Airtight Willie & Me Read Online Free

fishhook tied to a length of twine that was tied to an anchor post beneath the seat.
    The cunning sonovabitch had probably choreographed the rip-off while we were in the cell. With vivid hindsight, I knew why he pretended he needed the sawbuck from the bandana. He wanted to get the fishhook into it when he put it back. Then he could reel it in with his left hand when he leaned into the car for his benny. The dummy bandana was preplanted to “blow me off” smoothly just in case I got suspicious, as I did, before he hit the wind.
    I leapt behind the wheel. Maybe I could catch him in the Loop, or at one of the El stops along the way. The gas gauge was on “E,” and I didn’t have a cent.
    I got out and inhaled deeply. I felt my belly jitterbug in the greasy clouds of soul-food aroma floating from the rib joint. I straightened my tie in a gum machine’s fractured mirror, then I psyched up the mirrored mack-man staring back. “You a bad, sugar-rapping ho-stealing motherfucker . . . ain’t you? Ain’t nothing can stop a ho stalking stepped like you . . . Ain’t that right?” Frantically I nodded yes and turned away.
    I was lucky! It was black ghetto Christmas. Saturday Night! Easy to cop a ho! I’d guerilla my Watusi ass into a chrome-and-leather ho den and gattle-gun my pimp-dream shit into some mud-kicker’s frosty car.
    I pimp-pranced toward a ho jungle of neon blossoms a half mile away. Some ass-kicker was a cinch to be a ho short when the joints folded in the A.M .

TO STEAL A SUPERFOX
    I t was late summer back in the nineteen forties. The weeks before, I had graduated from a federal prison. I was stalking ho runs in an Ohio burg. It was my birthday. I was ho-less, without a sou in my raise. I was decked out in a gold silk vine and accessories an old pal junkie ho had boosted the day before in Chicago.
    Around twilight I stopped by Pretty Phil’s, a pimp pal’s juke saloon and two-story trick hotel. We embraced. He wiggled his lips against my ear lobe as we disengaged. I thought about the rumors that he now dug stud tours of his sphincter cave.
    I cracked it was my birthday. He got on the phone and ordered a monster cake and several cases of Mums.
    We sat down and snorted white lady until two A.M. and gazed through the Venetian blinds of his front window. A cavalcade of tricks, flat-backers, stuff players, and thieves paraded past. I shifted uneasily when I caught Phil’s assassin Harlequin Great Dane eyeballing me enigmatically. Phil stroked her muzzle. She sighed and nested her head in his lap.
    Phil gave me a rundown on every qualified, stealable ho that passed. His rundowns were boss. Sure, I appreciated the crystal blow and his plans to celebrate my birthday. But had he forgotten what a blue-ribbon pal I had been back in Cleveland several years before? He had blown into town with no ho. And worse, no wheels and frozen fireworks exploding off his dukes, necessary to cop a star ho.
    I had loaned him my total flash. He had gone on to pimp a zillion. I had too much player pride to smooch his rear end to nudge his sense of all-out reciprocity. I seriously mulled the odds that Phil would test out as a chicken poo-poo amnesiac.
    I stared thoughtfully at Phil’s yellow bitch face. Like my scarlet doubt was a tennis ball, Phil bombed back the serve when he cracked, “Slim, honey, you hip, I know, that you got my personal pad upstairs and the use of my new wheels and ice to catch you a ho. And, pally, since you my size, play your ass off in any and all of them sixty ho catchers hanging in my closet.”
    He dropped a key into my shirt pocket, then he picked up a phone and called upstairs to have the linen changed. I would’ve kissed the gaudy mother if I hadn’t been leery of inviting his tongue up my jib. Phil eased out a portly bankroll. He peeled off several “C” notes and scooted them across the tabletop.
    I slid them