AIRTIGHT WILLIE AND ME - ICEBERG SLIM
First, and perhaps most importantly, this book was put out by Ca$h Money Content, the publishing arm of Ca$h Money Records (where dreams come true). I hadn’t heard of this company or sub-company before, but I’m very excited to find out it exists. Will Baby be publishing a memoir? God, one can only hope (tho, I really good biography of Baby would be better, considering the nature of his life story). CMC seems to mostly publish contemporary Black crime fiction (ex. MURDERVILLE, JUSTIFY MY THUG, etc.) as well as the complete Iceberg Slim ouvre. This is great news, someone needs to keep Slim’s work in circulation and it might as well be tangentially connected to the creative forces behind “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy”. My actual assumption is that this CMC owns to Iceberg Slim stuff as a sort of I.P. play to own, and eventually put on the screen, the Iceberg Slim Cinematic Universe. Wikipedia seems to think there have been more than a few attempts to bring PIMP to the big screen, but, if I may, I’d like to offer the Ca$h Money empire some advice: Forget PIMP, film this. The popular version of the Iceberg Slim mythos is all shiny cars, and slick pimp-talk, and crazy suits and fast living. The Dolomite, Huggy-Bear shit. PIMP has that stuff (though it is set in the 30’s-60’s, and most people’s perception the quintessential Black urban pimp is a creature of the 70’s) but it’s too bleak and dark. Slim’s a wonderful writer and he can draw the connections between pimping and society as a whole, but on screen, it would just be brutality. The Pimp in PIMP is not a hero. This one, Airtight Willie and Me, would film better. The book is a series of 6 short stories, perhaps it could be a miniseries. The stories vary much more than I thought they would. We get stories that star female characters, as well as White characters (CMC’s tagline for this book is “The Story of the South’s Black Underworld” which is odd since only one story takes place in the South and that story stars White characters). Almost all of the stories take place in the underworld though one story features some great horror elements (a character has a book on her self entitled “How to Achieve Immortality Through Satanism” to give you an idea) which makes you wish Slim had been given the space to stretch more, genre-wise. The other 5 stories are more predictable, pimps and con men and prostitutes and hustlers all trying to score and make it out of the life (Slim’s stories are never celebrations, even the successful characters want out), typically there’s a sad twist at the end (white serial killer, OD, etc.). Slim’s the best at opening up the Pimp world and explaining how it’s a mircocosm for capitilism broadly: “I realized she was like ame and every other streeted poisedn nigger spawned behind the invisible wallas of the ghetto stackades. She was trapped, vulnerable but hurting human beneath the thought facade of leopard rage and bravado. But in the cruel nature of our special entrapment, and my survival, my comrade in pain was ironically my prey. I would have to scrape to the raw ends of her emotions, put her on the rack to steal her.” “Girl, why you so fucking square in this rich, fast cold world where every motherfucker in it that’s copping a big, easy fast buck and silky living ain’t?” 83 cold worlds.
P.S. As always with Iceberg Slim, there was a glut of wonderful street names. Unlike previous books, not all of these characters are pimps, many are robbers or con-men or other underworld figure. Also unusual for Slim, many of these characters are women:
Airtight Willie
Pretty Phil
Bitsy Red♀
Jabbo Ross
Pretty Opal♀
Candy Slim
Sweet Willie
Gold Streak
Sparky
Wee Billy
Dago Frank
Muskegon Shorty
Dandy Maurice
Pony Jones
Razzle Red
Jelly Drop
Frog
Mel the Ox
Caspar
Grandma Randy/Grandma Dracula♀
Satin♀
Tar Baby
Cassandra Jones♀
King Tut/Pharaoh Tut
Skeeter
New York Willie
