Read Online No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker - Free Book Online Page A

don’t want the halfway house, next you run around all night. It isn’t a good start, not at all. It’s your attitude, your outlook.”
    I flushed, wanting to protest, but snipped off the hot words. Confrontation with authority was a game I’d played often, and I knew its unfairness. If I argued, Rosenthal could put me in jail (unless I knocked him down and escaped), write a report saying whatever he wanted, and I’d be riding a bus with barred windows back to prison. There would be no hearing, no appeal, and I wouldn’t even see what he wrote. So I checked myself, and decided that a plea for reason might get through.
    â€œI’m sorry, if you think that,” I said. “I’m trying to be forthright and sincere. Tell me what I’ve done wrong.”
    â€œIt’s your attitude. I keep telling you that. You act like you’re free, can do what you damn well please. You’re not free. You’re still in custodia legis , a legal prisoner being allowed to serve part of your term outside on parole. Besides that, you’ve got a long, long record of mismanaging your life. And you should feel some remorse for what you’ve done.”
    â€œEight years for bad checks should clean the slate.” I saw the flippancy in the words after they were out. Rosenthal’s face soured. He was obviously a moralist and outraged by my file. He knew more about me than anyone should know about another. Yet the words in the file were less than the whole of me. Nothing there showed that I was human.
    â€œLook, I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve got more gray hair than you. I hope I’m old enough to make some decisions, at least where to sleep. If I didn’t learn that much in prison it was a waste.”
    â€œIt protected society. That’s my job, too, my first job.”
    â€œThey let me out. I want to stay out. You don’t have to be on my back. You’re doing a better job if you help me, aren’t you? I want to be a decent human being. I might not understand what it means exactly the way most people do.”
    I paused, struggling to channel the tumult into words, sweat on my forehead and under my arms. “You’ve got to realize I’m not like you. I’m too warped and tangled by too many yesterdays to be like you. This doesn’t mean I’m fated to be a menace to society. If I believed my future had to be like my past, I’d kill myself. I’m tired. I can bend enough to stay within the law, but I’m never going to be the guy who goes home to San Fernando Valley to a wife and kids. I wish I was that guy, but I’m not. And your threats aren’t going to hold me. Threats instill fury, not fear.”
    â€œNobody is threatening you,” Rosenthal said. “I’m just telling you the realities of the situation, what you must adjust to.”
    â€œIt sounds like threats.”
    â€œI’m here to help you with your problems.”
    â€œBy giving me ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’.”
    â€œI don’t make the parole conditions. I just enforce them. I can’t give you a license to break the rules even if I wanted to. I wouldn’t have a job very long if I did.”
    â€œBend a little and I’ll bend a little. Just ask that I don’t commit any crimes, not that I live by your moral standards. If society demands that, society shouldn’t have put me in foster homes and reform schools and twisted me. And these last eight years. Shit, after that, nobody would be normal. Just understand my predicament. I don’t know anyone but ex-convicts, hustlers, and prostitutes. I don’t even feel comfortable around squarejohns. I like call girls instead of nice girls. I don’t need a Freudian explanation, which wouldn’t change the fact anyway. But because I prefer going to bed with a prostitute doesn’t mean I’m going to use an acetylene torch on a