Daddy Cool (2 page)

my main man and his out-of-sight lady, Rickie, a tall, fine black sister who steps so fast that the only thing she has to worry about running second to is a mean-ass jet plane. The brother who is just as swift as his woman is the cool and always mellow Kenny. Here's wishing you good luck in any endeavor you and your lady might undertake. And I'd also like to wish the best of fortune to Kenny's beautiful sister Shirley, who also happens to be a very proud and lovely black lady.

Donald Goines's life ended abruptly in Detroit in 1974 just miles from his childhood home. He was shot to death while at his typewriter as he was putting the final touches on his seventeenth novel, Kenyatta's Last Hit. It was a tragic end, to be sure, but somehow fitting for a writer whose greatest gift was his ability to search his memory and tell the story of how his neighbors lived and died.

Goines was born in 1937 and was primed to take over his family's laundry shop. But while still in his teens, he ditched school, lied about his age, and took up with the Air Force. He returned home from Japan in 1955 a full-time heroin addict.

For the next fifteen years, Goines supported his addiction robbing and pimping, gambling and stealing, and was in and out of jail seven times. During his final stretch at the Jackson Penitentiary, a facility in which fellow Old School scribe Clarence Cooper, Jr., had served a decade earlier, he decided to try his hand at writing Westerns. Without much luck. Introduced to the writings of Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck, a pimp-novelist who was incredibly popular behind bars, Goines found the perfect model for the kind of blackexperience tales he wanted to tell.

Still incarcerated, Goines wrote Whoreson, a semiautobiographical account of the son of a prostitute who grows up to become a pimp. He followed it up with Dopefiend, a raw, sordid chronicle of two black middle-class girls' descent into the nightmarish world of addiction. There are no heroes to be found here-these are not remakes of Shaft. Like all of Goines's best books, each reveals the darker and truer side of reality where the common experience shared by all is pain.

Both works-along with the entire Goines oeuvre-were published by Holloway House, the same Los Angeles company that put out Iceberg Slim. It was a perfect match. Sold in cut-rate paperback editions in mom-and-pop, black America, they found an instant audience.

Released from jail in 1970, Goines had a lot of making up to do, and he spent the rest of his life in a creative, compulsive fever. His schedule was relentless, and methodical as Hemingway's. Writing in the morning, shooting up the rest of the day, he somehow managed to turn out as many as eight books a year. Their number included gritty, graphic accounts of crooked deals, pimps, and gangsters and the more politically charged Kenyatta series, which he published under the name Al C. Clark.

In the years since his death, Goines's novels have gained increasing influence in the hip-hop nation and are said to sell even better today than they did during his short, creative life. Indeed, it was recently reported that his total sales were now approaching 10 million copies. Domestically, however, critical recognition has been minimal, and white readership has been virtually nonexistent. Ironically, perhaps, the French have embraced Goines with the kind of fervor and reverence they bestow only on the greatest American icons. With the translation of Whoreson in 1993, Goines was compared to JeanJacques Rousseau; with the release of Dopefiend, he was heralded as the greatest black American writer since Chester Himes.

Daddy Cool isn't one of Goines's best-known novels, but it is surely one of his best. It reveals a literary breadth and stylistic intensity often overlooked amid all the bodies and bullets. The ultimate Shakespearean revenge fantasy, it is also unbridled ghetto realism at its best.

DA44 Coot

LARRY JACKSON, BETTER known as "Daddy Cool," stopped on the litter-filled street in the town of Flint, Michigan. His prey, a slim, brown-complexioned man, walked briskly ahead. He was unaware that he was being followed by one of the deadliest killers the earth had ever spawned.

Taking his time, Daddy Cool removed a cigarette pack and lit up a Pall Mall. He wasn't in a hurry. He knew that the frightened man in front of him was as good as dead. Whenever the man glanced back over his shoulder he saw nothing moving on the dark side of the street.