Trick Baby

by Iceberg Slim

  Then I thought of the tonic in my top coat pocket. I struggled the bottle to my mouth and drained it in front of the curious stares of passers-by. It was like a small transfusion of pure energy.

  Within a minute and a half, I felt strong enough to release my grip on the light pole. It was a long, long two blocks to the Caddie.

  Blue had been following me. He helped me into the car. He pulled the Caddie away from the curb and said, “Folks, you’re sick. I’m taking you to a croaker.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat.

  I said, “Forget the croaker. Let’s go to the Brass Rail. I need a stiff jolt of Scotch.”

  That night at home I lay in bed and framed a slick drinking plan. No drinking at all until noon. Then I’d take no more than a pint by shots or bottle before bedtime.

  After a week or so I’d made it no more than a half pint. Then after that less and less, until I didn’t take any. I knew it would work. Perhaps I’d even stop drinking harmless champagne with the Goddess in time.

  Too bad I’d switched from rum to the Goddess’s scotch. Perhaps rum wouldn’t have poisoned my system completely. Mr. Trick Bag had won a mere skirmish. I was sure I could win the war.

  I fell into jagged sleep. The next morning I awoke to the whirr of a vacuum cleaner. Our old cleaning woman was hard at work in the hall.

  Blue came to the side of the bed and said, “How are you doing?”

  I said, “I don’t feel like I could touch the sky. But I’m not sick.”

  Blue said, “Maybe you ought to see a croaker and get checked. You looked awful yesterday hugging that lamp post. Anyway, we’ll take the day off. Should I have the old lady bring you some breakfast?”

  I shook my head and said, “No, I’m not hungry. I’ll get up later and eat some cereal.”

  I dozed off. The clinking of cologne bottles on the dresser opened my eyes.

  Sister Franklin was dusting and softly humming an old black people’s spiritual, Give Me That Old Time Religion. Her tiny hunched body and white hair reminded me of Grandma Annie.

  I propped myself up in the bed. The mattress springs creaked. Sister’s dull brown eyes met mine in the dresser mirror. A toothless smile cheerfully creased her black face.

  She turned and said, “Good mawnin’, Mistah Johnny.”

  I said, “Good morning, Sister Franklin.”

  She said, “Ah warn’t aimin’ tu break yuh res’. Mistah Blue perticulah tole me not tu du no cleanin’ en heah atall. But ah caint stan no devlish filt’. Ah jes hed tu dus’ en heah.

  “Mistah Johnny, yuh ain’ got thet spry roostah look. Yuh ’pear porely. Ain’ nuthun’ tu beat thet gud book en truble time. Ah ain’ nevah seed thet book en dis hous. Is yuh evah redd it in yurh born days?”

  I said, “No, I haven’t, Sister Franklin. I’ve been too busy for most of my life trying to keep from starving. I’ve heard it’s a good book. One of these days, I’ll look into it.”

  Her mouth popped open in shocked awe. The dust cloth fluttered to the carpet. With perhaps divine agility she flung herself on her knees beside the bed.

  She shut her eyes and started to pray. Her moaning plea to God to show me the holy light and to save my soul gave me an uncomfortable, trapped feeling. The pitiful old lady was so sincerely caught up in the nonsense, I had to go along.

  I noticed Blue standing in the doorway shaking his head with an amused smile on his face. Finally she started pressing her fingertips against my head and then across my chest and sides. She was trying mighty hard to heal me back to that spry rooster stance. But my head still felt like I had thousand-pound dumbbells strapped to it, and her gnarled fingers tickled me silly.

  Blue pressed the palm of his hand across his inflated cheeks to keep from bursting out laughing at my silly bind. She got to her feet. Blue faded down the hall.

  Sister Franklin’s face had a joyful, hostess-type radiance. It was like perhaps she had just seated a famished Christ at His second coming to a banquet for her best cornbread and hog guts.

  Breathlessly she said, “Did yuh feel Him a runnin’ down mah fingertips? Ah’m gonna pray fuh yuh, Mistah Johnny. Yuh ain’ nuthin’ but a shell widout duh Lawd.”

  She picked up the dust cloth and went through the bathroom into Midge’s old room.

  Blue came and sat on the side of the bed.

  He said, “Is you been converted by the Holy Ghost and the fire? Speak up. Is you gwine repent your sinful grifter ways and flunkey for some peckerwood for fifty a week?

  “Seriously, Folks, we’ve never talked about it, but you know that my only religion is that lucky seven-day candle burning in my bedroom. How do you feel about religion and God?”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  Finally I said, “Blue, you’ll never lose your partner that way. I was raised on Thirty-ninth Street in an apartment that would make a hobo puke.

  “I use to look at the slick magazines that Phala brought home from River Forest. I’d see the pictures of just ordinary, middle-class, happy whites in settings that looked like palaces to me.

  “It was really confusing because all the black people around me lived in pigsties and never got enough of the cheap garbage they could afford to buy.

  “It was even more confusing to watch the shabby black religious buffs trudging to church every Sunday morning. I was eight years old, I think, when I asked Phala why she never talked to God or went to church. Her answer summed up the way I feel now about the whole God thing.

  “She said, ‘Johnny, the white people have all the nice things of life and all the money. Niggers have all the misery and poverty and their religion. White people love to see Niggers blinded by religion. It makes it easy to keep them shut out from their rights and the nicer things of life.

  “‘Those poor ragged Niggers you see on the way to church don’t know that if there is a God, he’s deaf to Nigger prayers. It’s a white world and God is white. So, why waste my time when I won’t be heard anyway.’

  “Blue, everything I’ve seen since that day proves the truth of what Phala said. Now, if I didn’t have Nigger blood in my veins, perhaps I would have tried to catch His ear when I was coming up. But this way I know where I stand. He doesn’t want me, and I’m not interested in Him. And that’s the guaranteed truth.”

  Blue said, “Folks, that’s a smart attitude to have. But my conviction is that God never existed. I believe the Bible was written by the slickest bunch of peckerwood grifters that ever crapped between two sandals.”

  Blue turned and went down the hall. I lay there for a long time thinking. Maybe God didn’t even exist.

  By the last week of October, I knew that the pint limit I had set for myself wasn’t reasonable. Twice I had attacks like that first one in the Loop. It took at least two pints a day to spark me for the con and the Goddess.

  Her best friend, the widowed Cordelia, had a plush apartment on Chicago’s Near Northside. Several times we used a bedroom in Cordelia’s apartment for our sex fun.

  We met at Cordelia’s the last day of October. We had made furious love, and we were just lying in the darkness holding each other close.

  Camille whispered, “Darling, I missed my period last month. Maybe there’s a wee Irish dream inside me. I’m going to see my doctor next week and take the Belgian rabbit test for pregnancy. Married or not, I’m going to have—”

  I cut her off.

  I said, “You can’t have a baby when your husband hasn’t touched you in ten years. How would—?” Her index finger across my lips silenced my protest. She kissed me and said, “Don’t worry about a thing. I might open my bedroom to my husband if I am pregnant. I’ll plan and take care of all the angles.”

  Cordelia and I liked each other. She had been one of the original Minsky Strippers. She was tall and buxom, with Coca Cola bottle curves. And her florid face was gullied with spidery wrinkles. But even so, a faint trace of dollish beauty was still there.

  She was plain spoken, and she and her orna
te apartment had a kind of bawdy elegance. Her thin hair had been dyed so much it looked like old straw. But she was a fancy dresser and huge rocks twinkled brightly on her long expressive fingers.

  Her husband had been a wealthy sportsman who drowned ten years before while deep sea fishing.

  I was glad to meet the Goddess at Cordelia’s place for two reasons. As I said, I liked her. And I was able to escape the temptation to drink past my two-pint daily limit in the Chez Paree, the cellar Blue Note and in all the other spots I usually made with the Goddess before we nested in a Loop bed.

  I had been able to avoid meeting Camille’s father. Just from the few tidbits of information that Camille dropped about him, I knew it wouldn’t be a moment filled with bliss.

  In his early twenties, he had been a slave-driving official in a South African prison.

  On the twentieth of November, the Goddess and I went to a movie at the State Lake Theatre. She was gorgeous in a formfitting, sable-trimmed white woolen suit. The movie was The Bells of St. Mary’s. The Goddess was wild about Bing Crosby even when he didn’t sing.

  We sat in the rear of the balcony. Just after a Lowell Thomas Travelogue, a huge burly black guy and a cute young white broad sat in front of us. Almost right away they started torrid petting and sucking of each other’s tongue.

  The Goddess was squirming in her seat like she was the one with the black guy’s mitt rammed between her thighs.

  She pinched me hard in the side and whispered, “Can’t we do something? That coon beast is desecrating that poor white infant. She can’t be more than fifteen. I’m going to be ill. Please do something. Get a policeman and have him arrested.”

  I couldn’t answer right away.

  Finally I got myself together and whispered, “Now, stop that. It’s none of our business. And besides, you don’t see a razor at her throat, do you? She looks like she’s having fun. She might even be in love with him. Let’s move before you make me ill.”

  We got up and sat on the far side of the balcony. But it was no use. The Goddess was so upset, she couldn’t watch the screen. She kept darting agonized glances at the passionate couple and whispering her outrage to me.

  I didn’t grasp the plot of the feature at all. I vaguely remember Bing Crosby and some old guy with a sweet voice decked out in priestly robes.

  When we walked to the sidewalk she was still rubbing my tender nerves raw with her bleats about the bestial black coon and his white love slave.

  I had already had my two-pint limit that day in the street while playing the con with Blue. I got behind the wheel of her Jaguar and drove us to one of our cozy little hangouts on Clark street.

  By eleven P.M. the affair of the white infant and the bleating and all the rest of it was almost humorous. I was feeling better than I had in weeks. I’d had a bad cold for several days. But the dozen double-shots I’d drunk seemed to wipe away the congestion and tightness in my chest. Mr. Trick Bag had won another minor skirmish all right.

  I looked at the grinning row of whiskey bottles on the back bar and silently said, “Goddamnit, tomorrow’s another day. You poisonous bastard. I won’t touch you tomorrow, to make up for tonight. You’ll see. What do you think about that Mr. Trick Bag sonuvabitch?”

  18

  THE HATERS

  I remember sailing in the Jaguar through a sea of glittery neon to a massive port. It was the Palmer House. And the Goddess was leading me into the swank Pump Room.

  A tall guy in an impeccable tuxedo and flawless smile approached us and crooned, “Ah, what a delight it is to see you, Mrs. Costain. Your father is expecting you.”

  I thought, “Well, she’s tricked me into meeting the old bastard.”

  We followed him through the dulcet light and muted hum of polite conversation to a large, plush booth. A tall aristocratic guy in a blue cashmere suit was rising from his seat with languid feline grace.

  His platinum hair was a sleek tailored cap with steel-gray emblems embossed at the temples. His glacial grey eyes held mine as he greeted us with a Madison Avenue smile. His voice was low and velvety, as he held out a pale manicured hand to her and said, “Whisty, you sweet girl.”

  She tiptoed and kissed his long straight nose.

  “You kept your promise. This must be the wonderful Johnny O’Brien I’ve heard you extol. It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Johnny. I’m Bradford Wherry.”

  His speech had a trace of arch-British crispness.

  I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Mr. Wherry. I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”

  He wrinkled his handsome face in mock pain as we all sat down.

  He said, “I would rather that you called me Brad. I envision a warm relationship between us. Whisty has already laid the foundation. I’ve told her a thousand times what a great P.R. talent was going to waste.”

  A waiter came with chilled glasses on a silver tray. He tilted champagne into them from a gigantic bottle nestled in a gleaming ice bucket on a stand beside the booth table. I noticed him fill an extra glass.

  I was wondering why, when the Goddess said, “Daddy, have we barged into some secret rendezvous of yours? Are you expecting some enchanting glamourous woman of the world to join you?”

  His voluptuous face crinkled into a vast amused smile.

  He said, “Unfortunately, nothing so romantic as that. Pete Packer, that outstanding western captain of police left just a moment before you came. He went to his suite upstairs. He’ll be back momentarily. You remember Pete. He was our weekend guest last year.”

  She said, “Of course I do. A sourpuss, but really a thoroughly nice fellow.”

  I raised the fragile crystal to my mouth and sipped the amber bubbly. A shadow fell across the snowy tablecloth. I looked up. A slender, hawk-faced guy with a phantom smile on his thin cruel mouth was sliding into the booth beside Camille’s father.

  Mr. Wherry said, “Pete Packer, Johnny O’Brien, a friend of the family. I don’t have to run a make for you on that exquisite female beside Johnny.”

  The captain nodded at me and said in a nasal voice, “Mr. O’Brien, it’s a pleasure.”

  I nodded and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Packer.”

  His wintry blue eyes twinkled warmly as he switched them to the Goddess.

  He said, “I couldn’t forget one of the most beautiful women in Chicago. How have you been, Camille?”

  She poked out her bottom lip petulantly and said, “Just splendid, Pete. But my evening was ruined earlier. Johnny and I witnessed the most distressing thing at the theater.

  “An adult coon was doing the most horribly despicable things to an underaged white baby girl. It’s nothing short of social catastrophe when coons can publicly violate the flower of white womanhood.

  “Oh! How I wished for a policeman to take that black brute to the Bastille. The coons have gotten completely out of hand in the North. Pete, where can one place the awful blame for this odious social condition?”

  The captain looked slyly at Mr. Wherry and said, “Camille, I am proud and happy to report that my conscience is clear of guilt relative to the nigra problem. My political views are steel-hard conservative. It is the maudlin, liberal whites like Brad who must be blamed for the worsening overall nigra problem.

  “Thank God, my police department in California is blessed with a realistic and practical philosophy. We strive for the high recruitment of good white policemen with Southern backgrounds who know what the nigra’s place is. Their minds are not cluttered with the nonsense of equality and civil rights.

  “They know that the nigras are really sub-human animals. We’ve discovered that ruthless containment and stern treatment are the answers to the nigra problem.

  “I have known since my rookie policeman days that the nigras steal, rape, whore, pimp and murder because they are basically criminally inclined. They’re derived from inferior loins. That’s all. Brad, can you refute any of my contentions?”

  Mr. Wherry had a canary-devoured expression
on his face.

  He said, “Pete, you’re a fine policeman. I admire you greatly as such. But, your political ideas are all wet. I’m going to give you a few political facts of life. But first, I must preface a bit.

  “I, and at least ninety percent of the whites in this country with so-called liberal leanings privately wouldn’t care a whit if all the niggers in America were herded into one of your larger canyons out West and then bombed into oblivion. However, we realize that the niggers are with us and lamentably will always be with us. You conservatives can’t resist your childish displays of hostility. You are—”

  The captain almost stuck his ugly, beet-red face into the handsome face of Mr. Wherry and said loudly, “I’m too honest to despise the black apes in secret and kiss then-backsides in public like you liberals do.

  “In California, we will always club their kinky heads bloody and let them know our true feelings. I’m a police scientist. What the hell am I supposed to do, live with them in their filthy ghettos?

  “Must I love them, get down on my hands and knees and beg them not to break the law? It’s you liberals who are all wet, Brad. It’s you liberals who have given them the freedom to threaten the white race.”

  I felt my sweaty collar choking me as I sat there and fought to keep my hate for the two racists from my face. The Goddess was beaming with pleasure in the excitement of the bout between them.

  The captain leaned back in the booth and looked triumphantly at me and the Goddess. Then I realized that we were the audience he had to impress. For him it was something more than a hot racial discussion.

  Deep inside of him, he probably hated the handsome face and polish of Mr. Wherry. My guess was that he was an ugly duckling, desperate to prove at least superiority of intellect over his attractive opponent. The captain stared at Mr. Wherry’s sympathetic face smiling urbanely at him.

  Mr. Wherry said, “Pete, let’s not get overly emotional. This is a discussion, not an argument. Now, I was going to say that you are not aware of the master plan now in effect in these United States for the containment and control of the niggers.