Low Road (15 page)

Back in Detroit, the younger brothers who came up behind Donnie found themselves eligible for draft duty. As it was elsewhere in the country, men between their late teen years and their mid-twenties were assigned numbers based on their birth dates. The higher the numbers, the less likely they were to see a uniform. Those unlucky enough to get lower numbers could reasonably expect to get their “greetings,” formal mail-delivered notice from the government that they were being drafted into the military. The notice contained details about where and when they should report for their physical and psychological evaluations. Those who were called “conscientious objectors” had generally already written the draft board: several pages detailing their reasons, religious, personal, or otherwise, for opposing the war and explaining why they should be exempt from service. Those who reported for induction and refused to take their oath to join, sometimes even after a little coaxing from a sergeant, were allowed to go home. But it was usually just a matter of months before they were visited by FBI agents, flashing badges and asking, “Are you…?” Following the normal arrest procedure and booking through county jail, they were scheduled for trial on the charge of violating the Selective Service Act. The end result found objectors locked up right along with the general prison population, including those convicts who had fought their way out of the jungle and made their way back alive. There had been a couple of other options besides the one that led to the joint. Full-time college students could legally avoid the draft. As could anyone willing to leave the country. A number of Detroiters simply chose to cross the river to Canada. And then there were the young men who opted to enlist in the reserves, figuring it was unlikely that they'd ever have to see battle. Of course, if they had been among the Michigan National Guard sent to Detroit in '67, they learned different. Among the brothers who went to the joint, however, refusing the call was viewed as a badge of honor. All that derogatory talk about draft dodging was meant to sting when it came from the mouths of politicians, but it didn't mean shit in the community or in prison, the one place that might have been, in many respects, just as tough as a tour of duty.

Less-celebrated resisters didn't make out as well as boxer Muhammad Ali, who was convicted of draft evasion before the Supreme Court reversed the judgment. Many ate, slept, and shared toilets with dope dealers and robbers until they were released for their crime of consciousness. As convicts of various backgrounds and persuasions came and went, Donnie got through his time. It was hardly a secret that drugs flowed into the prison population, but it was difficult to tell what, if anything, Donnie may have been able to score under the watchful eye of federal guards. Yet, when he left Terre Haute in September 1968, it appeared that he was shooting up the same amount of heroin he had used before he had been sent away. His drug of choice was now common contraband on the streets. The more things had changed in some corners of the world, the more they had managed to stay the same. That same year when Donnie came home, the
New York Times
published a quote from Orville Hubbard, the notoriously racist mayor of Dearborn, a Detroit suburb. “I favor segregation,” he told the newspaper, “because if you have integration, first you have kids going to school together, then next thing you know, they're grab-assing around, then they're getting married and having half-breed kids. Then you wind up with a mongrel race. And from what I know of history, that's the end of civilization.” Hubbard's comments left at least a vague impression of political maturity since his less-reasoned statement in the 1950s: “If whites don't want to live with niggers, they sure as hell don't have to. Dammit, this is a free country. This is America.” Regardless, this was one politician who would never admit to bigotry, instead explaining himself with declarations like “I just hate those black bastards.” Seeming to waste little time, Donnie used the American freedom, of which Hubbard spoke, to get himself right back into legal trouble.

By 1969, he had been sentenced to do time closer to home, at Jackson once again. Cops arrested Donnie for attempted larceny. No sense in lying, he figured. As he had the last time he was sent out to Jackson, Donnie pled guilty. The record from this particular bid of just over a year gave a cursory look at who he had become by age thirty-three. The “birthdate” box still carried that false recording of 1934, which he'd listed in order to make it into the air force. Under “religion,” the abbreviation “Cath” had been typed right next to “education,” accompanied by the number of his last grade, nine. Interestingly, Donnie's occupation was listed as truck driver, though he'd not worked for any serious length of time at anything besides hustling. His “intelligence,” presumably according to standard measurement, was named at an even 100. “Marks & Scars” was a section used to help identify an inmate if ever there was any confusion within the population or possibly in the event of an escape. Donnie's track marks on both arms were prominent from years of shooting smack. He had picked up a couple of tattoos along the way, too. They served as distinguishing features but had a significance that was limited mostly to his knowledge. There was the snake on his left forearm. Joanie and Marie could remember how nasty it turned with infection when he first came back from getting the design. It had taken a while to heal. On his upper right arm was a woman's name, Edna. Nobody his folks seemed to recognize. Not the mother of any of his children. Lord knew that among the ladies with whom Donnie became acquainted, he had plenty of names to choose from. Nevertheless, Edna earned a place in his heart. She simply wouldn't remain a part of his life. Otherwise, the data didn't reveal much for him to be proud of. Apart from its mention of his military experience, the record left doubt as to whether Donnie had ever served anyone or anything besides himself. But things were about to change.

Donnie began exploring talents and potential that he had neglected for maybe as long as it had been since he attended school as a child. First, he toyed around with artwork. Then, at one point, he got into essay writing; prison was an obvious place where the men inside had lots of time to reflect and consider their opinions about the world beyond. One of Donnie's proudest moments was when a piece he had written about the civil-rights work of Martin Luther King was printed in the prison paper. During one visiting day, Myrtle gave Donnie a typewriter she had hauled out to Jackson as a gift she thought to be a practical one. Through it all, he was still her boy. In the meantime, Donnie had gotten turned on to a particular author. The writer had traveled a path that Donnie could well relate to. They shared a connection to the city of Chicago, though they'd lived there at different times and had vastly different experiences. The writer grabbed Donnie's attention. Robert Beck became known as Iceberg Slim during his time in the underground. Older than Donnie, he had made a career of pimping and had also spent time in the joint. It was about 1969, the year that Beck's first autobiographical writings were printed, when Donnie developed an interest in his stories. Beck brought a raw reality about the codes of hustling and street survival to the reading public. This reality was largely unknown to brothers and sisters who had not witnessed and participated in the illegitimacies that folks like Donnie had. To the uninitiated, a pimp was often just a punk nigger who didn't want to get a real job and behave like a real man. A stable was a group of dirty, loose women who didn't have the good sense to keep in their own pocketbooks the money they earned while lying on their backs. For plenty of men in the joint, however, these were the people whose lives they had grown up trying to emulate. In fact, the particular series of events that had led a number of them to prison might have even had something to do with an episode that began as a simple business matter between a pimp and his woman. Donnie, for example, probably never considered the federal violations he was committing when he took his ladies to work out of state. A piece of ass was a piece of ass, whether in Michigan or Alaska. Others who'd gotten into the habit of handling women might find themselves dealing with less directly related charges pertaining to money, violence, or even corruption of children, who might lie about their ages to get away from malevolent homes.

Iceberg Slim's writing brought a lot of this into focus. His following was primarily in the circles of those who could relate or of those folks, black or white, who wanted to keep up with popular culture. Beck's books carried simple and self-explanatory titles like
Pimp
and
Trick Baby.
Both eloquent and worldly, by the time Donnie would leave the joint for his final time, Beck would be widely recognized as a celebrity. He was invited to lecture about his past life, present observations, and thoughts on current events at college campuses, and he was interviewed in such prestigious publications as the
Washington Post.
He became a fascinating figure, whose very presence was intriguing. He earned the respect of many who were open-minded enough to try to understand the perspective of a different kind of man who maintained a measure of credibility in the types of neighborhoods that produced him. An interview Beck would give to the
Los Angeles Free Press
offered a glimpse of what those who paid him any serious attention might find fascinating. Beck told the reporter of a question-and-answer session: “The best pimps that I have known, that is the career pimps, the ones who could do twenty, maybe thirty years as a pimp, were utterly ruthless and brutal, without compassion. They certainly had a basic hatred for women. My theory is, and I can't prove it, if we are to use the criteria of utter ruthlessness as a guide, that all of them hated their mothers. Perhaps more accurately, I would say that they've never known love and affection, maternal love and affection. I've known several dozen, in fact, that were dumped into the trash bins when they were what? Only four or five days old.”

While he was quick to say that he loved his own mother, he acknowledged that he must have resented her on some level because of the neglect he had demonstrated toward her through the years that led up to her death. He further elaborated on the events and disappointments that ultimately led him to retire from the dubious profession: “… I remember when I was a young pimp—and that's where the thrill is—when one is young enough and … ill enough to want to be a pimp. That's where all the glory is, when one is playing Jehovah, so to speak, and learning his craft. Then, oddly enough and disappointingly enough, when one learns to control eight or nine or ten women, then all the luster, all the glory is gone. It's much like learning to ski. One just does it automatically. Then, of course, all the clothes and diamonds and the cocaine and the girls, it isn't really important. There is a vacuum that is filled by the joy of learning the intricacies of being a pimp. But it was the greatest letdown because I was reaching always.”

Donnie grew to respect Iceberg Slim's words. He had become familiar with the conquests and defeats that came along with living in the underground. It was a realm in which only a few people were genuinely suited to thrive. Where—as Beck pointed out—the thrill and exhilaration were all in the pursuit. Where betrayal in the midst of camaraderie was nothing unusual. Where death could be the price of one mistake. It was, in all reality, a lonely place in the end, even for the most successful and prosperous hustler. What Beck was doing, though, was a new kind of hustle. He'd been in the life, made it out of the joint. Now he was simply telling about it. Seemed like a good, legal way to get paid. And Donnie had plenty of stories in him, authentic tales of moral corruption and judicial repercussions. He decided to try his own writer's touch. From inside the walls of Jackson, though it was far from the most creative of surroundings, he began putting words on paper. Employing Beck's style, he wrote in the first person, filling both sides of hundreds of sheets of lined, loose-leaf paper with variations on details he had lived and witnessed:

One of the older pimps staying at the hotel I moved into pulled one of my girls. In spite, I shot at, and [copped] a 24-year-old white girl from his stable. This proved to be my undoing. Not really having any connections for a white girl, I allowed her to lay around my pad for about a week, before having Boots take her down to one of my whorehouses on Hastings. The nigger tricks went crazy over her. It lasted exactly five days before the police caved the door in, taking my whores to jail. I knew that my cathouse was busted before the police came out the door with the girls … The judge gave me a 7½ to 15-year sentence. I looked at that white bastard in a state of shock. I had come to court looking to get probation, but instead [I was] sentenced to prison. I hadn't known the white girl two weeks!

My lawyer had promised me probation because of my age. How could a seventeen-year-old kid [possibly] corrupt a 24-year-old woman? If anything, he had told me jokingly, while standing in the hallway before walking into the courtroom, the judge would give her [ninety] days for teaching a young boy my age bad habits.

With no experience as a published author and no professional guidance, however, getting his work into the right hands was a shot in the dark. He thought maybe the newspaper would be a good place to begin in finding the feedback he sought. Donnie thought he'd send a sample to the
Michigan Gazette
back at home. Staff member Mildred Pruett responded. She addressed the letter, including Donnie's inmate number, 104882:

Dear Sir,

I am very sorry to be so late in writing to you. First of all, I would like to let you know that I did receive your material and found it to be very, very interesting. The second [thing] that you should know is that I am no longer with the
Michigan Gazette.
In fact, there will no longer be a
Gazette
published here in Michigan. Do not let this upset you because within a few weeks, or even less, I will be editor of a much better paper and a much larger paper. The paper will come out once a month, and by it being a larger paper, there will be room for much, much more of the type of things that you are writing about. You can look to hear from me in about two weeks from now. I will give you the new office address and all the information that you will need. I will say again that I am sorry about being so long [in] writing, but I am sure that you know how it is when there are legal ends to be tied.