I nodded, and she sprang to her feet. She slipped into a kimono, went to her purse on the dresser and dashed out the door. I heard a coin clinking into the phone in the hall.
I got up and stuck my ear against the door. I heard her placing a collect long-distance call to a whorehouse in northern Michigan. The sudden racket of missile warfare between a shouting couple across the hall blotted out the girl’s voice.
I was sitting on the side of the lumpy bed faking my cool when she joyously pranced in and screeched out the numbing news. It was bad, way out bad for me and Mama on her deathbed out in California. The establishment in Michigan would have an opening for her three-way talent at the end of the week. She went into a detailed rundown on how to feed, bathe, burp and diaper the gambler’s squealer while she was away nobly flatbacking our escape from the kitchenette dungeon.
There was at the time a very deep reason or fear that overrode the obvious ones why I was not aching to help this poor frustrated mother to employment in the Michigan flesh factory. Several years before an overconfident pimp acquaintance of mine had sent his one and only whore to the Michigan spot under consideration directly after she healed from the dropping of twin boys.
I visited mama pimp at his pad and pointed out that the town was crawling with shit-talking, whore-starved young studs, and that a dizzy young hot money tree like his was certain to be chopped down by a new master under the strain of whorehouse boredom and loneliness. He sneered and went into the usual novice pimp monologue about how “tight” he had his woman and the power of his game.
He was surprised that I wasn’t aware of the trump he held in the twins to bind his girl to him forever. He was an arrogant ass, so I made no effort to “pull his coat” to the street-tested truth that while whores simpered their love and loyalty, they were really pressure-shocked robots who prayed for the pimp’s destruction and often dumped babies in alleys like garbage.
Within a month the Michigan mud kicker found her new master and the naive young pimp was stuck with a brace of howling crumb crushers. But fortunately for the twins, the pimp’s mother found them adorable and took them over.
And now in the funky autumn of my life I was apparently being set up for mamahood. What with the white slave thing still pulsing, it was a treacherous and explosive situation with a five-day fuse. I considered extreme strategy as I lay beside her in midnight misery.
I decided to play the role of rapidly worsening senility. “What is usually most disgustingly flawful about the senile?” I asked myself. “No control of the plumbing, of course,” I answered.
I scooted back from the girl’s sleeping form and shortly managed a stout stream which momentarily made of her a peninsula. But she slept on, wearing on her lovely face the last beatific (or any other) smile I was to witness. Soon, above the din of erotic rats squeaking their rodent rapture within the dungeon walls, I joined my whore madonna in pungent slumber.
Next morning she was curly-lipped furious and my slack-jaw idiocy augmented by even looser bowels had by nightfall inspired her to masterworks of creative profanity. She roughly diapered me on the greasy couch (my new bed) with a mildewed bath towel, and she literally reeled away in disgust when I gurgled like a big black happy baby.
Much later I heard her tiptoe to the hall phone and repeatedly call numbers and ask for “Cat Daddy,” an ancient pimp with enormous light gray eyes and a penchant for young whores. I was praying that they made a contract together because a whore almost never sends her exiting pimp to the penitentiary when her new pimp is on the scene to witness her treachery.
The next day when the girl was out with the baby I went to the corner drugstore and talked to Mama in California. We really cried more than talked, but I felt happy that she was still alive as I walked back to the dungeon. I was a hundred yards from the building when I saw the girl with the squealer in arms alight from Cat Daddy’s orchid-hued spaceship. I stopped and sat down on a stoop. She stood outside the car and for a minute and a half she dipped and nodded her head toward the gesticulating silhouette inside. I suddenly felt a weird combination of joy and loss for I realized that she was giving Cat Daddy the classic “yes” response a young whore plays out for her new pimp.
I sat on the stoop for over an hour after she had gone in. When I went in she pulled me down beside her on the bed and went into her thing. She told me in a pleasant voice that she felt very sorry that my illness had forced her to get herself and the baby a sponsor. She was moving soon, like within twenty-four hours, into a groovy pad furnished by the sponsor. But she was awfully worried about me, and perhaps I would be smart to run a game for care on one of the county institutions until our luck changed.
I strangled my wild joy (and a pang of loss) behind a blank mask and mumbled, “Baby daughter, I’m going to my mama. She knows better than anybody how to nurse me back to the pink. And Angel Dumpling, as soon as I get myself and my game together I’ll write you at that bar on Forty-seventh Street and send for you and my baby girl.”
Later I lay sleepless in the stifling room watching her sleeping. Her magnificent body was nude except for wisps of whorehouse costume that seemed ready to burst against the buxom stress of her honey-toned curves and fat jet bush gleaming through the peach gauze.
I remembered the fast stacks of greenbacks, the icy, goose-pimpling, hot-sweet torture of that freak tongue and the exquisite grab of that incredibly heavy-lipped cunt in the giddy beginning when her sick whore’s skull was bewitched by my poisonous pimp charisma. My erection was sucker swift and rock hard, but as I started off the couch toward her, it collapsed. I suddenly realized that I had lost all power over her, and therefore, in her cold-blooded whore judgment, I was just another customer, a chump john. I turned my face to the wall and worried until dawn about my moves and the wisdom of willfully blowing off a young freak whore with mileage galore left to hump away.
I was fully dressed, standing by the side of the bed looking down on her, when she awoke and cringed away. I smiled and flapped good-bye with my fingers like a child. Her lips mutely formed “good luck,” and I went quickly away. In the cab on the way to the airport, I felt a stab of regret that I was leaving her forever back there. But then immediately the pain was gone in the great relief of my smooth exit from her and the terrible emptiness of the pimp game. And it was good to realize that no longer would I brutalize and exploit black women.
LETTER TO PAPA
May 10, 1970
Dear Papa,
I hope you are still alive and well somewhere among true friends who are warming and cheering the late winter of your life.
Mama passed away nearly ten years ago out here in Los Angeles. Oh, Papa, how she suffered before she died, and how wasted and unlike the lovely black maiden who became your bride in the Deep South and fled North sharing with you an impossible dream of everlasting love, bright opportunity and dignity as a human being in the Promised Land. But at the end, at least, she could be proud and happy that I had dropped the pimp life.
Papa, I am so sorry that I still hated you the last time I saw you in that liquor store in Chicago almost twenty years ago. I am haunted now by the memory of how utterly beaten and pathetic you looked with your fragile frame slumped inside your threadbare clothing as you whiningly begged the store owner for just one more half gallon of suds on credit.
Papa, I am ashamed to confess that I stood there behind you so sick with hatred I was exhilarated, thrilled at your torment. And, Papa, dear, I wish I could forget the goddamn stupid, cold-blooded joy I felt when you turned your face, that tortured replica of my own, toward me. My awful hurt, Papa, lies now in the bitter awareness that understanding and compassion are the only proper responses to black men, and especially fathers forced to abdicate manhood in the racist, brute crucible that is America.
Papa, you were so shocked and happy to see me that you didn’t notice my smile was really a sneer as you embraced me and stained my two-hundred-dollar suit with your tears. I paid off your eighteen-dollar bill a
nd perversely bought you a case of Keeley beer which wobbled your knees as we walked the half block to your sunless furnished room in a tenement building on Calumet Avenue.
Right away you started steering the conversation toward Mama. I knew about that everlasting torch burning inside you for Mama, so to dunk you in hot emotional grease, I lied and spun a tale about how much she loved some guy and how happy and successful she was.
Papa, I tried hard to make Mama understand about you before she died. And I don’t think she went to the grave still unforgiving, hating you for hurling me against the wall of that cold-water flat when I was six months old and walking away from us at the height of a subzero Chicago winter.
But, Papa, I swear all is forgiven for I understand now that the most hellish aspect of America’s racism is that for generations it has warped and twisted legions of innately good black men, causing the vital vine of black family stability and strength to be poisoned, hacked down by the pity, fear and hatred of black children.
What is most important to me now is that you forgive me for a long-ago brutal moment when I stupidly crushed you with cruelty and hatred. I can’t forget it, Papa. The FBI and every roller in Chicago wanted to bust me, and I had come into the street to cop a bag of dope. I got it and was on the way back to my hideout when you ran from a barbershop and saw me pass. You were screaming my name. You were happy to see me and afraid I’d get away before you could say hello. You caught me and held me tight.
And while you were making love to me, I stiff-armed you away and said, “Damn, Jack, I thought you had croaked. I’m in an awful hurry. See you around.”
Your voice broke when you said, “I did my part to bring you into this world. Please, don’t treat me like a dog. You look prosperous, what’s your line? Are you with some big white company? Are you married to some nice girl? Do I have any grandchildren, son?”
I said coldly, “Look, Jack, I’m Iceberg Slim, the pimp. Ain’t you proud of me? I’m the greatest nigger that ever came out of our family. I got five whores humping sparks out of their asses.”
Papa, I thought you were going to have a heart attack because the barber’s apron was quivering over your heart, and your face was gray with shock under the streetlight. But I still wasn’t satisfied. I had to do you in all the way. I jerked my shirt and coat sleeves up past spike hollow and stuck my needle-scarred arm under your nose.
You recoiled, and I snarled, “Goddamnit, Jack, what’s the matter? Shit, I shoot more scratch in that arm in a day than you make in a week. I’ve come a long way since you bounced my skull off that tenement wall. Jack, stick out your chest in pride. I been in two penitentiaries already. Shit, Jack, I’m on my way to the third one. You ain’t hip I’m important? Maybe one day I’ll make you a really proud father—I’ll croak a whore and make the chair.”
I walked away from you to a cab. I turned, and you had collapsed in the gutter crying your heart out. Forgive me, Papa, please forgive me. Forgive me, Papa.
Papa, if you are still in this mortal coil I know that you, like me and millions of other black men of all ages, have gained wonderful new ball power from the courage and daring exploits of the Black Panthers in this Eden of genocide. It is tragic that too many black fathers have always lacked something their children could be proud of and remember. Surely this genuflective, lackluster lifestyle molded by America’s harsh repression is responsible for the irrational, self-destructive contempt and hostility felt by young black militants for elderly and middle-age black men whose survival tactics—for themselves and their loved ones—seen through history’s unflattering lens appear the antics of despicable Uncle Toms marinated in cowardice.
Papa, we older black men must guard against condemning and hating the young rejuvenators of our balls for despising us and blaming us for letting them be born into this hellish society—one we at least could have risked our lives to demolish. Perhaps our black heroes of revolt would be less bitter toward old niggers if they could understand that they owe their very existence as revolutionaries to all those disenchanted black men who, since slavery, have probed and challenged America’s oppressive power structure. From the risks, suffering and deaths of these anonymous heroes have evolved the awesome courage and methodology of black revolt that now intimidates the masters of repression.
Papa, you have perhaps forgotten a long-ago incident that I will never forget. For on that occasion and at that shining moment the jewels of your manhood coruscated in a star burst of pride and courage that was, in that ultrarepressive era and circumstance, the purest heroism.
I was a small boy, and you had persuaded Mama to let me spend several days with you on Big Bill Thompson’s yacht. He was the mayor of Chicago at the time, and you were the chef on the boat during a short cruise on Lake Michigan for the pleasure of ruddy-faced politicians and Capone soldiers. The sleek craft vibrated with the coarse voices of foppish, olive-complexioned men and the drunken squeals of their brassy blond broads.
I remember I was perched on a stool in the steamy galley watching you and your two white assistants putting together an elaborate meal when Big Bill, the mayor, hurled himself into the galley and stood on unreliable legs glaring down at you like a silver-maned bull. You ignored him, but I saw your black face harden beneath the shiny film of sweat. And my heart beat less frantically when you moved away from him.
It almost stopped when the florid monster stalked you to the range and roared, “This goddamn meal is late! Get the fucking lead out, boy!”
Your hands worked eerily in space like spastic claws, and the stark white of your eyes flashed back at me for a pounding instant. The tyrant, perhaps infuriated by the insolent irritation on your face, shoved hard against your scrawny chest. You stumbled backward and stood with mouth agape for a moment. Then your face became feral like a killer black leopard.
And then you, Papa, nigger you from a plantation outside Nashville, Tennessee, had the courage, had enough raw heroism left in your battered black balls to clench your fists and scream out to the feared Croesus of Chicago’s corruption and crime, “Don’t you never put your hands on me, sonuvabitch. Don’t you never call me no boy. You get your big fat red ass out of my kitchen before I go plumb crazy and whale the shit outta’ you.”
I sat there on the stool in a trance of fear and excitement as the huge master of the power structure stood petrified in shock and stared down at you for what seemed like eons. And then suddenly, he surprisingly grinned, and the grin became booming ragged laughter as he strode from the galley shaking his head.
Papa, after forty years I still can’t be sure of how you got away with it. Was the colossus so secure in his self-image of power and superiority over you, the powerless inferior nigger, that he could finally respond only with amused tolerance at your indignation and rage—with perhaps a bit of that permissive admiration a master feels for a tiny dog with the guts to bare its teeth when teased beyond reasonable limits?
Or perhaps, in that galley arena with no gangster lackeys or hoodlum cops around to crush your challenge, he showed craven cowardice and camouflaged his terror with hysterical laughter. Who knows, Papa, but that may be all the power-gluttonous architects of repression and racism in America have yellow neon stripes glowing on their backs as they cower behind their police and soldiers. Papa, we will never know just why the mayor of Chicago kissed your black ass in that galley long ago. But whatever the reason, your glorious act of manhood cannot be diminished, for you flung your challenge into the unknown and maniacal winds of a hurricane.
Papa, this is one of the few letters I have ever written in my life, and it is certainly the longest. Writing it has given me more pleasure and satisfaction than any other I have ever written.
Please write me at 8060 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and I will send for you to come and stay for a week, a month or forever. Papa, we need you and love you, and you will be as welcome in our home as Malcolm X would be.
Sincerely your son,
Bob Jr.
RAPPING ABOUT THE PIMP GAME
In the spring of 1970 in Los Angeles, I was having a sandwich at an open-air stand when a slender, black guy with a doll face and a raging ambition to pimp swooped down on me from a new crimson Buick Electra, containing the most beautiful young brown-skinned girl I’d seen in a decade.
He draped himself too casually on the bench across the table from me. He had the same eager, familiar look in his eyes as dozens of young black guys have had as they set out to pick and probe for the criminal treasures they believe are buried inside my skull.
Trying to stiff-arm him away from the poison before he reached for it, I said: “You’ve got a freak machine there. What’ve you done, made foreman at the aircraft plant and decided to settle down with that brown-skinned vision?”
A pained look came over his face, as if I had clumsily ripped the lace of his lavender see-through shirt. He snorted and leaned back arrogantly and cracked, “Ice! You ain’t heard? I cut loose from that gig. I’m macking, and that vision is humping for me. I’m gonna split to the track in the big fast Windy in a few days, and I want you to run down the joints where I can cut into the boss pimps and get hip to where my girl can get action.”
I said, “So you’ve just turned out and you think you’re the greatest. You couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty. What makes you think you’re qualified to make it on the fast track in Chicago?”
He looked away and exchanged clenched fist salutes with a trio of young guys passing in a burnt-orange spaceship. He leaned toward me and said, “I memorized the bible you wrote on the whore game, and I’m so pretty the whores cream their panties when I come on the scene. I’ll have every nigger in Chicago scared that pretty Eli is gonna steal his whore. All the ones I can’t steal, I’ll shake down gorilla-style. And Ice, I can run a bitch up the wall with my boss dick. I know the game, Ice. I’m qualified. I’m ready for the Windy.”