Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade

by Edward Bunker

  I dipped slighdy left for leverage then sunk my left fist in his stomach just as if I was in a gym at the heavy bag. Any prizefighter will appreciate how wicked that can be if unexpected. He gasped and doubled over; then toppled sideways onto the floor, moving his legs as if on a bicycle. It was really wanton violence, a displacement of my frustrations and anger and an expression of how much I loathed Atascadero. Good God, I'd rather be in the penitentiary than turned into a vegetable and treated like a child in a state hospital, which is what seemed to be happening.

  Nobody had seen the punch. I departed the auditorium anil went back to the poker game and put it out of my mind. Atascadero had nearly 3,000 patients. What were they going to do, have a lineup of 3,000? Besides, the fool would be fine once he could breathe again.

  Without realizing it, I'd cracked three of his ribs. That evening as I went through the serving line in the mess hall, I looked up and saw him standing in the kitchen doorway with the white-clad attendant in charge of the watch. The molester tugged the attendant's sleeve, then pointed his finger directly at me while his mouth worked energetically. In the argot of the jad, he was tellin' it . . . He was still telling it when the attendants took me to the office.

  The third watch wrote a summary of the incident and referred it to the day watch when doctors and administrators were on hand. I didn't expect anything to happen. I'd already seen several dingbats blow their tops and swing on somebody. At most they would be locked in a side room for a few hours untd they calmed down. Unknown to me, the Department of Corrections report on A20284 Bunker arrived that morning. Instead of a side room, they put me on the special locked ward, reserved for about two dozen of those considered the most volatde patients. Among them were three ex-cons whom I knew from prison. One of them, Back really qualified as a paranoid maniac. When I first entered

  San Quentin, I met him in the reception unit. Rick had words with another inmate in an orientation class. The inmate was a bit of a bully and he gave Rick a dose of fear, a bad thing to do to a paranoiac. The only weapon Rick could get on short notice was a short-bladed but razor sharp X-acto knife. That evening in the mess hall, Rick saw the wanna-be bully carry his tray from the serving line and sit down. Rick walked up behind him, pulled his head back and cut his throat. Blood spurted ten feet in the air. Anywhere else in the world the victim would have died. In San Quentin, where doctors specialize in the endemic disease of knife wounds, they managed to save his life. Rick did his whole sentence in administration segregation, the psych ward and in prison medical facility at Vacaville, when that opened. When his prison term was finished, they committed him to the state hospital. Now here he was, happy to see me. The other two I knew less well. One was a tough young Chicano whose mind seemed a little out of focus, but whose precise malady escaped me.

  The ward of twenty-two patients had eight attendants on duty at all times except for the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 a.m., when they had just three. The ward consisted of the day room, with wicker chairs and padded cushions, two hallways with regular side rooms where we slept, but were not allowed in otherwise, and a final short hall behind a heavy, locked door. There was a total of fifteen rooms all used for maximum lock down. It was called being in seclusion, but the hole is the hole no matter what nomenclature is applied. At the end of that short hall was a door to a road around the institution. Rick told me that it was the very same door that my friend, Bobby Hagler, and his friends, had battered through several years earlier with the heavy bench. Since then the door had been reinforced, the heavy benches had been removed, and several more attendants had been added. We discussed the possibility and decided it was impossible. Alas, someone heard it and told it — and suddenly there were twenty white clad attendants crowding the day room. The three of us were stripped to undershorts and locked in short hall rooms.

  It may have been called seclusion, but it was a strip cell to me. A state hospital can do things that would never be allowed in prisons. It had the hole in the floor for a todet. The stench that rose from it was overwhelming. In prison the hole could be covered with a newspaper or magazine, but such things weren't allowed in seclusion. They might be disturbing. The room had a window (mesh screen and bars) so high that I had to chin mysell with fingertips to get a brief look at the barren rolling hillsides outside.

  A doctor arrived every afternoon, and spoke in meaningless monosyllables. His Eastern European accent reminded me of my chddhood experience in the nuthouse near Pomona. I asked him where he was from. "Estonia," he said. "Weren't you guys allied with the Nazis?" I asked. His face got red, his accent thickened and I knew I was in trouble. Nevertheless, I stepped back, threw up a right arm and declared: "Hed Hider!" He really disliked that. Then again, I disliked him. He would have adapted well to concentration camp eugenics experiments.

  Every day he made his rounds, peeking through the little observation window on each door, sometimes saying something, more often not. I asked him how long I was going to be locked up, and his reply was shrink jargon: "How long do you think it should be?"

  In prison there were rules and regulations about such matters, in the nuthouse it was according to the whim of the psychiatrist in charge. It wasn't punishment; it was treatment.

  After two weeks without seeing a chink in the status quo, my usual instinct toward rebellion took over. I began to agitate the thirteen patients in the other rooms. By nightfall they were worked up. Each of them broke the little observation window and used the pieces of glass to cut their veins. In an hour the Superintendent was on the ward. He was upset, for although a prison warden can disparage whatever convicts do, it is a different matter when patients in a hospital protest conditions with self-mutilation. Something like this could cause negative media coverage.

  The neo-Nazi ward doctor then arrived. He knew immediately who was behind it. He and the Superintendent came to talk to me. I told them our demands — mattresses and bedding instead of the rubber pads; books and magazines, the right to write and receive letters.

  The Superintendent agreed to everything, but the phones and teletypes were humming. At nine in the morning, my door opened and several attendants told me to step out. They gave me a white jumpsuit to put on, put me in restraints and took me out the back door to a waiting car. Three hours later I arrived at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. The transfer was under a statute that allowed certain dangerous mental patients committed under criminal statutes to be housed in the correctional facility.

  When I arrived, the prison officials only had teletypes about me. There was a lieutenant named Estelle, whom I think would later head the Texas prison system, who knew me from another prison, and for some reason had a special, personal animosity toward me. He put me in "S-3," the unit on the third floor of "S" Wing. It consisted of cells with walls of glass from about waist height to the ceding. The glass wall was both front and rear, causing the cells to be labeled "the fish bowls." Some had the holes in the floor, and some had a cast metal combination of washbasin and toilet. I was lucky and got the latter. When the water ran out of the washbasin, it ran into the toilet below. The drawback was that the bottom of the toilet was a fraction of an inch off the floor, and in the warm wet darkness resided a million cockroaches, so many that some got pushed out into the light where they ran around looking for darkness. When I lighted a piece of paper and pushed it under the todet, they charged forth in their multitudes, so many that I stood on top of the todet until they scurried back inside. I never bothered them again. To my benefit the cell lights were never turned out.

  I have no idea what papers or documents were teletyped or sent between the Department of Mental Hygiene and the Department of Corrections, but the latter somehow got the idea that I had gone to trial on the burglaries, had been acquitted by reason of insanity, and now the state hospital had discharged me and jurisdiction had reverted to Corrections. I stayed a month or so in the goldfish bowl. Convicts on the mainline sent me books from the library. I've always been able to make it if
I could read. While on S-3 I first

  read Herman Hesse and Sartre. I think I also read Anna Karenina and Lord Jim whde lying on the floor of the bowl.

  Across from me was the man for whom the law authorizing transfers from mental hospital to Vacaville had been written. His name was Jack Cathy. He was from Los Angeles, but had gone to prison in Arizona, where he killed someone. He eventually finished that term and was paroled. In Hollywood he was arrested and charged with another murder. At first he was found incompetent to stand trial under Section 1367, 1368 California Penal Code, and committed to Atascadero, where he stabbed four attendants, killing one. A court in San Luis Obispo again found him incompetent to stand trial, but ordered that he be held in Vacaville, which had a prison's security. A lawyer filed a petition for habeas corpus. In response the legislature passed the statute allowing his transfer - and mine. I was on S-3 for several months Three times a week he was taken out of his cell and given a shock treatment. A convict said he'd been getting that three times a week for several years. In half an hour they brought him back and dumped him in the cell. An hour or so after he was returned, he would call out: "Hey, man . . . you . . . next door ..."

  I would stand up so I could see him through the glass. Three times a week we would have the same conversation. He would ask wher j he was and I would tell him. He would ask where I was from. I would tell him. He would ask if I knew Eddie the Fox Chaplick. In a day his memory would nearly return. He would say. "Oh yeah," and remember something else. It was always the same sequence of conversation. When his memory was almost back, they would take him out for another electric shock treatment. It went on for two months.

  They let me out of S-3, put me in the parole violators' unit and began preparing for a parole violation hearing. They sent to the field for a report, and when they gave me the charges, included were the same charges for which a court had ruled that I was incompetent to face in a court of law with an attorney and all the protections of American jurisprudence. He couldn't face the charges there, how could I face them in a parole violation hearing without any legal protection or even a record? I sensed that they had made a mistake and I began studying law books.

  The parole violator unit had several men I'd known in San Quentin and elsewhere, including one who would eventually tell me the story that is the basis of my novel, Dog Eat Dog. My legal insanity became a running gag. Loitering in the long corridor was prohibited. A guard would come along, telling inmates to move on, out to the yard or into the housing unit. As a joke, when they got about fifteen feet away, I would turn and begin jabbing my finger at the wall and talking irrationally: "What? What? You better not say that. I'm tellin' ya now . . . now and now . . .. Stop it. . . freeze. Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom . . ."I would punctuate the last words by a pantomime of shifting gears in a car: I would throw it into third, make a hard pivot and take off walking while making engine sounds. The guard would look consternated, and my friends would choke back their laughter.

  In the mess hall serving hne, the new arrivals assigned to ladling the food were scared of me. I would look at them wdd-eyed and shake my tray in front of them. They would overload it, although I did it more for the fun than for the food, which was usually hard to eat in a regular ration, much less in extra portions.

  About this time I received a letter from the daughter of Dr Marcel Frym, the psychoanalyst whom I'd met through Al Matthews during court proceedings for the assault on the correctional officer. Every so often there is a newspaper account of some apparendy middle-class woman fading in love with some apparent human monster with a passel of grisly murders and awaiting execution. Most people simply shake their heads in awed distaste; it is beyond their range of experience. Actually the infatuation is not with a real person but with someone created in fantasy, someone they can visit periodically, as a patient does with a psychoanalyst. The convict behind bars suddenly has all the attributes for which the woman yearns. She gives them to him. She creates an imago and loves it as if it is a fully realized person. She can come every week, or every month, and sit across from him for several hours, pouring forth the torments of her soul and psyche until the inevitable transference transpires.

  I could see that this was what was happening here. I was very ambivalent about the relationship. I'd been accused of being manipulative and exploitative, especially of women. In all candor, it was a judgement I thought erroneous. Where were the facts? Mrs Hal Wallis? I had not taken advantage of her even when she was having the breakdown and would have given me anything. Nevertheless, I was still very conscious of the accusation — even though the whole world was arrayed against me and I needed at least one ally.

  Dr Frym's daughter, named Mickey, was not merely willing; she was enthusiastic. She said she had been in a cocoon since she was a teenager, "and now I'm a butterfly flying free." Frankly, she scared me. If she got hurt in my world, the other world would blame me. I was unconcerned about most of them, but Mickey's father had befriended me. On the other hand, this was a war for survival, and anyone close could get hit by shrapnel. Alone save for some scruffy convicts, I was desperate for allies. I let her into my life.

  Her letters became fiery and voluminous. Mail was pushed under the cell door before morning unlock, on the assumption that it would start the convict's day with him in a good mood. The assumption was correct. Mickey wrote every day, but with the vagaries of the US Mail and the prison mail room, some mornings nothing was beneath the door, and on others, usually Tuesday, her letters would literally cover my floor.

  Then she came to visit. She was no drop dead beauty, but she radiated a powerful sensuality from the toss of her thick, raven hair to the bounce of her hips as she walked. She bore some physical resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, with a great upper body and legs a littletoo short for perfection. Although I have always been a connoisseur of legs and derriere, with only minimal interest in the female breast (a near un-American attitude), I found Mickey sexually attractive. Her most attractive characteristic, however, was not physical; it was her moxie. She was dying for adventure. She would get plenty before it was over.

  When she left, she went to the county seat of Fairfield and retained a young lawyer, who came over and asked: "How do you treat him?" The prison official replied: "We treat him like everyone else." "That's the point. He isn't like everyone. He's a mental patient."

  The lawyer went to check the law books for remedies. The Department of Corrections decided to throw the hot potato. One day without warning, the public address system called out: "Bunker . . . A20284, report to Receiving and Release."

  I thought maybe it was a clothing package, or maybe they needed some fingerprints. The last thing I expected was that they would throw me a white jumpsuit and tell me to change. Fifteen minutes later I was rolling out the back gate in a seven-passenger van.

  When we reached Atascadero, the state hospital was taken by surprise. They didn't want me. I told them that I would leave immediately on foot if they were serious. The prison psychiatrists certified that I was returned to competency.

  After three hours of waiting, they took me in and let the driver leave. The neo-Nazi doctor was ready and waiting for me. Back to the same side room. I noted that the glass observation windows had been replaced by metal plates with holes to look through. That was before they put me in "full" restraints. First the straitjacket; then they stretched me on the bed and tied bed sheets from my ankles to the bed frame, and other sheets from my armpits to the top of the bed frame. The restraints were so tight and the old bed sagged so much in the middle that I was suspended over it. (No, that's an exaggeration, but barely.) The whole thing was topped off by a shot of Prolixin, the drug of instant, prolonged mental vegetation. The effect of a single injection lasts a week. As the attendant readied the needle, the neo-Nazi doctor stood grinning beside the bed. He'd taken my earlier insurrection of the insane very personally. Looking at me, he saw an outlaw, a criminal. When I looked at him, I envisioned a black uniform with swastika armband and
death's head lapel buttons.

  Reports were written, signed, sealed, stamped and sent in record time to the Municipal Court, City of Inglewood. In three weeks the Sheriff's Department bus came through, dropping some off,picking some up. I was among the latter.

  While I was in Vacaville, Denis my drag-dealing friend from Hollywood came through the reception center on a parole violation. He'd been approached for help by the pimps when I was extorting them. Denis told me that a certain well known shyster lawyer named Brad Arthur could get my parole warrant lifted How did he do it? Denis wasn't sure, but it could be done. Immediately I sent Mickey to see Brad Arthur to ascertain if lie could do this and what it would cost. "But don't give him any money until I tell you ..."

  Within days of that instruction, I was transferred back to Atascadero State Hospital. There, wearing a straitjacket, tied to a bed and turned into a vegetable, I was allowed neither visits nor to write letters. The necessary pencil was considered too dangerous for me to handle.

  Mickey, who knew California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk through her father, called him up. Although he didn't appreciate the imposition, and probably found her request borderline improper, he called Atascadero's Superintendent and mack- inquiry. Coming from a State Supreme Court justice, it was enough to get her and Brad Arthur through the firewall of the neo-Nazi doctor. I was to be returned to LA within the week. Although attendants and the doctor hovered around us, I was able to tell Mickey and Brad to "take care of the parole hold."