Rarely seen underground classic starring Kurt Thometz, owner of Jumel Terrace Books, New York City. Shot almost entirely in Washington Heights, Mr. Thometz’s Checker automobile is co-star of this high budget, violent story about smuggling the controversial novels of Milt Gross into New York in the 1970s. Currently Mr. Thometz is patiently awaiting his next film offer.
Peter Mintun
I’ve recently read, with great interest, that the African American Literature section of the Borders Books store at the Stonecrest mall in Lithonia, Georgia is suffering a pestilence of “pornography for black women.” The earnest author – most recently of A Love Story – Nick Chiles reports to the New York Times:
“What I saw there thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted me. On shelf after shelf, in bookcase after bookcase, all that I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half-naked and in some erotic pose, often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life. I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop, except in this case the smut is being produced by and for my people, and it is called “literature.”
Street literature, “ghetto fiction” as Mr. Chiles condescendingly calls it, is and always has been about sex, money and style. Immodest subjects, perhaps, but literature all the same. The English novel comes out of a street literature. The writers of the paperbacks for sale on 125th Street put Pamela in the projects, Moll Flanders on the stroll, and pit Tom Jones against The Man. Today’s provocateurs share with the canon’s Defoe and Richardson an enthusiasm for that same ever new concept, the written word.
As Samuel Johnson observed of the importance of the analogous literature of his times: “The mind, once let loose to enquiry, and suffered to operate without restraint, necessarily deviates into peculiar opinions and wanders new tracks, where she is indeed sometimes lost in a labyrinth, from which she cannot return and scarce knows how to proceed; yet, sometimes makes useful discoveries, or finds out nearer paths to knowledge.”
The language commandeered by the street writers has that jazz vernacular, that reducing of the don’ts into the doings of some kind, that seems intuitively in touch with language’s ability to shine. As the best jazz singers seem most comfortable in a limited range, some of these authors turn their limited vocabularies to great advantage. Colloquial, racy with simplicity and full of the humor of the average guy, Uptown’s writers are closer in style to rap and hip hop musicians than to Downtown’s university trained novelists.
Like their Elizabethan precedents, they write to entertain us common folk, who I see reading them on the subway. I asked a lady on her way uptown home from work, ‘How you like that book?’ As people like to talk about books, and I am a neighborhood bookseller, we talked about the “smut” she was into. She buys them in the neighborhood, swaps them with her girlfriends, reads them “for fun,” and sold me on reading the second volume of Thugs and the Women Who Love Them. “Good as sass,” was her estimation. I wish somebody would say that about my book.
Reading one book leads to another and cultivates a new reader. Far from causing, as Mr. Chiles would have it, “Ralph Ellison to cringe into a dusty corner,” street lit’s vernacular retellings of The Invisible Man bring him to an audience that hasn’t read it in school.
Many of these books were written in jail or in rehab. They have a story to tell and, unbeknownst to them, use old oral story telling techniques, African and English, preceding writing. Liberated, these authors got a manuscript and a dream. Ill-educated – in both the street and the academic senses – and with an infinitely small chance of making it through a “literary” agent’s slush pile – they take the means of production into their own hands.
You want to tell your story you self publish, market and distribute the book. One shouldn’t be surprised if their printing costs have laundered some money but when you are not good for a loan and you want to publish your book, what are you going to do? Printing a paperback novel might cost $2. At retail you can get $14.95. Selling them cheap to the Senegalese guy who puts them on the street, the author gets the money instead of the publisher or the distributor.
Taking thoughts and making them tangible is risky business. Socrates argued against writing poetry down. Kids in Harlem wear t-shirts admonishing others not to tell. It depends on what you don’t want caught. But what if you want to get caught? Uptown eloquence is elegance. You put it over and you get a rep. When you sell a sufficient number of copies, the publishers and the distributors downtown buy you out and you’re up.
That your works are showing up suburban Atlanta is a measure of their commercial and personal success. The prestige of authorship trumps whatever you had to live down and celebrates you. You’re in the suburban chains, arousing prurient interest and tweaking the prigs.
“This noble profession,” says noble professor Nick Chiles, ” …has been reduced by the greed of the publishing industry and the ways of the American marketplace to a tasteless collection of pornography.”
Appealing to the lowest common denominator is nothing new in publishing. As pop culture’s morphed into mass culture, the box stores and the internet forced the independents out of business, and formerly independent publishers were folded into mass media corporations. Having lost their independence, booksellers and editors learned to dumb it down from the marketing and accounting departments.
For the past fifteen years we have been losing our independents and our books are in chains. The recent statistics on literacy in the United States that reflect the change are not encouraging. Reading comprehension, literacy itself, among affluent whites is taking a dive. Curiously the only segment of our society in which the literacy numbers are up is in the African American community.
What’s up with that, you say? Other studies show African Americans don’t buy much in the chains and stick with the independent neighborhood dealers they know and know them, buying on personal recommendation. They browse and, unlike most white buyers, buy more impulsively. I don’t know what the statistics are but in my experience book buyers in Harlem have a reverence for the book more common with an academic than a commercial audience. To both, literacy is an esteemed accomplishment. Eloquence requires free speech.
Towards furthering our independence, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Daniel Webster differentiated American from the King’s rule-riddled English, lauding the vernacular. We don’t want rules for the sake of having rules. Their democratic ideals were such that Ebonics are less a blemish on than a triumph of our language. When the street talks, they would remind us, listen.
There’s a teenaged boy I know sells reefer on the corner who wandered off the street into my shop one day and lit up – not a smoke – “Whoa, man, this is dope,” – not meaning drugs – “I like to read.” He’d read some Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim and went away with a Chester Himes. I’m stringing him along. Next time I’m going to get him on the hard stuff.
“Police, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, dope dealers, prostitutes, pimps-all are dependent on one another, yet all prey on one another. In modern urban life, none of us is immune to this kind of social network; the very life of the city is made up of such networks. Sociologists and pimp philosophers agree: it is like a gigantic game in which individual players may enter, leave, or change sides, but the game goes on, the structure persists, the pattern remains, and the cash flows back and forth as a symbol of the exchanges which are constantly taking place.”
Urban anthropologists Christina and Richard Milner’s keen street ecology, Black Players: The Secret World of Black Pimps (Little, Brown and Co., 1972), laid out the game as played by what, in the early 70s, was commonly referred to as the Life. In the Life “Each player or actor is drawn to his particular role according to the needs of his personality, as well as the circumstances in which he finds himself,” and everybody plays the fool.
This is no less true now than it was then. Hence the continuing body of literature growing from the experience and study of Pimpology. One of street literature’s great subjects has always been the highlife player, the honky-tonk man; the big-dicked, bejeweled raconteur/entrepreneur, no nonsense, old s’cool of hard knocks connoisseur of cunny; the pimp with the plan to stick it to The Man. Chester Himes, Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim all postulated invincible rake potentates dedicated to the dubious proposition that pimps are smarter than their whores.
Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite offered an eloquent explanation of this phenomenon in Darius James’ That’s Blaxploitation! (St. Martin’s Press, 1995). “The essence of the pimp game is a mental game. It’s a mental chess game not played against women but with women. A lot of people who have negative views on this lifestyle fail to realize that it is a chosen lifestyle. That’s why it’s called The Life: those who are in it choose to live that way. When a woman wants to be with a pimp, she has to choose him And she has to choose him with a certain amount of money based on the status or level of the game.”
Or, as Nelson Algren’s put it in his short story “Watch Out for Daddy,” “It wasn’t my Little Daddy that made a whore out of me. It was me made a pimp out of my Little Daddy.”
The Life is a choice, in contrast to The Game, as played by the Establishment. There are essentially the players and the played, and what distinguishes those in The Life from those in The Game is recognition of certain fundamentals; primarily, that it is better to receive than to give. It is dishonest to pretend this formula for success is otherwise anywhere in the modern world. The player knows the screwing the trick is getting is not worth the screwing he’s getting. The player knows The Game is rigged and plays it to his advantage.
As The Life is played in The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler (University of Philadelphia Press, 1976):
You forget the quote that the Christians wrote
About honesty and fair play
For you can’t live sweet not knowing how to cheat;
The Game don’t play that way.
“If I can’t sell it, I’ll sit on it. I just won’t give it away,” was how Algren had a ho put it.
Funches and Marriott spent two years interviewing and photographing pimps and players and hoze for Pimpnosis. At the heart of Pimpnosis is the symbiosis that distinguishes the player from the tricks, the parasites, the johns and the junkies. “Junkies, man. They made me what I am-which is one very rich man. That’s all a trick is, is a junky. He just done fallen for pussy stead of blow, that’s all,” explains the sagely King Sugar Charmaine. “Every man has to fight the bondage of being like everybody else, and I beat that one right at the start. But then I also had to break free of the bondage of being turned out on my own shit.”
There are the addictions to drugs, sex, money and power, to controlling other people by having power over them. “Addiction,” the King explains to the new fish, “is the central nervous system of what we call ‘The Life’; addiction can be the pimp’s best friend-so long as it ain’t his own!” In Pimpnosis’ socio/sexual/economic equation, “…pimps are not a weird aberration of our social fabric – they’re the logical extension of the status quo.” The commensalism of pimps and whores places them as players of the played, but not above the ravages of the social equation. The Life, player wisdom has it, accepts suffering as the price of vice. It is what you get for choosing money over love.
Many do. The Game is for hunting in The Life. Playing The Game, “You may not be spreading your legs, or walking the streets, but you’re getting screwed. At least you’re getting paid for it. Guess what that makes you…there’s always someone making a profit on your hard work-and taking the lion’s share of the credit and the proceeds. Guess what that makes them.”
The Milners’ excellent (and now out-of-print) study of Black Players drew on some of the first written sources of this oral culture of laissez-faire savage capitalism – a kind of residual from the days of the slave trade. The same late-60s pulp literature by Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck) and Donald Goines I’d bought off the wire rack of the Greyhound bus station, published by L.A.’s Holloway House – which were amongst the Top 40 of the r&b reads of the day-along with Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, LeRoi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson and Muhammad Ali – were in Black Players academically applied to the study of street life.
What I was doing hanging around the bus station had something to do with making teenage life worth living. The pimp I knew sold everything for the head in bed; his card read, “Hollywood Ike, Nature’s finest.” A similar musk to that lingering around Ike, whom I liked, hung in Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life (1969), Airtight Willie and Me (1979) and Mama Black Widow (1969). But Beck/Slim really snagged white folks like me with Trick Baby: The Story of a White Negro (1967).
It wasn’t so much my wanting to be but not wanting to be that gave these books their appeal. They’re crime stories, and I have always been more interested in sin than not. Donald Goines’ Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp (1972) had the same hard grasp of the vernacular that endears one to street literature and pop music. As a teenager, my mind was full of r&b and sin. Theology was a dance, and the urban world was the stage. Writers who addressed my city and talked the talk were rapping on a soundscape of the Temptations, the Miracles, the never-smiling Miles.
Chester Himes presaged and transcended the genre. Like John Coltrane playing a Broadway show tune, his Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) made as much out of the street’s theater as I’d ever been charmed by in print. And I’d been charmed.
Susan Hall and Bob Adelman’s platinum-plated photo essay Gentleman of Leisure (1972; reprint, Powerhouse, 2007) could be an ancestor of Pimpnosis, and it succeeded better than Pimpnosis for being both closer in time and proximity to the Golden Age of American erotica, when the sexual revolution was being fought in the streets and the Cadillac was as synonymous with automotive splendor as the Benz is today. Adelman’s grainy b&w photos show the early-70s flared jeans and heels, the miniskirted and booted ho style appropriated by today’s yuppie princess.
It’s disappointing to compare today’s off-the-rack new jack to yesterday’s fine, hand-tailored Prince of Darkness, if for no other reason than that pimps used to be worth looking to as arbiters of taste and splendor. One looked to the player’s urban sophistication for a grandeur today’s oversizing doesn’t accomplish. Yesterday’s cultivated ponce looked stickpin sharp and lime-green tart-and was. Today’s gangsta too often appears lax, and is. If nothing else, one hopes a bit of the old-school couture the Gentlemen of Leisure display would inspire higher sartorial awareness among today’s peeps.
I am glad to have as part of my collection, but do not think so much of, recent titles from Research Associates School Times Publications. Alfred “Bilbo” Gholson’s The Pimp’s Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin (2001) and Tariq “K-Flex” Nasheed’s The Art of Mackin’ (2000) both suffer from their authors’ being more exposed to syndicated tv talk shows than to actual crime syndicates. Like the artless “bachelor guides” to women once found in Nigerian market stalls, there’s a high quotient of humdingers to guffaw at.
Nasheed’s The Art of Mackin’ features 20 Ways to tell if a woman may be a chickenhead (low-budget or hoochie), just as The Master of Life, the Nigerian author of No Condition Is Permanent several decades ago, touted “24 charges against wives.” They both draw on a centuries-old tradition of violence and misogyny known to have been unhelpful. Nasheed painstakingly distinguishes the difference between the hoochie and the low-budget chickenhead (“that ‘fried chicken’ and ‘urine’ smell,” differentiating her from the homegirls and hoodrats), as if this were useful advice.
I think Nasheed also makes a great mistake in debunking the biggest misconceptions about pimps, as they are the very things that make the pimp’s profession interesting. In my adolescence I enjoyed entertaining the idea of weasel-like pimps dressed in loud, tasteless clothing forcing satiable women into a sexual pay-as-you-go playpen that catered to whatever derivation on procreation my teenageness was into. But as Nasheed has it, it’s just a profession; a job as boring as a locker-room joke or softcore porn.
“King Pimp” Alfred “Bilbo” Gholson’s The Pimp’s Bible at least makes pimping sound like a vocation. As riddled with lists of rules as The Art of Mackin’, his prose styling is appreciably richer and has the antiauthoritarian askance of quality Trickster narratives. That is to say, a pimp telling the Anansi the Spider or B’rer Rabbit stories gives greater satisfaction than a B’rer Bear pimp does, as the former is better at laying out rather than laying down the law. Gholson’s cellblock writer’s style doesn’t work well enough to wholly succeed, but the reader appreciates his try. Not all panderers can be patterers.
These are both self-helps that fall way short of their mark. They are no The Game for Squares, Iceberg Slim’s unwritten but intended contribution to the genre, which promised to put the black on white and set the matter right. Closer in righteous spirit to the raw highlife tales of Nigeria’s Onitsha Market Literature is The Pimp’s Rap: A True Story, by Cincinnati’s Master Pimp (Old School, 1999). The Master Pimp’s first girl reminds me of the waitress in Speedy Eric’s Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away. Instead of working in a West African jungle juke joint, Master Pimp’s girl works at a Tad’s Steak House in LA. In fact, the book looks like an Onitsha production, although it isn’t a Nigerian-style chapbook, but a proper paperback. Both take promiscuity to the limit without really tantalizing, and neither is pornographic. They’re teases, really.
The Pimp’s Rap’s idlest claim is to being “The First Rap Book!” Its greatest claim, however, which is in its first assured sentence – “I will go on to write other great books but The Pimp’s Rap was written by my soul” – isn’t wholly without merit, if vain. It is refreshing to hear from a guy who really loves his job. While no Boccaccio, Master Pimp sufficiently succeeds at evoking a boisterous Spenceresque braggadocio that sustained me to halfway through the book, when his pentameter imploded and I, for one, lost interest entirely. That was all the Master Pimp I could take.
Critic and “Professional Model, Patricia Scott, Manhattan, New York,” quoted in the jacket copy, differs and I defer to her firmer grasp of the subject than mine. “The Pimp’s Rap,” she enthuses, “is like discovering a hidden treasure. Filled with desires, fantasies and kinky sex, it made me hot and my panties wet!” I wish someone would say that about my book.
Even so, The Pimp’s Rap lacks the elegance distinguishing Pimpnosis, which looks like a Sotheby’s catalog. Photographer Funches double-mocha-sepia-toned spreads of costume jewelry, lingerie, champagne and Fleetwoods might be captioned “From the estate of a Gentleman of Leisure.” Pimpnosis’ power dynamic is strong juju that plays on the primal desires that get us all into trouble. Sex, money and style are the real stuff of popular art, and there is no reason they’re any less the fundamentals today of new-schooled mass culture than they were in the 70s.
They just seem to be. If the 21st century’s contributions to the literature mirrors The Life today, it is all over but the posing. Today’s virtual misrepresentation in music videos prompts the response that “too many lames attempt to claim the name and the fame but ain’t got the game,” as Marriott declares.
Pimpnosis is an attractively packaged homage to a venerable heritage Marriott’s text illustrates the subject even better than Funches’ pictures. His homework must have been entertaining, because he tells the story that way. But no white girls? The union between a black man and a white woman used to be a revolutionary statement. Iceberg Slim and the pimps of Gentleman of Leisure and Black Players, were hip to the important role white women play in the game, but next to nothing much gets said about it in Pimpnosis.
When my father would tell me the stories about how he saw the big pimps pulling their Cadillacs up to the welfare office to get their weekly checks – paid for by his tax dollars! – there was always a white whore and her politician john waiting in the car. Whores black and white, as elsewhere in life, get the short end in Pimpnosis. Perhaps the book’s packagers are saving that material for the companion volume: Whoritosis.
Kurt Thometz is the author/editor of Life Turns Man Up and Down: Highlife, Useful Advice and Mad English. (NY: Pantheon Books, 2001)
