When it was time to leave (one drink), I drove around to the alley, Manny went out the back, and when I braked he put a long flower box into the back seat.
“What’s that?” Allison asked.
“None of your business,” I said, but patted her cheek to soften the rebuke.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll learn. I’m just a curious bitch.”
“Remember what happened to Pandora.”
“Whatever you’re doing, please be careful.” She wrapped her hands around my biceps in possessive affection.
We were in bed before midnight. A television set at the foot of the bed was showing the late movie; we were too busy to watch. The second lovemaking was even better than the first, less awkward, and again the chaos of my life was washed away in lovemaking. There was only the hour of joy, the room, her body, and hands.
“Come for me, daddy … come for me,” she chanted, her breath hot in my ear.
In the morning I found that I had $407.00 left from the market robbery. The pressure wouldn’t let up for very long. Now, however, I had what it took to get money: two good crime partners and an automatic weapon.
12
CHRONOLOGICALLY, the events of the next ten days are difficult to recall. They were hectic, but no more than is usual in a thief’s unregulated life. I know what happened, but not in precisely what sequence, nor do I remember many details. The utter clarity of memory that existed when I was first released now disappeared in the warp of life. Jerry and Aaron sniffed warily at each other during the first two meetings, but respect grew between them. Neither of them became as close with each other as each was with me. I was not the “leader” of the gang, but I was the unifying factor, the cohesion.
Aaron never met Carol, for Jerry wanted to avoid flaunting anything that might upset her. Allison and Carol, however, met during an afternoon visit and immediately became friends. They began phoning each other daily, and Allison visited her at least two or three times a week, taking her shopping or to the beauty parlor. Allison thought Carol looked only slightly ill, but Allison had never known her before onslaught of the disease. To me, Carol looked frightening. Her face had become dreadfully sallow, bloated from fluids, especially around the eyes. This was from the medicine rather than the disease, according to Jerry.
Once we tried going out to dinner together, but the night out was unsuccessful because Carol became totally exhausted. Her weekly transfusion of blood—and energy—had been given five days before. The disease had already consumed it and she had no strength. “It makes me feel like Dracula’s daughter,” Carol said, but the levity fell like lead; she was the only one who managed to chuckle.
Allison had given two weeks’ notice to her employer, but was still going to work in the morning, so Jerry, Aaron, and I usually met at the hillside apartment. Aaron was usually there anyway, especially during the day. The furnished room, though much nicer than usual for the genre, was still unbearably confining and dreary. Aaron had good identification, identifying him as a dentist. It was his policy to be indoors before midnight, but other than that he moved freely, using my car as if it was his own, especially in the evenings when Allison’s was available to me. He’d go off into the world of blackness. He met his family, but in out-of-the-way places. He knew the police would concentrate on watching the family and known associates of any seriously wanted fugitive. He’d found an exgirlfriend—though time had atrophied whatever romance might have existed. She was merely a receptacle for sexual hunger. He mentioned her, gave me her telephone number in case I needed to contact him, but he foreclosed any meeting, and vetoed Allison’s idea of a double date. The veto, I sensed, had something to do with race; maybe on the girl’s part. No matter how sincere our friendship, something would inevitably stir up the issue of race. It was an ineradicable fact.
And while these things were going on, we were looking for a bank to rob. It would appear at first glance that finding a bank would be a simple matter, considering that Southern California has several hundred of them in its sprawl. We were interested entirely in Bank of America branches because in prison I’d been given information about their security procedures. The information was of untested reliability, but it was something to start with. The first fact proved true: there were no armed security guards. Not that a security guard, per se, makes any difference. He’s generally an old man, and even if he’s Wyatt Earp, what can he do with a holstered revolver when an automatic rifle is pointed at his chest?
Bank of America’s main defense was the movie camera, which brought havoc to barefaced bandits who handed notes to tellers and appeared in living color on television that evening. Cameras would be harmless to men with hoods and high gloves. According to my information, employees were not supposed to try setting off an alarm until it was absolutely safe. The bank frowned on a gun battle. True or not, we worked on the assumption that an alarm would be sounding the moment we started the robbery. Speed was our counter weapon—get in and out within a matter of minutes. We wouldn’t have time to get the vault. That left the tellers and what was lying around loose. The bad part was that the average teller has no more than a thousand dollars or so, hardly worthwhile, especially when some of it would be “bait” money, bills with recorded numbers kept specifically for being mixed with other money when a bandit called.
Some branches, however, had a special teller for commercial accounts. This teller was usually in a semiprivate location, but with no more real protection than any other—and commercial tellers have between fifteen and twenty thousand minimum, a nice cornerstone for a robbery. It was what we were looking for, the problem being that most branches with such tellers were in metropolitan areas unsuitable for a robbery—too crowded on the getaway.
I looked for such a bank every day, but not with an unrelenting diligence. Rather, I was like a tourist exploring Southern California—and looking at banks incidental to lounging in dim cocktail lounges, bullshitting with ex-convicts and whores, or wandering through parks in outlying communities. Sometimes Aaron went with me. Jerry was doing the same in the northern and western regions of the megalopolis.
Aaron and I stopped on the way to Pomona, at Willy Darin’s. Aaron wanted a ten-dollar balloon of heroin and I wanted a pound of marijuana. Willy was home watching the boys when we arrived. Selma was working in a toy company. Willy had been fired from his job and had devastated his car on a telephone pole when the brakes went out. From the wreck he’d also gotten a traffic summons for driving without a license. When he went to court it would come out that his license was revoked.
Willy was unruffled by his predicament. He’d used his personal miracle drug to erase concern. I gave him a hundred dollars to buy another junk automobile so he would have transportation. It left me with less than a hundred and made me more diligent in looking for a bank to rob.
The one we decided upon was part of a colossal shopping center in Anaheim. There were two department stores, an immense drugstore, a supermarket the size of a warehouse, and many large retail businesses. The shopping center and its acres of parking covered a square mile. It was so new that construction crews were steamrolling blacktop on its fringes, and some stores had yet to open for business.
The bank was on one end, low-slung, ultra-modern. Its facade was designed to allow the maximum of light while surrendering the minimum of privacy. It had a commercial teller, isolated from the others. I got in line to ask a question and confirmed that there were stacks of hundred dollar bills in a drawer literally filled with green currency.
There were two entrances, one on the side, opening onto the wide parking lot. The side door was small, set into an alcove. Someone would have to cover that door, which was out of sight from the front door. It meant that all three of us would have to go in, leaving nobody at the wheel. One of us would step inside the front door, move to the side and wheel out the M16. All of us would have full hoods over our faces. The second man would vault the rail and start cleaning the commercial teller. If he got that d
one quickly he could clean the others, too. The third man would wait near the side entrance. We figured two minutes inside gave us plenty of leeway. A man can scoop a lot of money in two minutes.
The man by the side door would leave first, be in the car as we came out. We’d throw a smoke bomb for greater cover. A stolen car would carry us down a semirural road for one mile, and a private dirt road through orange groves to where we changed cars. We’d come out of the private road (which wouldn’t be on street maps) on a major boulevard five hundred yards from a freeway entrance. The police would never anticipate us being in that position from the direction we’d been using.
Once we’d found the right bank, the robbery went quickly. We visited the bank for three days, drew straws for our roles—I got the M16 and Jerry was to go over the rail. Aaron would watch the second door and drive the car. On the next afternoon, at 1:55, we heisted it, using pillowslips with eyeholes for masks. Half the employees were gone for lunch, and half of those who remained weren’t aware that a robbery was in progress until it was practically over—when Jerry came over the rail carrying a sack of money and someone yelled at him. Jerry pointed a pistol at the man and the yell was stifled. We were in the bank for two minutes and forty-one seconds.
At 2:45 we were squatting on the floor of the hillside apartment, hurrying to finish counting and dividing the loot before Allison came home. Piles of money and discarded bank wrappers covered the floor. The total was thirty-two thousand, which was ten thousand more than I’d expected. All of us were jubilant and relieved.
“We could’ve got more if we’d knocked out the alarm,” Jerry said, stating a fact rather than a complaint.
“We’ll have that next time,” I said, meanwhile stacking my share in a shoebox—as good a place as any.
“This might be enough for me,” Aaron said.
“Motherfucker,” Jerry said, throwing a playful headlock around Aaron’s neck, “you can’t quit now. Get a few nickels and fold, huh? This is the easiest shit in the world—money from home.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said. “We’re not hurting. We can take time to decide what to do. Remember there’s bait money in there, so don’t spend any big chunks in one spot. Change it over first.”
“Man, I know all that,” Jerry said.
“I worry about you, fool.”
“And I love you, jive ass motherfucker.”
We were indeed very happy.
13
IN the weeks after the bank robbery, countless things happened, some good, some bad, some exhilarating, others depressing or infuriating. But now, distilling them, I see that it totalled the most nearly happy period of my life, tainted solely by awareness of how precarious it was. The nexus of this happiness was Allison. My enjoyments were more fulfilled because we shared them, and the unpleasant, ugly things were soothed by her presence. Love was never mentioned. The feeling was not one of fiery passion. It burned softly. We were comfortable together. It was an end to loneliness.
Allison never knew of the bank robbery, though the sudden upswing of fortune was impossible to hide, especially when I’d bitched and grumbled about lack of money. By simply neglecting to mention the money I hid it for a few days, and this was long enough to cover its origin. One day’s coverage was all a bank robbery got—on an inside page of the Los Angeles Times and thirty seconds on the 10:00 P.M. television news. If Allison saw either, the information passed through one ear and out the other. She first realized that I had some money on Saturday, the morning following her last day of work. I went to buy myself clothes, and she went along to give me advice and counsel, for she knew styles better than I did. When she saw what I was spending she arched an eyebrow and made a wry comment that I must have visited a Mexican gold mine. She thought I was involved in narcotics traffic, but limited her curiosity to that single oblique comment. She’d so thoroughly and so quickly learned to ask no questions that I might have confided in her—if I’d been alone. I had no right to entrust Jerry and Aaron’s well-being to her, which is what I’d have been doing if I confided.
Thereafter, we fell into a life that was a long vacation.
It was the summer’s end and we spent many afternoons at the beach. She was deeply tanned, golden with flecks of freckles, especially around the shoulders. She lay soaked in oil, basking with transistor radio and book. I’d bought her Siddhartha and she was entranced by Herman Hesse, though some of what he said depressed her. I never understood how she could read with acid rock belching from the nearby radio. My pallor burned, peeled, and finally darkened to a respectable Southern California hue. On Allison’s advice—plus looking around—I let my hair grow longer than at any time since early teens and zoot suits, and wore more colorful clothes. She talked me out of growing a beard.
Days and nights were leisured. We browsed in musty bookstores and silent museums, or sat in parks smoking grass and watching children romp on carpets of sunny lawn. My anger at life and society never went out, but it dimmed. When I thought of how fragile this interlude was, how doomed (I was still a wanted man, still committed to further crimes), it hurt. The pangs came swift and unexpected, leaping to mind at Santa Anita when my horse won with fifty on his nose and I should have been exuberant. It came while we were laughing in Disneyland, and while we were in a discotheque being bombarded with mind-swarming sound.
Despite the spasms of foreboding, life was good. A Las Vegas weekend stretched into six relaxed days because we were enjoying ourselves and nothing required that we leave. I won eight hundred dollars at the dice table the first night; it was the only night we gambled. The way I lived was enough of a gamble to satiate that craving. The town was overflowing with entertainers and floor shows we wanted to see, and during the day we went horseback riding into the desert, or speedboating on Lake Mead. Jerry and Carol joined us for the last two days. Carol was losing weight and Jerry whispered in drunken, frightened confidence that the doctors were considering slicing off her breasts. I phoned Aaron and invited him to fly over. He declined without giving a reason, but lily-white Las Vegas is hardly the safest town for an escaped Negro lifer.
When we returned to Los Angeles, I mailed half a dozen bright picture postcards of the casino-hotels to friends in prison, knowing the token of remembrance would be appreciated.
Occasionally, when I was driving alone, I resented being happy, resented having found things that I cared about. I was enjoying life too much, was making things too precious, especially when it had to end. Had I lawfully reached my situation, a nice automobile (but not new), a decent wardrobe (but not a closet of silk suits and alligator shoes), a comfortable dwelling (but not a penthouse), and a woman whom I liked, nothing in the world could have induced me to risk losing it by committing a crime. I would have worked my ass off. Of course that was wishful thinking in the face of reality. And when it came down to truth—I didn’t know how to do anything but steal.
I resented thinking about such things, for the only way I could cease being a fugitive was to become a prisoner, a Hobson’s choice if there ever was one. Like everyone else, I could squirm and move around the boundaries of destiny prepared for me—and by me—but I could never go beyond.
“I’ve got to tear off another score,” Jerry said. “Whether it’s that jewel sting or another jug … with you dudes or Single O. It takes a millionaire to keep paying for blood transfusions.”
Aaron shook his head slowly, refuting Jerry’s desperate twang. Aaron soothed without condescension. “Cool it, brother. I’ll loan you a couple rather than have you run wild into something.”
Jerry looked down, abashed. He shook his head. “I don’t need it right now. But if we don’t crank something up in the next few weeks I’ll be hurting. I’m gonna fail Carol, no matter what.”
“They’re not going to quit giving her blood and let her die. Run up a bill.”
“They’ll want credit references, all that bullshit. Blood we can get in the county hospital, and if I can’t show them money or whe
re it’s coming from, that’s where they’ll wanna send her.”
“Yeah, you damn sure can’t show them where it’s coming from. But we’ll have something, don’t worry. My bankroll’s getting thin too.”
It was true. Just two months ago we’d rushed from the bank with a shopping bag full of money. I had twelve hundred dollars left. Aaron probably had half his money, for being a fugitive required that he live in inconspicuous frugality. Actually, Jerry probably had more, too, but his expenditures were unavoidable and ongoing, whereas I could pull back from high living and not be forced into a caper for months. Desperation crimes, however, are bad business, for desperation blinds judgment. From my view as well as Jerry’s it was best to pull a heist soon. Aaron and Jerry knew about Gregory’s, and during the week we’d each looked at it separately. I’d gone in with Allison, ostensibly to price engagement rings, but really to look the place over. I’d also checked the manager out. His name was Jules Neissen. He was married, lived in Topanga Canyon, had a wife and an eight-year-old daughter.
Now we were conferring in a plush, dim steakhouse on the coast highway. A steakhouse with beamed ceilings and walls paneled in rich dark wood. I’d reserved a choice table beside a huge window that overlooked the ocean surf as it pounded jutting rocks. The restaurant had been a favorite place of mine before prison. It had changed very little. We talked over filet and lobster. Though the conversation sometimes wandered to include the recent World Series and the looming elections, our real interest was another robbery. We got serious about it over coffee and pie.
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