateful Friday arrived without my father’s appearance. At recall, the ranks were thin because most boys went home for the weekend. Instead of going to the cadets’ dining room, I went out the back door of the dormitory and scaled a back fence. Adventure beckoned, new experiences and, most of all, freedom. It would also punish my father, who had lied to me. He had given his solemn word and broke it.

In Long Beach I caught a red car to downtown Los Angeles. It took about forty minutes. I planned to catch a yellow number 5 or “W” car to the Lincoln Heights district, where my aunt had moved into a tiny apartment in a four-unit building. Downtown, however, had flashing movie marquees. I stopped to see a movie based on Agatha Christie’s TenLittleIndians, with a quality cast, including Barry Fitzgerald as the villain. He had me fooled, faking his own death to turn suspicion away.

It was late when I came out of the movie. The old yellow streetcar was almost empty. The few passengers were in the center section, which had glass windows. I preferred to ride in the back section where the windows were open. I liked the cold air. It invigorated me then and it still does.

Aunt Eva’s lights were on and my father’s car was parked in front. I passed on by. I wore my military school uniform. My regular clothes were in my aunt’s apartment. I decided to come back the next day when she was at work.

Several blocks away, beside a railroad bridge across the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now the Pasadena Freeway), was Welch’s Industrial Laundry. I took an armload of torn, discarded bed sheets and overalls from a bin beside a loading dock and carried them to a scrap yard where old machines were turning to rust. I found a huge extractor on its side, pushed in the rags and climbed in. It was a small space and I was unable to completely extend my legs if lying down, but at least I escaped the cold night wind. Hours later I heard a humming in the ground, a sound that grew into a ground-shaking crescendo. A train was coming, and seemed as if it would run over my hideout. Its waving headlight came through every crack with blinding power as it passed about twenty feet away.

When the morning sun warmed the world, I climbed out. Every muscle in my body was cramped. One night of living on the street and my khaki uniform with the stripe down the leg was dirty enough to turn heads.

I walked to a Thrifty drugstore, planning to eat breakfast at the fountain counter. As I neared the entrance I saw a newspaper stand. The newspapers had a black border and the headlines read: ROOSEVELT DEAD.

The news stunned me. Roosevelt had been President for my entire life. He had saved America in the Depression. “He saved capitalism from itself,” my father once said, which I couldn’t understand back then, yet I was awed by the accomplishment. He was Commander-in-Chief in the war that still continued even though Allied armies were now marching through Germany. His voice was familiar from his FiresideChats. Mrs Roosevelt was America’s mother, and Fala, for all his Scots blood, was America’s dog. The news brought tears to my eyes. I changed my mind about breakfast.

An hour later I rang Aunt Eva’s doorbell to make sure she was gone. Then I went around the corner of the building where a little door opened into a compartment for the garbage can. Behind the garbage can was another little door into the kitchen. Decades would pass before bars on the windows of the poor and security systems in the homes of the wealthy became common. I opened the outer door, pushed the inner one open and squeezed through. I called out, “Aunt Eva,” just in case. Nobody answered. I then went about my business.

A closet held a box with my clothes. I found a pair of Levi jeans and a shirt. In the bathroom I began filling the tub. While the water ran, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat. The refrigerator yielded a quart of milk and loaf of bread. I moved to the toaster on the sink counter. Through a window I looked out at the house next door.

At that moment a policeman scurried across my line of sight and ducked behind a tree.

Crash! I dropped the glass and sprinted down the hall to the bathroom, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. Frantic, I pulled on the jeans and shoes, not bothering to button the former or lace the latter.

Above the bathtub was a window. I opened the window and pushed out the screen. The narrow window was twelve feet above a passage between the apartment building and the garages. As I climbed out, a policeman came around the corner below me. I jumped over his head onto the garage roof and ran to the other side. The garage ended over a brush-covered forty-foot embankment. I leaped off the roof and rolled down through weeds and bushes to the bottom.

A policeman appeared above me, looking down.

I jumped up and went over a fence beside the slanted concrete of a storm drain channel. The channel became a torrent when the rains came, but today it was a trickle three feet wide and four inches deep. I splashed through it. On the other side was another concrete wall with a far steeper angle. At its top was a fence bordering the freeway, and several feet below that was a storm drain outlet, now dry. I’d previously tried to run up the angled wall to the hole and had always fallen short. This day though I went up it like a mountain goat, disappearing into the storm drain beneath the freeway and into the city.

Half an hour later, I was two miles away on Mount Washington, huddling in a shallow cave. Rain began to darken the earth. It was a lonely moment in my young life.

Late that night, I found a bundle of the next morning’s newspapers outside the door of a neighborhood market. When the morning rush began, I was on the corner of North Broadway and Daly, peddling newspapers for a nickel apiece. Twenty-five was enough to eat and go to a movie. Late at night, I made my way back to Welch’s Laundry and burrowed into the rags beside the track. By the third day I was so filthy that eyes followed me when I entered the market where I’d stolen the newspapers for two nights. On the third night they weren’t there. I had enough to buy milk and a candy bar, meanwhile slipping several more inside my shirt.

When it started to rain again, I climbed the slope behind my aunt’s apartment building. The rain cleared the street. This time nobody was looking out a window as I pushed through the little door into the kitchen. I called out, “Aunt Eva! Aunt Eva!” No answer. The apartment was empty.

I wanted to get in and out quickly. Again I ran the bath and dug clean clothes from the box. I bathed quickly, the water turning gray from the grime in my hair, ankles, face and hands. I pulled on the clothes while still wet. When dressed, I felt a little more secure – and I was hungry.

I found some canned tuna in a dish, and put two slices of bread into the toaster for a sandwich. As I ate it, I went to see if she had some change lying around. In her bedroom, I spotted the envelopes on the dresser. Some were bills; one had an SPCA return address. It had been opened. I pulled out the letter. It was a receipt for putting my little dog to sleep. When I realized what they’d done, I think I screamed. I’ve had many things happen to me, but that was the greatest anguish I ever experienced. It welled through me. I choked and gasped; my chest felt crushed.

I rocked back and forth and sobbed my utter and absolute torment. Thinking of it more than half a century later still brings tears to my eyes. My aunt and father had told me the dog had a home in Pomona. Instead they had given her over to be killed because she was too much trouble. I believe that this was the moment the world lost me, for pain quickly turned to fury. How could they? She had loved them and they murdered her. If I could have killed both of them, I would have – and although a child’s memories are quickly overlaid with evolving matters, I never forgave them.

Three days later, a Friday morning, I came again for a bath, clothes and food. This time my father was waiting in the shadows. He blocked the door so I couldn’t run. He had to call the juvenile authorities. “Nobody else will take you. God knows I don’t know what to do.”

“Why don’t you kill me like you killed my dog?”

“What?”

“You know what! I hate you! I’m glad I made you old.”

Using the number on a business card, he started to dial the phone. I moved toward the bathroom, planning to go out the window again. He put the phone down. “Stay right here.”

“I gotta go to the bathroom.”

Perhaps sensing my plan, he put the phone down and accompanied me. As I stood at the toilet, I saw a heavy bottle of Listerine on a shelf. I grabbed it, whirled and swung at my father’s head. He managed to duck. The bottle gouged a hole in the plaster.

Twenty minutes later, two juvenile detectives arrived and took me away. By evening I was at juvenile hall on Henry Street, in the shadow of the general hospital. It was past my bedtime when they finished processing me. A tall, gangly black counselor with a loose-limbed gait escorted me through locked doors and down a long hallway to Receiving Company. The hallway floor gleamed with polish. At the end, where another hallway crossed it like a T, a different counselor sat at a desk illuminated solely by a small lamp. The black counselor handed my papers to the man at the desk. He looked them over, looked at me; then picked up his flashlight and ushered me down a hall to double doors into a ten-bed dormitory. With the flashlight beam he illuminated the empty cot.

The clean sheets felt smooth and cool. Despite my exhaustion, sleep came hard. Bright floodlights outdoors illuminated the heavy mesh wire on the windows. I was caged for the first time. When sleep finally took me, in my dreams I cried for my dog, and for myself.

I awakened among boys in a world somewhat reminiscent of John Barth’s Flies. Around me were boys from Jordan Downs, Aliso Village, Ramona Gardens and other housing projects. Others came from the mean streets of Watts, Santa Barbara Avenue, East LA, Hicks Camp, and elsewhere throughout LA’s endless sprawl. Most came from families without a father on hand, back then called a “broken home.” If a man was around, his job was probably going to buy the heroin with the money the mother made selling herself. If she went, she could expect them to sell her lactose for heroin or, if they didn’t have that, they might just take her money and cut her throat as an afterthought. It was a quid pro quo relationship between two junkies. It worked for them but wasn’t conducive to raising a thirteen-year-old who was already marked with blue tattoos and the values of vatosloco (crazy guys). This was a mish-mash of young testosterone and distorted machismo and hero worship of an older brother already in lapinta.

Until now, whatever my problems may have been I had been entitled to the privileges of the bourgeois child. Now I was swimming in the meanest milieu of our society, the juvenile justice system. Hereafter I would be “state raised.” Its values would become my values: mainly that might makes right, a code that accepts killing but forbids snitching. At first I was an outsider, the precociously educated white boy with the impeccable grammar. I was picked on and bullied, although that didn’t last long because I would fight, even if I was slower and less strong. I could sneak up and bash a tough guy with a brick while he slept, or stab him in the eye with a fork in the mess hall. My perfect grammar and substantial vocabulary quickly changed to the patois of the underclass. For a while when I was fourteen, my English had a definite Mexican accent. I had an affinity with Mexicans or, rather, with Chicanos, with their stoic fatalism. Instead of wearing the Levi jeans that were derigueur in suburban white high schools, I preferred the Chicano-styled surplus Marine fatigues, with huge baggy pockets along the side. Often dyed black, they were worn loose on the hips and rolled up at the bottom. That way the legs were very short and the torso was extra long. I wore a ducktail upswept along the sides, so thick with Three Flowers pomade that running a comb through it brought forth globs of grease. Pomade wasn’t allowed in juvenile hall, so we stole margarine and used that. It had a rancid stench, but kept the ducktail in place.

I went all the way. My shoes had extra-thick soles added on, horseshoe taps on the heels, and other taps along the side and the toe. To run was difficult, but stomping someone was easy. My pants were “semi,” which meant semi-drape, or semi-zoot suit. A zoot suit was “full drape,” but they lost favor before I became concerned about style. The music I liked wasn’t on the “Hit Parade”. It wasn’t Perry Como and Dinah Shore that thrilled me, but the sounds and the funk known along Central Avenue and in Watts – Lonnie Johnson, Bull Moose Jackson, Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Ella, Sarah and Billie, Illinois Jacquet and Big J. McNeely on sax, with Bird as the icon of everyone who was hip.

In the four years following my arrival at juvenile hall, I moved swiftly and inexorably through the juvenile justice system. I was in juvenile hall eight times and twice went to the state hospital for observation. I talked sanely, but behaved insanely. The hospital officials weren’t sure about me. I escaped at least half a dozen times, living as a fugitive on the streets. I could hot wire a car in less than a minute. Once when I escaped from the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, I stole a car. Halfway into Los Angeles, I stopped to urinate behind a Pacific Outdoor sign. When I got underway again, I failed to turn on the headlights. In San Gabriel a police car parked at a corner flashed his headlights. I knew it wasn’t a command to pull over, but I had no idea what it was. They pulled in behind me. I watched in the mirror. When the red lights flashed, I punched the gas. During the ensuing chase, they fired a couple of shots. I could feel the heavy slugs hit the car. One made a spider web pattern in the windshield. I ducked way down, my head below the dash. I opened the driver side door and followed the white line in the middle of the street, confident that anyone ahead would see flashing lights and hear the screaming siren and get out of the way. I glanced over the dashboard. Ohshit! I was coming upon a T corner. I had to turn right or left. I hit the brakes and tried to turn. The car jumped the curb onto a wet front lawn. It might as well have been ice as it skidded sideways and crashed through a front window into a living room. They had their guns trained on me before I could crawl from the wreckage.