I drank another cup of greasy spoon coffee before I started back to blow him off (get free of him). I stopped and waved two hundred yards away, so Willie could point me out to the mark. They looked at me. Willie stabbed his index-finger toward his chest. I waggled my head ‘no’. Willie stabbed his finger toward the mark. I waggled ‘yes’.
I was drenched and stinking of fearsweat as the mark’s long legs pumped toward me in great athletic strides. When he was midway, I saw Willie fading away fast behind the mark. Just before I ducked around the corner, the mark glanced back at Willie. He howled piercingly, and streaked toward me with the grace and speed of a gazelle.
I pistoned south on Indiana Ave. Before I turned at Fifty-Sixty, to double back to our jalopy parked under the Garfield Boulevard El, I glanced back. The joker had been ultra positively a second Jessie Owens in his youth. He was so close, I could see the gleam of his bared choppers and the glitter of the hatchet.
I couldn’t have run another foot when I fell through the jalopy’s open door and collapsed beside Willie at the wheel. Willie’s face was poxed with sweat as he ground the starter furiously. We stared at the mark growing to the size of King Kong and heard his number thirteens grenading against the sidewalk. I got the window up just as he reached us.
I said, ‘Oh Mama!’ over and over at the awful sound of the hatchet as he ran around the car smashing glass. His frothy mouth was quivering with madness as he chopped a confetti of glass into the car. He was reaching through the shattered window to unlock the door when the starter caught and Willie bombed the heap away.
At that instant I made an obvious vow that I’ve kept to this moment!
We got a pint of tranquilizer on the far Westside and sloshed the first hits down our chins.
Willie suddenly laid out a bandana on the seat between us. He pulled out his boodle-wallet, slipped out of his overcoat and said, ‘Pal-of-mine, we oughtta separate the boodle from the thirty-five hundred frogskins so we can split right down the middle.’
I stiffened at the thought he might try to switch me out of my end in the murk of fallen dusk. I placed all I held on the seat. And I was determined to challenge any suspect moves he made with the money before I had my end safely in hand.
With his overcoat off, I wasn’t really worried that he was slick enough to burn me in his sweater sleeves. He shook his head as he looked at the score. He straightened out the bills. Then he made a flat package of the money. He tied it up in the wide bandana.
He glanced at a passing police car and said, ‘Shit, Slim, we could get busted counting the score. Here shove it under your seat until after we cop some ribs and a motel room for the split.’
I x-rayed his hands as he passed the bandana. I pushed it under the seat. He pulled away and parked behind a rib-and-burger joint on Lake Street.
He sat there for a long time before he said, ‘Slim, you gonna cop the pecks?’
I was racked with closet laughter. Did he believe I was sucker enough to leave him tending the score?’
I said, ‘Cop for yourself, Willie . . . I ain’t hungry.’
He said, ‘I ain’t got a “sou” to cop with,’ and leaned down and pulled out the bandana.
He untied it on the seat and removed a ten dollar bill. He put our score back under the seat and his mitt was clean coming out, except for the sawbuck.
I hawk-eyed him as he got out and shut the door. He shivered elaborately and opened the car door. He leaned into the car and reached for his benny, draped across the back of the front seat. For only a mini-instant was his overcoat a curtain blocking him from view, as he lifted it off the seat.
I thought, Houdini, with four-foot arms, couldn’t have plucked that score from beneath my seat at that range. Anyway, I bent over and probed until my finger tips touched it. He slammed the door shut, I felt a twinge of guilt, watching the wind flap his overcoat tails, that he was trusting me with the score.
In a couple of minutes, I heard the thunder of the Lake Street El Train pulling into the station down the street. I looked up at it passing on the way to the Loop. Was that Willie wrapped in his blue plaid benny grinning down at me from a window in the last car?
I tore open the bandana! It was a dummy loaded with funny-money. I dug beneath the seat like a pooch for a buried bone. Nothing! I raced around the car and pawed beneath the driver’s seat. Something sharp gouged blood from my thumb tip. It was a fish-hook tied to a length of twine that was tied to an anchor post beneath the seat.
The cunning sonofabitch had probably choreographed the rip-off while we were in the cell. With vivid hindsight, I knew why he pretended he needed the sawbuck from the bandana. He wanted to get the fish hook into it when he put it back. Then he could reel it in with his left hand when he leaned into the car for his benny. The dummy bandana was preplanted to ‘blow me off’ smoothly just in case I got suspicious, as I did, before he hit the wind.
I leapt behind the wheel. Maybe I could catch him in the Loop, or at one of the El stops along the way. The gas gauge was on ‘E’, and I didn’t have a cent.
I got out. I inhaled. I felt my belly jitterbug in the greasy clouds of soul-food aroma floating from the rib joint. I straightened my tie in a gum machine’s fractured mirror. I psyched up the mirrored mack-man staring back. ‘You a bad, sugar rapping ’ho stealing mother-fucker . . . ain’t you? Ain’t nothing can stop a ’ho stalking stepped like you . . . Ain’t that right?’ Frantically I nodded ‘yes’ and turned away.
I was lucky! It was black ghetto Christmas. Saturday Night! Easy to cop a ’ho! I’d guerilla my Watusi ass into a chrome-and-leather ’ho den and gattle-gun my pimp-dream shit into some mud-kicker’s frosty car.
I pimp-pranced toward a ’ho jungle of neon blossoms a half mile away. Some ass-kicker was a cinch to be a ’ho short when the joints folded in the a.m.
It was late summer back in the Nineteen Forties. The weeks before, I had graduated from a Federal prison. I was stalking ’ho runs in an Ohio burg. It was my birthday. I was ’holess, without a sou in my raise. I was decked out in a gold silk vine and accessories an old pal junkie ’ho had boosted the day before in Chicago.
Around twilight I stopped by Pretty Phil’s, a pimp pal’s juke saloon and two-storey trick hotel. We embraced. He wiggled his lips against my ear lobe as we disengaged. I thought about the rumors that he now dug stud tours of his sphincter cave.
I cracked it was my birthday. He got on the phone and ordered a monster cake and several cases of Mumms.
We sat down and snorted white lady until two a.m. We gazed through the venetian blinds of his front window. A cavalcade of tricks, flat-backers, stuff players and thieves paraded past. I shifted uneasily when I caught Phil’s assassin Harlequin Great Dane eyeballing me enigmatically. Phil stroked her muzzle. She sighed and nested her head in his lap.
Phil gave me a rundown on every qualified, stealable ’ho that passed. His rundowns were boss. Sure, I appreciated the crystal blow and his plans to celebrate my birthday. But had he forgotten what a blue ribbon pal I had been back in Cleveland several years before? He had blown into town with no ’ho. And worse, no wheels and frozen fireworks exploding off his dukes, necessary to cop a star ’ho.
I had loaned him my total flash. He had gone on to pimp a zillion. I had too much player pride to smooch his rearend to nudge his sense of all out reciprocity. I seriously mulled the odds that Phil would test out as a chicken-poo poo amnesiac.
I stared thoughtfully at Phil’s yellow bitch face. Like my scarlet doubt was a tennis ball, Phil bombed back the serve when he cracked, ‘Slim, honey, you hip, I know, that you got my personal pad upstairs and the use of my new wheels and ice to catch you a ’ho. And Pally, since you my size, play your ass off in any and all of them sixty ’ho catchers hanging in my closet.’
He dropped