Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade

by Edward Bunker

  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 wine 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.

  At ten the next morning, I was taken to a disciplinary hearing. Captain Nelson was the hearing officer. I'd been hoping for the Associate Warden, who shared the duty. If I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck. Half a dozen other young inmates were standing in a line, also pending disciplinary court. The guard took me past them, tapped on the door and opened it a few inches to peer inside.

  He must have gotten the nod, for he opened the door wide for me to enter.

  Captain L.S. "Red" Nelson was behind the desk. It was our first conversation since my arrival. I'd seen him on the yard a couple of times; and I veered away to avoid his sight.

  "Here you are, Bunker. I knew I'd see you. I see you went into winemaking."

  I said nothing. What was there to say? Moreover, I had no wish to gossip with Captain Nelson even in the best of times.

  "... think you're a tough guy," he was saying. "You wouldn't be a pimple on those guys' asses." He was talking about Alcatraz, where he'd worked before coming to the California Department of Corrections. He told me about being locked in a cell with six other guards, while three badass bank robbers from Oklahoma and Kentucky emptied a .45 into the cell. Nelson had survived without a wound. It made him somehow fearless.

  "Anyway," he said after he finished his reminiscence, "You're charged with D 1215, Inmate Behavior. On or about September 23rd, you put four gallons of home-made alcoholic beverage in the library fire extinguisher. How do you plead?"

  "Not guilty. Nobody caught me with any home brew."

  "We don't have to. Both library clerks said it was yours. So find you guilty. You are sentenced to ten day's isolation, plus I'm raising your custody to maximum and putting you in administrative segregation. Review your status in six months."

  Six months! In segregation. It was lockup twenty-three hours a day. The difference between isolation and segregation was that segregation had some privileges - books and canteen and other trivial things that become important when there is nothing else. I could handle it, but six months was out of proportion to my little transgression. Making home brew was minor in the scheme of things. Segregation was long-term lockup for stabbing someone, or trying to escape. Nelson was looking at me with a sneer, as if to say, You don't like it, punk? I restrained the urge to turn his desk over. He waved me out. The guard opened the door for me. "One to isolation," he said to the guard in the hallway.

  The guard in the hallway had me sit down as they prepared the lockup order. The buzzer sounded. The guard beckoned the next inmate. When he came out, the inside guard announced, "Thirty days' loss of privileges."

  The buzzer sounded again. The hallway guard turned to open the door for inmate number three. In the moment that his back was turned, I stood up and walked out. Until I made the corner and turned I expected a voice to yell, "Hold it, Bunker." Nobody said anything.

  Outside the custody office, I headed for the
big Quonset hut gymnasium where I knew a knife was stashed. It was too small to be called a shiv. The blade was only two inches long and it had a round point. It would cut, but stab not at all.

  After picking up the knife, I went toward the library, planning to attack one or both of those who had ratted on me. Five guards with night sticks came around the corner as the public address system began calling me for a visit. That was absurd. I never got visits.

  1 would never reach the library, but I would play the hand out. I turned the corner between dormitories and headed for the yard. Close behind me came the crunch of footsteps on gravel. I started to turn and was instantly hit by a tackle worthy of an NFL linebacker. I was on my back and he was on top of me. He grabbed at the knife and got the blade. I jerked it away and sliced his palm open. Something hit me a sharp blow on the head: I thought it was a rock. When it came again, I saw it was the fat Sergeant with a sap.

  Guards piled on, snatching, punching, kicking. Around them a circle of inmates had formed. Someone yelled, "Get off him . . . you cowardly ..."

  "Not here! Not here!" yelled a voice of authority, wanting no witnesses.

  They dragged me by the legs, my back scraping on gravel and asphalt, across the prison to "the block," a small building of ten cells used as the hole. Once inside they went crazy. I was lucky there were ten, for they impeded each other as they rained kicks and punches down on me. Three would have been better for them. I coiled my knees high, my forearms covering my face.

  They cursed and stomped. An attack on one was an attack on all. Kill a convict and nobody got angry, but assaulting a guard was sacrilege.

  One guard made a mistake. When he bent over, looking for a place to put his fist in my face, it brought him closer. I lunged up with both feet, uncoiling my body for added force and hit him flush in the face. It sat him down.

  They grabbed my legs, one on each, two more grabbed my upper body and they lifted me high and slammed me down on the concrete floor. It made me cry out. "Again," someone said. I hey did it several times.

  Finally, they tore off my clothes and dumped me in an empty cell. One paused to leave me with the comment: "I'll bet you won't assault another officer."

  My retort was silent but true: "I've just begun to fight."

  Without a mirror, I had to use my fingers to assess the damage. There was a big lump on the back of my head where it hit the floor. My scalp had a gash from the sap. Blood ran down my cheek and neck and caked on my shoulders and chest. It had been a savage beating, but not as bad as at Pacific Colony. All things considered, I was in good shape — and not ready to quit.

  An hour or so later, an inmate was mopping the walkway outside (he cells. I had him give me the mop. I put the handle in the bars and snapped it off in the middle, took off the mop head and bent the frame prongs out so it vaguely resembled a pick or a mattock. Then I reached around the bars and stuffed splinters of wood in the big lock.

  Soon a guard peeked around the corner. "You don't quit, do you?"

  "Not yet."

  He gave a tsk-tsk and shook his head. Then I heard him making i phone call but couldn't hear what he said. Half an hour later, he peeked around the corner again. "The Captain's on his way and he's got something for you."

  I heard the outer door open and Captain Nelson's voice. He and a small-boned sergeant named Sparling came around the corner. Both of them had gas masks around their necks. Captain Nelson had a tank strapped to his back and a wand-sprayer in his hand. It looked as if he was going to spray plants with insecticide. "Hand it over, Bunker."

  "Come and get it."

  "Okay." He smiled and pulled the gas mask over his face. Sergeant Sparling did the same. The Captain raised the wand and sent forth a wet spray. What the . . .

  When spray touched my bare skin, I felt on fire, as if the spray was gasoline set afire. I later learned it was liquid tear gas. At the time, I thought it was killing me. I threw away the mop handle, rolled on the floor and tried to run up the wall. I behaved like a fly acts when hit with fly spray. My eyes burned and ran. It was terrible. Inmates in nearby cells were screaming in torment.

  Nobody could be left for more than a few minutes in such a concentration of tear gas. They started to unlock the cell but the wood splinters in the lock stopped them. It was hard for them to see behind the gas masks. By the time they got it open, the worst of the gas had settled. It still burned, but far less.

  "Raise your hands and back out," Captain Nelson said. He stood to one side of the gate, the Sergeant to the other.

  I backed out, with my hands up. As soon as I cleared the gate, I reached out with my right hand and pulled the Sergeant's mask off and punched him with my left hand. Down he went.

  Captain Nelson jumped on my back, trying to choke me down, but I managed to lunge and spin around and slam him into the bars.

  The Sergeant scrambled up and ran outdoors where a squad of guards without gas masks was waiting. Meanwhile, Captain Nelson and I were throwing punches in the corridor outside the cells, both of us with snot running from our noses and tears from our eyes. His gas mask was askew and he looked ridiculous.

  A herd of guards cursed me. With the tear gas burning their eye, they dragged me outdoors. Behind us the other convicts were yelling for respite. I was naked in the burning desert sun. I stood under a gun tower and they took up positions surrounding me at a distance of ten feet or so. The asphalt was so hot that I had to dance from foot to foot. It must have been a weird sight, a naked fifteen-year-old dancing in front of guards with watering eyes. Before he left, Captain Nelson had someone get me a towel to stand on. I had a tan over most of my body, so I didn't burn but my ass had never been exposed to the sun, much less the afternoon desert sun.

  An hour or so later a station wagon pulled up. A lieutenant got out and handed me a set of khakis. When I was dressed, they handcuffed me, put me in the screened-off back seat and drove me out the back gate. I asked where we were going. They wouldn't tell me, but when they took a right turn instead of a left, I knew we were heading toward the LA County Jail.

  The Los Angeles County Jail was on the tenth through fourteenth Moor in the Hall of Justice at the corner of Broadway and Temple Streets. When the correctional lieutenant handed me over to the booking officer, he gave him a sheet of paper. The report said that I had been arrested under Section 4500 of the California Penal Code. Section 4500 states that any inmate serving a life sentence who commits an assault able to cause great bodily harm is to be sentenced to the gas chamber. There was no alternative. The life sentence, according to California Supreme Court decisions, also includes indeterminate sentences — one year to Life or five years to Life. Actually I came under Section 4500, subsection B. The subsection wasn't mentioned on the papers. The booking officer asked me how old I was. I told him I was nineteen. With a shrug, he assigned me to 10-A-l, also known as "high power." It was the special security tank for men facing the gas chamber, cop killers and notorious murderers.

  Most prisoners are moved in groups, or sometimes sent places in the jail on their own, but high-power inmates are moved under escort one at a time. Being in high power gives one a certain cachet in the topsy-turvy world of underworld values. It usually takes from eight to twelve hours to get through the booking process. In groups, everyone has to wait for all the others to finish each step of the procedures before moving on. I was moved ahead of everyone else. First the booking office, next to the Bertillion Room where they took mug photos and several sets of fingerprints.

  Copies were sent to Sacramento and to the FBI in Washington. I was showered, sprayed with DDT (this was before Silent Spring) and given jail denim to dress in. A medical technician had me "skin it back and squeeze it down," to see if I had gonorrhea. He quickly looked at my bruises then pronounced me fit. After gathering a blanket and a mattress cover, inside of which was an aluminum cup and spoon, a deputy led me through the maze of the jail to the tenth floor next to the Attorney Room, where high power was located by itself. During
the walk, we passed walls of bars, inside of which were walkways outside of cells. The jail was crowded. Most cells had four or five occupants. Even the tank trusty in the first cell had three. The cell gates were open and the men were out on the runway, walking or playing cards. As I went by one tank, someone said, "Who'd he kill? He's just a kid."

  The tanks were racially segregated for the most part. One exception was the "queens'" tank. With towels wrapped like turbans around their heads, jail shirt tails tied at the bottom like blouses, makeup ingeniously concocted from God knows what, jeans rolled up and skin tight, they were all flamboyant parodies of women. Spotting me, as I walked with the guard along the length of their tank, they hurried along beside us. "Put him in here, deputy! We won't hurt him." The deputy snorted and quipped: "All we'd find is his shoelaces." "What's your name, honey?" I didn't reply. "Who'd you kill, kid?" "If you go to the joint, I'll be your woman — and kill anybody that fucks with you." I said nothing. It was a loser to exchange quips with queens; their tongues were too sharp, their wit too biting. Needless to say, I had no worries about anyone fucking me. I was no white bread white boy. If someone said something wrong, or even looked wrong, my challenge would be quick, and if the response was less than a swift apology, I would attack forthwith without further words.