Airtight Willie & Me (8 page)

“But your old man and mama were tight and strong together.
You grew up in a fine, respectable neighborhood. Your family nest was peaches and cream. I can't understand how you wound up in the sewer with me . . . Why, when I lost touch with you, you were on the turn for a cotillion ball for debs. You drove your own new Chevy convertible. You were decked out in the finest threads from Marshall Fields, fabulous Lili Anne suits. You were even voted, in high school, to be the most likely to succeed in the rat race of life. I've heard that your father took a fall fencing. I can understand that must have been a bitch of a crimp. But what happened, beautiful, after that to flush you all the way down the toilet? Where's your mother?”

She sighed and poured it out as she wept: “Poor Mom and Dad. He died in Joliet prison. Funny thing, the three of us were so happy before Mom started social climbing, started tearing her asshole out, and Dad's, to compete with the status shit bastard muckety-mucks of so-called nigger society. Dad was a religious, good man, with only a grade-school education. But he had lots of business sense. Mom came from a cushioned background. But so naive. She couldn't know that Dad's store couldn't support her extravagances toward the end. He loved her so much, more than his God. He let it override his morality, his basic common sense. He became a crook to finance her madness. He destroyed himself because he couldn't say no to her.

“But I paid for all of it when I went to dance at the Grand Terrace the next week. I picked up a dapper nigger with the softest voice and sweetest face I ever saw. It was Muskegon Shorty, the cruelest ass-kicking nigger pimp that ever fell out of a cunt. He turned me out and worked me sixteen hours a day, every day for two years at Thirty-fifth and State streets. A nigger in a craps game blew him out of my life.”

She sobbed uncontrollably. I gave her a couple of reds and rocked her into fitful sleep. We lay in each other's arms on the couch. Night fell as we clung together.

She stirred and said, “Bobby, I'm going to my grandma down in
Mississippi. I'll be safe. I can't go without stuff for heavy jones. I've got to get my stash of smack from the suite.”

She got up and slipped on her shoes. I begged her not to go. When I couldn't turn her around, that sucker inside me made me volunteer to take her back to the suite. Maybe she was a cold-blooded bitch.

But she said, “Bobby, darling, I can't front you like that.”

Guess she still had a teenage sucker spot in her ticker for me, too. She stood in the door and kissed me good-bye. She pressed a slip of paper into my palm.

She said, “Bobby, it's my grandmother's phone number and address. Let's keep in touch. Oh, by the way, I'll stash you a taste of shit under the face bowl in the public men's john on the lobby floor. Bye, baby.”

I watched her go down the hall through the lobby to the street. Jesus Christ! I felt bad to see her go in trouble. Around six
A.M
. my jones prodded me to check out Opal's john stash of smash she'd promised.

I drove to her hotel where I saw a cluster of people on the sidewalk at the front door. There was a city meat wagon on the street. My heart rode my throat. I parked and walked over to a bellman.

I said, “Who cashed in?”

He said, “Pretty Opal.”

I turned away so he wouldn't see the spill of tears down my cheeks. I went and sat in the car and watched the wagon's attendants load her corpse and truck it away into the night. I sat in the car for two hours before I got myself together. Then I went and checked the face bowl stash in the men's room on the lobby floor. Poor Opal had OD'd before she could keep her promise.

A month after Opal OD'd, Phyl blew to Milwaukee with a dealer holding a big bag of high-grade smack. It jolted me to be ho-less, broke, and alone. Except for my monkey, I had pawned all my double-breasted ho-catchers. I mean, I was ragged as Yakima. I
broke the long shoe rules and played peel-off stuff with a couple of fellow losers to bribe the monkey from kicking the vomit out of me. The three of us cruised up chump change in a stolen ride for a week before we got busted.

That last midnight we spotted a trick ramming it into a drag queen in a pickup truck. We leapt out and flashed our fake roller badge. We were inspecting their IDs and peeling off the green stuff when a squad of heat showed with shotguns. I caught a slat in the joint on the coal pile.

A month later, I said, “Shit! I ain't gonna do this bit.”

I did a black Houdini to Indiana on Good Friday. For the next thirteen years, I yo-yoed up and down the pimp string in a dozen states. I was up the string in Cleveland with three girls humping in cathouses when I decided to encore Chi. Naturally, I called to find out if that suite was available. It was!

I drove into town. I was disappointed and depressed to see a junkie coasting in the lobby when I checked in. I followed a bellhop, with my bags, to the suite's door. He unlocked it. I had made it! I was finally a tenant of the suite. I was so excited as I paused on her threshold. I entered her. I was betrayed. I was depressed! Her once bright complexion was brassy and pocked hideously with an ancient smog of nicotine. She was sleazed and greasy from the legions of junkie joy-poppers who had fouled her rotten with their shooting galleries.

Oh, I was turned off. I despised her leeched-away glory. Her bed raiment was splotched and frayed. Her panoramic windows, once so clear as to be almost invisible, were now cracked and glaucomitized by soot and pigeon offal. They now afforded only a myopic view of Sixty-third Street's festival of lights. My impulse was to desert her instantly. But, inexplicably, I could not. Even in her ruin, she held me captive!

I used the phone to keep in constant touch with my girls in the cathouse salt mines. The loneliness in the bleak suite became almost
unendurable. Since I was an escaped fugitive, I felt imprisoned in the suite.

As the Christmas holidays approached, I was beginning to think it was a wrong move back to Chi. But I had Rachel, my youngest star, coming in to keep me company through the holidays. I sent the bell captain in my ride, camouflaged by counterfeit registration with plates to match. He delivered the package. He set her bags down and split.

We embraced, and she kissed me with zest. But I saw her face spasm with disgust as she swept her emerald-flecked eyes about the pad. It was a comedown all right, from the glamorous high gloss of cribs prior to where I had headquartered.

I took her to Milwaukee for a riotous several days of cabarets and parties. Too quickly, the holidays were over. To bypass loneliness, I decided to let her kick street mud on Sixty-third. I hoboed heroin's express train to you know where for company while she was away humping from seven
P.M
. to four
A.M
. She was stand-up, four-square in my corner for almost a month. I mean, her bread was consistently up to par when she checked it in.

Then one morning at dawn, quite a bit past her customary show time, I noticed an odd, preoccupied radiance about her. Now, I knew that the stem where she worked was infested with young ho masters. But I was Rasputin; well, at least Svengali.

After all, I had liberated her from a third-rate greasy spoon and turned her out. I had transformed her from a grease-splattered chippie nobody into a chick and irresistible lure for tricks. But anyway, I couldn't quiz her. I couldn't tip any sucker emotional shit to her. That could blow her fast to one of the gaudy novices on the stem.

The one morning, close to eight A.M., she pranced home, reeking of alcohol, and her head bad. Now, I won't try to describe my agony on the ego rack waiting for that sugar-faced bitch. Let's just say, my pain was inexpressible. Oh, I wasn't in love or anything close to it. It
was worse! I mean, I was threatened by the pimp chattel thing. The threat of losing her could maim my delicate ego at thirty-five.

Well, anyway, I watched her from the bed in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth. I glanced at the thick wad of bills she'd flung on the bed. Christ! It was short. Was she splitting my bread with some downy-cheeked peacocker? It was a helluva struggle not to cross-examine the truth out of her. She darted a culprit look my way in the mirror.

I said, “Baby sis, the scratch is light . . . you feeling all right?”

She shackled her breath for an instant. “Yeah, Daddy, I feel fine. The track was lousy slow all night. That fifty on the bed, I got from a trick an hour ago. Except for him, I'd a shot a blank.”

I said, “Damn, baby, you're a star. I better get on the phone now . . . Maybe I won't put you down another night out there. . . . Why, it's easy, I'll cop you another gig in a top joint. . . . Maybe up at Grace's in Montana.”

I reached for the phone to test her.

She whirled and pleaded, “Please, Daddy! . . . I just had a bad one . . . first I've had . . . Let me stay on the track here . . . near you.”

She hadn't conned me. I knew she was fucking around. Now that I knew, I couldn't even ship her if I wanted to. I had made a mistake when I yanked her from the ho house. I had put too much trust in my power over a turnout. I had ignored the compulsive desire of any turnout to flee the master who had put her new slick image together.

I watched her from the sofa as she got herself together promptly for work that night at seven. She dipped her head to my crotch. I thought she would, as tenderly as always, kiss my swipe good-bye. But she raked her teeth down the shaft and moved away. She paused at the door and shaped a Mona Lisa smile. She waggled good-bye with her fingers like a little kid.

With her eyes averted, she said softly, “Daddy, I'll be very late . . . maybe noon . . . got a long ‘C' note trick, a regular . . . Gonna turn him around four this morning.”

I went to the window and watched her slog her booted delicate feet through the snow until she disappeared. Christ! She was delectable in her curve-hugging scarlet-hooded coat, white fox-trimmed. What a precious property! I thought about the countless hours, energy, and care it took to turn her out, to buff off her rough edges, to make her a top package. What a heartbreaking bitch if I blew her!

I remembered her noon check-in and how she had slashed my jones with her teeth. She had always been so lovingly gentle before in the good-bye ritual. I thought, maybe it was the tip-off that I had blown her. I felt a gnawing ache in my gut that she wasn't coming back. At least not as my girl. My head roared at the thought of blowing her. I decided to Dick Tracy her a bit to cushion me against the pain and shock if I lost her. Damn, the pimp game was torture for an old pimp, I thought, as I got the bell captain's borrowed ride and drove to the stem.

I parked with a view of her work corner at Sixty-third and Cottage Grove. I sat and watched her flip car tricks until midnight. I was thinking I might have been wrong that she was shaky, when a new white pimpmobile parked in front of a bar on the corner. Then I saw a dapper young dude get out and pose on the sidewalk.

He was a baby all right, no more than twenty-two and pretty as an Eurasian bitch. His processed hair coruscated like a black satin helmet in the neon splash. His pink vine trousers shimmered on his greyhound lean frame beneath his beige vicuna topper. Rachel raced to him. She kissed him and clung to him possessively. She dug frantically in her bosom and gave him what could only be trick bread.

I had lost her all right. I knew it by this pimp prance of triumph as they went into the bar. He had taken off the ho's bread and most likely had massaged her tonsils with his swipe to cop legal pimp title. He had stolen my ho! I was physically ill, devastated, as I pulled from the curb.

My hands trembled on the wheel as I drove like an automaton through near collisions to the hotel. My feet felt like anvils as I
went down the hallway to the suite. I collapsed on the bed in my overcoat, where I lay in a trance until daybreak. I just stared into the ceiling mirror at my haggard reflection, at my graying stubble of beard.

The phone rang. My heart leapt. Maybe she had quarreled with him. Maybe he had beaten her up so badly that she needed me. My hand trembled as I picked up.

One of my young, hero-worshipping bellboys said, “Mister Slim, your lady and Dandy Maurice, the young pimp, just checked into one-forty-three. I . . . uh . . . thought I'd pull your coat.”

I laughed. “Thanks, li'l bro, guess he's tricking to steal her ass backward with his dick.”

He laughed unconvincingly. I hung up and cooked a “C” and “H” speedball stew for breakfast. I shot it and mulled the situation. The pretty baby sonovabitch was playing a steel down game all right. He had contemptuously lugged her beneath the same roof with me. He was down there playing sweet protective Willie to tighten final screws, to strengthen her and his new contract. He knew how shaky and blowable a stolen bitch, fatigued from the track, was, before she faced her ex-boss to cop her clothes.

I decided I had to save face, give them a show, not a production, when they swooped down with the bad news. At eight
A.M
., I called the elderly ex-pimp bell captain to the suite. He came in and sat on the couch beside me. He was embarrassed in his empathy for my situation as we put together my show.

I said, “Roscoe, in the next two hours get me the finest young fox you know to come here and play my ho. Send up a Jeroboam of Mums bubbly and crystal goblets on a jazzy tray. Get me some fresh drapes and a sparkling throw rug to cover that worn spot in the carpet near the door.”

Roscoe said, “For three bills, I can get Helene, the prettiest white call girl in the Loop to spend the day. Nothing like a blond white bitch with movie star looks and body to drool that punk and chill
the shit of that nigger bitch you done blowed. That rest of what you want, you'll have by ten o'clock.”

I gave him two bills and went to the bathroom to sanitize myself. I scrubbed myself raw. I shaved my face raw. I brushed my hair and teeth until they shone. I decked out in gold silk pajamas and lavender silk robe with gold slippers.