Trick Baby , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Iceberg Slim

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168 pages

English

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Trick Baby charts the rise of White Folks, a hite Negro who uses his colour as a trump card in the tough game of the Con. Blue-eyed, light-haired and white-skinned, White Folks is the most incredible con man the ghetto ever spawned, a hustler in the jungle of Southside chicago where only the sharpest survive. With his partner Blue, an old hand who teaches him the tricks of the trade, White Folks rises to the top of his profession. The cons he pulls off get more and more lucrative and dangerous until one day they go too far . . .

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	31 août 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847677716
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Introduction
If the role of the artist is to tell you what he sees, then Iceberg Slim is a true artist. In all his works, Iceberg – as a junkie and a pimp – takes you through the reality of a hustler’s world. In blatant, uncompromising language, he takes you out into America’s ghetto streets and shows you the real deal. He doesn’t take the easy way out – merely glamorizing the lifestyle to make himself look good. No, he’s a true player. He shows you the unglamorous dark side to the hustling life, the side that leaves you strung out, messed up and dying inside.
While Pimp – one of his most definitive books – is about the pimping game, in Trick Baby , he takes you a step further. Although all his books reveal a world that was practically invisible outside of the ghetto before he took to the page, Trick Baby shows you the real deal of being black in America, no matter which shade you happen to be.
White Folks, the main character in Trick Baby , has such a light complexion, he can pass for white. That’s one of the reasons why they call him Trick Baby, because he can go inside and infiltrate situations another black man could never get into. This extra edge leads him one step closer to the game. Written in 1967, but set in an earlier era, Trick Baby’s all about the con. Trick Baby offers a pretty bleak portrayal of American society because skin color is such a determining issue. Some people will argue with this viewpoint, but his words strike a chord with me.
I, too, see life as being hard for a black person. Although I also try to tell people to overstep these hardships, I truly believe that everything I’m doing and every struggle I deal with would not be so hard if I weren’t black. That’s just part of the game. I see white artists come out and do something almost identical to a black artist, but make far more money and be accepted more broadly. Maybe one day that will change. But if the key to a good artist is telling it like they see it, you can’t criticise them for showing you the ugliness under the surface. Certain black artists don’t want to go there, they see things differently because they come from a different place or economic situation. Iceberg and I came from the bottom, and I know what he’s writing about is for real.
It’s almost thirty years since he wrote Trick Baby , but his words remain fresh to the game. The language may be a little different, the players might dress a little differently, and some of the commodities that are traded have changed, but what he calls ‘The Life’ is still the same rollercoaster ride it’s always been.
It’s the honest portrayal of his situation that makes his books so dynamic, especially to young black kids. They hear the truth in his words, and that’s the attraction. The fact that he wrote these stories at all after what he lived through is what ultimately counts. That he had the ability to turn himself around and become a writer, gave me the courage to say, ‘Yo, I can get out of this and I can make something of myself.’
He did, and that’s the greatest inspiration of all.

Ice T
Los Angeles, February 1996

Preface
In the middle of October in Nineteen Sixty, I was nervously pacing cell A-4 in Chicago’s House of Correction. I was having a bitch of a quarrel with a stupid jerk inside me.
Over and over I hollered at him, ‘You’re Iceberg Slim, the pimp. You can’t cash out like a square.’
I was trying to convince the screwy bastard that he shouldn’t go crazy and hang himself from the steel-barred cell door.
I had been arrested on an old fugitive warrant for a spectacular escape, thirteen years before from the joint.
I heard a screw’s key grate in my cell door lock. I spun around. The screw pushed a tall white con into the cell.
He could have been Errol Flynn’s twin. I wondered why the hell I was getting a cellmate. Were they planting a fink to bleed my secret of how I had made the escape long ago?
He didn’t speak. He nodded. I nodded back. He stood for a moment sweeping his sky-blue eyes over the crummy cell. He sighed and jumped to the top bunk.
I went to the crapper and sat on the stool waiting for him to rap something to tip me that he was a fink.
He was stretched out on his bunk staring through the cell door bars at the blank cell-house wall. I stared at him. But I just couldn’t place him.
I said, ‘I’m Iceberg. You look slightly familiar. It worries me, because the only white studs I know are rollers and bastard undercover rats. Who are you, buddy?’
He turned quickly on his side and looked down at me with a hurt look on his handsome face.
He laughed like a nut and said, ‘Relax, Iceberg. I’m not white. I’m a Nigger hustler. My friends call me White Folks. My enemies call me Trick Baby. Blue Howard and I were pals, and played con together for twenty years. Can you place me now?’

I said, ‘I goddamn sure do. You and Blue got on the syndicate wipe-out list a while ago. The wire had it that you got knocked off with him. What the hell are you doing back in Chicago?’
He said, ‘It’s a long story. I don’t want to talk about it. Christ, if I had known the bastards would shove me in this pigsty, I wouldn’t have refused to sling a mop for my lousy ten-day bit. In here, it will be like a ten-year bit.’
I lay there that night on the bottom bunk remembering what I’d heard about him in the street. He was one of the slickest con men in Chicago.
One thing puzzled me. How did a fast grifter like him wind up serving a chump’s ten-day bit? One thing for sure, he knew the con game backward.
So, since I was getting rather elderly for the pimp game, I figured I’d pick his brain and play con when I got out. After all, I’d picked Sweet Jones for the secrets of the pimp game.
That first night, White Folks gave me a bitch of a time. He kept waking up and hollering from nightmares all night long. I didn’t sleep two hours. I had a screw that I was tight with. I scored for sleeping pills from him. I laid them on Folks. He was so happy, you’d have thought I gave him a million dollars.
Within a couple of days, White Folks and I were like brothers. A prison cell has the strange power to quickly create friendships and trusts that would never happen in the free world. I guess it’s the loneliness and misery that draws two cellmates close enough to confide their secrets. And plus, in Folks’s case, the sleeping pills.
Five days before his release, after the lights had gone out, White Folks started to tell me his life story. He started at the point when he and his pal, Blue Howard, got their toughest break.
I lay there in the gloom forgetting my own troubles in the fascination of his story.
Contents
Title Page Introduction Preface Chapter One: A Shakedown Squeeze By Dot The Cop Chapter Two: Copper Dot’s Sucker Ear Chapter Three: The Dummy Payoff Chapter Four: Flight To Jewtown Chapter Five: The Voice Of Satan Cons The Preacher Chapter Six: Tears For A Lost Drum Chapter Seven: The Big Cruel Windy Chapter Eight: White Lamb In The Black Jungle Chapter Nine: Flat-Joint Flimflam Chapter Ten: A Doll With A Lust For Dames Chapter Eleven: Conning In The Spring Tra La Tra La Chapter Twelve: Livin’ Swell Fats Chapter Thirteen: The Goddess Chapter Fourteen: The Torturer Chapter Fifteen: Buster Bang Bang Chapter Sixteen: Rocks For A Gorilla Chapter Seventeen: Mr Trick Bag Chapter Eighteen: The Haters Chapter Nineteen: The Confession Chapter Twenty: The Fractured Nude Chapter Twenty One: The Search Chapter Twenty Two: Sister Franklin Snares The Elusive Ear Of God Chapter Twenty Three: The Fleeting Years Chapter Twenty Four: Wedding Bells For A Slick Sucker Chapter Twenty Five: State Street Murder Cross Epilog Glossary 1: Torn From The Nest Copyright

1
A Shakedown Squeeze by Dot the Cop
Blue Leon Howard and I sat in the front booth of the Brass Rail Bar on Forty-seventh Street, Southside Chicago. I felt that thrilling complacency that a con man has after a clean fat score. I couldn’t know a messenger of death would join us within minutes.
The Westside mark had been sweet as honeysuckle. He had blown ten grand on our slick version of the rocks.
I looked out the panoramic front window as we waited for our steaks. I felt sorry for the passing parade of hunched chumps buffeted by the December barrage of freezing winds screaming off Lake Michigan.
A gaunt car prowler paused and peered into my sparkling new ’fifty-nine Fleetwood at the curb. A squad load of Eleventh Street detectives cruised through the twilight. The prowler faded into the parade. I thought about Aunt Lula’s crazy cathouse in Indiana Harbor. I’d slip up there later tonight.
I figured it was cheaper and smarter to simply rent a dame’s machinery for a few hours. My fountain of romantic love was dust dry. The Goddess had cured me permanently. Old Blue was of a different opinion. He had to have a marriage lock on his dame. I turned toward him. His ebony face was almost invisible in the dimness. His processed white hair gleamed like burnished silver.
I said, ‘Blue, that score this morning just put us under the wire. Christmas is only a week off. I bet you make Cleo the happiest fluff in town. I bet you go down to Rothschild’s and plank down your five-G end on a sable coat for her.’
‘A guy has to keep his wife happy, you know. The young fancy ones get itchy feet in a hurry.’
His eyes flashed white lightning. His eyebrows zoomed up his brow like frosted boomerangs. Blue couldn’t stand the needle into his love life. Believe me, if I had known this was to be our last time in the Rail together I wouldn’t have ribbed him about the nineteen-year-old Cleo.
I had pricked him to the tender quick, because he blew air through the gap in his front uppers. His thick lips opened and closed over the dazzle of his chalky teeth like banging shutters in a windstorm.
In that whispery rich voice of his, he said, ‘White Folks, pleas