The Perfect American by Peter Stephan Jungk

Author:Peter Stephan Jungk [Jungk, Peter Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-578-5
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

My visit to Walt’s garden doesn’t appear in any newspaper article, magazine essay, or in any of the numerous biographies that have appeared over the years about my one-time employer. The family closed ranks and remained absolutely silent on the subject. More, they asked the authorities who were handling the case not to let any information whatsoever leak out.

The team of investigators who took up their work a few days after the incident, found traces of blood, identified paint spatters, and was able to pick up hairs of Jonathan’s and mine, as well as a box of crayons that fell out of my pocket as we were making our getaway. Since I had been arrested and fingerprinted in New York some years back over some driving offense, I was established beyond a shadow of a doubt as the owner of the box of crayons.

In the meantime, my last place of residence had been investigated as well. For the past four years we had lived in Chicago, where I made a modest living as a painter and carpenter. The apartment we lived in was just off Tripp Avenue, no more than a couple of hundred yards from the house where Walt was born, in a part of town that by the mid-sixties was rapidly degenerating into a slum. We had moved back to Los Angeles only two months before. My father readily gave the policeman who came knocking on his door information as to where I might be found: I was in the Silver Lake district of town. Martha and I were renting a little bungalow in the hope of being able to afford a larger, nicer house before long.

I was arrested in the early evening of October 11, before the eyes of my wife and sons, just as we were sitting down to dinner. The two policemen had been issued a search warrant, and came up with a small quantity of marijuana in the bedroom. Martha and I were in the habit of smoking the occasional joint in the evening.

With sirens and flashing lights, I was driven down to the main police administrative building in downtown L.A., on Pershing Square. There, for the next three hours, I was subjected to an extremely disagreeable interrogation, almost entirely devoted to my professional career and personal life since leaving Walt’s studio, and with remarkably little attention to my actions of October 9, 1966.

To my surprise, though, I was allowed to go home that same evening, at around 11 p.m., after Martha had deposited a bond of two thousand five hundred dollars. (My father loaned us the money, he always had cash hidden at home, and when Martha turned up on his doorstep in the evening and told him what had happened, he reluctantly pulled out a stash of hundred-dollar bills from under the mattress, and handed them to his daughter-in-law with the words: “There’ll be trouble if I haven’t got this back in a month!”) A year later, I was charged with illegal possession of drugs.

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