Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (5 page)

One favored punishment was "pulling the
block." The "block" was a slab of concrete that weighed about a
hundred pounds. Wrapped in layers of old wool blanket it had two eye hooks that
fastened to a wide, flat canvas harness about ten feet long. The composite tile
floor in a long side hall was smeared in thick paraffin wax and the
blanket-wrapped block was pulled up and down the hall twelve hours a day. One
Chicano from La Colonia in Watts was on "the block" for thirty days
for getting high on phenobarbital.

The most brutal punishment was hanging someone by the
hands from the overhead ventilation ducts. The miscreant wasn't actually lifted
off the floor, but he had to stand on the balls of his feet, or let the weight
fall on his arms and wrists. After ten minutes it was torture. In fifteen the
victim was usually screaming. The attendants preferred old-fashioned beatings.
Maybe they liked the workout it gave them. Knowing that I only had a ninety-day
observation case, I tried to remain inconspicuous. One night about two months
into my sojourn, I was standing at my window, looking across the grounds. A
hundred yards away was a female ward. A youth named Pee Wee in the next room
was yelling out the window to his girlfriend. The attendant in charge at night
was named Hunter but he was called Jabber. Unknown to me, he was hurrying from
door to door, peering through the little observation window to catch anyone who
dared to yell across the nuthouse grounds at night.

I
turned from the window at the sound of the door being unlocked behind me. The
Jabber came in with the shivering energy of a badger. Without a word, he
punched me in the face with both hands, short punches from someone accustomed
to using his fists. Both hit me flush, one in the mouth, one against the jaw. I
tasted blood from my lip being cut by my teeth, and a bolt of pain announced
the dislocation of my jaw. He rocked on the balls of his feet, hands up,
leering. "I'll teach you to yell, you little scumbag."

He danced in and punched again. I ducked and went down
on the bed, leaning away and covering my body up. It was hard for him to get at
me with his punches, so he began to stomp and kick my calves and thighs,
muttering angry curses. I knew that fighting back might get me killed.

They could get away with anything. I'd seen
brutalities that would never happen in reform school, or even a prison for that
matter where there are procedures for hearings. This was a
hospital.
We were patients being cared for.

The Jabber left after that. I could feel my eye
swelling shut. And the bedding had been torn off. I pulled the cot away from
the wall and began to straighten the blankets.

My door opened again. The Jabber stood there, rocking
back and forth on the balls of his feet, a facsimile of Jimmy Cagney. He was
twirling his key chain like an airplane propeller. Behind him was a big
redheaded attendant and a patient with special status because he did some of
their dirty work. The Jabber came around the bed to where I stood and began to
punch me around again.

I'd been choking back my fury. He was in my face, his
eyeglasses sparkling. He sneered at me and bunched his muscles to strike again.
This time I punched first. My fist smashed his glasses. The glass cut him above
one eye and across the bridge of his nose. Blood poured down his starched white
shirt with its black snap-on bow tie. Because his knees were backed against the
bed, the force of the punch sat him down. I tried to hit him again but the
redheaded attendant got an arm around my neck from the rear and pulled me back.
My fingers were tangled in The Jabber's shirt front, which tore away from his
body, leaving the shirt collar and the bow tie.

As
the redhead choked me, the patient goon lifted my feet off the ground. Someone
got on the bed and jumped down on my stomach. Someone else smashed a fist into
my face six or seven times. They were full-force punches by a grown man. When
they had all left, I could barely breathe. Anything more than a tiny sip of air
sent a bolt of pain through my chest. My right eye was completely shut. I was
spitting out blood from my lip, which had been cut wide open against my teeth.

At midnight, when the shift changed, my door opened
again and two graveyard shift attendants came in. One of them was named Fields,
a name I still remember after fifty years. He had played football for a small
local college. The smell of liquor was on his breath. The rules required me to
stand up when the door opened. I managed to rise. He then knocked me down and
kicked at me until I crawled under the bed. He tried to pull the bed away so he
could get at me. In his drunken rage he might have kicked me to death if the
other attendant had not finally restrained him. "Knock it off, Fields.
You'll kill him. He's just a kid."

The next morning the ward doctor, a little man with an
accent, came to my room and clucked like a chicken as he poked at my swollen
and disfigured face. It was in terrible shape. My closed eye stuck out like an
egg. "I don't think you'll strike another attendant, will you?" he
asked. I shook my head and thought: Not unless I could kill him.

I was kept locked in my room for the rest of the
observation period. After being certified sane, they returned me to reform
school.

Three weeks later I escaped from there with a black kid
from Watts, named Watkins. We stayed with his mother and sister on 103
^rd
near Avalon. His father was in the Navy. The family had a little yellow frame
bungalow with a chicken coop in the back yard. The juvenile officers came
around at night, trying to catch us sleeping there. We knew better and slept in
a shed between the railroad tracks and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers. The towers
were vaguely reminiscent of pictures I'd seen of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. You
could always see them against the sky when you rode the red car that stopped at
the Watts station. After a couple of months of running the streets, they caught
Watkins. I got away and lived several more months in a
barrio
called Temple. I slept in an old Cord
automobile that was on blocks in a back yard and ran around with the
vatos loco.

I got
caught because of my first love, an Italian girl. I met her through her
brother, whom I knew from juvenile hall. Her younger sister told her parents
that I was sleeping in the shed at the rear and they called the police, who
came early one morning. I woke up to a pistol in my face.

Instead of being returned to the reform school in
Whittier, I was sent to Northern California, outside of Stockton to the Preston
School of Industry. It was for boys of sixteen and seventeen, with a few who
were eighteen. I had barely turned fourteen.

When I arrived at the Preston School of Industry I was
pulled aside and given the warning I was always given: "Okay, Bunker, try
any of your bullshit here, we'll make you wish you hadn't. This isn't a
playpen. We know how to handle punks like you."

Fourteen months later, they expelled me from reform
school to freedom. They had tried the discipline of juvenile hall and Whittier,
plus a few other tricks such as shooting tear gas in my face and, once, a
straitjacket for twenty-four hours. I will concede that they stopped short of
what happened in the state hospital. Had they not done so, they might have
driven me to murder or suicide.

Preston
followed a practice still used fifty years later. Big, tough youths were made
"cadet officers." They received extra privileges and parole credits
for using their fists and feet to maintain order through force and fear. Each
company had three, one white, one black, one Chicano. They had to be both tough
and tractable. One cadet officer was Eddie Machen, who would be a top
heavyweight contender a few years later. Any one of them alone could whip me.
After one of them kicked me for being out of step while marching to the mess
hall, I waited until he was seated to eat; then I walked up behind him and
stabbed him in the eye with a fork. He was rushed to Sacramento where they
saved his eye, but his vision was never the same. I was assigned permanently to
"G" Company, a unit with a three-tier cell block. It was dark and
gloomy and a carbon copy of a prison cell block. Six mornings a week, we ate in
our cells than marched forth with picks and shovels on our shoulders. We
cleared weeds from irrigation ditches or shoveled pig shit, which must smell
more foul than anything in the world. Sometimes we poured concrete for new pig
pens. At noon we marched back, ate in our own little mess hall, showered and
went to our cells until the next morning. Most others chafed in torment over so
much cell time, but I much preferred the cell because there, I could read.

Some nameless benefactor had donated a personal
library of several hundred books. Most of them seemed like they were from the
Book of the Month club, but others had once been gifts, if the inscriptions
were any indicator. After the hard covers had been removed, they were stored in
disorder in a closet. We showered three at a time and could trade two or three
books then. The Man would turn on the closet light and let us search through
the books until we finished with our showers. I always hurried to be first out
of the water and dry so I could get an extra minute or two trying to find a
book I might like better than another. I had no critical faculty. A book was a
book and a path to distant places and wonderful adventures. I did develop an
early preference for the historical novel, which was extremely popular
throughout the '40s. I looked for authors and I soon recognized some names of
the bestselling writers like Frank Yerby, Rafael Sabatini, Thomas Costain,
Taylor Caldwell and Mika Waltari. I remember Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Richard Wright's
Native Son
and a single volume with several tales
by Jack London,
The Sea- Wolf, Call of the Wild
and
The Iron Heel.
One novel was in the form
of a memoir about a revolution in America. For several chapters I thought I was
reading a true story, but when it narrated a civil war in 1920,1 knew that had
never happened. Still, much of what the author wrote about society resonates
with truth today. It was in "G" Company that I realized that novels
could be more than stories that entertained and excited. They could also carry
wisdom and look into the deepest recesses of human behavior.

By code or administrative policy or some rule they
were not allowed to keep a youth under sixteen in a lockup cell for more than
twenty-nine days at a time. They really liked having me in "G"
Company. I wasn't causing them any trouble: no fights, no assaults on
personnel. I wasn't spitting on them, or stuffing the toilet and flooding the
cell house, agitating insurrection or planning an escape. So on the thirtieth
morning they took me out of "G" Company after breakfast. I checked
into the regular company and went to lunch. After lunch they took me back to
"G" Company. I was glad to return to the half-read book:
The Seventh Cross
by Anya Seghers.

After being incarcerated for three out of four years —
I'd spent the other year in a series of escapes — the Youth Authority paroled
me to my aunt. She would have preferred that I parole elsewhere, but there was
no elsewhere. My mother, whom I hadn't seen since my first trip to juvenile
hall, was remarried and had a daughter. Neither my mother nor her husband
wanted me around, and I felt the same. My father, now sixty-two, had a bad
heart and was prematurely senile. He was in a rest home. He didn't recognize me
when I went to see him.

My aunt met me with love, but she and I saw the world
differently. She saw a fifteen-year-old boy who had gotten into trouble but who
should have learned his lesson by now. She thought I should behave as a
fifteen-year-old boy is supposed to.

I, on the other hand, saw myself as a grown man, at
least with the rights of an eighteen-year-old. I'd lived on the streets on my
own since I was thirteen. I wasn't going to be home at 10 p.m. if I didn't want
to, nor at midnight either for that matter. As for school, when I went to check
in, my records came up. The registrar looked them over and told me to return on
Monday.

On Monday, the woman behind the counter handed me a
letter. On Los Angeles Unified School District stationery, and signed by the
Superintendent and the chief psychiatrist, it notified all concerned that
Edward Bunker was not required to attend school. A phone number was included if
anyone had questions. It had a seal of some kind. Nobody has ever heard of it
happening to anyone else in LA. It was great, for although I loved learning, I
loathed school. Already I knew that true education depends on the individual
and can be found in books.

The
night streets beckoned. Pals from reform school, most older than me, were on
the streets and into things. It was exciting to make the after-hours joints
along 42
^nd
and Central, where booze was sold in teacups under the
table, and you could get great ham and eggs and grits and hear some music, and
nobody asked for identification. I had some if needed. It stretched things, but
what the hell, who cares.

My aunt disliked my hours and prophesied that I'd be
back in trouble again. She was right. I would have disputed it. Then again, I
lived entirely in the time being. I never planned more than two days ahead. I
woke up in a new world every morning. The differences between how my aunt and I
saw the world began to poison our relationship.

I came upon a little less than $2,000 by helping a
Chicano, Black Sugar from Hazard, dig up a bunch of head-high marijuana plants
that were being grown between rows of corn up in Happy Valley. It was a nice
score. Nobody would know. Nobody would go to the police.