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opened
again and two graveyard shift attendants came in. One of them was named Fields,
a name I still remember after fifty years. He had played football for a small
local college. The smell of liquor was on his breath. The rules required me to
stand up when the door opened. I managed to rise. He then knocked me down and
kicked at me until I crawled under the bed. He tried to pull the bed away so he
could get at me. In his drunken rage he might have kicked me to death if the
other attendant had not finally restrained him. "Knock it off, Fields.
You'll kill him. He's just a kid."
    The next morning the ward doctor, a little man with an
accent, came to my room and clucked like a chicken as he poked at my swollen
and disfigured face. It was in terrible shape. My closed eye stuck out like an
egg. "I don't think you'll strike another attendant, will you?" he
asked. I shook my head and thought: Not unless I could kill him.
    I was kept locked in my room for the rest of the
observation period. After being certified sane, they returned me to reform
school.
    Three weeks later I escaped from there with a black kid
from Watts, named Watkins. We stayed with his mother and sister on 103 rd near Avalon. His father was in the Navy. The family had a little yellow frame
bungalow with a chicken coop in the back yard. The juvenile officers came
around at night, trying to catch us sleeping there. We knew better and slept in
a shed between the railroad tracks and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers. The towers
were vaguely reminiscent of pictures I'd seen of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. You
could always see them against the sky when you rode the red car that stopped at
the Watts station. After a couple of months of running the streets, they caught
Watkins. I got away and lived several more months in a barrio called Temple. I slept in an old Cord
automobile that was on blocks in a back yard and ran around with the vatos loco.
    I got
caught because of my first love, an Italian girl. I met her through her
brother, whom I knew from juvenile hall. Her younger sister told her parents
that I was sleeping in the shed at the rear and they called the police, who
came early one morning. I woke up to a pistol in my face.
    Instead of being returned to the reform school in
Whittier, I was sent to Northern California, outside of Stockton to the Preston
School of Industry. It was for boys of sixteen and seventeen, with a few who
were eighteen. I had barely turned fourteen.
    When I arrived at the Preston School of Industry I was
pulled aside and given the warning I was always given: "Okay, Bunker, try
any of your bullshit here, we'll make you wish you hadn't. This isn't a
playpen. We know how to handle punks like you."
    Fourteen months later, they expelled me from reform
school to freedom. They had tried the discipline of juvenile hall and Whittier,
plus a few other tricks such as shooting tear gas in my face and, once, a
straitjacket for twenty-four hours. I will concede that they stopped short of
what happened in the state hospital. Had they not done so, they might have
driven me to murder or suicide.
    Preston
followed a practice still used fifty years later. Big, tough youths were made
"cadet officers." They received extra privileges and parole credits
for using their fists and feet to maintain order through force and fear. Each
company had three, one white, one black, one Chicano. They had to be both tough
and tractable. One cadet officer was Eddie Machen, who would be a top
heavyweight contender a few years later. Any one of them alone could whip me.
After one of them kicked me for being out of step while marching to the mess
hall, I waited until he was seated to eat; then I walked up behind him and
stabbed him in the eye with a fork. He was rushed to Sacramento where they
saved his eye, but his vision was never the same. I was assigned permanently to
"G" Company, a unit with a three-tier cell block. It was dark and
gloomy and a carbon copy of a prison cell block. Six