Bunker No Beast So Fierce

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84243-748-3
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity' - Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2 An angry and mercilessly suspenseful novel about an ex-con's attempt to negotiate the 'straight world' and his swan dive back into the paradoxical security of crime. It is airtight in its construction, almost photorealistic in its portrayal of L.A. lowlife and utterly knowledgeable about the terrors of liberty, the high of the quick score and the rage that makes the finger tighten on the trigger of the gun. No Beast So Fierce was Eddie Bunker's debut novel and has the searing intensity of a novel based precisely on experience, with Bunker having spent most of his early life in maximum security penitentiaries for a variety of offences including armed robbery. It has been suggested that Tarantino draws on No Beast So Fierce for the botched robbery in Reservoir Dogs, a film in which Bunker plays the character of Mr Blue.

Edward Bunker, Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, was the author of No Beast So Fierce, Little Boy Blue, Dog Eat Dog, The Animal Factory and his autobiography, Mr Blue, all published by No Exit. He was co-screenwriter of the Oscar nominated movie, The Runaway Train, and appeared in over 30 feature films, including Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, the film of his book No Beast So Fierce. Edward Bunker died in 2005 and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bunker, Edward

Leseproben

Introduction

by William Styron 1988

Edward Bunker is one of a small handful of American writers who have created authentic literature out of their experiences as criminals and prisoners. Now fifty-five years old, Bunker has been out of prison since 1975, but before that time he spent nearly all of the years of his life, except those of his earliest childhood, behind bars. That is to say, until his early forties Bunker was far better acquainted with incarceration as a way of life than he was with even limited freedom. That this career, so practically devoid of any of the normal inducements toward education and self-realization, could have produced writing of any kind is most unusual; that it yielded not only No Beast So Fierce but two other novels of genuine literary achievement (so far) is astonishing, placing Edward Bunker among the tiny band of American prisoner-writers whose work possesses integrity, craftsmanship, and moral passion in sufficient measure to claim our serious attention. In order to understand the nature of Bunker’s extraordinary accomplishments, it is necessary to recount some of the details of his life, which was one of deprivation and violence, indeed, an existence so close to nihilism—at least in the mind of the bourgeois reader—as to make almost totally implausible any idea of creativity or the eventual blossoming of a literary career.

Bunker was born and reared in, of all places, Hollywood, California. Unlike the majority of American criminals, he was born white. His father was a stagehand in legitimate theaters around Los Angeles and occasionally found employment in the movie studios—he once worked for the Hal Roach organization during the filming of the famous Our Gang comedies. His mother was a professional dancer, and performed as a chorus girl in Busby Berkeley movies. Alcoholism drove Bunker’s father into a state hospital and the couple were divorced when Eddie was four. Exacerbated by the hard times of the Great Depression, the boy’s life followed the pattern of so many others that are the product of alcoholism and broken families. He was in and out of foster homes and military schools, from which he began to run away with determination augmented by an obstinate anti-authoritarian streak well developed even at that early age. At eleven he was committed briefly to Camarillo State Hospital for observation, and a year later he was sent to the juvenile reform school at Whittier. He made his escape, and when caught was sent to a much tougher school designed for unruly boys four or five years older. Here he spent a year or so and at fourteen was paroled. Twenty-nine days into freedom he was caught trying to rob a liquor store and was shot (though not seriously wounded) by the owner. This crime gained Bunker a sentence to the youth prison at Lancaster, even though he was considerably younger than the legally mandated age of eighteen to twenty-five. Throughout this period, Bunker was consistently thrown into an environment with older criminals. After having stabbed a guard at Lancaster, he was taken to the Los Angeles County Jail, where at fifteen he was placed in the tank reserved for notorious cases. His companions included several murderers awaiting the death penalty. Because of his age, and because his lawyer, the celebrated Al Matthews, who took the case pro bono, was able to show that correctional officers had abused Bunker on prior occasions, the judge deemed him too young for San Quentin and gave him a county jail sentence with probation. Proceedings were suspended. He was set free.

It was while he was briefly at large that Eddie was befriended by Mrs Hal Wallis, wife of the renowned film producer (Casablanca, Becket, and many others) and herself a onetime comedienne in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Comedies. Louise Fazenda Wallis made efforts to steer Eddie in the direction of probity and worthiness, but her concern came to naught. His friends, except for Louise Wallis, were reform school graduates and confirmed professional criminals. Bunker, now sixteen, began selling marijuana and was enthusiastically engaged in boosting (professional shoplifting) and learning to play short con games such as The Match and The Strap and Laying The Note. He was delivering some marijuana when a pair of detectives flagged him down. A wild chase ensued through Los Angeles streets; the automobile he was driving caromed off three cars and hit a mail truck head-on before he was captured. The judge was still unwilling to send a sixteen-year-old to San Quentin and gave him a year in the county jail and more probation. He promptly escaped.

At this point Bunker’s luck ran out. Rather, the calendar said he was seventeen—still not eighteen, but old enough. For the escape and the assault on the Lancaster guard, he was sentenced to two concurrent six-month-to-ten-year terms, and he was sent to San Quentin.

It was during the four-and-a-half-year stay at San Quentin that Bunker discovered books and began to read and write. Louise Wallis sent him a Royal portable typewriter and a subscription to the New York Times Sunday edition and Book Review. In his excited exploration of literature, he became a voracious reader, absorbing four or five books a week, ranging from a two-volume Military History of the Western World to collections of short stories from The New Yorker to novels by Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dostoevsky—and others equally or less celebrated. He also wrote a novel, which he later regarded as very bad, and many short stories, all unpublished.

When released on parole, he returned to the outside world with serious intentions of going straight, and once again he was taken under the wing of Louise Wallis, who obtained a job for her protégé at a nearby boys’ home, where she was the foremost benefactress; there he was employed as a combination chauffeur of boys, pool supervisor, study hall tutor, and counselor. Unfortunately, his protector began suffering severe depression and became dysfunctional, and Bunker lost his only anchor in a precarious world. Now twenty-three, he tried to obtain such legitimate jobs as story analyst or reader at various movie studios, but because of his criminal record he had no luck. Realizing that he had been not only locked up, but locked out of society, he resolved, as he has said, “to get by on my wits,” which at first meant selling used sports cars as a front while planning crimes in the back. He conceived schemes for robberies that were executed by others. “These guys were heisting liquor stores on impulse,” he recalls. “I laid things out so they could make some money.” He also planned to organize Hollywood call girls by extorting the pimps and madams to pay him protection. He lived this way for four years. By then he had drifted away from his relationship with Louise Wallis. Finally, caught in a forgery and check passing scheme, he was sentenced once again to San Quentin for an indeterminate term of six months to fourteen years. This was Bunker’s longest imprisonment, and one that did not terminate until he had served seven years. During this period he continued to read widely and to write with passion and amazing industry, producing four unpublished novels and many short stories. Lacking the money for postage, he often sold his blood to make up the needed amounts to send the stories to magazines. He recalls this interlude as one of near madness—so long was the sentence in terms of the crime, forgery usually being considered a minor felony. Worst of all, the sentence was meted out a year at a time, so he never knew whether he would be paroled in six months or six years, or anything in between.

No Beast So Fierce deals largely with the rage and frustration which the book’s protagonist, like Bunker, feels when, on release from prison, he faces at best the indifference—and at worst the hatred and hostility—of the outside world. One of the sharpest memories Bunker retains of that time is how, after years of wearing the ample prison brogans, his new dressout shoes caused severe blistering of his feet. He wrote over two hundred letters in application for legitimate jobs—but received not a single answer, his prison record acting effectively as his curse. Such is the fate of most ex-convicts in America, for whom the expiation of sin through incarceration does not usually serve, in the eyes of society, as meaningful redemption. A true outcast, Bunker fell once again into crime. One night, after having burglarized a floor safe in a bar, he was arrested following a high-speed automobile chase.

At the moment of arrest, he feigned insanity, claiming he was born in 1884 and that he had warned Roosevelt about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the arraignment, he told the judge that the Catholic Church was trying to put a radio in his brain. Proceedings were suspended pending a psychiatric hearing. The psychiatrists who examined Bunker found him to be an “acute, chronic schizophrenic paranoid with auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution.” So successful was this ruse that he was sent to the prison at Vacaville, where he was deemed a high security risk, a threat Bunker was at pains to exploit by taking every opportunity he could to loudly babble at the walls.

Eventually returned to Los Angeles for trial on the safe burglary charge, he made bail and remained free for a year. While on the streets, he shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco, managing what he now refers to as a “little drug empire.” At this point,...