Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade
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Authors: Edward Bunker
Mr Blue
Memoirs of a Renegade
Contents
In March of 1933, Southern California suddenly began
to rock and roll to a sound from deep within the ground. Bric-a-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
The Man without a Country, Pandora's Box
and
Damon and Pythias.
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 mothers'. 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 matinee at a neighborhood movie theater. It
showed double features. One Sunday between the two movies, I learned that the
Japanese had just bombed
P
earl 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?"
Though 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.