Books |
Pimp
Iceberg Slim
By
Published: Sep 25, 2013
Category:
Memoir
Consider Yourself Warned: Many readers will find ‘Pimp’ shocking, even disgusting. Men will likely find it sexist; women almost certainly will. So why feature it? Because I couldn’t put it down. Because it holds its ground against the best work of other trangressive writers, notably Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Because I believe it’s true — okay, mostly true.
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Dawn was breaking as the big Hog scooted through the streets. My five whores were chattering like Magpies. I smelt the stink that only a street whore has after a long and busy night. The inside of my nose was raw. It happens when you’re a pig for cocaine.
Sorry for the shocking opener. Iceberg Slim is in the house, and there’s no sugarcoating the man or his book. I’d call it an "underground classic," but the fact is, Slim — well, Robert Beck — has been one of the biggest selling African-American writers ever since this memoir was published in 1969. In the early 1970s, Universal Pictures grabbed the rights, thinking "Pimp" could be a "black ‘Godfather.’" There was no way such an explosive story could be reduced to mass entertainment. Forty years later, as many as five million copies of "Pimp" have been sold, and the closest we’ll probably ever get to a movie is a documentary about Slim. (The preview, with comments from Chris Rock, Snoop and others, is short and compelling.)
But the movie is irrelevant. The book is the movie.
The book is the movie because Slim writes in an amazing, visual slang that supports a jaw-dropper of a story: a street-smart urban kid’s apprenticeship in one of the most vicious and degrading criminal enterprises known to man. It’s got all the elements. Sex. Drugs. Money. Flashy cars and suits. Violence. Lying. Cheating. Stealing. And enough twisted psychology to send Dr. Freud reeling.
You see young Robert meet "Party Time," a lowgrade player. "The pimp’s game is like the watchmaker’s art, it’s tough," he writes. "’Party’ went through life struggling to make a watch while wearing boxing gloves." He meets "Pepper," and "that freak bitch cajoled and persuaded me to do everything in the sexual book." But then he learns to keep his distance, to build a "stable" by not servicing his whores. He’s God. They’re dirt. And soon he has them "humping sixteen hours a day in the street" — in his game, it doesn’t get better than that.
Slim wrote his memoir after leaving the pimp’s world. He was past 40, and fading. He had made repeated visits to jail — the last time in solitary for ten months. He had fallen in love and married and become the father of four kids, three of them girls. He needed money, and, in his view, he needed big money — a man who has been a pimp for two decades does not take halfway measures.
So…not any book would do. Slim boasted of a 175 IQ. He had, he said, "transcendental" ambitions — his book would be so extreme it couldn’t be ignored. And then he had an obligation to his people: "I should like to prove to the world, to dispel the myth that street niggers are devoid of intellect. You know that’s a myth. They think we are devoid of wit. I want to prove to older black men, just because you’ve passed age 50, man, don’t give up." [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
But don’t think for a minute that he has written a rough book with sentimental touches to warm it up. As a pimp, he was completely ruthless, and he’s very open about it: "Pimping is the bedrock of all male aspiration. The pimp, what has he got? All kinds of beautiful girls, who bring him sex and money. Kiss and suck and love him… on the surface, of course, because beneath they really pray for his ruin."
Publishers and producers like memoirs to have an "arc." Try this: Slim travels from beating women with wire hangers just to keep them in line to a man who describes himself as a loving father who gets up before dawn to heat the house for his sleeping kids. Iceberg Slim making it the square world? Difficult to contemplate. But that’s where "Pimp" ends.
This nasty, compelling, addictive book rips the veil off respectability and shows us the animal that lurks under the surface. To Slim’s credit, he doesn’t glamorize The Life. This may seem like a how-to book, but I read it as a cautionary tale, a guided tour of a sad, sour scene. And a long gone scene: "Pimp" comes with a four-page glossary.
I first read "Pimp" in the ’70s, when it was fresh and shocking and a literary find. Over the years, I’ve given the book to friends, both men and women. Many have told me they found "Pimp" shocking — raw to the point of lacerating. But no one has ever told me that he/she put it down out of boredom.
