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 103rd 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 w
ith 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 42nd 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.
I emancipated myself from my aunt and my parole officer. For three months I was having fun. I rented a room, bought a '40 Ford coupe for $300, and was on my own. Then I got arrested when I was visiting two buddies out of reform school who had been sticking up supermarkets. They were eighteen years old and they lived in a house on the east side of Alvarado just south of Temple Street. Someone's mother owned the house but the room under the back porch was where "anything goes." It was a clubhouse for incipient convicts. It was a great place to hang out waiting for something to happen, someone to come by, someone to call, someone to think of something. It was a great place to raid. And they did. They found some pistols, some illegal pills and some pot. It was enough to get everyone booked until it got sorted out. They mainly wanted to take all of us to lineups for robberies. Nobody picked me out, but my fingerprints came back with an outstanding parole violator warrant issued by the Youth Authority.
Chapter3
Among the Condemned
The Superintendent of the Preston School of Industry threatened to quit if I was returned to his institution, or so I was told by the man who drove me from the LA county jail to the prison for youthful offenders in the town of Lancaster. It was on the edge of the vast Mojave Desert, but still in the County of Los Angeles. Built during World War II as a training base for Canadian flyers, it was now operated by the California Department of Corrections. They'd built a double fence topped with rolled barbed wire around the buildings. Every hundred yards was a gun tower on stilts. Presto! A prison.
Except for a couple of dozen skilled inmate workers brought from San Quentin or Folsom (surgical nurse, expert stenographer/typist for the Associate Warden and so forth), the convicts of Lancaster were aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Ninety percent of those were between eighteen and twenty-one. When the transporting officer removed my chains in Receiving and Release, I was fifteen years old.
While I was being processed, a sergeant arrived to take me to the Captain. Wearing white overalls and then walking across the prison with the Sergeant, I was self-conscious. Heads turned to scan the newcomer. One or two knew me from other places and called out: "Hey, Bunker! What's up?"
Inside the custody office, which was somewhat reminiscent of an urban newspaper's city room, was a door with frosted glass and l.s. nelson, captain stencilled on it. The Captain commanded all uniformed personnel. Nelson was in his thirties and had red hair. Later, when the red was mixed with sand and he was Warden of San Quentin, everyone called him Red Nelson. He was one of the legendary wardens: a man known to be hard but fair. He had a strong jaw and sunburned face. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator-style dark glasses that he wore for the tough impression they conveyed. As he leaned back in his swivel chair and webbed his fingers behind his neck, there was the vaguest hint of a sneer in his voice. "Shit! You don't look like a holy terror to me. You're too light in the butt to be that tough. You'll be lucky if somebody around here doesn't break you down like a shotgun."
"I'm not worried."
"Me either. But I thought I'd tell you how it is. You've made a little name for yourself in those kiddy joints. This isn't a kiddy joint. This is a prison. Start any shit here and you'll swear the whole world fell on you. I'll stomp your brains out. Got it?"
"Yes sir," I said. "I wanna do my time and get out as soon as I can." My words were true, but I resented the threat. Everywhere I'd been — military school, juvenile hall, reform school, nuthouse — they all had promised to break me. All had inflicted severe physical and emotional pain on me, but here I was. If being part of the general population had been less important, I would have dumped his desk over on him and taken the ass-kicking - so he would know that I wasn't intimidated by his words.
"Okay, Bunker ... hit the yard. Any trouble, I'll bury you so deep in segregation they'll have to pump in the air." He dismissed me with a jerk of the thumb. I turned and the waiting sergeant opened the door.
Assigned to Dorm 3, I was making up my bunk when buddies of mine from reform school and juvenile hall began streaming in, grinning and horseplaying. Someone jumped on me and I bumped into a bunk that skidded loud across the floor.
"Take that horseplay outside!" yelled the dorm guard from his desk. We went outside down the road to the handball courts.
Ahead of us was a crowd. We came up from behind. In the center stood two young Chicanos, lean as hawks; each had a big knife. One of them I recognized from reform school without remembering his name. Off to the side was the object of their dispute, a petite white queen called Forever Amber. She was wringing her hands together. The Chicano I recognized gestured to the other, plainly signalling "come on . . . come on . . ." His
denim jacket was wrapped around his forearm. Both wore white T shirts.
What then happened bore no resemblance to a movie knife fight. They came at each other like two roosters in a cockfight, leaping high and flailing, stabbing and being stabbed. The one without the jacket took a blow that opened his forearm to the bone. Then he stabbed back. His long shiv penetrated the other's white T-shirt and sank in to the hilt. Both grunted but neither gave way. In seconds, both were cut to pieces. The one with the jacket suddenly muttered, "Dirty sonofabitch . . ." He sank to his knees and fell forward on his face, the knife falling from his dying fingers while his blood spread in a pool soaking the dry, hard earth.
The other Chicano turned and walked away, blood spraying from his mouth. It reminded me of a blowing whale. Forever Amber ran after him, still mincing and all feminine. About fifty yards down the road, the "winner" suddenly stopped, coughed up a glob of blood and fell. He tried to rise, but stopped on his knees, his head down. Several convicts rushed forward and carried him to the hospital, but when they came back they turned thumbs down. He, too, had died.
It took a while after lights out for the dorm to settle for the night. Silhouettes in skivvies moved through the shadows to the washroom and latrine. They carried their toothbrushes in their teeth or in their hands with towels wrapped around their necks. Down the dorm, two figures seated on adjacent bunks put their heads together as they whispered. Sudden laughter. The guard grunted "Knock it off down there." Silence.
I was on my back, fully dressed except for my shoes. I pulled a towel over my eyes. I had no enemies; no need for caution. Coughing. Bed springs squeaking, the shhh shhh of slippers moving along the aisle. The dorm windows were empty frames, holes in the wall in the shape of windows. The double fences with rolled barbed wire, the lights and the gun towers made window security superfluous. The desert wind that rose at every dusk was hot and hard tonight. It made the rolled barbed wire vibrate, and the chain link fence roll along its length, like an ocean wave rolling along the beach. In my mind, I saw the swift and deadly knife fight over and over, each moment almost frozen in time. I now recognized death. It had been delivered by the right hand, half sideways and half upward in a motion that looked defensive rather than attacking. The other guy was left handed — or at least he had his knife in the left hand. He had it extended and was slicing at his opponent's face. When his left arm was extended, the soft spot just under the left side of the ribs was exposed. It was there his opponent's knife sank to the hilt. It must have cut a heart valve.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 4