Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Read Free Page A

few minutes.
    By first light my entire body ached. My back really
hurt, and would turn into the largest black and blue mark I've ever seen.
    I dozed and came alert to the sound of rattling
garbage cans. Mr Hawkins was hoisting them onto the back of a pickup truck. He
was working in the space beside the garage where the cans were kept.
    "Mr Hawkins," I called.
    He stopped work and peered, closing one eye to focus
the other one. "Is that you?" he asked. He knew me better than the
other boys. Beside the jab, he taught me how to tie a Windsor necktie knot. He
may have been poor, but he dressed sharp when he had his day off.
    I stepped out of the shrubbery, but kept the edge of
the garage between myself and the house. "What's going on, Mr
Hawkins?"
    "You ain' seen Mizz Bosco yet?"
    "No."
    "She called your daddy Sunday afternoon. He said
you'd be here last night 'bout six. She's been worried sick."
    "What happened? Where is everybody?"
    "We had a fire in the attic late Saturday . . .
early Sunday 'fore it was light. Look there." He pointed at the roof. Sure
enough, there was a hole about four feet across. Its edges were charred black
from fire.
    "It was the wiring," he said. "They
moved the beds to the school auditorium over yonder." He gestured with a
finger. "It's just until she can get all the boys picked up."
    A maroon 1940 Lincoln Continental flashed into sight.
It went past us around the circular drive and pulled up at the mansion's front
door. The car stopped and Mrs Bosco came down the walk to greet the couple who
emerged.
    "That be Billy Palmer's folks," Mr Hawkins
said. "Gotta get those bags." He pulled off his work gloves and
abandoned the garbage cans to head toward the house. I backed up into the
bushes.
    A few minutes later, Mrs Bosco and Mr Hawkins came
into view. They were heading right toward my hiding place. I backed farther
into the bushes, tripping and landing on my butt. That galvanized me. I got up,
turned and ran. Mr Hawkins called my name. I was rapidly adding distance
between us.
    I leaped over the wrought-iron front fence and ran
across the wide boulevard, then crossed a lawn and went down a driveway to a
back yard the size of a baseball diamond. Several people in white — I would
think of the scene years later when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald — were playing
croquet. I flew past. One or two looked up; the others saw nothing.
    By noon, I got off a big red streetcar at the Pacific
Electric Terminal on 6 th and Main Streets in downtown Los Angeles.
The sidewalks teemed. Uniforms of all the armed services were abundant. There
was a long line outside the Burbank, the burlesque theater on Main Street. Two
blocks away was Broadway where the marquees of the movie palaces flashed bright
in the gray December light. I would have gone to a movie, for movies always let
me forget my troubles for a few hours, but I knew that this was a school day
and the truant officers routinely patrolled the downtown movie houses for
school truants.
    On Hill Street near 5 th was Pacific
Electric's subway terminal. The streetcars left for the sprawling western
communities and the
    San Fernando Valley to the northwest through a long
tunnel in the hillside and came out on Glendale Boulevard. I took a streetcar
to Hollywood where my father worked backstage at Ken Murray's Blackouts, a variety review with chorus girls and
comics in a theater on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard. I was familiar
with the area. I wanted to be where I knew my way around.
    Hollywood Boulevard was new, bright and crowded.
Thirty years earlier it had been a bean field. Now servicemen were everywhere.
They came from training camps and military bases all over Southern California.
They were drawn to Hollywood and Vine, and especially to the Hollywood Canteen,
where they might just dance with Hedy Lamarr or Joan Leslie, or stroll the boulevard
and see if their feet fit the imprint of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin
outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. Sid