Free Airtight Willie & Me by Iceberg Slim

on their way for Opal. They would wipe out any hapless soul found with her. I fanned out the door.
    I went down the hallway for the elevator. I almost soiled myself when an olive-tinted black pimp, with the moniker of Dago Frank, sporting a broke-down pearl-grey lid, stepped out of his room in the shadow-haunted corridor behind me and hollered, “Hello, Slim!”
    I was in the street with my hands on the door handle of my ride when the sentimental, interior sucker sent me back for Opal. Thedoor was still open. She was still transfixed with horror and terror on the floor. I yanked her to her feet. I scooped up her coat. We split the suite.
    Since day had decapitated night’s bummer head with a bright golden ax, that suicidal sucker in me forced me to get her off the street until night encored. At my pad, Phyl split to Sparky’s room with her spare of the quality smack.
    Opal and I shot up my dope and sat on a couch drinking syrupy refreshments as we planned her escape from the city when darkness fell. In the drawn-draped dimness of my pad, Opal’s face was so soft and innocent. I found it difficult to believe that almost fifteen years had passed since our puppy love affair.
    I said, “Baby, ain’t it a bitch how we both struck out? Remember how we used to dream and brag in the park, on your front porch swing on those summer nights? You were going to be the first superstar black painter for openers. Then after that, if you were in the mood and the dough was right, you’d hit Hollywood as an actress and nudge Nina Mae McKinney and Dorothy Dandrige aside.”
    She sighed, “Yeah, square-ass dreamer me. And you, Bobby, you were going to be the first black Clarence Darrow . . . to make your mama bust her heartstrings with joy. Sure, I remember the dreams I spun. It put the hurt to me through the years to get hip that there was never even a rainbow . . . much less a pot of fucking gold!”
    I said, “Something puzzles me. I fell from a family nest broken when I was just a squealer. My old man bounced my noggin off a tenement wall when I was six months old. Mama lugged the load solo. Before I met you I was street poisoned. We lived across the street from a ho house. I’d sit in my room and watch the pimps, in silk shirts and yellow toothpick shoes, come to get their money with satchels. Damn! I’d get excited when they’d pack their hoes into Duesenbergs, Lincolns, and Caddies and cruise away on joy rides. I ached to be a pimp when I was just twelve.
    â€œBut your old man and mama were tight and strong together.You grew up in a fine, respectable neighborhood. Your family nest was peaches and cream. I can’t understand how you wound up in the sewer with me . . . Why, when I lost touch with you, you were on the turn for a cotillion ball for debs. You drove your own new Chevy convertible. You were decked out in the finest threads from Marshall Fields, fabulous Lili Anne suits. You were even voted, in high school, to be the most likely to succeed in the rat race of life. I’ve heard that your father took a fall fencing. I can understand that must have been a bitch of a crimp. But what happened, beautiful, after that to flush you all the way down the toilet? Where’s your mother?”
    She sighed and poured it out as she wept: “Poor Mom and Dad. He died in Joliet prison. Funny thing, the three of us were so happy before Mom started social climbing, started tearing her asshole out, and Dad’s, to compete with the status shit bastard muckety-mucks of so-called nigger society. Dad was a religious, good man, with only a grade-school education. But he had lots of business sense. Mom came from a cushioned background. But so naive. She couldn’t know that Dad’s store couldn’t support her extravagances toward the end. He loved her so much, more than his God. He let it override his morality, his basic common sense. He became a