They will be further insulated against twisted accounts of my past life after they have read my autobiography—Pimp: The Story of My Life In fact, it might enhance their love and respect for their old man to discover how he clawed and crawled up out of the stinking sewer of the underworld in this racist society to give them life and love. And how incredibly Old Daddy now smells something like a rose.
BABY SIS
She wasn’t any kind of star when I first met her back in Chicago in the midfifties. She was just a big-eyed skinny kid singing funky blues with a shabby black revue. After the last show, a fellow pimp persuaded me to go backstage to rap a bit and maybe cop a couple of the cute young broads of the chorus for stardom in the street. A pair of cuties had been eye-balling and grinning down on Pretty Bert and me all during the show. But still, I wasn’t red hot to shoot at a show broad. In my book, they were spotlight freaks who weren’t worth a pimp’s headache to “turn out.”
The kid singer was in a corner of the ratty dressing room rapping with the two packages we had eyes for. I caught a flash of nappy crotch behind a ragged curtain where a guy was dressing. Pretty Bert and I moved into the scene and started quizzing and sounding. We found out the revue had played its last night in Chicago and the members of the show were waiting for their road manager to bring news of the next booking—and their wages for two weeks’ work. The owner of the theater finally came to say he wanted to lock up and go home. And he told the fifteen uptight entertainers that he had given the road manager the show’s bread at the beginning of the last performance. On the sidewalk somebody put in a call to the road manager’s hotel, and was told he had checked out.
We went into a greasy spoon down the street with the stranded troupe. Bert and I sat in a booth with the target broads and the kid singer who was a pal of the broad I was stalking. We sensed a kill, so we ordered plates of soul food for the hungry girls and listened to them crying the blues while waiting for the food. The two dancers did all the griping. Holly, I’ll call the kid singer, sat silently staring with those unforgettable big sad eyes out at the midnight street people infesting the intersection at Sixty-third and Cottage Grove Avenue. Just before the food came, she burst into tears and fled to the washroom.
Holly’s pal rushed after her, and the other dancer told us that Holly was only sixteen years old. She had left home two months before hoping to make enough money so she and her arthritic mama could get away from a horny stepfather who was frantic to get in Holly’s panties. Holly’s mama couldn’t work. She had left her youth and health in cotton fields down South.
After the girls had eaten, Pretty Bert moved his game ahead and split with his package to play on her. My game was a bit handicapped because my package was tied to the juvenile Holly. But there was something real, warm and likable about the big-eyed kid that maybe touched my deeply buried streak of sympathetic sucker. She instantly liked and trusted me. She called me Big Bro, and I called her Baby Sis.
So instead of figuring angles to cut Holly loose from my prospect in the rough, I took them to pick up their things from a slum hotel room they were sharing. I took them to my pad and put Holly up in an extra bedroom. The dancer and I sat down in my freaked off lavender and gold living room for serious rapping. Right away the beautiful broad cracked she was hip to what I was and she wanted to try me, and the fast scene, because she was tired of dancing. So I just reached into my skull and unfolded the contract.
Early next morning I went to work on the Holly problem. First, I made her call her mother who happened to be very sick. But Holly got the good news that the crazy stepfather was off the scene. Holly broke down and wept like the homesick child she really was. That afternoon I drove her to the airport. When her flight home was announced, she embraced me and kissed me and said, “Big Bro, I won’t ever forget what you have done for me. I’m going to pay you back some day.” Naturally I didn’t hip her that I bought her ticket home with bread her pal had humped for with a Chinese chump that very morning. I hugged her and said, “Forget it, Baby Sis. You don’t owe me anything.” She walked away toward the gate. I said, “Good luck, Baby, and I hope you score for some nice young stud back home and raise a big happy family.”
She braked sharply and spun around. She came back quickly with short, explosive steps. She looked up at me with enormous brown eyes aglow and said in her draggy big-foot country voice, “Big Bro, I’m going home to look after Mama, and nothing else. When I get eighteen, I’m going back on the road, and someday I’m going to be a real big star, a rich boss star. Bye-bye now, and don’t forget I told you so.” I watched her unglamorous frame move through the gate. I walked to the car and wondered where in ego hell a skinny black girl who sang funky blues with a so-so voice figured to become a star in a world loaded with high voltage broads who had a bitch of a time scoring for the daily grits and greens.
Holly’s pal humped and gave me her bread for a year before she hit the wind and reentered show biz with a cute little tap-dancing dude with a face just like Bambi’s, the cartoon deer. I didn’t go into shock. I hadn’t figured to hold a show biz broad for more than two months anyway. During that year she and Holly kept in touch by mail and phone. Holly was working in a laundry and singing a gig now and then. At least a dozen times I got on the line briefly to rap a few words of encouragement and affection to Holly, but I lost contact with her after I blew her pal. Several years of lightning-paced street struggle might have wiped Holly and her pal from memory: I said might have because Pretty Bert, who amazingly still held the dancer he had copped from the black revue, was a show biz buff. He read Variety and followed the entertainment news in black and white magazines and newspapers and passed along to me modest items about Holly and my ex-mud kicker. When Holly first surfaced she was singing ballads in not-so-swank Eastern cabarets and attending acting school. Then later she sang, danced and acted in several off-Broadway musicals and plays.
Pretty Bert had a five-whore stable, but he was the most discontented pimp I knew. He’d read an item about some black female theatrical star getting thousands a week for her act and bemoan the fact that a brilliant and gorgeous dude like himself was pimping his heart out on a gang of stinking street whores instead of taking off long bread from a glamorous black performer. He spent a lot of his time stalking his dream prey in a bar on East Sixty-first Street run by an ex-boxer. The joint was a watering and feeding spot for many of America’s top black sports and theatrical stars. And there were leggy cutie-pie vultures and cold-blooded toothy hustlers staked out in the plush murk to ambush celebrity bankrolls.
Like I told you, Pretty Bert stalked street whores only part time. I stalked them full time so I wasn’t on scene with Bert at his favorite bar when Holly, my play Baby Sis, blew in from New York with troubles again. It was a snowy night in December around midnight, and I was busily building breathtaking air castles for a dazzled new package when tipsy Bert called and said a fabulous young bitch was standing by to say hello. Her voice was ragged with tension as she blurted out her problem and begged me to come to the bar. I told her to have Bert bring her to my place. She said Bert had just gone out the front door with a broad and her problem, who was in the men’s room, would stick his knife in her if he caught her slipping out of the bar. Suddenly she slammed down the receiver.
Her problem was a cruel ex-gorilla street pimp who had turned idea man and pimp manager for black female performers. I had known him back in Detroit many years before as the kind of pimp who had to spill a whore’s blood before she could quit him. Other pimps shunned him as a suspected police informer. Holly had fled his terror and beatings, but true to the gorilla code, he had followed her to Chicago and threatened to kill her before he’d let her quit him. He had moved her and her trunks from her loop hotel suite into a southside hotel around the corner from Bert’s favorite bar. She hadn’t called in the cops because she was afraid of notoriety. Holly wanted me to talk to the gorilla, do something to get herself and her trunks cut loose so she could open in two days
at a fancy club on the near Northside in at least fair mental condition. After that engagement she was going to the West Coast.
It was against code to butt into the affairs of a stud and his broad unless the broad was a whore and I knew she wanted me for her new boss. But I decided to case the trouble scene and try to help Baby Sis without heavy melodrama like killing—or worse, dying! Since the gorilla knew me and was in my hometown I figured I could con him or bluff him out of Holly’s life. I made three calls before I located a ferocious-looking hustler who could do a cop bit that gave suckers diarrhea. I had done time with him at Leavenworth and we were tight. I gave him the rundown, and he promised he and a partner would be on the scene to back my play on the gorilla.
I dropped a .25 automatic in my overcoat pocket and drove the mile or so to the bar. Holly was alone in a booth clutching a glass and staring at the tabletop. She glanced up and saw me coming toward her. She came out to the aisle and hugged me. Her once scrawny frame was all softness and curves, and she looked like an African princess, with her hair worn in a then uncommon Natural. We sat down, and she said in a shaky voice, “Big Bro, what am I going to do? He’s been snorting H all day, and he’s so crazy I’m afraid to be alone with him.”
I said, “Where is he now?”
She glanced fearfully toward the front window and said, “I think he’s across the street in a peddler’s car. He’s not far away, and he told me that if he had to he was going to drag me out of here when he got back.”
I said, “Sit here with me until he shows, and then go along with everything I rap to him.”
Holly and I were seated side by side in the rear of the room facing the front door. 1 was next to the aisle with my overcoat folded across my knees in such a way that I could dart my hand in for the rod in case the gorilla got a sudden urge to do surgery.
He came through the front door and except for a few lines around his tight mouth he looked like the same dapper little snake I’d known in Detroit. He stopped and stared at us with dope-glazed eyes for a moment. He came past the crowded bar to our booth and teetered on his heels as we stared into each other’s eyes until Holly mumbled, “This is Ice.”
He shifted his eyes and said coldly, “I know him. Now let’s get out of here.”
I felt Holly tremble. I said firmly, “She’s not going anywhere, brother. You blew her to me. She’s my woman, and I’m gonna go by the book. Now sit down and have a taste and let’s work this thing out like players.”
The guy went rigid, and his handsome yellow face twisted ugly. Just like he hadn’t heard a word, he said harshly, “Come out of that booth, bitch.” He stepped back and stuck his right hand in his overcoat pocket.
I saw my two fake cops standing near the door watching us. Beneath the tabletop I started to ease the rod from my overcoat pocket. The weight of it didn’t feel right. A probing finger told me why. In my haste I had forgotten to shove a clip of bullets into the automatic! I was younger then, and quicker, and I was sure I could disarm a pint-sized knifer wobbly with a skull-load of H.
I was dumber then too. I said stoutly, “Clown, this is my woman, and I’m gonna look out for her if I have to go to the chair.”
He sneered, and as his hand started out of his overcoat pocket, I started to rise and wind my overcoat around my left arm to fend off stabs and slashes. I fell back into the booth and froze. The guy was holding a snub-nosed .38 close to his body so people at the bar and in the booth ahead wouldn’t wake up to the drama. He leaned over and put his left palm on the tabletop like he had stopped by for a bit of chitchat. He leveled the wicked snout of the .38 at my heart and almost whispered, “Motherfucker, I should make you suck my dick. You ain’t going to the chair. I’m sending you to the morgue if you don’t get out of my bitch’s face and stay out. Now slide out slow and let the front door hit you in the ass.”
He stepped back, and I went past him down the aisle toward the front door. The fake rollers looked puzzled and went through the front door ahead of me. As I passed them on the sidewalk, I said, “Heater in his benny’s right raise. Bust and bull scare him for a couple of hours.”
I went to my car up the street and in less than five minutes the gorilla walked out of the bar with Holly and was seized front and rear by the burly grifters and hustled into their car. I drove down the street and picked up Holly. Within an hour and a half a truck had moved Holly’s trunks to my place. At four a.m. my man the grifter called to report that the gorilla had been bull scared into taking a train back to New York.
I began telling him how much I appreciated the favor, and how I had a piece of bread he and his pal could pick up, when he cut me off. “Forget it—wait ’til I’m pressed. We squeezed more than two grand in jewelry and cash out of him.”
I was reading in bed when Holly came to my bedroom door and asked for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and she sat on the side of the bed smoking it. Her nude body gleamed like curvy sable through her gauzy pink wrapper. But I felt nothing. She fiddled with an embroidered rose on the bedspread and said softly, “Why did you do that for me tonight?” It was a tough question then, and even now I’m not sure I know the real deep-down answer.
I said, “I never liked that nigger, and I hated his style. And you are my play Baby Sis. You’re safe now. Count your blessings, and forget the whole thing.”
She stood up, smiled and said carefully, “I can’t forget it. You don’t understand how I feel.” She waved her hands helplessly about her head and went on. “I want to do something. Do you mind if I lie down with you?”
I laughed and said, “I’ve never had anything but whores in this bed. Baby Sis, you can’t qualify for this bed. You want to be a star, and you won’t ‘turn out’ for me. I gotta pimp for my bread, and I can’t do casual fucking with no understanding. Besides, I’m not the kind of slob that could lay his Baby Sis. Now get your beautiful square ass out of here. I’m expecting my bottom woman any minute.”
She giggled and leaped into bed with me and kissed me a dozen times on my face and neck. She was leaving the room when I said seriously, “Holly, if you must do something for me, stay real like you are if the white folks make a star out of you on the West Coast. Don’t become a phony black Caucasian star.”
She walked back to the side of the bed and said earnestly, “Slim, I’m always going to be real. I won’t let anything change me. I’ll never be a phony. I’ll stay black inside as well as outside. I love being black.”
Holly got rave notices at the Northside spot, and three weeks later she left for the West Coast. A companion made the trip with her. He was a handsome young piano player who lived across the hall from me. I liked Al, and Holly flipped silly for him. Holly called me when she got to the coast, and for a year and a half she and Al kept in touch. She was making a living, but nothing spectacular had happened for her when I got busted and started that tough bit in the steel casket in 1960. I lost touch with her.
I was living in L.A. in the late sixties when Holly’s career exploded star dust. Now, I don’t mean she had the luster and impact of, say, young white stars like Ann Margret, or Joey Heatherton, or even of black Diahann Carroll. But she was getting roles in movies and important guest shots on TV, and it was rumored that a wealthy older white guy had his nose wide open for her and was sponsoring her lavish lifestyle and a palatial house in the hills. According to the standards of black America and the black press, she was like at least a dozen other black female performers in America considered a star. I made no effort to contact her until I ran into Al, the piano player, at a party at John Wesley’s pad. He was a black actor who had played a role in the movie Up Tight!
I asked Al about Holly, and he came on with heat. He said, “Ice, I had to split. The girl is sick in the head. She’s a freak for white studs, and she tries to think, act and talk like a white broad. All of her so-called friends are white. She’s a pure Oreo. You know, like the cookie, black outside and white inside. She’s ruined, and she’s got a headshrinker. Find out for yoursel
f. I’ll give you her number, but believe me, she’ll make you puke.”
Few, if any, visibly black people have not secretly hated themselves and wished to escape the misery of a black skin. But Al had accused Holly of going beyond the wishing to live the delusion that she had escaped the trap of blackness and had become an adored equal in a racist white world that considered her deniggerized and no longer tainted by the black world with its struggle and rage.
A week after I talked to Al, curiosity made me dial Holly’s number. A maid or somebody took my name and a moment later Holly came on the wire with a gush of high gloss vivacity and unreal excitement that I had called. She demanded in her weird, new sleeky-accented voice that I rush right up to the hills to see her. I agreed to visit her the next afternoon.
The next day a uniformed white broad with thick ankles led me through Holly’s luxurious house to a kidney-shaped swimming pool at the rear of the house. Holly squealed in apparent joy at the sight of me and came out of the water glistening in the sun, and beautiful in a gold bikini. Her only flaw showed in the deep shadows beneath her eyes—and she came weaving toward me as if she had been drinking heavily.
She planted a damp kiss on my cheek, and we sat down at a poolside table. She removed a bathing cap and a golden blond wig fell to her shoulders. We sat there making small talk and sipping drinks from a portable bar beside the table.
Then I got slightly personal. I said, “Baby Sis, level with me. Are you really happy and satisfied now that you’ve made it?”
She frowned, and her mouth tightened. Then she showed her snowy capped teeth and said merrily, “How could I be anything but happy surrounded by lovely things and beautiful people? Don’t I look happy?”
“I guess you would, to somebody who hadn’t known you when,” I said. I leaned toward her and took her hands in mine. I looked into her eyes and said gently, “Baby Sis, you’ve changed, and our people are losing respect for you. They are saying you despise your blackness. You don’t want that, do you? Is it true what they’re saying? Level with me, Baby Sis.”