Crazy bolts of suspicious lightning flashed through my skull as I stalled there on my elbow and tried to figure what kind of angle the old screw had in mind to cross me. Then it struck me that it had to be that Old Tom was uptight for dough, bread, and it was the double saw buck that had shoved him back to me. I got off the cot grinning and holding the letter out toward him as I walked to the cell door. His face was hard in the glow of his torch as he quickly scanned outside and inside the envelope. His torch etched impatient tiny arcs of streaky yellow light as he said, “All right, where the hell is the twenty?”
I pushed the bill through the bars. He took it and folded it lengthwise. And then he did the goddamndest flabbergasting thing for a double-crossing white snake screw. He placed the bill in the letter to Mama and ran his tongue across the flap and sealed it. I was speechless. He mumbled, “Your old lady will need it.” And then he walked away into the cell-house murk. I sat on the side of the cot for a long time in utter confusion. Yes, Old Tom had lots of humanity, and his type was a rarity among the low-life hacks I have known.
But to those bitter ambushers in the cell-house blackness, Old Tom was just one of the torturers, one of the keepers who turned the key in the terrible steel boxes. When “Old Tom” passed their lair of shadows, they lunged forth ferociously. The pulpy sound of steel bar clubs against Old Tom’s skull and body and his piteous childlike wailing for mercy brought my already sick skull to the very end of its slack. Tom, the Establishment slave and shield, got his retirement all right—in a wheelchair.
Cops and prison guards are, as everybody, of course, understands, necessary for the protection of society’s members and their property. A tragic injustice and irony lies in the fact that most of the victims of America’s bestial cops and prison guards are black people, often denied due process of law and the opportunity to make a legitimate living. The irony is that the cynical clique of ruthless men who masquerade as champions of justice and humanity are really the architects of repression and murder at home and abroad. Cops and prison guards are the ruthless slaves and shields and the victims themselves of these viciously cold-blooded men who perhaps become emotional only when their power is threatened.
I know I can never forget that night the old guard suffered and bled because his masters had created a society of such hatred, torment and bigotry that men had been driven mad. The terrible irony is that Old Tom, the best of the worst, had given decades of his life to the system and to the powermongers lying back that horrible night in safety and in comfort behind Old Tom’s gory shield of torn flesh and shattered skull bone.
VIGNETTES: THE PROFESSOR
I met him by accident, which is a common aspect of calamity. I was fresh from the steel casket and huckstering insecticides at the time when he opened his apartment door with a tolerantly unctuous “Ph.D. in psychology” smile. I looked over his shoulder while pitching to him at the glamorous disarray of his writer’s workshop. He had no bugs, so my pitch was in vain, but before I turned away I asked him if he were indeed a writer. He was, and he invited me in to a Coke and a chair, for which my weary dogs were grateful.
In the course of our chat he asked if I had ever written anything. I dashed downstairs to my ancient jalopy and came back with a short piece (inspired by a true situation) about a black pimp who discovers that one of his girls has testified against him to a secret grand jury. He lures her to the countryside and punches her senseless before he douses her with gasoline. He stupidly strikes the one match left in a cover advertising a bar he owns, and after hurling the match to torch her off, he tosses the cover away and is on his way to the chair in record time.
The professor wasn’t visibly awe-stricken by the work. But when I revealed (by an account of several street vignettes) that I had been a pimp for a generation on an especially fast track, his excitement yanked him up and down in his chair like a black, hook-nosed yoyo.
He got the obsession to write my life story and during the next several weeks I recounted on his tape recorder the material to be used in the projected “pimp” book. I grew to like him and to admire his superior intellectual gifts and writing experience. There were many things about him that showed he was dangerously flawed; like he lived his life as much as possible among white people and in white prestige bistros like the Polo Lounge. And for a professor of psychology, he had some unique hang-ups, like the cute, intelligent black girl that spent her every free moment in his bed. He admitted he loved it, but was ashamed to be seen with her in public.
One day after a long session of taping he leaned back in his chair and said softly, “Well, old buddy, I am going to start transcribing the material from the tape for a first drafting of preliminary chapters. I want to be fair with you in the financial aspect of our book, so what do you think is a fair shake? Maybe we can think now about a tentative seventy-thirty arrangement.”
As I have indicated, I liked and admired the guy, and I was a newly born babe in the so-called square world, so I honestly figured the guy was unselfishly offering me the seventy percent and wanting thirty percent for himself.
I grinned like a mark and said, “The hell with that kind of split, pal. We’re friends, and we go fifty-fifty right down the line, and don’t you worry, you won’t have to write the book by yourself. I’m going to write a lot of it myself.”
The guy literally winced away from my remarks with a sudden grayish pallor suffusing his face and in a kind of strange choky voice said, “Yes, perhaps that is fair, but you can trust me to write the book.”
We talked for an hour after his near heart attack, but he wasn’t really there, if you get what I mean. When I got ready to go his eyes found the configuration of the fake Persian carpet utterly fascinating.
He said hesitantly, “Don’t get the wrong impression. I know we can trust an oral agreement and each other all the way, but maybe the best of friends should put business agreements in writing. I can have my lawyer draw up the proper papers. You want to think about it for a few days?”
I thought quickly, in a contract drawn up by this bird and his lawyer, I can get tipped off fast whether he is my friend or a thieving nigger motherfucker.
I said sweetly, “What the hell, pal, let’s get the ball rolling. I’d sign now if the contract were ready.”
Three days later in Beverly Hills we went through plush lavender and redwood catacombs to the inner sanctum of a florid-faced wheeler-dealer in a four-hundred-dollar suit who was oozing distractive charm like a pickpocket whore in a creep joint.
I read the proffered document twice before I caught it. The criminal who had constructed that contract was a master swindler to make the likes of a Yellow Kid Weil seem like a congenital idiot by comparison.
The goddamn thing was eerie in its burglarious perfection. The fifty-fifty split, all of it was there. But one clause of only several words nullified the whole document and raped my rights. As I said before, I was just free of the steel casket, and I was a very edgy citizen, so my first impulse was to slay them both with bullets in the head from a .25 automatic (carried because the professor was suspect as an enemy) dangling from a length of elastic inside my right coat sleeve.
But I stood up and smiled broadly and said, “Gentlemen, I would like to take this home and study it for a day or so. May I?”
On the drive back to my jalopy, the professor was very quiet, and I had a helluva time keeping my cool. Several days later after an agony of worry and indecision, I went to his pad and told him that I was aware of the crooked contract. He pleaded his ignorance of its sucker clause and begged me to forget the whole affair and suggested we go with just an oral agreement.
I rejected his proposal and his friendship, and because I had once really liked the guy, I told him to go fuck himself in the coolest, kindest voice I could muster.
That evening I sat down and started writing a fifty-page outline of what was to be Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim.
After my disappointment and bitterness over the professor’
s attempt to run the game on me had died, I rummaged through my mind and found the reason why I had reacted like an emotional con victim when I got hip that the professor’s dogs were clay. After all, I was a former street creature who had survived in a jungle of cunning and treachery for like eons. I suspected that the real reason why was bigger and deeper than either the professor himself, our fouled-up deal or the fact that I had liked the guy and resented his violation of my trust. In the past I had been crossed by underworld friends and been grimly amused, not stricken.
I remember when I was a boy the great respect, admiration and envy my pals and other members of the black masses had felt for educated, successful members of the black middle class. They arrested every eye as they cruised their class A autos through the streets wearing their fine clothes and the well-fed, pampered look of the affluent. They were stainless, inspiring symbols to many naive, low caste blacks aching to live a bit of the elusive “good life” before the grave.
When I reached my early teens one of the most respected men in the black community, a lawyer, was convicted of bilking an invalid black woman of her life savings. Everybody was shocked beyond description, for the lawyer had been a Mason and a deacon in the church. He had had the whole shining black middle-class facade.
But years went by, and now the awakened black masses have nothing but contempt and hostility for the black elite who victimize poor blacks with shoddy goods, crooked services and sky-high rents for firetrap flats.
And perhaps worst of all, with political betrayal. Most middle-class blacks are honest and interested in the uplifting of less fortunate black people. But many of the so-called black elite, foolishly driven to ape the extravagant lifestyle of wealthy whites, must swindle and racketeer to keep their phony images.
The reason I reacted to the professor’s clay feet the way I did was because, in a way, I had been reborn into the square world, and I wanted him to be a model of class and principle like the envied, respected black men of my early boyhood. Now, in the seventies, a grim question arises: Will the contempt and disdain that many middle-class blacks feel for lower caste blacks increase and deepen the distrust and hostility that the black masses feel for their privileged brothers? Will Black Revolution first shed the blood of black middle-class predators in the ghetto?
VIGNETTES: THE BLACK PANTHERS
A day or so after December 8, 1969, when a small band of Black Panther superwarriors defended the main office of the Southern California Chapter at 4115 South Central Avenue in Los Angeles for an incredible five hours against a frustrated Los Angeles Police Department blitzkrieg, I visited Panther headquarters, or what was left of it.
Unfortunately, much of black opinion about the Panthers (their newspaper and community benefit programs notwithstanding) is shaped by the news and writings of white columnists that appear in the white press, and also by what appears in the so-called black press (often controlled and/or secretly owned by whites) relative to Panthers.
Through rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the white press and its columnists have produced, except for rare posturings of fairness in reportage of police-Panther confrontation, the fraudulent illusion that cops are heroic victims and Panthers criminals whom the cops must imprison or destroy to protect us all from their homicidal compulsions.
The black press had (until the December 8 blitzkrieg) for the most part reinforced the grotesque illusion for blacks by reporting almost verbatim what the white press had printed. I do not recall ever reading an in-depth interview with a Black Panther in the black press.
In the wake of the monumental blunder by the Los Angeles Police Department in its invasion of the black community, black civic leaders and the black press leaped into the fray (with unprecedented, sulphuric rhetoric) to protest the high-handed tactics of the raid, and to weather eye justice for the Panthers.
But the printed and jawbone flak issued by so-called good niggers who had remained silent when Panthers and other black people were being beaten, shot and killed in the streets by police seemed only to express outrage that their trusted white power structure confidants had let them suffer humiliating surprise when the spectacular police raid came off. And too, for the “good niggers,” there was ominous portent both in the brute surprise and in the raid’s deadly extravagance, for the “good nigger” realized that in the final analysis, a nigger is a nigger is a nigger, and that his genuflective ass has no immunity from threat, terror and death.
I reached the 4100 block on Central Avenue around noon. Police cars were cruising past the war-ravaged facade of Panther headquarters. Through the open door I saw dark figures feverishly working with the debris of battle.
Although I had not suffered anything close to a massive brainwashing relative to the Panther image, my mental portrait of them had, in the typical and widespread fashion of the older, hip and unhip black man, been painted with a secretly envious and prejudiced brush. Because all sane old niggers who tell the truth, including myself, had been scared shitless of police in their youth. So, as I approached the office entrance reeking of eye-stinging tear gas fumes, the Panther image in my brain was of a young, courageous but jivey, kooky dude who stayed high, talked incessant shit and exuded immorality.
Several youngsters in the casual uniform of the Panthers came from the office to the sidewalk just as I reached the entrance. Their eyes streamed tears from the residual gas inside. I approached a muscular fellow who seemed to be the leader.
I said, “I’m Iceberg Slim,” and stuck my hand out, palm up.
He looked at me and hesitated for a long moment before he smiled thinly and slapped his palm against mine.
He told me his name and said, “What’s happening?”
I answered carefully, “Man, I had to come down here to say that as an older black stud I admired and appreciated the way you showed America your balls the other day in that police . . .”
I didn’t finish the sentence because one of the other young Panthers standing nearby overheard my remark and cut in. “What did you say, man? You mean pigs, right?”
I nodded my head. The leader said, “Cool it, this is Iceberg.”
The others moved in around us. As I stood there chatting about the raid and my writings, I had the sobering realization that unlike the hundreds of non-Panther black youngsters who had recognized me on the street and admired me as a kind of folk hero, because of my lurid and sensational pimp background, the Panther youngsters were blind to my negative glamour and, in fact, expressed a polite disdain for my former profession and its phony flash of big cars, jewelry and clothes. Their only obsession seemed to be the freedom of black people.
I noticed a thin, light-complexioned, secretary-type Panther, with a sheaf of paper under his arm, silently scrutinizing me.
He stepped forward abruptly and with curly-lipped contempt said, “Nigger, you kicked black women in the ass for bread. How many you got now?”
I was stunned, instantly furious, and my first impulse was to chop him down with still-remembered masterworks of pimp profanity. But I responded with love and understanding. Is there any other response for an old nigger surrounded by Black Panthers? I alibied that when I was young there were no reasonably dependable and available sources of big money and a sense of importance for a slum kid except as a hoodlum dope peddler or pimp.
He wouldn’t accept it and attacked my suspected criminal moral attitude with renewed ferocity. As I stood there absorbing the violent tongue thrashing, my anger evaporated and I was given an insight usually denied a black man my age.
The realization that these young black brothers were the antithesis of the distorted image carried in the collective mind of America’s older, brainwashed blacks moved me dramatically. I stood there joyfully aware of the fact that Black Panthers are the authentic champions and heroes of the black race, and are, as a whole, categorically superior to that older generation of physical cowards of which I am a part.
I mumbled good-bye and moved through a gathering crowd of sightseers. I
was grateful for the acrid presence of tear gas fumes swirling about the sidewalk which gave a nonsentimental cover for the rare and genuine tears rolling down my joyous old nigger cheeks.
MELVIN X
It happened on one of those hostile late-summer mornings in L.A. in 1970. The hoodlum smog, having terrorized the sun into hiding, now hurled stinging stilettos into my eyeballs as I approached the entrance of the Black Students Alliance office. I walked into a dim cavern that seemed haunted by some fiery spirit, a feeling heightened by several poster images on the lumpy walls of Melvin X, the assassinated revolutionary.
A reddish-tan young dude rose behind a counter at the murky rear of the room and stood motionless. I felt that something more than a length of pine flooring separated my generation from that of the wary young man facing me. I strode to the counter and bellied against it in a relaxed way. Sticking out my hand I said casually, “I’m Iceberg.”
The wiry body lost none of its tension, and the light eyes twinkled coldly with amused skepticism. “You are?” he replied.
On the counter I laid a book bearing my likeness on its cover. His eyes zoomed from the paper image to my face in a double check. Relaxing, he told me his name, and his hand came forward to meet mine.
“I came here to say how sorry I am about the loss of Melvin X and to get an intimate picture of what he was like in real life. I have a new book in the works, and I’d like to be able to rap about Melvin X in it.”
The slim young man said softly, “What do you want to know about Melvin?”
“Were you close to him? Do you have any idea how his last day was spent? Just rap and I’ll take notes.”
He heaved a sigh and began talking. “Melvin had a way about him, a power that drew all the brothers and sisters close to him.”