Mr Blue
Memoirs of a Renegade
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Afterword
Chapter 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-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 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 start
ed 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.
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 1 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 apparen
tly 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.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 1