I couldn’t get a breath of air until like a huge black balloon she would exhale with a whistling whoosh and relax, limply freeing my head. I remember more vividly the moist, odorous darkness and the bristle-like hairs tickling my face and most vividly I can remember my panic, when in the wild moment of her climax, she would savagely jerk my head even tighter into the hairy maw.
I vaguely remember, not her words but her excitement when we were alone. I have tried through the years to remember her face but all I can remember is the funky ritual. Strangely, she had a reputation in Indianapolis, Indiana as a devout Holy Roller. Mama worked long hours in a hand laundry and Maude had been hired as a babysitter at fifty cents a day. Mama told me about it, and always when she did her rage and indignation would be as strong and as emotional perhaps as at the time when she had surprised her, panting and moaning at the point of orgasm with my tiny head wedged between her ebony thighs, her massive hands viselike around my head. Her name was Maude and she Georgied me around 1921. Most of all I wish to become a decent example for my children and for that wonderful woman in the grave, my mother. Perhaps one day I can win respect as a constructive human being. Perhaps my remorse for my ghastly life will diminish to the degree that within this one book I have been allowed to purge myself. Unfortunately, it would require the combined pages of a half-dozen books. I regret that it is impossible to recount to you all of my experiences as a pimp. The account of my brutality and cunning as a pimp will fill many of you with revulsion, however, if one intelligent, valuable young man or woman can be saved from the destructive slime then the displeasure I have given will have been outweighed by that individual’s use of his potential in a socially constructive manner. I will lay bare my life and thoughts as a pimp. Pimping ain’t easy, but going straight is no picnic, either.In this book I will take you, the reader, with me into the secret inner world of the pimp.
The combination of unsentimental rigor and pulp poetry with which the author chronicled his life on the street made him an instant sensation, especially since Beck’s first autobiographical novel, Pimp, dovetailed with the shift from civil rights to black power.Īlthough its famous interview subjects come off like parody versions of themselves (Ice-T admits he tried to use the book as a guide for starting his own streetwalking business Snoop Dogg is interviewed with two Uglydolls propped on the couch behind him), Portrait of a Pimp doesn’t fully come to terms with the contradictions of its subject-nor, unsurprisingly, does the white academic who freely uses terms like “ho” and “bottom bitch.” Beck’s widow, his ex-wife and three daughters paint the man as someone whose success only complicated his life, estranging him from his family and eventually saddling him with crippling inertia. But for the voices in Jorge Hinojosa’s documentary who cite the writer as a formative influence, it’s not Beck’s regret but his realism that distinguished him. Given that he described running a stable of prostitutes as “ghastly” and wrote about his escape from “the grimy catacombs of the ghetto,” Robert Beck-better known to the world as Iceberg Slim-might seem an unlikely icon for less ambivalent chroniclers of the gangster life.
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