The Pimping Game

In the night world of San Francisco, Fillmore Slim, Soulful Spider and Bobby Joe from Baltimo' practice the same profession. All three are black players in "the game"--pimps in the world of prostitution. They and about 40 of their fellows, along with the hundred prostitutes who support them, are the principals in a study submitted to the annual convention of the American Anthropological Association. That study is about to earn a Ph.D. and a professorship for its author, a shapely, 27-year-old redhead who, as "Tiger Red," recently completed a stint as a topless (and sometimes bottomless) barroom go-go dancer.

The $20-a-night job was Christina Milner's way of financing her graduate work in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. But she soon found that her new colleagues were more interesting than the primate fossils she was supposed to be studying. Propositioned by a "player" and then threatened by his jealous "ho" (for whore), Tiger Red learned that the bar was a hangout for players and hos. She enlisted the help of her anthropologist husband, Richard, as fellow researcher and began making friends with the bar habitues. As they struck up conversations and collected taped interviews, the Milners came to the conclusion that what they were doing was "no different from studying any other remote culture." Among academics, Christina soon came to be known as "the Margaret Mead of North Beach."

To Iceberg Slim, a former pimp interviewed at great length by the Milners, successful pimping requires an outright loathing for women. "That's where the thrill was," he said. "In the absolute vilification, in the degradation. I had this intense hatred. To be a great pimp, I think you've really got to hate your mother." Bruce, a pimp who went to college, thought that society had twisted and perverted the Biblical role of the sexes: "Pimping goes back to the man controlling the situation before Eve bit the apple, see, and brought him down to her level and stuck the apple in his mouth. She was rebelling against Adam's authority. When Adam let Eve tempt him into taking the apple, he gave up his manhood, and today man is fighting to regain it."

Many players think that they have already won it back, and that pimps are the only real men left in America. To get a feeling of control over his stable of women--who may be either black or white and number from two to 20 --the pimp makes them treat him deferentially, light his cigarettes and speak only when spoken to. Said James, a pimp who, like his favorite ho, is an excellent painter: "Notice how quiet she is. You know why she's quiet? 'Cause I'm talking, not because she has nothing to say. She's as smart as I am, or smarter; she got two degrees. But she's a quiet, humble, beautiful woman because she knows the position of her place, she likes it." And he added: "Each ho thinks her man is God. Do you understand how beautiful that is?" Iceberg Slim even admitted to playing God, because "what lowly little whore can resist God?"

The pimp's total control over his women starts from the moment he takes a "square broad" (a non-prostitute) and "turns her out" (initiates her). "Pimping isn't a sex game," said Iceberg Slim. "It's a skull game." In other words, a pimp has to use his head and his psychological skills. Bruce explained: "It's a brainwashing process. When you turn a chick out, you take away every set of values and morality that she previously had and create a different environment. Instead of bookkeepers or secretaries for friends, you give her professional hos."

Pimps obviously have unconventional views on male-female relationships, but their material values are relentlessly middleclass. As Bruce put it: "A player is striving for the same things that a square is striving for--security, Utopia, annual income." The latter ranges from $25,000 to $50,000, out of which the pimp pays lawyers and bail bondsmen, buys food, cars, clothes, and sometimes drugs for himself and his stable. A communal apartment, with a pimp and several women living together, is one way of saving money, but Iceberg Slim had only scorn for that arrangement: "That's not an elegant way to pimp."

Elegance is all-important. Describing a pimp in a clothing store, Soulful Spider observed: "His eyes get big, and he gets to buying things like plum pants, shirts and socks. Oh yeah, they colorful, colorful, colorful, soulfully colorful; colors that would definitely make a rainbow look bad." About jewels worn at a party, another pimp rhapsodized: "There was one cat out of Miami, believe it or not had a diamond between his teeth, that's right. Had his ears pierced, had a diamond hanging out of his ear. Now that's what I call a lover of the stone or a connoisseur of nature, because diamonds are a form of nature, you dig?"

Lavish parties are only one form of fun for players. They may also golf, ride horseback, go yachting, or congregate at a "jam house" to sniff cocaine --which may be served on new hundred-dollar bills and carried to the nose on gold pocket knives. At one party attended by the Milners, the guests consumed cocaine worth $6,000. "I don't work," admitted one pimp. "I just eat, sleep, rest and dress." He does work, of course, making the rounds of bars to recruit new "bitches," make drug contacts, and keep track of the latest police activity in his area. He also has to keep his old hos from deserting him by making each one feel loved and wanted by him.

Jesse James. Some psychoanalysts believe it is the lonely prostitute's need to feel cared for by someone that binds her to her pimp. Others think that what cements the bond is non-threatening sex: prostitutes are often frigid, pimps latently homosexual. Thus the prostitute feels more comfortable in bed with a pimp than with a man who might expect more of her sexually. Some analysts also suggest that what the prostitute really wants, and thinks she has in her pimp, is someone even lower than she. To French Analyst Maryse Choisy, pimp and prostitute "do not unite to love, but to hate."

In the Milners' study, only two pimps were white, but they dressed, talked and acted exactly like their black colleagues. In fact, says Christina, "the success of the white pimps hinges on their ability to mimic the blacks." For ghetto Negroes, the choice of pimping as a career has a certain logic. Sociologists have long noted that because black men have traditionally had trouble finding legitimate jobs, they are used to the idea of being supported by women. Besides, in the black community there is no loss of status in making money from sex. Quite the contrary. Pimping is a way of striking out at the white man by taking his money--and his women too. By "gaming off" Whitey, the black pimp becomes a folk hero, the Jesse James of the ghetto.

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