Pimp: The Story of My Life Kindle Edition

I read this because Dave Chappelle recommended it in his comedy special.The plot is about a man's rise and fall as a pimp in the 1930s and 1940s. Oddly enough this reminded me of Malcom X's Autobiography. If Malcom X hadn't left the streets this could've been him.This book is fantastic, Iceburg Slim gives an unflinching, uncensored look at his life, his enviornment, and his actions. I won't spoil the plot further, it'll send you on a roller-coaster of emotions; from sadness to disgust, humor to anger, disbelief at the actions of the justice system, the side characters and Iceburg himself.It's great, it's sobering, and it's relevant. Read it!

This is an amazing read and exposes a rarely seen side to America from a pure genius in terms of writing and story telling and bringing the reader along for the experience few will ever see or necessarily want to, except through this format. Extreme violence is continually paired with what creates it; systemic injustice. It is as much an expose on the horrid realities of African American Life, due to systemic racism and a lack of accountability for the unspoken truths about implicit racism that reinforce it, as it is about the horrors of being guilty of being both in poverty and a woman, treated like a horse in a stable. The choices left black men and women in poverty during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Eras (and today) are fully on the table for all to see and experience from a voice that cares not for how the message is received as much as what it explains. Iceberg Slim is neither the protagonist, nor the antagonist. He is neither defending nor condemning his behavior; only sharing it. One need only contrast the culture in a neighboring "wealthy, whites only" neighborhood in the book to see the dichotomy of judgment inherent in our culture, and how the biggest, baddest pimp might earn the right to live in it. The manipulation of attitudes and defeated positions of the sex trade leaves little to the imagination, human sex trafficking and drug dealing being central subjects that are fleshed out in the book in the most stark terms and in a language the reader must learn to understand. The reader is left to acknowledge how the system in America allows whites to find safety, security, and success without major hurdles, while their black brothers and sisters in America do not receive the same benefits and have to hurdle walls others never had to (or want to) see only to be pushed back down if successful. In short, the book shows what white privilege truly is by demonstrating what white privilege never sees nor still wants to see. We all have choices to make and everyone is accountable for their own choices, but when the choices provided to one do not mirror that of another in society (equity and justice), the system itself must change or take full responsibility for the scenario it has created. We all share that responsibility.

DISTURBING. This book will scar you for life. You will learn about a dark side of human nature that only this topic can illuminate. It’s quite an educational trip into the underworld that extends back to the worlds oldest profession. At the same time it’s entertainment. It’s tragic. It will haunt you.

I've been forcing myself to read more often as a way to stay off of social media, this book has brought me on a journey that I never expected. I look forward to finishing up my current list of books and adding more from Iceberg Slim to Marchs must read list.

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.The book takes place mostly on the south side of Chicago between the late 1930s and the late 1950s. Slim, then going by the name Young Blood, arrives from Milwaukee with about one week of experience pimping his girlfriend, Phyllis. He finds a hotel on a street where rich white tricks cruise for black whores, turns his girl out on the street, and then goes looking for more to recruit.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:<blockquote>I said, “That stud would have gotten busted sure as hell if the heat had made the scene.”He stepped back and looked at me like I was fresh in town from a monastery in Tibet.He said, “You must be that square, Rip Van Winkle, I heard about. He’s heat. He’s vice heat. They call him Poison. He’s got nine whores. He’s a pimp. The broad is one of them. She got drunk with a trick.”</blockquote>This is part of Slim’s initiation into the cutthroat underworld of a notoriously corrupt city. He calls his neighborhood Hell, and describes a nighttime walk after shooting cocaine:<blockquote>I walked toward a rainbow bouquet of neon maybe ten blocks away. My senses screamed on the razor-edge of cocaine. It was like walking through a battlefield. The streaking headlights of the cars arcing through the night were giant tracer bullets. The rattling, crashing street cars were army tanks. The frightened, hopeless black faces of the passengers peered through the grimy windows. They were battle-shocked soldiers doomed forever to the front trenches.I passed beneath an El-train bridge. A terrified, glowing face loomed toward me in the tunnel’s gloom. It was an elderly white man trapped behind enemy lines. A train furled by overhead. It bombed and strafed the street. The shrapnel fell in gritty clouds.</blockquote>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.<blockquote>I was still black in a 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.</blockquote>Slim soon finds his mentor in the city’s top pimp, Sweet Jones. Sweet, who is close to fifty when they meet, had come to Chicago from Georgia as a teen and made a fortune. He had a stable of ten whores, and was universally feared and respected.Sweet, whose parents had likely been slaves, tells Iceberg that the best pimps, the ones who wrote the book, were freed slaves who had come to Chicago from the South. They saw a world composed of masters and slaves, and they knew which side of that relationship they wanted to be on.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.If you want to be a master, you have to find someone beneath you to enslave, someone even more down and out than yourself. Sweet says, “‘Berg, ain’t but one real Heaven for a pimp. He’s in it when there’s a big pool of raggedy, hungry young bitches.” By that measure, the ghetto in Chicago during the depression, full of desperate souls with no escape, was a pimp’s Heaven. (Though Slim always describes the ghetto as Hell with a capital H.)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, <i>The Body Keeps the Score</i>, “Hurt people hurt other people.”<i>Pimp</i> does have some funny points, like when Iceberg thinks he’s conning someone else, but is actually the one getting conned. The story of how he got his nickname is also a good one, while his sporadic encounters with his parents are painfully poignant.This book would probably be unpublishable today. It would never make it past the sensitivity readers because the author doesn’t ask for sympathy or forgiveness, nor does he engage in the kind of moral hand-holding readers today seem to demand. He does not condemn each atrocity in the same breath as he reports it. He trusts his readers to be adult enough to recognize the horrors of the world he describes. His conscience does begin to creep in over time, but for the most part, he simply chronicles world as it was, and the things he and others did to survive. That may be too much for some readers.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.Or maybe the professors think writers like Slim and Goines are too lowbrow, too sensational. The fact is, virtually all of the West’s “classic” literature was popular literature in its day, and it was popular precisely because audiences could connect with it on a visceral level. Shakespeare himself wrote partly to appeal to the illiterate groundlings, while Charles Dickens published his revered novels as serials in bi-weekly penny papers targeted at the uneducated masses. If today’s academics had been there at the time, they may have considered both Shakespeare and Dickens as popular entertainments unworthy of serious study, pointing students instead toward Latin.The works of Slim and Goines have been in print consistently for fifty years, which is an extraordinarily long time in today’s publishing world. They persist because they’re good, because however sensational they may be, they portray something real that people across generations can connect with. I don’t think any rational, sane human being would want to live in the worlds that Slim and Goines portray, but many of them have no choice, and someone has to tell their story.

Great book, tells a story (True) about abuse, neglect, struggle, survival, addiction, betrayal, self-preservation and redemption.This self titled bio, lays out the traps of a young man who was abused, controlled and dominated by those whom he trusted; only to rise, fall and finally rise again, throughout his life.The author tells the reader to NOT go down the road he's gone, Nor to glorify his past lifestyle. It's great to know the author found his True calling; as a man who purges his being by expelling his life choices, with the help of his wife; via this bio.

90s gangsta rappers owe a lot to Iceberg Slim, who published this first hand account of pimping way back in 1967. There is zero compromise in Slim's writing: He makes the reader understand the glamour and appeal of the pimp lifestyle, whilst also detailing its brutality and danger. He also makes it clear why it held a particular appeal for certain young black men in 1940s America. He does so with a language that is both street and poetic. Open to any page, and you'll find descriptions cracking with wit and gusto.This book is not for the faint-hearted. It contains horrifying accounts of violence against women that would make even the most vehement misogynist wince. In some ways, this is their story as much as Slim's: By the end of the book, you won't just understand why someone would choose to be a pimp, you'll also understand why someone would allow themselves to be pimped. It's a grim portrait, but there are certainly lessons from history worth learning here.

His style of prose is clearly unique for the time and furthermore influential, but I felt myself drifting in and out of the story. If this is based more on fact than fiction then this really is a warts and all documentary on that kind of like from a first person perspective, adding onto a very tough childhood. Maybe I was hoping for a rays of light to emerge here as, despite reading the entire Irvine Welsh collection on the other hand, I'm still brought up on traditional storytelling. It's gritty, does not pull any punches and occasionally humourous. Along with the style of prose, I can see why Irvine Welsh was influenced by this, as there are no clear protagonists or antagonists. Just huge grey areas of morality within the context of that world and it's down to the reader to determine what is right and wrong, although Slim's actions aren't all that surprising considering where he came from. Not a book based specifically on morality or even mere survival, but about a guy who just wants to be somebody, despite having been dealt a bad hand in life.

Glad Dave Chappelle mentioned it, glad I bought it. Brand new with free bookmark, thanks. Tip top.

The unofficial Autobiography of Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim. He takes you through his thoughts and his life as one of the most well known Pimps of his area and his time. It was a great read and if you like work like Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting then you will love this book. The intention behind this book was not to glamorise being a pimp, but quite the opposite. He tries to show you the life as it was with the good, the bad and the ugly. His honesty throughout was a pleasure to read and enjoy. Hope this helps.

A very honest portrayal of brutality and exploitation circa 1940/50. Both victim and villain, Iceberg Slim makes no apologies for his vile behaviour (e.g. beating one of his whores within an inch of her life with an uncoiled wire coat hanger) and yet, it's hard not to feel a sliver of sympathy amongst the disgust as you read his sick account of events first hand.