At the third level of the pyramid are the human needs for Love and Belongingness, such as the love of family and friends. Usually, the prostitute is not getting these needs met. That’s why the easiest way to get started pimping is to fall in love with a woman who is turning tricks. She probably has a need for love that is not getting met. The average guy on the street does not see her as a logical prospect for a love relationship and her family doesn’t love her—they probably sexually abused her when she was a little girl and then lied about it. Her only friends are other prostitutes, who by and large are dishonest, confused, and needy themselves.
This is where a good pimp can make a living—if he’s got the right stuff to be a pimp. All of these women need love. A lot of them are good-looking, resourceful, and funny. If you can find a way to “have feelings” for them you will be rewarded financially. The problem is, once you fall in love, you have to watch the woman you love go out and have sex with different men each night and that is not easy. This is what separates elevated pimps from wannabes. It takes a man’s man, a true player, a Mack, a pimp, to really love a woman who is having sex with other men every night.
If you think you can do this, you are ready to become an elevated pimp. If you could never love a working girl, then you’re better off calling yourself a pimp and looking for a puddle of water inside Walgreens so you can fall down, injure yourself, and then mount a lawsuit.
Of course, if you have good theatrical skills and knowledge of the Pyramid, you might be able to provide an illusion of love—that is, to make her think that you love her. But these women, through their work, become astute judges of human nature and they can spot a lie from down the street. They’ve heard pimp lines before, and although they may appreciate the attention, in the end they are going to support the man-pimp who they believe is in their corner.
As you get near the top of the pyramid, the area of need is less, but it still exists and may provide a way for you to be a pimp. At the fourth level, right underneath the top, is the need for “ego-self-esteem.” Everybody wants to feel good about themselves and that is a hard thing for prostitutes to do. They need to feel respected—it’s not as pressing a need as the need for food and water, warmth, or love, but it is the kind of thing that can ruin a person’s life if they don’t get it. That is why so many working girls are addicted to drugs. They feel bad about themselves, so they shoot heroin every day to forget about it. A lot of them were abused as children, most of them, in fact, and they have been feeling bad for a long time. You, as a pimp, will understand the pathway that brought her to be a prostitute and you’ll show some understanding and sympathy. You’ll respect her and show her that she should respect herself.
At the top of the Pyramid is the need for self-actualization—the need to be all that you can be. It’s hard to find a way in at this level, but it is possible if you provide a dream for the future—a way out. You explain that what she is doing now represents something temporary; that you know she is better than this so she is just doing it until you “get your insurance settlement,” inherit some money, or make it as a rapper or a rock star.
If you meet the prostitute’s needs at different levels of the Pyramid, simultaneously, you will make money. You’ve got to meet needs at the third and second levels while you are trying to find a way in at the fifth level. Then you will have a devoted woman pulling for you. You will call her your “baby girl” or “hope-to-die woman.” Once you have that, you will enjoy the benefits of being an elevated pimp and know that it is time to expand your empire. Your hope-to-die-woman will help you to recruit new women. She will think she is your business partner.
The only other way to become a pimp fast is to provide a business opportunity for a prostitute—to show her she can make more money in an easier way than what she is doing right now. See, it’s all about relationships. If you have a relationship with someone who sets up dates for girls, a massage parlor, acupuncture studio, or the tricks themselves, you can go up to a girl who already has a pimp and offer her something better. A bigger cut of the money, a safer work environment, or maybe even a fun group of people to hang out with between dates. If you can connect with a pimp who is running a business—a house of prostitution or an out-call service—and then see what their needs are, you might be able to be a liaison between working prostitutes who might take advantage of good business opportunities and the people offering those opportunities.
It’s important to behave like a businessman. Go to a massage parlor and ask if they need help. Make it clear that you have a “girlfriend” who is looking for work and that she does the kind of work that this business offers. Be friendly and ask them if there is some kind of bonus that you might receive if you bring them good earners. In these arrangements the house gets half and the girl gets half plus tips. It doesn’t leave much for you.
You make these choices and then you have to live with them. The time will come when you want security and the Life will not have as much appeal for you as it does now. After you’ve learned that pimping is a job, you’ll want a vacation. You can’t put yourself on Front Street after you reach a certain point in your career.
You won’t want to be “high-siding.” Showing your car and your women around the track won’t have any appeal because you will realize that the people out there are really crumbbums and the only thing that separates you from them is your respect for the game. By that time you will want to move in different circles and get respect from a different kind of person. You will have become accustomed to a certain quality of life and may be unwilling to compromise that lifestyle. Your business may flounder and you will start to run Murphy schemes or blackmail or you may look at opportunities outside of pimping, like selling dope or doing robberies. Then you will make mistakes, you’ll take chances you wouldn’t otherwise take, and you may wind up in the penitentiary. When you get out it’s harder to come up. Maybe your hope-to-die lady will send you some money for the prison commissary at first, but in time, she’ll find someone new. You may end up walking around the Tenderloin asking people for beer money and eating at St. Anthony’s like so many retired pimps do. But you will have your memories. These are the choices we make.
So, that’s what you need to know. You’ve got all the Mack-ability now. You are the real thing, baby. Remember your responsibility to all the players that came before you. Work on having a name that people will remember. Pair-a-dice is already taken. So is Iceberg Slim. Don’t put yourself on Front Street and always show respect for the game that puts food in your mouth, gas in your engine, and respect into the eyes of the young players looking to come up. Skip the light fandango for me, Fast Ricky. You are my piece of the rock.
Politoburg
Jedidiah Ayres
Maria is upset. Her chubby fingers, trembling, can’t cover her mouth sufficiently to smother the sobs. Wakes you up. Judging by the light coming through the gaps in the tin roof, it’s near nine. The atmosphere is like an amniotic sac.
“What is it, for fuck’s sake?”
Her reply is lost on you. She sounds like a Pentecostal Rosie Perez, frothing and speaking a hundred miles an hour. Four months here and you haven’t grasped the language. Haven’t even tried. You aren’t planning on sticking around.
“English. Speak English por favor.”
Hysterical shrieks.
“No, forget I said anything. I need a smoke.” You fish through your clothes beside the bed mat, till you see the cigarettes on her table. Clothed only in sweat, you stand and strike a match. She still sounds like a maniac, running in circles around the room. You grab her by the shoulders to slow her down, and speak very deliberately.
“What…is…your…problem?”
She slaps you hard across the face and chest and you slap her back. She grabs your clothes, tosses them outside the hut, and pushes you after them. Fine with you. You haven’t paid yet.
The dust clings to your damp parts. In this heat, that’s pretty much an entire outfit. You collect your clothe
s and carry them under your arm as you start toward the cantina.
You’ve been to Mexico once before, but this time had fuckall to do with Sammy Hagar and margaritas. This was all dust and rocks and heat stroke, skin turning to leather and sunshine so intense, your balls disappear when you squint. The Sierra Madres hemming you in sounds good for a movie, but actually makes you feel like a fish in a bowl.
You make your way barefoot towards the only road around, trying like hell to extract some nutrients from your cigarette. The dog carcass from the day before has disappeared from the roadside and you make a mental note not to chance Ramon’s stew today.
A debris cloud still hangs in the air, which means an automobile instead of a mule cart has come by recently. That could mean a couple of things: extra shipment this week or trouble in paradise.
A half dozen tin shacks like Maria’s pock the desert in no particular pattern. Thrown up without a thought to symmetry or community. A crowd gathers outside the farthest, next to the cantina. The cloud settles behind a black Cadillac, which means the answer is in fact B. Polito sent some of his muscle to settle something.
The crowd is comprised entirely of women, the whores who live here at the whim of Harlan Polito—who is decreeing judgment from on high back in the States. Also here by his will is a small group of gringos: roughnecks, punks, and psychos who do dirty deeds for money and pleasure. You belong to this group. You stay here till the man sends for you to return to the bosom of society and contribute again.
No one seems to notice your nakedness as you approach, not even Metcalf, who comes out to meet you.
“Dude.” Metcalf, the near retard you’re reduced to socializing with these days, is trying to relay gravity with his tone.
“S’up?” you offer in his native tongue.
“Dude.”
“Yeah, I got that part, what’s—”
“No, dude. Dick…”
Dirty Dick, the oldest, most senior of the gringos. A stone-cold killer. You all look up to him. He’s a legend back home. Killed five men, bad motherfuckers all, in one hit. Disappeared after that one, years ago. No one knew if he was dead or relocated. No one but you. Nearly plotzed when you’d met him here. Retired. Kicking back in old Mexico, getting stoned, getting pussy, getting fat.
“Where’s Dick?”
As you speak, the crowd parts and two beefy guys in black suits—the uniform of a Polito dipshit henchman—haul a dead man by his arms, his heels dragging in the dust, from the cantina to the back of the car. As they drop him into the trunk, you recognize the corpse as Conrad, one of the other gringos living here. His front is blackened with blood. His own, judging by the color of his face and the gash in his throat.
“Fuck me,” you whisper.
“Dude,” agrees Metcalf.
“Where’s Dick?” you repeat. Metcalf is rooted there; breathing through his open mouth, glad to have another civilized white man to stand next to. He doesn’t answer.
You start to pull your pants on. The sight of your dead friend, scumbag that he was, seems to require a gesture of dignity, even one as feeble as this. The two men had disappeared back inside the cantina and reappear now dragging another body, this one female and local. It’s a Maria, one of the prostitutes. All the women here are prostitutes the gringos call Maria, but this is Dick’s Maria, plain as day.
Dick is the third body hauled out. Though beaten and bloody, he’s definitely breathing as they drop him on top of the other two and slam the trunk. The henchmen get in either side of the Cadillac’s front seat.
Ramon, the barkeep, catches your eye as the car backs up and drives away. The crowd turns to watch it go, but you study Ramon grinning after the hearse. It’s always bad news when Ramon is happy. He wipes his face with his right hand and you notice his knuckles. Broken. Swollen. Bloody.
No wonder he’s smiling.
You get good and drunk. Pass out late in the afternoon. In the meantime, you gather a loose narrative from Metcalf: Dick and Maria had a spat about the new Maria he’d been spending time with (the Marias outnumber the gringos about five to one). She’d taken Conrad back to her place to piss Dick off.
Got his attention.
Got them all killed.
Ramon is replacing the lock on his door, which looks kicked in. The safe he keeps behind the bar is compromised. There’s no reason for more security. The only times anyone steals or kills here, there are immediate and permanent repercussions. You guess that after slicing their throats, Dick’s idea was to grab the money and run over the mountains.
A hasty, ill-conceived plan fueled by jealousy, tequila, and boredom. Simple in concept, the killing and theft was no big thing. He’d murdered them as they slept, and Ramon’s safe could be violated with a can opener, but escape?
Escape is a bitch. A man alone and on foot would have to be crazy to try.
Apparently, he was.
You wake up an hour or so past dusk. In a heap. In the gutter. Smelling like piss. You just hope it’s your own. Ramon’s little ghetto blaster is on eleven, in the back of your consciousness, broadcasting some station that plays mariachi music. All those greaser tunes sound the same, so it’s hard to know how long you lie there drifting in and out. But you wake up long after midnight, naked once again, while Maria washes you with a sponge.
You are in her hut, but you have no idea how you got there or why she’s taken you in again. Just her nature, you suppose.
She stares at you with those spooky, mongoloid eyes of hers. She is stripped to the waist, cradling your head between her breasts, which brush against your cheeks as she wrings water out, wiping away your guilty stains.
She speaks softly to you. All is forgiven, it seems. You feel an unfamiliar sensation in your gut. Shame. Shame about the way you’d treated her that morning. She’d lost a friend too—not the first—to this place.
You fall into your usual pattern, carrying on two mutually exclusive conversations. Each language a bastion of solitude and anonymity. You have no idea how her conversation went, but yours tend to go like this:
YOU. What was he thinking, killing Conrad like that? And over what? Some passed-around piece of beaner trim.
HER. It makes perfect sense. Stupid. But flawless logic.
YOU. How’d you get that scar on your thigh? Looks like someone used a knife.
HER. Somebody did.
YOU. Why?
HER. Only reason to. It made sense.
YOU. Who?
HER. Son of a bitch with a knife.
YOU. Why are you here?
HER. Paying for my sins, just like you.
YOU. Actually this is payment for my sins.
HER. What’s the difference?
YOU. One’s reward. One’s punishment. One you earn. One you owe.
HER. How very middle class of you. It’s all just price in the end.
YOU. Prize?
HER. That too.
She soaks the sponge and wets you both with giant drips that roll between her generous bosoms into your eyes and ears. As you drift off to sleep again, you think you hear her say: “It falls on the just and the unjust alike.”
It’s called Politoburg, this ramshackle camp in the middle of the desert. It’s so remote and desolate, it may as well be on the moon. There’s no agriculture or natural resource other than dust and lizard shit. The economy consists entirely of the goods sold from Ramon’s cantina and the services of the Marias. Ramon’s is stocked in weekly truckloads, and Ramon sends the contents of his safe back with the drivers.
Sweet fuckin’ setup. Harlan Polito hires you for something. A job he needs a little distance from, doesn’t wanna use his regular guys. Says, “You’ll need to lie low awhile. Get outta town. I’ve got a place in Mexico. You like Mexico? You’ll love it. Get laid. Get a tan.” And he pays well. There’s a reason everybody wants to work for him.
So you do your job. You’ve already been paid half and thinking about the rest of it is driving you crazy. A truck meets you at the
rendezvous and the driver tosses you a fat envelope that hefts like the first. As you get in, he says you should sleep ’cause it’s going to be a long ride.
For a week or so, you actually enjoy yourself. You’ve never had a proper vacation before. Maybe you’ll grow a beard. Maybe you’ll stay in Mexico; you kinda dig the vibe. Ramon’s got every kind of substance you’ve ever tried and a couple you’re curious about, and the Marias don’t care about your car or your education or whether you’re hung like a mule or a ferret. It’s all sunshine and beans and rice.
You get bored pretty quick.
You begin to think about it, a bad idea. You realize you’re just shoving Polito’s money back at him as fast as you can eat it, fuck it, or shoot it away. Starts to get to you. Don’t think about it. It’ll ruin your buzz.
But of course you do. Worse, you get yourself a little plowed one day and say something to this effect to Ramon and wonder further, just when will you be going back to civilization, air-conditioning, and escort services?
Ramon smiles, grabs that short bat he keeps behind the bar, and smashes your teeth in. He pats your kidneys while you grab your face and when you’ve stopped crying, he really puts you in your place.
“The fuck you think you are, pendejo? Huh? The fuck you think this is? A vacation?” Then he laughs. A cruel and practiced laugh. He’s made this same speech dozens of times. It’s the part of his job that he enjoys.
It begins to sink in, the horror, when you realize that you’re not a tourist. You’re a local. You belong here. You’re fucked.
The idea has kicked around in your head since Ramon had gone all Hank Aaron on you, but it takes Conrad getting his throat slashed for you to decide. Problem is, it will take two. And now your only choice is to use Metcalf, the only gringo left.
Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll Page 19