Free The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim by Iceberg Slim Page A

temples in great, curly, tumultuous waves. And because I was hurting like hell to see her like that, I had to get away from the sight of her.
    I said gently, “I’m sorry, lady, but I’m not going in that direction.”
    She frowned and said impatiently, “Well, how about spending a fin with me for a half-and-half?”
    I shook my head and said, “I’m not in the mood, lady. Why the hell don’t you retire and get off the track?”
    She stepped back and shouted, “You black motherfucker, mind your own business. Who the fuck . . .”
    I pulled away and headed for the highway. I passed the enchanted corner at Third and Galena and remembered a lovely young girl and how the sun ignited tiny blue bonfires in her hair. And I was glad I had kept my cool and not crushed her back there with my masterworks of creative pimp profanity. For even though brute life had hacked her hideous, she was still for me, and always will be, . . . a goddess.

VIGNETTES: CONQUEROR JACKSON
    H e was blue-black, squat and powerfully muscled, and visaged in the craggy image of a caveman. He was likable and charming enough when his luck was funky to get an extra fin from icy-hearted pawnbrokers and a buck and a half of my last deuce. He should have been an entertainer, but he literally burst his heartstrings to make a career of, in his words, “taking good money from bad girls.” He was regarded as a colorful joke, a sentimental clown by other pimps because Conqueror Jackson invariably fell in love with his girls, and he thought the pimp game was a fuck-in.
    In fact, his moniker was hung on him by contemptuous pimps because of Jackson’s almost psychotic sexual delusion (perhaps shared by millions of studs in much milder degree) that he was some kind of gladiator in the sex act, capable of inflicting an unprecedented orgasmic impression on adversary cunt and vanquishing it, conquering it, enslaving it with his heroic, invincible dick.
    But his greatest flaw and handicap as a pimp was a sympathy and admiration for all women; he lacked the ruthlessness and deep hatred for women that all career pimps must have. He was just too soft a guy deep inside to play the hard pimp game.
    I went to his pad in Chicago to snort some cocaine when we were twenty-two. He had one young mahogany-colored three-way whore who had freaked his nose wide open. And sharing Jackson’s pad was a tall, champagne-toned young pimp fresh out of the penitentiary and sleek and pretty and deadly as a coral snake. I knew thepunk was rank, but Jackson was crazy about him so I stayed on the dummy.
    The predictable happened, and a month later Conqueror Jackson burst into my pad at the Pershing Hotel on Cottage Grove sobbing and snotting, “That dirty motherfucker stole my girl and all my furniture and clothes.”
    Jackson roared, “I took that shit-colored double-crosser in and fed him and he crossed me. Hear me, Jim, it’s square business. I’m gonna find that lousy nigger and run him back up his mammy’s ass. I ain’t gonna croak him for stealing the bitch and my stuff, but for principle, Jim, for principle.”
    I bombarded him with street logic and begged him to recognize the hard pimp law of “cop and blow”; somebody has to lose when somebody wins. But he wouldn’t hold still and he split, spitting fire, thunder and murder. A week later he trapped the young whore-thief in a booth in a Chinese restaurant and smashed the dude’s neck with his hands. Jackson did a fin in the joint for manslaughter. He got out and for a while copped the bread for his grits and greens ripping off suckers with a short con mob.
    One salubrious summer afternoon I paused to watch the Conqueror toss the broads (manipulating the cards in three-card Monte) under the Forty-seventh Street El tracks for a gargantuan, young, mean-faced black guy. Jackson’s cap man (confederate) heckled and persuaded the