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

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and I was unable to completely extend my legs if lying down, but at least I
escaped the cold night wind. Hours later I heard a humming in the ground, a
sound that grew into a ground-shaking crescendo. A train was coming, and seemed
as if it would run over my hideout. Its waving headlight came through every
crack with blinding power as it passed about twenty feet away.
    When the morning sun warmed the world, I climbed out.
Every muscle in my body was cramped. One night of living on the street and my
khaki uniform with the stripe down the leg was dirty enough to turn heads.
    I walked to a Thrifty drugstore, planning to eat
breakfast at the fountain counter. As I neared the entrance I saw a newspaper
stand. The newspapers had a black border and the headlines read: ROOSEVELT DEAD.
    The news stunned me. Roosevelt had been President for
my entire life. He had saved America in the Depression. "He saved
capitalism from itself," my father once said, which I couldn't understand
back then, yet I was awed by the accomplishment. He was Commander-in-Chief in
the war that still continued even though Allied armies were now marching
through Germany. His voice was familiar from his Fireside Chats. Mrs Roosevelt was America's mother, and Fala, for all
his Scots blood, was America's dog. The news brought tears to my eyes. I
changed my mind about breakfast.
    An hour later I rang Aunt Eva's doorbell to make sure
she was gone. Then I went around the corner of the building where a little door
opened into a compartment for the garbage can. Behind the garbage can was
another little door into the kitchen. Decades would pass before bars on the
windows of the poor and security systems in the homes of the wealthy became
common. I opened the outer door, pushed the inner one open and squeezed
through. I called out, "Aunt Eva," just in case. Nobody answered. I
then went about my business.
    A closet held a box with my clothes. I found a pair of
Levi jeans and a shirt. In the bathroom I began filling the tub. While the
water ran, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat.
    The refrigerator yielded a quart of milk and loaf of
bread. I moved to the toaster on the sink counter. Through a window I looked
out at the house next door.
    At that moment a policeman scurried across my line of
sight and ducked behind a tree.
    Crash! I dropped the glass and sprinted down the hall to the
bathroom, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. Frantic, I pulled on the jeans and
shoes, not bothering to button the former or lace the latter.
    Above the bathtub was a window. I opened the window
and pushed out the screen. The narrow window was twelve feet above a passage
between the apartment building and the garages. As I climbed out, a policeman
came around the corner below me. I jumped over his head onto the garage roof
and ran to the other side. The garage ended over a brush-covered forty-foot
embankment. I leaped off the roof and rolled down through weeds and bushes to
the bottom.
    A policeman appeared above me, looking down.
    I jumped up and went over a fence beside the slanted
concrete of a storm drain channel. The channel became a torrent when the rains
came, but today it was a trickle three feet wide and four inches deep. I
splashed through it. On the other side was another concrete wall with a far
steeper angle. At its top was a fence bordering the freeway, and several feet
below that was a storm drain outlet, now dry. I'd previously tried to run up
the angled wall to the hole and had always fallen short. This day though I went
up it like a mountain goat, disappearing into the storm drain beneath the
freeway and into the city.
    Half an hour later, I was two miles away on Mount
Washington, huddling in a shallow cave. Rain began to darken the earth. It was
a lonely moment in my young life.
    Late
that night, I found a bundle of the next morning's newspapers outside the door
of a neighborhood market. When the morning rush began, I was on the corner of
North Broadway and