Free Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server

Mitchum crossed the California border on an empty boxcar beneath a bleaching afternoon sun. Out of the desert and through the valley, the freight approached LA by nightfall. The other bums had warned him to get off before the final stop. If the bulls caught you there, they said, you were marched straight to the delousing pen at Lincoln Heights and locked up for a week. Robert decided to take his chances anyway and rode straight into the Alameda Street yards. With his worldly goods in the knotted bindle flung over hisshoulder, he climbed down from the freight car and stood for the first time in the city of Los Angeles.
    He skulked in the shadows looking out for police and walked along the twelve-foot wire fence that ran down the yard as far as the eye could see. He walked along until he heard the sounds of voices, muffled laughter, and a guitar. A quartet of Mexicans was sitting in near darkness on the ground beneath a signal tower. There was a guy strumming and another quietly singing along in Spanish while a big jug of red wine was sampled and passed from one to the other. They greeted him and offered up the jug and a patch of ground. One man pointed at Robert’s face.
    “Tu eres Indio,”
the Mexican said.
    Somebody lit up a joint and passed that around, too. In fragments of English they told him about a place down the road where he could get a free hot meal, and later the man who had been singing showed him an opening in the fence where he could reach the street and pointed him toward the Midnight Mission. Robert was impressed. He had never seen anything like it—a reception committee for the bums.
“This was the place,
“he would remember saying to himself on that fateful first night in California.
“The Promised Land.”
    The mission fed him a dinner of chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes, and when he was done—it being too late to start out for his sister’s place—they gave him a voucher for a bed at the Panama Hotel, not much better than a flophouse really, in the middle of skid row, rummies and old prostitutes in the lobby. They gave him a cot in a tiny cubicle, and in the morning he found the Pacific Electrics Red Car that took him all the way to Long Beach for a dime. Arriving at Annette’s and her husband Ernie’s bungalow a few blocks from the ocean, Robert stretched himself out on the living room sofa and didn’t move again for the better part of a week.
    There was no sign of Jack Mitchum for another ten days. After the cops got the drop on him back in Louisiana, Jack was confined for a while and then escorted to the county line with a stern suggestion that he never come back. He continued on his way west, but all alone now, did not have an easy time of it. Catching the wrong train more than once, he went as far out of his way as the Arizona-Mexico border and then, riding a freight straight into Los Angeles like his brother but without Robert’s good luck, was rounded up with a group of hoboes and forced to spend three days in the holding tank. Worn to the marrow by his adventure, Jack could barely stand by the time he reached Annette’s Long Beach bungalow. She told him that Bob was down the hall in the tub,and Jack went back to find him luxuriating in a bubble bath, his head sticking out of the suds as he smoked a cigarette and read a detective magazine. Jack stood wavering in the doorway, expecting some show of enthusiasm for his deathless appearance.
    “That laconic fart looked up at me blandly and asked, ‘What kept you?’”
    After all Robert had seen of Depression-ravaged America, Long Beach seemed an earthly paradise. Bright cloudless skies, warm ocean breezes, rolling blue-and-silver-waves crashing on a golden beach. There was a boardwalk with a midway called the Pike, filled with smiling families and sailors in crisp, white uniforms and beautiful girls in brightly colored dresses. You could ride a merry-go-round and buy fresh-spun pink cotton candy. There were palm trees and happy