"Pimpin' ho's and slammin' Cadillac doors," was a common expression, but you had to say it with a cat in your walk-swinging your arm with one hand and holding your crotch in the other. Manley tried to teach me how to do it, but he gave up after a couple of tries. "Forget it, white boy, you're just too damn white."
I started to notice that you could tell who was streetwise, or conwise, by the way they carried themselves. I watched how they walked, the way they looked at you, and by how they pronounced certain words and phrases. Respect was determined, to some degree, by how long you had been doing time, so everything you did was telling.
I asked Slide Step why respect was such a big deal and how it related to teasing. It seemed a blurry line. It was, he said, and depended on who was doing it, because everyone is always watching what others are doing. "As they see one do," he said, "another will do. And then someone else will come along and want to try something larger. I try and avoid it," he said, "because I don't want to have to kill one of these knuckleheads over some silly bullshit."
I also liked the attention I got from convicts other than Slide Step. Everywhere I went it seemed, inmates smiled or said hello to me. Or they'd nod their heads slightly, and I could feel their gaze on me long after I looked away. Their voices would soften and their edgy shells would melt awayespecially if no one else was around. I felt almost seduced by it, but I knew pretty quickly that most of them wanted to do something more than just kick it with me-especially if it was out of earshot of Slide Step.
Manley said I needed to be careful, but it was more complicated than that. He said he couldn't really explain it.
"They knocked off all of his bitches," Red said one afternoon. We were lying on the grass while he and Slide Step were talking about some pimp they knew on the street.
"Why would they kill his bitches?" I asked.
"Stay out of grown people's business," Red said to me.
Slide Step looked over at me and explained that knocked-off meant when one pimp took another pimp's woman. "It comes from the expression, when somebody comes knocking," he said. "If she chooses another man, the pimp has to either accept it or he throws down over it," meaning he'd have to fight it out.
"Pimps usually let it go," Slide Step said, "accepting it as a weakness in his game."
"Why would she do that to her man?" I asked.
"Hos are weak-minded," Red said. "And always suspectable to another player's mind fuck."
"Susceptible," I corrected him, without thinking.
"Whatever," Red said. He gave me a dirty look.
"So how you handle that," Red said, "is you don't allow your bitches to talk to another man."
Red knew a lot about prostitutes because of his mother, Slide Step would tell me later, when we were back under his bed after having sex. "She was murdered when Red was ten. Probably by a pimp she tried to rip off."
That was when Slide Step's mom took Red in.
Slide Step and Red's mothers had grown up together in Detroit's Brewster Projects. They even worked together until Red's mom got strung out on heroin and turned to prostitution. That was how Red was born.
"A trick baby," I said. I remembered the term from the Donald Goines book about black gangsters I read while in Quarantine. Slide Step told me I could never let Red hear me say that.
"He's got a crazy temper," he said.
It was Red's temper that got Slide Step his first prison term, lie told me. They worked for Slide Step's nlom and were supposed to pick up a package from a guy that owed her some money. "Red went crazy," Slide Step said, ,,when the man called Iced a trick baby."
They had served ten years for aggravated assault, while the other guy lost his teeth, his right eye, and suffered severe nerve damage. Looking at Slide Step, I got a glimpse of how lie felt about Red. He was like a brother to him.
Slide Step's mom never came to visit him, and I could see how much this hurt him. "We have an understanding," lie said. "She won't come to a penitentiary because she thinks it'll jinx her business. So she does what she can, from where's she at." She meant everything to Slide Step, and I could see in his eyes how much he missed her.
Later that day, as I came in from the yard, Slide Step stopped me in the hall. "I want you to take your shower now."
"OK," I shrugged, but he seemed a little odd.
When I entered the shower room, Slide Step had Manley posted at the door. There was a shower room on both the north and south sides. As you entered, there was a row of sinks beneath a large mirror and a changing area with a long wooded bench on the opposite end. The showers, which were out of sight from the door, were in an open area with a half dozen spigots or so that came out from the wall.
When I stepped into the showers, there was a white man waiting for me. He was tall, in his early twenties with jet-black hair. He was heavier than nee, but not very muscular, and his chest was hairy. His dick was standing straight up, and if it wasn't quite obvious what I was there to do, he came over and placed his hand on my shoulder.
18
Careful What You Ask For
"You kids can have either a hamburger or
