Then he leapt to his feet and rammed a finger into the hole as he shouted, “Gimme a knife!”
One of the hoods drew a switchblade, popped it open and gave it to Tango as Tango disemboweled the bag and its paper innards burst forth. Tango made a brutish sound of awful anguish in his throat and sailed the bag to the ceiling, contents fluttering to the carpet.
His face was totally deformed with maniacal rage as he screeched, “Them niggers and that peckerwood 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 the peckerwood in the Loop with my hundred grand!”
He flung the door open, braked for an instant and seized the lapels of a bantam hood. “Sparky, didn’t you crack, the other day, that you spotted that Carl cocksucker going in a hotel?”
The bantam gasped, “Yeah, off a Forty-seventh Street.”
The gang dashed into the street.
Precious went to the window. He watched them get into the Buick and roar away, then he scrambled to the phone and dialed Speedy’s southside hotel.
The switchboard woman answered and put him on hold before he could ask for Speedy’s suite.
He frantically dialed again. Immediately that he heard the woman’s voice, he shouted, “Please! It’s an emergency! Connect me to room four-sixteen.”
The woman said, after seeming eons, “Mister Griffin just checked out . . . just a moment.”
Precious heard a male voice say, “I think I saw him and his buddy having a drink with Pretty Helen in one of the joints down the street.”
He hung up, called Folks and sprinted to the street. He jumped into his jalopy and bombed it away for Speedy’s hotel. He spotted the parked limo in the middle of the block at the mouth of an alley. There was a bar at the other end of the block. He braked sharply at the end of the block and coasted into the curb to park, then got out and eye-swept both sides of the block for Tango, in the Buick.
He went down the sidewalk to within yards of the alley mouth when he froze and stared into a record shop plateglass at the alley that reflected the Tango Buick staked out twenty feet up the alley across the street. Then he turned back to his car, got in and was about to “U” turn and go around the block to warn Speedy, in the bar, when he saw Speedy, with valise, and Upshaw leave the bar and come down the sidewalk toward the limo with a high yellow stunner between them.
He hit the middle of the sidewalk and waved his arms as they came forward laughing, with eyes chained to the super fox. He shouted, “Speedy! Watch it! Run!” as they approached the limo.
Speedy’s eyes were phosphorescent as he halted and stared at Precious for a long moment. The 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.
Precious sobbed as he ran down the crowded sidewalk to the mouth of the alley. He stared into it over the heads of a knot of horrified gawkers as the Buick smashed into Speedy with a terrible crunch sound. He and the valise flew through the air to bowl over Upshaw. The Buick’s 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.
Three of the hoods got out and retrieved the valise. Then they stooped over the pair as Boston shot them repeatedly through the head. They tore off Speedy’s money belt and rifled their pockets, then almost casually got in the Buick. Boston stomped the Buick into traffic at the other end of the alley.
Precious leaned against a telephone post and vomited until his guts dry-locked. He staggered back to his car and fell inside as an ambulance squealed into the alley. Then he started the car and drove away toward the Loop in a trance.
Folks let him into the suite. “Where are Speedy and Upshaw!?”
Precious stumbled into the living room and crashed limply on the sofa with stricken eyes.
“For Christ sake! What happened!?”
Precious mumbled, “The cruel bastards killed them the dirtiest way . . . ran over them over and over until my heart almost burst. Robbed them! Valise, everything. They had the license plates bent double. I’ve never been copper-hearted, but they won’t get away with it. I’ll put the finger on those motherfuckers!” Precious’ eyes burst tears as he reached for the phone.
Folks snatched it away. “Get yourself together, Precious!”
Precious leapt to his feet. “I’ll make the call to the police somewhere!”
Folks grabbed his shoulders, shook him violently. “Don’t crack up like a pussy, Precious!” He flung him back on the sofa.
Precious said, “Gimme some whiskey . . . lots of whiskey.”
“Now we’re on the same wavelength,” Folks said as he went to the bar.
He brought back water glasses and two bottles of Jack Daniels whiskey. He sat down beside Precious and filled the glasses to the brim.
Two days later, at midnight, after arranging with an undertaker to claim and cremate the bodies of Speedy and Upshaw, they checked out. They went to the Eldorado, and Folks pulled it through the light Loop traffic for the highway to L.A.
At a stoplight, Folks gazed at a spectacular blonde beauty crossing before him. For the zillionth time he wondered if Trevor Buckmeister was indeed the most accomplished actor on the planet. He wondered if Christina Buckmeister had been playing castle stink finger, waiting for him when Trevor turned him away.
A preview of
THE NAKED SOUL OF ICEBERG SLIM
FROM A STEEL BOX
TO A WICKED YOUNG GIRL
I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America’s fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time. And also, I want to make clear that my reason for starting these notes at a point of personal anguish and suffering is that these experiences marked the end of a corrupt pimp life and were the prelude to a still mauled, but constructive new life. I am not “playing the con” for sympathy.
In the cold-blooded academy of ghetto streets I was taught early that suffering is inevitable and necessary for an aspiring pimp, pickpocket or con man and even just a nigger compelled to become a four-way whore for the Establishment. I learned also that sympathy is a counterfeit emotion for suckers which is usually offered with a crooked con grin of amused contempt and rejected with a spittled snarl.
Within the moldering walls of Chicago’s House of Correction, in one of its ancient cellhouses, is a row of steel punishment cubicles where rule-breaking inmates spend at most several days. In 1960 I was locked in one of the steel boxes for ten months. I owed the joint an unserved part of a sentence from which I had vanished thirteen years before like a wisp of black smoke and without the usual damage to joint fixtures or guards’ skulls. And apparently the sweet joker who ordered me stuffed into the steel box to commit suicide or go mad (when I was returned to the joint on escape charges) felt he owed vengeance on me to his long-ago fellow clique of torturers and grafters who must have suffered a shit storm of consternation and rage when nigger me bypassed their booming instant release service and hadn’t bought out, but thought out.
But that second mob of debonair demons sure butchered off a hunk of my mental ass. For even now, a new life and a decade later, I will lay odds that until the grave the images and sounds of that violent, gibbering year will stomp and shudder my mind.
One instance, among many: I am in a pleasant mood when I hear through an open window the profane chanting of teenagers playing a merry game of ghetto dozens (dozens—the denigration of another’s parents or ancesters) that explode in a montage of pain, bright as flame, that shocks my brain. Again for the thousandth time I see and hear the likable little black con in the steel box next to mine, my only buddy, suddenly chanting freaky lyrics of a crazy frightening song about how God is a double-crossing cocksucker, and how he is going to sodomize and mur
der his crippled bitch mama.
I cry out like a scalded child, leap off my straw mattress and stand on trembly legs peering into Shorty’s cubicle through a ragged break in the weld of the sheet steel wall. He’s buck naked and his soft black baby face is twisted hard and hideously old as he stands slobbery with his hands flying like frenzied bats up and down his long stiff penis.
I have the vague hope that he’s “gaming,” playing the con, for the heartless white folks for some personal benefit or advantage. But there’s a chilling realism, a perfection about Shorty’s awful performance, so I rib him gently.
“Buddy, put your pants on and stop that chump jeffing. (Jeffing—playing or employing a low grade of con based on one’s blackness and the projection of the contemptible “Sambo” or “Rastus” image.) Instead of a hospital broad tucking you between white sheets, the ass kickers will show any minute now. Dummy up for me, pal. Huh? I like you and I got a weak belly.”
Shorty gives me zero response and his walling eyes are like coals of white fire. I feel a jolt of panic in my chest and a terrifying fluttery quaking inside my skull.
And because I know that madness can be catching I get stupid and scream, “You little jive ass, you’re suppose to be a player. Remember? What you gonna do, let these dirty white folks crack you up?”
But he’s so pitiful I go soft and plead, “Shorty, get your head together. Please pal, listen to me!”
I beg him until I stink of emotion sweat and my voice fades to a squealy whisper. But Shorty doesn’t listen for the pathetic reason that he can’t hear me or anything else except his private hellish drum beat.
The guards come soon to take Shorty away forever and he yelps and whimpers like a puppy under their fists and feet. I quiver and my teeth slash into my bottom lip with every thud. And as Shorty is dragged away I sink to the concrete floor and roll myself into a fetal ball against a frightening chaos of pulsing green-streaked puffy bladders that whirl madly in terrible near collision on a shuddery screen inside my head. I feel great anguish and terror as if the berserk missiles are really sections of myself facing bloody destruction.
The tragedy of Shorty and its recurring long range misery for me is but one “House” horror among many that haunt my new life.
A day or so before my expected legal release date from the House, I was taken from my steel box to an interview with a charmer who told me with a choreographed Billy Graham type smile that a new computation of my time served and owed left me in debt to the joint for two additional months. I had spent the two months in County Jail where I had been taken after Captain Churchill, a House bloodhound, backed by city police, crashed my pad and cracked me on an ancient fugitive warrant for the escape from the House.
I had expected the attempt to steal from me the two months served in County Jail. I stood battered but tall before the desk of the head Nazi and bombed the freakish grin off his fat face with the recital of an affidavit I had composed and memorized. Having no legal training, I could only sense its validity intuitively.
My position was that Captain Churchill, a House official, had arrested me. I was from the instant of that arrest legally in the custody of the House, and even in the event that Captain Churchill had somehow managed to jail me on as unlikely a place as the moon for two months, I technically would have been serving House time. I closed my argument with a flexing of fake muscle based on the misfortune of a House guard who had furnished grist for recent newspaper headlines. He was then under indictment for selling and delivering a hacksaw blade to a group of half corpses in the steel caskets down the way from mine.
So for a dramatic flexing of that personal muscle I hunched my wasted frame forward and arrogantly glued my palms to the mirrorlike top of the Nazi’s desk. I flinched back from a remarkable likeness of the wolfman staring up at me and switched my eyes to the fat red face before me. I told it in that low, disarming tone of voice used by sneaky cops just before they stomp or kick you into insensibility that the notorious guard under indictment had delivered, to a friend of mine on the outside, several pieces of explosive and embarrassing (for the Nazi and his City Hall bosses) mail.
His face turned from red to white to blue, and I remembered the rumors about his faulty pump. I stood there grinning and watched him choking and gasping for air. I went on to assure him that the letter contained the names of racketeering guards and an exposé of corruption within the joint that perhaps even he was not aware of. And I assured him that my friend would make public the contents of the letters if I did not get my legal release date.
I secretly hoped that convict me and my threats might have triggered a fatal attack. My emotions made of that pulse-leaping moment a monument of vengeance, an event that could not have been excelled except by the exquisite pleasure of blowing out his diseased brains. And for the first time since I’d been caged in the steel box I felt like a human being—like a man.
He seemed to be strangling as I smiled at him and slipped out the door to the escort guard waiting in the corridor for me. I paced the steel box in an agony of suspense: Was the torturer dead? Then panic and despair: I couldn’t survive in the box for those extra two months! Wouldn’t the muscle of my bluff and my chance for a legal release date die with him?
Later that afternoon the cellhouse vibrated with the sudden thunder of profane raillery and the feet of shop cons going to their cells on the tiers above me. I tuned my ears up high, but no gleeful announcement of the head keeper’s death filtered down through the bedlam of voices and epidemic farting.
He had survived and the chances were that I would escape the steel box within forty-eight hours. But suddenly I was terrified at the prospect of freedom. Almost immediately I realized why. I was caught in the nightmare bind that an older pimp faces after the age of thirty-five. He is then prone to many setbacks and disasters. Any one of them can put him on his uppers and without the basic gaudy bait, like an out-of-sight car, psychedelic wardrobe, the diamonds necessary to hook and enslave a fresh stable of humping young whores.
I still owned a portion of the mind of a young whore. But my bottom or main whore of many years had delivered my car, jewelry, clothes and other vital pimp flash to an obscure but younger, fresher monster than I. The young mudkicker had written me frequently and she had regularly sent me small money orders. She had left a Montana bordello to run afoul of a spermy gambler who ruined her commercial curves and blew away my heady dreams of mountainous greenbacks by blasting a squealer into her belly.
And now her sobby letters indicated that she was petulantly waiting for me, her favorite field marshall of cunt huckstering, to liberate her from her slum pad and her unwanted motherhood.
But she didn’t know I’d had the jolting insight that I had been a sucker, conned by my own velvet bullshit that the whores had bought for a generation, about the magnificence of the pimp game. She didn’t know I was determined not to join that contemptible group of aging pimps I had seen through the years and pitied as they went their pathetic way with a wild dream of new glory and a big fast stable of young freak mud kickers.
Young whores give an old pimp down on his luck merciless treatment. They flirt with him, play on him, give the corrupt old dreamer hope and then viciously poke fun at him as they coldly reject him. No, I was not going back to become one of them. And I was just as determined not to become a suicidal stickup artist or other “heavy” hustler.
But how was I going to make it out there in the free world with no training except in the art of pimping? I vowed there in the box to kill myself before I became like “Dandy” Sammy. He had been a boss pimp whom I had idolized as a boy when I was getting street poisoned.
One dazzling summer afternoon in Cleveland at the peak of my pimphood I was confronted on the sidewalk outside my hotel by an old, stooped black man. He clutched a shoeshine box and he stank of the vomit encrusting his ragged shirt front. His pitch was a poem of pathos.
I declined a shine, but the seamed ruin of his face nudged a ghost inside my
skull. Almost mechanically I gave him a twenty dollar bill and went past him. His face haunted me across a dozen states and cities.
Six months later I was shooting H in a fellow pimp’s pad. An old whore got dreamy eyed and cracked about how much bread she had made for Dandy Sammy and what a helluva pimp he had been. And then suddenly I knew who the filthy old bum with the shoe-shine box had been.
Now I waited in a steel box with compounded misery, Mama was dying of an incurable disease out in California, and the guilt I felt for my neglect of her through the years was crushing. Mama’s friends had sent me more than enough money for the trip to California. I had promised Mama I would come to her upon my release.
I got my legal release date and stood weakly outside the joint blinking in the April sun. I was a confused, wasted shadow of myself—unsure of in what direction lay the Southside. I chose a direction and found freedom from the box so intoxicating that I walked miles before my legs got rubbery. I staggered into a greasy spoon on the South-side and gulped down a bowl of gumbo. Peeping at my gruesome reflection in the chrome napkin holder, I wondered how my cute young whore would react to a face as wrecked as mine.
I went to a barbershop on Forty-third Street and got a shave and mud massage with scalding towels galore. I relaxed beneath the searing steam and tried to piece together exit con for the girl. I had expected the barber to perform a minor miracle, but his mirror told me I looked like my own grandpaw.
I walked toward the El station in my still blurry state of mind and stupidly decided I wouldn’t go to the girl’s kitchenette pad and display my ruin. Perhaps I was afraid that my sick pimp brain couldn’t cope with the certain temptation face to face to peddle her plush pussy. I would catch the first plane or train leaving Chicago and send her a nice creamy letter from Los Angeles.