By Paul Bishop
Paul Bishop Bookshop
December 3nd, 2019
I can’t express how much I enjoyment I received from reading every page of Sticking It To The Man—Revolution and the Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Fascinating, well written, filled with an amazing array of beautifully reproduced vintage paperback covers, and endlessly entertaining subject matter. This endorsement should be more than enough for those of you who know me—and know I don’t gush over much—to delay reading further and immediately swing over to your chosen Internet book source or head out to your favorite independent bookstore and order a copy.
Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
Stop reading…Go order…I said, I’ll wait…
Okay…You’re back…If you’re into instant gratification and
downloaded your copy of Sticking It To
The Man, feel free to skip out on this post and jump right in to the
electronic pages of a book you’re going to find way more interesting. If you’re
old school and have to wait for your copy to be delivered, you’re
welcome to hang out, but hold on ‘cause I’m gonna drag you down a rabbit
hole…
Having spent thirty five years serving with the Los Angeles
Police Department, there is no doubt the counter culture of the ’60s and ’70s
would have seen me as The Man. Not as
in you da man, but as in the jackbooted,
oppressive, heavy-handed authority figure and violent stooge who needs to be
eliminated in the coming radical civil war. You know—The Man who needs sticking it
to.
Fortunately, that stereotype is as false and prejudicial as
most stereotypes, but you still might not think I’m the intended target
audience for a scholarly, yet eminently readable reference tome entitled, Sticking It to the Man: Revolutions and
Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980.
You would be wrong…
I was fifteen years old when I first read Pimp by Iceberg Slim. A voracious reader
of everything I could find at the library or stretch my very limited budget to
buy off the spinner racks, I haunted a regular round of bookstores and other
retailers who stocked shelves of paperbacks.
Occasionally, I found my way to an old fashioned open air
newsstand on the corner of White Oak and Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando
Valley. There, perilously close to the forbidden section containing dirty
magazines and sleazy books of a questionable moral nature, was a double row of what
appeared to be angry Black-centric paperbacks.
These always fascinated me. The
books were new, but exposure to the open air had turned their covers grubby and
slightly warped the interior pages. Still, they seemed to call to me with an
illicit promise of exposure to another world I vaguely knew existed, but had
never experienced.
Most of these paperbacks were produced by Holloway House, a
shabby down market publisher with a shady reputation. I was totally unaware at
the time of Holloway House’s ironic nature—being run by two white publishers who saw the uprisings
in Watts and other black neighborhoods across the country as a crisis of
representation, a cultural void they could profit from by publishing cheap mass-market
paperbacks targeted specifically toward a black working-class readership.
As a
fifteen year old white kid, I only knew Holloway House’s crappy bindings,
cockeyed cover printing, and poorly chosen graphics lived in a world total different
to the traditionally published paperbacks I was used to reading—where James Bond
was considered risqué.
Books by Iceberg Slim and his protégé Donald Goines
dominated the small selection. Alongside them were the lurid pulp-style covers of men’s
adventure series featuring Black anti-heroes such as Radcliff, The Iceman, Kenyatta,
and Joseph Nazel’s pointedly named character, Black. And hidden deep in the mix
were Chester Himes’ blacker than black cops, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones—two
police detectives constantly caught between two worlds and accepted in neither.
I found myself compelled to buy a copy of Iceberg Slim’s Pimp. Maybe it was my own questioning
counter culture leanings. Maybe it was the driving quest I’d had from a young
age to seek out the authentic otherness of cultures outside of my own white
bread existence. Maybe, at fifteen, I was being seduced by books reeking with
the promise of something dangerous and purient—something not to be caught
reading by judgmental adults.
Whatever it was, I plunked my money down on the
counter. The grubby, unshaven clerk gave me the stink eye, but never the less
rang up my purchase. Smuggling the book home, I cracked open its pages as I sat
on the floor of my bedroom with the door closed and the light low—life was
never the same again.
An only child, I immigrated to America from Britain when I
was eight. I had a prissy English accent, prissy English manners, and my
bi-polar mother insisted on dressing me like Little Lord Fauntleroy—I am not
exaggerating. You can imagine what going to school was like for me in the late
sixties surrounded by California kids who were either cool surfers or hard-edged greasers.
Yeah, you get the picture. I’m not whining, but it weren’t pretty. I was
intimately familiar with the inside of school lockers and trashcans on the
quad.
However, in the pages of cheap garish paperbacks by Iceberg
Slim, Donald Goines, and Joseph Nazel, I found a connection to the experiences
of another culture which was also getting its ass kicked—they were the crack
in the door opening me to a whole different cultural world view. And then there
was the startling reality of the character’s representing the downtrodden cultures
in those books refusing to back down and being ready to fight.
At the same time I was discovering the words of Iceberg Slim and
Joseph Nazel, I also fell into the vast array of sordid NEL (New English
Library) paperbacks, which exploited any and every radical, rebellious, angry
British youth subculture from skinheads to boot boys to terrace terrors to mods
and rockers, and more. These took a little finding, but on trips back to
Blighty, I trolled the used bookstalls at the open air markets in London and
regularly stashed a supply in my suitcase when returning to California.
In both the black pulps and the low-end British trash
novels, I found a weird sort of encouragement. Like the characters in these books,
I was tired of taking crap and made a conscious decision to fight back. If I
was going to get my fifteen year old ass kicked anyway, I might as well do as
much damage going down as I could.
After collecting enough bruises to fill an emergency room, I
eventually learned to fight—and fight dirty (it’s amazing how much harder you
can hit with a roll of nickels in your fist). I became intimately familiar with
the principal’s office, but somehow never got expelled—mostly due to selectively
reverting back to my prissy accent and prissy manners when needed. I began
dishing out more damage than I took, and it didn’t take long before the bullying predators
went in search of easier prey.
My reputation stuck. When my wife forced me to
go to our 20th high school reunion, the first three classmates we encountered
looked at me and said, “Oh, you were the kid in all the fights.” Yeah, that was
me.
There was another surprising layer to many of the works that
mainstream society dismissed as not worth the paper to publish. Some of the
authors were screaming out their rage and pain on the page. Others were simply
trying to make a buck in a hustler’s world. Whether consciously or
subconsciously, their stories of fighting back, of fighting for self-respect
(or their world’s version of self-respect), there was also a thread that spoke
to righting wrongs and protecting others who couldn’t protect themselves.
In my autodidactic way, exposure to these fictional counter
culture pulp radicals led me to read Malcom X, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King,
Gandhi, Budda, and many other real life extremists and activists—all of whom
enforced and drove home the message of battling for self-respect and lifting up
others in the effort.
This long ramble has been to build the groundwork for why I
have been so profoundly moved by the impact of Andrew Nette’s and Iain McIntyre’s
Sticking It To The Man has had on me.
Within its covers, I was transported back to the raw emotions and desperate
struggles I’d first found in Pimp, Whoreson, Swamp Man, Howard Street,
A Rage in Harlem, Skinhead, Suedehead, Hooligan, and
so many more.
Sticking It To The Man
is filled with radical delights—Vietnam fiction, the beginnings of gay and lesbian
fiction, paperback original men’s adventure series, retrospectives on Iceberg
Slim, Donald Goines, Joseph Nazel, Joseph Hansen, Ernest Tidyman and Shaft—if it
was radical and it was captured in paperback between 1950 and 1980 it’s part of
Sticking It To The Man.
Finally, circling back to what I learned from radicalized trash fiction.
After thirty-five years
with the LAPD, I find myself now as a nationally recognized
interrogator. I’m
good at what I do. Immodestly, I’m very good. Those who I’ve sat with in
an interrogation room have never met a Machiavellian nightmare like me.
But I got here because of the two most important things radicalized trash fiction taught me.
First, to be an objective enforcer of the law without regard to race, religion, sexual orientation, affiliations, past behaviors, or anything else used to derisively judge another human.
Second, and more importantly, radical trash fiction taught me truth is not a set point…truth is about individual perspective viewed through the lens of the shit that happens to you in life.
The recognition of my quest to understand the nature of truth, and attempt to objectively get as close to it as possible in highly emotional situations, began when I read a book by Iceberg Slim, which I bought from a crap hole newsstand so many years ago. And I’m thankful to Sticking It To The Man for reminding me where I came from and how I got here today.
