The house was split-level, modern, painted gray and would have cost about 100K which was a lot of money at the time. The back door led into the kitchen which was also modernist and high-tech for the age, like the kitchens of homes you see in architectural magazines with everything impossibly, perfectly stacked or put away. A long butcher block table down the center with forever-unused shiny copper-bottom pots hanging overhead. It was a scene, really, not a kitchen. In my memory the home is more affluent, more opulent than it probably was, but these people were still loaded to my innocent black eyes. My feeling was, frankly, they needed to share, from a revolutionary perspective, in order for the black peep to recoup what had been taken by slavery and by Jim Crow.
The whole house was a museum, actually. Clean, orderly and amazing to me coming from a home where disorder was the only rule. In Bell Canyon everything was in its place. To a young brother or sister that could be disorienting and it was. The family must have a maid and it must have been her day off. Again, lucky for me. My modus operandi at the time was no jewelry, no artwork, no stereo systems, just cash.
Today you couldn't make a living doing cash-only burglaries but back then people still used greenbacks for transactions. In English class at UCLA they were teaching us about comparing and contrasting, and using that skill now, for example, to describe what it was like to be a young thug back in the day compared to today? A lot of bad boys today head straight for the bathroom, that’s my observation of crime in the modern era. The medicine cabinet is more important to today's burglar—or so they say. Painkillers can sell for twenty dollars a pill on the street in today’s market, more if it’s anything with genuine addiction potential like Oxycontin. Decades ago a thug didn't think like that, it was another era, a different time. A Negro was taking his life in his hands just being in an exclusive neighborhood, much less looking in white people's medicine cabinets. Which, even today, tells you everything you need to know about most of us, what meds we’re taking.
Personally, as a still-immature member of a revolutionary movement, booze and drugs were off limits to me. Pussy was okay, if you could get some, girls didn't just give it away like they do now, but no intoxicants, no sir, not even weed. Call it the healthy West Coast lifestyle, my ethos at the time was living right—macrobiotics and good karma—in tune with nature and all that. No chemicals—no thank you—just cash.
My roots as a reporter in Texas were planted during those undergraduate years doing burglaries in suburban Los Angeles, actually. Monday, Wednesday and Friday were lecture days when you would’ve seen me toting a backpack on campus, probably near Bunche Hall, home of the Economics Department. Tuesday and Thursday were off days when you wouldn’t have seen me at all, practicing my new vocation. After a rocky start, good grades got me on the Dean’s List and kept me there until LAPD ended a promising academic career.
It’s strange as you age what you remember most of the old days, before the fall or falls as the case may be. What impressed me about UCLA was not ivy-covered buildings, not intellectual rigor nor the healthy environment for debate. Not my first attempts at problem-solving or learning the discipline of putting one’s thoughts on paper instead of up in somebody’s face. It was not seeing the tall lanky figures of the university’s basketball stars walking between classes, or my morning commute past beautiful homes in Westwood. Mostly it was the chicks. There were some really fine mamas in attendance, then as presumably now. Southern California may be superficial—that was the rap you heard about the difference between going to SoCal’s UCLA or USC instead of the Bay Area schools Berkeley and Stanford. Southern California was home of the lightweights, that’s what we were told. The rumor was that chicks at Berkeley didn’t shave under their arms. At UCLA they shaved all the way down to their toenails. Where would you choose to study? Anyway, my journalistic epiphany did not actually take place on campus but instead in Bell Canyon, an exclusive housing development in Ventura County, about an hour west of L.A.
Bell Canyon was a gated community but had no fence. There were no man-made barriers except a front gate. The rough countryside was like a wall that surrounded the exclusive homes if one wished to view white people’s wealth through the lens of a race & power dialectic. Studying economics was giving me some pretty good problem-solving skills and my solution to getting into Bell Canyon was to park short of the guard post and hike in through the hills. The inhospitable landscape would delude these folks into thinking that their shit was secure, if one viewed through the lens of thuggery.
Choosing a target was also a rational exercise thanks to California’s system of higher education. In economics classes we did some rudimentary gaming to model the choices made by consumers. SoCal being built like Texas on the edifice of the automobile, my plan was to pick the first house in Bell Canyon that had no cars in the driveway on the assumption that in a mobile culture, where even kids had their own vehicles, if there were no cars present that meant nobody was home. Not brilliant but workmanlike and the kind of thinking that put to use the education my family was paying for. Later, that ability to think like a thug would pay dividends as a reporter in our bucolic River City, the World Capital of Live Music, Austin, Texas. For instance you have to have a plan but it doesn't have to be original, only effective, UCLA taught me that.
Assigned readings were helpful. That was in fact my understanding of world history, whatever worked worked, whatever didn’t didn’t. What my professors beat into us was that the simplest solution is usually the best, over-intellectualizing is as dangerous as being rash. You tend to overestimate the risks of action, that’s what rational decision-making told us. Intellectual training is—it seems to me now, after Bell Canyon, as much about balls as brains. You want to be just analytical enough to consider the risks—and dumb enough to do it anyway. Timing was in my favor, in that age before technology brought the home alarm system into practically every householder’s financial reach. There were no circuits to short or cameras to dodge. No access code to obtain or password to guess. In an exclusive community with a guard post a mile away at the front gate, duped into a sense of security, not everyone locked their doors. Nice.
So, like, the first house with no automobiles parked outside and an unlocked back door became my target. An apology at the start. Burglary is a trade not an art. But it was also a political act, it seems to me even now, separating the white man and white women from their ill-gotten gains and the ill-gotten fruits of slavery. Not to sound noble or revolutionary or anything, my action plan in Bell Canyon was to expropriate, ideologically-speaking, to take back what had been taken from us. You can call it wealth-sharing if one considers the historical imperative that drives The Black Man, not to repeat myself. To answer the ethical question at the start—before we go inside the house, so to speak, how can you justify entering another person’s home uninvited?
That’s what a Scandinavian friend once asked me, hearing about my college years. This particular act of “lawlessness” and all that other “illegal” shit that was done as part of my young black manhood? My friend was big-titty and blonde, not that that’s important, although it kind of was. She was entirely hot but totally clueless about the societal pressures that might drive an African American warrior male. You know? Who grew up in the 'hood where every day was a struggle just to survive.
The gritty ghetto reality of the black man-child’s upbringing meant that by the time you're watching somebody’s house, you were already past the particular concerns of my hot Norwegian friend. If you’re already checking the frequency of police patrols you really don’t care so much that you didn't get a RSVP. Her question only confused me at the time because there didn’t seem to me to be anything wrong with breaking & entering, in my undergraduate understanding of ethics, if you didn’t get caught. In lecture my philosophy professor mentioned Socrates or one of those medieval bitches who speculated that wrong is contextual, not absolute. That was my view in Bell Canyon too. My bad, call that a moral failing on my part, a missing gene for honesty or whatever, but to answer my Norwegian friend’s question, my feeling that day in Ventura County, to set the record straight, was that if someone left their house unlocked they must want a nigger to go inside. Which is what this one did.
Teenagers lived upstairs in matching bedrooms on the split part of the split-level, a boy and a girl from the look of the clothing. They yielded most of the money, actually. It was their saved allowances or whatever. Christmas gifts or birthday presents from Aunt Jen, you feel me, an amount that was really pretty hefty for kids. Call me old-fashioned but even then, thru an old school lens, these were thrifty children and you had to give the parents credit for teaching good values. But as would also be true later, busting balls and breaking news in River City, looking for that rich seam of corruption that runs through the State of Texas, from the Governor’s Office straight to County Jail? The search was more rewarding than the results. Call me kinky—call me a freak. There was just something orgasmic about being in a stranger's home—going through personal papers and personal belongings unbeknownst to the owners. Or known to them, as long as they didn’t get home in time. It took a while certainly. It was not so much thoroughness on my part as curiosity.
Insurance documents, photo albums, electronics warranties, they had two TVs and both were color, we had just gone color at my house too but there was only one that the entire family had to share. My class resentment rose and peaked. It was an affront to black dignity, actually, this unearned largesse for The White Man. And White Woman. But as a professional you just had to knuckle down and do the job and look for money.
There was a lot of personal correspondence—people still wrote letters and kept them in the envelopes they arrived in, in desk drawers. Where a stash of cash might also be hidden, not to sound all mercenary but this was business. In a search like that you don’t necessarily want to be detailed and thorough, like an artist or a scientist, B&E is more a practical endeavor and limited by time. Basically in this environment you were looking for the color green. For this purpose that day in Bell Canyon my mother had unknowingly given me a hint about how to proceed.
"If you ever want to hide anything from a black man," she once told me, spinning old Negro wisdom, "put it in a book. He'll never look there." Forewarned, my host family's library got a good going-over. Nothing.
The search for money took me everywhere in the house but especially into drawers and cabinets and boxes of documents where a bank envelope might be hidden. Today most everything in the modern home of the same socio-economic class would be computerized but back then people still had a lot of paper and containers to hold it. My timing, as it turned out, assisted but also hampered efforts to execute a successful robbery. Society was just moving to credit cards and this was the beginning of the era when people began to cut back on cash on hand. Even economics training had not prepared me for the possibility that the family that owned a house in Bell Canyon was wealthy but didn't keep much money at home. That blew my mind. It would make a great economics paper for school, actually. One learns through trial and error—by breaking and, in this case, entering.
The kids had their own passports, that was a total motherfucker. Did that mean they could leave this bitch, on their own? That was my dream—getting away to anywhere that wasn't amerika.
Like everything else in this white household the kids' rooms were perfectly ordered, beds made and bedcovers smooth. No one is that neat, at least no child, even an adolescent, especially not an adolescent. Again it was good for me. You didn’t have to hunt blindly, shit was where it was supposed to be, in drawers with labels. On some level, even as a thuggish young Negro, you had to love white people. Was this how they came to rule the world, by putting things back where they belong? Or was their success attributable to B&E too, like me, but on a countrywide scale, we never had that discussion in class in Westwood. Burglary is a very intimate crime, it seems to me now, looking fondly back, much more personal than most of the so-called “crimes against persons” that cops focus on, mugging for example even if there’s no bloodshed. Or carjacking—or homicide. Unless of course it’s a professional hit that’s up close and personal. But how much emotion does it really take to pull a trigger? In the modern age you can text and get it done.
Not to be old-fashioned or anything but you have to be respectful in your host’s absence, when the owner is at work or vacationing or whatever, if you're doing B&E. Don’t throw shit on the floor is the first rule. Just call me Old School! And remember, you can bust a nut on curiosity as well as cash. That's what my visit to Bell Canyon taught me. That fact alone would spark my later efforts as a reporter. Coincidence also played a big part that afternoon. There was a little metal box with a combination lock that the family used for important documents and valuables, instead of a safe. To set the scene.
The locked box had a roll of three tumblers side by side that you could set to any combination you liked and the coincidence was that my older brother, as part of a doomed-from-the-start effort to keep his private life out of my reach, had bought one just like it. Score! So, like, while my big bro’ was away at college, big helpings of time and patience—which would serve me so well in the Fourth Estate—taught me how to hold one tumbler at a time stationary and roll though all the possible combinations with relative ease. That was the first hint of the felonious serendipity that marked my newspaper career later along the banks of the mighty Colorado River.
The district attorney's secretary is away from her desk, for instance. The mere absence of someone from their desk fueled my reporting career in the Travis County Courthouse on more than one occasion. Or a drawer is unlocked, that kind of thing, in the room where you’ve been told to wait for someone from the State of Texas to come and lie to you? Or the lock can be easily forced, although that's crude and noisy and is something you probably want to do only at night. One of my happiest memories as a teenager had actually been picking the lock on a desk for the first time. With a paper clip like in a movie, you know, what a sense of achievement it gave me, a paper clip really worked, but it took a lotta time and a lot of patience, not to brag or anything.
In Bell Canyon there was no cash or diamonds in the locked box but it was one of my first times taking a skill learned in one area and applying it in a totally different field, almost as gratifying as finding a stack of freshly-minted twenty-dollar bills. A kind of crossover, if you like, and the sort of aha moment that my professors talked about in lecture, which made it doubly cool, being a striving undergraduate and all. Mostly though, what got my rocks off that day was the search. Not to sound like a freak and not to repeat myself. But that's how it was later, in journalism too.
As a reporter you have to choose your method. Basically in River City you were either an interview person or a documents guy or girl. Although interviews are always necessary, especially when wrapping up. There are great journalists today who just specialize in getting the video. But my thing, going back to my apprenticeship in Bell Canyon, was getting the paperwork. Seeing something in print and getting it into the newspaper. There was something so undeniable about having a state official's signature on the bottom of the page, no matter how you got the document. A signature could be a thing of beauty when you were trying to burn the State of Texas, and as intrinsically important in my system of values as primo weed or a chick who had shown a willingness to go down. Why not both? Why not all three?
Interviews, even juicy shit off the record, are so wishy-washy. What people say now they can deny later or say they misspoke. A lot of mofos in Texas government like to misspeak, btw. If the target has any sense whatsoever he’s watching what he says, especially if he or she is press-savvy like a public official or professionally wary like a prosecutor or a pig. So, like, unless you’re doing a magazine interview or writing a book and there are multiple sessions and hours of tape to review later in a search for subtleties and nuance—or unless you’re a hot chick and can show a little leg or boob in order to speed disclosure? Don’t go there. Just don't go there. Central Texas is like Southern California in that respect, you know, it’s so superficial. For me, documents have mostly been the way to go. Since Bell Canyon. That trip to the Southern California countryside revealed the beauty of knowing somebody’s else business—of being in somebody else’s business.
For a greater cause, in that case it was Black Liberation. Which has always just had a certain je ne sais quoi, not to get all sentimental. For me, running traps later in River City, the State of Texas was like that white family in Bell Canyon. The State wasn’t home either. And the people in power, instead of them serving on my jury, it was me judging them.
