Pimp: The Story of My Life

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Any good pimp is his own best company. His inner-life is so rich with cunning and scheming to out-think his whores." Both Sweet and Iceberg learned hardness and hatred from the traumas of their youth. As Bessel Van Der Kolk said in his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, “Hurt people hurt other people.” In reality, there are no practical lessons on pandering sex to be learned in this book. Despite that supposed reading by fans, I seriously doubt that it had a substantial effect on those who aspire to a criminal lifestyle. Like any potboiler it is as much wish-fulfillment as provocation. Rather, the supposed style presented as the mystery and allure of the pimp is, no doubt, simply a cover for the underlying and constant violence or threat of violence that is the heart of the process. It is the violence that is truly the method of a pimp. The patter is just the veneer. Learning about that veneer cannot truly prepare someone for a lifestyle filled with the most atrocious of crimes any more than reading a book about the one inch punch will turn the reader into Bruce Lee. On his first night in Chicago, in the spring of 1938, he sees a man beat an unconscious woman almost to death in front of a huge crowd of onlookers. The man then lifts the woman onto his shoulder, throws her into his car and drives off. Slim turns to another man in the crowd:

He is somewhat repentant. Borrowing a trope from Fanny Hill and Vanity Fair, he presents Pimp as a cautionary tale, and unlike those two books he seems to mean it; he doesn't glorify his life. Much. Big Daddy Kane's mileage apparently varied. Iceberg Slim's last book, Doom Fox (written in 1978 but not published until 1998), contains an introduction written by Ice-T. Please note that I say "verisimilitude" not truth. I sincerely doubt this book is a full and reliable accounting of his activities as a pimp. The prose is far too much of a pulp novel "hard-boiled" affectation to be truthful in any meaningful sense of that word. In fact, that style of prose and the particulars that are given would appear in many cases to have lead to a misinterpretation of this book as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale, and the author himself warned against that reading later in his career. (In a scene portrayed in the aforementioned documentary.) Okay, so I think we don't have to discuss that the exploits that Iceberg describes in his autobiographical novel are, you know, immoral, to say the least (lying to women and gaslighting them, severe physical and mental abuse, hooking them on drugs, taking all their money, throwing them away when they can't work anymore, etc.). What's interesting to consider here are different aspects: I don’t know why Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines are not taught in university literature programs. I went through two degrees without ever hearing of either author. Maybe it’s because the professors interested in “literary diversity” only like the kind of diversity that doesn’t offend their sensibilities. Maybe they insist their authors be squarely on the “right” side of every issue, lamenting wrongs instead of portraying them in a way the reader actually feels.There is a lot of repetition as well. The author loves to say the exact same thing over and over just dressed a little differently. It wasn’t unlike reading an Ayn Rand novel. It was akin to playing a video game from the 80s where you keep dying on a level and have to start said level over again. You get a little further each time, but you go over the same stuff a lot. See what I just did there? This is one brutal book, and a damn good one. Slim writes with a fire that you rarely see even from great authors at their best. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, nor does he lace his narrative with apologies to reassure delicate readers. He simply gives a straightforward account of a cruel world in which the cruelest rise to the top… at least for a while. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Maybe we need to make prostitution legal, and just like the current battle for women’s reproductive rights, boot the men out of the equation...well, except for when they want to exchange their cabbage for getting their pipes clean. Men should be customers only. Their opinions about women's bodies they can keep to themselves.

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The first thing Iceberg needs is a whore, and after being made a fool of more than a few times, he finally meets a woman who fits the bill. ”Through the blue mirror I zeroed my eyes in on the target. My ass bone starched on stiff point. Her big peepers were two sexy dancers in the velvet midnight of her cute Pekingese face.”

Sweet teaches Slim to maintain absolute physical and psychological control over his women through physical brutality and psychological manipulation. The treatment he prescribes is essentially the same playbook that plantation owners practiced on slaves: beat them, gaslight them, remind them at every turn that they are worthless and powerless, wring all you can out of them until they’re physically and psychologically ruined. Then go find new ones to recruit. Miriam Bale (July 18, 2013). "Movie Review: The Lessons of a Pimp - Ice-T Produces a Documentary About Iceberg Slim". The New York Times . Retrieved November 11, 2013. One attribute that I did not like was the overwhelming amount of footnotes. They were added to clear up vocabulary and give the reader extra information but this sometimes became annoying as I personally felt some of the footnotes could’ve just been incorporated in the story itself. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Slim knows he doesn’t yet have the toughness or experience to make it as a pimp in this rough town, so he goes looking for a mentor.That film was interesting enough to get me to seek out the book if for no other reason than I was curious to see how a pimp might turn pulp novelist. What it lead to was a book that has the ring of true crime novels plus the authenticity of the autobiography. Which is not to say much for truth in either crime novels or autobiographies... but more of that in a bit. Schilling, Dave (2018-01-03). "A Close Read of the Pimp Story Dave Chappelle Tells in The Bird Revelation". Vulture . Retrieved 2020-08-28. The whole book is a stream of consciousness type of story re-arranged to make sense. As it was being re-arranged, someone broke out the thesaurus and added footnotes (I had theory classes in college with less footnotes) to add a bit of legitimacy to the work.