My father said he would visit as soon as the month passed. I counted the days.
The fateful Friday arrived without my father's appearance. At recall, the ranks were thin because most boys went home for the weekend. Instead of going to the cadets' dining room, I went out the back door of the dormitory and scaled a back fence. Adventure beckoned, new experiences and, most of all, freedom. It would also punish my father, who had lied to me. He had given his solemn word and broke it.
In Long Beach I caught a red car to downtown Los Angeles. It took about forty minutes. I planned to catch a yellow number 5 or "W" car to the Lincoln Heights district, where my aunt had moved into a tiny apartment in a four-unit building. Downtown, however, had flashing movie marquees. I stopped to see a movie based on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with a quality cast, including Barry Fitzgerald as the villain. He had me fooled, faking his own death to turn suspicion away.
It was late when I came out of the movie. The old yellow streetcar was almost empty. The few passengers were in the center section, which had glass windows. I preferred to ride in the back section where the windows were open. I liked the cold air. It invigorated me then and it still does.
Aunt Eva's lights were on and my father's car was parked in front. I passed on by. I wore my military school uniform. My regular clothes were in my aunt's apartment. I decided to come back the next day when she was at work.
Several blocks away, beside a railroad bridge across the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now the Pasadena Freeway), was Welch's Industrial Laundry. I took an armload of torn, discarded bed sheets and overalls from a bin beside a loading dock and carried them to a scrap yard where old machines were turning to rust. I found a huge extractor on its side, pushed in the rags and climbed in. It was a small space and I was unable to completely extend my legs if lying down, but at least I escaped the cold night wind. Hours later I heard a humming in the ground, a sound that grew into a ground-shaking crescendo. A train was coming, and seemed as if it would run over my hideout. Its waving headlight came through every crack with blinding power as it passed about twenty feet away.
When the morning sun warmed the world, I climbed out. Every muscle in my body was cramped. One night of living on the street and my khaki uniform with the stripe down the leg was dirty enough to turn heads.
I walked to a Thrifty drugstore, planning to eat breakfast at the fountain counter. As I neared the entrance I saw a newspaper stand. The newspapers had a black border and the headlines read: ROOSEVELT DEAD.
The news stunned me. Roosevelt had been President for my entire life. He had saved America in the Depression. "He saved capitalism from itself," my father once said, which I couldn't understand back then, yet I was awed by the accomplishment. He was Commander-in-Chief in the war that still continued even though Allied armies were now marching through Germany. His voice was familiar from his Fireside Chats. Mrs Roosevelt was America's mother, and Fala, for all his Scots blood, was America's dog. The news brought tears to my eyes. I changed my mind about breakfast.
An hour later I rang Aunt Eva's doorbell to make sure she was gone. Then I went around the corner of the building where a little door opened into a compartment for the garbage can. Behind the garbage can was another little door into the kitchen. Decades would pass before bars on the windows of the poor and security systems in the homes of the wealthy became common. I opened the outer door, pushed the inner one open and squeezed through. I called out, "Aunt Eva," just in case. Nobody answered. I then went about my business.
A closet held a box with my clothes. I found a pair of Levi jeans and a shirt. In the bathroom I began filling the tub. While the water ran, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat.
The refrigerator yielded a quart of milk and loaf of bread. I moved to the toaster on the sink counter. Through a window I looked out at the house next door.
At that moment a policeman scurried across my line of sight and ducked behind a tree.
Crash! I dropped the glass and sprinted down the hall to the bathroom, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. Frantic, I pulled on the jeans and shoes, not bothering to button the former or lace the latter.
Above the bathtub was a window. I opened the window and pushed out the screen. The narrow window was twelve feet above a passage between the apartment building and the garages. As I climbed out, a policeman came around the corner below me. I jumped over his head onto the garage roof and ran to the other side. The garage ended over a brush-covered forty-foot embankment. I leaped off the roof and rolled down through weeds and bushes to the bottom.
A policeman appeared above me, looking down.
I jumped up and went over a fence beside the slanted concrete of a storm drain channel. The channel became a torrent when the rains came, but today it was a trickle three feet wide and four inches deep. I splashed through it. On the other side was another concrete wall with a far steeper angle. At its top was a fence bordering the freeway, and several feet below that was a storm drain outlet, now dry. I'd previously tried to run up the angled wall to the hole and had always fallen short. This day though I went up it like a mountain goat, disappearing into the storm drain beneath the freeway and into the city.
Half an hour later, I was two miles away on Mount Washington, huddling in a shallow cave. Rain began to darken the earth. It was a lonely moment in my young life.
Late that night, I found a bundle of the next morning's newspapers outside the door of a neighborhood market. When the morning rush began, I was on the corner of North Broadway and Daly, peddling newspapers for a nickel apiece. Twenty-five was enough to eat and go to a movie. Late at night, I made my way back to Welch's Laundry and burrowed into the rags beside the track. By the third day I was so filthy that eyes followed me when I entered the market where I'd stolen the newspapers for two nights. On the third night they weren't there. I had enough to buy milk and a candy bar, meanwhile slipping several more inside my shirt.
When it started to rain again, I climbed the slope behind my aunt's apartment building. The rain cleared the street. This time nobody was looking out a window as I pushed through the little door into the kitchen. I called out, "Aunt Eva! Aunt Eva!" No answer. The apartment was empty.
I wanted to get in and out quickly. Again I ran the bath and dug clean clothes from the box. I bathed quickly, the water turning gray from the grime in my hair, ankles, face and hands. I pulled on the clothes while still wet. When dressed, I felt a little more secure — and I was hungry.
I found some canned tuna in a dish, and put two slices of bread into the toaster for a sandwich. As I ate it, I went to see if she had some change lying around. In her bedroom, I spotted the envelopes on the dresser. Some were bills; one had an SPCA return address. It had been opened. I pulled out the letter. It was a receipt for putting my little dog to sleep. When I realized what they'd done, I think I screamed. I've had many things happen to me, but that was the greatest anguish I ever experienced. It welled through me. I choked and gasped; my chest felt crushed.
I rocked back and forth and sobbed my utter and absolute torment. Thinking of it more than half a century later still brings tears to my eyes. My aunt and father had told me the dog had a home in Pomona. Instead they had given her over to be killed because she was too much trouble. I believe that this was the moment the world lost me, for pain quickly turned to fury. How could they? She had loved them and they murdered her. If I could have killed both of them, I would have - and although a child's memories are quickly overlaid with evolving matters, I never forgave them.
Three days later, a Friday morning, I came again for a bath, clothes and food. This time my father was waiting in the shadows. He blocked the door so I couldn't run. He had to call the juvenile authorities. "Nobody else will take you. God knows I don't know what to do."
"Why don't you kill me like you killed my dog?"
"What?"
"You know what! I hate you! I'm glad I made you old."
Using the number on a business card, he start
ed to dial the phone. I moved toward the bathroom, planning to go out the window again. He put the phone down. "Stay right here."
"I gotta go to the bathroom."
Perhaps sensing my plan, he put the phone down and accompanied me. As I stood at the toilet, I saw a heavy bottle of Listerine on a shelf. I grabbed it, whirled and swung at my father's head. He managed to duck. The bottle gouged a hole in the plaster.
Twenty minutes later, two juvenile detectives arrived and took me away. By evening I was at juvenile hall on Henry Street, in the shadow of the general hospital. It was past my bedtime when they finished processing me. A tall, gangly black counselor with a loose-limbed gait escorted me through locked doors and down a long hallway to Receiving Company. The hallway floor gleamed with polish. At the end, where another hallway crossed it like a T, a different counselor sat at a desk illuminated solely by a small lamp. The black counselor handed my papers to the man at the desk. He looked them over, looked at me; then picked up his flashlight and ushered me down a hall to double doors into a ten-bed dormitory. With the flashlight beam he illuminated the empty cot.
The clean sheets felt smooth and cool. Despite my exhaustion, sleep came hard. Bright floodlights outdoors illuminated the heavy mesh wire on the windows. I was caged for the first time. When sleep finally took me, in my dreams I cried for my dog, and for myself.
I awakened among boys in a world somewhat reminiscent of John Barth's Flies. Around me were boys from Jordan Downs, Aliso Village, Ramona Gardens and other housing projects. Others came from the mean streets of Watts, Santa Barbara Avenue, East LA, Hicks Camp, and elsewhere throughout LA's endless sprawl. Most came from families without a father on hand, back then called a "broken home." If a man was around, his job was probably going to buy the heroin with the money the mother made selling herself. If she went, she could expect them to sell her lactose for heroin or, if they didn't have that, they might just take her money and cut her throat as an afterthought. It was a quid pro quo relationship between two junkies. It worked for them but wasn't conducive to raising a thirteen-year-old who was already marked with blue tattoos and the values of vatos loco (crazy guys). This was a mish-mash of young testosterone and distorted machismo and hero worship of an older brother already in la pinta.
Until now, whatever my problems may have been I had been entitled to the privileges of the bourgeois child. Now I was swimming in the meanest milieu of our society, the juvenile justice system. Hereafter I would be "state raised." Its values would become my values: mainly that might makes right, a code that accepts killing but forbids snitching. At first I was an outsider, the precociously educated white boy with the impeccable grammar. I was picked on and bullied, although that didn't last long because I would fight, even if I was slower and less strong. I could sneak up and bash a tough guy with a brick while he slept, or stab him in the eye with a fork in the mess hall. My perfect grammar and substantial vocabulary quickly changed to the patois of the underclass. For a while when I was fourteen, my English had a definite Mexican accent. I had an affinity with Mexicans or, rather, with Chicanos, with their stoic fatalism. Instead of wearing the Levi jeans that were de rigueur in suburban white high schools, I preferred the Chicano-styled surplus Marine fatigues, with huge baggy pockets along the side. Often dyed black, they were worn loose on the hips and rolled up at the bottom. That way the legs were very short and the torso was extra long. I wore a ducktail upswept along the sides, so thick with Three Flowers pomade that running a comb through it brought forth globs of grease. Pomade wasn't allowed in juvenile hall, so we stole margarine and used that. It had a rancid stench, but kept the ducktail in place.
I went all the way. My shoes had extra-thick soles added on, horseshoe taps on the heels, and other taps along the side and the toe. To run was difficult, but stomping someone was easy. My pants were "semi," which meant semi-drape, or semi-zoot suit. A zoot suit was "full drape," but they lost favor before I became concerned about style. The music I liked wasn't on the "Hit Parade". It wasn't Perry Como and Dinah Shore that thrilled me, but the sounds and the funk known along Central Avenue and in Watts — Lonnie Johnson, Bull Moose Jackson, Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Ella, Sarah and Billie, Illinois Jacquet and Big J. McNeeley on sax, with Bird as the icon of everyone who was hip.
In the four years following my arrival at juvenile hall, I moved swiftly and inexorably through the juvenile justice system. I was in juvenile hall eight times and twice went to the state hospital for observation. I talked sanely, but behaved insanely. The hospital officials weren't sure about me. I escaped at least half a dozen times, living as a fugitive on the streets. I could hot wire a car in less than a minute. Once when I escaped from the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, I stole a car. Halfway into Los Angeles, I stopped to urinate behind a Pacific Outdoor sign. When I got underway again, I failed to turn on the headlights. In San Gabriel a police car parked at a corner flashed his headlights. I knew it wasn't a command to pull over, but I had no idea what it was. They pulled in behind me. I watched in the mirror. When the red lights flashed, I punched the gas. During the ensuing chase, they fired a couple of shots. I could feel the heavy slugs hit the car. One made a spider web pattern in the windshield. I ducked way down, my head below the dash. I opened the driver side door and followed the white line in the middle of the street, confident that anyone ahead would see flashing lights and hear the screaming siren and get out of the way. I glanced over the dashboard. Oh shit! I was coming upon a T corner. I had to turn right or left. I hit the brakes and tried to turn. The car jumped the curb onto a wet front lawn. It might as well have been ice as it skidded sideways and crashed through a front window into a living room. They had their guns trained on me before I could crawl from the wreckage.
Back at Nelles, they put me in the punishment cottage. It was run with the harsh discipline of a Marine disciplinary barracks. The Man took a dislike to me. One morning he thought I was shirking work so he threw a dirt clod that hit me in the back of the head. It flew to pieces and gave no injury, except to my ego. I looked at him and the anger showed. "You don't like it, Bunker?" he challenged. With him he had two other counselors and three "monitors," boys used as goons against their own.
I maintained control but seethed inside. We went in for lunch (part of the punishment was to have the same menu seven days a week. Every lunch was stew.) When the Man went by my table, I called his name. He turned and I threw the bowl of stew in his face. Up jumped the monitors. I'd recently lost a fight to just one of them. Against three, plus the Man, it was no contest. They dragged me from the mess hall, down three staircases and along a hallway to the isolation cell at the rear, kicking and punching me all the way. When I was locked in the cell, the Man turned a fire hose on me. The bars diminished some of the force, but it was still enough to cut my legs out from under me and slide me up against the wall.
An hour later the Man came to gloat at my battered face and drenched body. "You look like a wet cat." His lip curled in a sneer. "You won't be throwing things for a while."
Down low, hidden by my body, I held a flattened roll of wet toilet paper with a pile of shit on top. While his sneering declaration was still in the air, I hurled the roll of toilet paper and the shit against the bars. It broke apart and splattered his clothes and his face and the wall behind him. He was so insane with rage that another man would not open the gate for him.
That night they took me out the back door, put me in a car and sent me to Pacific Colony state hospital near Pomona. Pacific Colony was primarily for the retarded, but it took some ninety-day observation cases from the Youth Authority. Its one locked ward was the most brutal place I've ever been. Even that far back, if the savage realities of the place had been exposed, it would have caused a scandal. Most of my time was spent in the day room sitting on the benches that lined three sides. Each bench had four names written on tape. We sat in silence with our arms folded. Any whispering and an attendant walking on crepe soles behind the benches might k
nock you to the floor. The fourth side of the day room had cushioned wicker chairs. Four of them were on a raised dais where the attendants sat. Their goons used the chairs at floor level.
For entertainment, the attendants staged fights between patients. Disputes were settled that way, or else the attendants acted as matchmakers. The winner got a pack of cigarettes.
One favored punishment was "pulling the block." The "block" was a slab of concrete that weighed about a hundred pounds. Wrapped in layers of old wool blanket it had two eye hooks that fastened to a wide, flat canvas harness about ten feet long. The composite tile floor in a long side hall was smeared in thick paraffin wax and the blanket-wrapped block was pulled up and down the hall twelve hours a day. One Chicano from La Colonia in Watts was on "the block" for thirty days for getting high on phenobarbital.
The most brutal punishment was hanging someone by the hands from the overhead ventilation ducts. The miscreant wasn't actually lifted off the floor, but he had to stand on the balls of his feet, or let the weight fall on his arms and wrists. After ten minutes it was torture. In fifteen the victim was usually screaming. The attendants preferred old-fashioned beatings. Maybe they liked the workout it gave them. Knowing that I only had a ninety-day observation case, I tried to remain inconspicuous. One night about two months into my sojourn, I was standing at my window, looking across the grounds. A hundred yards away was a female ward. A youth named Pee Wee in the next room was yelling out the window to his girlfriend. The attendant in charge at night was named Hunter but he was called Jabber. Unknown to me, he was hurrying from door to door, peering through the little observation window to catch anyone who dared to yell across the nuthouse grounds at night.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 3
