Bob Armstrong
Vanilla Slim: An Improbable Pimp in the Empire of Lust
2006, Carroll & Graf Publishers
Bob Armstrong’s brief career as a pimp is not the wildest story ever told. It’s crazier than what most people do, but Vanilla Slim was no Iceberg Slim. He didn’t see violence. He didn’t commit violence. He was nice to his girls. He didn’t confront some truly dark side of himself. He didn’t make enough money to roll around in a show-off car. He wasn’t dangerous. That’s all according to him in this first-person account, at least.
When the law eventually came down on him and Armstrong went to jail (he begins the book pondering his holding cell and all its glorious sights and scents), even that wasn’t too bad. He didn’t do serious time. Even the law could see that this Vietnam vet who was closing in on 60 merely misbehaved a little, even with drugs out in the open.
Or that’s how the wind blows in San Francisco, at least.
So why the hell did I blaze through this book in couple of days? Why did I get hooked? Why did I sit on the barstool next to this guy and take in every word he said?
I guess that’s because this is a bigger story than pimps and drugs and beautiful women and the men who pay $500 an hour for their company. This book is really about people who’ve missed the boat in life.
It’s the boat that leads to shiny normalcy. The marriage, the 2.5 kids, the career that puts you in a cozy home and a late-model car. Money in the bank. Retirement fund. Peace. Contentment. All of that shit.
The reasons for why people miss that boat are too numerous to even start listing.
Armstrong knows the allure of bad choices, but he’s not a total idiot, nor is he desperate in some sad way. He’s well-read, educated. He writes with gravity. He drops references to Wittgenstein and Emile Zola. He snorts speed off the back cover of Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps.
In fact, to the square world, he IS a writer. Freelancer. Has connections at The San Francisco Chronicle who have no idea about his side gig selling flesh.
Some of his credits are a little seedy, but that doesn’t mean he’s not good.
His first published piece was an article about Hitler’s sex life for Screw magazine. In time, Armstrong took a job editing the San Francisco edition of Exotic, a Portland-based sex industry rag. There, he saw for himself how much money there was to be made off of lonely men with cash to burn.
Next thing you know, Exotic shuts down their San Fran operation, but Armstrong remains at the office, from which he runs Zen, his premium-priced escort service. No riff-raff. Upscale clients only. Armstrong is comfortable dealing with them.
That took some business acumen, I guess, but Armstrong’s stories about the job remind me of a restaurant manager. His women (or Zen Dolls, as he calls them) are in their 20s and all crazy in their own ways. They quit suddenly. Some are reliable, some aren’t. Not all of them like each other. Meanwhile, his affection for them is not so much that of a leering perv (though he can’t resist an occasional sentence that appreciates the shape of a leg or the curve of an ass), but that of a man who curiously relates to them.
They have beauty. Armstrong has brains. They all missed the boat, though. They all ended up here despite their gifts. The girls are young enough to maybe catch another ride, but Armstrong is dedicated to being an outsider.
He writes:
All of us who work in the sex industry are cut off from normal existence. We are remote from other people except our fellow pervs.
And that’s not a complaint. He likes that. Hey, for many men, beautiful women sweeten any deal.
Armstrong describes himself in the prologue:
A classic underachiever, when I hit my fifties, and realized that there would be fewer new mornings ahead, I didn’t much care about anything. With my life escalating south, pimping seemed like a terrific way to weird up and fly high.
And that’s what this book is about. It’s about finding your place in a world in which you, for whatever reason, have no place. And, hey, sometimes that place is also against the law.
It takes getting busted for Armstrong to consider the negative effects of the industry that he jumped into. Is he a party to these womens’ future spiritual scars? Has he made the world worse? Maybe, but what about the men they served? Not all of them were creeps, to Armstrong’s mind. Some just needed a little lift.
Armstrong never settles on an answer. He considers the questions for about a half a chapter before he moves on. That’s fine with me. If you’re looking for answers from this mixed-up bohemian, you’re chasing the wrong goose.
He doesn’t write for that audience. I didn’t need a moral. I also didn’t close this book with plans to start my own pimping business. If I met Armstrong, I’d be more interested in talking to him about books or music. (His dislike for the “infernal” club music that he often encounters living this strange life was always memorable to me. Armstrong is more of a jazz, classical, and singer-songwriter guy.)
He also doesn’t write for anyone who seeks a pimping manual. Anyone looking for that here is likely to give up somewhere in the middle of the ruminations on Franz Kafka or the lengthy ‘Nam memories that slam into his brain during a bad high in the second chapter.
The peek into this weird life was good enough for me.
My favorite chapter is the one in which Armstrong attempts to make a girl-on-girl porn short with two of his favorites,
One of the girls is Havana, a lively and shapely Cuban, who is really the co-star of this book. Armstrong feeds off of her energy and is clearly in a sexual relationship with her (never mind her boyfriend, who Armstrong describes as a total idiot who doesn’t deserve her).
The other girl is Shannon, who has a massive psychiatrist’s bill worth of damage, but she’s also charming and agreeable, a trooper.
For the movie, Armstrong gets high-minded and has to shoot it by Dogme 95 rules (anyone remember that?) under the name Flagstone Walker, his pen name for a porn DVD review column. His writing is alive and funny.
First sentence:
Flagstone Walker bounces about like a yo-yo on a string, a camcorder against his right eye, preparing to film what he’s convinced will be a breakthrough in the adult biz: the first in a projected series of fifteen-minute softcore political porn epics.
The movie is called Who is Thomas Jefferson? and its premise is that Armstrong asks the girls the title question. He knows full well that they don’t know the answer, but I wouldn’t describe his motivation as contempt.
No, he finds this adorable. He gives us every gesture and fold of the legs as the girls try to figure this out, searching their memories, coming up with wild guesses. It’s a look into their crazy minds before they join bodies.
It’s very funny, but also subtly heavy with thematic relevance.
“Who is Thomas Jefferson?” is a basic question that any informed member of American mainstream society should be able to answer.
So are the questions that Armstrong later asks himself (and us) about his role in the sex industry.
The girls are stumped by the Thomas Jefferson question much like how Armstrong is later stumped by the pimping question.
Simple questions, no answers. The outsider’s plight.
In the book, Armstrong tells us that he was born in 1942. I write this piece in 2022. Is Armstrong still alive? Did he write anything after this? If so, I can’t find it, but I’d love to know.