Pimp: The Story of My Life

by Iceberg Slim

A pimp is happy when his whores giggle. He knows they are still asleep.

Any good pimp is his own best company. His inner life is so rich with cunning and scheming to out-think his whores.

A good pimp doesn’t get paid for screwing, he gets his pay off for always having the right thing to say to a whore right on lightning tap. I knew my four whores were flapping their ears to get my reaction to this beautiful bitch. A pimp with an overly fine bitch in his stable has to keep his game tight. Whores constantly probe for weakness in a pimp.

“Slim, a pimp is really a whore who has reversed the game on whores. So Slim, be as sweet as the scratch, no sweeter, and always stick a whore for a bundle before you sex her. A whore ain’t nothing but a trick to a pimp. Don’t let ’em Georgia you. Always get your money in front just like a whore.

In those tough depression times a Negro in his position was the envy of most Negro men. Henry was religious, ambitious, good and kind. I often wonder what would have happened to my life if I had not been torn from him.

I didn’t know at the time that the banker would never press another coin into my hand, that for the next thirty-five years this last day would be remembered vividly as the final day of real happiness for me. I would press five-dollar bills into the palms of shine boys. My shoes would be handmade, would cost three times as much as the banker’s shoes, but my shoes, though perfectly fitted would be worn in tension and fear.

I have wished to Christ, in four penitentiaries, that the lunatic lovers had left me in Rockford with Henry when they split.

There were too many wheels within wheels, too much hurt for me to cry. After

In my lifetime I have seen many degrees of shock and surprise on the human face. I have never seen on any face the traumatic disbelief and shock that was on my father’s face when he unlocked the door and stepped into his completely empty house. His lips flapped mutely. He couldn’t speak. Everything was gone, all the furniture and drapery, everything, from the percolator to the pictures on the wall, even my Mama’s belongings. Mama stood there in the empty house clinging to him, comforting him, sobbing with real tears flowing down her cheeks. I guess she was crying in joy because the cross had come off so beautifully. Mama missed her calling. She should have been a film actress. With only a bit part, an Oscar a season would have been a lead-pipe cinch for her.

When I walked away from her grave I thought, “I don’t know, maybe that prison head-shrinker was right when he told me I had become a pimp because of my unconscious hatred for my mother.”

I know one damn thing, I can’t help crying at her grave almost as if I was crying because I did so much to put her there. Maybe the hidden hate that I can’t feel wants me to laugh that she’s down there in the earth. Maybe my crying is really laughing.

I was losing, page by page, the fine rules of thought and deed that I had learned in church, from Henry to the Boy Scout Troop in Rockford. I was sopping up the poison of the street like a sponge.

He was ugly enough to “break daylight with his fist,” but for some curious reason he was irresistible to many of the thrill-seeking white women who sneaked into the black side of town panting as they chased after that hoary myth, “Nigger men do it so good it thrills you to your toe nails.”

Two sights I ain’t never seen and that is a pretty bulldog, and an ugly white woman.”

The alumni went into debt and sent me down to their hallowed school with a sparkling wardrobe. They didn’t know I had started to rot inside from street poisoning. It was like the poor chumps had entered a poisoned horse in the Kentucky Derby and were certain they had a cinch winner. They couldn’t know they had bet their hearts and blood money on a born loser.