Pimp: The Story of My Life

by Iceberg Slim

“There ain’t nothing more important than what makes a new bitch tick and why. You gotta scrape her brain. Find out whether the first joker who layed her was her father or who. Make her tell you her life story.

Fit all the pieces together. Maybe then you’ll know if she’s a two-day package or a two-year package. Don’t try to play ’em in the dark. Quiz ’em into a crack up if you have to. Wake ’em up from a dea...

yeasting

sheet.

“I was still black in the white man’s world. My hope to be important and admired could be realized even behind this black stockade. It was simple, just pimp my ass off and get a ton of scratch. Everybody in both worlds kissed your ass black and blue if you had flash and front.”

Those whores lit his cigarette. They took turns feeding him sips of his Coke. They fought to ram their noses up his ass.

“Preston, I’m not hip to the murder game. I don’t want to get hip to it.

He had panicked like maybe a cute nun caught naked in the Priest’s bedroom by the Mother Superior.

I wondered if he were alive and still in town. If I ran into him I sure wouldn’t know what to say to him after all these years.

bennys and my lid

some caps of girl and boy.

These whores on this fast track dig front and flash.

Horse is what puts the ice in a pimp’s game.”

yellows

He ain’t croaked nobody in over two years. He’s ninety percent Bull scare. He don’t kill nobody unless they bad mouth him or muscle his whores.

“But he sure hates white folks. He pimps awful tough on white whores. When he puts his foot in their asses he’s really doing it to the white man. He says he’s paying ’em back for what they done and are doing to black people. His brain is rotted from hate.

MELODY OFF KEY

Maybe I’ll decoy the runt to get past that scarfaced watchdog. I guess I’ll take a walk. Maybe I can cop my second whore. I feel hard and lucky as a horseshoe.”

the bag of sizzle

I had read a cellhouse full of books. I knew I could rise to a smooth pitch. That old philosopher convict had told me I should forget the pimp game and be a con man.

Surely I’m the luckiest black man alive. Convince me you’re real. Don’t evaporate like a beautiful mirage. I’d die if you did.”

She lived a long way from the black concentration camp. She drove for almost an hour. I could smell the pungent odors of early April plant life. This white world was like leaving Hell and riding through Heaven. The neat rows of plush houses shone in the moonlight. The streets were quiet as maybe the Cathedral in Rheims. I thought, “Ain’t it a bitch? Ninety-eight percent of the black people back there in Hell will be born and die and never know the joys of this earthly Heaven. There ain’t but two passports the white folks honor. A white skin, or a bale of scratch. I sure got to pimp good and cop my scratch passport.

“Baby, it’s a wonderful secret that you’ve discovered. Not many people know it’s better to give than to receive. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I wish you weren’t so beautiful and generous, so perfect.

GRINNING SLIM

the boob box

He’s sick in the head. He’s got an insane hate for the whole white race.

The son of the wealthy plantation owner that Sweet’s old man sharecropped for way-laid her on the way to a spring. He punched her out, tore her clothes off and socked it into her. She was naked and crying when she got back to her shack.

“He knew the woods like a fox. He found the white boy. He left him for dead. He covered him with brush. He slipped back to his shack. Sweet remembers the white boy’s blood on his old man, even on his old man’s bare feet. He had stomped the white boy to a red pulp out there in the lonely woods.

“He hadn’t croaked the white boy. He had only maimed and paralyzed him.

“Sweet heard the mob’s horses galloping toward the shack. He hid in the loft just as the crazy gang came through the shack slammer. Sweet peeped through a crack and watched them beat his old man’s head bloody. They dragged him outside. Sweet saw the whole mob rape his mother.

Through the open door he saw his old man swinging in the moonlight from a peach tree in front of the shack. “His mammy went to the funny farm. Sweet was taken in by a share-cropper on the same plantation. He worked the fields until he got seventeen. He ran away and caught a freight train North. He was eighteen when he got his first whore. She was a white girl. He drove her to suicide before he got nineteen. Sweet’s gotta be sixty now.”

I ain’t no black brute. I’m a pretty brown-skin lover. I love people. “When I was a square, I was even engaged to marry a white girl. Her parents and friends put pressure on her and she chickened out. I guess I loved her. Right after we quit I went to a hospital for my nerves. I ain’t had nothing but whores since.

Sweet’s a Ford and I’m a Duesenberg. He’s just an ugly lucky nut.”

She humps her ass into a cramp to outshine the other whores in the family. At first, it’s easy for the bitch to star. As she gets older and uglier her competition gets younger and prettier. “She don’t have to be no brain to wake up there ain’t no easy chair at the end. She gets hip there ain’t never even been a rainbow. She gets larceny in her heart. She bullshits herself that if she can drive all those young pretty whores away from the pimp that rainbow might come true after all.

“I’m a genius. I’m hip that after a bitch has had maybe ten-thousand tricks drill her she ain’t too steady, skullwise. I don’t tip her I’m salty and disgusted. I talk like a sweet head-shrinker to her. Indeed of air castles, I pump her full of H. “Her skull starts to jelly. I’ll be worried as hell about her. I’ll start sneaking slugs of morphine or chloral hydrate into her shots. While she’s out, I’ll maybe douse her with chicken blood. She comes to, I’ll tell her I brought her in from the street. I tell her I hope you didn’t croak anybody while you were sleepwalking. “I got a thousand ways to drive ’em goofy.

I’m all business. I ain’t got an ounce of hate in me.”

You gotta be icy; understand, Kid, icy, icy? You gotta stop that grinning. Freeze your map and keep it that way.

He’s living high in the sky like a black God in heaven with the white people.

I remembered Henry and how religious he was. Look what happened to him. I remembered how I used to kneel every night by the side of the bed to pray. I really believed in God then. I knew he existed. Now I wasn’t so sure. I guess the first prison rap started to hack away at my belief in him.

“Lord, I’m not asking you to bless my pimping. I ain’t that stupid. Lord, I know you ain’t black. Surely you know, if you’re up there, what it’s like to be black down here. These white folks are doing all the fine living and sucking up all the gravy. I gotta have some of that living and some of that gravy.

“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 whitetype living out of them.

“So Lord, if you’re up there listening, do one thing for me. Please don’t let me croak before I live some and get to be somebody down here in the white man’s w...

With young soft bitches like the runt I’m a champ. These old, hard bitches, I gotta solve. I gotta be careful and not blow Sweet. If I sucker out anymore tonight he’ll freeze and boot me.”

to be a good pimp, you gotta be icy, cold like the inside of a dead-whore’s pussy.

I wondered if the copper was Satan and I had croaked in the Hog and was being checked into Hell. Hell or not, Satan wanted identification.

We been to a party at Sweet’s. You know who he is. We’re personal friends of his, you dig?”

The only magic is in that C note a week Sweet lays on ’em. Every copper in the district from Captain down greases his mitts in that lard bucket in Sweet’s pocket.

“Bitch, some white rollers busted me tonight. They got the wire I’m in town to pimp. They took me down and beat the puke outta me. Baby, they wanted me to finger you. They wanted to know where you worked.

I went to sleep wondering what to do to solve the fast track.

THE BUTTERFLY