Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (44 page)

"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 direcdy 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, 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
light bulb. Two whacks and the blood squirted. I kept the homemade tourniquet
tight and held my arm close to the bars. The 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 and 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 other deputies came running. Whde 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 the wool olive twill sucked up 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, face down, along the corridor to the infirmary. I saw the deputy who 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. I was called down to an interview room in the
hospital area. I was ready. I sat rocking back and forth, looking at the first
psychiatrist 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."

"Can't you tell me?"

"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, stricdy
speaking, the provisions of Sections 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.
Someone may commit a crime and be sane and responsible when it happens, but
when arrested and charged years later may be totally out of his mind. How can a
defendant be brought to trial, or punished, whde crazy?

The second psychiatrist was a
cafe au lait
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 schizophrenic paranoid, suffering auditory hallucinations
and delusions of persecution," who "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 incompetent to stand trial doesn't mean
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 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 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 the 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, spat upon and persecuted. In prison, anything done to a
chdd 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
chdd 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 chdd 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 a carriage." The observation was greeted with grunts of
concurrence.

Atascadero was boring. Patients
were not allowed to he down during the day. They had to sit in the day room,
watching soap operas on TV, or maybe they went to OT (Occupational Therapy)
where they made clay ashtrays or painted a picture, neither of which interested
me. OT was too much like the second grade. The day room had a poker game (thank
God), and I went through it like a dose of salts. I acted perfecdy 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 was make note of all the weak places, and then either
reinforced them or assigned a member of the patient patrol on duty watching
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. It had started when
she was three and continued untd she was seven and told on him. I was
remembering that as he was asking my name and what ward I was on . . .

I dipped slighdy left for
leverage then sunk my left fist in his stomach just as if 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 an expression of 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 anil went back to the poker game and put it out of my
mind. Atascadero had nearly 3,000 patients. What were they going to do, have a
lineup of 3,000? 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, then pointed his finger directly at me while his mouth worked
energetically. In the argot of the jad, he was tellin' it . . . He was still
telling 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 untd they calmed down. Unknown to me,
the Department of Corrections report on A20284 Bunker 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 volatde patients. Among them were
three ex-cons whom I knew from prison. One of them, Back really qualified as a
paranoid maniac. When I first entered

San Quentin, I met him 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 have died. In
San Quentin, where doctors specialize in the endemic disease of knife wounds,
they managed to save his life. Rick did his whole sentence in administration
segregation, the psych ward and in prison medical facility at 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 a.m., when they had just three. The ward consisted of the day
room, 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 was a total of fifteen rooms all used for maximum
lock down. 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 friends, 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
day room. 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 the hole in the floor for a todet.
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 mysell with
fingertips to get a brief look at the barren rolling hillsides outside.

A doctor arrived every
afternoon, and spoke in
meaningless
monosyllables. His Eastern
European accent reminded
me
of
my
chddhood 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:
"Hed Hider!" He really
disliked
that. Then again, I disliked
him. He would have adapted
well
to
concentration camp eugenics
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 their veins. 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 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, 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 at
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,
whom I think would later head the Texas prison system, 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 ceding.
The glass wall was both front and rear, causing the cells to be labeled
"the fish bowls." Some had the holes 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 lighted a piece of paper and pushed it under the todet, they charged
forth in their multitudes, so many that I stood on top of the todet 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, 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
mainline 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
Karen
ina and
Lord
Jim
whde lying on the floor of the 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 killed someone. He eventually finished that term and was
paroled. In Hollywood he was arrested and charged with another murder. At first
he was found incompetent to stand trial under Section 1367, 1368 California
Penal Code, and committed to Atascadero, where he 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 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 he'd been getting that 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, he would call out: "Hey, man . . . you . . . next
door ..."