Oscar and I shared a double bunk cell. I had the bottom bunk. It was a chilling sight at night when the dummy should have been at home to look up from a book and see him out there on the tier motionless, staring up at Oscar in his bunk reading the Bible.
When I was sure that the cold, luminous, green eyes had slipped away for the night, I would crack, “Oscar, my man, I like you. Will you take some good advice from a friend? I am telling you Pal, it’s driving the dummy off his rocker to see you reading that Bible. Pal, why in the Hell don’t you stop reading it for your own good?”
That square jerk would go on reading, he hadn’t even noticed the dummy’s visit.
He would say, “I know you are my friend and I appreciate your advice, but I can’t take it. Don’t worry about me. Jesus will protect me.”
Mama was writing at least once a week. Every month she visited me. On her last visit, without worrying her too much, I suggested it would be a good idea to put in a long-distance call to the Warden once a week just so he would know somebody out there loved me and wanted me to stay healthy.
She was looking fine and had saved her money. She had opened a beauty shop. She told me when I came up for parole she was sure a friend of hers would give me a job. At night after her visits I would lie sleepless all night mentally recapping our sad lives. I could still remember too, every mole and crease in Henry’s face.
One night after one of her visits, the radio loud speaker on the cell house wall blared out “Spring Time in the Rockies.” I tried to keep my crying a secret from Oscar, but he heard me. He marked off a chapter in the Bible for me to read, but with the dummy around, I wasn’t about to do something stupid like that.
The dummy put one over on Jesus and busted Oscar. We had almost finished mopping the flag when the cell house runner brought me two wieners from the kitchen. A pal had sent them.
I gave Oscar one. He stuck it inside his shirt I stood my mop against the wall and ducked into an empty cell and wolfed mine down.
We had finished mopping and were at the supply closet putting our mops and buckets away. Oscar was nibbling slowly on his wiener like he was safe and sound at the “Last Supper.”
I saw the giant shadow glue itself against the wall next to the closet door. I looked through the trap door in the corner of my eye. The universe reeled.
It was the dummy. He saw the piece of wiener in Oscar’s hand. The dummy’s green eyes were oscillating.
That deadly cane razored through the air and cut a slice of hair and bloody flesh from the side of Oscar’s head.
The scarlet glob was hanging by a slimy thread of flesh dangling like an awful earring near the tip of his ear lobe. Oscar’s eyes walled toward the back of his head as he moaned and slipped to the flag. From the grey, whitish core of the wound spouts of blood pulsed out.
The dummy just stood there looking down at the carnage. His green eyes were twinkling in excitement. I had seen him every day for eight months. I had never seen him smile. He was smiling now like he was watching two cute kittens frolicking. I stooped to help Oscar. I felt feathery puffs of air against my cheek. The cane was screaming. The dummy was furiously waggling it beside my head. It was screaming, “Get out!”
I got. I lay in my cell wondering if the dummy had second thoughts and would try for two. I heard the voices of the hospital orderlies on the flag taking Oscar away.
I remembered the murderous force of the blow the dummy had struck. I remembered that pleased look on his face. I knew from con grape-vine that he was from Alabama. I knew now it hadn’t been Oscar’s Bible that had put the dummy’s balls in the fire. The dummy knew about that crippled Irish girl.
Oscar went from the hospital into the hole for fifteen days. The charges, “possession of contraband food” and “physical aggression against an officer.” I was there and the only aggression on Oscar’s part was the natural resistance of his flesh and bone to that steel cane.
The parole board met in the joint every month to consider applications. Every con, when he had served to within several months of his minimum, started dreaming of the street and that upcoming parole consideration.
Oscar was in the hole and I missed his company. He was a square, but a nice one with lots of wry wit. Several cons slightly older than I came in on transfer from the big joint. They claimed to be “mack” men.
In bad weather, when there was no yard recreation, I would join them at a table on the flag. I didn’t talk much. I usually listened. I was fascinated by the yarns they spun about their pimping ability. They had a lot of bullshit, and I was stealing as much as I could from them to use when I got out.
I would go back to my cell excited. I would pretend I had a whore before me. I would stand there in the cell and pimp up a storm. I didn’t know that the crap I was rehearsing wouldn’t get a quarter in the street.
Oscar came out of the hole and was put into an isolation cell on the top tier of the cell house. I didn’t see him come in so I wasn’t prepared when I got a chance to go up there.
When I got to the cell with his number in the slot, a skinny joker was peeing in his bucket with his back to me. He was in a laughing fit. I checked the number in the slot again. It was Oscar’s number all right.
I pulled the key to the supply closet across the bars of the cell door. The skeleton jumped and spun around facing me. His eyes were wild and vacant. It was Oscar. Only that livid bald scar on the side of his head made me sure.
He didn’t seem to remember me so I said, “How are you, Pal? I knew they couldn’t stop a stepper.”
He just stood there, his dingus flopping from his open fly.
I said, “Jack, you are going to give your bright future the flu if you don’t get it out of the draft.”
He ignored my words, and then from the very bottom of his throat I could hear a kind of eerie high pitched humming or keening, like maybe the mating call of a werewolf. I was beginning to worry about him. I was standing there trying to figure something to say to get through to him. He hadn’t been out of the hole for more than two hours. Maybe some loose circuit would jar him back to contact.
I knew he had been destroyed when he gave me a sly look and went to the back of his cell. He picked up his bucket and thrust his hand into it.
He brought out a fist full of crap. He scraped the crap from his right palm into the rigid upturned left palm.
Using his left palm as a kind of palette, he dipped into the crap with his right index finger and started to finger paint on the cell wall.
I just stood there in shock. Finally, he stopped, snapped to attention, saluted me and stuck his chest out proudly and pointed a crappy finger at his art on the wall.
There was an idiot’s look of triumph on his face like he had finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
I gave up on him. I went downstairs and told the cell house screw.
The next day they shipped Oscar to the funny farm where perhaps he is today, thirty years later.
My time went fast after the eighth month. I had gone before the parole board and I was waiting for my pink slip. A white one meant denial and a new date for consideration.
I saw the mail clerk when he shoved it through the bars of my cell. I leaped up and grabbed the small brown envelope. My hands shook so badly, it took seconds to rip it open. It was pink! I banged my fists against the steel wall of my cell. I was so happy I couldn’t feel pain.
They dressed me out in a cheap glen-plaid suit. I would have been thrilled to have left that den of pressure in tar and feathers. On the way out I had to face the bull.
When I walked into his office he said, “Well Snowball, you must have had your rabbit’s foot. So long, see you in a couple of weeks.”
I wasn’t out yet so I gave him the same uncle smile going out that I gave him coming in.
When I walked out of the joint the fresh air was like a blast of oxygen. It made me woozy. I turned and looked back at the joint. The dummy was standing at the chapel window staring at me, but for once that
steel cane wasn’t talking to me.
3
SALTY TRIP WITH PEPPER
First thing back in Milwaukee, I reported to my parole officer, a Mr. Rand, I think. After asking a thousand questions and filling out a mountain of papers he gave me an I.Q. test. When he computed my score his sea-blue eyes saucered in surprise.
He couldn’t understand how a boy with a score of one-hundred and seventy-five could do a stupid thing like peddling a girl’s ass on the sidewalk.
If that I.Q. test had been on the basis of the half-baked criminal, pimping theories that I had picked up in the joint at that table from those Chili pimps that were churning in my mind, and that I was so eager to try, my score would have been zero.
I was eighteen now, six feet two inches tall, slender, sweet, and stupid. My maroon eyes were deeply set, dreamy. My shoulders were broad and my waist as narrow as a girl’s.
I was going to be a heart breaker all right. All I needed was the threads and a whore.
Mama’s small, lucrative beauty shop was on the main drag. Poor Mama, she was doomed I guess to inadvertently set up my disasters.
I had started on my job delivering for the drugstore owned by the friend of my Mama’s who had hired me to satisfy the parole condition of a job upon release.
As fate would have it, Mama’s shop and the drugstore were in the same building. Mama and I lived in an apartment over the storefronts.
Mama called me in from the sidewalk one day about three months after I had gotten parole. She wanted me to meet one of her customers who was getting her eyebrows arched. I walked through the pungent odors rising from the hot pressing combs pulling through the kinky hair of several customers, to the rear of the shop.
There she was, flashy as a Christmas tree, sitting before a mirror at a dressing table with her back to me. Mama stopped plucking at her brows as she introduced us, “Mrs. Ibbetts, this is my son Bobby.”
Like a yellow cat hypnotizing a bird, she sat there motionless, her green eyes smoky, as she stared at me through the mirror.
Then the velvet purring voice undulated toward me, she said, “Oh Bobby, I have heard so much about you. It’s so exciting to meet you, but please call me Pepper, everyone does.”
I don’t know what excited me more as I stood there, her raw sensuality or the blazing rocks on her tapered fingers that I was sure hadn’t come from Kresges. I mumbled something like I had to go back to the drug store to work, and I would see her around.
Later I saw her slide into her sleek Caddie convertible, her white silk dress riding up exposing the satin sheen of her banana yellow thighs. As she gunned away from the curb, she turned deliberately and gave me a full dose of those hot green eyes. She was signing our deal.
I quizzed around and got the background on her. She was twentyfive, an ex-whore who had worked the jazziest houses on the Eastern Seaboard. A wealthy white fence and gambler had tricked with her out there, and it had gotten so good to him that he crossed her pimp into a five-year bit and squared her up.
Three days later, a half hour before closing, an order came in for a case of Mums. The address was in the plush Height’s, miles from the store.
I made the trip on a bicycle. She answered the door wearing only a pair of white lace step-ins. My erection was hard and instant.
It was a fabulous pad, and the lights were soft and blue. The old man wouldn’t be back for a week.
I was just a hep punk, I wasn’t in her league, but one of my greatest assets has always been my open mind. That freak bitch cajoled and persuaded me to do everything in the sexual book, and a number of things not even listed.
What a thrill for a dog like her to turn out a tender fool like me. She was a hell of a teacher all right, and what a performer. If Pepper had lived in the old Biblical city of Sodom the citizen’s would have stoned her to death.
She nibbled and sucked hundreds of tingling bruises on every square inch of my body. Fair exchange, as the old saw goes, is never robbery.
It took me a week to get the stench of her piss out of my hair. She sure had been pimped on hard back East. She hated men, and she was taking her revenge on me.
She had taught me to snort girl, and almost always when I came to her pad, there would be thin sparkling rows of crystal cocaine on the glass top of the cocktail table.
We would snort it through alabaster horns and then in the mirrored bedroom we made circus love until our nerve ends shrieked.
Pepper and that pure cocaine would have made a freak out of a Priest. She had sure put me on a fast track.
I couldn’t know at the time that at the end of the line stood the grim State Penitentiary.
I was green all right and twice as soft and Pepper knew it. Here was a hardened ex-whore who knew all the crosses, all the answers, who handled lots of scratch and wasn’t laying a red penny on me.
The dazzling edge on our orgies was dulling for me, but I was flipping Pepper with the techniques she had taught me. I knew all the buttons to push for her, and she burned hotter than ever for her little puppy.
No wonder, I was freaking for free, those Eastern pimps had charged her a fortune.
I tried one night to get a C note from her for a suit. I knew I had really come on fine in the bed. She had almost climbed the walls in her passion.
“Sugar,” I said, “I saw a wild vine for a bill downtown. If you laid the scratch on me, I could cop tomorrow.”
She slitted her green eyes and laughed in my face, and said, “Now listen Lil’ Puppy, I don’t give men money. I take it from them, and besides, as sweet as you are to this pussy, you don’t need a suit. I like you as you are, with no clothes on at all.”
I was a rank greenhorn, sure, but her cold turn down of my plea for the C note was bitchy cute, and I was a salty sucker, so I reacted like any stupid would-be pimp who had been Georgied.
I had fouled up basic business. I had led with my dick instead of my mitt.
I reached down and slapped her hard against the side of her face. It sounded like a pistol shot. On impact a thrill shot through me. I should have slugged her with a baseball bat.
The bitch uncoiled from that bed like a striking yellow cobra, hooked her arms around my waist and sank her razor sharp teeth into my navel.
The shock paralyzed me. I fell on my back across the bed moaning in pain. I could feel blood rolling from the wound down toward my crotch, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move.
Pepper was sure a strange twisted broad. She was breathing hard now, but not in rage. The violence, the blood, had turned her on.
She was gently caressing me as she licked, with a feathery tongue, the oozing wound on my belly. She had never been so tenderly efficient as she took me on a beautiful “trip around the Universe.”
The funny thing was, that throbbing awful pain some how became a part of, melted into the joy of the feathery tongue, the thrill of the thing that Pepper was doing to me.
I guess Freud was right. If it thrills you to give pain, you can get your jollies taking it.
When I left Pepper, I was sapped. I felt like an old man. My mood was as bleak and cheerless as the gray dawn I cycled through.
When I got home and looked into the mirror, a death’s head stared back at me. That vampire bitch was sucking my life’s blood all right. I also knew that crystal cocaine wasn’t exactly a health tonic.
Pepper was too fast, too slick for me. I had to make her shit or get off the pot.
I made the skeleton in the mirror a solemn vow that before the week was out I would in some way get Weeping Shorty, a pimp about fifty-five who, while a gorilla pimp, was the best pimp in town to pull my coat to give me a plan for putting a ring in Pepper’s nose.
Before I got busted, I had seen him at Jimmy’s joint. He had looked horrible then, and now less than a year and a half later he looked like a breathing corpse.
Hoss was his Boss. He had chippied around and gotten hooked. It was Friday, almost midnight when I found him.
He looked a
t me and made that clacking sound against the roof of his mouth with his tongue. You know, that mischievous, weirdly joyful sound that a young kid makes the instant before he rams a hat pin into your ear drum.
Then he said, “Well kiss my dead mammy’s ass, if it ain’t Macking Youngblood. The whore’s pet and the pimp’s fret.”
The junkie bastard was jeffing on me, lashing me with contempt and scorn. Old pimps always know when a youngster with a yen for the pimp game is desperate for advice.
After all, they remember when they started and what a bitch it was just to learn the million questions. The answers would come slowly, from heart breaking trial and error, from the ass kissing of the few who had solved the riddle, who pimped by the book.
The cleverest pimp could give a thousand years and never come close to all the answers.
Weeping Shorty was an old man, and he had gotten past the questions and had worked out a few answers, but even so he knew a thousand times more than I did. So, I fought for control, I couldn’t show anger. If I did he would cut me loose.
We had been standing under the awning of a vacant storefront. He pulled me with a jerk of his head, I followed him to a big shabby Buick. It was parked at an intersection in a cheap-trick district.
When we got inside the Buick I understood why he had parked it there. He could watch and keep tabs on his stable of scrawny, junkie whores working the four corners of the intersection.
He sat under the wheel not saying anything. His eyes straight ahead. I had kissed his ass for a half hour and now he was freezing up. I thought of the tiny pile of cocaine wrapped in tinfoil under my instep that I had filched from Pepper. I fished it out and held it in my hand. Perhaps the cocaine would open him up.
I turned to him and said, “Weeping, do you want a light snort of girl?”
He stiffened like a butcher knife had been run into his back. He looked at the wad of tinfoil in my palm and snatched it and in the same motion hurled it through the window on his side.
His top was blown, he shouted, “Nigger, ain’t you got no sense? You trying to go back to the joint and blow my wheels?”