Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (55 page)

The common belief is that having
an ex-con on parole, as opposed to just releasing him, is beneficial to
society. That may hold good as a general principle, but with me the opposite is
true. I reject the idea of
custodia legis,
that a parolee is still in legal custody. I gave up
trying to do a parole after the first one. I see the parole agent just once to
pick up my "gate" money, and then I find some false identification
and disappear. The next time the parole agent sees me is when I'm in jail. This
time, however, I think I would have waited until the movie was finished, but
after that I would have become a fugitive. By not having a parole, I was able
to leave California, which seemed a wise move when a crony and former cell
partner escaped from the county jail and called me from the highway. I had to
take him in and give him some help, at least for a few days. He began robbing
banks, and because my name came up when he went through the computer, the FBI
came to see me on the movie set. My friend happened to be visiting me — in
Dustin Hoffman's trailer. He wasn't spotted; they weren't expecting him. They
wanted it on record that I knew he was a fugitive, so if they found evidence
that I had seen him and not reported it, they could charge me with aiding and
abetting. Some weeks later, Paul was pounding on the door. When I let him in,
he ran into the bathroom, kneeled down and began dumping money on the floor.
His pistol fell out of his waistband. He had barely escaped a bank robbery in
nearby Santa Monica. Do you think the FBI would have believed my protests of
innocence if they had been following him? It was time to bale out of LA when
the movie was in the can and my second novel,
Animal Factory,
was in the bookstores.

I stayed for a while with an old
girlfriend and her daughter in Chicago, but Chicago was too damned cold, so I
went to New York. Dustin optioned the film rights to
Animal Factory,
not because he wanted to make
it, but to help me out. My third novel,
Little Boy Blue,
was almost finished, and the
first hundred pages are probably my best writing . . . Long before that I had
recognized, or decided, that I had to succeed as a writer or be an outlaw. By
making such an unequivocal decision, I set myself on a path of perseverance,
and it was only such determination, or obstinacy, that let me overcome in the
first place. Imagine someone with a seventh-grade education wanting to be a
serious writer, and accomplishing it without any help or encouragement. Indeed,
the prison psychologist said it was another manifestation of infantde fantasy.
However, when my first novel was made into a movie, my second novel was
published and my third novel was nearly finished, I thought I was victorious. I
wasn't prepared for
Little Boy Blue
to sell 4,000 copies, despite rave reviews. It would
have been hard to sell more, for my publisher had none in the stores, not even
in LA when I was doing talk shows on tour. At that time I might have returned
to crime. I doubt that I would have robbed a bank, although I might have
heisted a drug dealer or two, a crime I always liked because they couldn't go
to the police. Most likely I would have grown some pot. It is easy to do, hard
to get caught and is very profitable. While watching it grow, I would have
continued writing. If caught growing pot it wouldn't have been a life sentence,
not even for me. And back in a cell, I would have sharpened a pencd and
continued writing. Now I knew I could, and likewise knew I couldn't do anything
else — at least not anything legal.

The story has a happy ending
solely because of Jennifer. She was my salvation. We met when I was first
released. In the few weeks before the US Court of Appeal for the 9
^th
Circuit reversed my conviction, I'd been in a halfway house. Jennifer was my
counselor. She was twenty-four and looked like a seventeen-yeat old
personification of the "California" girl: tall, slender, blonde, .111
upper middle-class University of Southern California sorority girl. When my
name was discussed at a staff meeting before my
arrival,
she said she knew of me from my
essays in the
Nation.
I could scarcely believe it when this beautiful young woman introduced
herself and said, "I'm your counselor."

Counselor! Unbelievable! The
lamb would counsel the wolf.

It was a month until the
court-ordered reversal came through. We became friends. She was interested in
literature and philosophy. When I was out of the halfway house we met twice
for coffee and when I left Los Angeles I gave her my address and wrote one
letter in two years. Romance never went through my mind. Not only was she
married, but I can't imagine a metaphor to convey the difference in our
backgrounds. I doubt that she'd ever met anyone who had spent a night in jad,
much less eighteen years in America's toughest prisons, with much of that in
the hole. As a teenager she had a horse; I had a fat rat running across my
macaroni sandwich in the hole of the LA county jad.

When I saw her again, she was in
the process of getting a divorce — and romance did blossom. The difference in
our backgrounds was the same, so I was pretty certain, although silent about
it, that it was a star-crossed romance and would not last. I would try to leave
good memories, and I was sure I could play a sort of Pygmalion. She loved books
and was a college graduate, but public schools, even in an upper-class enclave,
leave vast gaps in what a truly educated person should know about history and
literature and myriad other things, gaps I could fill. On the other hand, she
helped to civilize me, and was so obviously a nice girl that those I might make
nervous, or even scare, would look at us and think: "He can't be
that
dangerous if she is with him."
I anticipated that this odd romance would last a year, perhaps two, before the
glamour wore off for her — or I got bored.

Neither came to pass, and after
two decades it seems likely we'll be together until I die. Even more unlikely
from my perspective, at sixty-five I'm the father of a handsome, extremely
bright and rambunctious five-year-old, my pride and joy. Who knows what he will
think of his father, but the cards we dealt him are infinitely better than what
fate dealt me. I could have played them better, no doubt, and there are things
of which I am ashamed, but when I look in the mirror, I am proud of what I am.
The traits that made me fight the world are also those that allowed me to
prevail.