Pimp
by Iceberg Slim
Canongate 2002 U.K. edition
(originally appeared in Scissorkick)

"I coasted the Hog into the curb outside the hotel where Kim, my newest, prettiest girl, was cribbing. Jesus! I would be glad to drop the last whore off. I could get to my own hotel to nurse my nose with cocaine and be alone. Any good pimp is his own best company. His inner life is so rich with cunning and scheming to out-think his whores." Like The Godfather for mobsters and This Side of Paradise for Ivy League lushes, Iceberg Slim's Pimp provides the mythology for an entire way of life —a subculture that may have existed before being described in its pages, but was inspired to new heights by its publication.

The book is a memoir of the author's rise from fatherless poverty to the pinnacle of pimping success, and his ultimate defeat by narcotics, incarceration, and treacherous whores. First appearing in 1969, the book was embraced by the black consciousness movement as a testimony of ghetto life and shelved alongside works by Eldridge Cleaver, Malcom X, and even Slim's Tuskegee contemporary Ralph Ellison.

As a manifesto of black liberation, Pimp is imperfect at best. Its contempt for women comes through loud and clear as new recruits are turned out to the street, beaten, cursed, and casually hooked on hard drugs, as well as in a rising pimp's simple prayer: "I don't wanta be a stickup man or a dope peddler. I sure as hell won't be a porter or dishwasher. I just wanta pimp that's all. It's not too bad, because whores are rotten. Besides I ain't going to croak them or drive them crazy. I'm just going to pimp some real white-type living out of them." Similarly, though Slim suffers cruel abuse at the hands of whites, his outrage typically takes the form of transparent rationalizations for self-indulgent or self-destructive behavior —no Black Panther-style charity work here.

But questions of integrity aside, Pimp is a great read. Slim's account of the pimping life combines the frantic uptown mayhem of Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and All Shook Up with the volatile rage of Jim Thompson's tortured narrators. Set pieces on red light streets, low-down bars, and lavish penthouses are populated with an endless succession of rich characters--a fallen hustler with nothing left but his stories, a crooked white cop with a stable of his own, a "double murderess with a skull load of H and a hot jib," and Sweet Jones, the king of the pimps, who loves only Miss Peaches the ocelot, all to the hot sounds of Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, and the Ink Spots. The glossary of terms like "Breaking Luck," "Georgia," and "Pulling One's Coat" are worth the price of admission alone.

The "Rules" of pimping are spelled and acted out in fine detail, from the iron fist used to maintain order in the stable to the preferred strategy for disposing of a used-up whore; and above all, the icy stare, " ‘cold, like the inside of a dead-whore's pussy,'" as Sweet Jones says. The principles of Pimp, passed down through subsequent generations of would-be hustlas and gangstas, have been maintained as precisely as the Koran: the love for mama, the hatred of squares, even the inescapable homoerotic undertones of blood brotherhood: " ‘Jeez, Sweet, I'd have a bitch of a time trying to cop another friend like you. I feel like bawling just to think about it. ... You know I love you like I loved [lost father figure] Henry. Maybe I love you, Sweet, more than I love Mama. ... Sweet, you taught me to be cold-hearted. You're the only person on Earth who could hurt me.'" And, when it's all over, a suicide note with style from Sweet Jones himself: " ‘Good-bye squares! Kiss my pimping ass!'"

Did Iceberg Slim really live the life he describes in Pimp, with its epic highs and tragic lows? One might as well ask whether Puffy and Biggie and Snoop ever really lived the life shown in their videos, before Puff switched to fashion and Biggie took up harp lessons and Snoop found a cure for the chronic. Ultimately, it just doesn't matter. Slim's world exists the same way it ever did: as an ideal in the mind of those that seek to attain it.