King Suckerman
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #2
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69590-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «King Suckerman». Краткое содержание книги:
“Bad ride,” said Dewey, stroking his weak Charles Bronson mustache, looking back one time at the Firebird as they moved away.
“The Green Ghost,” said Jerry, who had given Dewey’s car its name but did not own a car himself.
On the sidewalk, Jimmy Castle got down on one knee, raised his jeans at the cuff, retrieved his pack of Marlboros from inside his sock, where he always stashed it before walking past his mother and father when leaving the house. He struck a match, lit a ’Boro, caught up with Dewey and Jerry. He went behind them, trying to walk normally. When Jimmy got high, he had a kind of awkward bounce in his step; it was a stoner’s walk, and he felt it, but when he concentrated against it, the bounce only became more pronounced. He wore tanned leather shoes with wedge heels, and they made him a bit unsteady on his feet.
Jimmy watched Dewey and Jerry walking with confidence ahead as they neared New York Avenue. Dewey had a dumbell set in his bedroom, and when he wasn’t jacking off to Swank or drawing his replica CO2 .357 in the full-length mirror, he used it regularly. With each backswing of his arms, Dewey’s triceps became defined, his straight black hair jerking with the action. Jerry was not so muscular, but he had naturally wide shoulders, and he was tall. He was kind of ugly, though, with a knot of blackheads on his thick nose and black frizzy hair that was nearly matted in several spots. Jerry was some kind of Arab, Lebanese or Turkish or some shit like that, Jimmy wasn’t sure which. Still, despite the fact that Dewey was borderline redneck and Jerry was both red in the neck area and ugly, Jimmy wouldn’t have minded being either one of those guys for a day or so, just to see what it felt like to be normal sized. And then he thought, studying their bodies, What am I doing, admiring a couple of guys like that for? Or any guy, for that matter? What am I, some kind of faggot or something? And then Jimmy thought, like he often did when these things entered his head, I wish I hadn’t of smoked so much weed.
They neared the Town theater, its marquee brightly lit and a crowd around its box-office window. The ticket line went halfway down the block. Jimmy dragged hard on his smoke, flicked it out into the street. As he neared the line it seemed that he, Dewey, and Jerry were the only white faces in the crowd. Then he saw a skinny white kid with a ratty Afro standing at the head of the line next to a big dude who looked a little like Jim Brown. But the skinny white kid with the bad face was definitely it; the rest of the patrons were all black.
At the back of the line, Dewey tapped the shoulder of the guy ahead of him, a tall black man who appeared to be alone.
“Say,” said Dewey, “you got the time, blood?”
The man turned around, looked Dewey up and down. “Blood? Who you callin’ blood? The name’s Clarence Tate.”
“Okay, Clarence.”
“Clarence nothin’. It’s ‘sir’ to you.”
Jimmy felt that pulsing thing again, racing through his blood.
The Town theater was huge, bigger by a mile than any of the neighborhood KB theaters or the Roth’s in Silver Spring, and though it wasn’t a beautiful marble palace like the RKO Keith’s on 15th and G, it was still plenty awesome. Jimmy Castle’s dad had taken him to his first adult movie, The Dirty Dozen, at the Town when Jimmy was like eight years old. When Jimmy became a teenager, about the time he started smoking pot with his friends, he had grown apart from his father, and it seemed like they would never again be pals like they were when Jimmy was a kid. But the Town, it still brought a special feeling to him when he entered its lobby, and Jimmy figured that feeling had something to do with the way it had been with his dad.
The auditorium was nearly full. They had run a couple of trailers, one for a Fred Williamson picture called Death Journey (“Fred Williamson is Jesse Crowder — one mean cat!”) and another for a Raquel Welch — Bill Cosby movie named Mother, Jugs & Speed. Dewey hooted every time the trailer showed Welch bursting out of her shirt, but Jimmy knew better than to waste his money on a Raquel Welch flick, since Welch never showed bare tit in any movie, and he had been taken enough times already to not make the same mistake again. Finally the houselights came down all the way, and the main feature began.
Scratchy guitar and chicken-fried vocals came out over the main titles, with Tower of Power — style horn bursts punctuating the chorus, the singer talking about “King Suckermaaaan, runnin’ down the master plaaaan, takin’ it right to the Maaaan.” Some young D.C. ladies, Interhigh girls, groups of two and three, got out into the main aisle of the auditorium and began doing the bump spontaneously to the title tune. Jerry Baluzy stood up to watch until the deep voice of a brother behind them instructed him to sit his “narrow ass the fuck on down.” Jimmy had a chill, watching the girls dance. The way they were into it, deep into it and proud, was straight-up beautiful to him.
Wilton Cooper and Bobby Roy Clagget sat quietly during the show. Clagget because he was getting an education, and Cooper because he was relaxing, checking the whole thing out. Cooper had never pimped, but he had known plenty of players in his time, both in the joint and out, so he knew what it was to be in the life for real.
The movie started out like most of the films Cooper and Clagget had seen in drive-ins and B houses the last few years. The injustice of Ghetto Life specifically and Amerika in general had turned a basically good brother toward a life of crime. In that arena, evil competitors and a couple of bad white cops pressured the antihero for a piece of his action and caused the brother to take violent matters into his own hands. Usually the brother got out of the life in the last reel, but not before exacting his bloody revenge.
King Suckerman started out exactly that way, though from the beginning the audience sensed that there was something unsettling going on in the film. For one thing, Ron St. John, who played the title role, he was one stone ugly motherfucker, scarred in the face and narrow of shoulder and chest. Cooper had liked The Mack, thought it was more authentic than most, but in truth Max Julien as the pimp had always bothered him. Julien could be tough, but with his smooth skin, too-easy smile, and deep dimples, he was just way too pretty to be believable as the hard man a pimp had to be. You needed someone rougher in the face and body to make the story true. But Ron St. John? He went all the way in the other direction.
Ugly as he was, though, Ron St. John was cool. Cool and bad. No one could fuck with King Suckerman, ’cause the man feared no one and had all the bitches in his stable.
In the second act, the pimp took a wire hanger to one of his women, a girl named Diandra who had done a little too much blow, gotten cocky behind it, sassed him in front of the others, and then refused to get out of bed and go to work. King Suckerman gave her a backful of open welts, then kicked her in the face repeatedly as she cowered on the floor. She went out the door crying hysterically, begging her pimp to give her one more chance. She peddled her pussy like that, bloodied and chip-toothed and with torn clothes, all night in the street.
When that scene played, the auditorium had gone dead quiet. Even the smart-mouthed brothers who usually talked shit throughout the show, yelled at the screen and laughed at their own jokes, had shut their mouths. And then it got worse. King Suckerman let himself get framed by the two bad white cops, got convicted by an all-white jury, was let down by an indifferent white PD. And King Suckerman went to jail. The last shot of the movie had King Suckerman in his cell, wasting away from tertiary syphilis. The camera zoomed into his eyes, the hollow eyes of any scared old man lying alone in the terminal ward, waiting for death. A freeze-frame appeared then, and a slower, bluesier version of the title song ran over the end credits. By then most of the patrons had walked out of the auditorium without comment.