Pimp (37 page)

At the end of the fourth month my skull was shaking on my shoulders like I had palsy. A con on the row blew his top one night around midnight. He woke up the whole cell house. At first he was cursing God and his mother. The screws brought him past my cell.

In my state the sight of him almost took me into madness. He was buck naked and jabbering a weird madman’s language through a foamy jib. It was like the talking in tongues Holy Rollers do. He was jacking-off his stiff swipe with both hands. I gnawed into my pillow like the runt to keep from screaming.

The next day I put in a request to see the Nazi. Nothing happened. A week later I was sitting on the John with my head between my knees. I heard the morning line moving to breakfast. The line had stalled for a moment right outside my cell door.

I looked up into a pair of strange almost orange eyes sunk into an old horribly scarred face. It was Leroy. I had stolen Chris from him many years ago. He still remembered me. He stared at me and smiled crookedly as the line moved out.

I got my screw to check his rap sheet. The screw gave me the whole rundown. Since nineteen-forty Leroy had been arrested more than a hundred times for common drunk. He had also been committed to mental hospitals twice. I was forty-two. I was twenty when I stole Chris from him. I asked the screw to pull strings to send him to another cell house. I gave him a rundown on the Chris steal and how weak Leroy had been for her. The screw told me he couldn’t cut it.

Leroy was doing only five days for drunk. Leroy had to stay in the cell house. I wondered how Leroy would try for revenge. I had to be careful in the morning for the next five days. I had to keep my feet and legs away from the cell door. Leroy might score for a shiv and try to hack something off when he passed my cell. I worried all day about what he would do. Could he somehow get gasoline and torch me?

That night I heard the voice for the first time. The lights were out. The cell house was quiet. The voice seemed to be coming through a tiny grille at the head of the cot.

A light always burned in the breezeway behind the grille. The pipes for all the plumbing for the cells were there. I got down on my hands and knees and looked through the grille’s tiny holes. I couldn’t see anybody.

I got back on the cot. The voice was louder and clearer. It sounded friendly and sweet like a woman consoling a friend. I wondered if cons on one of the tiers above me were clowning with each other.

I heard my name in the flow of chatter. I got back down and listened at the grille. A light flooded the corner. It was the screw. I spun around on my knees facing him. The light was in my eyes. He said, “What the hell are you doing?”

I said, “Officer, I heard a voice. I thought someone was working back there.”

He said, “Oh, you poor bastard. You won’t pull this bit. You’re going nuts ‘Slim.’ Now stop that nonsense and get in that cot and stay there.”

The cellhouse lights woke me up. My first thought was Leroy. I got up and sat on the cot. Then I thought about the voice. I wasn’t sure now. Maybe it had been a dream.

I wondered whether I should ask the screw about it. One thing for sure, dream or not, I didn’t want to go nuts. My mind hooked on to what I’d heard the old con philosopher say about that screen in the skull. I remembered what the books at federal prison said about voices and even people that only existed inside a joker’s skull.

I thought, “After this when I get the first sign of a sneaky worry, thought or idea, I’ll fight it out of my skull.”

Maybe I wasn’t dreaming when I heard that voice. If I hear it again I’ll have some protection. I’ll keep a strong sane voice inside to fight off anything screwy from going on.

Every moment I’ll stand guard over my thoughts until I get out of here. I can do it. I just have to train that guard. He’s got to be slick enough not to let trouble by him. I’ll make him shout down the phony voices. He’ll know they’re not real right away.

I got up and went to the face bowl. I heard the rumbling feet of the cons coming off the tiers. I was washing my face. I heard a series of sliding bumps on the floor behind me. It was like several newsboys all throwing your paper on the porch in rotation. Then I smelled it. I turned toward the door. I squinted through the soap on my eyelids. I had been bombed with crap.

It was oozing off the wall. The solid stuff had rolled to my feet.
Pieces of loosely rolled newspaper were the casings. Cons were passing my door snickering. I felt dizzy. A big lead balloon started inflating inside my chest. I remembered the inside guard. He was new and late on the job. I puked.

I shouted over and over, “Watch out now, it’s only crap, it’s only crap. It’s just crap. Watch out, it can’t hurt you. It’s only stinking crap.”

A screw stood at the cell door twitching his nose. He was screaming, “Shut Up!”

He opened the cell. I got a bucket of hot water and a scrub brush. I cleaned the cell. The screw asked me who fouled my nest. I told him I didn’t know.

My screw came to see me at noon. He told me how Leroy had enlisted the crap-bombers. Leroy told them I had put the finger on him years ago when he got the bit for the Papa Tony beating. My screw dropped the truth around the cell house. All the bombers were down on Leroy. They dared him to bother me again. I was safe from Leroy. I didn’t mourn when Leroy finished his five-day bit. It was the end of my sixth month. I beat down worry, voices, and countless thoughts of suicide with the skull-guard plan.

A friend of Mama’s sent me a telegram. Mama had been stricken. The hospital doctors had given her up. Then she bounced back. She was very sick now, but still alive. The telegram gave my skull gimmick a tough test.

I had a very sad day around the middle of the seventh month. A booster from New York busted on his second day in town was on the tier above me. A con on my row several cells down called me one night to borrow a book. A moment later I heard my name called from up above. He came down next morning and rapped to me. His job was in the cell house.

The booster asked me if I were the Iceberg who was a friend of Party Time. I told him yes. He didn’t say anything for awhile. Finally he told me Party had often spoken of me as the kid he once hustled with who grew up to be Iceberg the pimp.

He told me Party had copped the beautiful girlfriend of a dope dealer when he got a bit. Party turned her out. The dope dealer did his bit. The broad tried to cut Party loose to go back to a life of ease.

Party went gorilla on her. He broke her arm. Two months later Party copped some H. He didn’t know his connection was a pal of the dealer who got the bit. It was H all right mixed with flakes of battery acid. I didn’t sleep that night.

I had come to a decision in that awful cell. I was through with pimping and drugs. I got insight that perhaps I could never have hoped to get outside. I couldn’t have awakened if I had been serving a normal bit. After I got the mental game down pat I could see the terrible pattern of my life.

Mama’s condition and my guilty conscience had a lot to do with my decision. Perhaps my age and loss of youth played their parts. I had found out that pimping is for young men, the stupid kind.

I had spent more than half a lifetime in a worthless, dangerous profession. If I had stayed in school, in eight years of study I could have been an M.D. or lawyer. Now here I was, slick but not smart, in a cell. I was past forty with counterfeit glory in my past, and no marketable training, no future. I had been a bigger sucker than a square mark. All he loses is scratch. I had joined a club that suckered me behind bars five times.

A good pimp has to use great pressure. It’s always in the cards that one day that pressure will backfire. Then he will be the victim. I was weary of clutching quicksilver whores and the joints.

I was at the end of the ninth month of the bit. I got a front office interview. I was contesting my discharge date. I was still down for an eleven month bit.

An agent of the joint had been in the arresting group. I spent thirty days in county jail before the transfer to the joint to finish out the year. I knew little or nothing about law. I was told at the interview I had to do eleven months. I wasn’t afraid I’d crack up serving the extra month. By this time I had perfect control of my skull.

Mama might die in California at any time. I had to get to her before she died. I had to convince her I loved her, that I appreciated her as a mother. That she and not whore-catching was more important to me. I had to get there as much for myself as for her.

I lay in that cell for two weeks. I wrote a paper based on what I believed were the legal grounds for my release at the expiration of ten months. It had subtle muscle in it too. I memorized the paper. I rehearsed it in the cell. Finally I felt I had the necessary dramatic inflection and fluid delivery. It was two days before the end of the tenth month. I was called in two weeks after I had requested the second interview.

I must have looked like a scarecrow as I stood before him. I was bearded, filthy, and ragged. He was immaculate seated behind his gleaming desk. He had a contemptuous look on his face.

I said, “Sir, I realize that the urgent press of your duties has perhaps contributed to your neglect of my urgent request for an interview. I have come here today to discuss the vital issue of my legal discharge date.

“Wild rumors are circulating to the effect that you are not a fair man, that you are a bigot, who hates Negroes. I discounted them immediately when I heard them. I am almost dogmatic in my belief that a man of your civic stature and intellect could ill afford or embrace base prejudice.

“In the spirit of fair play, I’m going to be brutally frank. If I am not released the day after tomorrow, a certain agent of mine here in the city is going to set in motion a process that will not only free me, but will possibly in addition throw a revealing spotlight on certain not too legal, not too pleasant activities carried on daily behind these walls.

“I have been caged here like an animal for almost ten months. Like an animal, my sensitivity of seeing and hearing has been enhanced. I only want what is legally mine. My contention is that if your Captain of guards, who is legally your agent, had arrested me and confined me on such an unlikely place as the moon for thirty days, technically and
legally I would be in the custody of this institution. Sir, the point is unassailable. Frankly I don’t doubt that my release will occur on legal schedule. Thank you, Sir, for the interview.”

The contempt had drained out of his face. I convinced him I wasn’t running a bluff. His eyes told me he couldn’t risk it. After all, surely he knew how easy it was to get contraband in and out of the rotten joint. Getting a kite to an agent would be child’s play. I didn’t sleep that night. The next day I got a discharge notice. I would be released on legal schedule.

I
had amazed cons and guards alike, I had survived it. I was getting out in twenty-four hours. I was almost forty-three sitting in a cell.

I thought, “I have been in a deadly trap. Have I really escaped it? Does fate have grimmer traps set? Can I learn to be proud of my black skin? Can I adjust to the stark reality that black people in my lifetime had little chance to escape the barbed-wire stockade in the white man’s world?”

Only time and the imponderables inside me would answer the questions.

I had no one except Mama. They dressed me out. My clothes flopped around on my skeletal frame. I still hadn’t told them how I had escaped. Cons cheered me as I shuffled toward freedom. They knew how I had suffered and what the awful odds had been that I wouldn’t have made it.

A friend of Mama’s had sent me my fare. As the plane flew over the sea of neon, I looked down at the city where I had come so many years ago in search of an empty lonesome dream.

I thought of Henry and the sound of that pressing machine. Of Mama when she was young and pretty. How wonderful it had been back there in Rockford. She would come into my room at bedtime,
a tender ghost, and tuck me in warmly and kiss me goodnight. It seemed a long time before I finally got to her.

When I walked into her room, death was there in her tiny gray face. Her eyes brightened and flashed a mother’s deathless love. Her embrace was firm and sure. My coming to her had been like a miracle. It was the magic that gave her strength.

She clutched life for an added six months. I never left the house for those six months. We would lie side by side on twin beds and talk far into the night. She made me promise that I would use the rest of my life in a good way. She told me I should get married and have children.

I tried hard to make up for all those years I had neglected her. It’s hard to square an emotional debt. That last sad day she looked up into my eyes from the hospital bed.

In a voice I could scarcely hear through her parched lips, she whispered, “Forgive me Son, forgive me. Mama didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

I stood there watching her last tears rolling down her dead cheeks from the blank eyes. I crushed her to me.

I tried to get my final plea past death’s grim shield, “Oh Mama, nothing has been your fault, believe me, nothing. If you are foolish enough to think so, then I forgive you.”

I staggered blindly from the hospital. I went to the parking lot. I fell across the car hood and cried my heart out. I stopped crying. I thought Mama had really gotten in the last word this time.

These stinking whores would have gotten a huge charge if they could have seen old Iceberg out there wailing like a sucker because his old lady was dead.

I
am lying in the quiet dawn. I am writing this last chapter for the publisher.

I am thinking, “How did a character like me, who for most of his life had devoted himself to the vilest career, ever square up? By all the odds, I should have ended a broken, diseased shell, or died in a lonely prison cell.”

I guess three of the very important reasons are lying asleep in the bedroom across the hall. I can see their peaceful, happy faces. They don’t know how hard and often discouraging it is for me to earn a living for them in the square world.