The escape was set for Tuesday. On Monday evening Earl was so tense that he couldn’t eat. Pains squeezed his chest. He spent twenty dollars of the escape money on two papers of heroin and they erased the anxiety.
Just before lockup in the South and East cellhouses, T.J. and Wayne cornered one of the trash truck swampers, Vito and Baby Boy the other, and told them what to expect and how to react—by acting normal and going on with their job. Telling them so late wasn’t to forestall them from snitching, but to keep them from gossiping to other convicts, who would gossip with yet more, until somewhere down the line a stool pigeon would hear.
After lockup, both Ron and Earl finished disposing of what was in their cells, giving away cigarettes, toiletries, bonaroo clothes, and books. Ron tore up letters and legal papers and put his photographs in a large manilla envelope that he would carry inside his shirt. Earl kept two packs of cigarettes, a spoon of coffee in an envelope for morning, and one squib of toothpaste on the brush. All he was taking with him were three snapshots in a shirt pocket. “Sheeit!” he muttered. “I travel light as Mahatma Gandhi.” He was soundly asleep before midnight, while Ron never really got to sleep. Ron had quit smoking months before, but that night he puffed nearly a pack.
The moment the security bar was lifted and North cellhouse convicts came out for breakfast, Ron went to Earl’s cell and found him snoring. The honor cellhouse door was unlocked and Ron pulled it open, tugging his friend’s foot through the blanket. Earl’s eyes opened immediately.
“Hey,” Ron said, uncertain if he should laugh or be indignant. “What’re you doing still asleep?”
Earl nodded in slow, dramatic patience. “Look, this is the first cellhouse out. The swampers and driver don’t even leave their cells for half an hour. It’s at least an hour before the truck starts rolling. What should we do, go to the vegetable room and cut up string beans until it gets there?”
Laughter won inside Ron. “Okay, but sometimes I can’t believe you. Sleeping!”
“Ain’t nothin’ better to do. But I’ll get up if you get me some hot water for coffee.”
When Ron came back from the hot water spigot at the end of the tier, carrying a steaming jar of water wrapped in a towel, Earl was buttoning the blue jail shirt over the candy-striped civilian one. Ron sat down on the end of the lower bunk, back against one wall, feet on the other, while Earl brushed his teeth, drank coffee, and hacked up the gummy phlegm of a heavy smoker.
Through the tall barred windows they could see the yard, the prison’s drabness even more monochromatic in the gray morning light. A line of convicts was starting to emerge from the East cellhouse at the far end, while below them North cellhouse residents were coming back.
“Shouldn’t we go say goodbye to our friends?” Ron asked.
Earl looked at him, smiled. “Yeah, we should—and I didn’t even think of it.”
They went downstairs, against a flow of convicts, and out into the still nearly empty yard—empty except for the long line of convicts stretching from mess hall to cellhouse. The yard would fill as the mess hall emptied. Now only a dozen convicts were standing around or pacing back and forth. Ron and Earl walked through and scattered a flock of pigeons waiting to be fed, and went to the concrete bench along the East cellhouse wall.
Moments later a pair of convicts came from the mess hall line—T.J. and Wayne, the former hugging Earl and shaking hands with Ron, the latter shaking hands, in reverse order, with both of them—and wishing them good luck.
“Yeah, good luck, brothers,” T.J. said. “We took care of that with that fool on the truck last night. He’s all right.”
“I’ll see you out there in a couple of months,” Earl said. “I’ve got your people’s address. I’ll get in touch when I think you’ve raised.”
“If you don’t make it,” Wayne said, “we’ll send you a care package into ‘B’ Section, smokes, coffee, and shit.”
“If we don’t,” Ron said, “send me some arsenic.”
“Ain’t that bad round here,” T.J. said. “Hell, there’s lots of excitement.” Then to Earl: “Send us a package of dope as soon as you can.”
“I’ll run off in a Thrifty drugstore for you.”
From the corner of the South mess hall, Vito and Baby Boy appeared, cutting through the lines and angling over.
“Glad we caught you,” Baby Boy said, shaking hands. “Sure wanted to say goodbye and wish you luck.”
Vito was more demonstrative, goosing Earl and giggling. “Say, man,” Earl said, slapping the hand away. “I’ll be glad to get away from you.”
The last of the mess hall lines was nearing the door.
“We gotta go,” Ron said.
The clique gave quick pats on the back, and then they crossed the yard and got in the end of the line.
“When we get inside,” Earl said, “follow me about ten feet behind.”
As they stepped within, Earl bypassed taking a tray and stepped out of the line, walking along the rear wall where off-duty kitchen workers were standing. They gave cover. He glanced back and Ron was following.
It was the same in the confusion of the huge kitchen. Nobody even looked curiously at them.
Just two of the braceros were still working when Earl opened the vegetable room door. They were using hose and squeegee to clean scraps from the tile floor. They glanced up and kept working; they were nearly done.
Earl held the door until Ron ducked through. Then Earl told him to keep lookout down the hallway and scrambled onto the sacks of potatoes, retrieving the weightlifting bars and shivs. The braceros still said nothing, but hurried to scoop up the scraps and get out of the room.
Earl handed one shiv to Ron and put the other under his shirt. He propped both weight bars next to the loading dock door and leaned forward, staring out at the kitchen yard and the top of the ramp. Ron stayed, watching the corridor.
The sound of the truck came before it was visible, but the time lapse was just a few seconds. Ron heard, and felt as if something that should have been in his chest had worked up into his throat and was trying to gag him. He could hear the truck growling loud as it strained in low gear; then it stopped and the gears shifted. He could hear it backing up.
Earl watched the gun tower on the wall against the gray sky. The guard had his back turned, as usual. The truck backed in less than ten feet away. The swampers bounded off, going for the trash barrels.
“C’mon, Ron,” Earl said, his words punctuated by the crash of the first barrel.
As Ron moved, the tension dissolved—burst and went away. He was as calm and detached as at any time in his life, and so keyed up his senses captured every impression intensely. He even noticed that Earl’s cheek was twitching.
They each held one of the long bars, pausing just momentarily at the door. “You get in first,” Earl said. “Push the bar ahead of you … and don’t drop the fucker.” He opened the door and Ron went out onto the dock, nearly bumping into a barrel, causing Earl to step on his heels.
The swampers looked at them with wide eyes and stopped work, stepping back to give them room.
Ron put his head down and plunged into the hole, running into a stench like a wall and instantly starting to breathe through his mouth, thinking that he had to get a handkerchief out to breathe into as soon as he was seated. His knees waded through the trash, and he pushed the bar ahead of him.
The moment Ron’s head and shoulders went in, Earl heard the truck’s cab open and he knew the guard was getting out. He couldn’t stay where he was, and he wouldn’t have time to follow Ron. Both of them would be caught. All of this took one second to register, and then he stepped around the rear of the truck and jumped down from the loading dock, angling as if heading toward the other kitchen door, appearing just a few feet from the old guard. “Hey, Smitty,” he said as if mildly surprised.
The guard’s head came up but there was no suspicion as he recognized Earl. “Copen. You’re a little out of your usual run, aren’t you?”
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br /> Earl held the weightlifting bar. “Yeah, somebody carted this out of the gym to the kitchen—who knows what for—and Rand sent me to get it.” As Earl finished the sentence, he heard a barrel being dumped and knew Ron was safe.
“Goddamn convicts would steal false teeth,” the guard said.
Earl nodded, said nothing, and walked away.
In the darkness Ron heard the voices, recognized Earl’s without the words. The fact of any talk was terrible. Ron’s hopes withered, he knew they were caught. Then a barrel of trash flew in, sending dust toward him, and he dug for the handkerchief. Another barrel came. There was no alarm. His thoughts and feelings were tangled. Something had made Earl back off. He couldn’t think further because the truck’s motor started and he heard the clunk of the crusher. He braced the bar against the wall and held it with both hands like a lance. The trash crept over his feet, but when the crusher hit the steel brace it stopped. Everything held for a few seconds that seemed like minutes, and then the crush receded and the square of light reappeared.
Ron’s confusion and terror evaporated in soaring elation. He was going to be free in a few minutes. The half-dozen stops were routine; he was over the hurdle. In the smelly darkness his thoughts had already left prison and were on life.
In the shadows of the kitchen doorway Earl Copen watched the high, ungainly truck roll down the ramp. His lips were pressed together but drawn as far back as possible, and his eyes were squinted into slits to suppress their stinging. His friend was gone and he was left behind, but it was better that one should be free than neither. Still, the hurt was deep—but when the truck had disappeared, Earl turned away, then snorted an ironical laugh. “Aw, fuck it. I run something around here. I’d probably starve to death out there.”
It was as good a way to look at it as any other.
To find out more about Eddie Bunker you should read,
Mr Blue:
Memoirs of a Renegade,
his autobiography, but followed here is an article by Crime Time’s Charles Waring, the master of the retrospective, on a life like no other …
BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN—THE LIFE OF EDWARD BUNKER
Charles Waring
Inauspicious Beginnings
Despite assurances from scientists about the nature of earthquakes, supernatural beliefs regarding the significance of seismic land-upheavals still persist in some parts of the world. Of course, in ancient times, natural disasters were often perceived as punishment from an angry deity. Although now, in the late twentieth century, we live in the epoch of the global village and at a time when science is regarded as an infallible avatar, superstitious notions are still harboured by many of the world’s inhabitants. One such person who didn’t accept earthquakes at face value was Edward Bunker’s mother, Sarah.
A sense of profound foreboding (call it superstition if you will) affected the troubled mind of this young woman who, during the 1930s, had worked in vaudeville theatre and been a chorus girl in Busby Berkeley’s extravagant Hollywood musicals. She sensed some portentous event had occurred at the moment of her son’s conception. That was March, 1933, in Southern California. A major earthquake—resulting in fatalities and extensive damage to buildings—terrorised Los Angeles’s inhabitants. It also mortified Bunker’s parents, who were coupling at the exact moment the first tremors of the earthquake struck. To make matters worse for Bunker, at the time he made his unpropitious entry into the world (at Hollywood’s Cedar Of Lebanon Hospital on December 31st, 1933), Los Angeles was in the grip of a torrential downpour of almost Biblical proportions with trees and even houses being swept away by dangerous currents. The alarming synchronicity of both cataclysmic events confirmed in his mother’s mind that Edward would be trouble. For her, there was no denying that Bunker Junior was born under a bad sign, and sadly, she instilled this belief into him when he was an impressionable youngster.
Formative Years
Well, for young Edward and his parents, it was not long before the seeds of that pair of bad omens seemed to bear substantial fruit. At the age of two, Edward wandered off from a family picnic in a local park but was eventually located after a search-party of two hundred men had combed the area. Then he accidentally set fire to a neighbour’s garage! On the face of it, young Ed may have seemed the toddler from hell but it’s more likely that these incidents resulted from his parents’ abject lack of supervision rather than any innate inclination on his part to do harm. Indeed, Bunker’s abiding memories from this period focus on the deteriorating relationship of his parents, who fought and argued with an intensity that resulted in the police frequently being called out to intervene. Bunker’s father, incidentally, Edward Snr, like his wife, worked in Hollywood. Principally he was a stage-hand although occasionally he worked as a grip (a specialised technician who builds film sets). He was almost fifty when his only son, Edward Junior was born. As the marriage became increasingly acrimonious (fuelled in part by alcoholism), so young Ed was left to his own devices.
Fight and Flight
Bunker was only five when his parents’ troubled marriage was finally dissolved. A consequence of the divorce proceedings was that he was sent to a boarding/foster home. Profoundly unhappy, he ran away for the first time and found himself roaming the city streets at night. For this, the foster home rejected him and Bunker then went through a succession of draconian institutions which attempted to curb his defiant, rebellious nature with harsh discipline and sadistic, often brutal practices. He attended a military school for a couple of months (where, through peer pressure, he took to theft). He ran way from here, boarded a train and found himself four-hundred miles away in a hobo camp. The authorities were alerted and Bunker was accosted but this chaotic, peripatetic lifestyle persisted throughout his formative years. Shoplifting and the theft of ration coupons eventually landed Bunker in a heap of big trouble and he was sent to an institution known as a Juvenile Hall, a kind of borstal or reform school. Here, Bunker became acquainted with hardened young criminals and quickly realised that if he wanted to survive this experience or at least avoid being somebody’s punk (being sodomised) he had to learn the rules of the jungle. Although younger and smaller than most of his fellow inmates, Bunker was smart (his IQ had been estimated at 152), highly literate, streetwise and recalcitrant. He soon became fearless and inured to the dog-eat-dog brutality of the place. After a fight with a fellow inmate, Bunker was sent to a state hospital for observation from which he soon escaped, living rough on the streets. He was caught by the cops after a car he hot-wired crashed. He was then sent to an insane asylum to be assessed and was almost beaten to death by an attendant. Fortunately, Bunker was declared sane, and was allowed to leave with his life just about intact. It was not long before he escaped reform school and was back roughing it on the streets. Three months later, he was apprehended by the cops living in an a old car in someone’s backyard. He was then shunted on to the Preston School of Industry which was designated for older teenagers. Bunker was still only fourteen. Eventually, he was paroled to his aunt. By this time his estranged mother had remarried and his father (now sixty-two) languished in a rest home because of premature senility. While with his aunt, Bunker continued to keep bad company and late hours. It was only a matter of time before he fell foul of the law again, this time for an outstanding parole violation. But Bunker’s reputation as a troublemaker had catapulted him beyond the remit of California’s Youth Authority. Despite his age, he was in the big league now. This time it was serious. This time it was prison.
Crime and Punishment
While most teenagers were still at high school, Edward Bunker was a veteran of California’s stern custodial institutions for young offenders. From his earliest days, his life had been hurtling on a relentless trajectory towards a life in crime that would ultimately lead to lengthy incarceration in prison. And that’s where he found himself at sixteen years-of-age. But it didn’t chasten him one iota. To the proud, hardened Bunker, prison was an underground university of life. He gain
ed the acquaintance of some of America’s most notorious criminals and from this experience gleaned knowledge which not only helped him to survive on the inside but inspired schemes and scams when he was back on the outside.
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