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His first book from prison: Whoreson, his second: Dopefiend. Iceberg Slim's publisher, the Man on Melrose, turns Donald into the mainstay of his new line of "Black Experience" writers. Donald writes Bad, he writes Black, and they just keep coming: three, four, five a year: Black Gangster, Street Players, White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief, Black Girl Lost, Eldorado Red, Swamp Man, Never Die Alone, Crime Partners, Death List, Daddy Cool, Cry Revenge!, Kenyatta's Escape...Donald always needs a fix. Each future million-seller he writes makes the author, actuarially speaking, bottom-line, worth less. Donald loses big in Vegas. The Man on Melrose steps in to arrange a loan to Donald-a loan from the Mob. As winter clenches down on Detroit, Donald smells payback in the wind 
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and writes his will at thirty-eight. In Kenyatta's Last Hit, he kills his only hero. When his own Daddy dies, Donald writes "I'm next." Two men hit the house on the night of October 21, 1974. (Remember that date.) Donald's woman, Shirley, dies "shut up, bitch" style with bullets to her mouth. The killers have to struggle with Donald to keep his face nice for the picture in the casket on the cover of the biography the Man on Melrose publishes in 1974 . . . but it takes only minutes to transform a prolific junkie into a legend of Bad and Black . . . into a smiling Buddha of pure, solid gold.  |
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