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From the opening pages of Pimp by Robert Beck (better known as Iceberg Slim) (slang translations provided by me in brackets):

I grinned widely, inside of course. The best pimps keep a steel lid on their emotions and I was one of the iciest. The whores went into fits of giggles at [bottom bitch] Rachel’s shaky witticism [a bottom bitch is the top whore in the stable, the most favored by the pimp and usually considered the most reliable.  Usually a seniority position.]. A pimp is happy when his whores giggle. He knows they are still asleep.

I coasted the Hog [car] into the curb outside the hotel where Kim, my newest, prettiest girl, was cribbing. Jesus! I would be glad to drop the last whore off so I could get to my own hotel to nurse my nose with cocaine and be alone. Any good pimp is his own best company. His inner life is so rich with cunning and scheming to out-think his whores.

As Kim got out I said “Goodnight Baby, today is Saturday so I want everybody in the street at noon instead of seven tonight. I said noon, not five minutes after or two minutes after, but at twelve noon sharp I want you down, got it, Baby?”

She didn’t answer, but she did a strange thing. She walked into the street around the Hog [car] to the window on my side. She stood looking at me for a long moment, her beautiful face tense in the dim dawn.

Then in her crisp New England accent she said “Are you coming back to my pad this morning? You haven’t spent a night with me in a month. So come back, Okay?”

A good pimp doesn’t get paid for screwing, he gets his pay for always having the right thing to say to a whore right on lightning tap. I knew my four whores were flapping their ears to get my reaction to this beautiful bitch. A pimp with an overly fine bitch in his stable [group of whores] has to keep his game tight. Whores constantly probe for weakness in a pimp.

I fitted a scary mask on my face and said, in a low deadly voice, “Bitch, are you insane? No bitch in my family calls any shots or muscles me to do anything. Now take your stinking yellow ass upstairs to a bath and some shut eye, and get in the street at noon like I told you.”

The bitch just stood there, her eyes slitted in anger. I could sense she was game to play the string out right there in the street before my whores…I knew the bitch was trying to booby trap me when she spat out her invitation. “Come on, kick my ass. What the hell do I need with a man I only see when he comes to get his money? I’m sick of it all. I don’t dig stables and never will. I know I’m the new bitch who has to prove herself. Well Godamnit, I am sick of this shit. I’m cutting out.”

She stopped for air and lit a cigarette. I was going to blast her ass of when she finished. So, I just sat there staring at her.”

Then she went on…”I am going back to Providence on the next thing smoking.”

She was young, fast with trick appeal galore. She was a pimp’s dream and she knew it. She had tested me with her beef and now she was lying back for a sucker response.

I disappointed her with my cold overlay. I could see her wilt as I said in an icy voice “Listen square-ass Bitch, I have never had a whore I couldn’t do without. I celebrate, Bitch, when a whore leaves me. It gives some worthy bitch a chance to take her place and be a star. You scurvy Bitch, if I shit in your face, you gotta love it and open your mouth wide….”

I went on ruthlessly, “Bitch you are nothing but a funky zero. Before me you had one chili chump [a chili pimp is a low-level pimp with only one whore] with no rep. Nobody except his mother ever heard of the bastard. Yes Bitch, I’ll be back this morning to put your phony ass on the train.”

I rocketed away from the curb. In the rearview mirror I saw Kim walk slowly into the hotel, her shoulders slumped. In the Hog, until I dropped the last whore off you could have heard a mosquito crapping on the moon. I had tested out for them, “solid ice.”

Now for this post, I want to try something different. Rather than just dissect it right away, I want to leave it to the readers and commenters. What are the social dynamics going on here? Although what’s going on seems like some heavy-duty street beef that the average person can’t identify with, I’d argue that what’s actually happening is an extreme version of everyday male-female relationships, with the volume just cranked up to 12. What is everyone’s role in this particular drama, what is each party’s goal from Kim to Iceberg Slim to the whores in the backseat? Even though I’m sure no one reading this is a pimp or a whore or has ever been involved in a stable, I bet everyone who’s been in a relationship can identify with this scene on some level once you strip it down to the pure social dynamics.

So anyway, that’s the challenge to the commenters. Dissect this scene. Tomorrow I’ll add my own analysis and dissection to this post and we’ll all compare notes.

Update:

Well, the day came and went, people commented and here’s my follow-up interpretation.

On a Related Note:

The author of 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene, discusses his appreciation of Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim and his uncanny grasp of human nature in this blog post:

Lately I have been rereading Iceberg Slim, one of my favorites. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, becomes an artist in the game. The following are the main distinctions he makes between the two types:

• “Chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth.” The sucker wants to believe certain things about life and so projects these wishes on to the real world, seeing what he wants to see, not what is. A hustler thrives on reality, ugly or unpleasant–finds his poetry in the real. He sees the whole table and plays it as it lays.
• “No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that.” A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about. They represent opportunities for new angles, new hustles. The sucker cannot stand the unknown and so either fouls up by getting impatient and over anxious, or retreats to a false world of security and the known.
• “Stop letting your mind leapfrog like a screwy sucker.” A sucker’s mind moves all over the place, forgetting the order of things and making chaos where there is none. Hustlers have to stay cool and focused on the chain of events as they unfold, the various angles that are being played, with the possible reactions. A hustler never forgets where the 8 ball lies and how to get to it methodically.
• “You can’t learn con by memorizing words. Every mark and every play of any con game is different. You have to memorize the elements of con.” A sucker wants formulas he can memorize and plug into situations. He has no flow because he is so rigid in his mind. The hustler has flow because he plays for the overall game, knows the elements, can improvise and make angles where no one else sees them.
• “I don’t lag my bills like a sucker.” Suckers have the wrong relationship to money. They try to save pennies here and there, or grasp for the big kill that has all the odds stacked against it. Money brings out all of their neuroses. A hustler understands money. It is a tool for power, for con, and a resource for pleasure. And he always knows the odds.
• “Don’t get foxed out of your bankroll. The con is made for everyone, you know.” Anyone is susceptible to being conned. The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge. A sucker thinks he knows it all and cannot be fooled. That is his fatal flaw.
• “Never forget that a grifter’s word has to be like a gold bond to his associates.” Honor among thieves, in other words. Lower-level hustlers forget this and the importance of reputation. They get lost in the moment and screw the wrong person. Greed should never trump consideration for your credibility. If you don’t understand the subtleties of this, you are a sucker.
• “I went to the phone to call the Goddess. I walked away from it. It was a sucker play to call her so soon.” Impatience is the hallmark of the sucker, and it is never clearer than in matters of seduction. He can’t wait to call, spilling out his guts with a confession of love, or trying to reveal how eager he is to impress and please. Emotion trumps strategy. Patience and time is the hustler’s creed. “I play for time and see what happens,” says Elizabeth I, the great hustler Queen of England.
• “…since you blew your top like a mark. You should have stayed cool and figured some con with me to separate that sonuvabitch from a few grand.” Anger is deadly and stupid. In a competitive and dangerous world, anger is a great temptation. But only a sucker gives into natural anger at the state of things by reacting with rants and outbursts. The hustler plays the bigger angle and gets revenge on the target by hitting him in his pocketbook, or his reputation. Anger is not repressed but properly channeled.

You must keep raising this game to higher and higher levels, as on the pool table–mastering eventually the psychological angles. Your playing is a pleasure, all the way to the end, to death, when the game is over.

Recommended Reading:

Pimp is considered the ultimate book on the pimp game, the one that brought many elements of the pimp game and the underworld to the mainstream. It’s a raw, gritty and unflinching look at a hellish life full of manipulation, distrust and mutual exploitation, and despite the regret Beck shows over his former life choices, it’s totally unapologetic in its explicit descriptions of how ugly that life was. The book is not an easy read due to its excessive use of outdated slang (when I first read the book, I was unaware there was a slang glossary in the back until I was already done with it), but he gives the narrative an incredible lyricism and he’s quite skilled with witty wordplay. Quite frankly, the man really was a genius.

I’ve recommended Pimp to people in the past, and some found it to be a disappointing read or didn’t even finish it. One of the things I find to be a great strength of the book is something that others apparently find to be a great weakness: Iceberg Slim does not dumb down the lessons and spoon feed you game. He doesn’t give you an explicit instruction manual on how to pimp, he doesn’t give you a step by step diagram on how to understand male-female interactions, and he doesn’t spell out human nature to you in simple, uncomplicated terms. He makes you work for the lesson. You can’t just mentally check out like you can with a self-help book or a pickup artist manual. You have to read between the lines, see the patterns, look for nuances and really actively engage the material. It’s more frustrating in a lot of ways, but it actually makes you understand what’s going on better and is more rewarding in the long run, because it’s a more challenging way to learn.

Another great Iceberg Slim book is Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, a collection of insightful essays:

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