The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim

by Iceberg Slim

  Our secret underground points of rendezvous were at the drugstore soda fountain where we first met, Lapham Park, the balcony of the Miller movie house downtown and especially every school morning at that enchanted place, the northwest corner of Third and Galena streets.

  The spring, summer and fall of that unforgettable year of the goddess went swiftly. It was in the first week of December that the cream of the giddy dream started to sour. I had hauled my lovesick young square ass out of a downtown jewelry store, where on layaway reposed a gleaming gold compact afire with simulated rubies and diamonds. The price was an astronomical forty dollars, and I had been buying it for six months with a shine box in the streets at five cents a shine. But what the hell, how often in a lifetime does a guy sweetheart around with a goddess?

  I was walking toward the Miller movie house when I saw the goddess come to the sidewalk clinging amorously to the arm of a tall, curly-haired, half-white guy and get into a shiny Model A Ford. They kissed deeply, long and hard before speeding away.

  I leaned weakly against a lamppost with my mouth open. I knew the guy’s father was a big shot with a coveted steady position as chief technician of toilet brushes and mops at City Hall. The goddess had told me that the young guy was adored by Cordelia, and I knew he had been calling on the goddess at home for several months. But the goddess had assured me that she really had no interest in him at all.

  I had understood. It was like the guy was a cover so Cordelia wouldn’t get wise that the goddess and I were sweethearting around. She had lied to me, and I had the biggest headache there ever was as I staggered home.

  Everything was lies, quarrels and hurt after that, and on Christmas Eve we met for the last time as children at the drugstore. Christ! She was so beautiful and innocent looking in her hooded white wool coat and scarlet boots. I just sat there gazing at her like a simpleton for a long time.

  She sat silently sipping a cup of Boston coffee. Finally, I reached into the pocket of my tattered lumber jacket and withdrew the jeweled compact and gently placed it in her lap and wished her a Merry Christmas. She frowned and hefted the gold-foiled package in a delicate palm.

  She slipped it back into my pocket and said softly, “It feels awfully expensive. You really shouldn’t have. I can’t take it.”

  I said idiotically, “You gotta take it. I ain’t got nobody else to give it to.”

  She shook her head and said firmly, “I am so sorry. Try not to hate me and please forgive me, but I have to get married.”

  I was speechless with shock and despair. She stood up misty eyed and squeezed my hands.

  I choked out, “But you ain’t got to do nothing like that.”

  Her bottom lip trembled and without sound her lips said, “I’m pregnant.”

  I jumped from the stool and seized her arms and shouted, “You can’t be! I’ve never done it to you!”

  She burst into tears and pulled herself free and ran into the night. I’ll never forget that Christmas Eve, how in my juvenile pedestal reverence for the goddess I sat there long after she had gone, unable to cope with the fact that the curly-haired guy had indeed fucked my sacrosanct goddess. And how, in my agony, I babbled my sorrow and hatred for her and every girl I’d ever known and ever would know.

  I sat on the stool until the owner tapped me on the shoulder at closing time. The next several months were a horror of excruciating goddess withdrawal agony. One spring day, when she was eight months gone, I saw her walking into a store with Curly Top. She was so bloated, disfigured and deformed that I ran home and wept in the attic for hours.

  That night I felt myself encased in rage and fury so poisonous that I went searching for him with the ancient .22 rifle that Giggling George had given me. Finally I spotted his car outside Cordelia’s house. I crept to the side of it and saw him playing the grand piano with his head thrown back in song. I put the back of his head in the rifle sights and was squeezing the trigger when for some reason I glanced away at the goddess. She was seated on the sofa looking at him so worshipfully and with so much helplessly pure love that I lowered the gun and left.

  A broken neck, a cracked skull can heal and so also can a broken heart, I discovered. I got my first penitentiary bit about two years after that Christmas Eve in the drugstore. I got out and did another bit in the state of Wisconsin before I got wise and left town.

  I had an obsession to be a pimp. I became one, and a hard and brutal one at that. But curiously, vivid memories of the goddess could always be evoked by the faintest trace of scented smoke in some woman’s voice or perhaps sunlight exploding blue light in a mane of jet hair.

  Twenty-five years passed, and I was on the highway to Milwaukee for a visit. I got there at night and went to several homes and bars to shuck and jive with acquaintances and old buddies I hadn’t seen in a generation. I didn’t ask about her at all. Toward daybreak, I found myself at the bar in an after-hours spot owned by a guy I had grown up with.

  It was crowded and dim. I was talking to a broad who had lived next door to me in our kid days when I glanced in the back bar mirror and saw an elderly gray-haired woman with a deeply seamed yellow face filching a bill from the shirt pocket of a drunk passed out at a table behind me.

  She came away and went to the end of the bar and threw a dollar bill on the counter. She stood there weaving and shouting for Old Taylor. My heart lost rhythm at the phantom flicker of moonlight in the whiskey-stained voice. I stared at her crepey, wattled throat as she flung her head back and hurled the double shot down her gullet.

  She turned and went out the door, and I considered the possibility that the time and whiskey-hacked old crone of seventy could be . . . But no, it just wasn’t possible. After all, she could be at most forty. And besides, she had been heartbreakingly beautiful, protected, cultured and with every advantage. She could never get ugly and debauched in a million years, I thought, as I tossed the whole ridiculous idea out of mind and gave my most seductive pimp wink to the bosomy young fox smiling at me down the bar.

  Two hours later I was bored, nauseous with the prattle of the fox and my old hometown. I slapped palms all around and stepped out into the bright morning sunshine. I passed the old crone talking to an elderly white man carrying a lunch pail. I wondered as I walked to my car if the old lady was optimistic enough to think she could find a buyer for her decomposed charms.

  I was running the engine a bit before moving away when I saw the old broad moving down the sidewalk toward me. I wanted to run away to avoid her, but there was something familiar and eerie about the rhythmic, swaying, girlish heat in the walk of such an apparently old woman.

  She stuck her head through the open window and grinned a jagged Halloween pumpkin smile and cackled, “How about a lift to Walnut Street, big shot?”

  I studied every wrecked plane of the yellow fright mask. I saw a faint lance of green fire in the bloodshot almond eyes, and saw how the tip of the still delicate nose tilted up and how the gray-riddled black hair still leaped away from the temples in great, curly, tumultuous waves. And because I was hurting like hell to see her like that, I had to get away from the sight of her.

  I said gently, “I’m sorry, lady, but I’m not going in that direction.”

  She frowned and said impatiently, “Well, how about spending a fin with me for a half-and-half?”

  I shook my head and said, “I’m not in the mood, lady. Why the hell don’t you retire and get off the track?”

  She stepped back and shouted, “You black motherfucker, mind your own business. Who the fuck . . .”

  I pulled away and headed for the highway. I passed the enchanted corner at Third and Galena and remembered a lovely young girl and how the sun ignited tiny blue bonfires in her hair. And I was glad I had kept my cool and not crushed her back there with my masterworks of creative pimp profanity. For even though brute life had hacked her hideous, she was still for me, and always will be, . . . a goddess.

  VIGNETTES: CONQUEROR JACKSON

  He was blue-bl
ack, squat and powerfully muscled, and visaged in the craggy image of a caveman. He was likable and charming enough when his luck was funky to get an extra fin from icy-hearted pawnbrokers and a buck and a half of my last deuce. He should have been an entertainer, but he literally burst his heartstrings to make a career of, in his words, “taking good money from bad girls.” He was regarded as a colorful joke, a sentimental clown by other pimps because Conqueror Jackson invariably fell in love with his girls, and he thought the pimp game was a fuck-in.

  In fact, his moniker was hung on him by contemptuous pimps because of Jackson’s almost psychotic sexual delusion (perhaps shared by millions of studs in much milder degree) that he was some kind of gladiator in the sex act, capable of inflicting an unprecedented orgasmic impression on adversary cunt and vanquishing it, conquering it, enslaving it with his heroic, invincible dick.

  But his greatest flaw and handicap as a pimp was a sympathy and admiration for all women; he lacked the ruthlessness and deep hatred for women that all career pimps must have. He was just too soft a guy deep inside to play the hard pimp game.

  I went to his pad in Chicago to snort some cocaine when we were twenty-two. He had one young mahogany-colored three-way whore who had freaked his nose wide open. And sharing Jackson’s pad was a tall, champagne-toned young pimp fresh out of the penitentiary and sleek and pretty and deadly as a coral snake. I knew the punk was rank, but Jackson was crazy about him so I stayed on the dummy.

  The predictable happened, and a month later Conqueror Jackson burst into my pad at the Pershing Hotel on Cottage Grove sobbing and snotting, “That dirty motherfucker stole my girl and all my furniture and clothes.”

  Jackson roared, “I took that shit-colored double-crosser in and fed him and he crossed me. Hear me, Jim, it’s square business. I’m gonna find that lousy nigger and run him back up his mammy’s ass. I ain’t gonna croak him for stealing the bitch and my stuff, but for principle, Jim, for principle.”

  I bombarded him with street logic and begged him to recognize the hard pimp law of “cop and blow”; somebody has to lose when somebody wins. But he wouldn’t hold still and he split, spitting fire, thunder and murder. A week later he trapped the young whore-thief in a booth in a Chinese restaurant and smashed the dude’s neck with his hands. Jackson did a fin in the joint for manslaughter. He got out and for a while copped the bread for his grits and greens ripping off suckers with a short con mob.

  One salubrious summer afternoon I paused to watch the Conqueror toss the broads (manipulating the cards in three-card Monte) under the Forty-seventh Street El tracks for a gargantuan, young, mean-faced black guy. Jackson’s cap man (confederate) heckled and persuaded the mark to blow close to a C note to Jackson with such violent enthusiasm that the mark woke up. He flexed his fortress of muscles and knocked the cap man into a coma, and demanded his lost break back from Jackson, who courageously instructed the colossus to do something relatively difficult for him to do to himself as he squared off before the foamy brute.

  I moved away and from a sensible distance watched the giant monotonously deck the Conqueror with a lightning array of hooks and crosses that would have made Sugar Ray drool with envy. Then while the Conqueror was rising from a knockdown, the giant cocked back a muscular leg for kick action. I saw the Conqueror’s right arm lash out toward the giant’s crotch and a laser lance of rippling silver light slash across the fly of tight dungarees and a sudden tiny spring of shiny crimson leap in the sunshine.

  I walked over and helped the Conqueror to his feet as the whimpering giant leaned buck-eyed against an El pillar. And then my eye was attracted by something that looked like a misshapen, black, bloody marble in the dust. I looked at the glassy-eyed giant who seemed amused at the scarlet pouring from the butchered-off tip of his organ, like a little kid playing the game of “who can pee the farthest.”

  The giant bled to death, and Conqueror did an encore at the penitentiary. The years galloped, and in ’68, almost thirty years later, I saw the Conqueror again while out for a walk in Los Angeles.

  He spotted me and picked me up in a battered ’58 Cadillac. He was white haired, stooped and the flashy chorus of muscles that once danced beneath the indigo skin had vanished behind an ugly curtain of fat, but he was still talking shit.

  On the way to his favorite bar he said, “Slim, I heard you come in off the street and now you pimping on paper for the writing game, and ain’t nothing wrong with that, for you. I ain’t got no kinda education or nothing, and my ticker is fucked up. I got a light porter gig I do at the airport. But I’m a player, and I’m gonna conquer some young fine fox and come back like gangbusters. Hear me, Jim, cause it’s square business. I gotta pimp my old ass off just once before I cash in. All I got to do is get the right young bitch in bed so I can do my thing. And that’s square business.”

  He stopped on a side street off Western Avenue, and we got out. Then he did an extremely odd thing. He unlocked the trunk of the Caddie and brought forth a long, heavy logging-type chain, and several gigantic padlocks. I stood there and watched him wrap the chain around his rear bumper and then around the trunk of a palm tree. And then he secured the works with the padlocks.

  On our way to the bar around the corner he chuckled and explained, “Slim, I been getting a little lightweight bad break, so I figured out that angle to keep the repo bastards from copping my hog when I ain’t in it.”

  Several months passed before I drove by the Conqueror’s favorite bar and decided to drop in and jaw a bit with him. The joint was quiet and deserted except for the barkeep. I played a record and asked about the Conqueror.

  The keep pursed his lips, shook his head and said sorrowfully, “Jackson dropped dead two weeks ago right down the street in the motel. They say he died riding one of those hot-ass tramp fillies, young enough to be his granddaughter. I liked that old bullshit fool, everybody did. I just don’t know why he’d go out and put his bad heart in a trick bag like that. Why did he have to chump off like a . . .”

  I walked away to the sun-bathed street and sadly remembered that sunny day long ago when I first saw him as an orphan, a grimy hobo, fresh in Chicago from Georgia aching to be somebody important, to be a big shot in the city. And for days I kept thinking, what a helluva way for him to go, what a lousy, stinking, disgraceful and ignoble death for a Conqueror.

  VIGNETTES: AN OLD WHITE SLAVE AND SHIELD

  During my long, idiotic quest for something for nothing, I met under nonsociable conditions in four penitentiaries an army of hacks, bulls, screws—prison guards. At least ninety-eight percent of them were fear-ridden scum trapped in a paranoia that they themselves had created through physical and mental cruelties inflicted on hapless convicts.

  But one seemed different or perhaps age had withered the brute in him when I met him. He was “Old Tom,” the guard on duty the night those half corpses down the way from my steel casket hacksawed themselves free into the nightmare shadows of the darkened cell house to stalk unwary “Old Tom” with that peculiar patience that men driven mad often summon.

  Like I said, Tom wasn’t too stinking as hacks go. He wouldn’t motherfuck you if you asked for extra aspirin, and he was on rare occasion almost kindly and even concerned about my health. I saw in his eyes and heard beneath his casual chitchat his awareness of and his desire to escape the trick bag of atrocity and danger that cops and screws are put into for the protection and benefit of the corrupt big wheels of the Establishment.

  One night I put Tom’s humanity to the stiffest test. I was desperate as hell to hit on him for a special favor before his shift ended. But I kept stalling and watching him passing my cell on his rounds of the cell house until I felt I would blow up with tension. I got off my bunk and stood by the cell door. At last I heard the scrape of his feet making the next-to-last round of his shift. His startled eyes glowed in his seamed face as his flashlight caught me standing in the quiet blackness. I whispered, “Tom, this telegram came from California today. My old lady is dying, and
I’m the low-life ass that’s been pushing her along for twenty years. I wrote some things she has to hear before she goes. Will you please take the letter out with you tonight and put air mail special stamps on it? I can oil you with a double saw note. How about it? Huh?”

  He grunted and flashed his torch on the telegram. I unfolded it and held it in the spotlight. He grunted again and growled, “Tough luck about your mother, but what the hell you think I am, a patsy? You goddamn well know it’s a serious violation of the rules for an officer to lug a kite for an inmate. Now get the hell in that bunk and send your mail through regular channels tomorrow. And money is contraband. Haven’t you got enough problems? Get rid of it.”

  I said, “I can’t use the joint mail. With the censoring and a three-cent stamp on it, she could be buried before the letter got to California. You’re the only hope I got.”

  He looked at me for a long moment and said, “Make a deal with somebody on the day shift.”

  I said, “The only one that would do it for me is off tomorrow.”

  Tom shrugged and went down the tier. I paced the dark cell and wondered how long before the ass-kicking goon squad would descend on me, tear my cell apart, and hurl me naked into a freezing stripped-down cell. I wanted to bang my stupid skull against the steel bars for cracking to Tom about the double saw buck and even the letter. I was certain Old Tom was going to finger me to the goon squad before he went home. After all, every black con with savvy knew that all the white screws in the joint were snakes.

  Believe me, I was sweaty sorry I had chumped off as I sat on the side of the bunk holding the wadded bill over the john. I turned my ears up high for the clanging of the cell-house door as the goon squad came stomping in to visit me.

  I heard the sound of Old Tom’s feet on his last round so I leaped onto my cot and closed my eyes. He stopped in front of my cell and blazed his torch on my face. I fluttered my eyelids open sleepily and raised myself on an elbow. Tom growled, “Come off that act and get the hell over here with the kite.”