Within ninety days he’d slit the maidenhead on half a dozen curvy co-eds and was told to leave. As a teenager he briefly attended the Tuskegee Institute in the mid 30s but he was like a fox in a chicken coop. Robert says his Mother prepared him for the pimp lifestyle by pampering him during his childhood. Abandoned by his Father, his Mama supported the family by working as a domestic and operating a beauty shop. Much of his childhood was spent in Milwaukee’s poor North side and the industrial town of Rockford, Illinois – one of America’s most depressed cities – before returning to Chicago as a teenager. Exhausting, isn’t it? The mystery inside a riddle inside an enigma syndrome, I call it. No relation, I’m sure, to Armistead Maupin – the homosexual writer who wrote Tales from the City set in San Francisco – but we are back with the classic identity crisis, like Magill, who called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy or Dusty who was really Mary or Ziggy who was really David Jones but is also known as Bowie. Prior to being known as Iceberg Slim, (or Robert Beck as he later became known), he was born Robert Lee Maupin in Chicago on the 4th August 1918. Now, I’ll try to explain what this book is all about. Nothing pejorative from Irvine Welsh there, then. His prose style is that adjective-rich mix, constantly looking out for the telling phrase, so often favoured by many self taught writers. Stylistically, his novels are a treat (so we’re told) and his eye for the psychology of a character sharper than just about anyone you’ll ever read. It’s not the voice of the newspaper expose or the smug prison psychologist.
Well, just how good a writer was he? Is PIMP literature, fiction, biography or biographical fiction? It’s certainly written from a hell none of us have known. Welsh begs us to get beyond his life as a pimp and accept him as one of the most influential writers of our age … Okay Irvine, so how come he’s not on any school syllabus? The only difference being that Slim was black. It’s written by Irvine Welsh, the man who brought us Trainspotting and Glue, and he immediately tells us that Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and William Burroughs did for the junkie – and that he is probably now as essential reading as William Shakespeare. Having got over that, let’s get on with the Introduction. There’s nothing on the cover that says READ ME! The title is printed in bold black underneath the aforementioned model and is enough to make you want to run a mile. Wrong decade, wrong character, wrong look. So, who’s the dude on the front? If this guy was paid to sell this book- he doesn’t. The model on the cover’s not the Author, because he appears on the inside back cover – and he’s one Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim.
The author wrote the novel in the 1960s, so where the 70s look comes into it I’m not quite sure. Someone forgot to tell the cover designer that the book starts in the 1920s and really concentrates on the 30s, 40s and 50s. You know – the decade that fashion forgot? It sports a black male model complete with gabardine, polo neck, dark glasses, checked trousers and high heels, oh – and a brolly and a fedora.
If I hadn’t known better I would never have picked it up. The first hurdle to get over with this book is the God awful cover. Unsurprisingly, in view of its subject, the review contains some fairly graphic language and imagery in places. Pimp: The Story of My Life ~ by Iceberg Slimįollowing yesterday’s interview with Jamie Byng, Jay Benedict takes a detailed look at Pimp : The Story of My Life, recently republished by Canongate.
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