Long White Con: The Biggest Score of His Life (2 page)

She had given me a queasy feeling in the gut with a crack, “Slim, we’ll stay loose on the road together. We can just hang out together.”

I was double leery when I left her because I knew “hang out” was New York white hippie argot for you know what. Now I’m a fairly well preserved nigger to be at the rim of sixty. But shit, I wasn’t Gable. Were her mag bosses shooting for a clay feet expose of the venerable ex flesh peddler? You know, maybe her spermy first person account of what a pedestrian lover I was, despite the mythic scam about my wizard swipe.

Or had the lamb been tethered out to elicit “turn out” action and dialogue from the allegedly reformed monster. What a piece for the mag that would make! Frustrated, what if she framed me? What a fat white slave bit I could catch! Wouldn’t that be a rack-up bitch, I thought, as I went through the door toward the parking lot.

We spotted each other at the same instant. White Folks, with luggage, was about to get into a cab near the hotel entrance. We yowled like estranged fairies about to try it again and sprinted into a warm embrace. A knot of white gawkers watched us get into my ride and pull away.

Except for a touch of gray at the temples, he hadn’t changed since he had been my cellmate ten years before in 1960. I naturally put him up in my pad. We rapped until midnight about the Big Windy in the old days, and dead Blue Howard. White Folks got sleepy just as he started to run down his adventures with the Vicksburg Kid’s big con mob.

Just before we retired, I laid out my deal with Josephina. I ran down to him my reasons why I thought she was a frame-up artist.

His eyes, blue as robin’s eggs, twinkled as he stretched and yawned. “Slim, don’t worry, we’ll put together a document for the lady to sign to test her out. And I might tag along with you on the tour as a white stand-up witness to keep the lady pure in the ticker.”

Next day, White Folks and I sat in my living room drinking coffee. We watched the cobra slither into the driveway in a rented compact. She wiggled to the front slammer, appropriately enscaled in a vari-colored mini dress.

I let her in with the classic ghetto grin. You know, coon-shine teeth galore and cold storage eyes. Then I introduced her to White Folks. At the sight of him, her horny eyes veiled over. I noticed her pump fluttering her dress silk down in silicone alley. The bandit odds were ten to five that she’d orgasmed.

She staggered, gap-legged, to the sofa and said tremulously, “Iceberg! You freaked me out! You were sadistic not to prepare me for Errol Flynn, reincarnated! I feel like a bumpkin, I really do!”

We soothed her by assuring her that Johnny had that effect on the majority of movie buffs he encountered. We rapped minutiae until she leaned toward the coffee table and flipped on her tape recorder. I flipped off the recorder, then slid the unsigned lie detector paper across the table top. She stared at it transfixed, like it was one of her cold-blooded cousins of strike.

I said, “Miss Lady, sign it. Far as the project is concerned, it don’t amount to an ounce of snot, really. Just a taste of breast protection for me and my crumb crushers. You know, I’m a squared-up subject from hell. You could flush me and my kids back down the toilet . . . say what if I blew your cool and your sweet human empathy . . . if my chauvinistic bullshit and ego sprung loose on the trip or something. All the paper does, when you Hancock it, is give me the right to delete cut throat shit before you publish it. Sign it, lady, so old Ice can flow and glow with you. You dig where I’m coming from, sugar baby?”

Her porcelain jaw hardened. She grated, “Mister Beck, I can’t sign that without authorization.”

“I’m certain you’ve got your boss’s home number.” I waved toward the phone. “Call him! After laying out long bread to send you three thousand miles, he’s a cinch to say ‘yeah’ to that paper.”

She knotted her fists in exasperation as she “jacked in the box” to her feet. She clicked her heels over to White Folks, the two hundred percent nigger. He gazed up at her with bland blue eyes.

She flung her arms out Jolson style and implored him, with piteous “mammy” eyes. “Don’t let him do this number on me! Please explain my position to him!”

White Folks shrugged. “What can I do, doll? This matter is over my head. I’m just a nine-to-fiver.”

She turned on the waterworks to cop her license to do me in but I was immune to ho tears. I found out why hos cry when I was just a boy. Even poor dead Mama’s tears had failed to turn me from that long, fast track. She stood, legs akimbo, fists on hips, chest heaving, a lynching glare beaming down at me. I grinned up at her like Fido juggling a filet.

She blew control. “You fucking nigger wretch!” she hissed as she snatched up her gear.

Now I wasn’t, years ago, the refined, defused bomb I am now. I mean, I was ticking! I blew control. I leapt to my feet, maroon eyes bulged out monster style. Maybe I could arrest her ticker with the bit. You know, the perfect murder.

I showered her with spittle as I rammed the doomsday mask into her face. “You come freak snake bitch! Get in the wind before I kick your heart out and stomp on it!”

White Folks stepped between us. She squeezed herself against him and waltzed him to the slammer.

As she stepped through it, she whined, “I’m so grateful for your presence. He would have attacked me!”

The chump broad wasn’t hip. It was me White Folks was protecting. We watched her Mustang stampede down the driveway into traffic.

As I told you, back then, I was still fresh and jumpy from the street, with a stone age understanding. I was without the rolled steel control and discipline I have now. The sight of an L.A.P.D. cruiser
passing in Josephina’s wake jolted me to the folly of my wayward passions.

Need I rundown to you the hypothetical horror of the aborted cross? I visualized Josephina, sans White Folks as a witness, of course, butt blood from her noggin against the door frame, rip off her dress and boogie to the middle of the stem screaming that a crazy nigger with a gun had tried to heist her poontang.

I shivered and broke out a fifth of tranquilizer. White Folks and I sat there sipping silently for a long while. He fiddled with and stared thoughtfully at an odd-looking ring on his finger. I vaguely remembered that he wore it when I met him years before in the jail cell back in Chicago.

“That’s a pretty ring, Johnny.”

He extended his hand and I saw the massive hoop was the cameo likeness of what appeared to be maybe an Inca Indian broad, with the fancy head trappings of royalty.

He said, “Phala . . . Mama was half Indian. She gave it to me the week before she died. It was passed down to Mama from her great, great grandma. Aztec Billy, a Mexican Indian, and grifter whiz, gave it to Grandma. Grandma and Billy were sweet as carnival candy on one another, but Grandma’s sod-busting folks wouldn’t hold still for a roustabout hustler son-in-law. So Billy and Grandma held hands one day and walked off a cliff together. When I was a little kid I used to bawl when Mama told the tale, and cried almost as hard about Billy’s rundown to Grandma, via Mama, about the fate of the Aztec Princess on the ring. Mama said Grandma called it The Unhappy Virgin Ring. So, when the Vicksburg Kid’s customers got short in supply for our stocks and bonds set-up in Canada, we put together an irresistible game to take off fat suckers based upon the legend of this ring. It’s known in big con circles as the Unhappy Virgin Game.”

His eyes became saddened as he paused before he mused on. “The Vicksburg Kid, bless him in his grave, picked up my con education
where our dear old friend Blue Howard left off. The Kid knew and kept the secret of my blackness. Soon as I hit Canada he invented for me a cover background and moniker. The Utah Wonder up from the coal pits, he told all the white grifters. I read a ton of books on mining and the coal slaves to protect my cover. He was the first and only white man I’ve met without a scintilla of racism or bigotry in his heart.”

I said, “What a follow-up novel to TRICK BABY that story would make!”

He said, “I agree, but you couldn’t use real names of the people involved . . . especially those of the police and politicians. I’m squared up, building a brand new life for myself. I could maybe get hit! And you couldn’t be specific about the locale. You could just refer to it as an area or a city in a southwestern state. And maybe, Slim, you could tell the story in the third person to give it a subtle fictionalized facade. Use your judgment to protect me.”

I agreed to his stipulations and we made a financial agreement royalty wise. I set up my tape recorder and for a week White Folks spun out his once in a lifetime tale of his adventures in the heady world of the white long con, and its ultrasonic pace, lush women and scores!

The factual story is White Folks’, the closet nigger, told from the point (after leaving Canada) when he roped the seventh mark, in the states, C.P. Stilwell II for fleecing against The Unhappy Virgin game. In the interests of vivid delineation of long con game wizard psychology, to afford full reader access to its drama, and for the spectator view of the pulse-slamming scenes and characters of White Folks’ story, I have taken one liberty. As he suggested, I have chosen to write his story in the objective third person based upon the facts as he recounted them.

Iceberg
Slim

T
he southwestern sky was sugary with rock candy stars. The four of them were happy, happy. Life was delicious! White Folks felt the sleek new ’62 Eldorado under his hands cruise smoothly as a spaceship through a galaxy of neon. The four of them were Wade “Speedy” Jackson, ex-crack detective and ex-Harlem grifter whiz, his main squeeze, pixie Janie, and Folks’ beauteous black Pearl seated beside him. You’ve made it Johnny O’Brien, he told himself. You’ve made it to become a big white con roper. Me, a closet nigger expatriate from the black southside of the Big Windy has made it!

A toothy attendant, in a red velvet monkey suit, scrambled to open the doors of the Eldorado. He drove it away to park. They caught a reflection of themselves, resplendent in dinner attire, mirrored in the glass doors as they stepped into the elegant maw of the supper club.

The room’s diners played muted music with the Rogers’ silver as the lyrics of their animated chitchat
sotto voced
politely across the Damask snow of the tablecloths. A strolling violinist teased haunting classics from his fiddle.

Writhing flamelets from candelabras sanctified the diners’ faces, ignited their jewels that showered a confetti of congealed fire in the
posh haze. A maitre d’ from Naples, with a charming appreciation for half C-notes, seated them grandly at a table reserved for V.I.P.’s.

They had just finished the fourth course of Speedy’s birthday supper when she and her entourage walked in. The diners stared at Christina Buckmeister, the coal mines, banking, real estate heiress. Folks thought, she carries herself like the finishing schools and long bread had turned her out, arrogantly,
prima ballerina
gracefully. A lush petticoat snare to the bone.

She paused for a mini instant in passing to her table. He had met her once, casually. Her dog-in-the-manger brother, Trevor, was the Vicksburg Kid’s source for the police and bank fixes for Kid’s con mob operation.

Christina gave Folks a gray, deliberate blast of she-wolf eyes as she nodded and moved past. Pearl barraged eye-gouging vibes when he smiled stingily and nodded back.

He was irritated with himself as he fought to keep his eyes off her even after she had seated herself facing him several tables away. In the cathedral ambience, her flawless patrician features and rosebud mouth shot a lance, half of thrill, half of hatred, through his head. She had a painful resemblance to Camille Costain. He’d never forget that racist assassin of his heart.

He smiled grimly, remembering how his precious white Chicago socialite Goddess had been fatally in love with him before he had confessed he was a nigger that night on Chicago’s outer drive at the edge of Lake Michigan. The heartless bitch had cut him loose, crucified his foolish young soul, nearly drowned him, mad and dead, in an ocean of booze to stop the pain that took months to fade away.

The fiddler paused for a moment at his side to break memory’s spell with his melodic
Clair de Lune.

He stared at Christina and wondered if she’d ever visited one of her nightmare coal pits. Wondered if she’d ever heard the pitiful bellow of a black lunger’s cough. How he despised that blonde bitch Camille Costain look-alike across the way. He remembered the
horror stories he’d read about the coal pit victims of the imperialist, heartless class she symbolized. He fantasized a mob of street bums gang raping her, punching her blue blood guts to ribbons.

But even as he despised her, he felt himself drawn to her. He wanted to garrote her with ropes of come. He was palpitating to despoil her, hurt her, violate her with a hate fuck.

Pearl sneaked a hand beneath the table and pinched his swipe to jolt him from his trance. Pearl said, “Who is that? I’d be thrilled to meet her. Introduce me, Sugar?”

He said, “She’s the sister of a business acquaintance . . . there’s a rumor she’s not thrilled to mix with the common folk.”

Pearl persisted, “Well, since you obviously are an exception, couldn’t you try for this little Harlem Belle?”

Ebonic Janie piped up, “Yeah Johnny, include this li’l old Central Avenue Fox in, too.”

Speedy glared at her and said, “Janie, use your mouth to put some curves on that skinny ass.”

Pearl leaned close, begging, “Please, Daddy Sweetback, introduce me . . . who did you say she was?”

He said, “She’s Christina Buckmeister. I’ll introduce you when we all make the Blue Book and Who’s Who.”

Janie exclaimed, “Wow! Spee, don’t you work for them?”

Speedy said, “Yeah, finish that creamed corn.”

The wire thin Vicksburg Kid, and his fluff, junoesque Rita, finally showed to break up the cat game. Since he was late, Folks wondered if the Kid was lugging bad news. They sat down and greeted all around. Kid’s tender, brown eyes were placid, so Folks knew the fix and the play for C.P. Stilwell II, the restaurateur mark, were set in smooth concrete for the next day.