Free No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker

near Seventh and Alvarado Streets, a neighborhood of decaying brick apartment buildings and Victorian mansions turned into boarding houses. This was an area of transient poor and near poor, alcoholics (not quite winos), pensioners, ten-dollar whores, junkies, and hustlers down on their luck. All were abundantly served by pawn shops, bars, and strip joints. I chose the neighborhood not because of the atmosphere, nor the cheap rents, though that was considered, but because it was easier to get around town from here than anywhere else. Downtown Los Angeles was twenty minutes away, and Hollywood half an hour by bus; these were the likely places to find a job.
    I selected the particular small hotel because it had no desk clerk. Rosenthal would be unable to question my hours. A lifetime of furtiveness, plus my distrust of the parole officer, made this a prime consideration. The room had a sink, but the bathroom was down a hallway. The carpet was threadbare, but compared to bare concrete it felt luxurious. The window opened to a passage between the hotel and the brick wall of a garage. Leaning from the window, I examined the ten-foot drop as a possible escape route—then laughed at what I was doing.
    My feet were throbbing. The blisters were swelling. I took off the ugly shoes and went downstairs barefoot to call the parole office and leave my address. Then I went upstairs. The day sizzled outside, a heat so intense it befuddled the mind. When I slept, sweating, I dreamed of drowning in the Sargasso Sea, pulled down by greenish-yellow seaweed. When I woke up the sweat had been chilled by the breeze. It was twilight and I was hungry. I was also refreshed from the sleep, so that after eating the special at a neighborhood café I decided to go for a walk and stop to buy toiletries.
    The blisters kept it from being a long walk. After two blocks I decided to go back, but by a different route. On Eighth Street I started for a liquor store to buy a cigar. An old man came out. He wore the uniform of lost old men: baggy khaki pants and drab olive sweater. He walked stooped and crablike, but too firmly to be a wino. Yet a paper bag was in his hand, gripped by the neck of the bottle within. The bottle was answer to a lonely furnished room, to meals eaten alone at a fountain counter or cafeteria. Such old men gravitated to these neighborhoods, survived on company pensions, social security, insurance—but they were all alone, and lonely.
    The old man brought memories of my father. He’d been fifty-two years old when my mother died bearing me. Four years later he was invalided with the first of many heart attacks. Ours was a family without relatives or close friends, so at the age of four I was taken before my first court, declared to be a needy child, and made a ward of the county. The county placed me in a foster home, and my father began the slow process of dying in convalescent homes and furnished rooms. From the very outset, I was a troublemaker—runaway, prone to tantrums, thief. If this behavior had any purpose, I was too young to articulate it, nor do I remember what I felt. Later my feelings were mingled—hatred for authority, loneliness, yearning to love. By then the state—or society—was committed to breaking the rebelliousness. By the time I was ten years old the circle was welded closed.
    My father was never an important figure in my childhood, just an old, stooped man in khakis and sweater who visited the foster homes and juvenile hall. I remember begging him to take me home and was unable to understand how someone could be “too sick” if they were on their feet. Sick meant in bed. While on the runaway from juvenile hall with Gino, I went to his furnished room after spending three nights sleeping in a gutted automobile in a wrecking yard. He wanted to turn me in and I ran away from him and hated him. It was the last time I turned to him for help. Now I understand that he had sacrificed to give