Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (6 page)

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.

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.

Bang! He was dead. With a snap of the fingers! He was
history, too. That night after the lights were out, I lay on my upper bunk,
listening to the night sounds, creaking bed springs, wordless whispers and
choked laughter — and I thought about those two dead young Chicanos. They died
fighting over a sissy and pure machismo. To many in the world, my behavior was
chaos for the sake of chaos. You probably could have gotten good odds that I
would not live into my sixth decade, much less seem likely to reach my seventh.

Now I'd seen a double killing and it was a serious
shock. Although I made no conscious decision, and my behavior would continue to
be wild and erratic, thereafter I always had something that stopped me on the
brink of the precipice. I would never go, and have never gone,
mano a mano
with knives. I wanted real victory,
not a Pyrrhic version.

For
three months I managed to avoid the hole and I had just two fistfights. One was
with an Indian named Andy Lowe, whom I'd known since juvenile hall. We were in
the dorm, body punching. Body punching is a bare-knuckle boxing match except
that no punches are aimed at the head. Andy could whip me when we were young,
but no longer. When he tensed to punch, I rammed a left jab in his chest,
stopping him so I could pivot away. He was missing every time he punched. He
didn't appear to be angry, so when a fist slammed against my head, I thought it
was a slip. Such things do happen.

Then two more bony fists thudded into my face — and
there was no "sorry." When he tried again, instead of putting the jab
in his chest, I rammed it into his nose. The fight was on.

Someone yelled, "
The
Man!'
Immediately we broke apart and the spectators dispersed to their
bunks. The guard sensed something amiss, but was unable to decide what it was.

The other fight was with a Chicano, Ghost de Fresno.
I'd once had a fight with his younger brother in Preston. Ghost took up the
cudgel. Cottages that had once been bachelor officers' quarters for the
Canadian Air Force were now privileged housing, three to each cottage, and that
was where we went to fight. Although I was getting the best of it, I could feel
my stamina fast slipping away. It was always my weakness. Luckily someone again
yelled, "The
Man!"
I dove under a
bunk, but Ghost tried to get away. The cottages were out of bounds unless
assigned. He was taken to the holding cell for investigation. They never found
out who was his opponent. Because several inmates had been stabbed since the
double killing, they didn't want to risk returning him to the general
population. At twenty-one he was older than average, plus he'd been committed
by the Superior Court after a valid conviction, so he could be transferred to
San Quentin. And that is what happened. They put him on a bus and sent him
north, which was fine with me.

Because I had nobody to send me $12 a month, the
amount then allowed for cigarettes and other amenities, I had to find some sort
of income I went into the home brew business. Each gallon required a pound of
sugar, a pinch of yeast and any of several things for mash to ferment
:
tomato puree, crushed oranges or orange juice,
raisins, prunes
,
even chopped-up potatoes. Mixed
together, they start to ferment immediately. You have a drink that tastes like
beer and
w
ine
poured
together that has about 20 percent alcohol. Yeast
and
sugar
were bought from a
thieving culinary worker, despite the facts that the free cooks watched
closely, and that the bread all came
out
flat. The
difficult part of the whole process was finding places to hide the brew while
it fermented. It was bulky and it smelt. It could not be airtight because the
fermenting process made it swell. I used one hiding place that I would use
again: the fire extinguishers. Each was fitted with a rubber liner sewn from an
inner tube by a convict in the tailor shop. Each would hold about four gallons.
A quart of brew cost five packs of Camels, and customers ordered ahead of time.
In about a month I had five fire extinguishers continually fermenting, and I
was rich by prison standards. Actually, all I had was a whole lot of tobacco,
although it would buy whatever else was for sale within the fences.

Three months went by. I'd never gone a single month
without going to the hole since my first day in juvenile hall. My bubbling fire
extinguishers were everywhere — on the Quonset hut gym wall, two in the
dormitory, one in the library, one in the hospital
j
corridor.
I spent my time either gathering the ingredients, mixing the concoction and
putting it up — or taking it down and wholesaling it by the gallon. It made
time go faster.

Then
one day, a library wastebasket caught on fire. The librarian reached for the
fire extinguisher and got a foul-smelling home brew. Captain Nelson was red
hot. He told the library clerks to snitch or ride the bus to San Quentin. One
of them snitched me off. After count but before dinner release, two guards came
to the dormitory door, spoke to the guard and came down the center aisle
between the sagging cots. I knew they wanted me the moment they came in,
although I waited for the crooked finger to make it official.

I grabbed a jacket, a pack of cigarettes and matches
and the book I was reading,
Gone With The Wind.
I knew I was going to the holding cell. It wasn't the hole. The holding cell was
where you went until the disciplinary hearing. It was five in the afternoon.
The lights would be on until 10.30 or eleven. What was I supposed to do all
night? Read
Gone With The Wind
, that's what.