Airtight Willie & Me (7 page)

Streak hollered above the din, “Set up every motherfucker and cocksucker in the joint, and give the mice some cheese, the cat some cream on Gold Streak!”

Tracy, the ex-pimp bar owner, was behind the bar slaving with his barmaids to serve the thirsty crowd. As I moved in close, I heard Gold Streak high jiving and needling perspiring Tracy. Just as I reached Streak's side, Tracy blew his cool.

He rammed his bitch face close to Streak's and shouted, “Get outta my ass, Gold Streak!”

Streak just threw his head back and laughed. He threw his arm around me.

I said, “Streak, let's split!”

He said, “Not now, Slim.” Streak said to Tracy, “Nigger, you funky as a two-dollar ho behind that bar. My woman is got enough scratch between her titties to buy this cracker box.”

Tracy said, “Fuck yourself, Jive Ass!”

She whipped out a bale of “C” notes from her outrageous cleavage and tossed it onto the bar top. You could have heard two cockroaches fornicating on Mars in the sledgehammer silence.

I leaned into Streak's ear and whispered, “Jesus Christ, get yourself together. Streak! Let's split! Two Outfit Aces are out to hit you!”

Streak's face ashened.

Some joker expressing the collective passion of the clientele shouted, “Girl, I oughtta stick you up.”

Streak glanced about anxiously and drew a Magnum pistol. He scooped up the bundle into his overcoat pocket. We threaded our way to the street. The three of us got into a cab. Streak checked into a fleabag hotel several miles away on the Westside. His fox went into the shower. He slumped down on the side of the bed. I sat down beside him.

He moaned, “Slim, it's the end of the world!”

I said, “Get in the wind, Streak. It's a big world.”

He shook his head and whispered, “It ain't no more. Slim, it ain't no use. Those cruel bastards have already shrank it to the size of a morgue slab unless I get all them ‘gees' I'm into 'em for.”

I stayed with him until dawn before I said good-bye. I split to Cleveland the same day. A week later, I got the news he had been shot a dozen times pulling his Caddie from a rented garage on the Westside.

After ten years and a slew of blown hoes, I came back to Chi on my uppers, strung out on “H” and one junkie ho, Phyl. Immediately as I checked into a third-rate Southside junkie hotel, I discovered there was a dope panic.

Old Man Sparky, reduced to boosting for a living, was a tenant in the hotel. He steered me to some three percent smack that kept me and my girl from being sick. His once round handsome, yellow face was wasted and scabrous. Sparky lay in his greasy bed coughing up tubercular phlegm as he ran down conditions in town.

He said, “Slim, you've come back to a motherfucking graveyard. Ain't been no decent dope in the street for a month. Better split with your ho to Detroit or the Apple.”

I said, “I have to get scratch to split. I'm almost on ‘E'. Any quality shit in Gary? Any on the Westside?”

He shook his head and said, “There's some choice brown Spic dope here on the Southside. But you gotta have the connection and the long scratch to copy at least a quarter of the piece, at double the usual bite.”

He was racked with a seizure of coughing for several minutes. He continued. “If Phyl is become the thief you think she is, maybe you can cop some of that decent dope if your ho stings big, soon! The only connection is a cold-blooded bitch, Pretty Opal. She's cribbing up in the hotel where we used to crib. The bitch is got Gold Streak's suite.”

I said, “Sparky! Is she a blue-black stallion with legs like Grable, tip-tilted nose, a big round ass, and bedroom eyes?”

He nodded and screwed up his face. He said, “Slim, if you can shape it up an angle for her, you better do it fast. Smarter still, Slim, don't play for her. Ina cross fire you could get in the family way. With lead!”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “ 'Cause she's one of the reasons for the present dope panic. Last month she toured the beds of the three top dealers in town. She laid her poontang and bullshit on 'em just long enough to get hip to their operations. She laid her suction cunt and a sawed-off shotgun on a snot-nose heistman called Wee Billy to rip off their merchandise. Those niggers got hip and sho' nuff salty. That ain't all.
I heard she just got back from fucking around with ugly-ass Klondike, the biggest dealer in Detroit. Klondike is the most treacherous nigger that ever shit between two shoes. The wiser is she and her dwarf sucker will be wasted any day now. I'm gonna worry about you, Slim, if you cut into her.”

I was stunned. Visions of clean-cut Opal, the teenage ball-blaster, rushed through my head. Oh, the spicy spoor between her satin thighs. The rose garden, the manicured jade of lawn, moonlit in the rear of her palatial home. Her hypnotic eyes caressing my face as I volleyed my blood-bloated weapon into her incredibly fat sex nest. I remembered the musical laughter of her elegant mother and socialite guests wafting on summer air just before Opal's father's bellowed rage spooked me into the wind just as I orgasmed. No, Opal the dealer wasn't—couldn't be—my Opal after all.

I said, “Sparky, I don't know Opal the dealer, so I got no angle. The Opal I knew was a stone young lady, with top-drawer parents. Why, her old man had the largest black furniture and appliance store in the country. Guess I'll run over to Milwaukee and try to score.”

Sparky hiked himself up in the bed. He said, “It's the same Opal. You know the bitch. Her old man got busted. He was the biggest fence for heisted jewelry and hijack whiskey there ever was. He made the front page of the Defender a coupla years after you split to Cleveland. You know the bitch! You gonna try to score for some of her Spic dope, ain't ya?”

I nodded.

He said, “Take real good care, Slim. Lay a pinch on old Sparky if you do.”

I felt my monkey sandpapering my guts as I went to my pad. I decked myself in the best threads I had. I didn't care if Opal had turned into the fucking devil. I had to cut into her and score for some of her brown Mexican ambrosia. I felt sorry for her in a way. But what the hell, I thought. Opal had realized the fondest dream of thousands of black street people past and present. She was ensconced
in the top black hotel, in its most lavish suite. Dope Queen Opal had arrived!

I called her. She squealed at the sound of my voice. My numb junkie scrotum tingled at the sound of her contralto voice.

I stared into the opaque eye of her suite's peephole as I rang the chimes and heard the metallic clamor as she unbarred and unbolted the door. It swung open. I stood on the threshold scanning her face. I was amazed that in the sorcerous pink glow, she appeared to be the same uncorrupted schoolgirl she had been. I rushed into her outstretched arms. We embraced and kissed for a helluva time before we sat down on the freshly upholstered gold silk sofa. Her Rubenesque curves shone through her diaphanous negligee like indigo satin. Her fabulous legs were curled beneath her Yoga fashion. Her waist-length hair shimmered black like a miniature waterfall. She gazed into my eyes as she pushed back my sleeve and finger-stroked the spike tracks on the inside of my wrist.

She said softly, “Bobby, maybe I shouldn't have invited you to see me. Your eyes have changed.”

I laughed hollowly. “It's jungle warp, angel, that's all. I can split if I make you leery. I don't heist or mug for my medicine.”

She shaped a little smile. “Come to think of it, you wouldn't have to. You had a sweet bitch of a hitch in your hips on the down strokes. How many girls do you rule?”

As I stroked her spike tracks inside of her thigh, I said, “One thief at the moment. But I'm taking applications from the qualified . . . even demonstrating an advanced bag of strokes from the hips and the brain. Doll face, five grand or so, in good faith scratch, would entitle you to the special introductory opportunity to get all of those goodies and paradise too.”

She nodded her head toward a gigantic oil painting on the wall and murmured, “I painted that. That's Wee Billy, my teenage sweetie. I'm the ruler type too, Bobby.”

I studied the nude image of her Lilliputian slave with the
cast-iron balls to rip off dope dealers. He had a snarling, girlish, banana-hued face and a steel wire body. His sex tools hung grotesquely huge. He seemed afloat in an ocean of flame red clouds.

She said, “I'm his Jocasta in a way. He loves me with reverence like the mother he never knew. But he fucks me with no hang-ups at all. He's devoted, obedient, and cold-blooded like the Doberman I had when I was ten. I could command Billy to waste that tie salesman in the White House, and he'd do it for me. He wouldn't ask why. He'd die trying. He loves me!”

She smooched my forehead as she rose and spun Eckstine's “Jelly, Jelly” on a mahogany console. She went to the bedroom. I glanced about the sparkling suite. I hoped Billy wouldn't show before I copped some medicine. I shivered remembering Gold Streak and that long-ago morning when Mutt and Jeff jacked me up. She came back naked. My first thought was that she would try to swindle me out of some swipe and/or cap, until I noticed the shooting works in her hand.

She crooned, “Darlinkins, take off your clothes and let's do up.”

I did. She cooked up a spoon and drew a shot up into the dropper. I was so frantic to bang some quality I missed the vein twice. She took the spike and hit me good. I was engulfed in salubrious waves of euphoria. She cooked another batch and drew up a shot. Then she got on her knees on the carpet with her big round rear end between my knees.

She said, “Sugar, hit me in the ass.”

I daggered the spike into a vein. Her plum-tipped anus blossom quivered when crimson flooded the dropper. She groaned ecstatically as I bulbed and drained the dropper empty. She turned and kneeling, cocooned my scrotum with her hair. Then she rested her head in my lap as she had when we were children.

She whispered, “Sweetheart, I'm so lonely and afraid, afraid for Billy. He's a whole day overdue from business in Detroit.”

I stroked her head and said, “He'll show, doll.”

We shot dope, and I kept her company until two
A.M
. Christ! She needed me as much as I needed her dope. I put on my clothes to split. Phyl would be coming in off the streets needing a fix.

I said, “Doll face, you've been a jewel. I don't beg charity. Do me a favor and sell me an eighth of shit for my girl and me to wake up on.”

She went to the bedroom and came back and gave me a fat glassine pack of smack and said, “I'm giving you that for old times' sake. Call tomorrow to check on me.”

I kissed her. I was at the front door when the phone rang. I paused and studied her face when she picked up and listened. I had never before, nor since, seen such bombshell terror on a human countenance. She let the receiver bounce on the carpet as she collapsed beside it. She stared up at me with tragic eyes that will haunt me to the grave.

She whispered raggedly, “Detroit niggers dumped him in an alley, like a varmint . . . Wee Wee is dead! . . . They chopped off his swipe and balls . . . stuffed them down his throat . . . sliced off his ass. Cocksuckers! Hammered a steel pipe up his ass! Poor Wee Wee . . . I was the only mama he ever knew . . . Oh God! Help me, Bobby!”

I thought, what a black widow mama Wee Wee drew. I turned and took a couple of steps across the carpet to comfort her. Then it hit me! Billy had been tortured before death released him. An eighteen-year-old, or just about anybody, would puke out his gut secrets under a torture quiz. Like Opal's address. Billy's killers could be on their way for Opal. They would wipe out any hapless soul found with her. I fanned out the door.

I went down the hallway for the elevator. I almost soiled myself when an olive-tinted black pimp, with the moniker of Dago Frank, sporting a broke-down pearl-grey lid, stepped out of his room in the shadow-haunted corridor behind me and hollered, “Hello, Slim!”

I was in the street with my hands on the door handle of my ride when the sentimental, interior sucker sent me back for Opal. The
door was still open. She was still transfixed with horror and terror on the floor. I yanked her to her feet. I scooped up her coat. We split the suite.

Since day had decapitated night's bummer head with a bright golden ax, that suicidal sucker in me forced me to get her off the street until night encored. At my pad, Phyl split to Sparky's room with her spare of the quality smack.

Opal and I shot up my dope and sat on a couch drinking syrupy refreshments as we planned her escape from the city when darkness fell. In the drawn-draped dimness of my pad, Opal's face was so soft and innocent. I found it difficult to believe that almost fifteen years had passed since our puppy love affair.

I said, “Baby, ain't it a bitch how we both struck out? Remember how we used to dream and brag in the park, on your front porch swing on those summer nights? You were going to be the first superstar black painter for openers. Then after that, if you were in the mood and the dough was right, you'd hit Hollywood as an actress and nudge Nina Mae McKinney and Dorothy Dandrige aside.”

She sighed, “Yeah, square-ass dreamer me. And you, Bobby, you were going to be the first black Clarence Darrow . . . to make your mama bust her heartstrings with joy. Sure, I remember the dreams I spun. It put the hurt to me through the years to get hip that there was never even a rainbow . . . much less a pot of fucking gold!”

I said, “Something puzzles me. I fell from a family nest broken when I was just a squealer. My old man bounced my noggin off a tenement wall when I was six months old. Mama lugged the load solo. Before I met you I was street poisoned. We lived across the street from a ho house. I'd sit in my room and watch the pimps, in silk shirts and yellow toothpick shoes, come to get their money with satchels. Damn! I'd get excited when they'd pack their hoes into Duesenbergs, Lincolns, and Caddies and cruise away on joy rides. I ached to be a pimp when I was just twelve.