Airtight Willie & Me by Iceberg Slim Page B

was a man’s mission. I dressed in dark clothes, rammed my pistol into my belt, and told Phyl not to leave the pad and split. I went to the roof and tried to spot the Mutt and Jeff Buick staked out. I went down the fire escape to the alley. I started down the black pit alley toward Sixty-third Street for a cab. Two blocks away! Platoons of rats scampered and squealed across my path.
    Deep into the nightmarish tunnel I saw the black shape of a car oozing toward me with lights out. I snatched out my pistol. It slipped from my sweaty hand and bounced on the alley floor. I dropped to my belly behind a trash bin and retrieved it. My shaking hand pointed it at the windshield of the car moving toward me. The car stopped ten yards away. It was a Cadillac!
    I got to my feet. As I passed the startled white dude under the wheel, I saw a Sixty-third Street ho laying head on him. I was dizzy with relief when I stepped into Sixty-third’s carnival of neon and whistled myself into a cab.
    On the long trip to Tracy’s on the Westside, I remembered how I’d met Streak. Junior high was out for summer vacation. Opal Grady, my first sex mate sweetheart, and I were having a picnic lunch in the park one July afternoon. We noticed an older young guy in tattered, dirt-streaked clothes. He’d amble out of the bushes to get a drink of water from a nearby fountain every few minutes. Each time, he’d sneak a ravenous glance at our layout of food. Opal suggested that we share with him. I followed him to his pad in the bushes. I had a helluva time convincing him to accept the invitation to join us.
    He introduced himself to us as Otis Banks. Guess we were the first to meet him formally when Otis the orphan had swung off that freight train from Dixie three days before. He had oodles of warm, comedic charm. He hooked Opal and me right away. I remembered there was an extra room at home. He shot Mama down within an hour after she met him. Mama copped him a gig as mop technician at city hall. I loved him like the brother I never had.
    But he was restless, had been street poisoned down in Memphis. A year later, he split to the fast track and left a sentimental note for Mama and me. Through his rare visits and rumors, I kept in touch with his street career. He had hooked his heart to become a pimp. His black patent leather skin stretched across the Cro-Magnon features was a slight handicap. The major handicap of his tender dick, compounded by his secret pedestal reverence for foxes early on, had chilled his long shoe dream.
    He peddled low-grade eights and sixteenths of smack and cocaine, instead of dick, out of crappers in junkie dives for several years. Then he copped the big bag. He bleached a gold streak down the center of his processed hair to cop his moniker and to match his gold hog. And now, I thought, as my cab pulled to the curb at Tracy’s, Streak’s golden street bubble had popped.
    Tracy’s doorman peeped at me through the spy hole and opened the steel door. I walked into the acrid smoke haze and wall-to-wall night people. The Seeburg jukebox was firing neon and Hamp’s “Flying Home.” I spotted Streak at the crowded bar. As usual, he was a loudmouthed, animated symphony, decked out in puce and gold threads. The Carole Lombard look-alike blond fox he’d stolen in New York was beside him, draped out in threads that matched his own. Next to the fox teetered the fat, black New York cabby. I muscled through jitterbugging fanatics in the aisle toward Streak.
    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