Bottle-bin raids. Bookstore grabs. Stolen booze sold to high school kids at drastic markup. T.J. runs to score pharmacia dope and catch the mule act.
Pad prowls-craaaazy, Daddy-o!
It's '66 to '69. I'm a girl-crazed, fuck-struck, quasi-young adult virgin. I subsist in cheap cribs near swank Hancock Park. I grew up craving the girls there. I stalked them and knew where they lived. They were poised young women now. They attended USC and UCLA. They wore high-line preppy threads. They were bound for careers of marginal note and marriage to rich stiffs. I craved them. I was unkempt, unlovable, unloved. I possessed no knowledge of the simple civil contract. I lacked the social skills and plain courage to approach them for real. I broke into their houses instead.
It was easy. This was the prephone machine/alarm system/home invasion era. I called the pads. I got dial tones. That meant no one's home. I bopped over and checked access routes. Open windows, loose window screens, pet doors with grab space up to inside latches. Entryways to affluence and SEX.
I pad-prowled roughly twenty times total. Kathy's pad, Missy's pad, Julie's pad. Heidi's pad, Kay's pad, Joanne's pad twice. I raided medicine chests and popped pills. I hit liquor cabinets and poured cocktails. I snagged five and ten-spots from purses and wallets. I hit my love-objects' bedrooms and snatched underwear.
I never got caught. I always covered my tracks. My thefts were modest and always geared toward sustaining egress. I was a soul-fucked youth reared behind poverty and death. I wanted to see where real families lived. I wanted to touch fabric that touched lovely girls' bodies. I did not hail from an aggrieved perspective. I knew the world did not owe me shit. I was too mentally jazzed and sex-tweaked to indulge self-pity. I knew that crime was a continuing circumstance. The redhead taught me that. I was pervertedly tracing her lead. I went at this pursuit sans remorse or compunction. I was young and implacable in my fervor. I hadn't absorbed enough deadening shit. I hadn't read Joseph Wambaugh yet.
I kept boozing and snarfing dope. I blew my rent roll and lost my pad. I moved into public parks and slept under blankets. Cold weather drove me indoors. I found a vacant house and crashed there. Bam-it's November, '68. The LAPD comes in the door with shotguns. It's overkill with a civil edge-the cops size me up as a passive putz with poor hygiene. They treat me brusquely, decently, dismissively. Say what? I thought the LAPD was a storm-trooper legion. The press roasts them for strongarm tactics. They're some Klan Klavern/ Bund hate hybrid. My shit detector clicks in. My street and stationhouse instinct: it just ain't so.
I do three weeks at the Hall of Justice Jail. It's a potent crime primer. I'm the geek that all the pro thugs disdain. I observe them up close. It's the '60s. It's social-grievance-as justification-for-bad-actions time. My cellmates have sadness raps down. I gain a notch on my crime-as-continuing-circumstance notion. Crime is large-scale individual moral default.
That means you, motherfucker.
Now you know it. Change your life behind the concept? No, not yet.
I exited jail right before Christmas. I went back to books, booze and dope. I pad-prowled. I stole underwear. I pursued the Panty-Sniffer Pantheon.
I roamed L.A. by night. I got repeatedly rousted by LAPD. I sensed that a cop-street fool compact existed. I behaved accordingly. I denied all criminal intent. I acted respectfully. My height-to-weight ratio and unhygenic appearance caused some cops to taunt me. I sparred back. Street schtick often ensued. I mimicked jailhouse jigs like some WASP Richard Pryor. Rousts turned into streetside yuckfests. They played like Jack Webb unhinged. I started to dig the LAPD. I started to grok cop humor. I couldn't quite peg it as performance art. I hadn't read Joseph Wambaugh yet.
It's August, '69. The Tate/LaBianca snuffs occur. L.A. goes freaky-deaky. I note private patrol signs on Hancock Park lawns. I weigh the odds. They hit against the Pantyphile Panther. Don't do it again. You will get caught. County jail is no sweat. Don't risk the penitentiary.
I stopped it. I never B &E'd again. I trucked through to '71. I read crime books. I guzzled booze and snarfed dope. I did an honor-farm petty theft jolt. I heard about this cop. He wrote this novel. It's the inside shit on LAPD.
I left Wayside Honor Rancho. I prowled public libraries. I found The New Centurions and read it in one gulp. It confirmed and trashed and realigned all my criminal conceptions. It fully rewired me.
It was the moral and psychic cost of crime on an unprecedented scale. It was a anecdotal social history of '60s L.A. It was a merciless treatise on the lives of men. It was bottomless dark humor. It was a sternly worded defense of the need for social order and a rebuttal to the prevelant anticop ethos of the day. It was my crime-as-continuing-circumstance configuration expanded and made humanly whole.
It burned my mental world down. It took me back to my mother's death and all stops in between.
I reread the book. I took in Wambaugh's knowledge. It dovetailed with my knowledge and gave me a view of the flipside of the moon. I couldn't quite dodge its moral power. I routinely violated the rule of social order that Wambaugh eloquently expressed. Joseph Wambaugh would dismiss me on moral grounds, and rightfully so.
I reread that book. I did not alter my lifestyle one iota. Wambaugh's second novel came out. The Blue Knight was a first-person narrative. Bumper Morgan is a street cop set to retire. He's reluctant to go. He's fiftyish. He's engaged to a splendid woman. The prospect of one-on-one lasting love flummoxes him. He's hooked on the mundane and occasionally thrilling pleasures of policework. He's fearful at the core of his heart. The job allows him to live at a distanced and circumscribed level on his downtown foot beat. He rules a small kingdom benevolently. He gives and takes affection in a compartmentalized fashion that never tests his vulnerability. He's afraid to love flat-out for-real. His last cop days tick by. His reluctance to walk away increases. Violent events intercede. They serve to save him and damn him and give him his only logical fate.
Joseph Wambaugh, sophomore novelist, age thirty-five. A great tragic novel of the cop's life, his second crack out of the gate.
I read The New Centurions.I read The Blue Knight.I read The Onion Field in idiotically staggered intervals. I took them as great criminal and literary teachings, and moral indictments of me.
I was twenty-five. I ran on bad chemicals and bad, crazy blood. Don't change your life yet. It may hurt too much. Don't rip out your own ruthless and impotent heart.
He was an only child and a cop's kid. His people were Irish. His father worked factory jobs and joined the East Pittsburgh PD. It was the Depression. Jobs were short, crime was up. His father rose fast and bottomed out quick. He made Chief. He got mired up in local politics. Political shit taxed him and forced him out. He quit the PD in '43. He returned to factory work.
Joe was six then. Joe loved to read. Joe loved animal stories and kids' adventure books. His snout was always tucked in some book. He never read crime books. They just didn't jazz him.
Hismotherhad fivebrothersout in thewar.Uncle PatMalloy's case was outre. He fought in World War I. He went from doughboy to town drunk. Uncle Pat never worked. Uncle Pat scrounged booze money. Uncle Pat got drafted in the Big War. He went from East Pittsburgh souse to army training officer. He met a rich woman and married her. They moved to California. They bought a chicken farm outside L.A. They boozed the postwar years away.
Uncle Pat always drove drunk. Career drunk driving lays tits-up odds against you. The odds crunched Uncle Pat in '51. He plowed an orange truck. He died. His wife died. Joe and his folks came out for the wake. They liked California. They stayed.
They settled east of the San Gabriel Valley. Ontario, Fontana- L.A. satellites with grape vineyards and orange groves. Joe's dad got factory work. Joe dug on the California weather, the California beauty, the California absence of grime. He attended Chaffey High. He graduated in '54. He did three years in the Marine Corps. He came home and found work. Kaiser Steel in Fontana-private-duty fireman.