Read Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Online
Authors: Edward Bunker
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (40 page)
As the bus turned off US 99 at
Castaic, and through the gate onto the farm, I prayed silendy that they
wouldn't be waiting for me.
The bus pulled up. A sergeant
was waiting. He called off names and assigned each of us to a barracks.
"Bunker, barracks eleven, bed fifteen."
I walked into the barracks,
walked past bed fifteen, went out the back door, sucked up my courage and
leaped high on the fence. The fence shook, the sound vibrating along its
surface for some distance. I kept climbing. It had three strands of barbed wire
at the top. I got a leg over it, the barbs hooking my pants and gouging my leg
but I tore loose and kept going, oblivious to the cut. It was far riskier
jumping the fence in daylight than at night. Any passing deputy might spot me,
or one of the supervisors for the many work crews constantly laboring on the
reservation. At night, darkness would cloak me once I was over the fence. But I
didn't have the choice of waiting for night. The teletype could come at any
minute.
I dropped onto the dirt road
that ran along the other side of the fence. A sharp pain ran up from my ankle.
I'd twisted it enough so that I limped up the first slope. It was bare desert earth
with a few dry plants. As I neared the summit I was high enough for anyone in
the compound to see me. I got lucky. Nobody sounded the alarm. I went over the
summit of the low ridge, and out of sight. Now the odds were in my favor. I
began telling myself:
I'm gonna get away! I'm gonna get away!
It was a chant that matched my
pace. Gone was my depression. Now there was excitement. Somewhere down the
line, in a month, two months or two years, they would catch me. That I knew.
But right now it was better being wanted than caught. Better a fugitive than a
convict. LA, here I come again.
If there is an apprenticeship
to being a fugitive, I began serving it in early childhood with all of the
runaways from foster homes and military schools. I polished these skills in the
escapes from juvenile hall and reform school. I assumed they would do the usual
for a parolee at large or a walkaway from a minimum security institution, which
means they simply wait until the fugitive is stopped for a traffic violation or
arrested for some minor offense then nab him. In most instances he cannot
produce false identification. He either has none or his own. He hands it over
and prays. It's the computer that nails him. Or else the authorities have a neighbor
call them if he goes around the family home. It surprised me when they put
forth effort to catch me. They tried to pressure Sandy into giving me up. When
she refused to rat ("I don't know where he is," she said. "Let
me call my lawyer"), they arrested her on suspicion of burglary, hoping to
intimidate her. Instead she went from the sub-station to the Sybil Brand
women's facility in a sheriff's bus, eliciting whistles and cheers from the
male prisoners. She was the only female in the special wire cage at the front.
She wore a tight leather skirt and tighter sweater (it was the era of
outstanding breasts in upstanding bras) and opera gloves.
The Sheriff s Department really
got angry when a lawyer arrived two hours later with a writ that set bail for
Sandy followed by a bail bondsman who put it up. The real effect was to make me
far more cautious than I would have been otherwise. My false identification
would withstand anything except a fingerprint check. Back then, that could be
done only in the station house. It took three days to come back from Sacramento
or Washington, unless there was an urgency call attached to it.
A fugitive, like everyone else,
is confronted with making a living. Social Security and the computer make
legitimate employment unavailable unless you want to do something like herd
sheep in Montana. From my earlier check-passing schemes I still had several
partial batches of payroll checks. They had cooled off in the intervening
months and it was easy to find people willing to go around cashing them. It was
safe and lucrative.
I rented an apartment in
Monterey Park, a community in Los Angeles County east of the central city. The
apartment budding was on two levels, with a balcony running around the upper
level. It was shaped like a horseshoe and had a swimming pool in the center.
One night I returned to my apartment, turned the key and opened the door.
Facing me was a pair of detectives, one of them with a pistol. Instantly, even
before he could speak, I made a right pivot and took off along the balcony.
"Stop! Stop!"
someone yelled as I reached
the end of the balcony and vaulted the rail to the stairs and landing. I hit
them wrong and fell the rest of the way to the bottom, stopping my fall with my
hands. I sprained both wrists and scraped off the skin to the meat, something I
didn't notice at the time.
"Stop!" he yelled
again. I ignored the voice and headed for a low wall at the rear. Three shots
rang out, the last one as I went over the wall. I saw it kick up sparks as it
angled off the concrete. I was now in the parking lot, but I ignored my car. It
would take too long. I kept going and spent the rest of the night lying in low
bushes in front of a house while police cars cruised back and forth through the
neighborhood, their roof lights glowing and their spotlights illuminating
driveways and other possible hiding places. The bushes were so low that I had
to he flat. They were so unlikely a hiding place that they got only passing
scrutiny. As the sky turned gray with first light, it began to rain. I'd once
gotten a sort of thrill at playing fugitive, but on this particular dawn I was
a wet, miserable wanted man. They gave up the search when it was time to change
shifts.
Someone had fingered me.
Perhaps half a dozen people knew where I was staying, but I had no idea who was
my Judas. Maybe they had confided in someone else and the confidant had dialed
the phone. I now had lost my car, clothes, typewriter and another partial draft
of my second attempt at writing a novel. I had 300 soggy dollars in my pocket.
Using a hundred, I bought a '46 Ford. Another hundred went for a .32 Colt
semi-automatic pistol and a double-barreled twelve-gauge, plus a hacksaw to
shorten the barrel and cut off the handle. It looked like an eighteenth-century
pirate pistol, complete with double hammers. The last thing I did was rent a
furnished room near 7
th
Street and Alvarado, a mile west of
downtown. It cost a pre-inflation $12 a week.
Not knowing who had ratted me
off, I trusted no one thereafter except Sandy and Carlos Guitterez, AKA
"Boonie." It wasn't Sandy. She had already gone to jail rather than
rat me off; and I trusted Boonie simply because I knew his integrity. He was a
mediocre criminal mainly because he wouldn't do anything unless he was broke
and desperate for money. Indeed, most crimes are acts of desperation. God knows
how many liquor stores or gas stations have been robbed because the criminal is
desperate to pay off a traffic ticket or get the transmission fixed on his car.
Of course the single overwhelming cause of desperate crimes is the need for
money to buy drugs. Hard times make hard people, and nothing makes anyone
harder than heroin addiction or the madness of craving cocaine. At the start of
a cocaine run, nothing, not even religious ecstasy, will provide the same joy,
but soon the craving becomes obsession, the high a keening paranoia, and then
it is as awful as the depression. The black dog in the white powder consumes
the whole soul.
Most thieves steal or rob only
when poverty is fast approaching or is already at hand. I tried to avoid that
mistake. When I was a thief, it was a profession practiced twenty-four hours a
day. My eye was always looking for money or something that could be turned into
money. I never owned a Rolls Royce, or even a fancier model
Mercedes, but I usually managed
to keep a fat bankroll — if not a bank account — and a credit card or two, even
if they were bogus or stolen.
After nearly a year on the run,
they almost got me again, although they had been waiting for my pal, Denis Kanos.
We were going to meet twin sisters, whose claim to fame was having done a
Penthouse
photo spread. They were both
kind of gaunt from shooting speedballs. We were to meet them at a motel on
Sunset near the Silverlake District. Although Denis had the virtues of loyalty
and generosity, which I value more than most others, he was habitually the
latest person I ever met. If he was to meet you at seven, he might arrive at
eleven or midnight. I stopped paying attention, and went on about my business
even if he was late. On that night, however, I was with him. He was supposed to
be at the motel around 5.30. As darkness fell on that December evening, it was
9.45 when we turned the corner and saw several black and whites, roof lights
spinning bright. As we drove by, we saw the sisters in handcuffs with a female
officer. Later we learned the police had staked out the motel for Denis. They
waited and waited and got tired of waiting, so they kicked the door in. Denis's
excessive tardiness had kept us from walking into a trap.
A couple of weeks later, Denis
and I played police detectives and arrested a Compton drug dealer. It was a
nice score.
I decided to leave Los Angeles.
My only trips outside of California had been several visits to Las Vegas, which
was really no more than a distant suburb of the City of Angels, and to Tijuana,
Mexico. I wanted to see New York City and all the country between the two
oceans. It was February when I started east on Route 66, reversing the sequence
of the song. San Bernardino was first instead of last. Arizona seemed starkly
of another world at twilight, its flat mesas rising to golden orange at their
summits whde the deep purple of night gradually climbed their sides. I had to
drive slowly enough to appreciate the sight, for the Arizona highway back then
was one axle-busting hole after another.
New Mexico's portion of Route
66 was equally rough. Albuquerque had a stretch of "motor courts,"
seedy bungalows, some that were cheap facsimiles of haciendas, and one a
cluster of lath and plaster Indian teepees, something I'd expect to have seen
in the LA of my chddhood.
I stayed one night in
Albuquerque looking around the town. Nothing attracted me to remain longer, so
before first light I was on the highway, pedal to the metal. I passed without
stopping through part of the Texas panhandle, and pulled into Oklahoma City,
and it did look mighty pretty. I ran into an LA musician at an all night coffee
shop, and he knew some people around town so I stayed three weeks before
pushing on.
I should have listened to the
weather reports, for between Oklahoma City and Joplin, Missouri, the wind rose
and the snow began to fall slanting across the road. I had no chains and
skidded more than once. The cold began to seep inside, despite the car's heater
and the radio said it was snowing all the way to St Louis. I was alone in the
storm at night in the middle of America. My clothes were for Southern
California's gentle clime, where a sweater and jacket are all anyone ever
needs. I didn't own a muffler or a pair of gloves or a hat or anything like
that. I pulled to the side of the road and put on another pair of pants,
another shirt and a sweater. My hands were still freezing on the steering
wheel. I traded off, using one on the wheel and the other down between my
thighs. Needles of icy wind came through cracks in the car I didn't know
existed. The road froze in spots, first on the occasional bridge because the
cold could work on bridges from both top and bottom. Ahead were red flares and
a figure waving a flashlight. The traffic was inching past a giant tractor
trailer that had jack-knifed and fallen on its side. There were several police
cars with flashing lights alongside the road, and an ambulance arrived from the
other direction.
I slowed even more, creeping along
at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, going tense whenever I felt the tires lose
grip and the car begin to skid. Each time it straightened out. I shivered every
inch of the way.
In Joplin I saw a red neon
sign,
hotel
, through the snow. It was a
cheap hotel over a bowling alley. From the fourth floor, I could hear the
crashing rattle of tenpins below me. At least the room was warm, with hissing
steam heat, and it had a TV set. The late movie, about ancient Egypt, starred
Joan Collins as a ruthless, scheming bitch. She could have schemed on me and I
wouldn't have cared.
The snow had stopped by morning
but it blanketed everything. I went out to eat and buy some warmer clothes. In
a J.C.Penney, the salesgirl recommended long underwear. I thought only old men
wore long johns, but I bought them, plus gloves, hat and heavy coat. I carried
the packages back to the room and changed.
Now warmly dressed, I wanted to
look aroundJoplin. I'd stashed most of my money in the crack of the room's
armchair. I stuck my hand down and felt around. Gone! No, it couldn't be gone.
I felt around again. I searched the mattress, knowing it was fruitless even
whde doing it.
The despair was replaced by my
standard rage. I remembered the desk clerk's face when I went by. It had
something on it, something imperceptible at the time, but now I recognized it
as acknowledgement. I oughta shoot him, I thought, imaging my satisfaction at
his cry of pain when I shot him through a kneecap. I couldn't do that. Although
I'd used an alias, the license number was real. That could lead them to me. My
fingerprints were everywhere. No, I wouldn't shoot him, but he damn sure
deserved to be shot — or at least experience a thorough ass-kicking.
My guns were in the car trunk.
Thank God for that. Wherever I was, Joplin, Chicago, Rome, Italy or Timbuctoo,
I could always get some money if I had a pistol. I didn't even need to speak
the language. The pistol muzzle spoke a universal language: "Gimme da
money!"
I half grunted a laugh, but
inside I wanted to cry. What bad luck.
In winter darkness with
Christmas lights and decorations filling the store windows, I walked around
downtown Joplin. Everything was closed except a movie theater. I walked some
more, and came upon a bank a couple of blocks from the hotel. A bank robbery!
Good God. They would bury my young ass if they caught me robbing a bank. But I
needed money. 1 couldn't get a job. I didn't even have a Social Security
number.
Plus I didn't know how to do
anything that anybody would pay me for.
On my way back to the hotel,
the movie theater's box office was just shutting down. The marquee lights were
turned off and the manager was counting money with the cashier. I knocked on
the window. "Can I buy a ticket?"
"It started ten minutes
ago."
"That's okay."
He motioned me to enter. In the
flickering gray light, I lost myself in a mediocre story. Rock Hudson is the
handsome, straight farmer in Kenya, battling the Mau Mau uprising. In
retrospect the movie seems to me to promulgate the racist views of civilized
European farmers versus the Mau Mau savages, who wantonly slaughtered white
women and loyal native servants with big knives called pangas. At the time I
made no analysis of the political or historical implications. It was just a
story, and the viewpoint precisely as expected. Thirty years later it would be
equally predictable: the heroic rebels versus the racist oppressors. We went
from the cliche of Stepin Fetchit to the cliche of Mr T., stereotypes at
opposite ends of the spectrum. If another movie was made about the Mau Mau,
they would be the heroic freedom fighters against the white oppressors. At
least the movie relaxed me without making me think.
Back at the hotel, I was glad
that a different clerk was on duty. I fell asleep easily.
In the morning, as I walked by
the main desk, the clerk said I was overdue one day. I told him that I would be
back with what I owed, and that he should get my bill ready because I was
checking out.
Without the pressure of being
broke, I might not have had enough guts to rob my first bank. As it was, I
froze on my first pass. I went in and stopped at the counter away from the
tellers, where I began to fill out a deposit slip. I looked around, conscious
of the weight of the pistol in my waistband. A man in a business suit was
talking to a bank executive; somehow I thought he was a cop. I froze and walked
out.
An hour later, fortified by
three shots of Wdd Turkey, I walked back to the bank and to the assistant
manager's desk and told him that this was a robbery. I opened my jacket enough
to display the pistol butt. To stifle my fear I spoke with fury until I saw the
fear on his face. We walked behind the two tellers' cages and he scooped
currency from the drawers and put it in a bag. The tellers looked confused, but
one of them recognized what was going on when the assistant manager handed me
the bag. I could see that he wanted to say something, or sound the alarm, untd
I shook my head and put my hand inside my jacket.
The distance to the front door
seemed to stretch out like a road in a Salvador Dali painting. Then I hit the
door and stepped out. God, the brisk winter air felt wonderfid. I walked along
the sidewalk in front of the bank window. At the end of the budding was the
alley and when I turned into it I broke into an all-out run. Near the end, I
looked back. Empty. Nobody was following me.
Entering the hotel lobby, I
choked back my heavy breathing as I passed the clerk, giving him a littlewave.
I started to wait for the elevator, and then instead went up the stairs beside
it.
With my door locked, I dumped
the money on the bed and began to count it. It came to slighdy over $7,000.
Twenty minutes later, I was
driving out of Joplin. At a coffee shop several mdes out of town that had big
trucks with traders parked in front, I stopped for breakfast of bacon and
scrambled eggs. I knew I was in the South because I had the choice between home
fries and grits. A newspaper was on the counter,
jfk to the moon
. I brush-read the story. The handsome young President
had committed the United States to landing a man on the moon and returning him
to earth within the decade. The weather said the storm had stalled in the
Ozarks and that parking enforcement was suspended untd the roads were cleared
of snow.
Later as I sped down the black
ribbon of highway between fields of white snow, I was elated: I'd gotten away
with heisting a jug! I was from so far away that nobody would think to show my
mug shot to the victims. It would slip into the annals of unsolved crimes and
the statute of limitations expired decades ago.
Soon, however, my elation
slipped into something like the blues. It wasn't guilt, for my life experiences
had diminished that capacity. It was sadness, loneliness and the desperation of
my days. It was always a question of choice, but
how
one would choose — now there
was the rub. I had to heist the bank because I was a wanted man unable to work
and without any money. If I could have gotten money without a pistol, which was
my preference, I would have done so, but I knew nothing of Joplin, and if I stole
something saleable, I had nowhere to sell it. It seemed to me that
circumstances had funneled me into the bank robbery. What else could I do? Give
myself up. Yeah. Right.
Of course, looking back, I didn't have to jump the
fence at the county farm. I could have waited untd they took me back to the
central jail and ridden the bus back to San Quentin as a parole violator. That
was contrary to my nature. I was incapable of lying down without a fight. I had
to struggle. If I hadn't taken that ride with Billy and Al to Beverly Hills on
that summer night, all this wouldn't have happened. A square john wouldn't have
known a pair of safecrackers or, if he knew them, he wouldn't have known what
they were. I wouldn't have known them if I hadn't been to San Quentin. Had I
been to Harvard I would have known an entirely different class, but that had
been foreclosed when the sapling was bent by the winds of fortune, or
misfortune, so very long ago. Everything in life stands on what has gone
before. You do this or that because, at the moment, it seems what to do. You
are faced with this or that because of what happened somewhere earlier in your
journey of life. Who would dispute that nobody stands in a void or a vacuum?