Bunker Mr Blue

Memoirs of a Renegade
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84243-746-9
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

Winner of the Macallan Gold Dagger 2000 for non-fiction Edward Bunker's life is beyond the imaginings of most fiction writers. He was born in Hollywood, California, the son of a stagehand and Busby Berkeley chorus girl, whose early divorce propelled him into a series of boarding homes and military schools. From the age of five he repeatedly ran away, roaming the city streets at night. A proud character, combined with an IQ of 152, resulted in a series of altercations with the authorities. He became the youngest ever inmate of San Quentin at the age of seventeen, and there he learned survival skills and faced down the toughest prisoners in the system. He was befriended by Mrs Louise Wallis, a former star of the silent screen and wife of movie mogul, Hal Wallis, who produced films starring Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. She introduced Bunker to her circle of friends, including Jack Dempsey, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley and William Randolph Hearst, whose guest he was at San Simeon. A parole violation resulted in a spell crossing America as a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list. His eventual capture led to Folsom prison. Encouraged by the example of Dostoevsky, Cervantes and Caryl Chessman, and by the kindness of Mrs Wallis, he determined to write his way out of prison. Bunker's first published novel, No Beast So Fierce, viewed by many including Quentin Tarantino as the finest crime novel ever written, changed his fortunes. It was filmed as Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. He published three other novels, The Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue and Dog Eat Dog, (all published by No Exit) in his lifetime, admired by writers as diverse as William Styron and James Ellroy, and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers after his death in 2005. Bunker appeared in a score of films, most notably his legendary role as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs. This blistering narrative is a memoir like no other.

Edward Bunker, Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, was the author of No Beast So Fierce, Little Boy Blue, Dog Eat Dog, The Animal Factory and his autobiography, Mr Blue, all published by No Exit. He was co-screenwriter of the Oscar nominated movie, The Runaway Train, and appeared in over 30 feature films, including Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, the film of his book No Beast So Fierce. Edward Bunker died in 2005 and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bunker, Edward

Leseproben

1

No Heaven, No Hell

In March of 1933, Southern California suddenly began to rock and roll to a sound from deep within the ground. Bric-à-brac danced on mantels and shattered on floors. Windows cracked and cascaded onto sidewalks. Lath and plaster houses screeched and they bent this way and that, much like a box of matches. Brick buildings stood rigid until overwhelmed by the vibrations; then fell into a pile of rubble and a cloud of dust. The Long Beach Civic Auditorium collapsed with many killed. I was later told that I was conceived at the moment of the earthquake and born on New Year’s Eve, 1933, in Hollywood’s Cedar of Lebanon hospital. Los Angeles was under a torrential deluge, with palm trees and houses floating down its canyons.

When I was five, I’d heard my mother proclaim that earthquake and storm were omens, for I was trouble from the start, beginning with colic. At two, I disappeared from a family picnic in Griffith Park. Two hundred men hunted the brush for half the night. At three I somehow managed to demolish a neighbor’s back yard incinerator with a claw hammer. At four I pillaged another neighbor’s Good Humor truck and had an ice-cream party for several neighborhood dogs. A week later I tried to help clean up the back yard by burning a pile of eucalyptus leaves that were piled beside the neighbor’s garage. Soon the night was burning bright and fire engine sirens sounded loud. Only one garage wall was fire-blackened.

I remember the ice-cream caper and fire, but the other things I was told. My first clear memories are of my parents screaming at each other and the police arriving to “keep the peace.” When my father left, I followed him to the driveway. I was crying and wanted to go with him but he pushed me away and drove off with a screech of tires.

We lived on Lexington Avenue just east of Paramount Studios. The first word I could read was Hollywoodland. My mother was a chorus girl in vaudeville and Busby Berkeley movie musicals. My father was a stagehand and sometimes grip.

I don’t remember the divorce proceedings, but part of the result was my being placed in a boarding home. Overnight I went from being a pampered only child to being the youngest among a dozen or more. I first learned about theft in this boarding home. Somebody stole candy that my father had brought me. It was hard then for me to conceive the idea of theft.

I ran away for the first time when I was five. One rainy Sunday morning while the household slept late, I put on a raincoat and rubbers and went out the back door. Two blocks away I hid in the crawlspace of an old frame house that sat high off the ground and was surrounded by trees. It was dry and out of the rain and I could peer out at the world. The family dog quickly found me, but preferred being hugged and petted to raising the alarm. I stayed there until darkness came, the rain stopped and a cold wind came up. Even in LA a December night can be cold for a five-year-old. I came out, walked half a block and was spotted by one of those hunting for me. My parents were worried, of course, but not in a panic. They were already familiar with my propensity for trouble.

The couple who ran the foster home asked my father to come and take me away. He tried another boarding home, and when that failed he tried a military school, Mount Lowe in Altadena. I lasted two months. Then it was another boarding home, also in Altadena, in a 5,000 square foot house with an acre of grounds. That was my first meeting with Mrs Bosco, whom I remember fondly. I seemed to get along okay although I used to hide under a bed in the dorm so I could read. My father had built a small bookcase for me. He then bought a ten-volume set of Junior Classics, children’s versions of famous tales such as The Man without a Country, Pandora’s Box and Damon and Pythias. I learned to read with these books.

Mrs Bosco closed the boarding home after I had been there for a few months. The next stop was Page Military School, on Cochran and San Vicente in West Los Angeles. The parents of the prospective cadets were shown bright, classy dorms with cubicles but the majority of cadets lived in less sumptuous quarters. At Page I had measles and mumps and my first official recognition as a troublemaker destined for a bad end. I became a thief. A boy whose name and face are long forgotten took me along to prowl the other dorms in the wee hours as he searched pants hanging on hooks or across chair backs. When someone rolled over, we froze, our hearts beating wildly. The cubicles were shoulder high, so we could duck our heads and be out of sight. We had to run once when a boy woke up and challenged us: “Hey, what’re you doing?” As we ran, behind us we heard the scream: “Thief! Thief!” It was a great adrenalin rush.

One night a group of us sneaked from the dorm into the big kitchen and used a meat cleaver to hack the padlock off a walk-in freezer. We pillaged all the cookies and ice-cream. Soon after reveille we were apprehended. I was unjustly deemed the ringleader and disciplined accordingly. Thereafter I was marked for special treatment by the cadet officers. My few friends were the other outcasts and troublemakers. My single legitimate accomplishment at Page was discovering that I could spell better than almost everyone else. Even amidst the chaos of my young life, I’d mastered syllables and phonetics. And because I could sound out words, I could read precociously – and soon voraciously.

On Friday afternoons nearly every cadet went home for the weekend. One weekend I went to see my father, the next to my mother’s. She now worked as a coffee shop waitress. On Sunday mornings I followed the common habit of most American children of the era and went to the matinée at a neighborhood movie theater. It showed double features. One Sunday between the two movies, I learned that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Earlier, my father had declared: “If those slant-eyed bastards start trouble, we’ll send the US Navy over and sink their rinky-dink islands.” Dad was attuned with the era where nigger appeared in the prose of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and others. Dad disliked niggers, spies, wops and the English with “their goddamn king.” He liked France and Native Americans and claimed that we Bunkers had Indian blood. I was never convinced. Claiming Indian blood today has become somewhat chic. Our family had been around the Great Lakes from midway through the eighteenth century, and when my father reached his sixties he had high cheekbones and wrinkled leather skin and looked like an Indian. Indeed, as I get older, I am sometimes asked if I have Indian blood.

At Page Military School, things got worse. Cadet officers made my life miserable, so on one bright California morning, another cadet and I jumped the back fence and headed toward the Hollywood Hills three miles away. They were green, speckled with a few red-tiled roofs. We hitchhiked over the hills and spent the night in the shell of a wrecked automobile beside a two-lane highway, watching the giant trucks rumble past. Since then that highway has become a ten-lane Interstate freeway.

After shivering through the night and being hungry when the sun came up, my companion said he was going to go back. I bid him goodbye and started walking beside a railroad right of way between the highway and endless orange groves. I came upon a trainload of olive drab, US Army trucks that waited on a siding. As I walked along there was a rolling crash as it got underway. Grabbing a rail, I climbed aboard. The hundreds of army trucks were unlocked so I got in one and watched the landscape flash past as the train headed north.

Early that evening I climbed off in the outskirts of Sacramento, 400 miles from where I started. I was getting hungry and the shadows were lengthening. I started walking. I figured I would go into town, see a movie. When it let out, I would find something to eat and somewhere to sleep. Outside of Sacramento, on a bank of the American River full of abundant greenery, I smelt food cooking. It was a hobo encampment called a Hooverville, shacks made of corrugated tin and cardboard.

The hoboes took me in, but one got scared and stopped a sheriff’s car. Deputies raided the encampment and took me away.

Page Military School refused to take me back. My father was near tears over what to do with me, until we heard that Mrs Bosco had opened a new home for a score of boys, from age five through high school. She had leased a 25,000 square foot mansion on four acres on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. It was called Mayfair. The house still exists as part of Ambassador College. Back then such huge mansions were unsaleable white elephants.

“Mayfair” was affixed to a brass plate on the gatepost of a house worthy of an archduke: but a nine-year-old is unimpressed by such things. The boys were pretty much relegated to four bedrooms on the second floor of the north wing over the kitchen. The school classroom, which had once been the music room, led off the vast entrance hall, which had a grand staircase. We attended school five days a week and there was no such thing as summer vacation. The teacher, a stern woman given to lace-collared dresses fastened with cameos, had a penchant for punishment. She’d grab an ear and give it a twist, or rap our knuckles with a ruler. Already I had a problem with authority. Once she grabbed my ear. I slapped her hand away and abruptly stood up. Startled, she flinched backwards, tripped over a chair and fell on her rump, legs up. She cried out as if being murdered. Mr...