A Well-Paid Slave Read Online Free

the Lord’s Prayer on a die so small that it could be stamped on the head of a pin. The meticulous work soothed his nerves. Johnny made Curt a partner and viewed him as his eventual successor at the shop. Curt’s desire to work as a commercial artist after his playing days seemed to be coming true.
    On December 15, 1966, however, Johnny was stabbed to death at the engraving shop. Oakland police detectives, skeptical about a friendship between a younger black man and an older white woman, brought both Curt and Marian in for extensive questioning even though Curt had been in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. Ultimately, the detectives believed that a mentally disturbed teenager had committed the crime, but he was never charged.
    In 1967, Curt begged Marian to move to St. Louis. After two go-rounds, his marriage to Beverly, a model whose family owned a St. Louis nightclub, was over. Their five children lived with their mother outside of Los Angeles. His photography business needed supervision. His social life was out of control. He needed Marian to help him pull his life together. She responded to his cry for help.
    Carl Flood also came to St. Louis to live with his brother. Marian had taken a particular interest in Carl. One year older than Curt, Carl had been serving 20 years in federal prison at Leavenworth and McNeil Island for robbing a West Oakland Bank of America. An artist and poet, Carl had won prison chess championships and taught himself several languages. Marian had successfully campaigned for Carl’s early parole after he had saved the life of a prison guard who had been beaten up by other prisoners.
    Trouble soon found Carl in St. Louis. Although he was supposed to be earning $100 a week selling Curt’s portrait commissions, Carl had begun pocketing the prepaid commissions without providing any portraits in return. The money fed Carl’s $300-a-day heroin habit, which Marian was trying to help him kick.
    One mid-March morning in 1969, Carl and a convicted murderer held up a downtown St. Louis jewelry store. They took the store owners hostage when the police arrived, and tried to escape in a police cruiser. The police shot out the cruiser’s tires. Carl was charged with two counts of armed robbery and attempted theft of the cruiser. He was sentenced to 20 years in a Missouri state prison. Carl’s arrest only added to Curt’s frustrations during the 1969 season.
    Marian spent most of the 1969 season keeping tabs on Curt’s photography and portrait business and his personal affairs. As his business manager, secretary, and social conscience, she could drink, swear, and trade barbs with Curt like one of his Cardinals teammates. Some people thought that Marian manipulated Curt, that she restricted access to him, and that she was the driving force behind his eventual response to the trade.
    Two days after the trade, on the morning of October 10, Marian drove Curt to the St. Louis airport for the first leg of his flight to Copenhagen. As they sat in the airport bar, Curt bemoaned the unfairness of the reserve clause. Even before his trade, he had criticized the reserve clause in the press. Marian suggested that Curt challenge the system by suing Major League Baseball.
    Curt pondered Marian’s idea during his three-week trip to Copenhagen. Johnny’s parents had come from Denmark, and he and Marian had raved about Copenhagen. After the Cardinals’ postseason tour of Japan in 1968, Flood and some of his friends from St. Louis had toured Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. “I went to Europe to relax, to get away from the pressures, to see museums and art galleries, to escape the things that are wrong here,” he told a reporter in March 1969. Flood fell in love with Denmark and planned on settling there after his playing career. He invested in a Copenhagen cocktail lounge called Club 6. He intended to reopen it after the 1969 season under the name Club 21, his uniform