My Fairy God-Pimp

“I don’t think you know what this word really means,” I say to one of my students. We are writing a short story, imagining if we had a fairy godmother/godfather, and what our wishes would be. Keeping it creative, we made our fairy god person into what ever we wanted. For example, I had a secret fairy god-agent who I met in Budapest. Some children chose to have fairy god-puppies, or fairy god-cars, or fairy god-princesses. One kid chose to have a fairy god-pimp, and he wished to go to New York and to learn how to be a hustler.

He tells me he knows what it means. “Someone who’s like, really tight.” I tell him the actual definition and ask him to change it, because I plan on posting these art/writing projects up, and I don’t need the principal seeing that.

Some pimp’n information, courtesy of Wikipedia:

A pimp finds and manages clients for prostitutes and engages them in prostitution in order to profit from their earnings.

At the top there is the pimp who runs the business. Below the pimp is the "bottom girl." She acts in a way like an office manager, keeping tabs on the "track" when the pimp is away, keeping the pimp informed of the law enforcement activity, and collecting money from the prostitutes. The bottom girl can be especially important when the pimp is incarcerated

The pimps recognize a hierarchy among themselves. The least respected, or newer pimps, are the "popcorn pimps", "wanna-bes", and "hustlers". A pimp who uses violence and intimidation to control his prostitutes is called a "gorilla pimp, while those pimps that use psychological trickery to deceive the younger prostitutes into becoming hooked into the system are called "finesse pimps." Lastly, the successful and established pimps are called "players."

Losing one's prostitute to another pimp is known as getting "peeled". Informing a pimp that one of his prostitutes has switched pimps is a professional courtesy.

The pimp business has an internal structure for dealing with rule breakers built around violence. For example, pimps have been known to employ a "pimp stick," which is two coat hangers wrapped together, in order to subdue unruly prostitutes. A variation is a "pimp cane". Another punishment for unruly prostitutes is to "trunk" them. The pimps lock the prostitutes in the trunk of a car to teach them a lesson.

While I did not present all of this information to my 4th grade student, in the end he chose to have a fairy god-rapper. Probably one with a gold grill.