But it was no joke. Rancho Linda was the best thing that had happened to me for a while, and I had no idea how much I would miss it after it was gone.
The next thing I knew, I was back in juvie.
They couldn’t keep me in Juvenile Hall. I hadn’t committed any crime—I wasn’t even one of the guys they caught in bed at Rancho Linda. I hadn’t been accused of anything. Besides, I was barely even a juvenile anymore. It was April 1966. I was seventeen and a half years old. I was practically grown up.
I was tall enough and big enough—six feet four inches and probably about 180 pounds. I had done enough sports at Rancho Linda that I was physically fit—no Jack LaLanne, but I was in good shape. In the pictures that I have from that time, I see a clean-cut guy who wears his hair short and his sport coat tight and has a little bit of an attitude. In most of the pictures from this period, I’ve got a smirk. Not quite a smile. Not quite a frown. Just a sort of look that says, “I know what a joke this all is.”
It seemed like a joke. It was like my dream of being in the army had come true. Now I had done my time in the service, and I was furloughed out. I was being returned to civilian life, and would walk the streets again with the rest of the citizens.
But I couldn’t go home. Despite Freeman’s reports about my continued progress, and the fact that I’d gotten through a few years at Rancho Linda without killing anybody, I was not welcome at the house on Edgewood. Lou still wouldn’t have me.
So, after a short stay at juvie, I was placed in a halfway house with a collection of other misfit guys who, like me, didn’t have anyplace else to go. The house was a two-story stucco with a glassed-in front porch and a kind of Oriental wood trim. The corners of the roof turned up like a pagoda. The address was 619 North First Street in San Jose.
The place was run by a crabby old lady. She fixed our meals and made sure the rules were followed. But there weren’t many rules. You had to be out by a certain time in the morning, and you had to be back by a certain time at night. Your rent was paid by the government, directly to the old lady. You got a little allowance out of that, so you could buy cigarettes and coffee. (I smoked Marlboro reds in those days.) Other than that, it didn’t matter what you did with yourself as long as you stayed out of trouble.
I did, for a while. Someone from the Welfare Department or the Probation Department or Social Services arranged a little job for me with Goodwill Industries. They called it a job, but it was a joke. I was paid ten cents an hour to sort through boxes of clothes. Ten cents an hour! Even for a guy with no work experience, that was insulting. The minimum wage was something like $1.25 or $1.35. How did they get away with paying someone ten cents an hour? In my case, they didn’t—not for long. I stopped going to work.
There was an International House of Pancakes right down the block. I’d go down there and hang out and drink coffee and talk to the people I’d meet. I fell in with some bad characters. I met a group of guys who belonged to this motorcycle gang called the Gypsy Jokers. They had names like Shorty and Butcher. They were like the Hells Angels, but maybe not as dangerous, and they let me hang out with them. Since I didn’t have a bike and wasn’t going to ride with them, they didn’t have to jump me in or do any of that hairy initiation stuff. They just let me hang out. They all drank at this beer bar called The Spartan Hub. In the afternoons and evenings, when I wasn’t busy goofing off at the IHOP, I’d go down there and drink beer with them. I thought I was pretty cool—not even eighteen yet, and here I was drinking beer with the Gypsy Jokers.
Back at the halfway house I made friends with a guy named Ed Woodson. He was a skinny little guy who wore a beard and mustache over what I think was a cleft palate. He had a slight speech impediment, and a weird habit of saying “But one thing” whenever he had something to say. He said it like he was sharing a secret, or like he was afraid you were going to get mad at him, but it was meaningless. You’d ask him if he wanted to go downtown. He’d lean over and say, “Yeah, but one thing: I have to go see my probation officer….”
I never knew what his background was or how he wound up in the halfway house, but we got to be buddies and started having some fun together. Sometimes the fun backfired, which seemed to happen a lot with me.
Usually it started out sort of innocent. There was a guy at the halfway house who had a motorcycle. He thought he was so cool, with his little motorcycle. We were jealous, so we decided to teach him a lesson.
I got two paper milk containers, one empty and one full. I drained the gas out of his tank into the empty one, and then I filled the gas tank with milk from the full one. I hid the two milk containers in the rubbish pit. We sat back to see what would happen to the guy’s bike.
That wasn’t very dramatic. The bike just wouldn’t start. The guy looked in the gas tank and saw this milky stuff and could not figure out what the heck had happened. It was pretty funny.
It wasn’t so funny the next time the gardener went out to the rubbish pit. He took the rubbish and put it in the incinerator, and started a fire. The gas ignited, and the milk container exploded. The whole backyard went up in flames, and the house almost burned down.
I didn’t get caught for that one.
Ed Woodson was a bit wilder than me. He had more experience. He knew people. For example, he knew two guys who had escaped from the county jail. I don’t know how they got out. I don’t know how Ed knew them. But when they escaped, they came straight to the halfway house. Ed hid them in the basement and snuck food down to them for a few days. When the heat was off, they left. I thought that was wild. Guys escaping from jail! Hiding out in our basement! It was like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. This was the big time.
I didn’t get caught for that one, either. Ed didn’t get caught. I don’t know whether the two guys went back to jail or what. At the time, I didn’t even realize it was serious.
And that was part of the problem. I didn’t understand what was serious and what wasn’t. I knew the difference between right and wrong. But I didn’t really understand the significance of doing right and wrong. I had no idea how to behave. I was on the street, and I had all this freedom, but I had no idea what to do with it.
For example…
Ever since Rancho Linda, I had been thinking about Annette. She had been my special girl. I kept with me a picture of the two of us dancing. She had written on the back of it, “For Howard, from Annette. I hope one day to be your wife.”
I heard she was staying with some friends, or some family member, in Glendale, a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles. Ed Woodson had family in Los Angeles somewhere. We decided we’d hitchhike down there together. I’d surprise Annette and he’d surprise his family.
We set out like it was going to be a little overnight visit. We didn’t have much money. We didn’t have any gear—nothing to eat, nothing to sleep on, nothing to wash with, nothing but the clothes on our backs.
It took us a long time to get to Los Angeles. A trucker picked us up and left us out in the sticks. We stood on the side of the highway all night trying to get a lift. It took three days just to get down to Ventura.
We split up there. Ed went on to Los Angeles. I went into the San Fernando Valley. I don’t remember where my last ride dropped me off, but I walked the rest of the way. The area was mostly orange groves in those days, and dirt roads. I walked for an entire day, down these dusty dirt roads, eating oranges the whole time, until I got to Glendale.
I hadn’t written to Annette to tell her I was coming. Now I knocked on the door. Some guy came out and said she wasn’t home. He said she might be back later. I said thank you and I left.
I was crushed. I had left San Jose with very little money. Now I didn’t have a dime. I had hardly eaten, except for those oranges, in a couple of days. I hadn’t bathed or changed clothes since leaving the halfway house. I was filthy. I was scared, too.
So I got mad. How dare Annette not be at home! What a nerve! Didn’t she know I had practically walked across the state of Calif
ornia to see her? Didn’t she love me anymore?
I suppose I could have waited for her. I could have asked her family to let me come in and wait for her. But I didn’t. I don’t remember whether I even thought about those things. Probably I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I was tired and hungry and upset. I probably wasn’t thinking at all. So I went back out to the highway and started hitchhiking.
I don’t remember how long it took, but I found myself in King City, California, up in the Central Valley. And there, hitching on the side of the road, I bumped into Ed. He had been hitching awhile, and he wasn’t getting any rides, so he was going to buy a bus ticket home. When he saw me, though, he changed his mind. We used his money to buy some food, and then we hitchhiked back to San Jose.
I never saw Annette again. I didn’t write. I have no idea what happened to her. I don’t know whether she ever knew that the dirty, crazy nut who came to her door that day was me.
For some reason I didn’t get into trouble for being away from the halfway house for those few days. The crabby old lady let me and Ed in, and we went back to our old routine. It wasn’t much of a routine. It wasn’t much of a life.
I was nearly eighteen. I was old enough to be doing all kinds of things. But I didn’t really know how to do anything. I didn’t have a high school diploma. I had never applied for a job. I didn’t have a checking account or a savings account. I had no idea how to handle money. I had never washed my own clothes. I didn’t know how to cook for myself—even though I had helped out in the kitchen at Rancho Linda sometimes. I had never bought food for myself in a grocery store. I had never bought myself a pair of pants or a shirt or a pair of shoes. I had never gotten myself a haircut. I had no idea how to do anything.
But now, out on the street, I was expected to take care of myself and stay out of trouble. I wasn’t very good at taking care of myself. My size usually kept bad guys away from me. I looked like I was going to be a problem. But if someone did come after me, I really didn’t know what to do about it.
Living on First Street, I was attacked one night. I was on the street in front of the halfway house and this guy sprang up out of nowhere and pulled a knife on me. He grabbed me by the hair—I had really long hair at the time—and said he was going to chop all my hair off.
I didn’t know what to do, but I was scared, so I started screaming. That was the right thing to do. He ran away without cutting my hair off, and he didn’t come back.
The real trouble I got into was of my own making.
One day me and Ed were sitting at the halfway house when the mail came. There was a bank statement in there, delivered to the wrong address, with a bunch of canceled checks from the IRS. I guess they were refund checks. They were in large amounts, like $1,000 and $1,500. They were canceled, but the bank mark showing the cancelations was so light that you could rub it out with an eraser without damaging the paper. So I hatched a plan.
I’d take the check to a bank and open a checking account. I’d say I wanted to deposit the $1,000, and have $200 in cash. Then I’d get a pack of temporary checks until my own personal checks could be printed. I’d leave the bank with money in my pocket and a handful of temporary checks.
I didn’t know if it would work. The IRS checks were no good, because they’d already been cashed, but the bank might not know that for a couple of days. By then, I’d pull the same thing with another check at another bank.
Meanwhile I started visiting pawnshops. I’d look around until I decided I wanted to buy something like an electric guitar. Actually, I did want to buy it. It was a nice guitar. But that wasn’t the idea. The guitar cost, say, three hundred dollars. I paid for it with a bad check. Then I took the guitar across town to another pawnshop. I hocked it for maybe a hundred bucks. That was the idea.
It was the perfect crime. Suddenly I was rich. I had a hundred bucks in cash, plus what I’d gotten from the bank. This was more money than I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t even know what to do with all the money. I’d hail a cab and ride around for half the night, just to spend a few bucks.
It was a great scam. Since it worked once, I figured it would work again. I did the same scam several times, buying things at one pawnshop with a bad check, then taking them to another pawnshop and hocking them there. I raised some good money that way.
The problem was this: I was a bad criminal. I had criminal instincts, but not a criminal mind. When you write a blank check at a place like a pawnshop, the pawnshop owner asks you for your name and address and phone number. Since it was a fake account and I didn’t have any money, I didn’t think it mattered what name and address I gave him. So I wrote down my right name, and I wrote down the address and phone number of the halfway house.
The phone calls started coming in. The checks were no good. The banks were onto me. The pawnshop guys knew where I was. It was only a matter of time before someone came to get me.
A real criminal would have run away. I didn’t. I just waited.
The call came from a Lieutenant Lance Hunt. He explained to me that I was in some trouble, and that the trouble would be worse if I tried to run from it. He said that he was coming over to get me, and that I’d better be there.
I waited.
Despite my little bits of trouble in the past, this was my first serious contact with the law. Before, I had just been a screw-up. Now I was a criminal. I had committed a felony. Passing bad checks was a serious crime. I guess I knew that, but I didn’t really calculate what kind of trouble I’d be in if they caught me.
Well, they caught me. And I found out pretty quickly what kind of trouble I was in. They told me guys went to prison for this kind of thing, even guys who were only seventeen and a half years old. Guys went to prison for one to fourteen years.
I was fingerprinted. They took my mug shot. They took away my belt and my shoelaces. They stuck me in a cell.
At some point while I was in Agnews or at Rancho Linda, my dad had gotten interested in law enforcement. He had become a reserve deputy sheriff. Over the years he had worked at the jail, helped the sheriff ’s department with transportation, done court security as a bailiff, and helped train other reserve officers. He had never been an actual policeman, but he knew lots of cops.
He must have known someone in the San Jose Police Department, because they contacted my dad and talked to him about my situation. They offered him some sort of deal.
My dad came to tell me the details. The cops had agreed to let me off the hook. No prison time. No jail time. All I had to do was let them stick me back in Agnews for a while. If I could convince the people at Agnews that I was a little bit crazy, I could stay there instead of going to jail. He made it real clear to me that if I didn’t convince them I was crazy, I was going to jail. Or, worse than jail, I would go to prison.
I didn’t know what prison was like. But I had been to Juvenile Hall, and county jail, and I could imagine. I didn’t want to go there. Oh, boy, did I not want to go there. So I made the deal. I agreed to go back to Agnews and act crazy.
Someone got the word to Freeman.
“Howard has been readmitted to Agnews in the last few days,” the doctor wrote on September 23, 1966.
The Rancho School has closed down when it was discovered that the patients were enjoying too much sexual freedom, and Howard was at some halfway house where he adjusted pretty well until he got hold of a batch of checks and made out a number of them to his friends and others until the law caught up with him. Both his mother and father were very much concerned over the possibility of his coming back into the home, saying that his influence would be definitely disrupting. They arranged for his commitment.
The following day, Freeman came for a visit.
I saw Howard at Agnews today on the admission ward where he was sent from jail after a bad check. He says he has not been home at all, but has been living in San Jose in a house with other discharged patients. He was employed for several weeks at Good Will sorting cards at 10 cents an hour, which he said was not en
ough to buy his cigarettes, so he got disgusted and quit. Then he found out that people were getting 60 cents an hour, so he was disgruntled. “I like it better in here than out there.” Howard has filled out quite a bit and is, I think, at least as tall as his father. He talks fairly freely, and in the few minutes I had with him did not express any unusual ideas.
I was saving my unusual ideas for the Agnews staff. My dad had told me that I had to convince them I was a little nutty in order to stay there, and out of jail. So I tried to look a little nutty.
At the beginning I was on the observation ward. But I was on a tighter rein this time. The doctors needed to come up with a report. The court people and the probation people had to make a recommendation. So they were watching me closely. They had to gather all the data on me.
I gave it my best shot. I tried to show them I was crazy. It was just a matter of acting weird at the right times. Anyone can do that. You don’t have to be crazy to act crazy. You just have to know what crazy people act like. And I had plenty of experience watching crazy people.
Crazy people hit themselves. They talk to themselves. So, I did that. I don’t know how convincing I was, especially with the talking-to-myself part. I thought it was stupid, and I thought I looked stupid doing it. But if they were looking for something to write about, I was going to give it to them. I was going to make them say, “Okay, this guy’s a nut.”
I talked to myself about normal things, just like I was telling a friend a story. But I also invented things. Like, I invented a guitar and amplifier that didn’t exist. One of the techs would come to talk to me. I’d see him coming and I’d start talking to myself. Then he’d start to sit in a chair and I’d say, “Hey! Watch out. That’s my guitar and amp there!”
That seemed to make them pick up their notebooks pretty fast.
My Lobotomy Page 17