Read the Onion Field (1973) Online
Authors: Joseph Wambaugh
But when he got that quarter from the white man he saw how it could be done, and he ran across the street to the shine stand and waited. Soon the white man came out of Carole Lombard's room, and Jimmy worked up his courage and ran around back and knocked at her door.
"Who's knockin?"
"Jist me," Jimmy said softly, and that was another thing he learned about being a number two man. To talk softly. It was more cool and safer. And everyone liked it. Talk softly.
"Who the fuck is jist me?"
"Jist the one that sent the trick."
The door opened and there she stood, not completely tucked into the blue velvet dress, barefoot, her breasts all but in his face, just buttoning the front.
"Looky here." She smiled cheerily and another black woman, leaner and darker, also half-dressed, came out from the closet carrying a roll of toilet paper.
"Come in, honey," said Carole Lombard, and Jimmy obeyed, his eyes furtively glancing from the toilet paper to the bared bosom.
"Ain't you a pretty child?" Carole Lombard said, putting a soft, long hand on his head. "He got us the trick, honey."
"Well bless you, little boy." The other one smiled and went back to the tap to run the water.
The smell was everywhere in the shabby little room. Overpowering, sickening, yet more exciting than anything he'd ever imagined. And he thought of them in this little room, these two big steaming women and that sweating fat white man. He looked at the walls almost expecting to see the wallpaper soppy, curling off the walls. Muggy as a jungle, that's what lovemaking with a grown woman would be.
"Guess you deserve fifty cents for what you done," said Carole Lombard, and sauntered to a closet where he heard coins clinking in her hand. He watched the big shivering buttocks as she walked.
When she gave him the two quarters she put her hand on his head again.
"My, you got nice soft hair," she said. "You ain't woolly at all. Martha, come here and feel this boy's hair."
"I ain't got time, less he got three dollars," said the voice from the other room.
"You got three dollars, honey?" asked Carole Lombard looking down at him.
"No," he whispered, gaping at the breasts.
"You so pretty," she said. "You got features kinda fine, know that? And so bright. You know, you put some pomade on, that's all, don't need no process, and I bet you could almost pass. You so pretty."
Jimmy was trying to think of something to say. Something about working a deal where he could send them maybe two, three tricks a day. Only he wanted seventy-five cents a trick, not fifty. He was trying to get up the nerve to say it, when she pulled his face into her breasts.
"You pretty boy, you run along now, hear me? You send me a good trick once in a while and when you get big you come see ol Carole. Carole wanna take you on your first ride, little jockey. But right now you ain't no bigger'n a doodle bug, and I gotta turn you loose."
"I'm . . . I'm . . . big," said Jimmy, and his throat and mouth were so dry, his lips popped. Carole Lombard held him back, and laughed uproariously.
"You devil," she said. "You pretty little devil. Git on outta here."
And she opened the door and swatted him on the bottom as he stepped out. The swat humiliated him and he felt a rush of anger and turned to see her watching him.
"Don't you go abusin yourself too much while you growin up," she said, still chuckling. "You save it up for ol Carole Lombard and then you come back. Soon as you old enough to pay three dollars. Hear me, pretty child?"
"I got three dollars now," Jimmy lied. "I got it right now."
"Then come on back, little jockey." She laughed.
"No. I wouldn't give it to you. I wouldn't spend it on you. You ain't the best around here."
"Now you know that ain't true, little jockey!' She laughed, and Jimmy ran out into the sunshine holding back tears of anger.
"You gonna see me agin, bitch," he whispered. "I'm comin back to you with twenty dollars someday. And you gonna do everything to me I want. Everything, nigger. Jist like a dog! Everything!"
There were other things he learned at the shine stand. Like the eye game. "Jist stare em down, Jimmy," said the boy they called Hip-enuff. "Jist look a whitey in the eye and stare and watch em look away. See, they's afraid of you, man."
"Afraid of me?"
"Uh huh," said Hip-enuff. "This ain't Texas. You livin in Los Angeles, man. They's afraid of you. They thinks you is some wild nigger. Stare at em and watch. Especially the pussy. Stare at some white bitch and watch how quick she go shaky in the lip and look the other way. Hot damn!"
"But why I wanna do that? What do I git from that?"
"Git from it? Sheeeit, you know you the man, that's what you git from it. Huh! Git from it. Boy, you ain't got no sense, you know?"
But Jimmy never played the eye game. Never stared anyone down, white or black, still unconvinced that it would show that he was the man. He proved to himself he was right one afternoon while walking by a Main Street shoe store. A young white girl with a pretty pageboy hairdo was trying on shoes. When the salesman went in back Jimmy walked in the store, hoping he could grab a good pair of men's shoes off the rack and run. But instead of paying attention to business he found himself staring at the girl, who was no more than nineteen. She didn't see him and she had pulled her pale blue pleated skirt up to mid thigh and was touching up the orange-tan leg makeup just above the knee. It was during World War II and nylons were all but impossible to get.
Her legs were shapely and elegant and Jimmy completely forgot what he had come for. And then she saw him and they locked eyes and Jimmy suddenly remembered the admonition to stare down a white bitch like a wild nigger. But he didn't. He dropped his eyes. And deliberately he tried his own ideas by saying, "I'm sorry for starin, miss. You're an awful pretty girl and all. I couldn't help lookin at you."
"Why, that's a nice thing to say!" she said. And he looked up and she was beaming at him. "That's not something to apologize for."
Then he turned and ran out, but waited outside, and in a few minutes she came clicking out in white, toeless wedge heels with little taps on the soles.
"Can I help you carry your things, miss?"
"Why, yes," she said handing him the paper bags with women things inside, and Jimmy walked two blocks with her to the bus station. He was oddly at ease and not self-conscious, and told her eight or ten lies as they chatted during the walk. He stood with her while she waited for the bus and when it came, he was bold enough to say, "If you ever comes down here agin, let's go to the movies."
She laughed and looked him in the eye for a moment and then shook her head still smiling and said, "Thanks for the help." She handed him fifty cents which he put in his pocket.
And that night he lay in bed in his room at the hotel and thought of a slim white girl with shiny hair and painted legs and the way she looked at him and gave him money. And then he laughed aloud as he thought of Hip-enuff, who claimed he got his from staring them down.
We all got our ways, Hip-enuff, Jimmy thought. You git yours by starin em down. Some guys git theirs by jackin off in a black leather glove. I git mine with my smile and my soft voice, and my curly hair, and let's see who's the biggest fool after all. He lay there giggling until he fell asleep.
"And one day the police brought Jimmy to my door," his Nana told a jury. "They knocked on my door and told me that Jimmy and three other boys had broken in a warehouse and stolen some boy scout things. Jimmy had been a boy scout when he was younger but he never had any boy scout things. Then they left Jimmy there with me and told me to bring him to court.
"Jimmy was raised in church. Church and Sunday school. Church and Sunday school is something that any kid live with me gets because I believes in God. I told them that.
"Yes, I took Jimmy down there. There was six other boys and they asked him why. And well, he said, he never had any boy scout things and he wanted them. I don't know anything about the boy scouts, but he got up and he recited several verses in the boy scout code he still remembered, and the man asked if Jimmy had any people that I could send him to to get him away from this bunch. And I sent Jimmy to Wyoming to his real mother.
"Well, his mother didn't understand. She didn't understand children. They called me up one night and Jimmy was cryin that she had choked him and he wanted to come home. I wired him the money that night."
Jimmy's Nana did not mention that he had conceived a child on this trip to Wyoming. He was to deny paternity, but two years later Jimmy was to see a photo of the handsome, yellow-skinned child named Ronnie, and there was no doubt. But he never saw the boy and wondered vaguely about him only once or twice over the years.
Now Jimmy was back at the shine stand. It was also a good place to score a few cans of pot which could be cut and resold. The stolen wine could be diluted to water and as long as there was a bit of color someone would buy it. There were lots of ways to make a sting at the shine stand and his Nana would never take any money from him, only cautioning him to save what he earned. She was proud of him when he got a job selling papers. It didn't last long, because he got too greedy and stole too much from the pa- perman on collection day. Yet it wasn't bad while it lasted because he had the opportunity to stuff cotton in some pretty good pay phones along the paper route, and later collect the coins that didn't fall through. And it was nice riding a bike around his route. Of course he had the finest, because why steal a cheap one when people were so careless with good ones?
The pot started getting to Jimmy. Eventually he wanted nothing but a can of pot in his jeans. He became a stone grasshopper, ditching school, wearing a Western Union cap so that if a cop stopped and asked why he wasn't in school he could point to the cap and say he was working part time and therefore wasn't truant.
"The weed smoking made me so lazy and lackluster that I hardly done anything except lay around the streets and panhandle the pimps and whores," he was to say.
"Well, I went to Bakersfield in '48 and I stayed there until '51, and Jimmy weren't with me all the time there," said his Nana. "He struck out on his own, doin farm work, but he would come and see me from time to time. And then Jimmy started gettin into trouble, in and out of prisons. But he never changed toward me. He never talked back or raised his voice to me. I don't believe he'd do it now. He doesn't, he just doesn't. He'd cry before he'd even talk back to me. He'd rather cry.
"Jimmy would never do a violent thing," his Nana would plead to a crowded courtroom when she was seventy-eight years old. "Why, once he sat up with his hurt dog and cried all night. He was always cryin cause he would get hurt so easy."
When he was twenty years old, Jimmy Smith fathered his second illegitimate child, a girl. He was in jail when he heard of the birth in Bakersfield. The light-skinned boy and the girl named Helen Marie were the only two children he knew for sure that he fathered. He was to say of his daughter: "Somewhere along the line I heard she was livin in L. A. but I never thought to look her up."
For a time Jimmy worked close to the land, in the sunshine and the dirt of the San Joaquin Valley. He hated it. All of it. The dirt in his teeth, and the sweat like turpentine in his eyes, the sun burning his skull from the inside out. The land was a hateful place, intimidating, defeating, dehumanizing.
"No more nigger work for me. No more pickin cotton in Bakersfield. No sir. No more pitchin watermelons in Blythe. Uh-uh, not this cat. No more swampin potatoes and pickin grapes like a fuckin wetback. Not Jimmy Smith. Not this dude. Catch you later, baby." So he returned to the city to something he understood.
He was to say that heroin gave him the finest hours of his life, the loveliest of all. He was now an addict, a shoplifter, a petty thief.
Once he was convicted of stealing a suit out of a car and pawning it for two dollars. And there were state prisons. Hard time. Soledad. San Quentin. Then he was caught stealing a nine-dollar toaster to sell for heroin, a felony crime because of his prior convictions. He ended up at Vallecito Honor Camp fighting a forest fire, but ran away from the camp. Five months of freedom, the longest he would have as an adult, and then he was rearrested on a narcotics charge and convicted of the escape from Vallecito. Then the real jolt: the dreaded Folsom Prison. The theft of that toaster ultimately would cost him more than five years of his life.
Chapter
5
Ian and Karl had not gotten around to discussing where they would eat tonight. Few policemen brownbagged on a Saturday night. It was the night to eat as well as they could afford. Felony car Six-Z-Four could easily have been in a restaurant during the time the little Ford passed through Hollywood.
Gregory Powell, the driver of the Ford coupe, was turning north toward the Hollywood Freeway. His partner, Jimmy Smith, was considering putting his automatic in the glove compartment until they arrived at the market.
"You know something, Jim?"
"Say what?"
"You know what I was thinking? I was thinking it seems like you* and me been partners a long time."
"Uh huh," said Jimmy, thinking: Amen, motherfucker, and it ain't gonna last much longer.