Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (2 page)

One Sunday night in December, it was past midnight
when I got off the streetcar on Fair Oaks and Colorado in downtown Pasadena and
began my walk. The last street was a narrow lane with tiny frame houses for
servants that ran parallel to Orange Grove a block away. The lane and tiny
houses are long gone, but back then they were fronted by huge trees that
overhung the street. A lighted Christmas tree was in one house window, and a
candle in another. They calmed my fear at walking through the shadows where
wind and moonlight made weird moving shapes. It was enough to make an
imaginative nine-year-old whistle his way through the dark.

I turned into the rear gate of Mayfair. Up the slope
loomed the dark outline of the great house set among tall pines that suited its
Bavarian hunting chalet architecture. The house had once belonged to an
American general who had apparently invested heavily in Germany after World War
I. I found the certificates between the walls. I was now familiar with the
great house as I circled to the slender tree next to the balcony.

The tree actually grew three feet from the balcony,
but as I climbed, my weight bent it over and I disembarked by throwing both
arms over the rail and pulling my legs away from the tree. It snapped back
straight and erect.

On the balcony I always felt a pang of anxiety: had
someone locked the balcony door? Nobody ever had, so far, although I was
prepared to break the glass and reach inside if it ever became necessary.
Nobody would know who, or why; it might even go unnoticed for days. No need for
that on this night. The door opened as usual.

The hall was totally dark, again as usual. Immediately
I smelt something I couldn't recognize. It was definite but not overpowering.
I reached for the room door. It opened. I went in.

The room was pitch black. From memory I crossed the
darkness to my bed in the corner. It was gone. Where was my bed?

I reached out, feeling for the bed next to mine.
Nothing.

My heartbeat jumped. I was scared. I went to the door
and flipped the light switch.

Nothing.

I felt along the wall. Empty space. Something weird
was going on. I wanted to yell, but that would expose my post-midnight arrival.
With my fingers touching the wall, I moved to the door. Before reaching it, my
shoes crunched on broken glass.

My heart raced. What was happening? No rational
possibility came to mind. I knew better than magic or the supernatural, but the
idea was inescapable for a moment. Just then, in the blackness, something
brushed against the calf of my leg, triggering instant terror. I jumped up in
the air, came down and tore open the door. I can't remember crossing the hall
to the balcony. In the darkness I climbed on the rail and jumped for the tree.
It was three or four feet out but I got both hands on it and it bent away from
the balcony, pulling my upper body with it. My feet were still on the
balustrade. For a moment I was a human bridge; then my feet came free.

The limb I held snapped with a loud crack. I fell
through snapping limbs that grabbed and scratched me finally landing flat on my
back.

Every bit of air was smashed out of my lungs. I knew I
was going to die. I could not breathe. But even while dying, I drew up my legs
and rolled over to rise. I wanted distance from the huge mansion. I wasn't
thinking. I was running on automatic fear.

When the first tiny breath kicked in, I was limping
across the parking area toward the shrubbery. There was an acre of greenery,
much of it half wild, right here — and I knew every inch of it. I hit the wall
of shrubbery with both hands folded over my face. I ploughed through with the
branches tearing at my clothes and face.

I veered right, behind the garage, and hit the ground
in a space beneath a giant elm whose branches swept the ground. We had put a
flattened cardboard box in there, as boys do. Exhaustion modified my fear. It
was crazy. I knew there were no ghosts. (Years later, while I was telling this
story, a listener said "I'll bet it was a cat's tail that brushed your
leg." I think he was right. Mrs Bosco had a black kitchen cat that roamed
the house and brushed against legs. What else could it have been? I spent the
night in that space beneath the tree, sometimes shivering with the chill,
sometimes dozing off" for a few minutes.

By first light my entire body ached. My back really
hurt, and would turn into the largest black and blue mark I've ever seen.

I dozed and came alert to the sound of rattling
garbage cans. Mr Hawkins was hoisting them onto the back of a pickup truck. He
was working in the space beside the garage where the cans were kept.

"Mr Hawkins," I called.

He stopped work and peered, closing one eye to focus
the other one. "Is that you?" he asked. He knew me better than the
other boys. Beside the jab, he taught me how to tie a Windsor necktie knot. He
may have been poor, but he dressed sharp when he had his day off.

I stepped out of the shrubbery, but kept the edge of
the garage between myself and the house. "What's going on, Mr
Hawkins?"

"You ain' seen Mizz Bosco yet?"

"No."

"She called your daddy Sunday afternoon. He said
you'd be here last night 'bout six. She's been worried sick."

"What happened? Where is everybody?"

"We had a fire in the attic late Saturday . . .
early Sunday 'fore it was light. Look there." He pointed at the roof. Sure
enough, there was a hole about four feet across. Its edges were charred black
from fire.

"It was the wiring," he said. "They
moved the beds to the school auditorium over yonder." He gestured with a
finger. "It's just until she can get all the boys picked up."

A maroon 1940 Lincoln Continental flashed into sight.
It went past us around the circular drive and pulled up at the mansion's front
door. The car stopped and Mrs Bosco came down the walk to greet the couple who
emerged.

"That be Billy Palmer's folks," Mr Hawkins
said. "Gotta get those bags." He pulled off his work gloves and
abandoned the garbage cans to head toward the house. I backed up into the
bushes.

A few minutes later, Mrs Bosco and Mr Hawkins came
into view. They were heading right toward my hiding place. I backed farther
into the bushes, tripping and landing on my butt. That galvanized me. I got up,
turned and ran. Mr Hawkins called my name. I was rapidly adding distance
between us.

I leaped over the wrought-iron front fence and ran
across the wide boulevard, then crossed a lawn and went down a driveway to a
back yard the size of a baseball diamond. Several people in white — I would
think of the scene years later when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald — were playing
croquet. I flew past. One or two looked up; the others saw nothing.

By noon, I got off a big red streetcar at the Pacific
Electric Terminal on 6
^th
and Main Streets in downtown Los Angeles.
The sidewalks teemed. Uniforms of all the armed services were abundant. There
was a long line outside the Burbank, the burlesque theater on Main Street. Two
blocks away was Broadway where the marquees of the movie palaces flashed bright
in the gray December light. I would have gone to a movie, for movies always let
me forget my troubles for a few hours, but I knew that this was a school day
and the truant officers routinely patrolled the downtown movie houses for
school truants.

On Hill Street near 5
^th
was Pacific
Electric's subway terminal. The streetcars left for the sprawling western
communities and the

San Fernando Valley to the northwest through a long
tunnel in the hillside and came out on Glendale Boulevard. I took a streetcar
to Hollywood where my father worked backstage at Ken Murray's
Blackouts,
a variety review with chorus girls and
comics in a theater on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard. I was familiar
with the area. I wanted to be where I knew my way around.

Hollywood Boulevard was new, bright and crowded.
Thirty years earlier it had been a bean field. Now servicemen were everywhere.
They came from training camps and military bases all over Southern California.
They were drawn to Hollywood and Vine, and especially to the Hollywood Canteen,
where they might just dance with Hedy Lamarr or Joan Leslie, or stroll the boulevard
and see if their feet fit the imprint of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin
outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. Sid Grauman had built three great palaces to
honor the movies. The downtown Million Dollar theater was the first, but when
he realized the city's wealth was moving west he built two on Hollywood
Boulevard, the Chinese and Egyptian. It had a long walk from the box office to
the lobby that was lined with images of Ancient Egypt and giant kitsch statues
of Rameses II and Nefertiti, or somebody with a head like an animal. That first
night on my latest runaway, I went to the plush Hawaiian, farther east on the
boulevard, which was showing the original
Mummy
with Boris Karloff and a new sequel,
The Mummy
Returns.
That scared away my troubles for a few hours.

When I came out, a cold wind had risen. No rain was
falling, but the sidewalk and street were dark where the rain had come down
while I was inside. I turned up Gower. The Hollywood Hills started a block
north of the theater. Beyond Franklin Avenue was Whitley Heights. It was
"old" Hollywood and looked as if it belonged in Naples or Capri. Once
fashionable enough for Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin and Ramon Novarro, in the war
years it was still nice, although since then it has lost favor as Hollywood's
surrounding streets became infested with poverty and poverty's handmaidens,
crime, drugs and prostitution.

Rain began to fall. I tried to find shelter from the
wind. Heading for where my father worked, I walked along Franklin and turned
back down Ivar. The marquee had been turned off and the box office was closed.
I went down the alley beside the building to the stage entrance. I didn't know
the old man on the door, but he knew my father and remembered me from an
earlier visit. "We were working the Mayan downtown. It was
Abie's Irish Rose . . .
or maybe
Song of Norway."

I remembered
Abie's Irish
Rose
at the Mayan, but not the old man. It was immaterial; he motioned
me to come in. I shook my head.

"When's curtain?"

"Ten fifty-two . . . 'bout half an hour."

"I'll be back."

"Here's your dad now. Hey, Ed!"

My father, wearing the white bib overalls of a
stagehand, was crossing backstage. He turned his head, saw me and hardened his
expression. As he walked over, his jaw muscles pulsing, I wanted to turn and run.
I was sure he wouldn't show his anger here, but I knew the fury of his
exasperation. He was never mean, but frustration sometimes overcame him. He
looked at me: "Just like a bad penny," he said.

What did that mean? Bad penny? I'd never heard the
phrase and had no idea what it meant. Still, the tension of the situation
imprinted it on my memory so that years later I remembered this moment whenever
I heard the phrase.

My father took his keys from his pocket, "Go wait
in the car," he said. "It's around the corner on Franklin."

I took the keys and went out. His car, a '37 Plymouth
with the first streamlined ship as hood ornament, was easy to find. The white
stood out in an era when dark colors, especially Henry Ford's black, still
dominated. On the windshield was a decal "A," which meant the car was
allowed the basic ration of four gallons of gas a week. Gas coupons were issued
and handed over in the gas station. Stealing and selling them would become my
first monetary crime.

I
unlocked the car and got in to wait, listening to the rain hit the roof,
watching it bounce on the ground. It was hypnotic, soothing, and I must have
dozed off. I hadn't really slept the night before. I closed my eyes with cars
parked all around. When I opened them again, the other cars were gone and my
father was knocking on the window.

I opened the door lock and slid over to make room. I
was wary, for although my father was generous and loving, once or twice he had
lost his temper and cuffed me around, yelling: "What in God's name is wrong
with you? You can't do what you do. You'll . . . you'll end up—" his
anguish stifled his words. His torment never rose to anything near abuse, but
it made me feel terrible to upset him and I invariably promised reform.

This time he avoided looking at me as he pulled out
and headed for the Cahuenga Pass. The Hollywood Freeway was almost a decade in
the future. As he drove, he grunted and shook his head, reacting to the turmoil
in his mind. I thought we were going to the residential hotel where he lived, but
he drove past that intersection and went up into the hills. The clouds were
breaking up, allowing a little moonlight to come through. Soon we were at the
summit, looking down on Lake Hollywood, which was really a water reservoir. It
overlooked the western half of the City of Angels, a sprawl of glittering
lights with patches of darkness in between. In another ten years, the lights
would fill all the LA Basin to the sea — and deep into the desert going the
other way.

My father shut off the engine and gave a long,
agonized sigh. He visibly sagged. "What do I do now? Mrs Bosco is closed
down. She didn't have a permit for those two crazies upstairs."