The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim: Robert Beck's Real Story by Iceberg Slim

Author:Iceberg Slim [Slim, Iceberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781483040455
Amazon: 1483040453
Publisher: Buck 50 Productions and Blackstone Audio
Published: 2014-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

VIGNETTES: THE PROFESSOR

I met him by accident, which is a common aspect of calamity. I was fresh from the steel casket and huckstering insecticides at the time when he opened his apartment door with a tolerantly unctuous “Ph.D. in psychology” smile. I looked over his shoulder while pitching to him at the glamorous disarray of his writer’s workshop. He had no bugs, so my pitch was in vain, but before I turned away I asked him if he were indeed a writer. He was, and he invited me in to a Coke and a chair, for which my weary dogs were grateful.

In the course of our chat he asked if I had ever written anything. I dashed downstairs to my ancient jalopy and came back with a short piece (inspired by a true situation) about a black pimp who discovers that one of his girls has testified against him to a secret grand jury. He lures her to the countryside and punches her senseless before he douses her with gasoline. He stupidly strikes the one match left in a cover advertising a bar he owns, and after hurling the match to torch her off, he tosses the cover away and is on his way to the chair in record time.

The professor wasn’t visibly awe-stricken by the work. But when I revealed (by an account of several street vignettes) that I had been a pimp for a generation on an especially fast track, his excitement yanked him up and down in his chair like a black, hook-nosed yoyo.

He got the obsession to write my life story and during the next several weeks I recounted on his tape recorder the material to be used in the projected “pimp” book. I grew to like him and to admire his superior intellectual gifts and writing experience. There were many things about him that showed he was dangerously flawed; like he lived his life as much as possible among white people and in white prestige bistros like the Polo Lounge. And for a professor of psychology, he had some unique hang-ups, like the cute, intelligent black girl that spent her every free moment in his bed. He admitted he loved it, but was ashamed to be seen with her in public.

One day after a long session of taping he leaned back in his chair and said softly, “Well, old buddy, I am going to start transcribing the material from the tape for a first drafting of preliminary chapters. I want to be fair with you in the financial aspect of our book, so what do you think is a fair shake? Maybe we can think now about a tentative seventy-thirty arrangement.”

As I have indicated, I liked and admired the guy, and I was a newly born babe in the so-called square world, so I honestly figured the guy was unselfishly offering me the seventy percent and wanting thirty percent for himself.

I grinned like a mark and said, “The hell with that kind of split, pal.

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