Airtight Willie & Me

  He laughed. “Your ass, buddy. I’m back in Chi! Stole the finest three-way silk bitch in the Apple. I’m celebrating my birthday at Wimpy’s, then Tracy’s for a taste. C’mon!”

  I said, “I’m waiting for Phyl. Want me to pick you up in your wheels later?”

  He said, “No, Jim, I got the cabby with me that drove me from the Apple.” He hung up.

  I went to the bathroom to freshen up for my lady due to check in. I was just a nineteen-year-old pimp novice. I wasn’t scoring a big buck from the streets with one flat-backer. I wasn’t really the suite’s tenant. I had agreed to hawk-eye (from my modest pad down the hall) and occupy the suite during prime burglar time. Streak had a fear that some scuffler would shim his pad and cop his five dozen pairs of stomps, hundred vines, and assorted personal treasures. Streak had been on business in the Apple for a week. Dope business.

  I brushed my teeth and felt pangs of worry and fear for Streak. The nasal sludge in his voice was the tip-off that he had strung himself out on his merchandise. Worse for Streak was the street scam that he was long past due in payment for supplies of dream shit from you know who.

  I went to a bedroom window and idly glanced down a street. I saw a group of white couples and a pair of sharply dressed Mutt and Jeff Italian dudes alight from cars in front of the hotel. Apparently they were catching the Nat “King” Cole Trio’s last show in the hotel cabaret.

  I went to the blue-mirrored bar and mixed a Cuba Libra, overweighted with rum. I heard Sparky, a pimp friend with a noisy mob, go into his suite across the hall. Then I put Savannah Churchill’s “Time Out For Tears” on the turntable. I heard a gentle knock on the door. I thought it had to be Phyl. I felt irritation that she had lost the key I had entrusted her with.

  With casual reflex, I unlatched the door. It swung open. The stack of records clattered to the carpet. I stared slack-jawed at the Mutt and Jeff Italians I had glimpsed on the street muscling into the suite. Jeff pushed the door shut. They stood like sphinxes, royal blue overcoated, dap and deadly, inky eyes hooded staring at me. I couldn’t ask them what they wanted. My terror and the stench of the oppressive cologne made me nauseous, mute.

  My vocal chords were paralyzed. My lips banged together soundlessly as I obeyed the imperative command of porcine Mutt’s head dip at the sofa. I collapsed onto the sofa with gluey palms. Mutt shoved his blue fedora back off his face and sat on the coffee table facing me. My ticker boomed counterpoint to Savannah’s tearjerker.

  Jeff stage-whispered something in Sicilian. Mutt grunted and belched a stinking gust of garlic and pasta. Jeff materialized an automatic piece from a shoulder holster as he cat crept into the bedroom. Jeff came back into the living room scowling. He sat down on the coffee table beside Mutt. They glared at me.

  I found my voice to say inanely, “What’s the trouble?”

  Mutt said, “Who are you, kid?”

  I said, “Bobby Lancaster.”

  Jeff leaned and tapped my forehead with the snout of his piece. He said, “Now, Bobby, we got urgent business with Otis . . . very important! Where is he?”

  I bit my lip thinking fast. They exchanged a few rapid words in Sicilian as I procrastinated. I caught a bit of it for I had grown up next door to Sicilian pals in Rockford, Illinois. Their rap had sounded like, “squeeze the skinny asshole.” Jeff stomped his heel down on my bare instep. My eyes leaked water. I almost tinkled in my pajamas with the jolt of pain.

  I was about to blurt out the info when the truth hit me. They had to waste me since Streak was a walking dead man already. They couldn’t leave me alive. They couldn’t risk my possible identification after they hit Streak! I closed my eyes and thought about Mama. I remembered how she had wept and pleaded with me to stay in school, to avoid ruin and early death in the underworld. I thought about unforgettable, dazzling Opal, my childhood sweetheart. Now it was all over. I was finished at nineteen.

  Savannah’s song was winding up. I heard Phyl’s key in the lock. I groaned. She was finished too. I opened my eyes. Jeff raced to the side of the door with pistol ready. Phyl opened the door. My friend Sparky, the pimp, and his dozen-odd mob of hustler pals were spilling out of his suite. Mutt released his grip on my hair. Sparky embraced Phyl’s waist from behind and nuzzled her ear.

  Sparky glanced at me on the sofa and hollered as he waltzed Phyl into the room, “Young Blood, my man!”

  The wild mob followed Sparky and Phyl into the suite. Jeff dropped his piece tight against his hip. He jerked his head at Mutt as he stepped into the hallway. Everybody froze and stood staring at my mussed up condition.

  Mutt snarled, “Clear the way!” He moved from behind the couch waggling the automatic. The crowd parted to make an aisle to the door.

  Sparky said, “What the fuck is going on, Slim?”

  I said, “Everything’s cool now.”

  Mutt went past the muttering, menacing mob into the hallway. I went to the window and watched Mutt and Jeff drive away. I knew their unfinished business wouldn’t take them far from the hotel.

  While Phyl was helping me clean myself up in the bathroom, Sparky came to the doorway. He said, “Baby bro, you better cut Streak loose.”

  I said, “Streak and the mob split to an after-hours spot down the street.”

  Phyl and I split to our pad. I called Tracy’s joint several times and got the busy. I put in an emergency call. No dice; the line was out of order. I paced the floor and glanced out the window every few seconds. Streak was a cinch to be ambushed if I didn’t risk my life and go to Tracy’s and pull his coat. But I was leery!

  Then I got it! I’d send Phyl in a cab. I went to the bathroom doorway and watched tiny Phyl cold creaming off the ho makeup from her baby face. I couldn’t send her. Her face looked like a trusting child’s in the mirror.

  She smiled at me. “Daddy, you feel like making love?”

  I kissed her hard and said, “For real, baby! Soon’s I get back.”

  It was a man’s mission. I dressed in dark clothes, rammed my pistol into my belt, and told Phyl not to leave the pad and split. I went to the roof and tried to spot the Mutt and Jeff Buick staked out. I went down the fire escape to the alley. I started down the black pit alley toward Sixty-third Street for a cab. Two blocks away! Platoons of rats scampered and squealed across my path.

  Deep into the nightmarish tunnel I saw the black shape of a car oozing toward me with lights out. I snatched out my pistol. It slipped from my sweaty hand and bounced on the alley floor. I dropped to my belly behind a trash bin and retrieved it. My shaking hand pointed it at the windshield of the car moving toward me. The car stopped ten yards away. It was a Cadillac!

  I got to my feet. As I passed the startled white dude under the wheel, I saw a Sixty-third Street ho laying head on him. I was dizzy with relief when I stepped into Sixty-third’s carnival of neon and whistled myself into a cab.

  On the long trip to Tracy’s on the Westside, I remembered how I’d met Streak. Junior high was out for summer vacation. Opal Grady, my first sex mate sweetheart, and I were having a picnic lunch in the park one July afternoon. We noticed an older young guy in tattered, dirt-streaked clothes. He’d amble out of the bushes to get a drink of water from a nearby fountain every few minutes. Each time, he’d sneak a ravenous glance at our layout of food. Opal suggested that we share with him. I followed him to his pad in the bushes. I had a helluva time convincing him to accept the invitation to join us.

  He introduced himself to us as Otis Banks. Guess we were the first to meet him formally when Otis the orphan had swung off that freight train from Dixie three days before. He had oodles of warm, comedic charm. He hooked Opal and me right away. I remembered there was an extra room at home. He shot Mama down within an hour after she met him. Mama copped him a gig as mop technician at city hall. I loved him like the brother I never had.

  But he was restless, had been street poisoned down in Memphis. A year later, he split to the fast track and left a sentimental note for Mama and me. Through his
rare visits and rumors, I kept in touch with his street career. He had hooked his heart to become a pimp. His black patent leather skin stretched across the Cro-Magnon features was a slight handicap. The major handicap of his tender dick, compounded by his secret pedestal reverence for foxes early on, had chilled his long shoe dream.

  He peddled low-grade eights and sixteenths of smack and cocaine, instead of dick, out of crappers in junkie dives for several years. Then he copped the big bag. He bleached a gold streak down the center of his processed hair to cop his moniker and to match his gold hog. And now, I thought, as my cab pulled to the curb at Tracy’s, Streak’s golden street bubble had popped.

  Tracy’s doorman peeped at me through the spy hole and opened the steel door. I walked into the acrid smoke haze and wall-to-wall night people. The Seeburg jukebox was firing neon and Hamp’s “Flying Home.” I spotted Streak at the crowded bar. As usual, he was a loudmouthed, animated symphony, decked out in puce and gold threads. The Carole Lombard look-alike blond fox he’d stolen in New York was beside him, draped out in threads that matched his own. Next to the fox teetered the fat, black New York cabby. I muscled through jitterbugging fanatics in the aisle toward Streak.

  Streak hollered above the din, “Set up every motherfucker and cocksucker in the joint, and give the mice some cheese, the cat some cream on Gold Streak!”

  Tracy, the ex-pimp bar owner, was behind the bar slaving with his barmaids to serve the thirsty crowd. As I moved in close, I heard Gold Streak high jiving and needling perspiring Tracy. Just as I reached Streak’s side, Tracy blew his cool.

  He rammed his bitch face close to Streak’s and shouted, “Get outta my ass, Gold Streak!”

  Streak just threw his head back and laughed. He threw his arm around me.

  I said, “Streak, let’s split!”

  He said, “Not now, Slim.” Streak said to Tracy, “Nigger, you funky as a two-dollar ho behind that bar. My woman is got enough scratch between her titties to buy this cracker box.”

  Tracy said, “Fuck yourself, Jive Ass!”

  She whipped out a bale of “C” notes from her outrageous cleavage and tossed it onto the bar top. You could have heard two cockroaches fornicating on Mars in the sledgehammer silence.

  I leaned into Streak’s ear and whispered, “Jesus Christ, get yourself together. Streak! Let’s split! Two Outfit Aces are out to hit you!”

  Streak’s face ashened.

  Some joker expressing the collective passion of the clientele shouted, “Girl, I oughtta stick you up.”

  Streak glanced about anxiously and drew a Magnum pistol. He scooped up the bundle into his overcoat pocket. We threaded our way to the street. The three of us got into a cab. Streak checked into a fleabag hotel several miles away on the Westside. His fox went into the shower. He slumped down on the side of the bed. I sat down beside him.

  He moaned, “Slim, it’s the end of the world!”

  I said, “Get in the wind, Streak. It’s a big world.”

  He shook his head and whispered, “It ain’t no more. Slim, it ain’t no use. Those cruel bastards have already shrank it to the size of a morgue slab unless I get all them ‘gees’ I’m into ’em for.”

  I stayed with him until dawn before I said good-bye. I split to Cleveland the same day. A week later, I got the news he had been shot a dozen times pulling his Caddie from a rented garage on the Westside.

  After ten years and a slew of blown hoes, I came back to Chi on my uppers, strung out on “H” and one junkie ho, Phyl. Immediately as I checked into a third-rate Southside junkie hotel, I discovered there was a dope panic.

  Old Man Sparky, reduced to boosting for a living, was a tenant in the hotel. He steered me to some three percent smack that kept me and my girl from being sick. His once round handsome, yellow face was wasted and scabrous. Sparky lay in his greasy bed coughing up tubercular phlegm as he ran down conditions in town.

  He said, “Slim, you’ve come back to a motherfucking graveyard. Ain’t been no decent dope in the street for a month. Better split with your ho to Detroit or the Apple.”

  I said, “I have to get scratch to split. I’m almost on ‘E’. Any quality shit in Gary? Any on the Westside?”

  He shook his head and said, “There’s some choice brown Spic dope here on the Southside. But you gotta have the connection and the long scratch to copy at least a quarter of the piece, at double the usual bite.”

  He was racked with a seizure of coughing for several minutes. He continued. “If Phyl is become the thief you think she is, maybe you can cop some of that decent dope if your ho stings big, soon! The only connection is a cold-blooded bitch, Pretty Opal. She’s cribbing up in the hotel where we used to crib. The bitch is got Gold Streak’s suite.”

  I said, “Sparky! Is she a blue-black stallion with legs like Grable, tip-tilted nose, a big round ass, and bedroom eyes?”

  He nodded and screwed up his face. He said, “Slim, if you can shape it up an angle for her, you better do it fast. Smarter still, Slim, don’t play for her. Ina cross fire you could get in the family way. With lead!”

  I said, “Why?”

  He said, “ ’Cause she’s one of the reasons for the present dope panic. Last month she toured the beds of the three top dealers in town. She laid her poontang and bullshit on ’em just long enough to get hip to their operations. She laid her suction cunt and a sawed-off shotgun on a snot-nose heistman called Wee Billy to rip off their merchandise. Those niggers got hip and sho’ nuff salty. That ain’t all. I heard she just got back from fucking around with ugly-ass Klondike, the biggest dealer in Detroit. Klondike is the most treacherous nigger that ever shit between two shoes. The wiser is she and her dwarf sucker will be wasted any day now. I’m gonna worry about you, Slim, if you cut into her.”

  I was stunned. Visions of clean-cut Opal, the teenage ball-blaster, rushed through my head. Oh, the spicy spoor between her satin thighs. The rose garden, the manicured jade of lawn, moonlit in the rear of her palatial home. Her hypnotic eyes caressing my face as I volleyed my blood-bloated weapon into her incredibly fat sex nest. I remembered the musical laughter of her elegant mother and socialite guests wafting on summer air just before Opal’s father’s bellowed rage spooked me into the wind just as I orgasmed. No, Opal the dealer wasn’t—couldn’t be—my Opal after all.

  I said, “Sparky, I don’t know Opal the dealer, so I got no angle. The Opal I knew was a stone young lady, with top-drawer parents. Why, her old man had the largest black furniture and appliance store in the country. Guess I’ll run over to Milwaukee and try to score.”

  Sparky hiked himself up in the bed. He said, “It’s the same Opal. You know the bitch. Her old man got busted. He was the biggest fence for heisted jewelry and hijack whiskey there ever was. He made the front page of the Defender a coupla years after you split to Cleveland. You know the bitch! You gonna try to score for some of her Spic dope, ain’t ya?”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Take real good care, Slim. Lay a pinch on old Sparky if you do.”

  I felt my monkey sandpapering my guts as I went to my pad. I decked myself in the best threads I had. I didn’t care if Opal had turned into the fucking devil. I had to cut into her and score for some of her brown Mexican ambrosia. I felt sorry for her in a way. But what the hell, I thought. Opal had realized the fondest dream of thousands of black street people past and present. She was ensconced in the top black hotel, in its most lavish suite. Dope Queen Opal had arrived!

  I called her. She squealed at the sound of my voice. My numb junkie scrotum tingled at the sound of her contralto voice.

  I stared into the opaque eye of her suite’s peephole as I rang the chimes and heard the metallic clamor as she unbarred and unbolted the door. It swung open. I stood on the threshold scanning her face. I was amazed that in the sorcerous pink glow, she appeared to be the same uncorrupted schoolgirl she had been. I rushed into her outstretched arms. We embraced and kissed for a helluva time before we sat down on the freshly up
holstered gold silk sofa. Her Rubenesque curves shone through her diaphanous negligee like indigo satin. Her fabulous legs were curled beneath her Yoga fashion. Her waist-length hair shimmered black like a miniature waterfall. She gazed into my eyes as she pushed back my sleeve and finger-stroked the spike tracks on the inside of my wrist.

  She said softly, “Bobby, maybe I shouldn’t have invited you to see me. Your eyes have changed.”

  I laughed hollowly. “It’s jungle warp, angel, that’s all. I can split if I make you leery. I don’t heist or mug for my medicine.”

  She shaped a little smile. “Come to think of it, you wouldn’t have to. You had a sweet bitch of a hitch in your hips on the down strokes. How many girls do you rule?”

  As I stroked her spike tracks inside of her thigh, I said, “One thief at the moment. But I’m taking applications from the qualified . . . even demonstrating an advanced bag of strokes from the hips and the brain. Doll face, five grand or so, in good faith scratch, would entitle you to the special introductory opportunity to get all of those goodies and paradise too.”

  She nodded her head toward a gigantic oil painting on the wall and murmured, “I painted that. That’s Wee Billy, my teenage sweetie. I’m the ruler type too, Bobby.”

  I studied the nude image of her Lilliputian slave with the cast-iron balls to rip off dope dealers. He had a snarling, girlish, banana-hued face and a steel wire body. His sex tools hung grotesquely huge. He seemed afloat in an ocean of flame red clouds.

  She said, “I’m his Jocasta in a way. He loves me with reverence like the mother he never knew. But he fucks me with no hang-ups at all. He’s devoted, obedient, and cold-blooded like the Doberman I had when I was ten. I could command Billy to waste that tie salesman in the White House, and he’d do it for me. He wouldn’t ask why. He’d die trying. He loves me!”

  She smooched my forehead as she rose and spun Eckstine’s “Jelly, Jelly” on a mahogany console. She went to the bedroom. I glanced about the sparkling suite. I hoped Billy wouldn’t show before I copped some medicine. I shivered remembering Gold Streak and that long-ago morning when Mutt and Jeff jacked me up. She came back naked. My first thought was that she would try to swindle me out of some swipe and/or cap, until I noticed the shooting works in her hand.