ALTHOUGH I OCCASIONALLY PULLED an armed robbery in my lengthy criminal career, it was never my first choice among the various methods of thievery. Firearms created a situation too inherently volatile. There was always the chance of something going wrong. Guns had explosive consequences. Similarly, the authorities considered armed robbery far more serious than forgery or even safecracking. At the end of the day, I would say that I was primarily a merchandising burglar. I didn’t burglarize homes, but beyond that you could say that I stole whatever I could sell. The best things were cigarettes and whiskey, of course, and I have stolen those in abundance, but I have also stolen a truckload of outboard motors, 2,000 paintbrushes (which sold quite rapidly, believe it or not), a roomful of cameras, the contents of a scuba-diving store and a couple of pawnshops.
ON A RAINY WEEKEND an old professional thief named Jerry and I took off a cocktail lounge in the Rampart district of Los Angeles. It was ridiculously easy to enter. The door had a burglar alarm, but it also had a transom without an alarm. Jerry boosted me on his shoulders. I put masking tape over part of the transom above the latch, then hit it with a fist wrapped in a towel. The glass cracked without falling. I peeled back the tape with the glass stuck to it except for a couple of shards that fell with a tinkle.
Seconds later I dropped inside the lounge, landing softly as a cat. I listened for a couple of heartbeats; then I unlocked the door for Jerry to enter. The rainstorm covered for us. Jerry had a Buick Roadmaster. We had taken out the backseats and filled every inch of space with cases of whiskey. I also found a shotgun and a few other things worth money. In the desk was a checkbook. I tore out several pages at the back of the checkbook and returned it to the drawer. From a pawnshop I could get a check protector machine. I figured the bar owner might not notice checks missing from the rear.
A Hollywood club owner was waiting for the whiskey. We unloaded it through the back door on a wet Sunday afternoon. The next morning I took the other stuff to a fence who owned a small car wash on Venice Boulevard a mile from downtown Los Angeles. While we were negotiating prices his telephone rang. The fence answered it and his side of the conversation was grunts and monosyllables: “Uh-uh. . . . Yeah. . . . Uh-huh. . . . Yeah. Right.” Then the fence said, “Tell this guy.” He handed the telephone to me.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Look here,” said the voice of a black man. “I’m down here on Western. I’ve got all kinds of stuff out in the alley behind an electronics store. I can’t get my car running and I need a ride.”
“Where are you?” It was down Western in the seventies.
“I’m tellin’ you, man, it’s a taxi job.”
It would cost me nothing to look, and I was intrigued. In retrospect it was crazy, but I had a fascination with crazy once upon a time.
On the corner of Western and the cross street he gave me, a skinny black man with the haggard face of the hooked junkie met me. He had me go around the block and turn down the alley. Sure enough, covered by a blanket in the parking space behind a shop was a pile of stereos and television sets and a thousand LPs that sold for a dollar and a half apiece on the hot goods market. It wasn’t Fort Knox, but as he said, it was a taxi job.
I turned in and stopped, bending down the license plate as I got out of the car—in case someone came by. We began piling stuff in the back of the Buick, which still had its backseat removed. In less than two minutes we were rolling.
The fence bought everything except a full-length woman’s coat. It was cashmere except for a mink hood, collar, and label. The label said: BULLOCKS. The fence offered less than I knew I could get from a cocktail waitress on Sunset Boulevard. Even if she gave me less, I preferred letting her have it. In fact, if she was friendly enough, I might make her a gift.
My new crime partner, whose name I didn’t know, was simultaneously sweating and shivering and yawning. “You’re sick, huh?” I asked. The term sick on the street meant sick from heroin withdrawal.
“Like a dog, man. You use, man?”
I shook my head. “I’ll smoke some grass.”
“Would you drive me to my connection?”
On impulse, I agreed. Actually, I had to drive him to two connections. The first one wasn’t home; the second one wanted to know who I was. We were so far from a white area that we might as well have been in Nairobi.
It was dark when I took him to his home near Manchester and Western. It was a nice bungalow on a residential street. I went inside to use the telephone. I wanted to tell a barmaid that I’d be late and not to make another date.
While I was in the house, someone knocked on the door. My new crime partner’s girlfriend went to answer it. I heard voices that had an unfriendly timbre. It was time for me to go.
“I’m gone,” I said to my associate, heading toward the front door.
The newcomer was actually a pair of young black men. Both of them were six-foot-three or more. As I squeezed past and stepped outside into the darkness, I could feel their eyes burning me.
Down the walk and out the gate, my car was at the curb thirty feet away. As I reached it, I heard the gate squeak. I looked back. The two young black men were following me. I got in and opened my knife just as they arrived. One came around to the driver’s side. He suddenly reached through the back window and grabbed the mink-trimmed coat: “That’s my mother’s coat.”
As soon as he spoke, I understood the whole thing. My “crime partner” had burglarized someone he knew, someone who suspected him as soon as the crime was discovered.
He reached to open the driver’s door. I swung the knife and he jumped back. I turned the key and punched the gas. The big Buick fishtailed and burned rubber.
I turned a corner and another, meanwhile constantly looking in the mirror. I saw a pair of headlights. Were they following me? I couldn’t tell. I turned a corner and hit the gas.
Suddenly a car behind me announced it was the police with flashing lights on its roof.
Here we go again. I pushed the accelerator to the floor and the car jumped forward. The scream of the siren filled the LA night.
I had to abandon the car. I was out of my area and didn’t know the streets. But first I had to get around two corners—and then bail out. I could just imagine the chase. The radio was being cleared, and the car in pursuit was giving them a running account: “South on Budlong, turned west on Forty-third. . . . South on . . .” Other police cars were coming to join the chase.
I came down a side street toward a boulevard with a traffic light ahead. Both lanes were blocked with waiting cars. I spun the wheel to the right, half-jumped the curb and driveway into a gas station, hit the brakes, and swerved. My back end swung around and smashed into a signpost. Over the curb onto boulevard. Punch it. The speedometer climbed. They weren’t around the corner when I turned the next one. Halfway down the block, I stomped the brakes. The tires screeched and the car skidded to a halt. Before it stopped, I was out and running in a line across the street and down a driveway beside a house. Behind me the police car came around the corner. Had they seen me? I couldn’t tell.
I sprinted through a backyard, hands extended. Before everyone got washers and dryers for their laundry, clotheslines in backyards were a menace to fugitives running through the darkness. I’d once hit one across the forehead while running full tilt. My feet kept going and went right up into the air. I came down on my head, lucky that I didn’t break my neck. It cut me in a line to the bone, and blood flowed copiously down my whole face. That is how the face bleeds.
Through the backyard, over a fence that teetered beneath me I ran. Out the next backyard, out a driveway, and across the next street, praying in a silent scream that another car didn’t turn the corner at that moment. One didn’t. I had a chance if they spread out like water in all directions from the site of the abandoned car.
I crossed a front yard and down into the darkness of another driveway. It had a gate. As I reached for the latch, a snarling Rottweiler leaped up, snapping at my hand, its breath hot on my face. Shit!
Without a moment’s hesitation, I doubled back. I would go down the driveway next door. I came out and cut across the lawn.
Across the street, from where I’d come, appeared a dark uniform. “Halt!”
I ran faster.
A shot sounded. The bullet kicked up sparks on the driveway ahead of me. I tried to run faster. Ahead of me another gate. Please, God, no dogs.
I tried to hurdle it. My foot hooked. Down I went. Headfirst. My foot still hooked.
The bobbing flashlight was followed a second later by a dark, looming figure. A .357 Magnum leveled on me. “Don’t fuckin’ move!”
Another dark uniformed figure, panting hard, arrived. Lights in both houses were going on. One policeman was trying to open the gate while the other held flashlight and pistol trained on me. “Just stay right there.”
A window went up. “What’s goin’ on out there?” The voice had the telltale sound of the African-American.
“Police business! Stay inside!”
They got the gate open and the handcuffs on, then began half-pushing, half-pulling me down the sidewalk. A couple other cops arrived. They were pumped up and fairly vibrating from the hot pursuit. One kicked at my stomach, but I managed to turn and raise my knee enough to deflect it. “Ixnay . . . ixnay,” said one policeman. I remember it clearly because it was a term I hadn’t heard since grammar school. Ixnay! What kinda shit is that? The reason was the witnesses. Several of the neighbors had come out onto their porches to look. It was a black middle-class neighborhood.
An alley ran from street to street, so they didn’t have to take me all the way around the block. Now there were four cops and two more came charging down the alley from the other side, crashing into me like charging linebackers. “Okay, sonofabitch! We’ll teach you to run, fuckhead . . . shit-for-brains bastard. . . .”
It has always been de rigueur for cops to kick some ass at the end of a chase. It’s all part of the game. I expected it and felt no indignation but, in fact, a little gratitude, because half a dozen were trying to get in their licks. A cluster of bodies rolled down the alley to the next street where several police cars sat with lights flashing. The Buick filled the middle of the street with the driver’s door still open. A crowd of neighbors was at the curb. They were all black, and over the other noises I heard a voice say in surprise, “It’s a white man! Goddamn!”
I was shoved into the back of a police car. A sergeant came over and opened the door. They had taken my wallet. He was holding up the three driver’s licenses in three different names from three different states. “What’s your name?”
“I’m John McCone, CIA. I tried to warn them—”
“Warn them? About what?”
“In thirty-six, I told them the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor.”
“What the fuck have you been taking?”
“Will you get me to Washington?”
Another policeman came over and peered in. “He’s loaded on something. Fucker thinks he’s in the CIA.”
“Who cares if he’s the queen of May? Let’s book him so we can go home.”
They took me to the infamous Seventy-seventh Street precinct house, where I was the first white man they’d booked in two years. They beat on me awhile for being white. By now I was into it. When they booked me, I signed the booking card as Marty Cagle, Lt., USNR, and gave my birth year as 1905. The booking officer showed it to the sergeant: “Put it down. Who cares?” They booked me as “John Doe #1.”
They threw me in a cell. There was no way to make bail. I was a fugitive and a parole violator, ineligible for bail. They were going to have to drag me back to prison. There would be skid marks all the way up the highway. They’d wondered if I was crazy since I was ten years old, so I decided now I would be nutty as a fruitcake. Let the games begin. The bravado covered an inner emptiness bordering utter despair.
One would assume that a situation such as this would have me climbing the walls. Instead an all-powerful drowsiness washed over me. Sleep is an escape from depression. I slept with the stink of the jail mattress in my nose.
IN THE MORNING, A UNIFORMED OFFICER unlocked my cell gate. A detective waited to interrogate me in the standard windowless room with a table and three hard-backed chairs. He looked at me with cold, hostile eyes. “Sit down, Bunker.”
They knew my name already. Damn! They had pulled out all the stops, or so I thought for a moment. “He’s dead,” I said. “I am number five. Who are you?” As I spoke, I leaned to the left and looked at the ceiling, slowly moving my head as if watching something crawl across.
The detective’s face maintained its studied impassivity, but his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and he did glance at the ceiling.
“You know who they are, don’t you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Catholics. They’ve been trying to put a radio in my brain, you know.”
“What I want to know about are these burglaries. We found those checks in your hotel room.”
Hotel room! How did they . . . ? The hotel key. Damn. It was in the car.
“I don’t know about a hotel. It’s the Church. . . . It’s all of them . . . all of it. Don’t you see?”
My words had a stridence that stopped him. He’d assumed I was high on angel dust or some other hallucinogen. He was a handsome man, well tailored. He also had a cold demeanor. Most wizened old detectives have seen so many human foibles that they are bemused most of the time. In many instances an old cop and an old thief will have more in common than either has with a newcomer of either persuasion.
He broke off the interrogation and sent me to the cell. I had to walk in front of half a dozen cells. Each had four or five young blacks. It was the age of the Afro hairstyle, which they created by using a hair pick to fluff it into an upstanding bush, the bigger the better. Alas, the booking officers took away their hair picks, so after a night in jail their hair looked like wild explosions of countless watch springs. As I went by a cell, one of them said in disbelief, “Hey, man, they got a white dude in the back.”
“White dudes break the law,” said another.
“I ain’ ne’er seen one in Seventy-seventh.”
The uniformed officer escorting me said, “He’s no white man. He’s a white nigger.”
Back in my cage with graffiti on the walls and the striped mattress shiny with the sweat and smell of previous occupants, I sank into the pit of despond. What a life. What had I done to deserve this? The question had its own answer, and I laughed at my moment of self-pity. One thing was certain: I would give them one helluva fight before San Quentin’s gates slammed shut behind me again.
In late afternoon, with the light coming through the small barred windows across from the cell turning gray, the outer door opened and two sets of feet sounded out, coming down the runway. “Hey, man . . . hey . . . hey . . . hey, motherfucker!” screamed a brother down the tier. The jailer failed to acknowledge the summons.
The jailer, a beefy black man in a dark LAPD uniform, still had exasperation on his face when he reached my cell and opened it. Behind him was an older white man. We’ll call him Pollack, because his name was Eastern European, I think. He was seamed and rumpled; he had been around.
I was led back to the interrogation room. Pollack, the handsome detective, waited for me with some files in front of him. I sat down.
“Your parole officer says you’re faking,” the detective said.
“Man . . . he’s part of the Church. Don’t you see that?”
It sent his eyes rolling, and a barely audible: “Shiiit. . . .
“Look, Bunker,” said Pollack, pulling forth his wallet and extracting a card. “I’m not a Catholic. I’m a Lutheran. Look. . . .” He extended a church membership card.
I leaned forward and peered at the card with great seriousness, then sniffed. “Forged,” I said.
So it went. They asked about Gordo. Where’d they get that name? Many months later, reading a police report during a courtroom proceeding, I learned that he had called the hotel and left his name.
ONE DARK NIGHT, BRIGHT WITH LIGHTS, they took me out to the scene of a safe burglary. A woman living next door to the bar had seen a car drive up beside the back door. A man stepped out, she said, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the car. She was about thirty yards away and saw him at an angle partly from the rear. Could she identify me?
I had to get out of the car I was in and stand beside it. One detective stood beside me, while the other brought the witness to the curb fifteen feet away. We exchanged no words, but I saw her shake her head and toss her shoulder. No identification. It hadn’t been me anyway. I had been driving the car in that heist.
The next morning the detective and his partner took me from the cell at the Seventy-seventh to the Municipal Court in Inglewood for arraignment. There I would be served with the complaint. They locked me in a bullpen next to the courtroom. It held several others scooped from the streets in the last day or so. All of them were going before the judge for the first time.
During the wait, I got into costume. I tied Bull Durham sacks to my shirt like a row of medals. I put a towel over my head and tied it with a shoelace. I had my shirttail out and my pants rolled up above my knees. To the court, I looked like the craziest fool they’d ever seen, although the deputies paid no attention. They had seen many crazy fools pass through.
Before court convened, we filed into the courtroom and sat in the jury box. This was the arraignment court. It buzzed with activity, with lawyers and bondsmen, clerks and arresting offices, and abundant spectators in the audience.
The clerk entered and announced that the Municipal Court of the City of Inglewood, County of Los Angeles, was now in session, the Honorable James Shanrahan presiding judge.
When the judge came through the door, I came out of my chair, screaming at the top of my lungs, “I know him! He’s a bishop! Lookit the robes! Help! Help!”
Bailiffs came running, their keys jangling; chairs crashed. Spectators jumped up, some to see, some to flee. Chaos reigned in the court.
They carried me out, screaming maledictions, feet waving. I even lost a shoe that never got returned.
In an adjacent office, a young district attorney asked me a few questions, such as how long I’d been in jail. A hundred and six years seemed appropriate. After a few more questions and similar answers, they took me back into the courtroom before the judge. I was flanked by two burly deputies. The young district attorney made a motion under Section 1367, California Penal Code. With a vacant expression, I paid no attention and looked around the courtroom. Actually, Section 1367, California Penal Code, stops the proceedings and refers the matter to a department of the Superior Court for a sanity hearing to determine if the accused is competent to stand trial. Although it does not deal with guilt or innocence, it can be considered with other evidence.
As they led me from the courtroom, I looked at the handsome detective who had conducted the investigation. He was seated in the row inside the railing, and his displeasure was written large across his face. I wanted to wink, but that would have been too much of an insult, and somewhere down the line he would have to testify. Besides, what did I have to wink about? I was caged and he was free. All my machinations might, at best, slice a tiny fraction from how long I would be imprisoned.
AFTER COURT, I WAS AMONG those called for the first bus back to the jail. It was a new jail, having opened while I was away, and it was already notorious as a place where the deputies busted heads and had killed more than one prisoner. I remembered a friend, Ebie, telling me that some drunk Mexican being booked in had thrown a trash can through an interior window. They had dragged him away. It was when they were away, in a room without witnesses, that the guy slipped on a banana peel and broke his skull on the bars. It was part of the criminal ethos to expect an ass kicking as part of the game if you did certain things, mainly threatened them physically, either by word or deed. In some places a little mouth could bring the goon squad down on you. All places of incarceration have a goon squad, although it may have been called something more politically correct than goon squad, something like reaction team.
In the LA Central Jail it took nothing to get jumped and stomped, maybe teargassed and thrown in the hole—and maybe charged with a new crime, for the best way they had of getting away with administering a savage beating was charging the inmate with attacking them. It was their collective word against his individual word.
The module where they placed me happened to have single cells. When the gates opened for chow, I saw many familiar faces coming through the serving line or seated at the tables. The food was barely edible; I could force down a few bites and eat the bread and drink the hot, sweet tea at night. I lived on oranges.
A few days later they called me out to court at 5:00 A.M. We were fed eggs in the mess hall and sent downstairs to the “court line.” Our civilian clothes were given to us if we wanted them for court. It mattered not to me. I was in costume and the jail blues helped.
The sanity court was held over at the general hospital. A deputy public defender came to interview me. I made no sense to him. The court appearance lasted about thirty seconds. The clerk called the case. The judge peered at me, the poor, demented creature with strips of toilet paper stuck in his ears, shirt worn inside-out with Bull Durham sacks attached like medals. The judge had seen many crazies in his time, and the figure facing him was classic. With everyone stipulating, he appointed two psychiatrists to conduct an examination and submit a report.
When the deputy public defender tried to talk to me, I babbled nonsensically. He gave it up and wished me good luck. Riding the bus back to the jail, I visually devoured the city at night, as I always did on such journeys. So today I remember, as if it were yesterday, a sight thirty years in the past: an open door of a cantina with the sounds of mariachis pouring onto the sidewalk. Incarceration at least has the beneficial aspect of letting a prisoner see the world with fresh eyes, the way an artist does.
The next day I was called for the busload being transferred to the old county jail above the Hall of Justice. We were herded like cattle into a bullpen. Who was assigned to a particular jail was determined by where they went to court. Those kept in the new central jail were going to outlying courtrooms in Santa Monica, Van Nuys, Pasadena, and elsewhere around the vast county. Those going to court in the Hall of Justice were those arrested in the central city; hence blacks were the majority being transferred.
The deputies yelled and bullied the prisoners. We were jammed together—and I smoldered. A couple of trembling old winos were on the bus.
On arrival at the Hall of Justice, we were taken to the shower area. It was the same place I had cut up mass murderer Billy Cook more than a decade earlier. “Listen up!” yelled a deputy. “Strip to your underwear and throw your clothes in here.” He indicated a wheeled laundry basket.
As outer clothes came off, the stench of unwashed bodies came up. I breathed softly through my mouth, thinking that mankind must have really smelled until recently.
Everyone was hurrying except me and an old wino shaking from age and booze. Having a hard time maintaining his balance while stripping down, he stumbled and reflexively reached out to steady himself, inadvertently bumping a black youth. The youth turned and saw it was a trembling old man. “Fucking old grape,” the youth said. “Get the fuck away from me.” Using both hands, he shoved the old man, who slipped on the floor and went down hard. Nobody moved to help him. They walked past him to throw their clothes in a laundry hamper and stand naked in line. The little display of racial hatred grated on me, but it was none of my business according to the prison code.
I hung back. Let everyone else go first. I wasn’t in a hurry to get into another set of jail denim. There was plenty to go around.
“Move it, man; move it.” Pressing behind me was another young black. He was taller than me but slender.
“Take it easy. We’ll get there.”
He said something. The words I didn’t decipher, but the sound was hostile. It has been my experience that young ghetto blacks huff and puff and bump chests together before getting it on, a sort of male dance of intimidation. While he was huffing, I put a short left hook into his solar plexus. His grunt was surprise and pain. No white man was supposed to fight. That wasn’t what he’d been taught. I swung another left hook and missed, wrapping my arm around his neck. Down we went on the tile floor. He was on the bottom.
Within seconds the deputies were there, dragging us apart. Off to Siberia we went. Siberia was a tank of regular cells stripped of amenities, including mattresses, and devoid of all privileges.
It was time to add to the record of insanity: an old-fashioned suicide attempt for later use, if it became necessary. It always helped. The light fixture was recessed in the ceiling and covered with mesh so the prisoner would not reach the bulb. When they brought the meal, I kept the Styrofoam cup. I filled it with water and threw it onto the hot bulb. Pop! It broke and I had shards of sharp glass. Using a shirt sleeve as a tourniquet around my upper arm, I chopped at the swollen vein at the inner aspect of my elbow. At first I was tentative. It may be physically easy, but it is not mentally easy to cut yourself. The skin parted, exposing white meat and the vein. It took several chops. Then it opened and blood shot up about three feet. I quickly grabbed the paper cup and let the blood run in there until it was about an inch high. I added two inches of water. Then I poured that slowly over my naked shoulders and chest until it covered my torso. Then I began spinning and swinging my arm. The blood splattered around all the walls and dripped from the cell bars. It made for a gory mess. Finally, I partially filled the cup with blood and water and poured it outside the cell, so it ran along the floor on the runway. “Hey, next door!” I called. “Look over here . . . through the door.”
“Goddamn! Oh shit!”
“Call the bull.”
The bar shaking and screaming began: “Poo-leese! Officer! Help! Help! Man down! Man down!”
In seconds, it was a chorus from all the cells.
It took several minutes before I heard the outer gates opening. At that point I stretched out in the pool of blood on the floor. The cell looked like a slaughterhouse.
The jangling keys, then the startled voice: “Jesus Christ! Call the clinic. Get a gurney!”
The gurney rattled loudly as they came on the run. As they wheeled me past prisoners looking through their bars, I heard voices: “Aw, man, that dude’s dead.”
“Shit, man, that’s fuckin’ messy.”
“Chump killed hisself.” Someone passed judgment: “Sucker gotta be weak to do that. . . .”
Down the elevator, into an ambulance, and out the tunnel for a siren-screaming ride to the general hospital several miles away. They sewed me up, washed me off, and took me to the jail ward on the thirteenth floor. When the doctor asked why I’d done it, I said the Catholic Church had a radio in my brain and told me to. He wrote it down. Thank you, Doctor.
The jail ward in the hospital was so overcrowded that beds overflowed the rooms and lined the big main corridor. Late that night they discharged me back to the central jail. I was put in a room with three beds in the jail infirmary, left ankle and right hand chained to the bed. The middle bed was occupied by an old diabetic. Next to him was a husky young Chicano who had one foot cuffed to the bed frame. He sat up, rocking back and forth while saying his rosary over and over, sometimes mixing in Acts of Contrition. The nurse who passed out medication said he was having a reaction to angel dust. She gave me two brown pills that I recognized as Thorazine. I feigned taking them.
It was in this hospital room that I saw something so grotesque that it remains etched in my mind as if burned by acid. “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the old diabetic, then jumped up and began pounding and kicking the door. For a moment I looked at him, and then I turned my gaze to the Chicano on the other bunk. He was sitting up, still rocking and muttering prayers. His right eye socket opened and shut—but it held no eyeball. It stared up from the white bed sheet. His left eye dangled back and forth below his chin, held by some kind of tendon. He had used his thumbs to reach into both eyes and pluck them from his head. My heart bounced and my hair stood up. It was horrifying. More than a year later, I came back to the central jail and saw him being led to court. He was totally blind, but they didn’t drop the charges. Oh no, he wasn’t going to get off that easy. I don’t know if they sent him to prison. It wouldn’t surprise me. After all, he had stolen something.
When the jail doctor came to talk to me, I told him that the pope had assassins waiting to murder me in the Hall of Justice and that I couldn’t be in a cell with anybody else because I could see lights floating over their heads. I hoped to be put in the “ding” tank here in the central jail. I wanted to avoid the Hall of Justice, mainly because they would immediately put me back in Siberia when I returned. He wrote it down on the chart and told me not to worry; I wasn’t going back to the Hall of Justice.
The next morning, needing the space, another doctor discharged me. I was put in a section of one-man cells in the central jail. That suited me fine.
Two days later, the deputy called out, “Bunker, roll ’em up!” It was for transfer to the Hall of Justice. It was a transfer determined by the numbers; nobody looked at any files. When the deputy opened my cell and called for me to step out, I went to the front. He was at the control panel, in a cage behind bars, busily throwing levers and calling names. Other prisoners were being transferred or called out to see their lawyer or parole officer. He was a fresh-faced kid, and he had been told at the academy that all prisoners were liars and con men, scum wanting to take advantage of him. So when I approached the bars and said, “Hey, boss,” which according to my education was a sign of respect, he thought it was some kind of disrespect and responded with suspicious hostility. He wasn’t receptive when I told him that I wasn’t supposed to go to the Hall of Justice, according to the jail doctor. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Tell the deputy in the control booth in the hallway.” He pushed the button that buzzed open the lock to the second-floor hallway. It was long and wide. Prisoners had to walk along the right-hand wall. Next to the doorway to the escalator was the control booth. The deputy sat up high behind reinforced glass, so he had a clear sight of everything in the corridor.
I walked up to the window. “They called me to roll up to HOJ, but I’m not supposed to go.”
“You’re not? Why not?”
“The doctor said—”
“Tell the deputy running the court line downstairs,” he cut me off.
I went down the escalator and followed the painted line on the floor to the doorway into the large room filled with cages, each about fifteen feet square, with a sign over its gate designating an outlying courtroom. In the morning, long before daylight, the cages were packed with prisoners waiting to take bus rides. It was less humane than the stock pens in railroad yards.
It was late morning now. The buses had gone and would not begin returning until late afternoon, continuing through the evening. The cages had been swept and held prisoners being transferred to other facilities, including the Hall of Justice.
A deputy sat behind a table that had lists of names Scotch-taped to its top. As prisoners gave their names, he directed them to cages. Even before I stepped up and started my story, I knew that the deputy at the module, who had sent me to the booth, and the deputy at the booth, who had sent me here, had been playing a game: to move me another step closer to the bus.
“I’m not supposed to go to the Hall of Justice.”
“What’s your name?”
“The doctor wrote it in the medical records.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bunker.”
“Cage Six.”
“The doctor—”
“I don’t give a shit about the doctor. Get in Cage Six.”
“Would you check with the medical department?”
“I’m not checking with anybody. Get in the goddamn cage.” He stood up to add threat to his order. Cage Six was directly across from the table. I stepped inside and he slammed the gate shut.
“Look here, Deputy,” I said. “Can I see a senior or a sergeant?”
“No. You can’t see anybody.”
“Okay . . . but let me say something—I’m not going.”
“Not going! You’re going on that bus if I have to put you in chains and throw you on it.”
I decided I might as well add more insanity to the record. I was carrying an empty cigarette carton with my meager personal property: comb, toothbrush—and Gillette razor blades.
I unwrapped a new razor blade, put it on the bars, and took off my shirt and the bandage around my arm. I twisted the sleeve around the bicep, pumped up the vein, retrieved the razor blade, and began to chop. It was much easier than with the piece of lightbulb. Two whacks and the blood squirted. I kept the homemade tourniquet tight and held my arm close to the bars. Blood sprayed across the space and began to rain on the lists fastened to the table.
The deputy had missed what I was doing until the blood rained down on his paperwork. Even then, it took him a couple of seconds to wake up. “What the hell. . . .” He jumped to his feet. He tried to grab the paperwork, but it was Scotch-taped to the table. He ripped one sheet in half. Blood splattered across the rest as I moved my arm and changed the trajectory.
The deputy yelled for assistance, and deputies came running. While they reached for a key to open the gate, I moved my arm back and forth, spraying blood on their uniforms, which made them cry out and curse as their wool olive twill uniforms sucked up my blood.
The door came open and they swarmed over me. I must admit that they only punched and kicked me a few times. I expected worse from the sheriff’s department. Three or four of them carried me, facedown, along the corridor to the infirmary. I saw the deputy who had said he was putting me in chains. “I told you I wasn’t going,” I said. He said nothing, but I think he would have sizzled if someone threw water on him.
An hour later I was back in the hospital ward with the three beds. After a couple of days the doctor put me back in a regular cell. This time there was no doubt that I wasn’t supposed to go to the Hall of Justice.
The psychiatrists appointed to examine me came one at a time. When I was called down to an interview room in the hospital area I was ready. I sat rocking back and forth, looking at him with narrowed eyes; then I looked down at the floor. He asked me what the voices were telling me. I told him it was too dirty and I couldn’t repeat it. Then I asked him if he was a Catholic. When he assured me that he wasn’t, I told him that the Catholics had been after me for years.
“What do they do?”
“You know what they do.”
“They talk to me through the radio and TV . . . call me bad names . . . tell me I’m a queer. I ain’t no goddamned queer.”
“Of course not.”
After about ten minutes the examination was over. There was no suspicion of my feigning because, strictly speaking, the provisions of Section 1367 and 1368 did not constitute an acquittal by reason of insanity. They simply said I was incompetent to stand trial at this time. As soon as I was adjudged competent, I would be put on trial. People may commit a crime years hence and be sane and responsible when it happened, but when arrested and charged they may be totally out of their minds. How can a defendant be brought to trial, or punished, while crazy?
The second psychiatrist was a café-au-lalt black man with a French name, probably with ancestors from Louisiana. I put on the same act, but he seemed to be observing me very closely—so I suddenly yelped, overturned the table, and ran out of the room. Down the jail corridor I sprinted, deputies in hot pursuit. They tackled me and dragged me back. I sat trembling in the chair. The examining psychiatrist told me his decision without knowing that he did so. He said, “You can go back to your ward.” It was an obvious Freudian error. Ward means hospital, and that’s where the sick go.
Both psychiatrists said I was “an acute, chronic paranoid schizophrenic, suffering auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution, is and was legally insane and mentally ill.” It was as crazy as you can be. Back at the sanity court, the judge determined me “insane within the meaning of Sections 1367 and 1368, California Penal Code.” He committed me to Atascadero State Hospital until I was certified as competent to stand trial.
I was ready to stand trial forthwith. I had my defense. Although being incompetent to stand trial doesn’t mean someone was insane at the time of the crime, it is admissible evidence a jury can consider. The arresting officers would testify, unless they lied, that I had claimed to be en route to Dallas with new evidence about the Kennedy assassination. The precinct booking records had me claiming to be ninety years old. The investigating detectives had to testify, again unless they lied, that I had claimed that the Catholic Church had a radio in my brain. The jail’s hospital records had two suicide attempts and other irrational behavior. Finally, if the psychiatrists said I was insane two weeks after the crime, how could I not have been crazy when the crime occurred hours before the arrest? How could a jury not find me insane? Moreover, it was highly unlikely that the district attorney’s office would fight very hard. It was routine burglary. Moreover, I wouldn’t really beat the system, for it would take at least six months to a year to get back to court, and no matter what happened there, the parole board would take me back to finish my first term. I would serve three or four years at a minimum, which was all the crime deserved. My only gain would be getting rid of another parole, or perhaps I could escape. A state hospital was not a prison. It might have bars, but it had no gun towers. A friend of mine once led a breakout from Atascadero. He and several others had used a heavy bench as a battering ram to get through a rear door.
One thing I was unaware of at the time. My rap sheet would forever list the following: “Adjudged Criminally Insane.” Anyone who saw that without knowing the truth would expect a raving maniac.
LOCATED HALFWAY BETWEEN LOS ANGELES and San Francisco, Atascadero State Hospital was as close to maximum custody as a state hospital can be. The majority of its patients were under commitment as mentally disordered sex offenders, commonly known as pedophiles or child molesters and in convict parlance: short eyes. I’d been taught convict values, and by convict values a child molester is a maggot to be reviled, spit upon, and persecuted. In prison, anything done to a child molester is acceptable. Anyone sent to prison for child molesting does his best to hide the fact. Nobody admits to that despicable behavior. The usual defense, which I’ve heard more than once, is that a vindictive wife orchestrated a false accusation.
In Atascadero, the short-eyed child-molesting majority looked down on the criminally insane thief minority. They were sick; we were criminals—that was how they saw it. The cherry on the sundae was that the institution had a “patient patrol,” complete with armbands, which to my way of thinking was no more than a license to snitch. I remember someone in Folsom saying that child molesters were as bad as stool pigeons, and someone else said, “Not as bad . . . the same thing. I’ve never seen a short eyes who wasn’t a rat, have you? They go together like a horse and carriage.” The observation was greeted with grunts of concurrence.
Atascadero was boring. Patients were not allowed to lie down during the day. They had to sit in the dayroom, watching soap operas on TV, or maybe they went to OT (Occupational Therapy), where they made clay ashtrays or painted pictures, neither of which interested me. OT was too much like the second grade. The dayroom had a poker game (thank God), and I went through it like a dose of salts. I acted perfectly rational except once, when an attendant came over to the game and asked how I was feeling. I told him I was fine except that I’d seen a priest in the hallway, “. . . and I could tell by the red light over his head that he was after me.”
When we wanted to go anywhere, perhaps to the commissary, the nurse had to write out a pass. We weren’t supposed to wander around. I, however, was looking for a hole, a way out, a place where I could climb or cut and escape into the surrounding hills. What the officials had done, however, was make note of all the weak places and then either reinforce them or assign a member of the patient patrol on duty to watch them. That was how I got into trouble. I was looking around backstage in the auditorium when a child molester with an armband asked what I was looking for. He didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him from years earlier in the county jail. He had been awaiting trial for molesting his niece. I recalled that it had started when she was three and continued until she was seven and told on him. I was remembering as he was asking my name and what ward I was on. . . .
I dipped slightly left for leverage, then sank my left fist in his stomach just like I was in a gym at the heavy bag. Any prizefighter will appreciate how wicked that can be if unexpected. He gasped and doubled over, then toppled sideways onto the floor, moving his legs as if on a bicycle. It was really wanton violence, a displacement of my frustrations and anger and how much I loathed Atascadero. Good God, I’d rather be in the penitentiary than turned into a vegetable and treated like a child in a state hospital, which is what seemed to be happening.
Nobody had seen the punch. I departed the auditorium and went back to the poker game and put it out of my mind. Atascadero had nearly three thousand patients. What were they going to do, have a lineup of three thousand? Besides, the fool would be fine once he could breathe again.
Without realizing it, I’d cracked three of his ribs. That evening as I went through the serving line in the mess hall, I looked up and saw him standing in the kitchen doorway with the white-clad attendant in charge of the watch. The molester tugged the attendant’s sleeve and then pointed his finger directly at me while his mouth worked energetically. In the argot of the jail, he was tellin’ it. . . . He was still tellin’ it when the attendants took me to the office.
The third watch wrote a summary of the incident and referred it to the day watch, when doctors and administrators were on hand. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I’d already seen several dingbats blow their tops and swing on somebody. At most they would be locked in a side room for a few hours until they calmed down. Unknown to me. the Department of Corrections report on A20284 Bunker had arrived that morning. Instead of a side room, they put me on the special locked ward, reserved for about two dozen of those considered the most volatile patients. Among them were three ex-cons whom I knew from prison. One of them, Rick, really qualified as a paranoid maniac. When I first entered San Quentin, I met Rick in the reception unit. Rick had words with another inmate in an orientation class. The inmate was a bit of a bully, and he gave Rick a dose of fear, a bad thing to do to a paranoiac. The only weapon Rick could get on short notice was a short-bladed but razor-sharp X-Acto knife. That evening in the mess hall, Rick saw the wanna-be bully carry his tray from the serving line and sit down. Rick walked up behind him, pulled his head back, and cut his throat. Blood spurted ten feet in the air. Anywhere else in the world the victim would’ve died. In San Quentin, doctors specialize in the endemic disease of knife wounds and they managed to save his life. Rick did his whole sentence in administrative segregation, the psych ward, and the prison medical facility in Vacaville. when that opened. When his prison term was finished, they committed him to the state hospital. Now, here he was, happy to see me. The other two I knew less well. One was a tough young Chicano whose mind seemed a little out of focus but whose precise malady escaped me.
The ward of twenty-two patients had eight attendants on duty at all times except for the graveyard shift, midnight to 8:00, when they had just three. The ward consisted of the dayroom, with wicker chairs and padded cushions, two hallways with regular side rooms where we slept but were not allowed in otherwise, and a final short hall behind a heavy, locked door. There were a total of fifteen rooms all used for maximum lockdown. It was called being in seclusion, but the hole is the hole no matter what nomenclature is applied. At the end of that short hall was a door to a road around the institution. Rick told me that it was the very same door that my friend Bobby Hagler and his pals had battered through several years earlier with the heavy bench. Since then the door had been reinforced, the heavy benches had been removed, and several more attendants had been added. We discussed the possibility and decided it was impossible. Alas, someone heard it and told it—and suddenly there were twenty white-clad attendants crowding the dayroom. The three of us were stripped to undershorts and locked in short hall rooms.
It may have been called seclusion, but it was a strip cell to me. A state hospital can do things that would never be allowed in prisons. It had a hole in the floor for a toilet. The stench that rose from it was overwhelming. In prison the hole could be covered with a newspaper or magazine, but such things weren’t allowed in seclusion. They might be disturbing. The room had a window (mesh screen and bars) so high that I had to chin myself with fingertips to get a brief look at the barren rolling hillsides outside.
A doctor arrived every afternoon and spoke in meaningless monosyllables. He had an accent that reminded me of my childhood experience in the nuthouse near Pomona. I asked him where he was from. “Estonia,” he said.
“Weren’t you guys allied with the Nazis?” I asked.
His face got red, his accent thickened, and I knew I was in trouble. Nevertheless, I stepped back, threw up a right arm, and declared: “Heil Hitler!” He really disliked that. Then again, I disliked him. He would have adapted well to concentration camp experiments.
Every day he made his rounds, peeking through the little observation window on each door, sometimes saying something, more often not. I asked him how long I was going to be locked up, and his reply was shrink jargon: “How long do you think it should be?”
In prison there were rules and regulations about such matters; in the nuthouse it was according to the whim of the psychiatrist in charge. It wasn’t punishment; it was treatment.
After two weeks without seeing a chink in the status quo, my usual instinct toward rebellion took over. I began to agitate the thirteen patients in the other rooms. By nightfall they were worked up. Each of them broke the little observation window and used the pieces of glass to cut a vein. In an hour the superintendent was on the ward. He was upset, for although a prison warden can disparage whatever convicts do, it is a different matter when patients in a hospital protest conditions with self-mutilation. Something like this could cause some negative media coverage.
The neo-Nazi ward doctor then arrived. He knew immediately who was behind it. He and the superintendent came to talk to me. I told them our demands—mattresses and bedding instead of the rubber pads, books and magazines, and the right to write and receive letters.
The superintendent agreed to everything, but the phones and teletypes were humming. At nine in the morning, my door opened and several attendants told me to step out. They gave me a white jumpsuit to put on, put me in restraints, and took me out the back door to a waiting car. Three hours later I arrived at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. The transfer was under a statute that allowed certain dangerous mental patients committed under criminal statutes to be housed in the correctional facility.
When I arrived, the prison officials only had teletypes about me. There was a lieutenant named Estelle, who I think would later head the Texas prison system and who knew me from another prison and for some reason had a special personal animosity toward me. He put me in S-3, the unit on the third floor of S Wing. It consisted of cells with walls of glass from about waist-height to the ceiling. The glass wall was both front and rear, causing the cells to be labelled the fish bowls. Some had the hole in the floor, and some had a cast-metal combination of washbasin and toilet. I was lucky and got the latter. When the water ran out of the washbasin, it ran into the toilet below. The drawback was that the bottom of the toilet was a fraction of an inch off the floor, and in the warm, wet darkness resided a million cockroaches, so many that some got pushed out into the light where they ran around looking for darkness. When I lit a piece of paper and pushed it under the toilet, they charged forth in their multitudes, so many that I stood on top of the toilet until they scurried back inside. I never bothered them again. To my benefit, the cell lights were never turned out.
I have no idea what papers or documents were teletyped or sent between the Department of Mental Hygiene and the Department of Corrections, but the latter somehow got the idea that I had gone to trial on the burglaries and had been acquitted by reason of insanity and now the state hospital had discharged me and jurisdiction had reverted to Corrections. I stayed a month or so in the goldfish bowl. Convicts on the main line sent me books from the library. I’ve always been able to make it if I could read. While on S-3 I first read Herman Hesse and Sartre. I think I also read Anna Karenina and Lord Jim while lying on the floor of the fish bowl.
Across from me was the man for whom the law authorizing transfers from mental hospital to Vacaville had been written. His name was Jack Cathy. He was from Los Angeles but had gone to prison in Arizona, where he had killed someone. He eventually finished that term and was paroled. In Hollywood he was arrested and charged with another murder. He was initially found incompetent to stand trial under Sections 1367 and 1368, California Penal Code, and committed to Atascadero, where he had stabbed four attendants, killing one. A court in San Luis Obispo again found him incompetent to stand trial but ordered that he be held in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, which had a prison’s security. A lawyer filed a petition for habeas corpus. In response the legislature passed the statute allowing his transfer—and mine. I was on S-3 for several months. Three times a week he was taken out of his cell and given a shock treatment. A convict said Cathy had been getting them three times a week for several years. In half an hour they brought him back and dumped him in the cell. An hour or so after he was returned, and he would call out, “Hey, man . . . you . . . next door . . .”
I would stand up so I could see him through the glass. Three times a week we would have the same conversation. He would ask where he was, and I would tell him. He would ask where I was from. I would tell him. He would ask if I knew Eddie “the Fox” Chaplick. In a day Cathy’s memory would nearly return. He would say, “Oh yeah,” and remember something else. It was always the same sequence of conversation. When his memory was almost back, they would take him out for another electric shock treatment. It went on for two months.
They let me out of S-3, put me in the parole violators’ unit, and began preparing for a parole violation hearing. They sent to the field for a parole officer report, and when they gave me the parole violation charges, included were the same charges a court had ruled that I was incompetent to face trial for in a court of law with an attorney and all the protections of American jurisprudence. If I couldn’t face the charges there, how could I face them in a parole violation hearing without any legal protection or even a record? I sensed that they had made a mistake and began studying law books.
The parole violator unit had several men I’d known in San Quentin and elsewhere, including one who would eventually tell me the story that is the basis of my novel Dog Eat Dog. My legal insanity became a running gag. Loitering in the long corridor in the parole violators’ unit was prohibited. A guard would come along, telling inmates to move on—out to the yard or into the housing unit. As a joke, when he got about fifteen feet away I would turn and begin jabbing my finger at the wall and talking irrationally: “What? What? You better not say that. I’m tellin’ ya now . . . now and now. . . . Stop it . . . freeze. Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom. . . .” And I would punctuate the last words with a pantomime of shifting gears in a car, which I would throw into third, make a hard pivot, and take off walking while making engine sounds. The guard would look consternated, and my friends would choke back their laughter.
In the mess hall serving line, the new arrivals assigned to ladling the food were scared of me. I would look at them wild-eyed and shake my tray in front of them. They would overload it, although I did this more for the fun than for the food, which was usually hard to eat in a regular ration, much less in extra portions.
About this time I received a letter from the daughter of a psychiatrist I met during court proceedings of the assault on the correctional officer. Every so often there is a newspaper account of some apparently middle-class woman falling in love with some seeming human monster who had committed a passel of grisly murders and was awaiting execution. Most people simply shake their heads in awed distaste; it is beyond their range of experience. Actually the infatuation is not with a real person but with someone created in fantasy, someone the woman can visit periodically, as a patient does with a psychoanalyst. The convict behind bars suddenly has all the attributes for which she yearns. She gives them to him. She creates an imago and loves it as if it is a fully realized person. She can come every week or every month and sit across from him for several hours, pouring forth the torments of her soul and psyche until the inevitable transference transpires.
I could see that this was what was happening here. I was very ambiguous about the relationship. I’d been accused of being manipulative and exploitative, especially of women. In all candor, it was a judgment I thought erroneous. Where were the facts? Mrs. Hal Wallis? I had not taken advantage of her even when she was having a breakdown and would have given me anything. Nevertheless, I was still very conscious of the accusation—even though the whole world was arrayed against me and I needed at least one ally.
This woman named “Mary” was not merely willing; she was enthusiastic. She said she had been in a cocoon since she was a teenager, “and now I’m a butterfly flying free.” Frankly, she scared me. If she got hurt in my world, the other world would blame me. I was unconcerned about most of them, but Mary’s father had befriended me. However, this was a war for survival, and anyone close could get hit by shrapnel. Alone save for some scruffy convicts, I was desperate for allies. I let her into my life.
Her letters became fiery and voluminous. Mail was pushed under the cell door before morning unlock, on the assumption that it would start the convict’s day with him in a good mood. The assumption was correct. Mary wrote every day, but with the vagaries of the U.S. Mail and the prison mail room, some mornings nothing was beneath the door and on others, usually Tuesday, her letters would literally cover my floor.
Then she came to visit. She was no drop-dead beauty, but she radiated a powerful sensuality from the toss of her thick raven hair to the bounce of her hips as she walked. She bore some physical resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, with a great upper body and legs a little too short for perfection. Although I have always been a connoisseur of legs and derriere, with only minimal interest in the female breast (a nearly un-American attitude), I found Mary to be sexually attractive. Her most attractive characteristic, however, was not physical; it was her moxie. She was dying for adventure. She would get plenty before it was over.
When she left, she went to the county seat of Fairfield and retained a young lawyer, who came over and asked, “How do you treat him?”
The prison official replied, “We treat him like everyone else.”
“That’s the point. He isn’t like everyone. He’s a mental patient.”
The lawyer went to check the law books for remedies. The Department of Corrections decided to throw the hot potato. One day without warning, the public-address system called out: “Bunker . . . A-two-oh-two-eight-four, report to Receiving and Release.”
I thought maybe it was a clothing package or they needed some fingerprints. The last thing I expected was that they would throw me a white jumpsuit and tell me to change. Fifteen minutes later I was rolling out the back gate in the backseat of a seven-passenger van.
When we reached Atascadero, the state hospital was taken by surprise. They didn’t want me. I told them that I would leave immediately on foot if they were serious. The prison psychiatrists certified that I was returned to competency.
After three hours of waiting, they took me in and let the driver leave. The neo-Nazi doctor was ready and waiting for me. Back to the same side room, as they are called. I noted that the glass observation windows had been replaced by metal plates with holes to look through. That was before they put me in “full” restraints. First the straitjacket, then they stretched me on the bed and tied bed sheets from my ankles to the bed frame and other bed sheets from my armpits to the top of the bed frame. The restraints were so tight and the old bed sagged so much in the middle that I was suspended over it. (No, that’s an exaggeration, but barely.) The whole thing was topped off by a shot of Prolixin, the drug of instant, prolonged mental vegetation. The effect of a single injection lasts a week. As the attendant readied the needle, the neo-Nazi doctor stood grinning beside the bed. He’d taken my earlier insurrection of the insane very personally. Looking at me, he saw an outlaw, a criminal. When I looked at him, I envisioned a black uniform with swastika armband and death’s head lapel buttons, and I would not have been surprised if he had once worked in a German hospital’s eugenics program.
Reports were written, signed, sealed, stamped, and sent in record time to the Municipal Court, City of Inglewood. In three weeks the sheriff’s department bus came through, dropping some off, picking some up. I was among the latter.
WHILE I WAS IN VACAVILLE, Denis, my drug-dealing friend from Hollywood, came through the Reception Center on a parole violation. He’d been approached for help by the pimps when I was extorting them. Denis told me that a certain well-known shyster lawyer named Brad Arthur could get my parole warrant lifted. How did he do it? Denis wasn’t sure, but it could be done. I had immediately sent Mary to see Brad Arthur to ascertain if he could do it and, if so, what it would cost. “But don’t give him any money until I tell you. . . .”
Within days of that instruction, I was transferred back to Atascadero State Hospital. There, wearing a straitjacket, tied to a bed, and turned into a vegetable, I was allowed neither visits nor letter writing. The necessary pencil was considered too dangerous for me to handle.
Mary, who knew California Supreme Court justice Stanley Mosk through her father, called him up. Although he didn’t appreciate the imposition and probably found her request borderline improper, he called Atascadero’s superintendent and made an inquiry. Coming from a State Supreme Court justice, this was enough to get her and Brad Arthur through the fire wall of the neo-Nazi doctor. I was to be returned to Los Angeles within the week. Although attendants and the doctor hovered around us, I was able to tell Mary and Brad to “take care of the parole hold.”
I had no idea if it had been done when the sheriff’s department bus arrived at Atascadero, dropping a couple off, picking some up. For the next several days we traversed the highways of Central California, stopping at county jails to pick up prisoners wanted in Los Angeles and delivering others wanted in San Luis Obispo or Monterey or Bakersfield. When we reached the bus unloading yard of the LA Central Jail, it was past midnight. LAPD buses and vans were disgorging young black men by the score and by the hundreds through the night. The air was filled with anger’s ozone. The police wielded nightsticks, poking and prodding and slapping them in their palms as threats, while yelling, “Move it! Move on in!” I did not know it at the time, but it was the first night of the Watts riot. While I was being booked, notice came that bail had been posted. I knew the critical moment would be when I was at the last stage of release, when the booking clerk called me to the window to check my armband and compare my fingerprints.
“When the door buzzes, push out,” said the deputy.
The gray paint was worn off where countless thousands of hands had pushed through ahead of me. The door buzzed, I pushed, and the door opened. Mary was waiting outside, and dawn was coming up over the City of Angels. We went forthwith to a motel on Seventh Street where she had already rented a room. We watched the Watts riot on the tube. Thank God I wasn’t in jail when the thousands of angry young blacks were dragged in.