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a corner flashed his headlights. I knew it wasn't a command to pull
over, but I had no idea what it was. They pulled in behind me. I watched in the
mirror. When the red lights flashed, I punched the gas. During the ensuing
chase, they fired a couple of shots. I could feel the heavy slugs hit the car.
One made a spider web pattern in the windshield. I ducked way down, my head
below the dash. I opened the driver side door and followed the white line in
the middle of the street, confident that anyone ahead would see flashing lights
and hear the screaming siren and get out of the way. I glanced over the
dashboard. Oh shit! I was coming upon a T
corner. I had to turn right or left. I hit the brakes and tried to turn. The
car jumped the curb onto a wet front lawn. It might as well have been ice as it
skidded sideways and crashed through a front window into a living room. They
had their guns trained on me before I could crawl from the wreckage.
    Back
at Nelles, they put me in the punishment cottage. It was run with the harsh
discipline of a Marine disciplinary barracks. The Man took a dislike to me. One
morning he thought I was shirking work so he threw a dirt clod that hit me in
the back of the head. It flew to pieces and gave no injury, except to my ego. I
looked at him and the anger showed. "You don't like it, Bunker?" he
challenged. With him he had two other counselors and three "monitors,"
boys used as goons against their own.
    I maintained control but seethed inside. We went in
for lunch (part of the punishment was to have the same menu seven days a week.
Every lunch was stew.) When the Man went by my table, I called his name. He
turned and I threw the bowl of stew in his face. Up jumped the monitors. I'd
recently lost a fight to just one of them. Against three, plus the Man, it was
no contest. They dragged me from the mess hall, down three staircases and along
a hallway to the isolation cell at the rear, kicking and punching me all the
way. When I was locked in the cell, the Man turned a fire hose on me. The bars
diminished some of the force, but it was still enough to cut my legs out from
under me and slide me up against the wall.
    An hour later the Man came to gloat at my battered
face and drenched body. "You look like a wet cat." His lip curled in
a sneer. "You won't be throwing things for a while."
    Down low, hidden by my body, I held a flattened roll
of wet toilet paper with a pile of shit on top. While his sneering declaration
was still in the air, I hurled the roll of toilet paper and the shit against
the bars. It broke apart and splattered his clothes and his face and the wall
behind him. He was so insane with rage that another man would not open the gate
for him.
    That night they took me out the back door, put me in a
car and sent me to Pacific Colony state hospital near Pomona. Pacific Colony
was primarily for the retarded, but it took some ninety-day observation cases
from the Youth Authority. Its one locked ward was the most brutal place I've
ever been. Even that far back, if the savage realities of the place had been
exposed, it would have caused a scandal. Most of my time was spent in the day
room sitting on the benches that lined three sides. Each bench had four names
written on tape. We sat in silence with our arms folded. Any whispering and an
attendant walking on crepe soles behind the benches might knock you to the
floor. The fourth side of the day room had cushioned wicker chairs. Four of
them were on a raised dais where the attendants sat. Their goons used the
chairs at floor level.
    For entertainment, the attendants staged fights
between patients. Disputes were settled that way, or else the attendants acted
as matchmakers. The winner got a pack of cigarettes.
    One favored punishment was "pulling the
block." The "block" was a slab of concrete that weighed about a
hundred pounds. Wrapped in layers of old wool blanket it had two eye hooks that
fastened to a wide, flat canvas harness about ten feet long. The