FRESH YARN presents: My Grandfather the Pimp... by Jeff Hopkins

FRESH YARN presents:

My Grandfather the Pimp
By Jeff Hopkins

It was 7:30 AM. I'd stepped out of the car and was standing on the sidewalk in front of Meadowbrook Junior High. I waved "bye" to my mother, but she didn't drive away. The passenger window lowered, liberating a cloud of cigarette smoke as Mom leaned across the seat to shout something through the window.

"Oh, by the way, we're not going to Grandma's for Easter because your grandfather left town. The police were after him for soliciting women into prostitution." The car window rolled up again, leaving a smoke signal exclamation mark hanging in the air as she drove away.

I stood there in shocked stillness as other kids drifted past. I'd recently turned 13 and had begun to develop a filter that blocked out most of what my mother said to me at any moment. But somehow, "The police are after your grandfather for soliciting women into prostitution" cut through to my general consciousness.

I walked into school and sat down at my desk in my first-period algebra class. I was already a D-minus student who had trouble paying attention, but now the "FOIL" method of multiplying polynomials was losing in the gray matter turf war against mental images of my grandfather dressed up as a pimp. My grandpa. The gray-haired old man who took me fishing, carved the turkey at Thanksgiving and passed out itchy sweaters at Christmas. A man I now envisioned strutting down the street in the suburbs of Shawnee, Kansas, wearing a purple velvet jumpsuit and a wide-brimmed hat, keeping his bitches in check.

For a moment I thought my mom might have made it up. Yes, she was frequently sarcastic, and often exaggerated the flaws of others, but had never really needed to when it came to the men in our family. Most were drunks, some had been incarcerated. A few years earlier my father, who was a printer by trade, had been arrested for making money… literally. He made his own twenty-dollar bills with a printing press on our back porch. But he didn't go to jail, no. He somehow got out of doing time for counterfeiting by pleading guilty to arson. A friend of his owned a Gone With The Wind themed disco in Kansas City called "Scarlet O'Hara's Plaza West" and had persuaded my dad to help him torch it for the insurance money. So my dad testified against that guy and the feds let him off with six years probation for the whole deal. So at an early age I learned that although crime doesn't pay, if you commit two crimes, you could pretty much break even.

I'm digressing but the point is it wasn't hard to imagine a member of my family being a criminal; I was kind of getting used to it.

But this was my grandfather. And unlike my dad, the printer/counterfeiter, his crime didn't align with his occupation. He was a 65-year-old appliance repairman who looked kind of like Lorne Greene. During the week he fixed deep fat fryers for a restaurant supply company. During the weekends he was king of the garage sales and could normally be found in a yellowed V-neck t-shirt and Wranglers.

By lunchtime I'd become obsessed with uncovering the truth about my grandpa the pimp. I wanted to know his M.O.; I needed some factual evidence. And I got it when the other third chair trumpet player and I ditched band class and went to the school library to read about my grandfather in the Metro section of the Kansas City Star. "Joseph L. Peterson is believed to have left town after being questioned by local detectives on accusations of pandering." It went on to explain my grandpa's method as, "wearing a dark suit and approaching waitresses in restaurants such as Perkins and Denny's and offering them contracts for employment as secretaries to traveling business executives, positions that would require them to have sexual relations with the executives." The article also said his typed-up contract required the women to have sex with him as well, to determine their qualifications.

For the rest of the day at school, my brain was just completely short-circuiting. It's one thing to find out your grandfather is a pimp, but to then find out he's a completely different kind of pimp than you originally thought is maddening. My earlier visions of my grandpa as a '70s era street mack-daddy had now been replaced with one of him as a strange sex industry corporate recruiter. Now I just wondered if his approach ever worked. What woman goes about her job at Denny's waiting tables thinking, sure, slinging Eggs Over My Hammy is fulfilling work, but if an old man in a cheap suit sits down and offers me a job as a traveling prostitute, I'm there.

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.

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.