Paris Just Before Spring
I AM ALONE in Paris. My wife of nearly two decades has gone home to Brendan, our five-year-old son. I was invited here to play a small role in a small French movie, Caméléon, about a femme fatale who is definitely a chameleon. Benoit Cohen, the enthusiastic young director, is using both prayer and donated pieces of film stock to put his vision on the screen. My pay is minuscule, but it does cover most of my expenses—and who would refuse a free month in the world’s most beautiful city? February has turned to March and the meager snow has disappeared except in the crevices the sun never probes. The tree branches are still starkly bare, but since I’ve been in Paris they’re sprouting hard little buds that will soon become glorious leaves dancing in the breeze. God, I love Paris any time of year.
The Normandy Hotel is on the right bank near the Louvre, the Seine, and the Place de Concorde.
“Do you know where this is?” I asked the concierge. I had to pick up a week’s per diem, the cash money for expenses that isn’t taxed as income.
The concierge produced one of those convenience street maps for tourists, the kind that lists main boulevards and landmarks, but meager details otherwise. He pointed to a green spot designating a park. “It’s right around there,” he said, “four or five kilometers.”
“I can walk it? Right?”
“Yes. It’s a long walk . . . but it’s a nice day.”
He was right on both counts. I set forth up the Avenue de Opera. It is bright enough for sunglasses, but the morning chill is perfect coolant for a vigorous stride. I’m sure I can reach my destination if I find the park, and that should be easy. On the other hand, how long it takes is immaterial. I enjoy exploring cities on foot: New York, London, Rome, any city but LA—and Paris most of all. I recall Thomas Wolfe’s nocturnal meanderings through the dark, empty streets of Manhattan while communing with his muse. His prose turned deserted streets into symphonies of description.
At the opera house (it sure is big enough to have a phantom wandering around inside), I turn right. I think it is the Boulevard Haussman. After another twenty minutes, I turn right again. Now I’m trudging up a fairly steep hill lined with chic apartments. Unlike the United States, where the middle class abandoned the central city to deteriorate in the care of the poor and minorities, in France and most of Europe, the affluent have stayed within the city. The poor have been pushed to the surrounding suburbs. Space in the city has increased in value. Apartments are small and expensive. It was one reason there was so much vibrant street life in Paris. In LA almost anyone might have a swimming pool in their backyard. In Paris only the rich have a backyard.
The park started a block from the hill’s summit. It was bigger than I anticipated and I didn’t know which way to go. Spotting a couple of men engaged in conversation, I waited for an opportunity to excuse my intrusion and extended the slip of paper with the address. It was a question that didn’t require French. One of the men pointed back down the hill and up the next hill.
I started walking. I had gone about half a block when the sound of running footsteps made me stop and turn. A young man was gesturing for me to wait. I did so. He arrived, panting, and spoke in accented English: “I know you.”
“You know me?”
He nodded. “Edward Bunker. I read your books.” His grin was wide, perhaps in reply to my manifest surprise. He held up three fingers. That was how many I’d published at the time.
“There’s another one due next year.”
“I’ll get it. What’s the title?”
“Dog Eat Dog.”
“I’ll still be waiting. That man—” he gestured back up the hill from whence I’d come. “He told you wrong. That street is that way . . . on the other side of the park. I saw a film crew over there.”
“Merci beaucoup. That’s what I’m looking for.” I started to turn and stopped. “So how did you recognize me?”
“Reservoir Dogs. Mr. Blue, right?”
“Yep.” The role had been minuscule, but Reservoir Dogs had been a blockbuster in most of Europe, especially France and England and, especially in the latter, had spurred sales of my books.
As I continued walking through the park that overlooked Paris, I found it hard to believe that someone would recognize me on a Paris sidewalk, six thousand miles from home, someone who had read all three of my books. I was still glowing within when I spotted the trucks and lights of the small film crew. The set was a cafe. When I arrived the cast and crew were having lunch. Without intruding, I paid my respects to Benoit Cohen, the talented young director, for he was going over a scene with the leads, Seymour Cassell and Chiara Mastrianni (I played his ex-con best pal), and it was poor movie protocol to interrupt such a situation. I found the production manager, who gave me a stack of francs, supposedly enough to live on for a week. She also had the “call sheet.” I was scheduled to work the next day. It was at this location, and they were at the end of the scene they were shooting today. I was welcome to hang out and watch the scene being shot, but I had other plans for the afternoon. I wanted to see the Pantheon and Napoleon’s tomb. He sure made some big noise for a little Corsican. They still have the Napoleonic “N” on bridges over the Seine.
As I waved good-bye to the director, one of the cameramen came up with two of my books in the French editions. Would I sign them? I drew my trusty felt tip, which makes for great signatures. Thick and dark, they look substantial. Ball-point pen signatures look too thin.
Before I finished with the cameraman, a line had formed. The crew was small as film crews go, no more than a score, but more than half had books for me to sign. Some were brand new, but many were books the owner had for some time. One said he’d taken the job because I was in the cast. Who would have imagined such things from my first forty years of life? It may not have equaled the metamorphosis of St. Augustine, but it was certainly unexpected. I never imagined this reality when I walked out of prison twenty some years earlier. Now I’d passed sixty, which I’d never thought I’d see. In recent years my body has shown evidence of mortality, bladder cancer cured by surgery ten years ago, antibodies for hepatitis C (I’m one of the 80% who remain inactive), a mild heart attack (if there is such a thing) treated with angioplasty, and a borderline case of adult diabetes that seems under control from half a pill and diligent exercise on a treadmill. I have never looked better and, with average luck, expect to live another decade to play with and educate my son. Still, whatever way I look at it, most of the game had been played and it seemed time to write about it.
Meandering in the direction of the hotel, I thought about the two decades since I’d gotten out of prison. Who would have expected me to stay out? Not me, for sure. The only decision in that regard was that I would not do anything stupid. Other than that, whatever happened, happened. Over the years I’ve been asked by interviewers why I’ve changed. My reply, and the truth, is that I changed as my circumstances changed. Being a published, and somewhat acclaimed writer was, of course, central to everything. Just when I got out, the movie based on the book was beginning preproduction. That introduced me to an entirely new milieu—and people that I liked. I also made my acting debut, playing a scene in a bar with Dustin Hoffman. It takes all day to shoot one five-minute scene. When the assistant director yelled, “That’s a wrap” at the end of the day, the cast and crew applauded, which made me blush. Over the years I’ve appeared in a score of small roles, not exactly a living but enough to cover health insurance for my family.
The common belief is that having an ex-con on parole, as opposed to just releasing him, is beneficial to society. That may be true 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 would see the parole agent just once to pick up my “gate” money, and then I would find some false identification and disappear. The next time the parole agent saw me was when I was 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 being on parole, I was able to leave California, which seemed a wise move when a crony and former cell partner. Paul, 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 his name went through the computer, the FBI came to see me on the movie set. My friend happened to be visiting me when they arrived—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 bail out of LA when the movie was in the can and my second novel, Animal Factory, was in bookstores.
I stayed for awhile 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. I had recognized or decided that I either 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 only such determination, or obstinacy, would let me overcome this 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 infantile 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 four thousand 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 and 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 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 pencil 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 is my salvation. We met when I was first released. In the few weeks before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed my conviction, I’d been in a halfway house. Jennifer was my counselor. She was twenty-four and looked like a seventeen-year-old personification of the California girl; tall, slender, blond, an 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 twice met for coffee. 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 jail, 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 Jail.
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 that wouldn’t 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 knows about history and literature and a 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 who 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 for 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 made me prevail.