Free The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim by Iceberg Slim

owner tapped me on the shoulder at closing time. The next several months were a horror of excruciating goddess withdrawal agony. One spring day, when she was eight months gone, I saw her walking into a store with Curly Top. She was so bloated, disfigured and deformed that I ran home and wept in the attic for hours.
    That night I felt myself encased in rage and fury so poisonous that I went searching for him with the ancient .22 rifle that Giggling George had given me. Finally I spotted his car outside Cordelia’shouse. I crept to the side of it and saw him playing the grand piano with his head thrown back in song. I put the back of his head in the rifle sights and was squeezing the trigger when for some reason I glanced away at the goddess. She was seated on the sofa looking at him so worshipfully and with so much helplessly pure love that I lowered the gun and left.
    A broken neck, a cracked skull can heal and so also can a broken heart, I discovered. I got my first penitentiary bit about two years after that Christmas Eve in the drugstore. I got out and did another bit in the state of Wisconsin before I got wise and left town.
    I had an obsession to be a pimp. I became one, and a hard and brutal one at that. But curiously, vivid memories of the goddess could always be evoked by the faintest trace of scented smoke in some woman’s voice or perhaps sunlight exploding blue light in a mane of jet hair.
    Twenty-five years passed, and I was on the highway to Milwaukee for a visit. I got there at night and went to several homes and bars to shuck and jive with acquaintances and old buddies I hadn’t seen in a generation. I didn’t ask about her at all. Toward daybreak, I found myself at the bar in an after-hours spot owned by a guy I had grown up with.
    It was crowded and dim. I was talking to a broad who had lived next door to me in our kid days when I glanced in the back bar mirror and saw an elderly gray-haired woman with a deeply seamed yellow face filching a bill from the shirt pocket of a drunk passed out at a table behind me.
    She came away and went to the end of the bar and threw a dollar bill on the counter. She stood there weaving and shouting for Old Taylor. My heart lost rhythm at the phantom flicker of moonlight in the whiskey-stained voice. I stared at her crepey, wattled throat as she flung her head back and hurled the double shot down her gullet.
    She turned and went out the door, and I considered the possibility that the time and whiskey-hacked old crone of seventycould be . . . But no, it just wasn’t possible. After all, she could be at most forty. And besides, she had been heartbreakingly beautiful, protected, cultured and with every advantage. She could never get ugly and debauched in a million years, I thought, as I tossed the whole ridiculous idea out of mind and gave my most seductive pimp wink to the bosomy young fox smiling at me down the bar.
    Two hours later I was bored, nauseous with the prattle of the fox and my old hometown. I slapped palms all around and stepped out into the bright morning sunshine. I passed the old crone talking to an elderly white man carrying a lunch pail. I wondered as I walked to my car if the old lady was optimistic enough to think she could find a buyer for her decomposed charms.
    I was running the engine a bit before moving away when I saw the old broad moving down the sidewalk toward me. I wanted to run away to avoid her, but there was something familiar and eerie about the rhythmic, swaying, girlish heat in the walk of such an apparently old woman.
    She stuck her head through the open window and grinned a jagged Halloween pumpkin smile and cackled, “How about a lift to Walnut Street, big shot?”
    I studied every wrecked plane of the yellow fright mask. I saw a faint lance of green fire in the bloodshot almond eyes, and saw how the tip of the still delicate nose tilted up and how the gray-riddled black hair still leaped away from the