Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp Page #2

from a mooring,

From a foundation

that he's found,

But the way she does it.

- I can never forget

that morning

When mama had finished

packing our clothes

And henry lost

his inner fight

For his pride and dignity.

He fell down on his knees

And bawled

like a scalded child,

Pleading with mama

not to leave him.

I will never forget

her face,

As cold as an executioner's,

which she was

As she kicked

and struggled loose from him.

Then, with an awful grin

on her face,

She lied and said,

henry, honey,

I just want

to get away for a while.

Darling, we'll be back.

- To see his mother betray

the only man he ever loved,

He learned that there's

one thing I'm not gonna be

Is those guys.

I'm gonna get her

before she gets me,

'cause I know

she's gonna betray me.

- She then conspires

with steve

To take off

her ex-husband's loot.

- From that, he lost

all respect for women,

In a sense.

It's, like, even you

fell for this sh*t?

And in a sense,

she created the pimp.

When the money runs out

And she's essentially

outlived her usefulness,

Steve starts to show

his true colors

And he starts

kicking her ass.

And this steve is, like,

One of the cruelest

motherfuckers

I've ever seen in a book.

Like, he murders

this kitten,

Like, right in front of 'em.

Like, who does that?

- Steve had stomped on three

and a half years of our lives.

I would soon be 14.

On August 4th, my birthday,

Mama came home

from the hospital

With her broken jaw wired

And her body

covered with bruises.

Steve attacked her

with his fists and feet

And then escaped

through the grimy catacombs

Of the ghetto.

- She was alone

in the streets,

Trying to find work.

We're talking about

during the depression

When people-

not only black people-

People were suffering.

She left iceberg

by himself a lot,

Isolated in this

little place that they had.

He discovered the streets.

The slide was greased.

I was starting

my long plunge

To the very bottom

of the grim pit.

My trip downward

really was cinched

When I met a petty hustler

who was very likeable,

And we became pals.

My hustler pal

was called party time.

He had a head

full of wild risky hustles

He wanted to try.

He needed a partner.

- Party time, he was this

real knowledgeable brother,

So he was able to give ice

the rundown.

He was able to break it down

into the simplest terms,

Like, you know, and not

become cross with him

If he didn't

catch on right away.

- Even though

I had started to rot inside

From the street poisoning,

Amazingly, at 15,

I graduated from high school

With a 98.4 average.

- I got a scholarship

to go to college,

And I got it by daydreaming,

But I was able to retain

enough of the information

So that

the black tuskegee club

Sent me to tuskegee

during the depression.

- This is the home

of booker t. Washington,

One of the most powerful

black leaders ever.

- Immediately, because I was

already street poisoned,

I started bootlegging

on campus.

In alabama, okay?

So I got expelled.

I was sent home.

So my mother sat down,

And her words of wisdom,

come back to me now.

She says, bobby,

apparently,

You like to run

and associate with bad people,

With street people.

She says you can become

a criminal lawyer,

She says,

and make 'em pay you.

She said, bobby,

get your education.

Become a criminal lawyer

and get a license

To associate with the people

That you admire

and like so much.

Have you ever heard anything

more wise than that?

He's out of tuskegee.

He's in milwaukee.

He comes across a woman

named pepper ibbetts.

Bobby beck thought he was

the slickest guy on earth,

But as slick

as he thought he was,

Pepper ibbetts

was even slicker.

As fast

as he thought he was,

She was 10 times faster.

She was older than he was.

She was an ex-prostitute.

She had been around.

She had married a white guy.

She had money.

She introduced him

to cocaine.

She turned him out.

I was just a hep punk.

I wasn't in her league.

That freak b*tch

cajoled and persuaded me

To do everything

in the sexual book.

What a thrill

for a dog like her

To turn out

a tender fool like me.

If pepper had lived

In the old biblical city

of sodom,

The citizens would have

stoned her to death.

She had his nose wide open

And she had him jumping out

the window, so to speak,

And doing things

that he normally

Probably wouldn't have done.

- He later got double-crossed

into prison,

It was pepper

and a cop named delansky,

Along with

an unknown heist man.

He got charged with

accessory to robbery.

An 18-year-old black man

Being sent to reformatory

back in the 1930s and 40s

Would have been

very, very likely

Subjected

to all sorts of racism.

At that time,

many of the guards,

Or probably most of them

would have been white.

They knew that

they could push them around,

Perhaps

physically abuse them.

He probably got treated

very, very poorly.

- It was there,

in the dormitory,

That I got the insatiable

desire to pimp.

I was a member of a clique

That talked about nothing

except whores and pimping.

I began to feel

a new slickness and hardness.

He's like a sponge.

He's soaking up

all these stories

And all the game these

different guys are running down,

And he's plucking out

the best parts

To apply to what

he's trying to do.

- He wanted to master

manipulating the psychology

Of the hos,

of the women,

When he started to realize

that the best pimps-

That is to say

the most successful ones-

Were the ones with the coldest,

with the least emotion.

The real iceberg heart.

- With good time,

I was free, slick, and bitter.

No more small towns for me.

I was going to the city

to get my degree in pimping.

When you're black,

my friend,

And you get twisted,

One's ego

Needed to be thought of

as great and grand,

And this was a way to do it,

To have

your own little kingdom.

- When I first got

to chicago,

I had this wild dream

Of picking the brain

of the town's top pimp,

And eventually I did.

In retrospect,

I suppose I could say

That I wanted to be

like god

For a whore, you see.

- Chicago at that

period of time

Was profoundly saturated

With every kind of element

you could think of.

There were

very, very good people

And very, very bad people.

- I come from that life,

and I come from chicago.

Every street had a gang,

And all we saw

were machine guns

And dead bodies every day.

Harlem and watts and compton,

man, was like boystown.

That was nothing

after chicago, man.

Chicago was rough, man.

- During those days

in the forties,

You could either be a barber

You could be a lawyer

if your parents had money,

You could be a boxer,

you could be a musician,

Or you could be a pimp.

We saw pimps everywhere.

Serious, serious pimps.

I don't mean

jheri curl pimps.

- Baby bell

was the big pimp in chicago.

- Baby bell

was phenomenal, man.

He was big time.

It's a level

that players wanna reach.

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