Iceberg slim family8/25/2023 Most of the successful pimps in those days had been dumped in garbage cans, had been abandoned and had never known maternal love. Beck admitted as much in later interviews: “I had a very good mother. You got to get what there is in her as fast as you can…’” Bell encouraged Beck to beat his whores with a coat hanger when they got out of line because “ain’t no bitch, freak or not, can stand up to that hanger.”īeck had never been shy about using physical force, but Bell showed him that he had a serious career liability: He didn’t hate women enough. “His main philosophy was ‘One whore ain’t got but one pussy and one jib. “Bell’s form of pimping was more violent and manipulative than anything Beck had ever seen in prison or in the taverns of Milwaukee,” Gifford writes. One of his most influential mentors was a notorious Chicago pimp and killer named Albert “Baby” Bell, who set an impossibly high standard of cruelty. I’d barraged them daily for three years to persuade a ten ho stable to hump my pockets obese.” Beck was in awe of the smooth Chicago pimps, who drove Duesenbergs and kept pet ocelots. As he put it with typical flair, “I had memorized an arsenal of howitzer motivators I’d kept on instant alert in my skull. The trade secrets were passed down by word of mouth from veteran pimps in the form of the unwritten pimp “book.” Young Beck drank in these lessons, spent hours practicing his come-ons. Street Poison paints a rich picture of a young pimp’s unsentimental education. Later he described his world as a “black hell” awash in “the poisonous pus of double standard justice, racial bigotry and criminal economic freeze-out.” It was almost inevitable that he got seduced by the dazzle of the pimp life. He would do time in prisons that were little more than academies for refining criminal skills. He despised school - he got expelled after a brief stint at Tuskegee Institute because he spent most of his time in juke joints - and he saw no future in straight, menial jobs. These traumas spawned a deep ambivalence toward women, especially his mother. Another was his sexual abuse at the age of three by a babysitter. His abusive father left soon after his birth, and his mother abandoned her devoted second husband in favor of a street hustler, a pivotal event in young Robert’s life. He tells us that Iceberg Slim was born Robert Lee Moppins Jr., in Chicago in 1918, and later changed his name to Robert Beck. Gifford’s worthy goal is to right this wrong. ![]() “He is arguably one of the most influential figures of the past fifty years,” Gifford writes, “and yet, apart from what he reveals in his own writings, very little is known about this fascinating and contradictory character.” ![]() ![]() ![]() Chris Rock, Ice-T, and Andrew Vachss are major fans. Though published by a small press and available mostly in drugstores, liquor stores, barbershops, and prisons, Iceberg Slim’s books, including his scorching autobiography Pimp: The Story of My Life, sold millions of copies and influenced countless writers, actors, directors, comedians, and musicians, including the creators of blaxploitation films, street fiction, and gangsta rap. He has just published his second book, Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim, a vivid retelling of the fluorescently eventful life of a hardened pimp, drug addict, and convict who turned to writing highly autobiographical pulp fiction about black street life.
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