begging her to come and see me. I needed her, loved her, and wanted to see little Charlie. Though the letters were never answered, for a few weeks I held on to the hope that her affair with the truck driver was just temporary and that she would eventually come back to me. All hope ended when Mom reported, “Your wife, your son, and her truck driver friend have moved out of the state.” To this day I have never seen or heard from her or the son that came from our marriage. When I gave up on her, my attitude of wanting to be Mr. Straight left me.
My work assignment was outside the prison walls, and I decided if my wife wasn’t going to come and see me any more, I was going to try and locate her. I attempted an escape. However, like so many of my escape attempts while in reform school, I was caught before I was out of sight of the prison, in the prison parking lot trying to hot wire a car.
For my attempt, I was taken off the minimum custody work assignment, which meant I was no longer allowed outside the prison walls, and given an additional five-year probation period to begin after I completed my existing sentence. It was a break from the court, but I wasn’t in an appreciative mood. My marriage, the new baby and a good clean work record inside the prison had been my ace in the hole toward an early parole date. And now that was gone.
I went back to being bitter and hating everyone. I had been bitter when my mom turned me over to the court when I was twelve years old. I hated her when she refused to let me stay with her after my first escape from Gibault. The bitterness I had learned at Plainfield never left me. And though I don’t blame her or feel bitter toward her now, my wife had the full brunt of my hate then.
Even if she had stuck by me and had been waiting when I got out of Terminal Island, I don’t know what the results would have been, because it’s obvious there is something lacking in my make up. It could have started with being a bastard son and my life with and without my mother. Maybe it was the years at Plainfield, or maybe the insanity of my uncle Jess and grandfather. I do know that until my wife left me I was filled with honest thoughts for our future together. I also know that the letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was a turning point in my life. I figured, screw all that honest-john bullshit, I’m a thief, I don’t know anything else. I made up my mind to perfect myself in the life I had been leaning toward since I stole all those toys and burned them when I was seven years old. And what better place to begin the perfection of an outlaw than in a penitentiary, a place that was loaded with every anti-establishment offender imaginable?
I was into learning ways to beat the law besides robbing or stealing. I was already pretty adept in those areas even though I had never made any big scores and I never doubted my ability to pull off a job if I needed to go that route. What interested me now was status. Among criminals in the joint, a thief or a gunman is kind of like a blue-collar worker, whereas a pimp or a top-grade con man is comparable to a bank president on the outside, kind of a high-roller, envied by other convicts. Pretty girls and sex provide the most interesting conversation for a guy doing time, and girls and their bodies are also big business in the free world. As long as I had decided to continue a life of crime, why not pursue what appealed to me most? What could be better than having all the girls you want and letting them supply the money and lifestyle an ex-convict dreams of on the outside?
To simplify my quest to become a pimp, right there in Terminal Island was one of the nation’s best known procurers—I’ll call him Vic. At one time Vic had his fingers in every whorehouse in Nevada and controlled call girls in numerous other states. He was a regular godfather of prostitution. The Feds hadn’t been able to bust him on any illegal activities other than income-tax evasion so I figured he really knew the score. Another thing that drew me to him was the fact that he wasn’t a big guy. Though I was never consciously insecure about being small, at times I did give up on pursuing roles in life I might have challenged if I were a bigger person. Here was a guy who, like myself, would really have to stretch to reach five-foot-six in height. He was older and uglier than me, and definitely not the person one might imagine as a king-pin in a state full of whorehouses. I figured if he could make it big through broads, so could I.
Without being too obvious, I began to seek out Vic’s company. I would hang around and rap to him and the guys he lined up with, the majority of them also pretty successful pimps. In most cases I didn’t have to initiate any conversations; they all talked about their ups and downs as well as the procedures they applied to different girls and situations. The stories I heard about big cars, pretty girls, luxurious apartments, fine clothes and plenty of money had me thoroughly convinced: there wasn’t anything better in life than having control over several women and letting them provide your every need.
One day I asked Vic point blank how he went about turning a girl out. He laughed at me and said, “Charlie, it’s been over twenty years since I’ve had to work on a girl for her to hustle for me. All the girls that come my way are already hustlers. But Charlie, there really isn’t anything to it. Almost every broad alive, at one time or other in her life, has had the desire to be a whore. A lot of girls are wrapped up in moral ethics and would never turn out, but any woman would be lying to you if she were to deny that she didn’t often wonder what a whore’s life was like. For those who are reluctant, a good pimp knows how to eliminate the barriers and convince the girl that his love will be deeper than ever for her if she is willing to go all the way for him.”
On my release from Terminal Island in September 1958 after serving two years of the three-year sentence, I immediately began trying to put together the life that so infatuated me while in prison. The area of my conditional release put me in the very best location possible to carry out my dreams—Hollywood, California.
What can I say about Hollywood that hasn’t already been said? I saw it as the most artificial, most pretentious city in existence. I suppose that line of thinking can be attributed to the movie and TV industry since everyone in it is looking for recognition and stardom. To me it seemed as if everyone I came in contact with was greedy, narcissistic and lacking in morals. They all existed in a dog-eat-dog, no-holds-barred world. I was in my element! I was twenty-three years old and my jail-house tutoring was going to go to work for me. All I had to do was come up with that string of pretty girls and I could begin living my dream. Life should be so simple! It was all bogus bullshit, another jail-house fantasy that isn’t real on the streets—but I tried to make it real.
My first problem was that I had trouble scoring with the kind of broad whose moral ethics I was capable of “eliminating.” The ones who were already hustlers were with guys who had been in operation for a long time. Those guys had the class and the connections that Vic had forgotten to tell me were so important. When I finally found a girl who would go the whole route for me, I was so much in love with her that I couldn’t stand the thought of some trick sticking his dick in the girl I loved. Some pimp I was.
She and I had set up housekeeping together in an apartment in Hollywood, and every day I went out hustling and stealing to bring the bread home to her. One day one of my joint partners who was now on the streets and enjoying pretty good success as a pimp along Sunset Strip, told me, “Charlie, you’re that broad’s trick! What the fuck is your story? Turn that girl out!” I gave him some feeble answer like, “Yeah, I’m working on it,” but knew in my mind the guy was right. The girl had me wrapped around her finger. So I fought my jealousy and possessiveness, saying to myself, “Didn’t I plan on being the big-time hustler and pimp? Never mind all that love shit—Do it! Put that girl on the streets!”
That evening as my girl and I sat in our apartment, too broke to go anywhere, I made my move, telling her, “Sandy, baby, it’s time for us to sit down and do some talking.” “Sure, Charlie,” she replied, “what’s on your mind?” I went on, “We been together for weeks. You know I’m out stealing and breaking my ass to keep us in this apartment and some food in our mouths. Here we are living in an area that is loaded with all the finer things in life. Those things are passing us by. We both dig making the scene down on Sunset. You like nice things and I enjoy seeing you with nice things. Why don’t the two of us really put our heads together
