The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (3 page)

Papa, you were so shocked and happy to see me that you didn't notice my smile was really a sneer as you embraced me and stained my two-hundred-dollar suit with your tears. I paid off your eighteen-dollar bill and perversely bought you a case of Keeley beer which wobbled your knees as we walked the half block to your sunless furnished room in a tenement building on Calumet Avenue.

Right away you started steering the conversation toward Mama. I knew about that everlasting torch burning inside you for Mama, so to dunk you in hot emotional grease, I lied and spun a tale about how much she loved some guy and how happy and successful she was.

Papa, I tried hard to make Mama understand about you before she died. And I don't think she went to the grave still unforgiving, hating you for hurling me against the wall of that cold-water flat when I was six months old and walking away from us at the height of a subzero Chicago winter.

But, Papa, I swear all is forgiven for I understand now that the most hellish aspect of America's racism is that for generations it has warped and twisted legions of innately good black men, causing the vital vine of black family stability and strength to be poisoned, hacked down by the pity, fear and hatred of black children.

What is most important to me now is that you forgive me for a long-ago brutal moment when I stupidly crushed you with cruelty and hatred. I can't forget it, Papa. The FBI and every roller in Chicago wanted to bust me, and I had come into the street to cop a bag of dope. I got it and was on the way back to my hideout when you ran from a barbershop and saw me pass. You were screaming my name. You were happy to see me and afraid I'd get away before you could say hello. You caught me and held me tight.

And while you were making love to me, I stiff-armed you away and said, “Damn, Jack, I thought you had croaked. I'm in an awful hurry. See you around.”

Your voice broke when you said, “I did my part to bring you into this world. Please, don't treat me like a dog. You look prosperous, what's your line? Are you with some big white company? Are you married to some nice girl? Do I have any grandchildren, son?”

I said coldly, “Look, Jack, I'm Iceberg Slim, the pimp. Ain't you proud of me? I'm the greatest nigger that ever came out of our family. I got five whores humping sparks out of their asses.”

Papa, I thought you were going to have a heart attack because the barber's apron was quivering over your heart, and your face was gray with shock under the streetlight. But I still wasn't satisfied. I had to do you in all the way. I jerked my shirt and coat sleeves up past spike hollow and stuck my needle-scarred arm under your nose.

You recoiled, and I snarled, “Goddamnit, Jack, what's the matter? Shit, I shoot more scratch in that arm in a day than you make in a week. I've come a long way since you bounced my skull off that tenement wall. Jack, stick out your chest in pride. I been in two penitentiaries already. Shit, Jack, I'm on my way to the third one. You ain't hip I'm important? Maybe one day I'll make you a really proud father—I'll croak a whore and make the chair.”

I walked away from you to a cab. I turned, and you had collapsed in the gutter crying your heart out. Forgive me, Papa, please forgive me. Forgive me, Papa.

Papa, if you are still in this mortal coil I know that you, like me and millions of other black men of all ages, have gained wonderful new ball power from the courage and daring exploits of the Black Panthers in this Eden of genocide. It is tragic that too many black fathers have always lacked something their children could be proud of and remember. Surely this genuflective, lackluster lifestyle molded by America's harsh repression is responsible for the irrational, self-destructive contempt and hostility felt by young black militants for elderly and middle-age black men whose survival tactics—for themselves and their loved ones—seen through history's unflattering lens appear the antics of despicable Uncle Toms marinated in cowardice.

Papa, we older black men must guard against condemning and hating the young rejuvenators of our balls for despising us and blaming us for letting them be born into this hellish society—one we at least could have risked our lives to demolish. Perhaps our black heroes of revolt would be less bitter toward old niggers if they could understand that they owe their very existence as revolutionaries to all those disenchanted black men who, since slavery, have probed and challenged America's oppressive power structure. From the risks, suffering and deaths of these anonymous heroes have evolved the awesome courage and methodology of black revolt that now intimidates the masters of repression.

Papa, you have perhaps forgotten a long-ago incident that I will never forget. For on that occasion and at that shining moment the jewels of your manhood coruscated in a star burst of pride and courage that was, in that ultrarepressive era and circumstance, the purest heroism.

I was a small boy, and you had persuaded Mama to let me spend several days with you on Big Bill Thompson's yacht. He was the mayor of Chicago at the time, and you were the chef on the boat during a short cruise on Lake Michigan for the pleasure of ruddy-faced politicians and Capone soldiers. The sleek craft vibrated with the coarse voices of foppish, olive-complexioned men and the drunken squeals of their brassy blond broads.

I remember I was perched on a stool in the steamy galley watching you and your two white assistants putting together an elaborate meal when Big Bill, the mayor, hurled himself into the galley and stood on unreliable legs glaring down at you like a silver-maned bull. You ignored him, but I saw your black face harden beneath the shiny film of sweat. And my heart beat less frantically when you moved away from him.

It almost stopped when the florid monster stalked you to the range and roared, “This goddamn meal is late! Get the fucking lead out, boy!”

Your hands worked eerily in space like spastic claws, and the stark white of your eyes flashed back at me for a pounding instant. The tyrant, perhaps infuriated by the insolent irritation on your face, shoved hard against your scrawny chest. You stumbled backward and stood with mouth agape for a moment. Then your face became feral like a killer black leopard.

And then you, Papa, nigger you from a plantation outside Nashville, Tennessee, had the courage, had enough raw heroism left in your battered black balls to clench your fists and scream out to the feared Croesus of Chicago's corruption and crime, “Don't you never put your hands on me, sonuvabitch. Don't you never call me no boy. You get your big fat red ass out of my kitchen before I go plumb crazy and whale the shit outta' you.”

I sat there on the stool in a trance of fear and excitement as the huge master of the power structure stood petrified in shock and stared down at you for what seemed like eons. And then suddenly, he surprisingly grinned, and the grin became booming ragged laughter as he strode from the galley shaking his head.

Papa, after forty years I still can't be sure of how you got away with it. Was the colossus so secure in his self-image of power and superiority over you, the powerless inferior nigger, that he could finally respond only with amused tolerance at your indignation and rage—with perhaps a bit of that permissive admiration a master feels for a tiny dog with the guts to bare its teeth when teased beyond reasonable limits?

Or perhaps, in that galley arena with no gangster lackeys or hoodlum cops around to crush your challenge, he showed craven cowardice and camouflaged his terror with hysterical laughter. Who knows, Papa, but that may be all the power-gluttonous architects of repression and racism in America have yellow neon stripes glowing on their backs as they cower behind their police and soldiers. Papa, we will never know just why the mayor of Chicago kissed your black ass in that galley long ago. But whatever the reason, your glorious
act of manhood cannot be diminished, for you flung your challenge into the unknown and maniacal winds of a hurricane.

Papa, this is one of the few letters I have ever written in my life, and it is certainly the longest. Writing it has given me more pleasure and satisfaction than any other I have ever written.

Please write me at 8060 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and I will send for you to come and stay for a week, a month or forever. Papa, we need you and love you, and you will be as welcome in our home as Malcolm X would be.

Sincerely your son,

Bob Jr.

I
n the spring of 1970 in Los Angeles, I was having a sandwich at an open-air stand when a slender, black guy with a doll face and a raging ambition to pimp swooped down on me from a new crimson Buick Electra, containing the most beautiful young brown-skinned girl I'd seen in a decade.

He draped himself too casually on the bench across the table from me. He had the same eager, familiar look in his eyes as dozens of young black guys have had as they set out to pick and probe for the criminal treasures they believe are buried inside my skull.

Trying to stiff-arm him away from the poison before he reached for it, I said: “You've got a freak machine there. What've you done, made foreman at the aircraft plant and decided to settle down with that brown-skinned vision?”

A pained look came over his face, as if I had clumsily ripped the lace of his lavender see-through shirt. He snorted and leaned back arrogantly and cracked, “Ice! You ain't heard? I cut loose from that gig. I'm macking, and that vision is humping for me. I'm gonna split to the track in the big fast Windy in a few days, and I want you to run down the joints where I can cut into the boss pimps and get hip to where my girl can get action.”

I said, “So you've just turned out and you think you're the greatest. You couldn't be more than nineteen or twenty. What makes you think you're qualified to make it on the fast track in Chicago?”

He looked away and exchanged clenched fist salutes with a trio of
young guys passing in a burnt-orange spaceship. He leaned toward me and said, “I memorized the bible you wrote on the whore game, and I'm so pretty the whores cream their panties when I come on the scene. I'll have every nigger in Chicago scared that pretty Eli is gonna steal his whore. All the ones I can't steal, I'll shake down gorilla-style. And Ice, I can run a bitch up the wall with my boss dick. I know the game, Ice. I'm qualified. I'm ready for the Windy.”

I sat there silently for a long moment looking at his smooth, unlined face and remembered how my own youth was lost and poisoned long ago in the dope-soaked Chicago underworld. I had seen scores of young black dudes with more guts, gab and looks than this boastful guy owned who had been mangled on the fast track.

I fought back the disgust and anger I felt; this young guy had all his life, had everything going for him to make it outside the lousy underworld. Now he was wild to chump off his life. I decided to blast his ass off and maybe, at least, turn him away from the fast track.

I said, “Young brother, you come from a nice family, and I like you, so I'm going to tell you like it is. There are young pimps in the Windy twenty times faster and smarter than you who can't score for grits and greens, and they're so good-looking their asses would make you a Sunday face.

“You read and memorized
Pimp: The Story of My Life
, and you didn't get your coat pulled that pimping is for dudes who are suckers for jail cells and smack dealers? You think pimping is a beauty contest? You think you can fuck? There are johns, tricks in the streets that can lay your whore and suck her cunt so good she'll have convulsions with diarrhea! You take that cream puff young broad to the city and in six weeks some slicker will pump her rotten with H, and you'll be flat-ass busted waiting for your folks to send you the fare back home. I wouldn't even lay a two-bit bet you won't wind up a puddle of shit and blood in some alley.”

I rose from the table and left him with his mouth ajar. He didn't
split to the fast track because I run into him now and then, and he always turns his eyes away. An acquaintance of his told me a young Italian customer stole the brown skin vision from the dude, and he went back to the aircraft gig. I like to believe that my tongue-lashing had some part in maybe saving the young black for something more rewarding than pimping.

For several years I've been answering questions about the pimp life on TV, on radio, in the street and at teen posts. I'm going to rap about the street and the pimp for a while, and maybe answer some questions that you have posed in your mind.

The career pimp lives by a rigid code of self-discipline which projects (for his admiring whores) an image of icy composure in the face of the constant stresses and threats of the turf. He keeps his cool despite the most voluptuous sexual temptations within his stable or in the streets.

He's a gutter god who has put his emotions and sex drive into a kind of commercial cold storage. He never gets sweeter than the amount of a particular whore's money. The codes, the rules, the attitudes of pimping are passed along to new young pimps who, if imaginative, will discover something new and cunning to add to the pimp book.

An amusing example of how the book gets thicker and slicker is that inventive young Eastern pimps are at present instructing their street whores to immediately request that new customers who approach them expose their genitals. This screening gimmick must give undercover vice cops a helluva headache, since it is against the law to expose one's genitals in public.

Many people ask if I have any thoughts about why I and others become pimps.

In the late forties, a headshrinker in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, told me that I had possibly become a pimp because of savage and unconscious hatred for Mama, who was the perfect loving mother except for that one mistake when she fell in
love with a snake and tore me away from my stepfather—my only and beloved father image.

Maybe his analysis of why I became a pimp was accurate. Looking back, I remember that the most efficient and brutal pimps I have known had mothers who were drunkards, dope fiends or whores. Several of the cruelest pimps that come to mind were abandoned as infants. One was put in a trash bin, and another was stuffed into a garbage can. I am positive that as much as anything else, my boyhood admiration for the flash and dazzle of well-heeled pimps cruising the poverty-mauled slums in gaudy cars inspired me to pimp.