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

mark to blow close to a C note to Jackson with such violent enthusiasm that the mark woke up. He flexed his fortress of muscles and knocked the cap man into a coma, and demanded his lost break back from Jackson, who courageously instructed the colossus to do something relatively difficult for him to do to himself as he squared off before the foamy brute.
    I moved away and from a sensible distance watched the giant monotonously deck the Conqueror with a lightning array of hooks and crosses that would have made Sugar Ray drool with envy. Then while the Conqueror was rising from a knockdown, the giant cockedback a muscular leg for kick action. I saw the Conqueror’s right arm lash out toward the giant’s crotch and a laser lance of rippling silver light slash across the fly of tight dungarees and a sudden tiny spring of shiny crimson leap in the sunshine.
    I walked over and helped the Conqueror to his feet as the whimpering giant leaned buck-eyed against an El pillar. And then my eye was attracted by something that looked like a misshapen, black, bloody marble in the dust. I looked at the glassy-eyed giant who seemed amused at the scarlet pouring from the butchered-off tip of his organ, like a little kid playing the game of “who can pee the farthest.”
    The giant bled to death, and Conqueror did an encore at the penitentiary. The years galloped, and in ’68, almost thirty years later, I saw the Conqueror again while out for a walk in Los Angeles.
    He spotted me and picked me up in a battered ’58 Cadillac. He was white haired, stooped and the flashy chorus of muscles that once danced beneath the indigo skin had vanished behind an ugly curtain of fat, but he was still talking shit.
    On the way to his favorite bar he said, “Slim, I heard you come in off the street and now you pimping on paper for the writing game, and ain’t nothing wrong with that, for you. I ain’t got no kinda education or nothing, and my ticker is fucked up. I got a light porter gig I do at the airport. But I’m a player, and I’m gonna conquer some young fine fox and come back like gangbusters. Hear me, Jim, cause it’s square business. I gotta pimp my old ass off just once before I cash in. All I got to do is get the right young bitch in bed so I can do my thing. And that’s square business.”
    He stopped on a side street off Western Avenue, and we got out. Then he did an extremely odd thing. He unlocked the trunk of the Caddie and brought forth a long, heavy logging-type chain, and several gigantic padlocks. I stood there and watched him wrap the chain around his rear bumper and then around the trunk of a palm tree. And then he secured the works with the padlocks.
    On our way to the bar around the corner he chuckled and explained, “Slim, I been getting a little lightweight bad break, so I figured out that angle to keep the repo bastards from copping my hog when I ain’t in it.”
    Several months passed before I drove by the Conqueror’s favorite bar and decided to drop in and jaw a bit with him. The joint was quiet and deserted except for the barkeep. I played a record and asked about the Conqueror.
    The keep pursed his lips, shook his head and said sorrowfully, “Jackson dropped dead two weeks ago right down the street in the motel. They say he died riding one of those hot-ass tramp fillies, young enough to be his granddaughter. I liked that old bullshit fool, everybody did. I just don’t know why he’d go out and put his bad heart in a trick bag like that. Why did he have to chump off like a . . .”
    I walked away to the sun-bathed street and sadly remembered that sunny day long ago when I first saw him as an orphan, a grimy hobo, fresh in Chicago from Georgia aching to be somebody important, to be a big shot in the city. And for days I kept thinking, what a helluva way for him to go, what a lousy, stinking, disgraceful and ignoble death for a