The Black Stiletto Read Free Page A

my old room. If my old room still exists.
    I’m chronicling everything that’s happened to me lately, just in case something bad happens. I’m not sure if I really want the truth to come out, but here it is. So much has occurred in the last six months. In a way, I’m more famous than the mayor of New York City! Well, not me, Judy Cooper. The Black Stiletto is. No one knows Judy Cooper is the Black Stiletto, and I hope to keep it that way.
    Funny, I can hear Elvis singing his new song, “Hard Headed Woman,” on someone’s radio in the distance. He could be singing about me, ha ha. Whoever has that radio must be playing it awfully loud, ‘cause right at this moment I’m sitting on top of the Second Avenue Gym building and watching the fireworks on the East River. Or it could be just ‘cause my hearing is better than most people’s. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell.
    The gym is my home and has been for quite some time. Freddie Barnes runs the place. He’s a trainer and former boxer.He lives above the gym, and so do I. He’s been letting me live in a room above the gym for a few years now, and I pay for it by working for him in all kinds of capacities. I started off being the janitor—cleaning and sweeping and washing the disgusting toilets in the men’s locker room. Then he made me a cashier and assistant manager. Now I get to help with the training because I’m pretty good in the ring. Not many women are. Not many women do that kind of thing. It’s fun. I like it. I hope to someday start my own self-defense program for girls. I don’t want anyone growing up to be victims. No one should have to experience what happened to me when I was thirteen.
    Right now I’m twenty years old. I’ll be twenty-one on November 4. I’ve been in New York since I was fourteen. I guess you could say that’s when my life really started, because before that I was in hell. Luckily, I managed to escape.
    I suppose I should take up the first part of this diary with the past to bring it up to date. I’ll spend the next few days writing and filling in the story and then, when I’ve reached July 4, 1958, I can just make entries on a daily or weekly basis—or whenever I feel like it.
    So here goes, dear diary. This is my life, and I warn you—some of it ain’t pretty.
    Like I said, I was born on November 4, the year 1937, in Odessa, Texas. My parents named me Judith May Cooper. My father, George Cooper, was an oilman, a roughneck, which was the only kind of work he could get during the Depression. He worked on the oil rigs. I don’t know how good he was at it. He’d moved to West Texas when they discovered oil there in 1926. My mother, Betty, cleaned houses. She was no better than the colored ladies who did the same thing. I actually think she brought more money home than my dad. It was a tough time. We were on the low end of middle class, or maybe the upper end of lower class. All I knowis we lived in a shack on the edge of the town. There were still a lot of people who didn’t have jobs at all.
    I had two older brothers—John was five years ahead of me, and Frank, three years older than me. Growing up with two older brothers made me a tomboy from the get-go. All I wanted to do was play with them and do boy stuff—play ball, do sports, act out cowboys and Indians—you know, boy stuff . One of our favorite games was playing “Americans vs. Japanese,” in which we’d take turns being the army, navy, or marines, and the other team was the Japs. I was particularly good at sneaking up on the Japanese “bunker” and surprising them. I think I always won when we played that game. So, yeah, I was really into doing stuff with the boys. Whenever I did play with girls I was bored silly. If I had dolls, I usually ended up breaking them or letting my brothers use them for target practice with their B-B guns. Sometimes I shot at them, too, ha ha. We didn’t have any pets, although there was a stray cat that used to come around