Where I was raised, a lot of kids, we looked at role models. Act Two, The Price of Ignoring the Rules. I have to say, part of what's amazing about him is the detail that he gets to in describing how that world worked. Today's show is the story of him and his friends and his observations about the rules of the game on the street back then. Today, instead, we are devoting our entire program to just one story of a man who tried to be a pimp, found out he did not have the stomach for the violence, and how that let to his downfall in the pimping world. Most weeks on our program, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. Today on our program, a former pimp makes the case that in Oakland, California, in the 1970s, in the last heyday of American pimps in a stronghold of American pimping, the rules of the game that Iceberg Slim describes were not just a reassuring fiction but a way of life for hundreds of people, maybe thousands. "By the book" means, when it comes to pimping, knowing that you're using people, outmaneuvering them when they try to play you, and never getting sentimental about it. "By the book" is always said in this reverential way when you read Iceberg Slim.
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And then he gives him the pointers on how to pimp by the book. He begins by laying out the entire history of pimping in the Americas. And the guy doesn't just give him the advice. It is such a clearly-defined tradition, the way he tells it, that at one point, he visits an older pimp for advice.
In it, Iceberg Slim explains the rules of being a successful pimp. Well, it turns out that there's a classic American primer about the laws of pimps and pimping written in 1968, Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life. If there's a system, if there are rules, if it's a business, it doesn't even seem like crime. Of course we want to believe that it's all so orderly, rather than the thing that we fear about crime, which is that it's random and can strike us at any time, that it's senseless. This is one of the most romantic ideas that we have about crime, that there could be a system, that there could be ancient, strict rules, and that there are people out there who actually try to follow those rules, you know?Īnd at one level, of course we want to believe that.
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We like to believe that there are rules of honor, that when Michael Corleone orders a mob hit, it's because some code has been violated, that if Tony Soprano chokes a guy to death in a parking lot, it is because that guy broke some rule, that he deserved it somehow. We like to believe that there are laws among thieves.
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