Read Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Online
Authors: Edward Bunker
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (3 page)
Mrs Bosco had kept two truly demented boys, or young
men up there. No doubt she had been handsomely paid to keep them out of sight.
One I remember was just slightly gaunt and freckled. The other, named Max, had
thick black hair and heavy black facial hair. Max used to come down to unload
the station wagon when Mrs Bosco returned from buying provisions. He was strong.
He was obsessed with rending his clothes: they hung in rags across his torso,
and in strips down his legs. He would rip up a new pair of Levi's if he was
goaded. All you had to do was stare at him and tell him, "Max, bad boy!
Bad boy, Max!" and he would start passionately rending his clothes.
She had no permit for these two. And the fire had
illuminated their presence to the authorities. Even if she managed to finance
roof repair, she was closed down. It was the only place I'd gotten along, even
marginally.
I wanted to say, "Let me stay with you," but
the words were choked back. What I wanted was impossible and only agitated him
when I brought it up. His standard reply was that he had to work nights; there
was nobody to look after me and I was too young to look after myself.
He turned and looked at me closely. "Are you
crazy?" he asked.
"I don't think so."
"You sure act crazy sometimes. I thought
everything was great with Mrs Bosco—"
"It is great, Pop."
"No it isn't . . . not when I find you've been
roaming the city all night. You're nine years old, for Christ's sake."
"I'm sorry, Pop." It was true; my sorrow for
his anguish was painful.
"You say that, but... it only gets worse . . .
Sometimes I think about starting the car with the garage door closed."
I knew what that meant, and from some source within me
came a Catholic canon: "If you do that, you'll go to hell, won't
you?"
Even in his despair, he swelled with scorn. "No,
I won't. There's no hell. . . and no heaven either. Life is here. Reward is
here. Pain is here. I don't know very much . . . but that much I know for
sure." He paused, then added: "You'll remember this won't you?"
He held my arm above the elbow and stared at me.
I nodded. "I'll remember, Pop."
I have remembered, and although I've searched
everywhere for a refutation, the facts of existence affirm the dismal truth of
his declaration. The only way to deny it is to make a leap of faith across the
chasm of reality. That I cannot do. Whatever else I've done, flagrantly and
repeatedly and without apology, violating every rule that blocked whatever it
was I wanted, I have tried to sift kernels of truth from tons of chaff
bullshit. Truth is the distilled meaning of facts, for any truth refuted by a
fact becomes a fallacy.
I am an apostle of Francis Bacon, the messiah of
scientific objectivity, which leads inexorably to secular humanism and
relativism, and contradicts the notions of kneeling in prayer before one totem
or another, be it a cross, golden calf, totem pole or African fertility god with
a giant phallus.
Eva Schwartz, nee Bunker, was my father's only
sibling. Two years older than her brother, she married Charles Schwartz, who
wasn't Jewish despite the name. He owned a small movie theater in Toledo,
beside Lake Erie, where my fur trading ancestors settled in the eighteenth
century. "Bunker" is Anglicized French from the original Bon Couer,
or "Good Heart." Childless herself, she had raised a cousin's
daughter. When her husband died, Aunt Eva moved west to take care of her
brother's son. For the first time I could remember, I had a home. It was a tiny
bungalow they rented in Atwater Village, an area between Glendale and the LA
River. I had a dog, a small tricolor bitch of mongrel pedigree, and a girlfriend,
a blonde named Dorothy who lived next door. I showed her mine and she showed me
hers. Her father owned a cocktail lounge on Fletcher Drive near the gigantic
Van de Kamp bakery. The dog, named Babe, was my best friend and constant
companion. Every day in the fierce summer of '43, we trudged a mile or so along
the concrete-lined riverbank, and crossed a footbridge into Griffith Park where
there was a huge public swimming pool. Nearby were several stables where a
horse could be rented and ridden though the miles of trails in the park. Off
Riverside Drive was a big steakhouse owned by Victor McLaglen, the only actor
who both won an Academy Award (as best actor, in
The
Informer)
and fought Jack Dempsey.
I was an habitual wanderer by then. I always wanted to
see what was over the next hill or down the road around the next corner.
Sometimes I went north beside the river into Burbank, sometimes south beside
the railroad tracks. In Burbank I climbed the fence into Warner Brothers' back
lot and played among permanent sets of island lagoons and jungle villages. My
dog always waited outside the fence until hell froze or I returned. We also
explored Lockheed, easily bypassing the ring of antiaircraft gun emplacements.
Once the Army bivouacked several thousand soldiers in part of Griffith Park.
Rows of tents, lines of olive green trucks. They disappeared as magically as
they appeared.
The railroad tracks ran between the factories, shops
and Van de Kamp. A pottery factory there was later declared a major
environmental hazard and fenced off for years. Several times I climbed over the
sagging fence to see if I could find adventure on the other side. I played in a
mound of white powder that might have been asbestos. It never seemed to bother
me; it would be decades before anyone declared asbestos dangerous.
Along
the street nearest the railroad tracks were little houses. About a mile from
there the single lane of tracks entered the main railroad freight yards and
became dozens of tracks. This area was across the tracks in terms of status,
and bohemian in lifestyle. The impish and precocious little Irish girl named
Dorothy lived there with her hard drinking, heavy-smoking mother. Whenever I
arrived Dorothy's mom had a cigarette in her mouth and a glass of beer close
by. At least she wasn't drinking from the bottle. It was far different from my
aunt's stern Calvinistic demeanor and demands. Dorothy's mom once mentioned how
rationing made it hard to get gas. After she had said that I remembered a cigar
box full of clipped gas coupons in a Texaco gas station close to the Gateway
Theater on San Fernando road. The Gateway was where I saw
Citizen Kane.
Walking home the following Saturday
afternoon I stopped at the Texaco for a Coke. I watched the attendant clip the
coupons from a customer's ration book, carry them past me and put them in a
cigar box on the desk in the office. The Irish girl's mother would pay a dollar
apiece for gas coupons. A dollar would buy a cheeseburger, milkshake and a
ticket into a first run movie theater downtown. The following Saturday
afternoon, I delivered far more coupons than she could pay for. She gave me $10
and, during the next few days, sold the rest to her friends. I made $40, which
is what a unionized stagehand earned for a week's work. It was my first
successful money caper.
This period of my life was happy for me. Alas, it was
disillusioning for my aunt. She was totally unable to rein me in. I was the
neighborhood hellion, but I was a well-spoken hellion. In quick succession I
was caught shoplifting from the local Woolworth, then seen throwing a rock
through a window (to impress Dorothy). Although we got away, they caught my dog
and traced me through his collar, and I was eventually caught by a gas station
attendant stealing from the cigar box of gas ration coupons. I was spanked and
put to bed, and I promised my father and God that I would change my ways and be
a good boy. I was sincere.
Of course I always felt different the next day, or
forgot my promise. I woke up in a new world every morning. When summer ended, I
went to school for the first time - the Atwater Avenue Elementary school.
Because they had no transcripts and because I'd been in three military schools
and half a dozen boarding homes in five years, they tested me. Despite the
chaos of my childhood, I scored two full years ahead of my age group in reading
skill, although I was below average in mathematics. I don't know any more about
math now than I did then. I think my weakness in math was because it must be
taught in sequence: one thing laid a foundation for the next. My peripatetic
life had not been conducive to that.
The principal split the difference and put me two
semesters ahead of my age. I would go to middle school the next semester, a
couple of weeks after I turned eleven.
A
month after school started, however, my aunt and father sat me down and
solemnly told me that the house we were renting was being sold. We had to move,
but because of the war they could find nothing. I would have to go to another
foster home or military school. I was devastated, but I agreed to go if my
father promised to remove me if I disliked it. Dislike was a certainty, decided
even before he delivered me to the Southern California Military Academy on
Signal Hill in Long Beach. The rules forbade visits for a month. The commandant
wanted newcomers to get over homesickness before they could go home for
weekends.
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.