EdwardBunker. Interview. MarkCampbell. Crime Time. 09 May 2015.

  Eddie Bunker doesn’t really need an introduction. The author of four highly acclaimed hard-boiled crime novels, cult star of Reservoir Dogs, and ex-con extraordinaire, Bunker’s life reads as fiction until you actually meet him, and then you know it’s fact. You can see it in his eyes. They move slowly, lazily, around the room, heavy-lidded and impenetrable. If they are windows to the soul, his are so scummed over with a life-time’s filth, you can’t see beyond the surface.

1.      First question: Eddie or Edward?

2.      Either one. Friends call me Eddie.

3.      How has the publicity tour been going?

4.      It went great in Manchester. It was hard warming them up at the start, but at the end they responded well and bought a lot of books. Most of them had read my novels.

5.      Do you enjoy this sort of thing?

6.      Talking to people? Yeah, sometimes. It depends on how I feel at that moment. I’m not real comfortable with it at the start, it’s hard to get into it, but at the end I’m okay.

7.      What questions do you hate?

8.      I can’t thing of any off-hand, but of course if I heard one now I’d think, “Yaggh.” People ask the same questions because they’re interested in the same things.

9.      How did the Howard Marks event go?

10.   It was funny, yeah. He carried two-thirds of the load, which he’s supposed to do - the more he does, the less I do. I told my stories and people laughed.

11.   Your attitude about drugs is obviously totally different to his, isn’t it?

12.   Well, he’s an absolutist, and I’m a semi-absolutist. He’d like to legalise everything, and I might too, but I’d keep the price up somehow. The only thing that worries me really is crack cocaine. People in Hollywood tell me, “If we can get hooked on cocaine, we’ve got too much money.” Jeez, it’s the price of coke that keeps people addicted, because you keep using more and more. And coke will drive you crazy, make you psychotic.

13.   Who would benefit from the money if it was legalised?

14.   You’d tax it and use it for propaganda. I’d use all the money I could for anti-drugs programs. They got my kid, 5 years old, singing songs: (he sings) “No drugs, no way.” You could do it that way, educationally. Whereas now it has a kind of charisma, a certain element that’s kind of rebellious. [Accurate.] When I was young it was Charlie Parker shooting heroin, he was the no.1 icon of that era.

15.   Washington is the crack capital of America, isn’t it? When I went there I felt very unsafe.

16.   Well, you should’ve. It’s an unsafe place, particularly if you’re a middle-class white person. I go down there armed to the teeth, and I usually go boldly so they think I’m a cop.

17.   Do you know many cops?

18.   A few. They’re not bad. Old cops usually have the same attitude to things as criminals, the same worldview, the same value system. Keep your mouth shut, the code of silence.

19.   What’s the relationship between you and Quentin Tarantino?

20.   Not really any. I don’t see him much anymore. We just made a movie together, we were never great friends.

21.   What was it like making Reservoir Dogs?

22.   It was like any other movie, but for very little money. I had no idea it would be what it was, and what effect it would have. I’ve made a lot of movies - you’d be surprised how often I pop up as a bodyguard or something.

23.   You’ve got a good face for a bodyguard. Do you enjoy it?

24.   Sure. The final irony of my life is if I end up a movie star.

25.   You’ve had an unlikely life already, haven’t you?

26.   I have, most unusual. I wasn’t even aware it was unusual until my mid-twenties. [Accurate.] After that I was almost conscious I was collecting material, because by that time I wanted to write, so I gained a writer’s eye for that sort of thing. But my first published book, No Beast So Fierce, was the sixth book I wrote. I’ve got the others round the house, but they’re bad. My wife read the first manuscript I ever wrote, and she said, “If I’d read this when you were starting, I would have told you to quit.”

27.   So what kept you going?

28.   That’s my nature. I’m a believer in perseverance over everything. Just to become a writer - not necessarily a good writer - you don’t need luck or talent, just perseverance.

29.   You haven’t been very prolific, have you?

30.   Let me tell you what happened. I wrote six fucking books before No Beast So Fierce, and it did well. Then came The Animal Factory and it did okay, it got great reviews. Then came Little Boy Blue and it sold nothing, under 4,000 copies the first time round in the United States. It was mis-published there, it was fucked over, you know what I mean? It broke my heart, and I didn’t think I’d write another book. Then a few years later, the books became very successful all over Europe and they wanted another one, so I wrote Dog Eat Dog. But for 10 years I just wrote and edited screenplays, and acted.

31.   Did you teach yourself to write?

32.   Yes, completely. I had a seventh grade education. I don’t really understand grammar, [Accurate.] but I think I write well, I think I handle language pretty well. But it’s because I’ve read so much.

33.   Crime?

34.   Anything. I don’t think I was a particular crime reader - the first thing I picked up I would read. And I don’t think I’m a crime writer really, unless Truman Capote is a crime writer, or Dostoyevsky. When I write about crime, believe me it’s crime. It’s not a mystery, or a cop procedural or anything like that, it’s a story of a crime from the criminal’s viewpoint. I believe it’s the purpose of a novel to put down the human condition.

35.   Do you think real-life crime is getting worse?

36.   I think it’s a cycle that goes back and forth, decade by decade. In America they go on about the increasing crime rate, but they’ve been saying that for God knows how long, centuries, and things still hold on. They were saying it in the 1880s. But I do feel the streets are not as safe as when I was a child. In Los Angeles, if you were the wrong colour and you went in the wrong neighbourhood, you’d get your ass kicked and rocks thrown at you, but you wouldn’t get shot.

37.   I guess that’s because most people nowadays have guns…

38.   There’s 200 million of them in the United States. My attitude is I wish nobody had them, nobody, but I’m not giving mine up till they’re down to at least 50 million. When they get down to that, I’ll give mine up. But the cops don’t want anyone to have guns except them - I wonder why?

39.   In this country, people have arguments in the street, but at least they don’t end up shooting each other.

40.   That’s true. London has apparently the highest fist-fight rates in the world. It’s good if you weigh 230 lbs, like me. If I weighed 110, I’d rather have a gun.

41.   You’ve been imprisoned three times. The first time you went in, was it a shock?

42.   It was like I was raised for it. Many of my friends from school were already there, and many came after me. I turned 18, my first week in San Quentin. It’s not some country club - I didn’t smile for a couple of years. Can’t you see the murderous hostility in my eyes? (He points to a photo of his teenage mug shot.)

43.   Did you begin writing when you first went to prison?

44.   Pretty much. They allowed portable typewriters, and Louise Wallace sent me one. She was a silent movie star in Mack Sennett comedies.

45.   Did you always like movies as a kid?

46.   Yeah, they were an escape. In those days I’d sometimes go to a double feature, and walk right out and go next door to another double feature. I’d see four in a day.

47.   Your criminal record has given your books a certain credibility. Do you sometimes read other crime writers, and think they haven’t got their details right?

48.   Yes. Unless they’ve been there, they wouldn’t understand. [Unlike Soderbergh.] What they have is a myth they’ve got from some other source or they take it from movies. What else do they have?

49.   You must have seen some interesting things in prison.

50.   I’ve seen some weird shit. Once I was in LA county jail, and there were three of us chained to our bunks in a row. Someone started screaming and yelling out “Oh my God.”, and it turned out the other guy had just lain there and gouged out his own eyeballs with his bare hands. Another time, some character had plunged a 14 inch blade into someone else’s back, right up to the hilt, and then just skidded away into the crowd. He couldn’t reach round and get it out, so he went over to a couple of guards with this fucking knife sticking out of him, and they didn’t know what to do either, so they took him to hospital. Then they called me, “Bunker 820284, report to the custody office,” because I used to type out all the reports for them. And the report said there was 9½ inches of blade inside him, and it missed everything. It shoved some of the organs aside, but it didn’t hit a single fucking vital organ. They just sealed it up, and a couple of days later they transferred him out. That’s unbelievable.

51.   Did anything positive happen in prison?

52.   Oh, there were friendships. Certain values, like personal loyalties, are highly respected. Wherever you are, life goes on.

53.   Is it like a microcosm of the world outside?

54.   In a way, but it’s distorted. One thing is, you don’t have facades. You’re stripped down to the bare essentials of what you are, and who you are as a man.

55.   How long did it take you to write your autobiography?

56.   Two or three years. I made a lot of notes and shit, and it flowed pretty easily. I knew the subject.

EdwardBunker. Interview. StephenLemons. Salon. 24 Apr 2000.

1.      Edward Bunker has a face like an ax, a voice like a buzz saw and the watery blue eyes of a saint. Standing in the middle of an office garage behind his picture-perfect home in L.A.’s tony Hancock Park, he lights a half-smoked cigar for the umpteenth time — the matches burning down close to his fingers before they fire up the cherry. And then leans back on his heels as he answers my question: “Is there any similarity between a criminal and an artist?”

2.      “Both tend to have a sociopathic deviancy in their attitudes,” he says, sucking on the stogie. “They don’t see things like the average citizen. So to that extent, there is. Dustin even made that comment somewhere.”

3.      Bunker’s referring to Dustin Hoffman, who played a version of Bunker in the 1978 Ulu Grosbard film “Straight Time.” The movie was based on Bunker’s first published novel, “No Beast So Fierce.” Its protagonist Max Dembo is one of Bunker’s alter egos.

4.      Bunker’s in the film as well, playing a different version of himself — an underworld figure who meets Hoffman in a dark bar and plans a heist for him. According to Bunker’s recently published memoir, “Education of a Felon,” it’s a role Bunker fleshed out in the late ’50s when he spent most of his time concocting schemes for other criminals to enact.

5.      “I was really good in that scene, man,” says Bunker with a wicked little smile. “When they wrapped for the day, the whole cast applauded me. I’ve been in 20 or 30 movies since and never seen a cast do that. At the time, I had only been out of prison for six or seven months.”

6.      Bunker’s bio offers an almost seamless melding of life and art. In brutal, uncompromising novels such as “Dog Eat Dog,” “Little Boy Blue,” “No Beast So Fierce” and “Animal Factor” (the subject of an upcoming Steve Buscemi-directed film starring Bunker and Willem Dafoe), the 66-year-old author has mined a wealth of experiences from his years in the underworld, on the lam and in the joint.

7.      The scion of a broken home, he was in and out of juvenile detention facilities throughout his childhood — mainly for truancy, thievery and escaping, which he did on several occasions.

8.      Then, when he was 17, he drew a stint in San Quentin state prison, earning him the distinction of being the youngest person incarcerated there. It was the first of three terms, eventually totaling 18 years. Whenever he was out, L.A.’s street life lured him into a career of robbery, fraud and various other offenses, and soon enough, he’d be back in the joint.

9.      But San Quentin was, strangely enough, the place where Bunker began to transform himself into the American Jean Genet, and it’s where he did most of his serious reading.

10.   “My library day was Saturday,” he writes in “Education of a Felon.” “We were allowed to have five books checked out at one time. I tried to read all five in seven nights, so I could get five more. I was no speed-reader, but I had six hours every night and half an hour in the morning. Sometimes if I was entranced, as with [Jack London's] ‘The Sea Wolf,’ I came back to the cell after breakfast.”

11.   Prison is also where he had the epiphany that he wanted to be a writer — his inspiration coming from another cell-bound ink-slinger, Caryl Chessman, aka “The Red Light Bandit,” whose death-row memoir made him a cause célèbre in the ’50s.

12.   Bunker was in isolation, near Chessman on death row when Chessman, knowing Bunker liked to read, sent him over a copy of Argosy magazine via a guard. The mag had excerpted the first chapter of Chessman’s “Cell 2455, Death Row,” and after Bunker read it, he thought, “Why not me?”

13.   “More than inspiration, it was revelation,” Bunker states, pausing before a framed poster from the 1985 film “Runaway Train,” for which Bunker co-wrote the screenplay. “It’s what I wanted to do, and it was something I could do no matter what my condition. I didn’t have any idea it would take 17 years and six books to get published.”

14.   Bunker’s literary ambition rescued him from the cycle of recidivism, and he’s been out of jail for 25 years. Not only does he enjoy the fruits of bourgeois affluence — a charming, attractive wife, a well-mannered 6-year-old son, a house right out of Better Homes and Gardens and two sports cars (a brand new BMW and a classic ’78 Alfa-Romeo); in addition, Bunker’s the recipient of high literary praise from the likes of James Ellroy, who calls him “a true original of American letters.” And William Styron writes in the introduction to Bunker’s memoir that Bunker is “one of a small handful of American writers who have created authentic literature out of their experiences as criminals and prisoners.”

15.   “I fought the law and the law won,” goes the refrain. Bunker reversed that, beating authority at its own game — subverting the status quo by crafting art from the penalties imposed upon him. As Bunker puts it in his memoir, “A lotus definitely grows from the mud.”

16.   “My relationship with the world changed,” Bunker says. “When I got out of prison, I had not found God or anything. I had been in and out so many times and failed so many times and had [negative] attitudes about making it. Being a published writer changed all that.”

17.   If it hadn’t been for his talent and drive, things might have been different.

18.   “At one time in prison, I wrote over 200 letters for a job and didn’t get an answer,” he says. “I don’t mean ‘kiss my ass’ or ‘suck my dick’ or ‘fuck you, convict.’ I didn’t get a reply — from nobody. I mean, the social contract has to work two ways.”

19.   The hardships and brutalities Bunker underwent in the pen fed right into the gritty realism he’s known for. Unlike his great friend James Ellroy who “makes everything up,” Bunker says he makes nothing up: “It’s all taken from memory or experience or someone else’s stories.”

20.   Even the bit parts he gets in movies not drawn from his life or fiction overlap his own history with an eerie irony. It was his cameo as Mr. Blue in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino film “Reservoir Dogs” that brought Bunker to the attention of Gen-Xers. In the film, he was part of a gang of hardened jewel thieves — once again, a role for which Bunker had ample real-world preparation.

21.   Would Bunker have become a writer, much less a celebrity, if he hadn’t been in prison?

22.   “Who knows?” wonders Bunker. “I loved to read. I read as an escape from the misery of my existence. But you don’t know what you would have been. You go back and say, ‘If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been this.’ Well, I wouldn’t have been me. There are other things I have an inclination for — I have a natural affinity for the law, for the logic of it. I learned it easier than anything in the world.”

23.   However, being an ex-con still carries a stigma, even for a renowned novelist. Bunker points to the controversy surrounding convict Jack Henry Abbott, author of “In the Belly of the Beast.” Abbott became notorious in 1981 for stabbing a waiter to death in New York’s Greenwich Village after Norman Mailer had worked to secure his release from prison.

24.   “That maniac-rat!” Bunker exclaims. “After that, every schlock TV series in the country had an episode with a convict-writer. I’m the only other one. Who else is there? It really did me a lot of damage. It still does. A lot of people can hide the fact they’ve been in prison. How can I hide it? It’s part of my reputation.”

25.   Does Bunker still have problems with authority? Does he miss the adrenaline rush of breaking the law?

26.   “Sometimes,” he smiles. “But I can’t punch people. They’ll sue me and take money from me. If I ever start to miss the rush, I immediately remember the courtroom and the joint on top of that. No persons over 40 are heavy thieves. You burn out. The guy may have done things wild when he was young, and he may be a habitual criminal. But he doesn’t do the same things. He becomes a shoplifter or a petty thief. Hard crime is a young man’s game … Once you’re locked up, you’re locked out. It’s almost impossible to do what I did.”

27.   About this time, Bunker’s young son appears in the doorway of the office, ball in hand, to ask his dad to play. Bunker’s eyes light up as he tells him he’ll be there in a minute.

28.   No, Bunker will never return to the transgressions of his past. The social contract has finally worked, for him at least. Now he has far too much to lose.

  Stephen Lemons is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Salon. He lives in Los Angeles.