Thanksgiving With Pimp Chicago
We wanted to get into the Players Ball. He told us he could help.
Hi Everyone,
It’s been a minute, my apologies. Got waylaid working on this book. For a couple of years I spent Thanksgiving with different iconic American subcultures. I should have continued! These pictures are low-res files shot by the English photographer Chris Anderson (not the Magnum guy), with whom I lost touch several years ago. If you’re out there Chris, get in touch!
Thank you as always for reading, and hopefully I’ll see you in the comments.
Sanjiv
“We Family Now.”
It was 3am when Billy finally brought the van to a halt. We were in a motel car park beside the freeway, somewhere near Gary, Indiana. Exactly why we’d stopped I couldn’t say, only that when we left the party over two hours ago—me and Chris, the photographer, and Billy and his boss Pimp Chicago. We were supposed to collect two prostitutes from a truck park near the Illinois border, but we sailed past that state line 60 miles ago and still no sign of Gypsy or Aphrodite.
“What did I tell you about pimping? It’s a business, that’s right. And in business you got to pay. Now you want to go to the Players Ball, but you don’t want to handle your business. So what—you trying to pimp us?”
As Billy spoke, Pimp Chicago sat imperially silent in the passenger seat. It’s a pimp’s affectation to have assistants and such, so Billy served variously as his minder, driver, gopher and, on special occasions, his door-opener. He was the Walmart version of that guy who went around holding a parasol for P-Diddy. But he’s also Chicago’s older brother by six years—he was 46 then—a double drop in seniority which has done nothing for his general charm.
“Now Chicago don’t need your money, he got money. Tell me, does he look like a man who needs money?”
In a pumpkin suit, flashing rings and twinkling cherry gators, Pimp Chicago delicately tweaked the tilt of his strawberry hat in a wing mirror. A bony five-two, he put the imp in ‘pimp’, an elfin dandy, dressed for a tap dance.
“But you gotta pay the Bishop,” Billy went on. “Everybody pays that n*****—Snoop Dogg, HBO, everybody. So you making a big problem right now, and this ain’t no game–”
Chicago silenced Billy with a wave and turned briskly to look me in the eye. “Now don’t be scared,” he said, quietly. “Stick with me and the Bishop can’t touch you. We family now—didn’t I invite you in my house, didn’t I introduce you to my mother? Well then.” He pulled his jacket to the side and revealed a handgun tucked into his belt. “You know I carry this, right? So I ain’t scared of no Bishop, I ain’t even scared of no penitentiary. I already did 15 years and I didn’t mind. I go there again tomorrow.”
I first met Pimp Chicago a few days earlier because I wanted to go to the Players Ball, an annual pimp convention from which the press are typically banned. I was originally meant to go with Pimp Domination from Miami but one of his girls had been choked in Las Vegas so he couldn’t afford to travel, what with the hospital bills. Domination passed me onto his pimp friend Whitefolks, but Whitefolks couldn’t get me in, so he introduced me to Pimp Chicago. And for a few days it had been going just fine. But now, not so much. Was he going to rob us? Would he take us back to our hotel at least, or leave us here in the icy nowhere?
“Listen, I’m a get you in that Ball tomorrow,” said Chicago, “but you gotta pay the Bishop. That’s how it is.”
At the first cash machine we found, I withdrew as much as Barclays would permit. The rest, I assured him, would be tomorrow.
The Bishop’s Last Bash
The year was 2003. A simpler time as Gen Xers like to say. So why am I telling this story now? Because, well, two reasons:
1) It’s Thanksgiving and this is a Thanksgiving story. Just a couple of days before robbing me, Chicago had me over for turkey and fixings (God bless America).
2) It’s as relevant today as it was then. Which is a shame and it points to a problem with liberal identity politics, one that we should probably fix. We think the world changes, and we’re so much more enlightened now. But does it? Are we?
I first pitched the story to GQ in the UK, where I wrote for many years, but they already had it covered—pimps were trending—so I tried the Times Magazine instead. It seemed absurd to me that criminals could hold a convention like this, flaunting crimes like trafficking and sex slavery, and then be celebrated in the media. It would never happen with smack dealers, say, or bank robbers. But pimps had acquired an odd respectability. They’d been fully embraced by hip hop, by the likes of Snoop, Jay Z and Fifty Cent in particular, and also by a couple of fawning documentaries that framed them as icons of Black American culture, to be admired for their style and jive and their ability to hustle their way out of poverty. Even daytime TV hosts like Jennie Jones were booking pimps as guests so the moms in the studio audience could gasp at their silly outfits and outrageous patter.
Since then the gentrification of pimp culture has continued without pause. Which is extraordinary when you consider that we’ve lived through MeToo, TimesUp and BelieveWomen. We’re righteously up in arms about Epstein and Andrew Tate, a pimp himself, and feminists have assailed almost every aspect of patriarchy, right down to the way men explain things and sit on trains. But there’s been scarcely a peep of protest about the annual pimp convention in Chicago, where the sexual exploitation of women is celebrated by a bunch of men with gaudy furs and Arthurian goblets. It’s as though the social justice era never happened. Why have feminists given pimps a pass? Is it because sex work is “empowering” now, or because pimp culture is dated, a piece of the past? Or is it because pimp culture is Black culture, so to criticize it is racist?
This year, the Players Ball turns 50. Golden jubilee time. The Bishop that Pimp Chicago mentioned is Bishop Don Juan, the most notorious pimp in America, and it’s his party—a convention/awards ceremony that coincides with his birthday. After a solid run, largely free of feminist pushback, the Bishop has said that this year, 2025, will be his last—ball not birthday (he turns 76). It’s scheduled for December 6th, and he promises special guests and performances.
Who can we expect? The old champions of pimping are probably too big for the Bishop’s last bash, many are icons now, billionaires even, like Jay Z. But Snoop might show up. He’s akin to a national treasure now, palling around with Martha Stewart and giving commencement speeches at USC. Five years after MeToo, in 2022, he and Dr Dre did the Super Bowl half-time show with 50 Cent, a milestone for the mainstreaming of pimp culture in America. And Snoop loves the Bishop. He calls him his spiritual advisor.
“All The Bishop Know About Church Is The Goddamn Collection Plate.”
Born Donald Campbell, the so-called Bishop grew up on Chicago’s Southside, where he started criming as a teenager, enlisting girls to go steal from stores for him. Soon they were turning tricks, and by his late 20s he was cruising around in a green and gold Rolls Royce: “green for the money and gold for the honey”. He became known for his encrusted cane, or ‘pimpstick’ with which he used to beat his working girls, all of whom were tattooed ‘property of Don Juan’. And though he claims he retired in the 80s, having heard God’s call after a heavy drugs binge—which is when he ordained himself Bishop and establishing another racket called Church—he has always remained the face of pimping, cashing in on his notoriety and crowing about what a lovely guy he is because he occasionally bought his women clothes and got them checked for diseases.
Much of Campbell’s profile stems from the Players Ball. By making it an awards ceremony—with trophies like Mack of the Year, and Cross-Country Pimp of the Year (ie. trafficking girls across state lines)—he established Church as a kind of Pimp Vatican, similarly led by an old robed man with a big ring. And since he’s the sole judge of the contest, not to mention the birthday boy, he receives a steady stream of ‘blessings’ each year. Pimps love to lord it over their “bitches”, but when it comes to the Bishop they’ll stand in line to hand him an envelope of cash, like… well, like bitches.
“We Going Worldwide With This Pimp Shit.”
The South Side of Chicago is the roughest neighborhood I’ve ever been to. Worse than Brixton in the 80s, Bethnal Green, the Bronx, Compton, Crenshaw and Nickerson Gardens in Watts. I even felt safer in the favelas of Rio. There was something about the street Pimp Chicago lived on. The crumbling brownstones with broken windows. Huddles of men on the corners, bundled up against the cold. Silhouettes on a distant sofa in an empty lot like The Wire. I just knew that if I and the photographer, Chris, had to walk down that street alone even in broad daylight, we’d be broke and barefoot by the end of it.
Pimp Chicago invited us over for Thanksgiving, a few days before the Ball. Nice of him, I thought. And one of those reporting win-wins. We got great material and Ronnie, as he’s known at home, got to brag, which is his favorite thing to do. He bragged to us, about how large he was living, and to his friends and family, he bragged about us. Every call included some version of “I got media here from London England, we going worldwide with this pimp shit… ” We arrived in the morning, and it was already a full house. Everyone squeezed into his cramped three-bedroom on the 2nd floor. I met his mom, a house cleaner who was “proud of little Ronnie, whatever he does.” And his sister, a prim young legal clerk, of all things, who told me that “Ronnie has to respect women, they put food on his table don’t they?” Some local hustlers passed through with their fake furs and watches, preening and effeminate. And Whitefolks dropped by too, as if from another movie. A pink, fortysomething beergut, he looked like a roadie fallen on hard times. “Imma retire from pimping, so I can move into entertainment like Eminem,” he said. “And my story’s better than his. Eminem’s trouble is, he can’t express himself.”
For a few hours, the house was all noise. Everyone heaping food onto paper plates, smoking menthols and drinking liquor out of solo cups. Mob Deep’s “Murder Murder Kill Kill” played on the stereo, battling the sound of Pimps Up Ho’s Down on the TV, and the screeching cars and gunfire coming from the back room Playstation, where the kids were playing Grand Theft Auto. Some local teens smoked cheap weed in the corner. A sad woman in the armchair quietly necked beer from a brown paper bag. And a toddler crawled about at her feet shooting everyone with a toy pistol.
“Ain’t Nobody Can Provide For My Man Like Me.”
I got talking to Ronnie’s two prostitutes, Gypsy and Aphrodite, who were mostly in the kitchen, serving up turkey and collard greens. “You finish that and I’ll fix you another plate’,” Gypsy told me. “God is good.” Gypsy was Ronnie’s “bottom bitch” (a compliment). The daughter of a prostitute herself, she saw her mother get beaten horribly growing up, so she avoided ‘the game’ at first, working at various low-grade office jobs. “But I wanted that fast money,” she said, and before long she too was getting smacked around. That was when she found Ronnie. He didn’t have any women then. He claims Gypsy was the one who made him a pimp by offering to whore for him. “I needed protection,” Gypsy explained. “And I couldn’t take care of my money, so I needed financial management. I give it all to him.”
“But he spends it on goblets and mink coats,” I said.
“That’s right,” she shot back, “ain’t nobody can provide for my man like I can.”
Gypsy and Ronnie weren’t together in the traditional sense. She had a girlfriend, named Aphrodite, whom she brought into the mix just a few weeks before my visit. A fellow prostitute, Aphrodite was getting the treatment from her “gorilla pimp”, as the violent ones are called, so Ronnie took her in. She was younger, she could earn, and anyway, you’re not much of a pimp with only one ‘ho. Aphrodite was grateful. Her backstory is a horror show of shootings, abuse, addiction, you name it. Now 28, she can’t stand to watch sitcoms on TV. “They’re always hugging and kissing on those shows, it makes me feel sick.” She’s the one with vampire teeth in the pictures.
You could call it a family I suppose—Ronnie and his ‘hos. There were six kids running around too, all of them Gypsy’s and none of them his. But ‘family’ implies ‘love’ which is hard to find at Ronnie’s house. He bragged to me about how loyal Gypsy was, how devoted. Like the time a john savagely beat her with a fire extinguisher, but she insisted on going back to work. “I said, shit, with that face you’ll scare the customers! But it was cool because her regulars just gave her money because they felt sorry for her. That’s how I know I got a ho for life.” But in the next breath he shrugs it off. “Ain’t no love though. She could leave tomorrow and take the kids. They ain’t mine anyway.”
If there’s any love, it’s between the women. They called each other ‘wife-in-laws’ though neither were married to Ronnie, nor did they have sex with him. Outside of work, Ronnie told me, “a lotta ho’s on that lesbian shit.” Which leaves the pimp with an oddly sexless life. So much for the mythical potency of the silver-tongued hustler who can turn any girl out. Ronnie hasn’t had any action in six months. “No, a year. I don’t know, a long time anyway,” he shrugged. “But pimping ain’t about sex. Pimping’s about money.”
Speaking of which, by nightfall Ronnie was left tallying the costs and swearing under his breath. Chris and I were among the stragglers at the end, as he sat on his sofa, doing the math and shaking his head.
“All the Bishop know about church is the goddam collection plate,” he said. “That’s why a lot of n*****s don’t fuck with Church no more. They be giving him ten, twenty thousand dollars for Pimp of the Year. But I ain’t spending no $20,000 for no $40 plastic trophy! Shit, I got to buy my outfit, my bitches’ outfits – that’s $3000 right there. Then I got the limo to pay for, my shoes…” He wipes his forehead. “Man, today was expensive enough!”
“You Making Money On This Story, Right?”
I got an email from GQ Magazine that night, from my editor there, Alex. He wanted to know if I could write a pimp story for him too. The story he’d planned had hit a snag. They’d committed to a photographer named Tomas who was doing a book about the Bishop, and another GQ journalist, Martin Deeson, was meant to fly out for the Ball and interview whomever Tomas shot. Extend captions, type of thing. But then Martin lost his passport. Could I work with Tomas instead? I said sure, just send me his number and we’ll figure it out.
I was rubbing my hands. Two stories meant two fees. It also meant that I was definitely getting into this Ball, with or without Ronnie, who was forever going on about money. “I gotta paying to get into the ball and I’m a pimp, so how are you going for free, tell me that,” he said. “You making money on this story right? That means you making money off me.”
“But I’m making you famous,” I said. “The Times gets millions of readers. You’ll be the biggest pimp at the Ball.”
He broke into a smile. “Yeah, I’ll probably get some London bitches off it. You can put that in the story. But this ain’t about me, it’s the Bishop. You gotta pay that n*****, it’s his birthday.”
I told him about GQ and Tomas’s book. The Bishop would be cool, I said.
“Well, we going to his crib tomorrow night, so you can tell him yourself.” A couple of days before the big event, the Bishop was having a house party, so that pimps could come and grovel, hand him their envelopes. It was an opportunity for me too to meet the big man and make sure we got access to the party.
“You A Ho For The Times. That’s How It Is.”
The next afternoon we drove to Mister Kays, the premier pimpwear outlet in all of Chicago. It was me and Chris, the photographer, with Ronnie and Billy up front, in his old brown Cadillac with its back bumper held on with sellotape. Ronnie had some gators to pick up and a gift for the Bishop to buy. And all the way there, he waxed on about pimping, which, as I was discovering, is something pimps love to do.
“It’s very political,” he said. “You gotta network. Like you can give a n***** a call, say ‘how your ho’s doing in Las Vegas?’, and he could say ‘they making $3000 a night, you need to bring your bitches out here’. See? But the Bishop, he got all the hook ups. He got me playing the lead in a movie Snoop Dogg’s producing. We shooting in a couple of weeks in Miami.” Ronnie couldn’t name the movie or the director. He hadn’t even seen a script. “I’ll read that when I get there.”
His point is that pimping is like any other business. It’s politics and networking, management and sales. That’s how pimps dignify their crimes—they call it a business, a lifestyle, a tradition even. All of the pimps I spoke to that week—Fourteen K, Al Capone, Scorpio and um, Dave, “but I call myself Super Dave because I’m super and shit”—saw themselves as torchbearers of a storied lineage, the second oldest profession, a trade so fundamental that the whole world could be reduced to its binary ontology of pimps and ho’s. “The Times is pimping you right now,” Ronnie told me. “You a ho for the Times. That’s how it is. And you getting pimped by your wife too, because you out here working while she stays home. Think about it.” (Great, so I’m a ho twice over. Thanks Ronnie, good talk.)
This characterization of pimping as a business and, by extension, pimps as hood CEOs, is one of the reasons that pimp culture has been given a pass. We’ve all heard the hype that if such-and-such hustler wasn’t selling dope or women—if only he had the opportunities—then he’d be running a Fortune 500 company. Just look at Jay Z. It’s an irresistible story—the street hustler who beats a system that’s stacked against him. And it’s a core part of hip hop’s allure. I too was swept up by that myth. I even moved to LA to work for a hip hop and RnB label. So I know first hand how a myth like that can sometimes make us excuse the ugliness that comes with it.
“White girls… they just finer than Black girls.”
Another reason why liberals overlook the ugliness of pimps is because we believe, deep down, that it’s not their fault. We’re always looking to absolve the individual and indict the system. Ronnie was shaped by environment and history, by systemic racism and deprivation. He exhibits the cruelty that made him. So rather than judge him, we should widen the scope and consider the generational trauma he has suffered, the epigenetics.
There’s also an adjacent argument here—that pimp culture is an elaborate mask for Black pain. That’s how Joan Morgan describes misogyny in hip hop, in her book Chickenheads. I certainly caught glimpses of that pain in Ronnie. Given the way that pimps brag endlessly about everything—it’s their principle talent, if that’s the word—the armchair psychology of ‘he doth protest’ suggests crippling insecurity and self-loathing. According to what history exists on the subject, the first pimps were opportunistic slaves who thought to capitalize on the rape of their women by White masters. And Ronnie embodied that abuse. Like a slave master, he kept Black women as property, like the first pimps he cashed in on their abuse, and like the house slave he looked up to the master’s lily-white daughter as an object of unattainable beauty.
“White girls are too beautiful, they just finer than Black girls,” he told me in an unguarded moment. “I know some White bitches want to get with me too, but I might fall in love with them. And the worst thing you can do is fall in love with your bitch.”
None of this is straightforward. But the liberal blindspot for pimp culture can make for some jarring juxtapositions. Around the time of the Snoop Super Bowl—a few weeks before which, one of his dancers accused the Bishop of sexual assault—I was standing in line at a coffee shop in Highland Park, with its typical hipster clientele of liberal LA women.
Then a Dodge Challenger drove by, pumping hip hop at top volume. The lyrics went: “murder the pussy, I’m gonna murder the pussy.” And the women in line nodded to the beat like, yeah, I’m down, before returning to their cellphones to retweet Rebecca Solnit.
“What Money You Got?”
When we reached Mister Kays, Ronnie joined a bickering rabble at the front desk.
“What’s his name, Snoop Dogg came in the other week,” Mister Kay said, a chubby fast-talking Italian with a ponytail. “He had 20 Church guys with him and they started stealing shoes. So we had to lock the shop up and search everyone.”
Ronnie shook his head. “They’re disrespectful n*****s. I don’t even fuck with Church no more.” He then picked out a pair of green and gold gators worth $950, saying “I gotta get the Bishop something for his birthday.” And he started pleading with Mister Kay for a loan.
We went straight to the Bishop’s house party afterwards. And this time, Billy did the talking, in his usual hectoring style. “Now, you gotta be real respectful in there, because this ain’t just a party. This is his private house.”
There’s lore about the Bishop’s house—with his glass toilet seats lined with $100 bills and the walls bedecked in green and gold drapes. Legend has it, he would dye his poodles in those colors and lead his women, the Juanettes, around on leashes. What a prince. But today, we found him in a dark basement flat in a grotty, paint-chipped tenement on a street possibly even more dilapidated than Ronnie’s. He was drunk on a sofa beside an addled old dear in her 70s. A DJ played old soul in the corner and about 15 overdressed Black men, reeking of cologne, clustered in the halls, sipping cheap bubbly from their Rhinestone goblets. In the tube-lit, adjoining kitchen, two heavy women in tracksuits were tucking into tubs of leftover turkey and a near toothless old man stood at the door barking “Church! Church!”
The Bishop immediately palmed us off to his assistant, Minister Seymour, a boorish man in a bright pink suit. And Seymour sneered at us. “You want to interview the Bishop, I need $2000.”
“I wanted to talk about that, see there’s this photographer called Tomas—”
“What money you got?”
“I think Tomas figured it out, he’s shooting the Bishop for a book?”
“Oh Paparazzi! You talking about Paparazzi. OK hold on, I’m a call him.”
We were in the middle of a dark living room, surrounded by pimps, all watching to see what happened. Bobby Byrd was singing “I Know You Got Soul” and Seymour was shouting into his phone.
“Yo Paparazzi, listen, we got a writer here, Sanchez. Says he’s with you. What you know about that? Oh yeah? OK.” Seymour hung up. “He don’t know you. So what money you got? Give me $2000 and I’ll get you the Bishop. You with the pimps now, you got to pay!” And all the pimps nodded, that’s right, show me the money… All I had was $200 in cash, so I nervously offered that. And it went down about as well as expected. The Bishop came lurching out of his stupor, ranting “HBO paid me $50,000!” And in short order, the photographer and I were bustled out onto the street, where a dandy bouncer yelled “Church!” and slammed the door.
It was freezing out there. What now? Do we get a taxi? How long would that take? It was me and Chris, a white guy with a conspicuously expensive camera. We felt like sitting ducks. Luckily Ronnie and Billy emerged shortly afterwards and drove us back to the hotel. No doubt, they were planning our mugging even then.
“Listen, you making a problem for me and the Bishop, now,” Ronnie said. “Because I vouched for you. I brought you to his house. And didn’t I tell you, you got to pay? That’s the Bishop, one of the richest motherfuckers in the world. He richer than Donald Trump!”
“No Offence, But I Don’t Know You.”
The next morning, I called Alex at GQ, in a bit of a state. He gave me Tomas’s number and said that there should be no problem getting in with the Bishop because Tomas had been given $2000 of GQ bribe money. So I called Tomas and left a voicemail. Then another. And another. What was up with this guy? We were meant to be working together.
Eventually he picked up and told me bluntly that he wanted nothing to do with me. “No offence, but I don’t know you,” he said. “And these pimps are tricky. The Bishop kicked you out of his house, so I just can’t associate with you otherwise it puts my book in jeopardy.” (For what it’s worth, I don’t think his book ever happened. I can’t find it online.)
Our story was falling apart and time was running out. The Bishop didn’t want us there, nor did Tomas. Our only hope was Ronnie who wouldn’t stop going on about money. But we had no other option. So when Ronnie and Billy came to our hotel that evening, and said they had to go pick up Gypsy and Aphrodite from a truck stop outside the city, we said sure, let’s go.
That was the night he robbed us.
“If Those Church Cats See Me With You, It’s A Problem.”
We were angry, Chris and I, but also a little afraid that they might come back for more. But mostly we were exhausted. Not only had we been robbed, but now we had to spend the whole day with Ronnie and Billy if we were to stand any chance of getting into this damn Ball. Neither editor in London, at GQ or the Times, would cover the costs of our shakedown. Apparently getting jacked by pimps isn’t a legitimate expense. If we didn’t feel safe, they said, we could quit and collect a kill fee as per our contracts. But kill fees are peanuts. We couldn’t afford to give up now.
That night we rode to the Ball in Ronnie’s rentalimo. Everyone dressed up, drinking Henny and getting their picture taken. But the venue itself was bleak. The East of the Ryan motel, a rundown yellow brick building with a busted sign, it seemed better suited to bingo night. Ronnie and the gang stepped out into the cold, first the pimp, then his ho’s, each one holding a white teddy bear and a red rose. Then Billy and his burbling drunken girlfriend picked up the rear
“Listen, we can’t go in at the same time,” Ronnie said. “If those Church cats see me with you, it’s going to be a problem. And these n*****s don’t play. So wait here, and Billy will get you when it’s cool.”
What choice did we have? We joined the small crowd that was forming outside. Locals mostly, some of them children, hoping to catch sight of the Bishop, their hometown celebrity. There were a couple of cameras present, none of them national, no CNN or ABC. And they leapt into action when Snoop Dogg showed up in a stretched Hummer. But after that, it went quiet. And as we waited and waited, in the tundra that is Chicago in November, my patience started to fray.
The Runaround
It was the runaround, the lies, the bullshit, never-ending. Yes, it’s a mask for Black pain and systemic racism, no argument there, but an explanation isn’t an excuse. Ronnie didn’t have to rob me. That was his choice, just like his choice to exploit broken women for a living.
Today, I’m a little better able to say what infuriated me back then. It was the fact that these people, these scumbags, had been put on a pedestal. The constant bragging and ego, the fake jewels and bad taste, the obsession with money and gold—they’re so Trumpian, these pimps, it’s no wonder Ronnie looked up to him. And yet the broader culture has granted them status. Called them cool and excused their crimes. We shouldn’t have to choose between holding people accountable and indicting the system. I’m reminded of that meme with the little girl shrugging: “why not both?”
For 20 years, the left has raged about racism and patriarchy but remained largely schtum about pimp culture, and that double standard contains a soft bigotry of its own. It excuses behavior in minorities that would never be tolerated in White people. We see this most recently in the progressive support for an Islamic culture that tramples liberal values regarding women and gay people—Queers for Palestine, take a bow—and the effect is to expose the left’s identity politics as a posture rather than a principled stand. How can it be that MeToo was started by a Black woman, and yet Black pimps get a pass?
To be honest, though, what flipped my switch on the night in question, was the Chicago cold. I had this dumb leather jacket that looked like cold weather gear in LA, but was useless of course. The Arctic wind rushed up the sleeves and into my marrow. I couldn’t feel my fingers, my lips. My teeth were chattering. And I was watching pimps roll up, one after the other, in thick furs. Eventually I felt a light go on, a neon sign in my mind that spelled the words: “Fuck it”. And with Chris, I marched up to the gate.
“Hi, we’re here from the Times to do a story and we need to get in there now,” I said. “We’ve flown here from the UK, we’re not going to wait outside.”
The guy at the counter looked up at us. “Tickets are $50 each.”
And that’s all it took. This whole time, we could have just bought a ticket.
***
I don’t need to tell you what the Ball was like. You already know. It was chicken wings and plastic goblets and shiny shoes and sad-eyed women. And assholes, plenty of those. Speaking of which, I found Ronnie in the corner, holding a cheap 3rd Runner Up trophy. That was all those gators bought him.
“You left us out there, you lied,” I said. I don’t know what I expected to happen. I just had to say something. And Ronnie looked at me with a smirk.
“Listen, I got a better story for you. Better than this Bishop shit…”