Free Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim

was a little past three years of age. My terrible crying seizures started. I’d cry until I threw up. Sometimes Phala would hear me above the clamor of the drunken revelry.
    She’d come to me in the darkness. I’d be holding my testicles. She’d turn on the light and look. My testicles would be swollen to big sore lumps from my bitter crying.
    It’s a strange thing, I don’t ever remember calling my mother anything except P.G. to her face. The G was for Grisby, her maiden name. She hadn’t liked it. She’d begged me to call her mama. She’d threatened, and even tried to bribe me. Finally she gave up.
    In Nineteen Twenty-six she became a waitress-hostess. She was eighteen years old. She had a magnificent body and an Eurasian appearance. Silky clouds of jet hair floated to her twenty-inch waist. She’d found it easy to get work in the wooly roaring-Twenties nightspot in Kansas City, Missouri.
    Later, in my teens, she told me how she had run away from her home in the country outside of New Orleans. She’d left her father and mother, one sister and four brothers.
    She got work as a waitress in a Rampart Street gumbo house. My father and several other white musicians came there one early morning from Bourbon Street. My father was half drunk. He was stricken foolish at the wondrous sight of Phala. He was stone drunk that same week when he actually married my ravishing fourteen-year-old mother. He was twenty-five.
    When his gig on Bourbon Street played out, he and Phala went to Kansas City. Phala said he was a good drummer when sober. His trouble was, he couldn’t stay sober for long.
    A second-rate band took him on in Kansas City. The band toured the country, doing one-night stands. Phala got pregnant with me shortly after. John Patrick O’Brien, Jr. was born January fifteenth, Nineteen Twenty-three.
    My father had drummed for three bands by the time I was three. Somehow, despite his drinking, he managed to keep food in our mouths and a roof over our heads. He came to see us only when his band was playing near Kansas City.
    When he came, it was usually for only overnight. Then he didn’t come at all. Phala told me later he had fallen in love with a wealthy white girl and was living common law with her in the East.
    Phala loved him too much to get a divorce. She always hoped he’d come back to us. Maybe I’m better off that he never came back. He might have made a drummer out of me. At least as a con man I could give my brain a play.
    Yes, Phala really needed her waitress-hostess job. But there wasone awful drawback. Phala would leave me in the care of a young couple when she left in the evenings for work.
    They lived in a decrepit frame house next door to our apartment building. Many times they left me alone. I would go to a front window and watch for Phala. I’d leap with joy when finally she came home in the early morning.
    One night I had been deserted by the fun-loving black couple. I was keeping a terrified vigil at the window. I fingered an old-fashioned window spring. It was attached to a sharp hook screwed into the window sill.
    The hook slashed into the fleshy tip of my thumb and went to the bone. I remember how I tried, in vain, to twist the thumb free from the fish hook sharpness. I remember pounding on the window with my free hand.
    None of the dusky passersby heard it. They were perhaps too enchanted by the magnetic pull of the bright festival of cabaret neon at Kansas City’s famous Eighteenth and Vine Streets, a block away.
    Finally I was exhausted by my thrashing agony. I fell asleep on my knees at the window. That hook gouged a scar that I’ll take to my grave.
    It was about six months after my musician father and his drum had gone for the last time that a wonderful thing happened. Phala brought Grandma Annie home with her. She was a four-foot-tall, eighty-pound bundle of pure love and kindness.
    Her face had the look of a cheerful prune,