Other Titles by Iceberg Slim
Pimp
Trick Baby
The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
Airtight Willie & Me
Long White Con
Death Wish
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1: Mama, you Mother . . . !
Chapter 2: Sally Freaks Off
Chapter 3: Back to the Web
Chapter 4: Forty Cents a Hundred Ain’t a Precious Gift
Chapter 5: The Promised Land Ain’t
Chapter 6: Merry Christmas in Hell
Chapter 7: Poor Papa Struck Out
Chapter 8: Mama’s New Pants
Chapter 9: Thet Peckahwood Varmint
Chapter 10: The Wizard of Woo
Chapter 11: Bessie’s Red Satin Dress
Chapter 12: A Doll Fella for Dorcas
Chapter 13: The Magnificent Hard-On
Chapter 14: Madame Miracle’s Stinking Little Faggot
Chapter 15: The Freakish Fifties
Chapter 16: Encore, Doll Fella
Epilogue
“. . . my reason for telling my story is not money. I’m doing if for my poor dead Papa and myself and the thousands of black men like him in ghetto torture chambers who have been and will be niggerized and deballed by the white power structure and its thrill-kill police . . .”
PREFACE
One early evening during the first week of February in 1969 I visited Otis Tilson. He was an incredibly comely and tragic homosexual queen with whom I had been acquainted for most of the twenty-five years that I had been a black pimp in Chicago, Illinois.
Otis lived in a third-rate hotel at Forty-seventh Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. He was colorful in fresh makeup, platinum wig and rainbow print hostess pajamas with the outrageously full legs.
His almond-shaped hazel eyes sparkled as he eagerly took the paper sack containing the gin I’d brought him and said in a throaty contralto, “Iceberg, you were an angel not to forget my medicine.”
We sat on a battered sofa in his one-room kitchenette. A tall, young black stud with a natural hairdo and a hostile face got off the rumpled brass bed, glared at me and slammed the door going out.
I said, “Otis, he’s got rocks in his jaws.”
Otis raised a water glass and took a big belt of gin.
He giggled and said, “He’s jealous and fatally in love with my old hot yellow asshole, and also he’s afraid I might suck a new cock.”
I said, “How is Sedalia?”
He wrinkled his tiny tip-tilted nose and said, “I haven’t seen Mama since I walked out on her in ’68. I guess that rotten bitch is doing as well as anybody can in a wheelchair.”
A moment later as I was setting up my tape recorder, Otis’s smooth yellow face became serious and he said passionately, “Iceberg, my real reason for telling my story is not money. I’m doing it for my poor dead Papa and myself and the thousands of black men like him in ghetto torture chambers who have been and will be niggerized and deballed by the white power structure and its thrill-kill police.
“This goddamn society is crooked and corrupt from top to bottom. Lots of police, judges and prosecutors put their heads together and frame homosexuals into long jail terms. The hysterical bastards are really punishing the cocksucker and the faggot-hot-to-be-fucked-in-the-ass that are inside themselves.”
Otis paused and looked at me sheepishly.
He said softly, “Iceberg, was the machine turned on?”
I nodded.
He said, “I guess you’ll have to erase what I said. I got carried away. I’ll be careful and watch my language.”
I said, “The hell you will. Any book I have any connection with has to tell it like it is. You were beautiful. The gutsy language is you, the street and life, and it’s real.
“I know something of what happened to you and your family, and I guarantee all you need do is tell your story like it is to prove a thousand points about this black hell and the poisonous pus of double standard justice, racial bigotry and criminal economic freeze-out, infecting and grotesquely bloating the hideous underbelly of white America’s shining facade of democracy and freedom and opportunity for all.
“Start your story with Dorcas and that first time you lived with her as a stud. I’m going to lift your whole story off the tape and put it in the book, gutsy and like it is.”
In writing the book, I found it necessary in the interests of literary unity, clarity and values, to restructure and realign some scenes and events from Otis’s rambling and often tearful account. And I supplied transitional bridges. Except for my minimal involvement, the unforgettable story is his.
There are no esoteric psychiatrist dialogues, dead preachments or leaden footnotes on the living pages of this book. The dialogue is in the gut idiom of the queer—the black ghetto—the Deep South—the underworld. Critical social delineations are in the stark dramas of the internal and external conflicts of Otis Tilson’s heartbreaking struggle to free himself from the freakish bitch burning inside him. And also in the tragic lifestyles of Otis’s older brother and two beautiful sisters adrift in a dark world of pimpdom and crime and violence where good is condemned and evil applauded.
1
MAMA, YOU MOTHER . . . !
She lay beside me in the late March night, naked and crying bitterly into her pillow. The bellow of a giant truck barreling down State Street in Chicago’s far Southside almost drowned out her voice as she sobbed, “What’s wrong with me, Otis? Why is it so hard for you to make love to me? Am I too fat? Do you love someone else? Yes, I guess that’s it. And that’s why you haven’t married me. This is 1968. We’ve been sleeping together for a whole year. I wasn’t brought up like that. Let’s get married. Please make me Mrs. Tilson. I hope you’re not stalling because I married twice before.”
I just lay there squeezing the limp flesh between my sweaty thighs and feeling desperate helplessness and panic.
I danced my fingertips down her spine and whispered tenderly into her ear, “Dorcas, there’s no one else. I think I’ve loved you since we were very young. I just have to stop drinking so much. Maybe we’ll get married soon. Now, let’s try it again.”
She turned over slowly and lay on her back in a blue patch of moonlight. Her enormous black eyes were luminous in the strong ebony face. Desperately I set my imagination free and gazed at her tits, jerking like monstrous male organs in climax.
I felt an electric spark quicken my limpness. Frantically I closed my eyes and gnawed and sucked at the heaving humps. Her outcries of joyful pain pumped rigid readiness into me.
She pinched it. She moaned and held herself open.
She screamed, “Please! Please, fuck me before it falls again.”
I lunged into her and seized her thighs to hold them back. But as I touched her fat softness I felt myself collapsing inside her.
I was terrified. So I thought about Mike and the crazy excitement I had felt long ago when I pressed my face against his hard, hairy belly. Then in the magic of imagination, instead of Dorcas, it was the beautiful heartbreaker Mike that I smashed into.
Later, I lay and watched Dorcas sleeping. Except for added weight and faint stress lines etched into the satin skin, she looked the same as she had on that enchanted spring day when I first met her twenty years before.
What a chump I had been then to dream that the daughter of a big shot mortician could really be mine.
• • •
Mama had warned me then, “Sweet Pea, don’t you get your heart broken. A slum fellow like you don’t have a chance with a girl like that. Her father will see to it. If anyone despises poor niggers more than dirty white folks, it’s so-called high-class niggers like him.”
Mama had been right. He had he
lped to marry her off and broken my heart. The prejudiced bastard was dead now.
By sheer chance I had run into Dorcas a week after his death. She was a trained mortician, but she was lonely and needed help.
I knew right away that there was still lots of warm sweet voltage between us. Two days later I moved from Mama and the tenement flat where I had spent most of my life.
I hadn’t dated a guy since I moved into the funeral home with her. I put off marrying her because I knew that freakish creature I called Sally was still alive inside me. I was afraid of Sally. I couldn’t marry Dorcas until I was certain that the bitch Sally was dead.
I thought about the freshly embalmed corpse of Deacon Davis lying in the mortuary morgue downstairs. I would have to groom and dress it by midmorning for viewing in the slumber room. I tried until dawn to sleep. But it was no use. I couldn’t get the corpse of Deacon Davis off my mind. I decided to prepare the deacon.
I eased out of bed and slipped on a robe and slippers. I took a ring of keys from the dresser top and went down the front stairway to the street. I went down the sidewalk through the chilly dawn to the front door of the mortuary.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the dim reception room. I walked across the deep pile gold carpet into the office. I switched on a light and sat down at the old mahogany desk. I took a fresh fifth of gin from a drawer and sipped it half empty.
The shrill blast of the desk phone startled me. I picked up and said, “Reed’s Funeral Home.”
Mama’s high-pitched, rapid voice chattered over the wire, “Sweet Pea, it’s been over a week since you visited or called me. You know I have a bad heart and I’m all alone. Don’t let that woman make you neglect your mama. Think about it and let your conscience be your judge.”
Before I could reply, she hung up. I started to call her back, but decided against it. I took two more belts of gin and went through the darkened chapel on my way to the morgue at the rear of the building.
The heavy odor of spoiling flowers and the harsh chemical stench of preserved death burst from the slumber room. I walked into its shadowy blueness and paused beside a cheap chalky casket with a bouquet of stale blossoms lying on the foot of it. There was a poignant message scrawled on a smudgy card:
“Happy journey, Papa, to the arms of sweet Jesus. See you soon. Lettie, your loving, lonesome wife.”
I stared down at the tired dead face, creased hideous by the lifetime terror and torture of its blackness. I remembered the puckered emblems of hate on the corpse’s back.
I turned away from the pitiful corpse wrapped in the shabby suit. I walked unsteadily down the long murky hallway to the morgue. I opened the raspy door. There he was, a skeletal black blob on the porcelain table that gleamed whitely in the half darkness.
I walked across the room and the scraping of my feet against the concrete floor was like shrieking in the tomb quiet. I flipped on the high intensity lamp over the table. I slipped on rubber gloves and stood hypnotized, sweeping my eyes up and down the white-haired wasted corpse.
I shook with rage as scenes and sounds of the awful past shattered and filled the bright stillness. I was nine years old when the corpse everybody respectfully called Deacon Davis lived on the third floor of the Westside tenement where Mama still lives.
I remembered that first time in his apartment. His hand was hot between my legs, caressing the throbbing tip of my stiff little organ.
His voice was hoarse with excitement. “Kiss mine and lick it, you dear little boy, like I did to yours. Mine is a magic wand to make any wish come true when you make it cry tears of joy.”
I put the long, crooked thing in my mouth until I spat its slimy tears. I cheated the wand and made two wishes: That poor Papa found a steady job. And that Mama wouldn’t be so bossy and cruel to Papa anymore.
To my complaints of wishes unfulfilled, the deacon would grin and say, “I know what’s wrong. My wand must cry deep in your bunger, my dear boy.”
For more than a year, until he moved away, the deacon shoved his wand deeply into me. The deacon sure ruined me. He really did.
I leaned over the corpse and roughly jabbed my thumbs into the sunken eye sockets. I pushed back the withered eyelids and stared into the brown orbs filmy and vacant.
I whispered, “Dear Deacon Davis, you can’t know how thrilled I am to see you again. I just don’t want you to go to your grave unpunished. You bastard child-raping freak. I’m going to shave you and dress your nappy hair. Then I’m going to punish you for ruining me. But no one will know except you and me, dear Deacon Davis.”
I groomed the corpse and got a razor-sharp scalpel. I lifted his wrinkled shaft and held it erect at its tip between a thumb and index finger. I stood there with the glittering blade in my hand.
I glanced at the deacon’s face. The blank sable eyes were staring at me. I felt suddenly queasy and faint. The scalpel clattered to the tabletop. I jerked my hand away from the shaft and pressed the eyelids down. I just couldn’t do a vicious thing like that even to a filthy freak like Deacon Davis.
I was putting underwear on the corpse when it groaned as trapped air escaped its chest. I went to the office in a hurry for a stiff drink of gin. I came back to the morgue and split the burial suit coat and shirt down the back and dressed the body.
I wheeled the white satin-lined casket to the side of the table. I attached pulleys over the table to the corpse and lowered it into the casket. Then I wheeled it into the slumber room for viewing by mourners who believed the deacon was holy.
Funeral services for Deacon Davis were held two days later. The anguished wails of his surviving brother and sister moved me not at all.
I drove the hearse to the cemetery. Two elegant black limousines driven by chauffeurs Dorcas hired at a ten dollar fee followed behind me. At least thirty private cars behind them crawled through the dazzling sunshine to the grave. The deacon was well thought of, all right. But then I’m sure that the mourners didn’t know about his dirty passion for little boys.
A nice funeral like that was much more than the deacon deserved. But I was really glad I hadn’t used that scalpel on the deacon. I’ve always, at least in one respect, tried to be like my idol, Martin Luther King, Jr. To not hate anybody.
To tell the truth, I’ve never really hated a living human soul except cops. There may be cops who are human, but I’ve never known any.
The day after the deacon’s funeral I called Mama more than a dozen times. I didn’t get an answer, and the line was never busy. I was awfully worried, so that evening around seven I killed the fifth of gin and drove my old Plymouth to the Westside.
I drove past raucous clusters of ragged kids frolicking on the sidewalks and stoops in the twilight down Homan Avenue past 1321, the six-flat slum building that my idol and his group had taken over in February 1966. The plan had been (in violation of the law) to collect the rents and spend the money to make the building fit for human occupancy.
I parked at the curb at the end of the block. A gorgeous black brute striding down the sidewalk toward me mesmerized me. The bulgy thigh muscles undulated against his tight white trousers. I forgot all my resolutions to keep Sally shackled and scrambled to the sidewalk and stood fumbling with my key ring.
His raw body odor spiced with the scent of shaving lotion floated deliriously on the warm air. I inhaled hungrily. I was flaming. I really was. He came abreast of me, and I saw the imprint of his huge dick. I was dizzy with a hot roaring in my head. I almost fainted with excitement. I really did.
I had an insane urge to stroke his thing. Instead, I caressed my eyes over his crotch, and then waltzed them to the depths of his dreamy brown eyes, searching for a flicker of sweet kinship for “the” secret message. I saw only a cold quizzical indifference as he passed me. The beautiful bastard was straight!
Almost instantly I felt like shouting with joy and relief that he was, and that the bitch, Sally, had been denied. I went down the cracked walk toward the grimy, familiar front of the six-un
it building that Mama now owned.
I glanced at Mama’s front window on the first floor. I saw the curtains flutter above a red and white sign, “Madame Miracle—Come In—Get the Golden Touch Blessing—Win and Hold Money and Friends—Discover How to Punish Your Enemies—Ward Off Evil Spirits—Enslave Sweethearts—Wives—Husbands—I am blessed with infinite wisdom and power.”
I went past several cursing preteeners shooting penny craps on the stoop. I opened the front door and stepped into the building’s musty vestibule.
A bandy legged old man in faded blue undershorts was piling his ancient pocket watch wallet and small change on the rumpled heap of his puke-stained trousers and shirt lying on the floor.
I paused beside him. I heard the door open leading to the first-floor hallway. A tall, elderly woman with a fierce face was standing with arms folded across her chest glaring down at the muttering old man.
She screamed in a shrill voice, “Nigger, this ain’t our apartment. This is the vestibule. You drunk sonuvabitch. Pick up your filthy rags and get your black simple ass upstairs before I knock the shit outta’ you.”
The old man blinked his sad eyes like a frightened puppy and mutely worked his thick lips. I felt a sharp pulsing of sorrow and anger looking at his eyes. They were whipped, hopeless, pitiful eyes, so much like poor Papa’s before he crawled off to die.
I went up the short stone stairway past the husky hag and opened the splintered glassed door. I walked scabrous tile to Mama’s door. I put my key in the lock and stepped inside. It was very dark except for cloudy rays of the street lamp that filtered through the living-room curtains.
I said loudly, “Mama, it’s Sweet Pea. Mama, are you here?”
There was no answer. I went down the hallway toward Mama’s bedroom at the rear of the apartment. I thought about Mama’s heart condition that was all in her mind. Her doctor had told me confidentially there was no organic trouble at all, just that Mama had deep mental needs for her attacks.
Then I remembered the movement of the curtains when I came up the front walk. I shivered. Mama had made enemies with her witchcraft. I wondered if she was dead and the murderer was still in the apartment. I stopped and stood uneasily at Mama’s bedroom door, listening to the wild pumping of my heart.