Sunday, October 30, 2022

Bell Canyon

           Roots as a reporter were planted during my undergraduate years doing burglaries in suburban L.A. 

            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 basketball stars walking between classes, or my morning commute past cool houses in Westwood. Mostly it was the pussy. Being completely honest here. There were some really fine mamas in attendance, then as presumably now, Southern California may be superficial—that was the rap you heard for the difference between going to UCLA or USC in SoCal instead of the Bay Area schools Berkeley and Stanford. Southern California was home of the lightweights, that’s what we heard on campus even though the Internet was being invented at UCLA at the time it was being said. Whatever their intellectual failings the SoCal schools had other assets. There were fine chicks everywhere, shorts and halter tops being the school uniform those days, the early 1970s,Vietnam winding down and Watergate heating up. When some kind of mildly-infectious social bug was the only danger of hooking up. The rumor was that chicks at Berkeley didn’t shave under their arms. At UCLA they shaved all the way down to their toenails. If you were a guy where would you choose to study? 

My journalistic epiphany did not 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. To set the scene. 

There were no man-made barriers with the exception of 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, Austin, Texas, the World Capital of Live Music. You have to have a plan but it doesn't have to be original, only effective, UCLA taught me that. Assigned readings were very helpful. That was my understanding of history too, 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 said, intellectual training isit seems to me now, after Bell Canyon. It's as much about balls as brains. You want to be just analytical enough to consider the risks—and dumb enough to do it anyhow. 

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 business plan in Bell Canyon was to expropriate, ideologically-speaking, to take back from The White Man what he had taken from us. You can call it wealth-sharing if one considers the historical imperative of The Black Peep, 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 and all that other shit that had to be done as part of my early 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, like yours truly? You feel me? Who grew up in the 'hood where everyday was a struggle just to survive. The gritty ghetto reality of my 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 didn’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. 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 completely let’s use an analogy that isn't about sex. 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. 

The house was split-level, modern, painted gray and would have cost about 100K at the time, which was a whole lotta money then. 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 not a kitchen. In my memory the home is more affluent, more opulent than it probably really was, but these people were still loaded to my innocent black eyes. My feeling was, frankly, they needed to share. From a revolutionary perspective of course, merely to recoup what had been taken from us by slavery and by Jim Crow. The whole house was a museum, actually. Clean, orderly and amazing to me a a Negro 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 mildly 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 not back then, in Bell Canyon. People still used cash.

A lot of bad boys today head straight for the bathroom, that’s my observation of crime in the modern era. In English class they taught us about comparing and contrasting, for example what it was like being a young thug back in the day compared to now? The medicine cabinet is more important today—or so they say. Painkillers can sell for twenty dollars a pill on the street today, 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 the black 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. Call it the healthy West Coast lifestyle, my ethos was living right—macrobiotics and good karma—in tune with nature and all that. 

No chemicals—no thank you—just cash.

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. In my modest opinion. 

Call me old-fashioned but they 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 our bucolic Austin, Texas, looking for that rich seam of corruption that runs through Travis County, from the Governor’s Office to the Travis 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 we all had to share. My class resentment rose and peaked. It was an affront to my black dignity, actually, this unearned largesse for The White Man. But as a professional you just had to knuckle down and do the job and look for the money, like a pro.

There was 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 much constrained 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 job. 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 this family, that was the subject of my present efforts in Bell Canyon, was wealthy but didn't keep much money at home. That blew my mind. It would make a great economics paper. One learns through trial and error—by breaking, in this case, and entering. 

The kids had their own passports, that was a 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 good for me. You didn’t have to hunt blind, shit was where it was supposed to be, like in drawers and with labels. On some level you have to love white people. Was this how they came to rule the world, by putting things back where they belong? Or by B&E too, we never had that discussion in class. Burglary is a very intimate crime, it seems now, looking fondly back, much more personal than most of the so-called “crimes against persons” that cops focus on now, mugging for example even if there’s 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? 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. 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 played a big part that afternoon. There was a little metal box with a combination lock that the family used for important documents and shit, 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, in 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 Lone Star State, working 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. It worked in Bell Canyon too. That was the first hint of the felonious serendipity that marked my career later here, along the banks of the Mighty Colorado. The secretary is away from her desk for instance. The mere absence of someone from their desk fueled my reporting career on more than one occasion in Austin. Or the drawer is unlocked, that kind of thing, in the room where you’ve 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 was picking the lock on a desk. With a paper clip like in a movie, you know, a sense of achievement, it 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 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 al that. Mostly though, what got me off that day was the search. Not to sound like a freak, not to repeat myself. But that's how it was later, in journalism. As a reporter you have to choose your method. Basically back in my day as a reporter in River City, you were either an interview person or a documents guy or girl. Although interviews are always necessary, especially when wrapping up, today you have to consider the most dominant documentary evidence to be video. There are great journalists who just specialize in getting the film. 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’s something so undeniable about having a state official's signature on the bottom of the page, no matter how you got it. 

A signature can be a thing of beauty when you’re trying to burn the State of Texas, as intrinsically important in my system of values as primo weed or a chick who’s shown a willingness to go down. Why not both? Why not all three? 

Interviews, even for juicy shit off the record are so wishy-washy. What people say now they can deny later or say they misspoke. A lot of motherfuckers as City Hall like to misspeak. If the target has any sense whatsoever he’s watching what he says anyway, 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. It’s like Southern California, you know, it’s just so superficial

For me, documents have mostly been the way to go. Since Bell Canyon. 

That trip to the countryside revealed for me the intrinsic beauty of knowing somebody’s else business—of being in somebody’s business. 

For a greater cause of course, in this case, Black Liberation. 

For me that has just always had a certain je ne sais quoi, not to get all sentimental. For me, running traps in River City, the State of Texas was like that white family in Bell Canyon. The State wasn’t home either. And the white people in power, instead of them serving on my jury, it was me judging them. Is this a great country or what?