Three days later, a half hour before closing, an order came in for a case of Mums. The address was in the plush Height’s, miles from the store.
I made the trip on a bicycle. She answered the door wearing only a pair of white lace step-ins. My erection was hard and instant.
It was a fabulous pad, and the lights were soft and blue. The old man wouldn’t be back for a week.
I was just a hep punk, I wasn’t in her league, but one of my greatest assets has always been my open mind. That freak bitch cajoled and persuaded me to do everything in the sexual book, and a number of things not even listed.
What a thrill for a dog like her to turn out a tender fool like me. She was a hell of a teacher all right, and what a performer. If Pepper had lived in the old Biblical city of Sodom the citizen’s would have stoned her to death.
She nibbled and sucked hundreds of tingling bruises on every square inch of my body. Fair exchange, as the old saw goes, is never robbery.
It took me a week to get the stench of her piss out of my hair. She sure had been pimped on hard back East. She hated men, and she was taking her revenge on me.
She had taught me to snort girl, and almost always when I came to her pad, there would be thin sparkling rows of crystal cocaine on the glass top of the cocktail table.
We would snort it through alabaster horns and then in the mirrored bedroom we made circus love until our nerve ends shrieked.
Pepper and that pure cocaine would have made a freak out of a Priest. She had sure put me on a fast track.
I couldn’t know at the time that at the end of the line stood the grim State Penitentiary.
I was green all right and twice as soft and Pepper knew it. Here was a hardened ex-whore who knew all the crosses, all the answers, who handled lots of scratch and wasn’t laying a red penny on me.
The dazzling edge on our orgies was dulling for me, but I was flipping Pepper with the techniques she had taught me. I knew all the buttons to push for her, and she burned hotter than ever for her little puppy.
No wonder, I was freaking for free, those Eastern pimps had charged her a fortune.
I tried one night to get a C note from her for a suit. I knew I had really come on fine in the bed. She had almost climbed the walls in her passion.
“Sugar,” I said, “I saw a wild vine for a bill downtown. If you laid the scratch on me, I could cop tomorrow.”
She slitted her green eyes and laughed in my face, and said, “Now listen Lil’ Puppy, I don’t give men money. I take it from them, and besides, as sweet as you are to this pussy, you don’t need a suit. I like you as you are, with no clothes on at all.”
I was a rank greenhorn, sure, but her cold turn down of my plea for the C note was bitchy cute, and I was a salty sucker, so I reacted like any stupid would-be pimp who had been Georgied.
I had fouled up basic business. I had led with my dick instead of my mitt.
I reached down and slapped her hard against the side of her face. It sounded like a pistol shot. On impact a thrill shot through me. I should have slugged her with a baseball bat.
The bitch uncoiled from that bed like a striking yellow cobra, hooked her arms around my waist and sank her razor sharp teeth into my navel.
The shock paralyzed me. I fell on my back across the bed moaning in pain. I could feel blood rolling from the wound down toward my crotch, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move.
Pepper was sure a strange twisted broad. She was breathing hard now, but not in rage. The violence, the blood, had turned her on.
She was gently caressing me as she licked, with a feathery tongue, the oozing wound on my belly. She had never been so tenderly efficient as she took me on a beautiful “trip around the Universe.”
The funny thing was, that throbbing awful pain some how became a part of, melted into the joy of the feathery tongue, the thrill of the thing that Pepper was doing to me.
I guess Freud was right. If it thrills you to give pain, you can get your jollies taking it.
When I left Pepper, I was sapped. I felt like an old man. My mood was as bleak and cheerless as the gray dawn I cycled through.
When I got home and looked into the mirror, a death’s head stared back at me. That vampire bitch was sucking my life’s blood all right. I also knew that crystal cocaine wasn’t exactly a health tonic.
Pepper was too fast, too slick for me. I had to make her shit or get off the pot.
I made the skeleton in the mirror a solemn vow that before the week was out I would in some way get Weeping Shorty, a pimp about fifty-five who, while a gorilla pimp, was the best pimp in town to pull my coat to give me a plan for putting a ring in Pepper’s nose.
Before I got busted, I had seen him at Jimmy’s joint. He had looked horrible then, and now less than a year and a half later he looked like a breathing corpse.
Hoss was his Boss. He had chippied around and gotten hooked. It was Friday, almost midnight when I found him.
He looked at me and made that clacking sound against the roof of his mouth with his tongue. You know, that mischievous, weirdly joyful sound that a young kid makes the instant before he rams a hat pin into your ear drum.
Then he said, “Well kiss my dead mammy’s ass, if it ain’t Macking Youngblood. The whore’s pet and the pimp’s fret.”
The junkie bastard was jeffing on me, lashing me with contempt and scorn. Old pimps always know when a youngster with a yen for the pimp game is desperate for advice.
After all, they remember when they started and what a bitch it was just to learn the million questions. The answers would come slowly, from heart breaking trial and error, from the ass kissing of the few who had solved the riddle, who pimped by the book.
The cleverest pimp could give a thousand years and never come close to all the answers.
Weeping Shorty was an old man, and he had gotten past the questions and had worked out a few answers, but even so he knew a thousand times more than I did. So, I fought for control, I couldn’t show anger. If I did he would cut me loose.
We had been standing under the awning of a vacant storefront. He pulled me with a jerk of his head, I followed him to a big shabby Buick. It was parked at an intersection in a cheap-trick district.
When we got inside the Buick I understood why he had parked it there. He could watch and keep tabs on his stable of scrawny, junkie whores working the four corners of the intersection.
He sat under the wheel not saying anything. His eyes straight ahead. I had kissed his ass for a half hour and now he was freezing up. I thought of the tiny pile of cocaine wrapped in tinfoil under my instep that I had filched from Pepper. I fished it out and held it in my hand. Perhaps the cocaine would open him up.
I turned to him and said, “Weeping, do you want a light snort of girl?”
He stiffened like a butcher knife had been run into his back. He looked at the wad of tinfoil in my palm and snatched it and in the same motion hurled it through the window on his side.
His top was blown, he shouted, “Nigger, ain’t you got no sense? You trying to go back to the joint and blow my wheels?”
I said, “What did I do wrong? All I did was to offer the C just to be sociable. What’s wrong with that?”
He said, “Sucker, first booty butt, you don’t transport no hard in your stomp, keep it in your mitt so you can down it fast to the turf. Second, you’re on parole. You’re hot! You ain’t got no business sitting dirty in my short. There’s a law, Sucker, that can confiscate a short with stuff in it. You know if the heat had hit on you you would unload in my short. Keep stuff off you. When you stop somewhere down it in the street until you ready to split. It’s better to get beat for the stash than beat by the heat. Now what took your head outta Pepper’s ass long enough for you to look me up?”
Oh! How this junkie creep bugged me. I sat there beside him trying to think of questions that would bleed him so I could get out of his face fast. He looked exactly like a withered baboon. His breath stunk like he had just eaten a bowl of maggots.
I said, “Weeping, Pepper hasn’t got my nose open for her. She’s too jazzy and slick for me. I came to you because everybody knows that your game is mellow. I want you to pull my coat so I can pimp some scratch out of
