ICEBERG SLIM IS SYNONYMOUS WITH THE PIMP GAME AND IS THE BLUEPRINT OT BEING THE ULTIMATE PLAYER. HE IS A WRITER, WHO LIVED AN INCREDIBLE LIFE AND WROTE AMAZING BOOKS THAT I GREW UP ON, ABOUT THE “LIFE”
—Ice-T
“HE WEAVES EXOTIC TALES FROM HIS PAST INTO A TAPESTRY”
—Los Angeles Free Press
“HIS TITLES SHOULD BE TAUGHT EVERYWHERE”
—Esquire
Long White Con
Picking up where Trick Baby left off we dive into the world of Johnny O’Brien, better known as White Folks. After learning to use his fair skin to his advantage to rise to the top of the Chicago con game, Folks is back for the big money and the big stakes of the long con.
Following the death of his partner and mentor, Blue, Folks takes off for Canada. Having honed his skills and polished his acting, Johnny is done cheating marks out of small money. With a gang of grifters working with him, High Pockets Kate, High ass Marvel and the Vicksburg Kid among them, Folks is after the biggest score of his life.
Cover design by Marc J Cohen
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Tango’s face was totally deformed with maniacal rage as he screeched, “Them niggers and that pecker-wood done ripped me off!” He turned to the ebonic hood leader. “Boston, we gonna catch ’em and waste ’em. They headed for the Outer Drive back to that peckerwood in the Loop with my hundred grand!”
Alerted to Tango’s vengeance, Precious searched frantically for Speedy, Upshaw and the loot, finally spotting them leave the bar and come down the sidewalk with a high yellow stunner between them. “Speedy! Watch it! Run!”
Speedy’s eyes were phosphorescent as he halted and stared at Precious for a long moment. Tango’s Buick catapulted into the street and Speedy raced into the alley behind Upshaw. The super fox screamed and fled back toward the bar as the Buick roared into the alley in pursuit.
The Buick smashed into Speedy with a terrible crunch sound. He and the valise flew through the air to bowl over Upshaw. Transmission and brakes howled and squealed as Boston repeatedly backed up and shot the Buick’s wheels forward over the prostrate targets, crushed and crimsoned on the alley floor.
—LONG WHITE CON
Other Titles by Iceberg Slim
Pimp
Trick Baby
The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
Airtight Willie & Me
Death Wish
Mama Black Widow
Long White Con
Copyright © 2011 by Robert Beck estate
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Cash Money Content™ and all associated logos are trademarks of Cash Money Content LLC.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
First Trade Paperback Edition: January 2012
Book Layout: Peng Olaguera/ISPN
Cover Design: MJCDesign
For further information log onto www.CashMoneyContent.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011931192
ISBN: 978-1-936399-05-5 pbk
ISBN: 978-1-936399-06-2 ebook
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1: Happy . . . Almost
Chapter 2: Unhappy Virgin Score
Chapter 3: Blow off The Mark
Chapter 4: Sucker Brainstorm
Chapter 5: Petticoat Pit
Chapter 6: Hook for A Shark
Chapter 7: Hate Bangs A Dream
Chapter 8: Sweet Dreams Sour
Chapter 9: Christina Turn Around
Chapter 10: The Bates Play
Chapter 11: Jaws of The Cross
Chapter 12: Requiem for A Dream
Chapter 13: Encore The Big Windy
Chapter 14: Tango Finger
Chapter 15: Tango to Con Music
Chapter 16: Play and Score
Chapter 17: Requiem for Speedy
The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
From A Steel Box to A Wicked Young Girl
Long White Con
PREFACE
I was dozing off early in L.A. to store up energy for a series of college rap gigs I’d be off to in a few days. It was several hours before the fetal Seventies would pop from time’s booby-trapped vagina.
I was unaware that fate would, within less than twenty-four hours, pop back into my life the most electric black hustler I’d ever known. How could I know on New Year’s Day I’d have a reunion with an unforgettable friend. I mean, Johnny O’Brien, White Folks, the blue-eyed, white-skinned nigger con man from the Big Windy. Dead, black Blue Howard, his spiritual father and mentor, had turned him out on the con.
How could I know White Folks would furnish his account of adventures more gripping and fascinating than his exploits in the novel Trick Baby. How could I, or any black outsider, discover the sacrosanct secrets of the big white con except through White Folks, who played it with a top flight mob.
The phone jangled like the wake-up bells in a cellhouse. I picked up to a silk broad’s voice. A chilling sound really, despite the fact that I had expected its owner to contact me. It was Big Apple rotten, glossy and slick as ermine droppings. But how could I know she was tied in to my reunion with White Folks.
“Mister Beck?” she said. “I’m Josephina, the writer. I’ve arrived, with an inevitable case of jet lag. I’m in Playa Del Rey.”
From the sleazed bowels of the ghetto, I replied, “Welcome to emphysema city. I’ll present you the key at your convenience. Lady, let’s kick off things by dropping the ‘Mister’ tag.”
She faked ingenue flabbergast. “I . . . uh, oh luv! What should I call you?”
I despise phony, pretentious rectums, black and white. I said, “Beck, Bob, Iceberg, Ice, Berg . . . nigger, with love and a smile. Even motherfucker with the light turned down low.”
She handcuffed her breath for an instant. You know, like one of those closet bisexual whores in Long Island emoting snob outrage at the visual atrocity of some lackey peasant sneaking a crap in the shrubbery.
She said, “Iceberg, excuse me for a moment.”
I heard the dulcet bells of crystal toll as some service person arrived to lay out some booze to cushion her jet lag.
I heard her say, “Thank you very much.” Then, to me, “Hi again . . . it’s still early, why not come here? To get acquainted . . . get the prerequisite things out of the way, before we put together the actual nuts and bolts of the interview and your profile for the magazine.”
I said, “Why not tomorrow night? Even daytime ain’t the right time, no time for a nigger to travel across several police division turfs.”
“What?”
“I mean, nighttime is never really the time to even walk Fido out to pee. Some roller in heat, with blood lust, might scribble in a death report. Mine! That he thought I was a dead ringer for a mass murderer at large and that the leash was a piece in the dark.”
She chuckled oddly, like I was one of the Camarillo Picasso’s, in the asylum upstate, who was showing her one of my finger paintings executed in poo-poo on her wall.
She said, “How about tomorrow at noon? Surely you won’t need to take precautions then. Mother of Jesus, you’re paranoid!”
“All right, I’ll see you then. Look, white girl, I wouldn’t pull my ride out of the garage until I turned on my hide-out tape recorder to document roller craziness and maybe my murder. If you meet a nigger in these times who ain’t paranoid, you’ve met a nigger dreaming and bucking the odds to die a natural death. Lady, your mag should have arranged a crash course in the black experience before they assigned you to the project!”
She giggled her New York ass off and gave me the address to her pad before she hung up. The jazzy bitch
had turned me off before we started.
Now I’m not a supersonic mouthpiece with a law school college course in logic gracing my portfolio. But believe me, sugar babies, I got a Ph.D. in the logical evaluation of ho character. And I sensed that Josephina was a closet ho to her come-blistered diaphragm. I’ve developed a bloodhound’s acuity for smelling out the stench of ho treachery upcoming. And as I indicated, I’ve assembled the nitro item of paranoia in my survival kit. Understandably, I use that item gingerly. You know, with that twang in the tush care that a herpetologist uses heisting king cobra venom.
I tossed the New Year in on my bed. I mulled why the prestigious white mag for men had selected a broad, a white broad, to wiggle on the lap of an ex nigger pimp across the several states of his rappings gigs. She was suspect as a cobra all right, I decided as I slipped into Josephina-haunted slumber.
Next day at noon, I found myself sitting with the sensual and curvaceous Josephina, in the posh barroom of her hotel. We sat sipping frosted drinks at a table in a corner of the shadowy joint. We had just put together an agreement to have the first formal interview at my pad in the ghetto next day. After that she would accompany me on the rap tour to flesh out my in-depth profile her mag had commissioned her to write.
We had conned each other that we had a viable bedrock of trust and congeniality necessary for a successful project. But I knew before we boarded a flight in tandem that I was going to find a way to unearth any sub rosa motivations behind her saccharine facade. Why the hell had they sent a white broad?
She had given me a queasy feeling in the gut with a crack, “Slim, we’ll stay loose on the road together. We can just hang out together.”
I was double leery when I left her because I knew “hang out” was New York white hippie argot for you know what. Now I’m a fairly well preserved nigger to be at the rim of sixty. But shit, I wasn’t Gable. Were her mag bosses shooting for a clay feet expose of the venerable ex flesh peddler? You know, maybe her spermy first person account of what a pedestrian lover I was, despite the mythic scam about my wizard swipe.
Or had the lamb been tethered out to elicit “turn out” action and dialogue from the allegedly reformed monster. What a piece for the mag that would make! Frustrated, what if she framed me? What a fat white slave bit I could catch! Wouldn’t that be a rack-up bitch, I thought, as I went through the door toward the parking lot.
We spotted each other at the same instant. White Folks, with luggage, was about to get into a cab near the hotel entrance. We yowled like estranged fairies about to try it again and sprinted into a warm embrace. A knot of white gawkers watched us get into my ride and pull away.
Except for a touch of gray at the temples, he hadn’t changed since he had been my cellmate ten years before in 1960. I naturally put him up in my pad. We rapped until midnight about the Big Windy in the old days, and dead Blue Howard. White Folks got sleepy just as he started to run down his adventures with the Vicksburg Kid’s big con mob.
Just before we retired, I laid out my deal with Josephina. I ran down to him my reasons why I thought she was a frame-up artist.
His eyes, blue as robin’s eggs, twinkled as he stretched and yawned. “Slim, don’t worry, we’ll put together a document for the lady to sign to test her out. And I might tag along with you on the tour as a white stand-up witness to keep the lady pure in the ticker.”
Next day, White Folks and I sat in my living room drinking coffee. We watched the cobra slither into the driveway in a rented compact. She wiggled to the front slammer, appropriately enscaled in a vari-colored mini dress.
I let her in with the classic ghetto grin. You know, coon-shine teeth galore and cold storage eyes. Then I introduced her to White Folks. At the sight of him, her horny eyes veiled over. I noticed her pump fluttering her dress silk down in silicone alley. The bandit odds were ten to five that she’d orgasmed.
She staggered, gap-legged, to the sofa and said tremulously, “Iceberg! You freaked me out! You were sadistic not to prepare me for Errol Flynn, reincarnated! I feel like a bumpkin, I really do!”
We soothed her by assuring her that Johnny had that effect on the majority of movie buffs he encountered. We rapped minutiae until she leaned toward the coffee table and flipped on her tape recorder. I flipped off the recorder, then slid the unsigned lie detector paper across the table top. She stared at it transfixed, like it was one of her cold-blooded cousins of strike.
I said, “Miss Lady, sign it. Far as the project is concerned, it don’t amount to an ounce of snot, really. Just a taste of breast protection for me and my crumb crushers. You know, I’m a squared-up subject from hell. You could flush me and my kids back down the toilet . . . say what if I blew your cool and your sweet human empathy . . . if my chauvinistic bullshit and ego sprung loose on the trip or something. All the paper does, when you Hancock it, is give me the right to delete cut throat shit before you publish it. Sign it, lady, so old Ice can flow and glow with you. You dig where I’m coming from, sugar baby?”
Her porcelain jaw hardened. She grated, “Mister Beck, I can’t sign that without authorization.”
“I’m certain you’ve got your boss’s home number.” I waved toward the phone. “Call him! After laying out long bread to send you three thousand miles, he’s a cinch to say ‘yeah’ to that paper.”
She knotted her fists in exasperation as she “jacked in the box” to her feet. She clicked her heels over to White Folks, the two hundred percent nigger. He gazed up at her with bland blue eyes.
She flung her arms out Jolson style and implored him, with piteous “mammy” eyes. “Don’t let him do this number on me! Please explain my position to him!”
White Folks shrugged. “What can I do, doll? This matter is over my head. I’m just a nine-to-fiver.”
She turned on the waterworks to cop her license to do me in but I was immune to ho tears. I found out why hos cry when I was just a boy. Even poor dead Mama’s tears had failed to turn me from that long, fast track. She stood, legs akimbo, fists on hips, chest heaving, a lynching glare beaming down at me. I grinned up at her like Fido juggling a filet.
She blew control. “You fucking nigger wretch!” she hissed as she snatched up her gear.
Now I wasn’t, years ago, the refined, defused bomb I am now. I mean, I was ticking! I blew control. I leapt to my feet, maroon eyes bulged out monster style. Maybe I could arrest her ticker with the bit. You know, the perfect murder.
I showered her with spittle as I rammed the doomsday mask into her face. “You come freak snake bitch! Get in the wind before I kick your heart out and stomp on it!”
White Folks stepped between us. She squeezed herself against him and waltzed him to the slammer.
As she stepped through it, she whined, “I’m so grateful for your presence. He would have attacked me!”
The chump broad wasn’t hip. It was me White Folks was protecting. We watched her Mustang stampede down the driveway into traffic.
As I told you, back then, I was still fresh and jumpy from the street, with a stone age understanding. I was without the rolled steel control and discipline I have now. The sight of an L.A.P.D. cruiser passing in Josephina’s wake jolted me to the folly of my wayward passions.
Need I rundown to you the hypothetical horror of the aborted cross? I visualized Josephina, sans White Folks as a witness, of course, butt blood from her noggin against the door frame, rip off her dress and boogie to the middle of the stem screaming that a crazy nigger with a gun had tried to heist her poontang.
I shivered and broke out a fifth of tranquilizer. White Folks and I sat there sipping silently for a long while. He fiddled with and stared thoughtfully at an odd-looking ring on his finger. I vaguely remembered that he wore it when I met him years before in the jail cell back in Chicago.
“That’s a pretty ring, Johnny.”
He extended his hand and I saw the massive hoop was the cameo likeness of what appeared to be maybe an Inca Indian broad, with the fancy head trappings of r
oyalty.
He said, “Phala . . . Mama was half Indian. She gave it to me the week before she died. It was passed down to Mama from her great, great grandma. Aztec Billy, a Mexican Indian, and grifter whiz, gave it to Grandma. Grandma and Billy were sweet as carnival candy on one another, but Grandma’s sod-busting folks wouldn’t hold still for a roustabout hustler son-in-law. So Billy and Grandma held hands one day and walked off a cliff together. When I was a little kid I used to bawl when Mama told the tale, and cried almost as hard about Billy’s rundown to Grandma, via Mama, about the fate of the Aztec Princess on the ring. Mama said Grandma called it The Unhappy Virgin Ring. So, when the Vicksburg Kid’s customers got short in supply for our stocks and bonds set-up in Canada, we put together an irresistible game to take off fat suckers based upon the legend of this ring. It’s known in big con circles as the Unhappy Virgin Game.”
His eyes became saddened as he paused before he mused on. “The Vicksburg Kid, bless him in his grave, picked up my con education where our dear old friend Blue Howard left off. The Kid knew and kept the secret of my blackness. Soon as I hit Canada he invented for me a cover background and moniker. The Utah Wonder up from the coal pits, he told all the white grifters. I read a ton of books on mining and the coal slaves to protect my cover. He was the first and only white man I’ve met without a scintilla of racism or bigotry in his heart.”
I said, “What a follow-up novel to TRICK BABY that story would make!”
He said, “I agree, but you couldn’t use real names of the people involved . . . especially those of the police and politicians. I’m squared up, building a brand new life for myself. I could maybe get hit! And you couldn’t be specific about the locale. You could just refer to it as an area or a city in a southwestern state. And maybe, Slim, you could tell the story in the third person to give it a subtle fictionalized facade. Use your judgment to protect me.”