Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (4 page)

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
vatos
loco
(crazy guys). This was a mish-mash of young testosterone and
distorted machismo and hero worship of an older brother already in
la pinta.

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
de rigueur
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. McNeeley 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.
Oh shit!
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.

Back
at Nelles, they put me in the punishment cottage. It was run with the harsh
discipline of a Marine disciplinary barracks. The Man took a dislike to me. One
morning he thought I was shirking work so he threw a dirt clod that hit me in
the back of the head. It flew to pieces and gave no injury, except to my ego. I
looked at him and the anger showed. "You don't like it, Bunker?" he
challenged. With him he had two other counselors and three "monitors,"
boys used as goons against their own.

I maintained control but seethed inside. We went in
for lunch (part of the punishment was to have the same menu seven days a week.
Every lunch was stew.) When the Man went by my table, I called his name. He
turned and I threw the bowl of stew in his face. Up jumped the monitors. I'd
recently lost a fight to just one of them. Against three, plus the Man, it was
no contest. They dragged me from the mess hall, down three staircases and along
a hallway to the isolation cell at the rear, kicking and punching me all the
way. When I was locked in the cell, the Man turned a fire hose on me. The bars
diminished some of the force, but it was still enough to cut my legs out from
under me and slide me up against the wall.

An hour later the Man came to gloat at my battered
face and drenched body. "You look like a wet cat." His lip curled in
a sneer. "You won't be throwing things for a while."

Down low, hidden by my body, I held a flattened roll
of wet toilet paper with a pile of shit on top. While his sneering declaration
was still in the air, I hurled the roll of toilet paper and the shit against
the bars. It broke apart and splattered his clothes and his face and the wall
behind him. He was so insane with rage that another man would not open the gate
for him.

That night they took me out the back door, put me in a
car and sent me to Pacific Colony state hospital near Pomona. Pacific Colony
was primarily for the retarded, but it took some ninety-day observation cases
from the Youth Authority. Its one locked ward was the most brutal place I've
ever been. Even that far back, if the savage realities of the place had been
exposed, it would have caused a scandal. Most of my time was spent in the day
room sitting on the benches that lined three sides. Each bench had four names
written on tape. We sat in silence with our arms folded. Any whispering and an
attendant walking on crepe soles behind the benches might knock you to the
floor. The fourth side of the day room had cushioned wicker chairs. Four of
them were on a raised dais where the attendants sat. Their goons used the
chairs at floor level.

For entertainment, the attendants staged fights
between patients. Disputes were settled that way, or else the attendants acted
as matchmakers. The winner got a pack of cigarettes.