Pimp: The Story of My Life

by Iceberg Slim

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

Georgia.

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.

PREFACE

I will take you, the reader, with me into the secret inner world of the pimp.

however, if one intelligent, valuable young man or woman can be saved from the destructive slime; then the displeasure I have given will have been outweighed by that individual’s use of his potential in a socially constructive manner.

my ghastly life

win respect as a constructive human being.

1

TORN FROM THE NEST

Her name was Maude and she Georgied me around 1921. I was on...

Strangely, she had a reputation in Indianapolis, Indiana as a devout Holy Roller.

she would savagely jerk my head even tighter into the hairy maw.

My idiot father had come to the big city and gone sucker wild. He couldn’t stay away from the high-yellow whores with their big asses and bitch-dog sexual antics.

Mama naturally refused so he hurled me against the wall in disgust.

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.

Her clientele was for the most part whores, pimps, and hustlers from the sprawling red light district in Rockford. They were the only ones who always had the money to spend on their appearance.

I didn’t know when I first saw him that he was the pin-striped snake who would poison the core of our lives.

poor Henry’s fears had foundation. Mama had never loved my stepfather. This kind, wonderful man had only been a tool of convenience. She had fallen in love with the snake all right.

the traumatic disbelief and shock that was on my father’s face when he unlocked the door and stepped into his completely empty house.

When we got to Milwaukee by train, ninety miles away, Steve had rented a house. Every square inch of that house was filled with my father’s things.

within weeks had sold everything, piece by piece, and lost it across the craps table.

“You little mother-fucker, you. I’m going to beat your mother-fucking ass. I am telling you, if you don’t run away, I’m going to kill you.”

He grabbed that kitten and took it downstairs where there was a concrete wall. He grabbed it by the heels. I was standing (we lived on the second floor) looking down at him; he took the kitten and beat its brains out against that wall.

know my lousy old man deserved what happened to his goods. I know Mama got her revenge and it was sweet I am sure, but it was bitter for a kid like me to know that Mama was part of it.

Perhaps if Mama had kept that burglary cross a secret from me, in some tiny way I might have been stronger to fight off that pimping disease. I don’t know, but somehow after that cross Mama just didn’t seem like the same honest sweet Mama that I had prayed in church with back in Rockford.

Mama, we could have been happy, our lives would have been different, but I don’t blame you. Mama, I love you.”

On August fourth, my birthday, our old friend Steve, with diabolical timing, made that event unforgettable. Since that chilly dawn in April he had searched the slum streets for his escaped dupes, thirsty for revenge. I waited eagerly in the hotel room for Mama who had promised to bake a cake in her white woman’s kitchen. She said she would be home early at six o’clock to celebrate my birthday. Well, she came home all right on the seventh of August, from a hospital, with her broken jaw wired, and her body covered with bruises. Steve had stalked her and attacked her with his fists and feet and then escaped through the grimy catacombs of the Ghetto.

Henry died a year after we left him. Until the grave claimed her, Henry would rise from his own to haunt her in the lonely gloom.

Mama was desperate to save at least fragments of her image, to hold fast the love and respect I had for her in Rockford. I had seen too much, had suffered too much. The jungle had started to embalm me with bitterness and hardness.

I was sopping up the poison of the street like a sponge.

FIRST STEPS INTO THE JUNGLE

My hustler pal was called Party Time.

Murphy

Party went back to the joint for a yard after he got out of City Hospital. One thing about Party he wasn’t copper hearted. He never tipped my name to the heat.

The pimp game is like the watchmaker’s art, it’s tough. Party went through his life struggling to make a watch while wearing boxing gloves. Party’s bad break sobered me, and I started hearing what was going on in day classes at school.

There was a sizeable alumni of Tuskegee, a Southern Negro college, who insisted upon Mama letting them underwrite all expenses for my education at their Alma Mater.

On campus, I was like a fox in a chicken coop. Within ninety days after I got down there I had slit the maidenhead on a halfdozen curvy coeds.

I got a break and got the chance to stay until mid-term of the Sophomore year when I went for the “okey doke.” I took a bootlegging rap for a pal.

Party had taken our beef without spilling.

I didn’t turn over on my roommate. I obeyed the code.

“Do you love me enough to do anything for me?” She said, “Yes.” So, I said, “Even turn a trick?” She said, “Anything.” I put my clothes on and went to the street and saw an old gambler whom I knew was a trick and told him what was upstairs. Sure enough he gave me a five-dollar bill, the asking price, and I took him upstairs and let him in on her. She turned him in less than five minutes.

I could get rich with this girl and drive a big white Packard. My next prospect was all wrong. He was an acquaintance of the band leader, June’s father. He went up the stairs, saw her and called the father in Pittsburgh. The father called the local police department and my pimping career died aborning. When the detective came, I was still out there looking for tricks for the down payment on that big white Packard.

My sentence to the Wisconsin Green Bay reformatory almost cracked Mama up.

The pressures of Henry’s death and now my plight must have been awful.

A rough pine counter stretched for twenty yards down a green-and-gray flagstone floor that looked clean enough to eat from. This was part of the shiny, clean skin of the apple. The inside was rotting and foul.

his talkative cane.

The next day they shipped Oscar to the funny farm where perhaps he is today, thirty years later.

SALTY TRIP WITH PEPPER

one-hundred and seventy-five