Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (39 page)

The pre-sentence interview and
report went well enough. The probation officer was overworked and indifferent.
He accepted
as
real the
facade of a job I gave him, and there was, in fact, some question if I was
involved in the safecracking scheme. Even the police report said I was
apparendy asleep in the back seat when tin- officer walked up to the car. After
reading the probation report. my lawyer talked to the judge, "kind of
unofficially . . . and lie thinks it calls for something like $100 or fifty
days ..."

"Fifty days!"

"No . . . no. It's fifty
days if you don't pay the fine. Two dollars a day."

I stopped worrying and
continued devouring hedonistic pleas ures. The days ticked away. Finally came
the day circled on the calendar.

It was an afternoon appearance
and I was late. I don't remember why. I do remember meeting my lawyer in the
corridor outside tin- courtroom. He was upset. "They already called you. The
judge was ready to issue a bench warrant." While speaking, he ushered me
through the courtroom door. The courtroom was not crowded but still had plenty
of business. The judge was hearing arguments on another case; someone seeking a
bad reduction. My lawyer had two seats on the aisle. When we sat down, he
handed me some papers. "Jesus, why didn't you warn me?"

I read, "Department of
Corrections, Parole and Community Services." Oh God! It was
him,
my elephant-assed
bete noire. I
read in snatches, my mind jumping
too much for continuity.
". . . LAPD has suspected him of two murders
..."
Was he nuts? What was he
talking about? A long time later I would realize that he was referring to the
Hollywood Prowler fiasco — but I never did find out what other murder he was
talking about.
". . . involved in drug trafficking and exploiting prostitutes in
the Sunset Strip-Beverly Hills area
..."
Had he been in the courtroom
and had I a pistol, he would have been shot dead in front of judge, bailiffs,
deputy District Attorney and God Almighty. I was going to jail on bullshit.
Murder!
What kind of shit was that?
Exploiting prostitutes!
That was crazy. I was a
whore's best friend. I
hated
pimps.

If I had just known about this
. . . "I'm gonna take a piss," I said, intending to leave and not
come back.

"The People versus Bunker,
number 5696 dash 57 . . ."

The judge gave me ninety days
in the county jail, and the bailiffs closed in and took me to the bullpen
beside the courtroom. When the heavy door was unlocked I was met with the
combined stench of unwashed bodies and a stopped-up toilet. As with most
courtroom bullpens, it was crowded. All the benches were taken; so was most of
the floor. I was by far the most elegantly dressed. All the others had come
from a precinct house, where they'd slept for two or three days in whatever
they were wearing when arrested. Nearly all were poor, and it showed in their
clothes. I found space near the wall, took off my camel hair sport coat and
used it for a pillow. If my past experiences were any indicator, it would be a
long wait before we went anywhere.

At about 6.30, the deputies
arrived with the chains. The bus waited outside. From Beverly Hills we went to
Inglewood and picked up more prisoners, and from there to Long Beach. It was
long after midnight when we were disgorged at the old Hall of Justice at Temple
and Broadway. A new central jail had been planned for a landfill over a dump
behind the Union Station, but it was a couple of years away. It took eighteen
hours to go through the booking process, most of it spent waiting somewhere in
the building. The visiting room was used after visits were over, ditto for
courtroom bullpens downstairs during the night. Once a fish was dropped into
the processing hopper, not even God could find him until he came out the other
end, his body sticky with DDT sprayed on after a shower, wearing rumpled,
ill-fitting jad clothes and carrying a mattress cover bedroll.

It was Friday afternoon when
the judge sentenced me. It was about four in the morning on Sunday when the
jail tank's gate crashed shut behind me. The runway outside the cells was wall
to wall mattresses and mostly sleeping bodies. One or two men were reading
paperbacks in the light that was coming through the outer bars from the
jailers' walkway. I was able to stretch out on the concrete without a mattress
and use the folded mattress cover for a pillow. Despite the discomfort, I
quickly fell asleep. I'd gotten less than an hour the night before, and that,
too, was on a hard floor.

On weekday mornings, at 4 a.m.
a deputy with a clipboard would start calling names for court. Because it was
Sunday, it was 6 a.m. when the lights went on and the tank trusties came out of
the first cell and began waking up those sleeping on the runway. Around the
jail the gates were beginning to open. The runways were being cleared of
mattresses and bedding so breakfast could be passed out. I struggled hard
against the awesome need for sleep. The runway was rapidly getting emptier as
prisoners rolled up their mattresses and carried them into cells. This wasn't
the same as high power, which always had room. This was five men to each
two-man cell. I turned toward the first cell; the tank trusties would assign me
to one.

"Bunker! Eddie
Bunker!" The speaker was in the doorway of the first cell. He wore a blue
tank top that matched the India ink blue tattoos covering both arms and every
other spot of exposed flesh, including a line around his neck with the words:
cut on dotted line
. It was the full beard, which
wasn't allowed in San Quentin, that made me frown because I didn't recognize
the speaker for a few seconds. He realized the origin of my frown. "Jimmy
Thomas, fool!"

Sure. Skinny Jimmy. I hadn't
seen him in several years. "Hey, man, what's goin' on?"

"I'm fightin' a robbery beef.
Me and Buddy Sloan. Bring your gear in here." He beckoned me into the
first cell. No matter how crowded the rest of the tank, cell number 1 had just
two occupants for the two bunks. Nobody even slept on the floor unless invited
— and they invited me. Indeed, from here onward it was impossible for me to
enter a jail or prison on the West Coast without knowing several (if it was a
jail), or many (if it was a prison) of the occupants.

The other trusty from the first
cell appeared in the doorway, all 6' 4" of lean muscle and shaven head.
"You know Bobby Hedberg?"

"I sure know who he
is." I extended a hand. "Eddie Bunker."

"I know about you, too . .
. crazy motherfucker."

"Not as crazy as
you." It was true, Bobby Hedberg was a bona fide crazy man. He seemed to
be sane and rational in his conversation — he made sense when he talked — but
he did some things so wild that my adventures were minor by comparison. Had I
done what Bobby did over the course of his criminal career, I would have spent
my entire life in prison rather than a mere eighteen years in three jolts.
Bobby was an anomaly. His father, R.B., for whom Bobby was named because he was
the oldest son, was rich from building tract homes in the San Fernando Valley
when World War II ended. A tough, strict Irish Catholic, everyone to him was
either a nigger, a spic, a greaseball wop, a kike, a Jap, a king-worshiping
English sonofabitch, a guinea bastard or a fuckin' Protestant. He disliked
everyone but the Pope, and he was suspicious of John XXIII for being too
goddamned liberal. Bobby was the oldest son, and Bobby broke his father's heart
by being a hoodlum. Bobby was no rich boy having an adventure on the other side
of the tracks, he was a hard core tough guy to the bone. He would do outrageous
things over the next two decades, in prison and out. Being pursued by the
California Highway Patrol once, he crashed through the US/Mexican border in a
hailstorm of bullets, and surrendered over there. Another time, a parole
officer managed to lock him in an office on the ninth floor of a downtown
office building. Bobby threw everything out the window: his own ticker tape
parade made up of inmate records. He finished the scene by taking Ronald
Reagan's picture off the wall and throwing that, too.

I went to see him one time in
West Hollywood. When I reached the high rise condominium it was cordoned off by
black and white sheriffs' cars. At a nearby pay telephone I called him. Sure
enough, it was Bobby they had surrounded, although now I can't remember why.
His voice was slurred with a heroin high. We talked a few seconds and he said
he had to go. Months later I learned that he packed as much heroin as he could
into condoms tied in tight knots and stuck it up his butt. Then he fixed until
he nearly overdosed. When they kicked in the door, he was unconscious on the
middle of the floor. He didn't even know he'd been arrested untd he woke up in
the jail ward of the general hospital.

Another time he was in the
county jail and he conspired with one of the Manson girls to kidnap a Central
American consul general to force his release. The FBI curtailed the plot, and
never took it seriously. I would have gotten forty years, Bobby got two — and
they ran concurrently with the term he was serving in San Quentin.

Bobby overdosed himself to
death when he was forty or so but that was in the future.

When we met in the jad, Bobby
said, "Man, I've been hearing about you since I went to juvenile
hall."

The tank was packed four and
five to a cell, except for the first three cells, which held two, three and
three, and the men in those cells passed out the food, swept and mopped the
runway, assigned cells and bunks — and maintained order with boot and fist. I
moved into the first cell with a mattress on the floor.

It was Sunday and slow. No
court appearances, no visits, no vendor wagons selling things except for Oscar
with the newspaper and magazine cart. Oscar had the jad concession for decades;
selling thousands of newspapers and paperbacks every day made him a wealthy
man. I slept on Bobby's bunk through the day. After the evening count, I played
poker to occupy my mind so I wouldn't dwell on my troubles. There was nothing I
could do except worry. Better to concentrate on the cards coming off the deck.

Finally, it was lockup and
lights out. I went to sleep quickly to escape thinking about my situation.

Late the following morning, I
was called out of the tank and told to go to the Attorney Room. As I checked in
with the deputy on the desk, I looked around the room and saw the parole
officer. I walked between the tables toward him, and saw the malicious glee in
his little pig eyes and the corners of his mouth.

"You know you're going
back, don't you?"

I nodded, not trusting what
would come out of my mouth. Sheer willpower kept me from diving across the
table and smashing him in the face. It wasn't the consequences that bothered
me. It was that in seconds they would pile on and pull me off. If I'd had even
two or three minutes I would have assaulted him. I'd be lucky to get fifteen
seconds, and that wouldn't have provided enough satisfaction for the beating
they would inflict on me, the stint in the hole and the addendum to his parole
report. Actually he was merely confirming what I already knew. It was standard
policy that any parolee sent to jad for anything went back to prison; then the
Adult Authority reviewed the matter. Nobody was ever reinstated on parole. Some
men did more time on the parole violation than on the original conviction. I'd
been trying to maintain hope despite what I knew. That was over.

As I walked back through the
corridors to the tank, I was resigned to seeing the Big Yard. Now my biggest
hope was that the paperwork would go through quickly so I didn't have to spend
a couple of months in the county jail.

When I reached the landing outside
the tank, Bobby Hedberg was waiting inside the gate. He had my meager gear in
hand. "Who was that?"

"The parole officer."
I turned my thumb downward; the gesture said it all.

"They called you for roll
up to the farm."

"To the farm."

"Yeah. Right after you
left."

The deputy who ran the four
tanks on the landing came up to unlock the gate and let me in. Bobby told him,
"This is Bunker. Here's his gear."

The deputy unlocked the gate
and Bobby handed out the mattress cover.

Half an hour later I was on a
sheriff's bus heading north through the San Fernando Valley. I wore no
handcuffs. The county farm was minimum security. As the bus rolled, I realized
that the jail bureaucracy, which always needed space in the downtown jad, saw
me as someone eligible for the farm. The parole officer had not yet put the
detainer on me when the roll up was called.