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My
Grandfather the Pimp PAGE
TWO I found him in his bedroom and showed him the ripped-out newspaper article. He wasn't even fazed; he just rolled his eyes and reached under the bed and unearthed a shoebox and handed it to me. "Check this shit out." I opened the shoebox and immediately felt sick. Mike told me he'd found Grandpa's porn collection behind his C.B. radio equipment during the Easter egg hunt the year before. "Here, take it. There's more, lots more." In the box were: A few old Hustler magazines (their covers missing), a glossy hardbound book featuring a lusty chauffeur boning his upper-class passenger on the hood of her Bentley, and a super-8 movie reel with the title Horny Honeys handwritten on a label on the side. I took the contraband to my room. The graphic porn, mixed with the moldy basement smell, mixed with my grandpa's hidden life, was making the bile come up in my mouth and I could taste it. I re-read the article over and over before my mom came home from work, and I felt embarrassed. Memories came streaming back; times my grandfather did things that could be construed as "creepy." My grandpa told me my first dirty joke. Well, showed it to me. When I was seven he pointed out that if you looked right, you could see the image of a man standing with an erection on a pack of Camels, and wouldn't stop pointing it out until I lied and said I could see it, too. When I had my first girlfriend at age 11, he took me with him to 7-Eleven to get lottery tickets and as we sat in the parking lot, he turned and asked me if I was "getting any." I didn't know what "any" was. And there was the time he slipped my step-mom the tongue after insisting on a good-bye kiss. My grandfather's character was definitely questionable. But there was never any doubt that he had charisma. His hair was always loaded up with Alberto VO-5, which he styled into a perfect helmet with a novelty switchblade comb. And he was smooth; he could do tricks with his Zippo, blow intricate smoke rings, and play music on the piano. He was like a white, middle-class Ike Turner. And I realized he was always pimping, as far as I can remember. Other than performing a few ceremonial "man" duties like opening stuck jars or playing Santa Claus, he sat inert in his favorite chair and shouted his needs to my grandmother or any other woman within earshot. It took about an hour to warm to my grandpa's secret identity. Heck, it was fairly conventional. After all, this was the mid-eighties. Movies such as Risky Business and Night Shift had glorified the oft-overlooked wackier aspects of the sex industry. And hey, perhaps pimping was in my blood; if the gene for baldness was passed on from your maternal grandfather, maybe I had the DNA for pandering in my double helix. This discovery of my true calling could not have come at a better time. As an adolescent, I was floundering in my search for an identity, struggling to assemble some kind of personality I could wear without shame. But now my destiny was laid out before me... my life was about to become a cinematic romp about an elderly pimp and his wisecracking teen prodigy. Maybe we could solve crimes on the side! It was not until 5:50, when I saw my mom's car pull into the driveway, that it struck me that having her father run out of town by the cops might have been emotionally trying for her. I asked her if she was upset, and the answer I received made me feel that I had been pimped and used more than anyone. She told me: "Oh, hell no, I'm not upset. He wasn't my real father. You knew that, right? He was my stepfather and your grandma's second husband and she'd been trying to get rid of that son-of-a-bitch for years, but never had the guts. Thank God the police finally chased him away. It was an Easter Miracle." My
dreams of teenage pimpdom had been dashed. In an instant, I'd lost
a family member and a criminal mentor. All that was left of my ersatz
grandfather, the one who took me fishing and played Santa at Christmas,
was a shoebox full of porn.
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I
tore the article out and caught a ride home after school to show
it to my brother, Mike. He was only a year older, but recently that
age difference seemed huge, as he'd started to ascend to stellar
heights of coolness by taking up smoking and playing drums in a
band. But I knew I'd blow his mind with this news about Grandpa.
