The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (6 page)

She stood up, smiled and said carefully, “I can't forget it. You don't understand how I feel.” She waved her hands helplessly about her head and went on. “I want to do something. Do you mind if I lie down with you?”

I laughed and said, “I've never had anything but whores in this bed. Baby Sis, you can't qualify for this bed. You want to be a star, and you won't ‘turn out' for me. I gotta pimp for my bread, and I can't do casual fucking with no understanding. Besides, I'm not the kind of slob that could lay his Baby Sis. Now get your beautiful square ass out of here. I'm expecting my bottom woman any minute.”

She giggled and leaped into bed with me and kissed me a dozen times on my face and neck. She was leaving the room when I said seriously, “Holly, if you must do something for me, stay real like you are if the white folks make a star out of you on the West Coast. Don't become a phony black Caucasian star.”

She walked back to the side of the bed and said earnestly, “Slim, I'm always going to be real. I won't let anything change me. I'll never be a phony. I'll stay black inside as well as outside. I love being black.”

Holly got rave notices at the Northside spot, and three weeks later she left for the West Coast. A companion made the trip with her. He was a handsome young piano player who lived across the hall from me. I liked Al, and Holly flipped silly for him. Holly called me when she got to the coast, and for a year and a half she and Al kept in touch. She was making a living, but nothing spectacular had happened for her when I got busted and started that tough bit in the steel casket in 1960. I lost touch with her.

I was living in L.A. in the late sixties when Holly's career exploded star dust. Now, I don't mean she had the luster and impact of, say, young white stars like Ann Margret, or Joey Heatherton, or
even of black Diahann Carroll. But she was getting roles in movies and important guest shots on TV, and it was rumored that a wealthy older white guy had his nose wide open for her and was sponsoring her lavish lifestyle and a palatial house in the hills. According to the standards of black America and the black press, she was like at least a dozen other black female performers in America considered a star. I made no effort to contact her until I ran into Al, the piano player, at a party at John Wesley's pad. He was a black actor who had played a role in the movie
Up Tight!

I asked Al about Holly, and he came on with heat. He said, “Ice, I had to split. The girl is sick in the head. She's a freak for white studs, and she tries to think, act and talk like a white broad. All of her so-called friends are white. She's a pure Oreo. You know, like the cookie, black outside and white inside. She's ruined, and she's got a headshrinker. Find out for yourself. I'll give you her number, but believe me, she'll make you puke.”

Few, if any, visibly black people have not secretly hated themselves and wished to escape the misery of a black skin. But Al had accused Holly of going beyond the wishing to live the delusion that she had escaped the trap of blackness and had become an adored equal in a racist white world that considered her deniggerized and no longer tainted by the black world with its struggle and rage.

A week after I talked to Al, curiosity made me dial Holly's number. A maid or somebody took my name and a moment later Holly came on the wire with a gush of high gloss vivacity and unreal excitement that I had called. She demanded in her weird, new sleeky-accented voice that I rush right up to the hills to see her. I agreed to visit her the next afternoon.

The next day a uniformed white broad with thick ankles led me through Holly's luxurious house to a kidney-shaped swimming pool at the rear of the house. Holly squealed in apparent joy at the sight of me and came out of the water glistening in the sun, and beautiful in a gold bikini. Her only flaw showed in the deep shadows beneath
her eyes—and she came weaving toward me as if she had been drinking heavily.

She planted a damp kiss on my cheek, and we sat down at a poolside table. She removed a bathing cap and a golden blond wig fell to her shoulders. We sat there making small talk and sipping drinks from a portable bar beside the table.

Then I got slightly personal. I said, “Baby Sis, level with me. Are you really happy and satisfied now that you've made it?”

She frowned, and her mouth tightened. Then she showed her snowy capped teeth and said merrily, “How could I be anything but happy surrounded by lovely things and beautiful people? Don't I look happy?”

“I guess you would, to somebody who hadn't known you when,” I said. I leaned toward her and took her hands in mine. I looked into her eyes and said gently, “Baby Sis, you've changed, and our people are losing respect for you. They are saying you despise your blackness. You don't want that, do you? Is it true what they're saying? Level with me, Baby Sis.”

She jerked her hands away and stood up. Her eyes were blazing. Her face looked old and hard framed by the silky Caucasian blond wig. She was furious and drunk. She spat, “All right, here it is, and don't call me Baby Sis. Say
your
people, your niggers, not mine. Niggers didn't put me up here. White people did. I don't give a goddamn about niggers, or what they think about me. There are scads of important beautiful white people who have forgotten I'm black. I don't need niggers, and when I was suffering and scuffling down there with them, not one nigger in my whole life ever did anything for me. White people are in my corner. They love me, and that's where it's at.”

I got to my feet while she was still raving and stood looking at her until she stopped to catch her breath. I said, “Holly, I risked my life in Chicago to help you, remember? And I happen to be a nigger.”

Her jaw hinge dropped, and she turned gray. I turned and
walked through her house to my car in the driveway. As I drove off, I looked back at her house and remembered the flash of nappy crotch in the ratty dressing room where I first met her. And I remembered the skinny kid singer's gratitude at the airport in Chicago when I sent her home to her mama, and her boast that she was going to be a star.

She had become a star all right, a black Caucasian star.

I
am convinced that most pimps require the secretly buried fuel of Mother hatred to stoke their fiery vendetta of cruelty and merciless exploitation against whores primarily, and ultimately, all women.

Throughout most of my life, my unconscious hatred for my mother leapt painfully from the depths like bitter bile from the guts of a poison victim. But I believe that the unfeeling rejection of me by a lovely young girl at an emotionally crucial period of my life might well have been another reason why I became a pimp.

Her memory, her face, her voice haunted my lonely nights in four penitentiaries. For me, she was a goddess and perhaps such an elusive, unearthly, wonderful creature, real or imagined, torments the private dreams of every man. I will never forget the flavor of those days long ago when the goddess and I were in the spring of our youth. Somehow the bittersweet mystique of the northwest corner at Third and Galena streets in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will always have a wistful charm and sorrow for me. For it was there in rain, shine or storm, that I sped early mornings to glimpse, to hear the melodic voice of the goddess before the bus arrived to whisk her to Catholic Messmer Junior High. I wasn't welcome to visit the goddess at home. You see, her Creole mother didn't approve of me. I was too black.

It was in the spring of '33, I think, that I met the goddess. Hilarious jokes were making the rounds, like: “That wasn't no girl you
saw me with last night; that was my brother.” Anyway, it was just a short time before that fabulous cripple charmed himself into the most exclusive club there ever was.

Mama was on earth then. I remember how attractive and regal she was. Once a month Mama and I would pass that corner. I'd stare at it and feel little firecrackers of excitement popping off inside me.

We'd be on our way to a gigantic barnlike building. Mama would always proudly square her shoulders before we stepped inside. The slippery sawdust on the rough pine floor would be like shredded ice against the slick, stiff soles of my county relief brogans. There was a fresh pungency in the melded odors of prunes, onions and potatoes stacked inside chicken-wire cubicles.

Tattered paupers filed past the cubicles. Anemic joy lit their drawn faces as bored county clerks shoved a month's ration of relief groceries across the dusty cubicle counters. They would eagerly fill their gunny sacks and shuffle away to the street with their treasures.

When our turn came, Mama would hold her chin high in the manner of a queen accepting gifts from her subjects. You can't imagine how my skinny six-foot frame would tremble when I'd hoist our sacks to my back. I remember how the coarse burlap would sear my palms as I stumbled to the sidewalk.

Mama always brought a twenty-five cent piece with her. There were bootleg taxis about the building. The hustlers would be waiting in flivvers to haul people with gunny sacks home.

Many times Mama saved the quarter. A good guy called Giggling George would be out there on the hustle. He and Mama had been kids together down in Nashville, Tennessee. He'd take us home, and the only time he'd stop giggling was when Mama would try to give him the quarter fee. He'd get real serious and act like Mama had insulted him when he turned it down.

One Christmas, George gave me an exciting gift. It was an old .22 rifle. He had cleaned it and polished the walnut stock to a rich
patina. I enjoyed blasting out the brains of the hunchback rats nesting in our cellar. Sure, old George drank too much. It's true he had that ugly giggle, and yes, he cursed a lot. But he was the kindest guy that ever was.

Oh yes, after I met the goddess, I'd often have a crazy wish that Phillippa (that was her name) and her mother would be standing in that charity line for groceries. I guess I thought at least we could have had hunger in common. It never happened.

Her mother was a beautiful widow, a coldly arrogant octoroon. She was color sensitive too, acting like a half-white house nigger in slavery times who was suddenly made boss of the whole damn plantation. Cordelia Cordray was her name, and she was to blame for that corner at Third and Galena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, being the most poignant corner there ever was.

Now, I'm not so sure about the year that I met the goddess. But I'm damn sure of the day of the week. It had to be on a Sunday morning. Two slightly uncommon events had occurred the night before. Mama and I lived in a flat over Steve's Bar, at Eighth and Galena streets.

A curvy pushover called Three-way Rosie lived up at Tenth and Galena. Her old man was an ex-heavyweight fighter who ran a sneak poker game in his home every Saturday night.

Rosie had given me this time slot in her very busy schedule. We were on the grass in her backyard. I was fiddling with one of her buttons and looking up at the Big Dipper in the brilliant sky. Strange thing about her was, one of her buttons was a dud. Every Saturday night I'd fritter away crucial time. I'd forget which button lit her fire. Finally Rosie flamed, and moaning, she started working me out the straight way.

Suddenly a shower of kitchen light rained down on our mad thrashing. Rosie's old man stood glaring down at us. It was lucky for me that I was sneaker shod. I yowled and leaped straight up out of the squishy valley like a black tomcat from the top of a red-hot
stove. I slipped through his clutching hands like a buttered eel. He didn't have even a remote chance of catching me. I vaulted the backyard fence and torpedoed down the alley. I heard his angry bellowing and the pounding of his feet die in the sultry spring air.

That was the first event that makes me certain I met the goddess on a Sunday morning. The second event happened less than an hour after the first.

Recreation has its valid place. Unless you're a yard-wide square, you need a bit of excitement now and then. Except for the chase scene, the grass game with Rosie was pure recreation.

In small towns a guy has to search out his excitement in the most common ways and places. Perhaps I was hopelessly jaded, but I could never get goose pimples watching the neighborhood mechanic tune up a car motor. Watching the sky for shooting stars gave me no celestial bang. And I would even completely ignore a bustling construction site.

Believe it or not, I got a charge watching mock murders. I guess you have to be black and live in a ghetto to be able to understand and appreciate that kind of thing. But look into it sometime when you have nothing else to do.

On a Saturday night, I'd spend hours at my upstairs window. I'd watch old drinking buddies horse around down on the sidewalk in front of Steve's Bar. Even though it was almost always drunken play, it was still exciting to see their knives and pistols flashing under the street lamp.

I guess it was so exciting because at first I couldn't ever be sure that it wasn't for real. Let me tell you, when those savage pranksters bared their teeth and rolled their eyes in fake madness it was hard to tell. Often one of the phony victims would flop around on the sidewalk like a dying chicken.

The night before the morning I met the goddess, I saw Giggling George on the sidewalk. His best friend, Slick Shorty, was standing looking up at George.

Shorty had his back to me screaming up at George, “George, gimme mah dime you owe me. I saw you bust that half a buck across the bar. Gimme mah dime, George. Ah don' wanta croak you. Gimme mah dime, George.”

George exploded, “Man, you ain't only slick, you crazy too. You been paid that lousy dime with interest when you guzzled my bottle of gin dry. Now get outta my face, little nigger. This is Saturday night, and I ain't for wasting it waiting around county hospital for them doctors to take my foot outta your ass.”

George turned his back on Shorty and lumbered toward his jalopy at the curb. He was giggling up a storm. Then I saw Shorty slip a gleaming butcher knife from his waistband. Even when Shorty bear-hugged George from behind, I couldn't be sure it wasn't just another mock murder. Poor George screamed like a sledge-hammered calf in a slaughterhouse. The butcher knife in Shorty's hand was blood streaked when he leaped back from George. I heard a dull clatter when Shorty hurled the blade into the gutter and sprinted away.