Airtight Willie and Me. Iceberg Slim

of a cigarette protruded from her vulva. I staggered away, vomiting all the way to the sidewalk.

      We buried Sue, that week, from Mama’s church. We got the location of Sue’s infant daughter’s foster home from Sue’s address book. Mama shipped Sue’s stuff to Carla.

      In the limo, on the way from the cemetery, I told Mama about Sue’s plans and dreams to square up and open a restaurant to make a decent home for Carla, her daughter. Mama broke down and wailed like a crumbcrusher. Small wonder. Mama had lost her dream too, a billion tears ago.

      Thirty years later, whenever I see a pygmy fox with indigo, velour skin and pony eyes, or see a shimmering mane of crow breast hair, or hear a smoky voice, I get a lump in my throat remembering Black Sue.

Lonely Suite

      I tossed restlessly in the emperor-size bed in the Big Windy. The moon drenched branches of a wind mauled tree outside the bedroom window cavorted spectral shadows about the suite. Raucous March gales screeched off Lake Michigan. I felt a bleak loneliness, a nameless apprehension. I chain smoked as a blond console in the living room issued Ellas’s new hit wail about the loss of her ‘Little Yellow Basket’.

      I was startled from my counting of the gold satin ruffles on the bed’s canopy by the jangle of the telephone on the nightstand. I froze and stared at the phone for a long moment. Three a.m.! Was it Phyl, my one and only mud-kicker calling from the slams? Had some mugger on Sixty-third Street slugged and robbed her? Had some trick maimed her?

      I picked up with vast relief to friend Gold Streak’s frog-in-a-log voice. ‘How ya doing, Slim?’ he shouted above a background of honky-tonk pandemonium.

      ‘Great, Streak,’ I said. ‘You must be balling at Small’s Paradise, or maybe at the Cotton Club?’

      He laughed, ‘Your ass, Buddy. I’m back in Chi! Stole the finest three-way silk bitch in the Apple. I’m celebrating my birthday at Wimpy’s, then Tracy’s for a taste. C’mon!’

      I said, ‘I’m waiting for Phyl. Want me to pick you up in your wheels later?’

      He said, ‘No, Jim, I got the cabby with me that drove me from the Apple.’ He hung up.

      I went to the bathroom to freshen up for my lady due to check in. I was just a nineteen-year-old pimp novice. I wasn’t scoring a big buck from the streets with one flat-backer. I wasn’t really the suite’s tenant. I had agreed to hawk-eye (from my modest pad down the hall) and occupy the suite during prime burglar time. Streak had a fear that some scuffler would shim his pad and cop his five dozen pairs of stomps, hundred vines and assorted personal treasures. Streak had been on business in the Apple for a week. Dope business.

      I brushed my teeth and felt pangs of worry and fear for Streak. The nasal sludge in his voice was the tip-off that he had strung himself out on his merchandise. Worse for Streak was the street scam that he was long past due in payment for supplies of dream shit from you know who.

      I went to a bedroom window. I idly glanced down a street. I saw a group of white couples and a pair of sharply dressed Mutt and Jeff Italian dudes alight from cars in front of the hotel. Apparently they were catching the Nat ‘King’ Cole Trio’s last show in the hotel cabaret.