The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (7 page)

George spun around facing my window. He stood there looking down at his ragged belly. His guts gleamed in the glow of the street lamp like ropes of crimson pearls. He tore his phosphorescent eyes away and tried to pump his leaden legs to flee the oozing horror at his waist. His legs buckled and twisted and entwined like magnetized pretzels as he slammed to the sidewalk on his back.

I rushed down the stairs to the sidewalk, where a small, silent crowd stood looking down at him. I looked at his face. His eyes were bucked wide, and his fat black lips were moving. I stooped down close to him.

Through a gout of blood he burbled in a child's plaintive voice, “Bobby, ain't it a low-down dirty shame? Shorty done kilt me.”

His eyes closed. He heaved a heavy, liquid sigh and lay still. I cried there on the sidewalk beside him until I heard the squeal of a police siren. It was the real thing that time. George was a good guy.
I really liked him. I went to bed, but I didn't sleep. I couldn't get butchered George out of my mind.

Now you can see why I'm so sure it had to be on a Sunday morning that I met the goddess. I heard Mama coming in around three
a.m.
She had served a banquet for a rich white woman. I tossed and turned, wishing for cheerful daybreak, until finally the sun slit night's treacherous throat with a golden butcher knife.

Later, I heard Sunday school buffs laughing on their way to the church around the corner. I had the worst headache there ever was. I heard Mama humming a hymn, and then shortly the metallic clicking of the boiling coffeepot's lid. I got up, took a bath and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Mama was at the sink washing navy beans to cook for our dinner.

She turned toward me and said, “Good morning, Mr. Red Eyes. My heavens, you look bad. Bobby, I hope you're not drinking. George Rambeau was killed last night in a drunken fight on the corner. The police have that dwarf buddy of his in jail.”

I said, “Mama, I got an awful headache, but not from drinking. I saw the whole thing last night. George wasn't fighting. His pal, Shorty, executed him for a dime. Mama, do we have any aspirin?”

“No, we don't, but there's a half dollar on top of the icebox. Get some at the drugstore, and you can keep what's left for pocket change. And Bobby, for God's sake, don't tell anyone you saw that killing. The white folks might lock you up until after Shorty's trial. I hope he gets a life sentence. I'm going down on my knees to pray for poor George's soul.”

I dressed and went to the drugstore at Seventh and Walnut. I stepped inside. There she was at the soda fountain on the first stool near the window. The bright morning sun ignited tiny blue bonfires in her shimmering black hair. She was sipping a Coke. I forgot the worst headache there ever was.

I feigned an interest in the magazines on the rack beside her. My captive eyes were chained to her. I stumbled to the stool next
to her. Her lilac perfume whirled my brain on a wild, fragrant, merry-go-round.

I stuttered, “Good morning.”

She turned her yellow, fawn face to mine. Jade jewels coruscated in her huge, green, almond-shaped eyes. There was a dazzling slash of faultless ivory in her face when she gypsy violined, “Good morning.”

Everything was a blur until I had walked her home. I came out of the trance on the steps of Roosevelt Junior High School at Eighth and Walnut. I was deliriously aware of a powerful posthypnotic suggestion that the goddess had said I could call on her that evening at eight o'clock. I just sat there on the steps hallucinating her voice, her odor, her face until late afternoon.

I got home at five o'clock. Mama was frantic. She thought I had flapped my jaws and gotten jugged as a material witness hostage.

The navy beans were done. But I wasn't the least bit hungry. I took another bath and spent the next two and a half hours shining my brogans, fingernails, teeth and hair. I ironed a razor crease into my Sunday corduroys.

Mama was awed. She asked, “Whose party you going to?”

I said, “Mama dear, I'm in love. I have a date at eight with Phillippa Cordray.”

Mama frowned and shook her head. “Yes, I've heard about her and her mother. They're big shots from New York. They came to town a couple of weeks ago. But isn't she out of your league? Mrs. Williams told me they're high class and they have a beautiful stone house. Her mother teaches in an all-white school. I've heard she's passing for white. Bobby, please don't get hurt. I'm afraid you're too brown and we're too poor.”

I was a love-stricken fool playing against a stacked deck. Mama's plea didn't register until too much later. But never since has spring been so magical, so memorable. I floated through the lavender twilight to the goddess. As Mama had told me, she lived in a gray stone
house on Fifth Street. I rang the doorbell. My mouth was dry, and my palms were gluey with sweat. Small wonder. How many times in a guy's lifetime does he call on a goddess?

She opened the door and smiled at me. She said hello, and her voice was perfumed smoke tinted with moonlight. She wore a flowing lime chiffon dress. In the lavender glow, she looked like a nymph who had fled Botticelli's
Allegory of Spring
I just stood there mutely with my fifteen-year-old heart savagely mauling my rib cage.

She took my hand, and I followed her into a dazzling gold and white living room. Cordelia Cordray, an older, harder version of the goddess, stood near an alabaster grand piano with languid feline grace eyeing me from head to toe. Almost imperceptibly she seemed to wince at my harsh clothing. She delayed an icy, taut second before acknowledging my introduction with a mute dip of her spectacularly coiffed head. Then she flounced from the room with a hostile look on her face.

Hurt? Sure I was, but in the presence of the goddess I soon forgot the bitch Cordelia. I was having one miracle of a time just gazing at the goddess and hearing that moonlit voice describing the wondrous excitement of New York City when Cordelia made a trilling sound and the goddess excused herself and went into the dining room and through a swinging door to the kitchen.

I sat there on the sofa listening to the velvet bellowing of Gabriel Heater, a newscaster, and hearing the jagged tone of a quarrel coming faintly from behind the kitchen door.

Curiously, I pressed my ear against it and heard Cordelia say, “Sugar Bunny, how can you say something like that about me? We are not in the military. I did not, and I will not, ever command you to do anything. I am suggesting that you are wrong to encourage and clutter up my living room with that unkempt little alley creature when he is so patently not your type. Be patient, Bunny, and select your boyfriends from the professional group in town.”

There was a long pause before the goddess said angrily, “Baloney,
Mother, he's clean and neat, and he has good manners. What's really wrong with him?”

Cordelia said evenly, “All right, Sugar Bunny, you asked for it. He is completely wrong for you from those county gun boats on his feet to his nappy head. His parents, aside from being paupers, are probably drunkards, thieves, ex-convicts or you name it. And he is so wretchedly black my flesh crawls at the remote possibility that you would be insane enough to let him violate you, not to mention the threat and disgrace of a nigger-type grandchild.”

I didn't wait to hear more. I slunk from the house, vibrating in a hot straitjacket of humiliation and rage. I was a half block away trying desperately to figure an angle to murder Cordelia without leaving clues when I sensed scented smoke rising anxiously behind me. I looked over my shoulder and stopped.

The goddess's hair was flying in the purple light like an indigo banner as she ran toward me calling my name. “You heard! You heard! I'm so sorry. Please forgive us!” she sobbed as she squeezed my hands and pressed the dizzying softness of herself against me.

But all the excitement as we embraced was inside my head and riotous chest. She walked to Lapham Park with me, and we sat on the stone steps of Roosevelt Junior High planning how, because of Cordelia, we would take our friendship underground.

I walked her back home, nearly. I blurted out I loved her, and then I recited the words of a touching poem by a poet whose name and most of whose words I have now forgotten. But it went something like, “Darling, I feel so sad and strange that all those years before, could be before we met. Don't you wish there had never been any other lips, any other sweethearts? Darling, don't you wish we could blot them out just as the smoke from a cigarette rises and fades into nothingness?”

I summoned the courage to brush her cheek with my lips and bashfully turned and sprinted away.

Our secret underground points of rendezvous were at the
drugstore soda fountain where we first met, Lapham Park, the balcony of the Miller movie house downtown and especially every school morning at that enchanted place, the northwest corner of Third and Galena streets.

The spring, summer and fall of that unforgettable year of the goddess went swiftly. It was in the first week of December that the cream of the giddy dream started to sour. I had hauled my lovesick young square ass out of a downtown jewelry store, where on layaway reposed a gleaming gold compact afire with simulated rubies and diamonds. The price was an astronomical forty dollars, and I had been buying it for six months with a shine box in the streets at five cents a shine. But what the hell, how often in a lifetime does a guy sweetheart around with a goddess?

I was walking toward the Miller movie house when I saw the goddess come to the sidewalk clinging amorously to the arm of a tall, curly-haired, half-white guy and get into a shiny Model A Ford. They kissed deeply, long and hard before speeding away.

I leaned weakly against a lamppost with my mouth open. I knew the guy's father was a big shot with a coveted steady position as chief technician of toilet brushes and mops at City Hall. The goddess had told me that the young guy was adored by Cordelia, and I knew he had been calling on the goddess at home for several months. But the goddess had assured me that she really had no interest in him at all.

I had understood. It was like the guy was a cover so Cordelia wouldn't get wise that the goddess and I were sweethearting around. She had lied to me, and I had the biggest headache there ever was as I staggered home.

Everything was lies, quarrels and hurt after that, and on Christmas Eve we met for the last time as children at the drugstore. Christ! She was so beautiful and innocent looking in her hooded white wool coat and scarlet boots. I just sat there gazing at her like a simpleton for a long time.

She sat silently sipping a cup of Boston coffee. Finally, I reached
into the pocket of my tattered lumber jacket and withdrew the jeweled compact and gently placed it in her lap and wished her a Merry Christmas. She frowned and hefted the gold-foiled package in a delicate palm.

She slipped it back into my pocket and said softly, “It feels awfully expensive. You really shouldn't have. I can't take it.”

I said idiotically, “You gotta take it. I ain't got nobody else to give it to.”

She shook her head and said firmly, “I am so sorry. Try not to hate me and please forgive me, but I have to get married.”

I was speechless with shock and despair. She stood up misty eyed and squeezed my hands.

I choked out, “But you ain't got to do nothing like that.”

Her bottom lip trembled and without sound her lips said, “I'm pregnant.”

I jumped from the stool and seized her arms and shouted, “You can't be! I've never done it to you!”

She burst into tears and pulled herself free and ran into the night. I'll never forget that Christmas Eve, how in my juvenile pedestal reverence for the goddess I sat there long after she had gone, unable to cope with the fact that the curly-haired guy had indeed fucked my sacrosanct goddess. And how, in my agony, I babbled my sorrow and hatred for her and every girl I'd ever known and ever would know.

I sat on the stool until the owner tapped me on the shoulder at closing time. The next several months were a horror of excruciating goddess withdrawal agony. One spring day, when she was eight months gone, I saw her walking into a store with Curly Top. She was so bloated, disfigured and deformed that I ran home and wept in the attic for hours.

That night I felt myself encased in rage and fury so poisonous that I went searching for him with the ancient .22 rifle that Giggling George had given me. Finally I spotted his car outside Cordelia's
house. I crept to the side of it and saw him playing the grand piano with his head thrown back in song. I put the back of his head in the rifle sights and was squeezing the trigger when for some reason I glanced away at the goddess. She was seated on the sofa looking at him so worshipfully and with so much helplessly pure love that I lowered the gun and left.

A broken neck, a cracked skull can heal and so also can a broken heart, I discovered. I got my first penitentiary bit about two years after that Christmas Eve in the drugstore. I got out and did another bit in the state of Wisconsin before I got wise and left town.

I had an obsession to be a pimp. I became one, and a hard and brutal one at that. But curiously, vivid memories of the goddess could always be evoked by the faintest trace of scented smoke in some woman's voice or perhaps sunlight exploding blue light in a mane of jet hair.

Twenty-five years passed, and I was on the highway to Milwaukee for a visit. I got there at night and went to several homes and bars to shuck and jive with acquaintances and old buddies I hadn't seen in a generation. I didn't ask about her at all. Toward daybreak, I found myself at the bar in an after-hours spot owned by a guy I had grown up with.

It was crowded and dim. I was talking to a broad who had lived next door to me in our kid days when I glanced in the back bar mirror and saw an elderly gray-haired woman with a deeply seamed yellow face filching a bill from the shirt pocket of a drunk passed out at a table behind me.