Dog Eat Dog by Edward Bunker Read Free Book Online Page B

For the first twelve years of his life, Troy lived in a two-story house in Benedict Canyon and attended an exclusive private school, where his grades were perfect and tests indicated his IQ was 136. Contrary to outward appearance, his life was less than idyllic. His father was a periodic binge drunk and wife beater. Once or twice a year, a binge ended in a psychotic episode. He drank until he became an animal, blind and brutal, invariably knocking his wife around while accusing her of infidelity.
    At age twelve, with pubic hair and testosterone, a boy thinks he is a man and should protect his mother, even from his father. Troy got between them and was backhanded across the room. He took a .22 from an upstairs closet, loaded it, and put three bullets in his father’s back.
    His father survived, which was probably worse for Troy, because his mother denied what Troy described. That raised a question of sanity; however, the psychiatrists said he was legally sane and extremely intelligent and very rational—but also extremely sociopathic. His values, his beliefs, what he saw as the right and wrong of things, were atypical. They also talked psychological jargon about unresolved Oedipal complex. Notwithstanding all of that, he might not have been served to the Beast except that he had seriously injured a black youth who had stolen Troy’s shoes. The black kid was two years older and thirty pounds heavier. When they were in the mess hall, Troy picked up a mop wringer from a bucket and slammed it into the back of the extortionist’s head. He lay there, toes pointed upward, in the expensive athletic shoes. Troy grinned; he thought of the Wicked Witch of the East … The officials found his grin especially damning. It got him sent to the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys.
    Reform school was harder for him than most, at least initially. An only child from the upper middle class, he stood out among the generally underclass youths of all races. He talked with perfect grammar in the land of the vulgar and inarticulate. He was educated; most of them were illiterate. Within a few months, however, he had assumed the coloration of the world surrounding him, the argot, the swagger, and the codes of what was virtuous and what was not. His dreams, however, were born in the world of books, to which he escaped as much as possible, to Zane Grey, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling. Troy had a dearth of civilizing influences and was alien to the position in the world that Fate had decreed for him. He was incapable of the 11th Commandment, Thou shalt adjust.
    Even then he might have blended back into his former world, except that he found himself ostracized. The girls he’d known as a child were now forbidden to see him. He was as marked as Cain by what he’d done at age twelve. The Christian myth of forgiveness and redemption embodied in the Prodigal Son was bullshit. In a way he was glad it was bullshit; hypocrisy provided him self-justification—and self-justification is all anyone needs to do anything.
    If the bourgeoisie cast him out, the underworld gathered him in. By the time he was sixteen, he had robbed several supermarkets, invested the money in Humboldt County’s premium-grade pot, and was the Grass King of West Hollywood. His next bust came when a full-fledged transvestite turned out to be a state narco agent. In the precinct, Troy looked at the agent in eyeliner, lipstick, and heels, six foot three and deceiving nobody, and just shook his head. Who the fuck woulda thought it? A drag queen narc bull? That got him sent back to the Youth Authority until he turned twenty-one. By then he was a hardened criminal, as devoted to crime as a novitiate is to Rome.
    It took them five years to get him again. During those years he finished his apprenticeship and became a journeyman thief. He burned open safes with acetylene torches and planned armed robberies for Diesel Carson and Bobby Dillinger. The robberies included hijacking cigarette and whiskey