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.
Ego keeps many pimps from knowing the real reasons why the prostitute needs the pimp. The practical reasons are that the whore needs the pimp to protect her, to advise her, and to keep her out of jail. For another no less urgent reason, she needs the pimp to drive her, to punish her, to make her suffer so that painful guilt for her bitch dog existence can be relieved.
After all, whores are not born. Before they are “turned out,” they are kick-outs from broken homes, students, waitresses, entertainers, barflies, middle-class kooks, and even daughters of preachers. But all have some conscience and know of society’s contempt and loathing for the hooker.
I also discovered that whores need and use the flashy front, notoriety and phony glamour of pimps to get a sense of personal importance and worth. I don’t think I ever got a dime from a whore because of any sexual prowess I possessed.
I am often asked, where does a pimp go to recruit girls for his stable, and how is a contract drawn up with a girl?
A career pimp literally is working every waking moment, sounding out potential whores for his stable everywhere he goes. A pimp’s next whore could be the young bossomy girl working the elevator or desk at his hotel, she could be a waitress or a barmaid, a lush and susceptible stenographer in an office where he might legitimately visit and notice her commercial curves.
Then a pimp’s next woman might be a seasoned whore that he cops in the street or in one of the early-morning feeding and drinking joints catering to hustlers. And maybe a pimp’s next package will be a whore from his best pimp pal’s stable. Whores are like quicksilver and twice as hard to hold.
How a contract is drawn up depends on the speed of the scene, and the individual pimp and the strength of his game. In the Southern and Western cities of the country, many pimps have a loose, jivey, unstated type thing with whores.
In Chicago and New York and other big Eastern cities, most pimps have a concrete contract situation with whores and spell out in great detail their rules and regulations and play the whores into commitment to an airtight mouth agreement which is enforced by the threat of mayhem or great bodily harm or, in the case of a true gorilla pimp, death.
What makes young guys itch to pimp is the popular belief that a pimp’s life is dream stuff, like gangs of sexy girls and money and night-clubbing. But trauma for trauma, a pimp’s life is perhaps the worst type of life anybody could live. He is feared, hated, despised and walks a greased wire with the penitentiary on one side and his death on the other from other pimps, his victims, or their parents or relatives. He is constantly faced with the triple-crosses of whore-hungry fellow pimps who want to take what he has.
Any one of dozens of intrastable calamities can occur, and the pimp will blow whoreless and penniless. Then he will glut himself with alcohol or drugs to escape the painful reality of his booby-trapped life. Worst of all, when his youth is gone, whores won’t give him a cigarette. A pimp lives his life with a stick of dynamite stuck in his rectum. When on the hunt a pimp must spot weakness, a girl’s softness to the pimp and the fast life. His personality must be like his clothes and jewelry—flashy, bold and fascinating. If he also has a handsome face and is young enough so that sleek muscles still writhe under his skin like a tiger’s, he is going to have instant and pulse-leaping impact on a large percentage of the females he faces. The quality and quantity of response from a particular prospect will depend upon her background, her set of values and the state of her love life.
I can’t say how other pimps spot weakness in a girl. I usually was able to spot the weakest ones by a glance held a fraction of an instant too long and, of course, the excitement in their eyes was obvious. I have always believed that anything I could touch I could get. I would maneuver myself into rap range and watch arteries in the temple and throat pulsating wildly, tipping me off that the girl would probably go for a cop or a “turnout.” This type would also stutter under pressure and would follow me like a little dog to my pad and a contract.
In others not so clearly weak I would use powerful funky pimp dialogue to test for signs of weakness. Another type of jazzy prosp
ect will hide her weakness behind a cool front of indifference, even hostility.
A seasoned pimp, however, will know from the texture and possibly outrageous degree of such a response whether it is real or fake.
Once I visited a pimp pal fresh from the penitentiary and a newly acquired young package of his reacted with glaring hostility from the instant she saw me.
I remember I winked at her pimp and cracked, “Baby Sis, how come meeting me put rocks in your jaws? Am I maybe the spitting double for some gorilla that kept his foot in your ass?”
She didn’t answer. She poked out her jib and fled the hotel suite. I peeped at her hole card at that first meeting, and I knew I could steal her, but I didn’t because she was the only whore he had and I liked him.
Six months later he lost her and I stalked her and bought a wino a jug to trap her in a restaurant booth and to loudly accuse her of picking his pocket the night before. I came in just as he was frothing at the mouth and waving a switchblade through the air, and she was hypnotized with fear. I moved in and rescued her and got the contract an hour later while riding in my convertible and smoking “gangster.”
I have often said pimping is like the watchmaker’s art. To outsiders it may look easy, but it’s tough. One of the iron-clad truths of the pimp game is that, “the easier the cop, the quicker the blow.”
When a pimp meets a girl with a curvy body and a weak mind and she is not a whore he must turn her out. This can be difficult when a girl has strong moral inhibitions against selling her body.
The “turn out” is an art within an art. However, I’ll try to give you a feeling as to how it is done.
Pimps have an exciting aura of wicked bravado and raw sexiness that would threaten even the morality of a nun in long exposure. A girl with strong inhibitions but who has been weakened and stricken by the pimp’s poisonous personality will have her inhibitions brainwashed away by the pimp.
After all, sexual inhibitions are usually formed in an early parental and social learning process which, in a way, is benign brainwashing, pointing up the superiority and “good” of tight sexual habits over the “bad” and loose sexual habits. The pimp in teaching the inhibited young girl to “unlearn” will point up the moral hypocrisy and greedy materialism rampant in the so-called square world. He will constantly portray socialites and actresses who marry older men as merely glorified prostitutes who have bartered their bodies for money.
In cases where a girl’s inhibitions stand firm to this approach and to his corrupting aura, the pimp will probably dump the package. But if she really has great commercial potential, he will try to trick her into her first whore transaction through the use of a prearranged con skit or minipsychodrama.
There are dozens of these, but one of the most used and effective in my own pimp days was to have an older pimp buddy pose as an eccentric and wealthy square. He would take the prospect and me out on the town with lots of the bubbly. Then after we had partied and he had ingratiated himself to her with a nice gift and lots of smooth flattery, he would stop by my place for one last drink.
Tipsily, he would pretend he had something on his mind but was afraid to give voice to his desires for fear of offending me, his best friend, and her, the most beautiful and sweetest and most understanding young lady he had ever met.
Finally, after a convincing game of hem and haw and my almost tearful pleas for him to reveal his secret desires because the girl was no neurotic prude, but a sophisticated person with an open mind, he would blurt out that he would give her one hundred dollars and die happy if he could see her fabulous body unadorned.
I would wink at her and say that I didn’t believe it, and that I was sure she would call his bluff. He would take out a checkbook, but I with high humor would say, “Oh, no, you don’t. This whole affair is beginning to take on a theatrical tone, and if she’s going to be a star, she needs an agent to protect her interest. Give her the C note in cash.”
He would peel it from a large roll, and I would nod and wink as she took it and say, “It’s not queer, is it?”
She would bring it to me, and I’d look at it and put it in my pocket and say, “Go on, baby, strip and let our old rich friend die happy.”
She would, and as she stood before him, he would jump about in excitement and exclaim, “Good gravy, I’ve never seen anything that came close to this. I can’t stand it! I hope you folks don’t get mad and throw me out of here for what I’m gonna say, but I’m gonna have to suck those luscious tits, and I’ll pay a C note a tit.”
I’d pour another round of bubbly, wink my eye at her and crack, “Man, she’s beautiful all right, but aren’t you drunk? You’ve been very nice to us tonight, and we are your friends. Are you sure you want to give my star two more C notes?”
And so it would go with the bubbly and the C notes and the fake eccentric square would con the girl into the bedroom to turn her first trick.
The “turnout” hinges on one clear-cut sexual act for pay that, whether performed in awareness or in trickery, forces the instant and sharp emotional and moral transformation from square to whore.
Pimps with an air-tight game demand all the money a girl makes and consider it a grave offense for a girl to hold out or spend any money without permission.
That is the difference between a whore and a call girl.
Call girls usually are fragile, chickenhearted kittens who like to spend a lot of time and money on themselves and usually like to dole out a fraction of their earnings to gigolo-type jokers who know their place and stay in it. Whores are for pimps who want all the money and full control of the woman. And whores have lots of heart and pure disdain for gigolo types.
Only rarely does a pimp ever keep all of his women in quarters where he lives, and then only if the house is big enough to afford him complete privacy. Of course, some pimps with slight class will shack up with a bunch of bitches in a cracker box kitchenette.
Also, a pimp doesn’t keep track of six, seven or eight women. He can’t, and he doesn’t try unless he’s a lunatic. What he does is play as tight a game as he can and he lets the earnings of each girl tell the story of what each girl’s value is, and whether she’s lollygagging instead of working, or really in the pimp’s corner.
He doesn’t try to keep a stable of whores happy, either. He can’t even keep himself happy. What he does is keep them conned, confused, bamboozled and fascinated so that they will continue to hump his pockets fat with greenbacks. Life for a whore if she’s got a pimp is around-the-clock pressure, terror and constant fear of the death traps in the street.
Years ago, a pimp was a pimp, but now a lot of so-called pimps have a girl or two and sell everything except tours of their sphincter muscles. Many pimps are not ethical among themselves, with their women, or with people in the square world. They will only take an ethical position for a future advantage or because not to be ethical in a certain instance would cause a loss of public face or embarrassment. They are only ethical with any group or individual when it is strategic to be so.
Most pimps chump off their money. They blow it on drugs, clothes, jewelry, cars and in chrome and leather cesspools.
If prostitution were legalized only in houses of prostitution the ranks of pimps would be drastically cut. The street whore’s clientele would patronize the safer, protected houses, forcing her off the streets or into a house as an employee where many older whores would decide they didn’t need a pimp.
If legalized in the street the pimp would be in heaven because then one of his major recruitment problems would be gone and his girls could work with complete abandon. But I don’t believe there will ever be countrywide legalization of prostitution in America.
Perhaps you have wondered what happens to pimps and prostitutes when they get old. Do they retire and live happily ever after when the sporting life bubble bursts?
A scant few of the older career pimps I have known survive to old age. Drugs, whiskey, shootings, stabbings and the debauchery of the fast life us
ually doom them to a coffin in early middle age.
The survivors become bar owners, bums, bookmakers, slum hustlers, stick men or flunkeys in sneak gambling joints. A few marry well-fixed businesswomen or widows. Others are raving lunatics in mental hospitals. Several became preachers of the gospel.
Whores who survive the murderous ravages of the sporting life square up and become housewives and mothers. Others become madams, thieves, pimping lesbians, businesswomen and religious fanatics. As to whether any of the survivors I have known are living happily ever after, I can only say that the squared up ones I have run into through the years claimed they were glad to be out of the life.
I have squared up and cut all underworld cronies loose. My few acquaintances and the couple of friends I have are about evenly black and white, and include writers, a theatrical manager, an actor, homemakers and just ordinary nine-to-five people.
For many years I used drugs and drank hard liquor. I don’t use anything now. I don’t even smoke cigarettes any more.
People are always asking me what my thoughts are now that I have squared up when I see whores and pimps doing their thing in the street.
What they are really asking is, am I envious and do I miss the pimp life? I see pimps and their girls working the streets and remember how it was to crack the whip and to count the fast green. But before I can start missing the old days or wanting to play the game again, I always remember the tension, fear and grief that no pimp can escape. I feel no envy for pimps—only pity that they waste their youth and intellect.
Last summer a young lady in a television studio asked one of the most important questions I have ever been asked: “Do you expect any problems, emotional or otherwise, with your children when they get old enough to know their father is a notorious ex-pimp and ex-con?”
I have given the matter a lot of thought, and I don’t think my lurid past will create any major problems for anyone in my family. I am confident that my children’s intelligence will permit them to cope with any poison the haters might throw at them.