Mama Black Widow

  Mike came out of the bar with a pretty light complexioned girl about nineteen and pulled away in the Chevy.

  I felt so old, and I was so hurt because she was so much like me physically—except she was radiantly young—and the possessor of a precious, fuckable cunt to offer Mike.

  I trailed them to a hotel on Roosevelt Road and watched them go to the desk and register. I went to the apartment and changed into male clothes. I sat at the window with a fifth of gin getting drunk and waiting for Mike.

  At daybreak, he parked haphazardly in front of our building with the rear end of the Chevy poked toward the middle of the street.

  He got out and walked unsteadily around to the passenger side of the front seat and jerked open the door. He bent over and stuck his head into the car. He checked the floor, the seat and dumped a dashboard ash tray into the street

  Then he stooped and scrutinized his face in the rearview front fender mirror. He dabbed furiously at his mouth and cheeks with his handkerchief.

  Finally he managed to lock the car. He came into the apartment and didn’t see me at the window. He looked in the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom. He came into the living room and grunted when he saw me. He collapsed on the sofa with his long legs stretched out under the coffee table and beyond.

  He cut a bloodshot eye at me and said, “Why the hell are you up and in stud clothes this early in the morning?”

  I said bitterly, “I’m on my way to suck a yellow cunt. I’m curious about its apparently irresistible taste and allure for stupid young studs. And I suppose you stayed out until this early in the morning to admire the glory of the sunrise?”

  His jaw muscles rolled, and he yanked his legs from beneath the table and leaned toward me at the end of the sofa.

  He said sternly, “Grandma, I’m gonna give you a fat mouth if you don’t stop signifying and talking shit to me.”

  I stood up and picked up a pointed, dagger-type letter opener from an end table.

  I said, “You touch me and I’ll send you to your dead mammy. I’m sick of you tramp niggers using me. I took the wrinkles out of your starving gut, put some decent clothes on your black lousy ass and rescued you from that disaster you were riding in. Some chippie has let you stick your head up her sour ass, and now I’m old, gray-ass Grandma!”

  He had his head between his palms staring down at the floor. I was standing six feet away on the end of a red rectangular accent rug.

  Suddenly he exploded in a blur of motion, and I flew into the air and crashed the side of my head against the edge of the end table. He had violently jerked the other end of the carpet from beneath me.

  I lay half-stunned and watched helplessly as Mike loomed above me snarling in anger. He straddled me and battered my face and chest with his iron fists until I passed out.

  I came to in a tub of warm water, and Mike was tenderly bathing me. I couldn’t see because my eyes were swollen shut. He toweled me dry and carried me to bed. He cradled me in his arms and cried and begged me to forgive him.

  Then because I was his hopeless slave and sucker, I lay there blind, bruised and battered and let him sodomize me until my rectum was raw and quivering.

  And despite all the agony and the pain, I watched him sleeping and hated myself because I loved him. I lay thinking about the pretty young girl and crying, but remembering and still thrilling to the maddening sensation of his plunging organ burying itself in the freakish depth of me.

  Mama was sympathetic to me, but she didn’t condemn Mike or advise me to leave him, I guess she was hoping I’d get so much abuse that eventually I’d come home and never leave her side again.

  Mike agreed to quit tending bar if I would finance him in the soft narcotics racket—that is, he would sell reefers and pills like bennies, yellows and reds instead of heroin and cocaine and other hard narcotics.

  I withdrew my remaining fifteen hundred dollars and he got his stock. He had made wide contact for customers while working at the bar and the phone rang constantly.

  About a month after he started dealing, a customer called and wanted a half pound of pot delivered to his pad. Mike was expecting an important call from his connection and might need the new ’60 Caddie we owned.

  I called a cab to make the delivery. The customer lived in an apartment building on Douglas Boulevard on the Westside.

  I was ringing the customer’s bell in the foyer of the building when two city narcotics detectives rushed in and took me to an unmarked car and searched me and found the pot pinned to the crotch of my trousers.

  I was booked for possession, and bail was set at ten thousand dollars. I was afraid to call Mike for fear the police would monitor the call and trace our address where I knew Mike had pills and pot stashed.

  I called Mama, and that night, a bondsman came, and I was released. I went directly to the apartment to see Mike and get a thousand dollars to repay Mama for paying the bondsman’s ten percent fee for posting my ten thousand-dollar bond.

  I didn’t see the white Caddie out front. I unlocked the apartment door and turned on the lights. I went into the bedroom. All the dresser drawers were on the floor and bed—empty!

  I looked in the closet—bare! I rushed feverishly about the apartment looking for a note explaining and telling me he’d contact me later. But there was nothing. Mike had taken all my lovely drag and accessories.

  I stood in the bedroom stunned. Suddenly, I heard someone in the living room. I went to the bedroom doorway expecting to see Mike. Instead, I saw the two detectives that had arrested me.

  They had followed me and come through the front door that I had left open. They searched the apartment and found ten rolled reefers held together with a rubber band in the toe of an old pair of shoes Mike had left.

  The cops wouldn’t believe that I didn’t know where Mike was. They were very angry with me after the manager of the building told them the apartment was in my name. They arrested me again and booked me for possession.

  Mama came to see me the next day and told me she thought it best that she only spend additional money on a lawyer to defend me.

  Two days later, I was transferred to County Jail and placed on a hold-over tier while awaiting trial. My tier held about twenty-five accused armed bandits, pimps, murderers, strong-arm robbers and assorted practitioners of mayhem and cutthroatery.

  We lived in two parallel rows of barred single cells, which, in the morning, were automatically unlocked by a screw from a control box within a barred cubicle at the front of the dayroom where the inmates ate and spent the long day until bedtime.

  The only time that guards came into the dayroom and the cells was during shakedowns. Every tier had an inmate barn boss who had been chosen by the jail officials to keep order and cleanliness. And the barn boss distributed the food that arrived in tin plates on a dumbwaiter from the kitchen.

  The barn boss was naturally the most jailwise, vicious, cunning, brutal inmate available to the jail officials.

  Our barn boss was a massive hulk of cruelty accused of smashing out a pal’s brains with a brick over a twenty-five-cent debt.

  The tier was a seething pit of violence and sex. There were several bloody fights in the dayroom and in the toilet off the dayroom almost every day.

  And on general cleanup day when the cells were opened for scrubbing, new young inmates were taken in the cells and forced to take every sexual abuse in the book.

  At night after lights-out, the male inmates in the cells across the courtyard would light matches to show their erected dicks and balls to the screaming female inmates on the tier above my tier.

  The female inmates would do likewise to show their cunts in bold relief to the profane males across the way, cheering the bitches on as they jacked off their stiff cocks in the yellow glow of the matches.

  Often, apparently, females sharing a cell would really play dog for the guys across the way, because excited shouts rode the night air like, “Sit in her face, baby! Bite that bitch’s tiddie off. Fuck that long cunt
whore, you big dick bitch.”

  It was perhaps the horny sights and hot sounds of this nightly bacchanalia that kept the caged hoodlums on our tier inflamed and edgy and eager to assault and rape one another.

  At thirty-three I was fairly safe from wholesale rape. That is, unless I tipped my secret or somebody came in from the street that knew me and told that I was an experienced “round eye.” If this happened, then, I would be a target for violent mass rape just like a tender youngster.

  After witnessing a week of violence and brutal rape, I was terrified and so nervous and ill with a pounding headache that I, unfortunately, put in for sick call with the hope I could be transferred to the hospital until my trial.

  A guard took several of us to sick call, including the straw boss. We were put into a large cell with milling inmates from other tiers on sick call.

  I was sitting on a wooden bench beside the straw boss when a paunchy, bald guy with a vaguely familiar voice stopped in front of me and said, “Hello, Baby Sweets.”

  I stared up at the guy’s seamed face and tried to place him.

  He said, “How can you forget me, Sweet Butt? Show me your belly button.”

  In that instant, I remembered him. It was Ray! He had ground his cigarette into my navel sixteen years before.

  I said, “Hello, Ray,” and went to the other end of the cell.

  My knees shook when I glanced back toward the bench. Ray was sitting next to the straw boss saying something to him, and the straw boss was winking at me.

  I saw the doctor and tried desperately to convince him I was ill enough for the infirmary, but he only gave me a pill and sent me back to the tier.

  I went to a corner of the dayroom and had chills one moment and hot flashes the next when I saw the straw boss grinning and talking to the barn boss. Then they both stared at me.

  I didn’t sleep that night because I knew the next day was general cleanup day, and I was certain to be beaten or raped or both.

  Morning came and after a breakfast I didn’t touch the barn boss issued cleaning materials. I looked around the dayroom and didn’t see anybody paying me any attention, so I went to my cell with soap and a rag to clean the bars.

  Ten minutes later I had my back to the cell door rinsing out the rag in my face bowl. I felt a presence and whirled around. The giant frame of the barn boss filled the cell doorway. He was breathing fast and heavily, and his cruel black face was tense with excitement. The front of his trousers poked out like a midget tent.

  He waved his ham hock hands through the air and croaked, “Now, Lil Bit, I ain’t gonna’ kick ya ass or nuthin’, so don’t go gittin’ scared. They say ya ken sure nuff suck a dick, and ya asshole ain’t no bigger’n a dime. Git them pants down. We gonna’ have a light party.”

  I backed away and said, “That guy lied on me. I’m not funny. Please leave me alone.”

  He put his hand in his back pocket, and I thought for a moment he was going to draw a knife. But he brought out a snuffbox and opened it. It was packed with Vaseline.

  He walked toward me and said hoarsely, “Git them pants down, nigger. I’m gonna grease ya and fuck ya this mornin’.”

  I shouted, “I can’t do anything with you. I don’t have any feeling for you. Go away! Keep your—”

  He grabbed me by the throat and strangled me into silence. He kept putting on the pressure until I was almost out.

  He stuck his wild face close to mine and whispered, “Motherfucker, I’m gittin’ my nuts off, or I’m killin’ ya.”

  He slightly loosened his hands around my throat.

  I choked out, “Please don’t kill me! I’ll do what you want.”

  He made me bend over wide legged and support myself with my hands against the face bowl. While he was sodomizing me I saw the shadows of several others lurking outside my cell.

  No sooner had the barn boss withdrawn from me than the straw boss pushed into me, and when I protested and tried to straighten up to eject his penis, he punched me in the kidneys and spine.

  Fifteen of them were in line and had it timed so that when one of them pulled out of me, the next in line was there to ram into me before I could even catch my breath, much less straighten up.

  Several of them had monstrous dicks, and the pain was horrible, but I couldn’t scream for help. I was afraid they would kill me.

  When it was over I crumpled to the cell floor moaning and feebly dabbing a cold wet rag against my torn, bloody rectum. I went to sick call the next day and was given three stitches. I told the doctor what had happened, but he just shook his head.

  A week later I went to trial, represented by a lawyer Mama paid for, and received one year in the House of Correction. I guess I was lucky. I might have gotten time in the state prison or county jail.

  16

  ENCORE, DOLL FELLA

  I served out my sentence in the laundry at the House, and the time passed quickly and without unusual events. Faithful Lucy and Mama wrote often and sent weekly money orders.

  I was released in 1961 and naturally went to Mama. I went back to Spiegel’s to work, and Lucy was still my best friend.

  The experiences with Mike and the jail sentence had calmed me considerably. I still drank and dolled up in drag occasionally and picked up some guy for a hot moment, but I didn’t go hog wild anymore, and I didn’t get serious about any guy.

  I dated several young female employees at Spiegel’s, but nothing really came of it. I guess I was slowing down at thirty-four, because most of my free time was spent visiting Lucy and at home with Mama—until I had to flee her pressure.

  Mama’s heart and legs seldom gave her trouble now. I guess that was true because I wasn’t doing anything or involved with anyone that threatened her possessive position.

  Mama’s profession was on the wane, but she wasn’t weeping. She was well fixed.

  I have often wondered about and puzzled over why and how the six years between 1961 and 1967 evaporated as if some kindly sorcerer had cast a spell and bewitched my brain to convince me those dull dreary years never existed.

  In February of 1967, I was on a streetcar going south on Cottage Grove Avenue. An old Plymouth I owned was in the shop, and I was eager to buy some wild sport shirts at a shop on Sixty-third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

  At Fifty-first Street, I noticed a new, blue Buick staying abreast of the streetcar, and the driver, whom I couldn’t see, was steadily blowing his horn.

  I didn’t know anybody who owned a blue Buick, so I went back to my newspaper. Several blocks farther south, the streetcar stopped for a traffic signal, and I heard the horn of the Buick blowing even more insistently beside the streetcar.

  I looked down at the street, and I thought my eyes had gone haywire. A tall, powerfully built woman with an African warrior face had stepped out of the blue Buick and was pressing the horn with one hand and gesticulating wildly that I get off the streetcar.

  It was Dorcas! The light turned green, and the streetcar rattled forward. I sat there staring down at the Buick doggedly keeping abreast of the streetcar.

  I half rose to go and stand at the exit door so I could get off at the next stop and let Dorcas pick me up. But I sank back into the seat when I remembered the pure agony when I lost her.

  I was frozen in my seat when the car reached the Fifty-eighth Street stop. And the persistent blue Buick wouldn’t go away with its tantalizing horn.

  At the Sixty-first Street stop, I tore myself loose from the seat and rushed to the street. Dorcas pulled to the curb, and I walked a palpitative thousand miles to the Buick.

  I stuck my head in the window and said, “Hello, Mrs. Duncan.”

  She frowned and said, “Hi, Doll Fella. I am no longer Mrs. Duncan. Please get in.”

  I got in, and after two minutes in each other’s presence we knew there was still magically sweet voltage between us.

  And after we lunched, we went to Washington Park and parked in the same spot we had that first day we met. Just like then, we
sat there excited and thrilled to find each other until darkness fell.

  I had forgotten the jazzy sport shirts in the hypnosis of joy. And on the El train going to the Westside, I was deliciously aware of a posthypnotic suggestion that I had promised to come and stay at the funeral home with Dorcas. Her father had passed two weeks before, and she was lonely and needed my help with the business.

  I broke the news to Mama, and she had the first trouble with her heart and legs that she had suffered in years.

  I wasn’t able to leave immediately as I had planned. It took a couple of days of Mama’s doctor’s placebos and soothing reassurances from me before I could move to the funeral home.

  Dorcas and I slept in separate bedrooms, and she made no sexual demands. I sexed her on occasion, but always I had to visualize a homosexual experience from the past to perform successfully.

  I kept Mama placated by frequent visits and even more telephone calls. I learned a great deal about the mortuary business and lost my squeamishness of the dead.

  Time passed rapidly in the hectic business environment of the mortuary, and for a year I had not dated a guy.

  I visited Mama in April of 1968, and she shot me through hot emotional grease about Dorcas and just unhinged me and destroyed my fine balance.

  I left Mama and hit the sauce and wound up brutalized by a fruit hustler call Big Lovell. I was sick with shame and left Dorcas because I didn’t want to hurt her further.

  The black rebellion exploded in riot and flames on the Westside. I went back to Mama until order was restored and danger no longer threatened her.

  She didn’t know that I was determined to escape the neurotic web she had spun around me through all the long years. A week after the black rebellion ended, I sat down beside Mama on the front-room sofa.

  I said, “Mama, I’m going to get myself a place to stay now that I know you will be all right.”

  She looked puzzled and said, “Sweet Pea, why do you need a place to stay when you have a home right here with me?”