On Iceberg Slim

The day after Iceberg Slim died, there was rioting in the streets of Los Angeles. And even though the one event wasn’t a result of the other, it’s satisfying to think of their coinciding the way they did. The rioters were protesting the police-assault of Rodney King, and they were doing so on the streets of the very city where Iceberg Slim not only died but where he had first made moves toward writing about his experiences as a pimp, junky, thief, and inmate, thereby fashioning for himself a new kind of life. Gifted with a stratospheric IQ, it was his native intelligence that allowed him to not only capture his own experiences but the experiences of others from his environment, shaping them into fictional form when necessary, which was most of the time.

His own story he told in memoir form, letting the raw truth bleed under its proper nonfictional name, most notably in Pimp: The Story of My Life, but also in The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim. He wasn’t worried about protecting the innocent in these cases, because he believed the chief protagonist of his own story to be anything but innocent. Coming to terms with that truth is what allowed him to confront it with such honest candor. His story was sensational without being sensationalistic; there were no high-pitched hysterics in its telling. There didn’t have to be. He just laid his line out smooth and cool, the way he used to do when putting the con to one of his marks. He was locked in prison on multiple occasions, once even managing to escape. He was an enormous success as a pimp, all that talent poured into a pursuit so devious, and some of the stories he tells are positively horrifying. Becoming a writer wasn’t the first time he demonstrated preternatural self-discipline: he had taken up heroin and was able to quit it cold turkey—just left it behind like he left the whole life behind, eventually.

And yet, people still came up to him all the time looking for secrets in how to excel at the game the same way Slim had—like all those avaricious youngsters of a different pedigree who used to come up to Budd Schulberg, asking for advice on how they could make themselves run like Sammy ran. Sometimes a cautionary tale can seem like nothing except a wet-dream fantasy, depending on how it’s interpreted by the interpreter. One of Iceberg’s most perceptive interpreters, Ice-T, took much more than just his name from Iceberg. He took a hard and vivid use of language, as well as a propensity for offering up his slices of street life as object lessons. When someone finally gets around to making a film from Pimp (an enterprise that’s been in various stages of fruition for some time), I hope this aspect of Slim’s intentions gets conveyed. Just because Iceberg Slim died for our sins doesn’t mean our sins died with Iceberg Slim.