King Suckerman

  Rasheed said, “Count on it, blood.”

  Clay said, “You know I will.”

  They shook hands. Clay put the cash box in the hole, replaced the panel, covered the panel with the throw rug. When he stood, Rasheed was glancing at his wristwatch again as he headed for the door.

  “You lock up behind me, boss?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Sure. What’s your hurry?”

  “I got a meeting, man, across town. An empowerment seminar. See you tomorrow, hear?”

  Rasheed unlocked the door, went out, walked south on the avenue. Marcus Clay watched him go as he put his key to the lock.

  Clay grinned, seeing the quickness in Rasheed’s step as he turned the corner at R. He knew Rasheed wasn’t going to sit in on any seminar. Rasheed, with all his talk and ideology, he was just like any young man, looking to have a little fun. Rasheed, he was going downtown to check out that movie, just opened at the Town. The one everybody was talking about.

  The one about the pimp.

  EIGHT

  Jimmy Castle watched from the backseat as Dewey Schmidt slapped in his eight-track of Not Fragile. From the passenger seat, Jerry Baluzy turned to his friend Dewey, who sat behind the wheel, and rocked his head back and forth at the twin guitar kick-in, his motion slopping beer from the can of Bud he held in his hand. Bachman-Turner Overdrive was Dewey and Jerry’s favorite group.

  “Aw, come on, man,” said Jimmy, who was totally not into BTO. “Not this again.”

  “Not fragiiiile,” sang Dewey and Jerry together, giving it their best gravelly try. They laughed and slapped each other five. Dewey grabbed the beer can lodged between his thighs and took a long swig, closing his eyes momentarily as he drank. The Pontiac swerved a little, and the driver of an AMC Rebel to the right of them honked his horn. Dewey flipped the guy off before accelerating and cutting into the right lane.

  “Hey, Dewey,” said Jimmy, “why don’t you give this shit a rest?”

  Dewey nudged Jerry, said to Jimmy, “Whaddaya wanna listen to, Toothpick? Gong? Kraftwerk? Some bullshit like that?”

  Dewey called Jimmy Toothpick just to piss him off. Jimmy wasn’t just thin. He was skinny, and in a scary kind of way.

  “Anything,” said Jimmy.

  “How about Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow?” said Dewey.

  Jimmy had a pull off his beer while he thought it over. “Leave this on,” he said. “I guess this is all right.”

  Jerry grabbed the bag from the glove box and the pipe from under the seat. The pipe was Dewey’s, a corncob number he had purchased from a retarded middle-aged clerk at People’s Drug in Wheaton Plaza. On the pipe’s body Dewey had wood-burned a sketch of a snake with a tongue in the shape of a cross. Dewey was known around Einstein High as Schmidt the Snake, a name he had invented himself. Though he talked a big game about his lovemaking technique, quoting liberally from the porno mags spread around his bedroom in the garden apartment he shared with his widowed mom, Dewey Schmidt had seen very little action in his seventeen years on earth—one shockingly quick blow job from a hooker on his sixteenth birthday and one messy cherry-bust with a short-term girlfriend named Laurie Lynn—but somehow the moniker had stuck.

  Dewey punched the gas, going south on 14th. The ’68 Firebird sounded faster than it was—a stock 350 sat beneath the hood—courtesy of the dual exhaust and Glas-pac Dewey had added after he bought the car. They neared Thomas Circle, and Dewey put his head out the window to yell at a black woman with blond hair who wore a short, tight leather skirt.

  “Hey, sugar, you datin’ tonight?” he called.

  “Pull over,” said the whore halfheartedly, her eyes blank, her smile as long lasting as a street-bought watch, but Dewey just laughed and kept driving.

  “Hey, Jerry,” said Dewey, “what’s your mother doin’ downtown?”

  “Your father,” said Jerry.

  “Your baby sister,” said Jimmy, because he was expected to say something.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” said Dewey. He wiped some beer off his chin.

  Jerry filled the pipe, gave it a light. He passed the reefer over to Dewey, who hit it hard.

  Jimmy looked out the window at the lights and the movement and the life on the street. Like Jerry and Dewey, he was a Maryland boy who came from Montgomery Hills—Monkey Hills to the locals—a community in Silver Spring just a couple of miles over the District line. Their infrequent trips into D.C. always made Jimmy’s pulse race, partly from the thrill of the new and partly from fear. Whatever the reason, he liked the way driving into the city made him feel.

  “Here,” said Dewey, trying to hold the smoke in as he spoke. He passed the pipe over his shoulder to Jimmy.

  Jimmy drew hard on the pipe, watched the embers flare in the bowl. He coughed out a lungful, sending a horizontal mushroom cloud of smoke toward the front. Dewey and Jerry had rolled their windows up to “keep in the high,” and a thick gray curtain had settled in the car. Jimmy was hot, sweating through his favorite long-sleeved shirt, a cowboy-style job with fake pearl buttons he had purchased at the Slack Shack. Jimmy wore long sleeves even in the summer; he was embarrassed about his girlishly thin arms.

  “What, are you Bogartin’ that shit back there?” said Dewey. Jimmy handed him the pipe.

  Dewey cut over to 13th. Jimmy watched Jerry Baluzy, who was staring at Dewey hitting the pipe. Jerry’s eyes were at half-mast, pink and glassy; his thick-lipped mouth was open, too. Jimmy smiled.

  “Hit that motherfucker,” said Jerry, blinking heavily and jerking his chin in the direction of the pipe.

  “Hit ’er in the shitter,” said Dewey.

  All of them laughed.

  “But you’re not getting any,” said Jerry.

  “That’s not what your mama says,” said Dewey.

  “Huh,” said Jerry, issuing a short, honking guffaw. He looked stupidly at Dewey. “You gotta suck it, maaaan!”

  “Suck this,” said Dewey.

  The chorus came back in on the song. Dewey and Jerry put their heads together, sang, “Not fragiiile.” Jimmy had one of those smiles on his face he couldn’t unglue. He was ripped and with his boys. The BTO tape, it sounded pretty good.

  Dewey parked on 13th, slanted it a little off the curb so the Firebird caught the light coming down from the street lamp just right. Dewey had just waxed the car in Sligo Creek Park that afternoon, and he had Armor Alled the vinyl roof as well. The olive green finish had a nice buff glow to it in the yellowish light, and the chrome-reverse Cregar wheels shone flawlessly. Dewey had even SOSed the raised white letters on the wide-track tires. The air shocks he had installed made the car sit up in the back, gave it a look like an animal poised to strike; Dewey thought so, anyway. A blue-and-orange Hi-Jackers sticker, a cartoon rabbit with tires for back legs burning rubber in the street, had been affixed to the top right corner of the back window.

  “Bad ride,” said Dewey, stroking his weak Charles Bronson mustache, looking back one time at the Firebird as they moved away.

  “The Green Ghost,” said Jerry, who had given Dewey’s car its name but did not own a car himself.

  On the sidewalk, Jimmy Castle got down on one knee, raised his jeans at the cuff, retrieved his pack of Marlboros from inside his sock, where he always stashed it before walking past his mother and father when leaving the house. He struck a match, lit a ’Boro, caught up with Dewey and Jerry. He went behind them, trying to walk normally. When Jimmy got high, he had a kind of awkward bounce in his step; it was a stoner’s walk, and he felt it, but when he concentrated against it, the bounce only became more pronounced. He wore tanned leather shoes with wedge heels, and they made him a bit unsteady on his feet.

  Jimmy watched Dewey and Jerry walking with confidence ahead as they neared New York Avenue. Dewey had a dumbell set in his bedroom, and when he wasn’t jacking off to Swank or drawing his replica CO2 .357 in the full-length mirror, he used it regularly. With each back-swing of his arms, Dewey’s triceps became defined, his straight blac
k hair jerking with the action. Jerry was not so muscular, but he had naturally wide shoulders, and he was tall. He was kind of ugly, though, with a knot of blackheads on his thick nose and black frizzy hair that was nearly matted in several spots. Jerry was some kind of Arab, Lebanese or Turkish or some shit like that, Jimmy wasn’t sure which. Still, despite the fact that Dewey was borderline redneck and Jerry was both red in the neck area and ugly, Jimmy wouldn’t have minded being either one of those guys for a day or so, just to see what it felt like to be normal sized. And then he thought, studying their bodies, What am I doing, admiring a couple of guys like that for? Or any guy, for that matter? What am I, some kind of faggot or something? And then Jimmy thought, like he often did when these things entered his head, I wish I hadn’t of smoked so much weed.

  They neared the Town theater, its marquee brightly lit and a crowd around its box-office window. The ticket line went halfway down the block. Jimmy dragged hard on his smoke, flicked it out into the street. As he neared the line it seemed that he, Dewey, and Jerry were the only white faces in the crowd. Then he saw a skinny white kid with a ratty Afro standing at the head of the line next to a big dude who looked a little like Jim Brown. But the skinny white kid with the bad face was definitely it; the rest of the patrons were all black.

  At the back of the line, Dewey tapped the shoulder of the guy ahead of him, a tall black man who appeared to be alone.

  “Say,” said Dewey, “you got the time, blood?”

  The man turned around, looked Dewey up and down. “Blood? Who you callin’ blood? The name’s Clarence Tate.”

  “Okay, Clarence.”

  “Clarence nothin’. It’s ‘sir’ to you.”

  Jimmy felt that pulsing thing again, racing through his blood.

  The Town theater was huge, bigger by a mile than any of the neighborhood KB theaters or the Roth’s in Silver Spring, and though it wasn’t a beautiful marble palace like the RKO Keith’s on 15th and G, it was still plenty awesome. Jimmy Castle’s dad had taken him to his first adult movie, The Dirty Dozen, at the Town when Jimmy was like eight years old. When Jimmy became a teenager, about the time he started smoking pot with his friends, he had grown apart from his father, and it seemed like they would never again be pals like they were when Jimmy was a kid. But the Town, it still brought a special feeling to him when he entered its lobby, and Jimmy figured that feeling had something to do with the way it had been with his dad.

  The auditorium was nearly full. They had run a couple of trailers, one for a Fred Williamson picture called Death Journey (“Fred Williamson is Jesse Crowder—one mean cat!”) and another for a Raquel Welch–Bill Cosby movie named Mother, Jugs & Speed. Dewey hooted every time the trailer showed Welch bursting out of her shirt, but Jimmy knew better than to waste his money on a Raquel Welch flick, since Welch never showed bare tit in any movie, and he had been taken enough times already to not make the same mistake again. Finally the houselights came down all the way, and the main feature began.

  Scratchy guitar and chicken-fried vocals came out over the main titles, with Tower of Power–style horn bursts punctuating the chorus, the singer talking about “King Suckermaaaan, runnin’ down the master plaaaan, takin’ it right to the Maaaan.” Some young D.C. ladies, Interhigh girls, groups of two and three, got out into the main aisle of the auditorium and began doing the bump spontaneously to the title tune. Jerry Baluzy stood up to watch until the deep voice of a brother behind them instructed him to sit his “narrow ass the fuck on down.” Jimmy had a chill, watching the girls dance. The way they were into it, deep into it and proud, was straight-up beautiful to him.

  Wilton Cooper and Bobby Roy Clagget sat quietly during the show. Clagget because he was getting an education, and Cooper because he was relaxing, checking the whole thing out. Cooper had never pimped, but he had known plenty of players in his time, both in the joint and out, so he knew what it was to be in the life for real.

  The movie started out like most of the films Cooper and Clagget had seen in drive-ins and B houses the last few years. The injustice of Ghetto Life specifically and Amerika in general had turned a basically good brother toward a life of crime. In that arena, evil competitors and a couple of bad white cops pressured the antihero for a piece of his action and caused the brother to take violent matters into his own hands. Usually the brother got out of the life in the last reel, but not before exacting his bloody revenge.

  King Suckerman started out exactly that way, though from the beginning the audience sensed that there was something unsettling going on in the film. For one thing, Ron St. John, who played the title role, he was one stone ugly motherfucker, scarred in the face and narrow of shoulder and chest. Cooper had liked The Mack, thought it was more authentic than most, but in truth Max Julien as the pimp had always bothered him. Julien could be tough, but with his smooth skin, too-easy smile, and deep dimples, he was just way too pretty to be believable as the hard man a pimp had to be. You needed someone rougher in the face and body to make the story true. But Ron St. John? He went all the way in the other direction.

  Ugly as he was, though, Ron St. John was cool. Cool and bad. No one could fuck with King Suckerman, ’cause the man feared no one and had all the bitches in his stable.

  In the second act, the pimp took a wire hanger to one of his women, a girl named Diandra who had done a little too much blow, gotten cocky behind it, sassed him in front of the others, and then refused to get out of bed and go to work. King Suckerman gave her a backful of open welts, then kicked her in the face repeatedly as she cowered on the floor. She went out the door crying hysterically, begging her pimp to give her one more chance. She peddled her pussy like that, bloodied and chip-toothed and with torn clothes, all night in the street.

  When that scene played, the auditorium had gone dead quiet. Even the smart-mouthed brothers who usually talked shit throughout the show, yelled at the screen and laughed at their own jokes, had shut their mouths. And then it got worse. King Suckerman let himself get framed by the two bad white cops, got convicted by an all-white jury, was let down by an indifferent white PD. And King Suckerman went to jail. The last shot of the movie had King Suckerman in his cell, wasting away from tertiary syphilis. The camera zoomed into his eyes, the hollow eyes of any scared old man lying alone in the terminal ward, waiting for death. A freeze-frame appeared then, and a slower, bluesier version of the title song ran over the end credits. By then most of the patrons had walked out of the auditorium without comment.

  “That was boolshit,” said a man who had stayed, just a few rows back from Cooper and Clagget.

  Clagget turned to Cooper. “Was it bullshit, Wilton?”

  “Little brother?” said Cooper. “That there was the real deal.”

  Jimmy Castle, Dewey Schmidt, and Jerry Baluzy walked quickly to the Firebird. The tone of the movie had killed their high from the very beginning, and they had crashed halfway into the flick. None of the patrons they saw out on the street, the ones who had been joking and enthusiastic while standing in the ticket line, looked happy or friendly now. Jimmy caught a couple of unprovoked hard looks. And then a black kid their age went out of his way to bump his shoulder against Dewey’s. Dewey stared at the young man for a second, if only to avoid losing face with his boys. But he quickly looked away.

  “What,” said the young man. “You want some go?”

  “Naw, that’s all right,” said Dewey in an unconcerned way, but still moving toward the car.

  “I ain’t think so, bitch.”

  Dewey let that slide. Jimmy and Jerry followed behind him, looking down at their feet. They hurriedly got themselves into the car.

  Dewey fired the ignition, pulled away from the curb. He headed the Firebird north toward the Maryland line. Jerry filled a bowl and lit it, passed it around. In a few minutes they had gotten their heads up again, but not to where they had been earlier in the night. Dewey pushed a Grand Funk eight-track into the deck. “We’re an American Band” came from the wedge speakers mo
unted on the rear deck. Jimmy thought of complaining; the song was just a U.S. rip-off of “Smoke on the Water,” and basically it blew. But he knew Dewey was pissed, being stood down in front of them by the black kid like that. Jimmy kept his mouth shut.

  “That was pretty good,” said Jerry, talking about the movie.

  “Who was that actor played the pimp?” said Dewey.

  “Ron St. John,” said Jerry.

  “Ugly sumbitch,” said Dewey. “Had some soup-spoon lips on him, too.”

  “That was one Leeroy-lookin’ dude,” agreed Jerry.

  “Fuckin’ niggers,” said Dewey. “Right, Toothpick?”

  Jimmy Castle didn’t answer. He hung out with this one kid at Einstein every so often, a black kid named Keith. They cut fourth period together about once a week, got high in the nearby woods. Jimmy thought Keith was a pretty nice guy.

  Cheek first saw Rasheed as he exited the theater lobby after the show. Cheek recognized his red, black, and green knit cap and that quick walk of Rasheed’s straight off. He grinned, followed Rasheed out the doors and into the night. He walked behind him for a bit, then tapped him on the shoulder as they passed into the darkened end of the street.

  Rasheed turned warily, his eyes wide. He relaxed when he saw Cheek, tried to recover his composure.

  Cheek smiled. “What you doin’ down here, man?”

  “Gettin’ up on a meeting down this way.”

  Cheek laughed. “You a lyin’ motherfucker, nigger. I saw your thin ass walking out the theater.”

  “Shit.”

  “Gettin’ up on a meeting. Yeah.”

  “I was curious is all.”

  “That’s all right, blood. Curious is cool.”

  Rasheed touched a finger to his lips. “It wasn’t what I expected, you know?”

  “Me either, man. That’s the truth. They laid that shit out and ran it down.”

  “You know that picture’s not gonna do any business.”