Authors: Edward Bunker
Little Boy Blue (14 page)
As he kept looking for Red, Alex was still
excited about his triumph in the game. He pushed through the restroom door and
was met with a cloud of thick tobacco smoke. This was the one place on the ward
where smoking was allowed. Inside was a crowded foyer of puffing men, most of
them with hand-rolled cigarettes made of awful-tasting, sweet-smelling state
tobacco packaged at San Quentin and nicknamed “Duffy,” after the
famous warden of the prison.
Alex walked by unconcernedly, barely glancing
at the cadaverous, swollen, fierce-eyed, vacant-eyed faces. Then he went
through a second door into a much larger but less crowded room with huge
semicircular washbowls on the right and urinals and toilets on the left. Butts
and streamers of toilet paper littered the floor. Red wasn’t here.
“Hey, kid,” a toothless black man
with scaly gray skin and hair like wild watch springs said. His teeth were huge
and yellow, and some were missing. But he didn’t faze the boy, for Alex
knew that, frightening as he appeared, he was harmless. Alex reached into his jeans
and picked out a cigarette without extracting the pack. Exposing it would have
invited a crowd of beggars. Factory-made cigarettes were at a premium, and the
mentally ill were the world’s most unabashed beggars. Alex had started
smoking three weeks earlier and had been inhaling for the past week; he was
proud of himself.
Red had to be in either the clothing room or
the dormitory, though the last was out of bounds during the day. Red, however,
had an attendant who accepted ten-dollar bills slipped into his pocket with a
wink. He also brought Red bottles of whiskey and cough syrup laced with
codeine, which Red hid in a locker under his bunk. Once late at night Alex had
found him and First Choice Floyd in the small dormitory restroom, huddled over
a spoon with matches flaming under it. Red had told him quickly, “Get the
fuck outa here,” and he left, red-faced. The next morning Floyd told him
to forget what he’d seen.
Barzo was in the clothing room—actually
two rooms: one a place to get dressed next to the showers, and the other for
storage of civilian clothes. He’d shaved and changed into a zoot suit of
hound’s- tooth check, with a yellow shirt and maroon tie, the era’s
epitome of sharpness. His processed red hair was slicked down stiff, and he smelled
of cologne. Somehow First Choice Floyd had found Red first; the dark-skinned
black man was propped on one elbow on a bench next to the wall.
Red looked around at the sound of the door
opening. “How do I look, boy?”
“C’mon, niggah,” Floyd
said, slurring the last word. “You know you look pretty. But hurry your
ass up an’ don’
keep
that broad waitin’.”
Red turned back to the full-length mirror,
making a final check of how his clothes hung. He looked at Alex in the mirror.
“Heard you won a bundle.
Took you a while gettin’
heah. How much you steal?”
Alex’s face crimsoned and he stuttered
a denial, realizing, as Red burst out laughing, that the accusation was a joke.
“Well, young’un, you shoulda took a little end. That’s what
I’da done. How much you got?”
“A hundred and twenty
dollars.”
“The boy is a poker-playin’
genius. Sheeit!
I might ’dopt you, sho’
nuff.”
Alex was digging out the roll of bills.
“Take twenty in green and the
change,” Red said. “Coins fuck up the hang of my rag.”
When that was done, Alex sat down while Red finished
his ablutions. “Boy,” Red said when he was ready to go,
“ain’ no doubt you headin’ dead for San Quentin, ‘
cause
you got the devil in you. Ain’ no stoppin’
it, so it’s good you fuckin’ with me ‘n Floyd ’n gettin’
schooled. You gotta decide if you wanna be a pimp, a player, or a
gangster.”
“What’s the difference?”
“One’s slick and the
other’s
tough.”
“I think I’d like to be a little
bit of both.”
The two black men burst out laughing.
Alex couldn’t help another blush, but his embarrassment was mixed with
pleasure.
The ward doctor was an infrequently seen god.
When he did appear, it was seldom to talk directly to patients. He disappeared
with the senior attendants behind the office door, looked at charts, sometimes
wrote on them, listened to what the attendants had to say, and drank coffee.
Occasionally he toured the corridor of lockup rooms, peered through the window
slots, and looked at each occupant strapped to a bed. Then he swept out,
followed by a retinue of white suits until he went through the door.
Alex never talked to the doctor or knew his
name—or cared. He was happier here in the state hospital than in any of
the foster homes or boys’ schools or anywhere else. His initial fear of
being among the insane quickly went away. The joy of this place was that he
lived a virtually unstructured existence. He was too young for work, and there
was no school. Within the vast confines of the institution he was free to
roam until sunset, and during the evening the ward itself had the poker game or
something else to pass the time. He had no hunger to escape from his
surroundings into books. What went on around him was more stimulating,
especially the huge yard surrounded by the buildings. The institution was both
circus and menagerie, a multitude of the insane thrown into the sunlight across
two walled acres. Alice found beyond the looking glass no weirder conversations
than Alex found here. One old man cruised relentless as a shark, seaching for
cigarette or cigar butts. They didn’t even need to be discarded—if
someone set one down, he grabbed it. During a softball game the charge
attendant of the juvenile ward, a cigar addict, set his stogie on the bench
while he went to bat. He took a third strike—bat on his shoulder, mouth
agape, and eyes wide—as he watched the shark scoop up his cigar and
stroll oil, puffing. Alex began giving the shark whole cigarettes, which only
prompted gestures for a match. The shark was known to be able to talk, but
nobody had ever heard him say a word. Alex wondered how they knew he was crazy.
Another character, nicknamed “the
Flusher,” stood in one place, muttering curses to himself, working
himself to
a frenzy
; whereupon he put his index
finger knuckle between his teeth, contorted his face, and meanwhile raised his
right hand and jerked down, as if ringing a train whistle or pulling the chain
on an old-fashioned toilet. Alex made friends with the chain-puller through
bribes of cigarettes and discovered what he was really doing. The Flusher was
in charge of all executions throughout the world, and when he cursed he was
passing judgment. When he pumped his raised arm, another trap on another gibbet
somewhere sprung on some poor wretch.
One afternoon Alex was waiting in the yard
for an attendant to open a gate so he could go back to the ward when he noticed
an immense black man with gray hair, standing pressed against a nearby wall.
The man was looking around wildly, and he focused on Alex’s glance as
swiftly as radar. The flicking eyes kept coming back to the boy, and the huge
body began to tremble. Now Alex’s attention was laced with anxiety
because of the unpredictable fear he saw. The boy watched the man, who suddenly
began moaning, “Abe bad, boss… easy, boss… no, boss…
no…” And while he spoke the huge hands began rending his own
garments. He tore new denim as if it were
paper,
his
protestations of guilt and fear growing more and more feverish until foamy
spittle flew from his mouth. Alex was somewhat afraid, yet he wondered what
could have implanted such fear in so powerful a man. The boy started to step
forward to soothe the man, but the yipping cry and the ripping cloth stopped
him short. By then shredded rags hung on the giant ebony body. Seeing that Alex
might approach, the giant fell to the ground and began groveling in utter
terror. Across his whale-sized back were hard lines, the silky scars of black
skin. Alex turned away, ignoring the crazy man because he couldn’t think
of anything more appropriate. It was easier to force
himself
to forget the man, and Alex was glad when the attendant finally came with the
key.
Later, First Choice told the boy that Abe had
gotten those scars on a Louisiana chain gang, in the thirties. Abe had been a
professional thief, booster, and con man, one who crossroaded around the
country; he had been caught shoplifting three Hickey-Freeman suits and got a
one-year sentence on each. An educated man, he’d lacked the syruped burr
of northern blacks and the hat-in-hand demeanor of southern blacks. These
things had marked him to redneck guards, and his worst mistake had been to meet
the focused repression with head-on rebellion. “Fool-ass niggah didn’
know how to
jeff
to live. They fucked him over
bad—stuck sweat boxes to him, clubbed him,
whipped
him. They didn’t kill his body, but they got his mind. When he finished
that trey they sent him back here. You gotta be a man an’ say ‘no’
an’ fight sometimes, even if they kills you… but suicide ain’
nuthin’, an’ he committed it sure as he used a gun.”
“I’d make them kill me if they
did that,” Alex said, the words intense but strange in his childish
voice.
“They’ll
damn sure do that. They don’t care if you white—sheeit, you a white
nigger, boy. You can pass sometimes, but if they knew ‘bout you
they’d sho’ nuff treat you like a nigger.” First Choice rumpled
the youth’s head. “You got a lot of fool in you, white boy.”
A few days later, in another part of the
yard, Alex walked close to a pot-bellied little Syrian, a demented creature
with hooked nose and beady eyes beneath a hairless pate. His nickname was
“Abraham,” which never failed to bring vociferous protest; the
words were nearly unintelligible because his passion exaggerated his accent.
But his claim to fame was that he spent every day masturbating. He stood near a
corner where two buildings came together; he’d worn the lawn down to bare
earth in a four-foot zone. But his penis remained healthy, though it was a
miracle when he got an erection. Indeed, it was on such an occasion that Alex
first saw Abraham. A small crowd had gathered, and they were egging him on. His
tongue flapped out of his mouth, and sweat broke on his forehead from the
effort. Someone watching said it was the first time Abraham had gotten it up in
six months. Alex laughed and shook his head, blushing because he too was
beginning to masturbate, in great privacy and unsuccessfully.
Now, as Abraham was flailing away, Alex stood
closer to him than ever before. The man called out, “Boy, eh now!”
He faced Alex, clenched his fists beside his pelvis, and rolled himself
suggestively, jerking his head toward a stairwell doorway.
Prior warnings—half in jest and half
serious—from both Red and First Choice had made Alex sensitive to
homosexual overtures. And this gesture from the Syrian was definitely obscene.
The boy’s rage flared, and his eyes swept the ground for a rock. He
snatched one up—it was the size of an egg—and hurled it with all
his strength at the man’s head. The distance was short, but the Syrian
barely managed to duck away. The pot-bellied degenerate was also a coward, and
he stood there, cowering behind his hands. Alex grabbed another rock and threw
it at the man’s still-exposed genitals, hitting him on the thigh. The man
yelped and trotted off. Alex kept throwing, and the man kept circling away,
ducking most throws, yipping when struck. On seeing the Syrian’s fear,
Alex’s indignation turned into something crueler: enjoyment at causing
torment, a sense of power. When he tired of it he quit, but he was back the
next day, and the day after that. The moment Abraham saw the boy coming he
began to moan and put out his hands. A couple of times he was goaded into
charging, but Alex was too nimble, and the pursuit never lasted more than a few
steps.
The patients in the yard paid no attention;
they were filled with their own problems and delusions. No adults were on hand
to pass judgments born of love that nurture seedling consciences. Alex knew
what he was doing was wrong, but his feeling of wrongness was lacking. Red
Barzo saw the stoning from across the yard, and that evening, when they were in
the mess hall, the black con man- junky admonished him: “Best freeze on
that shit, boy. White folks runnin’ this camp will get in your young ass
if they catch you teasin’ the nutty motherfucker.
Ain’
no money in it, anyway.
You can’ go wrong in life, un’erstan’,
if before you do somepin’, un’erstan’, you say, ’any
money made here?’
That ain’ no bullshit.
That’s the best way to look at the fast life, can you dig it?” The
frequently interjected question wasn’t really a question but a
rhetorical pause. Yet the advice was intended seriously, and the sincere tone
impressed the content on Alex. He would always remember and quote it, even if
he didn’t always follow it.
This time, however, he did follow it, and he
stopped harassing the man, both because Red’s approval was important and
because he found other things to do. Mainly he found a way to get out of the
yard by squeezing through wrought-iron bars into a tunnel walkway, and then
through other bars into a courtyard with an open gate. Outside the gate was a
road that went around the sprawling institution’s buildings.
Among the six thousand patients, nearly a
thousand had “grounds paroles,” meaning they were allowed to roam
the vast grounds, much of it alfalfa fields, orange groves, and walnut
orchards, and some of it rocky desert like most of southern California. Many
male juveniles (not females) had grounds paroles, so one more boy walking
around didn’t attract attention, though Alex did stay away from the administration
buildings, where he might run into a staff member who knew him.
The first few days when he squeezed out, he
hurried straight into the rugged low hills behind the hospital. Dotting the
rugged terrain were little shacks—perhaps half a dozen over a square
mile—built by long-term
patients.
Most were
actually roofed pits with stoves and makeshift cots, a chair and
table—and maybe a footlocker where someone kept cigarettes, coffee, and
other things of small but important value. The cabins all had a tribe of
cats; the scrawny felines were half-wild, but they came running when the man
from their particular cabin came up the hill carrying food scraps wrapped in
newspaper. The scraps were easy to get from the kitchen, and the cats mewed
loud and tangled themselves in the men’s feet, providing them with a
facsimile of needed affection; they frequently talked to the cats as they
spread the scraps on the ground.
Alex watched one of these men feeding his cat
from a distance, wanting to be invited. But the man turned away, as if the boy
weren’t there, so Alex went on with his explorations, following narrow
paths upward to high rocks halfway to the summit of a mountain; they provided a
view of the hospital grounds and the flat land stretching west. He could even
see the glimmer of the sea in the distance. It was about five miles away. To
the right the hospital property stretched for three miles, mostly cultivated fields,
some just rows of turned earth waiting seed, others gleaming emerald, the
geometric lines framed by the dirt roads and windbreaks of tall, swaying
eucalyptus. There, too, were the farm buildings, and someone told him of a
large melon patch.
After a week of exploring the nearer side, of
digging into holes and dislodging hordes of red ants (he put flaming twigs into
their holes), of tearing thick green wrappings from unripe walnuts, he decided
to circle the buildings, staying out of sight, and head toward the melon patch
and dairy.
He trudged through the soft, dry earth
beneath the walnut trees,
then
went along an
irrigation ditch, staying off the hospital roads. Finally he was in a dry wash;
it became a shallow, swift stream in winter but was now empty and smooth. From
his earlier pinnacle view, Alex knew it came close to the melon patch and the
farm buildings beyond. He trudged along, his feet sinking into the soft earth.
It would have exhausted the average adult, but youth isn’t so conscious
of physical exhaustion. Ahead was a concrete bridge, the main road leading into
the hospital, traveled by many
vehicles.
Before
getting too close, Alex turned off the main road. But the dry shrubbery on
the banks offered no path, so he plunged in, holding his hands up to keep the
thin, scratchy branches away from his face. It was a hot day, and in seconds he
was sweating; the sweat attracted a swarm of gnats that clustered about his
face. The earlier thrill of adventure was gone, replaced by a kind of
desperation. The barrier of wild shrubbery wasn’t the few feet he’d
expected; he’d gone fifteen yards and it was still solid in front of him.
He burst through after thirty yards, his
hands and forearms itchy and irritated. He wondered from his itching face if
he’d run into poison oak or poison ivy; he’d heard about the
torture of itching, of scratching until the flesh was stripped (the horror
stories told by little boys to each other), and right now he certainly felt as
if he could scratch that much.
Finally he was on a dusty road beside the
field of melons. Two boys were already there; one of them, who looked older
than Alex, was hunkered down, chopping a striped watermelon open with a rusted
garden trowel. The ground around him was littered with half a dozen split melons,
their meat pale pink rather than succulent red, unripe except to the swarms of
flies they attracted.
Both boys were in profile to Alex, facing
each other and not seeing the new arrival. Their voices but not their words
came across the twenty yards of heat-shimmering air. The younger boy’s
voice had a sibilance higher than most, making Alex think of a girl, and in
profile his chest had the twin jutting configuration of budding breasts.
Alex’s hostility toward these interlopers in a territory he was hunting broke
into confusion. He’d seen this rosy-cheeked young boy with the other
juveniles, that was certain, and that meant he wasn’t a girl even if he
had a girl’s breasts, voice, and complexion. Later Alex would learn that
a hormone imbalance caused these things, and in turn these had caused a nervous
breakdown. The boy was getting hormone shots for one problem and psychotherapy
for the other.
The older boy saw Alex first. He stood up
from the split watermelon, trowel in hand. “Whaddya want?” he
demanded.
“Nuthin’,” Alex said, taken
off balance and ashamed because his response wasn’t equally challenging.
“What’re you doin’,
watchin’ us?”
“I’m not watching you. I
didn’t even know you were here.”
“You could see us from half a mile if
you came down the road. Where did you come from?”
Alex waved at the thick wall of foliage.
“Through that!
Why didn’t you just walk?”
Before Alex could answer or even decide if he
was going to (he resented the tone of the interrogation and had answered only
because the other boy had momentum), the rosy-cheeked boy touched the
other’s arm and talked too softly for Alex to hear. The older boy
grimaced and nodded, indicating that he understood what was happening. Then
Alex noticed that the older boy had extremely bad acne; it had scarred him so,
his face had lost most of its flexibility. He turned to Alex. “You
haven’t even got a grounds parole. You’re on Ward Fourteen. You
killed somebody and now you’re running off. That’s right,
huh?” The boy had piercing green eyes, old for his years.
“No, it’s wrong. I didn’t
kill anybody and I’m not running away. But what’s it to you? Are
you a cop?”
“Hell no, I ain’t no fuckin’
cop.”
“Well,” said Rosy Cheeks
,“
I know you’re on Fourteen and I know you had
to do something serious or you’d be with us. And you can’t get a
grounds parole on Fourteen… at least no juvenile can.”
Alex’s feet suddenly felt hot in his
tennis shoes. He wondered if they would snitch on him, doubting that the older
one would, for in youth Alex equated physical toughness with strength of character.
But he was uncertain of the pretty boy. Years from now he would learn the
impossibility of determining who would snitch from mannerisms. Actually, there
was nothing he could do now—except run away—and he might have to
chance it. These boys weren’t clean either; half a dozen watermelons were
smashed open and thick with flies.
“We don’t care what you’re
doing,” Acne said. “Are you escaping?”
Alex shook his head.
“Just
messing around.”
“Did you really shoot somebody?”
Rosy Cheeks asked.
Alex nodded, the thread of awe in the
boy’s voice making him view that never-forgotten but time-dimmed memory
in a new way. In some places with some persons it was an accomplishment to have
shot a man.
“None of these fuckers are ripe,”
Acne said, chopping the trowel into the mottled green shell of yet another
melon.
His manner signed acceptance, so Alex came
down the row. “I’m Alex,” he said.
“I’m Raymond Taylor,” Acne
said. “But everybody calls me ‘Scabs.’ I don’t know
why.” He grinned. “This is Pat.”
Alex shook hands with Pat. Alex wanted to ask
him if he was a boy or a girl but thought it would be impolite. Now he was part
of the group, and it was taken for granted that they would spend the afternoons
together, at play, smashing watermelons on the grounds of Camarillo State
Hospital.
Leaving the smashed watermelons to the flies
and the birds, they went toward the cluster of yellow frame farm buildings
surrounded by trees that provided shade and a windbreak, an oasis of coolness
amid the glare and weighted heat. Scabs assured Alex that nobody would pay them
any attention, that he’d been here many times and the free personnel and
patient workers were used to boys wandering around.
Scabs’s prediction was accurate. Nobody
gave the three boys more than a glance. The area was more like a model farm
than a real one. The frame walls had fresh yellow paint, and the windows
gleamed. The gravel-paved roadways and square were raked clean and smooth, so
the handful of leaves fallen on them from overhanging trees were like pimples
on flawless skin. Weeds were nonexistent; the flowerbeds were tended; the
lawns were manicured. The many trees gave shade and coolness.
The exploring trio, like all boys,
instinctively sought out the animals. First the cows, the boys marveling at them
as they came into the milking barn on their own, turning into their stalls,
chewing placidly and waiting for the patients to arrive and hook their swollen
udders to the machines. Alex wanted to squeeze one, to follow what someone had
once told him about rolling the fingertips from top to bottom. Cows were
harmless, everyone said, and he wasn’t really afraid, but he was from the
city and a cow was, after all, awfully big. He slipped past a fly-slapping tail
and along the road flank. “Easy, Bossy,” he said, patting the cow,
then
leaned forward to grasp the pinkish-white nipple,
pulling and squeezing, surprised by the force of the squirting stream. The cow
sounded and shifted its bulk, its flank banging into Alex’s head and
pushing him back because of his ungainly posture. It also frightened
him—a flash fright that made him
leap
out to the
aisle and brought laughter from Scabs and a grin from Pat.
