bathroom. I heard the water sloshing in the bowl. She was doing our laundry. I turned my back to the sunlight. I felt old Morpheus slugging his velvet hammer against my eyelids.
I woke up in darkness. I looked at the front-room window. The streetlights were on. I turned the nightstand lamp on. Mickey said seven-ten. The runt was gone. She was breaking her luck with Chuck.
I thought, “Jesus, I sure needed rest all right. That fast track I’ve been blundering on sure took the juice out of me.”
I got up and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I had made several brush strokes when the phone rang. I picked it up. He rapped before I could open my mouth.
He said, “Kid, this is Glass Top. The plans have changed. I’m in a hurry. Be outside your joint in fifteen minutes. You got that?”
I said, “Yeah, but …”
He had hung up. I dressed even faster than I had at the sissy’s pad. I rushed down the hall. I stopped at the broom-closet stash. I hurled the sizzle into the corner on the shelf. I took the stairs three at a time to the lobby. I sailed the key to the desk top. I bolted out the door.
Top was parked in front of the joint in the red Hog. He had his hand over the horn when he saw me. I got in. The Hog squealed from the curb. Top was sure in a hurry. I could hear the harsh whisper of the Hog’s tires against the pavement. We passed that neon bouquet. I looked back and saw the “Fun House” sign flashing. I wondered if Melody was out here somewhere booby trapping with his entasis.
I said, “Jack, I didn’t expect your call for a coupla days. What happened?”
He said, “There’s a big boxing match tonight. All the biggest pimps and whores in the country are gonna be at Sweet’s after the fight. Kinda like a party. All of ’em use stuff. Even with Sweet as the middleman I should take off a coupla grand for my end.”
“Sweet never goes to fights. He can’t stand big crowds, and besides they won’t let Miss Peaches into fights. Sweet’s gnawing his nails waiting for this stuff. He ain’t got none for himself and he’s anxious to cop some stuff for those birds coming from the fight.”
I said, “Have you cracked anything about me to him?”
He said, “Kid, you ain’t hip I’m a genius? He called and I rapped to him this morning. I played you off as my punk nephew from Kansas City. You got wild ideas you wanta be a pimp. I’ve tried to chill you back to K.C. to maybe hustle pool or even be a broom mechanic. You’re a stupid, stubborn punk. I’ve told you a thousand times you ain’t got it to pimp. You gotta pimp.
“You would eat ten yards of Sweet’s crap. You think he’s God. You won’t believe your uncle is tight with God. I’m Glass Top. I gotta save face even for a snot-nosed punk. Maybe if you hang around the inside of the fast track for a hot minute you’ll get scared. You’ll wise up, get outta my ass and run your ass back to K.C. Now Kid, don’t shoot your jib off at his pad. If he don’t remember you from the Roost, don’t wake him up.”
I said, “Don’t worry Top. I won’t rank us. I’ll never forget you, Pal, for the cut in. That was sure some beautiful stuff you played for Sweet.”
He caressed his patent-leather hair. He erected his wide shoulders inside his blue mohair jacket. His pretty, bitch face wore that terrible conceit and awful pride maybe of a cute mass murderer who never gets her victims’ blood on her. The full moon through the windshield shone flush on his face.
He said, “Kid, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Shit, I done drove three whores screaming crazy with this brain. They in the boob box upstate right now babbling about Pretty Glass Top. Even Sweet ain’t shipped but two up there. He’s been pimping almost twice as long as me.”
I said, “Christ, Top, I don’t get it. Why drive a whore nuts if she’s still humping out the scratch. A stud would have to be slick as grease to plant bats in the skull of a bitch that was sane. I can’t dig how a stud could do it. I ain’t hip to it.”
He said, “Sucker, what you don’t dig, and ain’t hip to would make a book bigger than this Hog. Now you take Sweet, the two he crossed were young white broads with small mileage. He’s sick in the head. He’s got an insane hate for the whole white race.
“He was a crumb crusher of seven down in Georgia when the white folks first poisoned his skull. His mammy was jet black and beautiful. The peckerwoods for miles around were aching to lay her. The son of the wealthy plantation owner that Sweet’s old man sharecropped for way-laid her on the way to a spring. He punched her out, tore her clothes off and socked it into her. She was naked and crying when she got back to her shack.
“The peckerwood pig hid out in the woods. Sweet’s old man came in from the fields and found his wife clawed and bawling. He was close to seven feet and weighed three hundred. Sweet still remembers how his old man hollered and butted his head against the door of the shack. The hinges ripped loose.
“He knew the woods like a fox. He found the white boy. He left him for dead. He covered him with brush. He slipped back to his shack. Sweet remembers the white boy’s blood on his old man, even on his old man’s bare feet. He had stomped the white boy to a red pulp out there in the lonely woods. The old man figured he was safe. The white folks would never find the corpse in those thick woods. He cleaned himself, repaired the shack door, and waited.
“He hadn’t croaked the white boy. He had only maimed and paralyzed him. That night a white man out possum hunting with his dogs heard the kid bleating under the brush. He was out of his skull. It was midnight before the kid’s raving made sense to the white folks.
“Sweet heard the mob’s horses galloping toward the shack. He hid in the loft just as the crazy gang came through the shack slammer. Sweet peeped through a crack and watched them beat his old man’s head bloody. They dragged him outside. Sweet saw the whole mob rape his mother.
“Finally all was quiet except for his mother whimpering on the bed. He sneaked out of the loft. Through the open door he saw his old man swinging in the moonlight from a peach tree in front of the shack.
“His mammy went to the funny farm. Sweet was taken in by a share-cropper on the same plantation. He worked the fields until he got seventeen. He ran away and caught a freight train North. He was eighteen when he got his first whore. She was a white girl. He drove her to suicide before he got nineteen. Sweet’s gotta be sixty now.”
He paused. He steered the Hog with one hand. He took a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He punched in the dashboard lighter.
I thought, “No wonder Sweet’s off his rocker. I wonder why Top really gave me that tight rundown on Sweet?”
The lighter popped. Top lit his cigarette. He sucked hard. He blew out a white cloud against the windshield that for an instant blotted out the moon.
He said, “I ain’t insane like Sweet. My skull is clear and cool. I ain’t no mixed-up Southern Nigger. I was born in the North I grew up with white kids. I don’t hate white people or any other people. I ain’t no black brute. I’m a pretty brown-skin lover. I love people.
“When I was a square, I was even engaged to marry a white girl. Her parents and friends put pressure on her and she chickened out. I guess I loved her. Right after we quit I went to a hospital for my nerves. I ain’t had nothing but whores since. It’s like I told you when I met you. Sweet’s a Ford and I’m a Duesenberg. He’s just an ugly lucky nut.”
I said, “But Top you cracked your booby-box score was higher than Sweet’s. Those three gibbering bitches upstate sure don’t show no love for whore people.”
He said, “There you go, fool. A young chump is just like a dumb bitch. He can’t figure nothing out himself. He’s gotta have a rundown on everything. Of course I drove those whores crazy, but for a sane reason, sucker.
“A pimp cops a whore. He cons her maybe if she stays in his corner humping his pockets fat, at the end of the rainbow she’s got a husband and a soft easy chair. To hold her beak to the grindstone, he pumps air castles into her skull.
“She takes all the stable grief. She humps her ass into a cramp to outshine the other whores in the family. At first, it’s easy for the bitch to star. As she gets older and uglier her competition gets younger and prettier.
“She don’t have to be no brain to wake up there ain’t no easy chair at the end. She gets hip there ain’t never even been a rainbow. She gets larceny in her heart. She bullshits herself that if she can drive all those young pretty whores away from the pimp that rainbow might come true after all. If it don’t, she’ll get her revenge anyway.
“It’s a violation of the pimp book to quit a whore. A bitch like that is a ticking bomb. Every day, her value to the pimp drops to the zero line. She’s old, tired, and dangerous. She can rattle a pimp into goofing his whole game.
