No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker Page A

watching three girls eat lunch and giggle. Then I moved on.
    Across from the bus stop on Wilshire Boulevard was a men’s shop. I remembered buying a sixty-dollar sweater there, mainly because it had cost so much. It was long ago, shortly after my graduation from delinquency to crime—before I was accustomed to expensive clothes and high living.
    While riding the bus, I thought back to the two years before prison, to the Sunset Strip and, especially, to its vice underworld. The Strip underworld, with call girls that looked like ingenues and pimps that looked like young movie executives, was buffered from the savage underworld of the slums by location and money. My first awareness of it came from a downtown junky streetwalker. She had a notebook with several hundred telephone numbers, many of them well-known celebrities. Heroin had stolen her youth prematurely, and when she was beaten and thrown out for hiding money from her pimp, nobody else would take her. She told me how the top girls made seventy thousand dollars a year. The streetwalkers I knew made enough to buy dope and pay the rent. I was making good money with merchandise burglary, but there was risk involved, and certainly less money than what she talked about. She loved to tell stories and while I listened I sensed weakness in those who ran the racket. Nobody was organized—but the hint of possible weakness lay in their success. She told me they owned cocktail lounges, cigarette vending routes, and one had an eighty-foot yacht he chartered out.
    I began frequenting their hangouts. Soon I decided that I was going to organize the call girl prostitution and take a percentage. The plan was to gather information about them, bring in some henchmen and show them that resistance would destroy everything. Force and fear would be necessary, but more important was the psychology of force and fear. They had to be confronted with something outside their experience, a knife-wielding maniac who raved about cutting their hearts out, who put a shotgun barrel in their girls’ mouths and left no doubt that it was not bluff—let them know that their bars and businesses would be bombed, and the girls’ tricks would be hassled over the phone, ruining the business. And the other part of the psychology was to show them that they weren’t being ripped off, but were joining an organization that was beneficial. Floating whores and pimps would be kept from the territory, and if anyone gave them trouble they had muscle.
    The main problem was getting help. The pimps, though un-organized, had money and could hire someone to eliminate one man. And getting help proved a stumbling block. Ragamuffins dragged from the slums would be ludicrous, especially if they were young, as were most of my friends. Junkies’ horizons were too short—shoplift half a case of cigarettes to buy a spoon of heroin now. Older criminals wouldn’t listen to someone my age. Some others I passed over as being inadequately violent. Others were too violent to direct themselves to a goal. They’d want to rape the girls, who were much more desirable than the faded creatures to whom they were accustomed.
    Before I got ready to move, I made a mistake—I talked too much. I’d kept stealing, and during the weekend of celebration after selling the truckload of stolen meat, I took L&L Red to see the whore who’d given me the original idea. She cursed the pimps, and I drunkenly boasted about what was going to happen to them. The prostitute, from fear or maliciousness (who knows what goes through the mind of a dope fiend whore?), telephoned her former pimp.
    The pimp and two goons caught me in a parking lot and bounced me around. It was a pretty fair ass-kicking, but I was able to drive away. That was the pimp’s mistake.
    A week later he walked into his apartment and I was waiting, pistol in one fist and brass knuckles on the other. I told him, “You didn’t think this