WHORESON - DONALD GOINES

I’m almost positive the first time I heard the name Donald Goines, it was on a Re-Up gang mixtape. I believe it was Ad-Liva or Sandman, the members of the group who aren’t the Clipse, who claimed to be (and this is from memory, I tried to find the lyric but couldn’t, perhaps I made it up), “Donald Goines reincarnated”. I was really into the We Got It 4 Cheap series and made it a point to look up references I didn’t get in the lyrics. These tapes all came out before RapGenius so you had to listen closely and hope that google could figure it out. Most of the references were either to the Wire or a quasi-famous real drug lord (think Larry Hoover) but I was struck by one of them mentioning a crime author, since they were so insistent that they weren’t trafficking (pun intended) in fiction. Irregardless, this book is wild and perhaps the bleakest book I’ve read. Whoreson is basically Goines’ take on PIMP, the Iceberg Slim book that somewhat inaugurated this genre, black street crime stories. Goines began writing because of Slim’s success. He saw how Iceberg leveraged his street credentials into a legit career and wanted the same for himself. PIMP is set, primarily in the 30’s and 40’s, WHORESON takes place about a decade later. Both are first person coming of age stories about young black me who grow up in grinding, horrifying poverty, become pimps and underworld figures, then  suffer the consequences of the life. Both of these books are quasi-autobiographical, though Goines wrote this while in prison and apparently folded in the experiences and life stories of the people he knew there. I was trying to remember how long ago I read PIMP. I know it’s been a few years and I wonder if the second-hand (and, to a lesser extent, first-hand) trauma I’ve experienced in my life since that reading has made me more sensitive to the brutality of this book. PIMP was also brutal, both books pride themselves on being unflinching and they certainly appeal to a lurid instinct (which I have more than my fair share of), but I found the cruel and violent sections of this book, and there are many, harder to read than I had anticipated. That being said, I got through the book in day or so, and the story is engrossing. Towards the beginning of the book, a classmate asks a 5 year old Whoreson (the main character, I’ll bet you can guess how he got his name) what he wants to do when he grows up. He answers, “pimp, baby, pimp.” And it pretty much goes from there. In this world, as in PIMP, Whoreson and other players and pimps are also con-men and scammers and robbers and boosters and general chistlers. Professional criminals, hustlers. I’m always interested in the mechanics of the cons they run (lots of them seem to be change-based) and this one has some good ones (as well as a complex scheme to marry a white woman that never really pays off to me). Not unlike PIMP, this book occasionally “opens out” or seeks to wax philosophical about the nature of pimping or race relations or whatnot. PIMP, I think does this better (the ultimate authority of the “deeper” meaning of PIMP is Dave Chappelle) but it does happen in this book. Unlike PIMP, which posits that pimps are themselves basically prostitutes that prey on prostitutes, Whoreson maintains that prostitute themselves are tricks. PIMP is full of passages about how race and capitalism are manifested and made clear in the underworld; you have to read between the lines to get most of this stuff in WHORESON. Interestingly, both of these books have, what I call, the Clockwork Orange ending (specifically, the “original” book ending, the one with the extra chapter) where a violent/depraved anti-hero gets older and looks at his life and decides he wants a family and middle class normality. It’s a weirdly happy and out of place ending for all three books. One assumes these endings (at least in the case of PIMP and WHORESON) exist because the primary audience were actual criminals and pimps who maybe wanted some hope? Goines wrote WHORESON in prison and worked on it with fellow inmates, perhaps they didn't’ want a story where the player-hero dies or is resigned to jail forever. In both cases, PIMP and WHORESON, it does seem like the main characters get off easy, given the depths of their savagery and evil.   Either way, good and brutal and exciting. I want to read his other famous book, DOPEFIEND, now, as well as his Black Power Kenyatta series.