by Kari Lydersen
For Lip Magazine

If one of "his ladies" showed up wearing an outfit he didn't buy for her, Homer King would know she was stealing. That's because she wasn't supposed to have any money of her own.
"Just enough to make a phone call for me to pick her up," he said. He paid for everything else she needed -- food, housing, lingerie and "costumes," minks, jewelry, even a car if she was one of his favorites.

To earn this kind of treatment, she would work every night turning tricks on the street, and give all her money to him.

"I'd say ladies stack up, and they'd give me the money, or if they came home when I was out gambling or something they'd leave the money on their dresser and I'd go through and clean out the traps," he said. "Things would be said like, 'Bitch, you don't need to wake up with no money. What do you need money for? You're crazy anyway.'"

King was a pimp.

He's not anymore. Now, at age 46 and still retaining his tailor and his dress style from his pimp days, he spends his time talking to people about "the lifestyle" and doing what he can to atone for his years of "being a predator, seeing women as prey."

For about a quarter century, from age 17 until about 42, King made his money off women. He controlled them to the extent that if they held onto any of the money they were paid for sexual services, or the money they stole from their tricks for that matter, they were "stealing" from him, taking what he was rightfully owed as their "manager" and "protector."

King was introduced to pimping by a woman, an older woman who he said molested him as a teenager growing up on the west side of Chicago. She essentially made him her pimp.

"She'd go out and turn tricks and give me the money," he said. "She could see I had all the qualities," including "the gift of gab."

The lifestyle seemed a natural to him. It seemed like the answer to all his dreams.

"Growing up my idol was James Bond," he said. "He had all the cars, all the women. It was an illusion. But I saw the guys with the cars, the women in teeny skirts, and I thought I could get that illusion. It wasn't about money, it was about the power, about being cool, about being socially accepted."

To do it, all he had to do was sell women on the dream as well.

"I was their ticket to fame and fortune, 'together we can conquer the world baby!'" he says, slipping into a smooth voice, leaning forward provocatively to display his technique. "It was all about the money, cars, jewels, furs. It was like Oscar night every night on the strip."

The sell worked, many times.

"Most of them weren't hard to convince," he said.

He didn't actually get tricks for them. He was the muscle, the one who would make a trick pay up and come after him if he tried any funny business. More than that, he convinced the women they needed him.

"I was daddy," he said. "I was the one who could make everything wrong right. They needed me emotionally, and I needed them, because we were all emotionally devastated."

Some were doing it mainly for the money. Some were not.

"Lots of them could ask mommy and daddy for whatever they wanted," he said. "They were women of all different races, that was one of my specialties. Some just wanted to get out of the routine of their everyday lives. One of my ladies, her mother was one of the most prestigious doctors in Florida, she had her own car and a trust fund. She wanted to break the boredom. Rich kids do things sometimes as a cry for attention."

It was easy to get in. When the illusion began to wear off, it wasn't so easy to get out.

"It was like the roach motel," King said. "You can check in but you can't check out. This was a business I was running, and this was about power. I would do whatever necessary to hold onto that business, to hold onto that power."

Violence was the norm. King took some extreme measures to keep his women in check and to make sure they didn't leave. He doesn't want to go into too much detail about his own actions, but he says they are things he isn't proud of. He'll talk more about the industry as a whole.

"The tools of the trade included coat hangers," he said. "We're talking about a world with no values, no boundaries. We're operating on a non-human level. It's sticking a gun in someone's mouth and saying this is what will happen if you don't do it."

Early on King had asked a more experienced pimp for advice.

"I said, 'I've got her doing it, now how do I make more money?'" he said. "He said, 'Beat her ass.' He's standing there with all these jewels and the Cadillac so I knew he must be right."

He didn't find it hard to take the advice.

"My parents were from a different time period," he said. "They were from a farm, they plowed fields, then they came to the city with a big city dream. The way it became so easy for me to hit my lady was that I had watched my father hit my mother for many years. It was handed down to him from his father and to him from his forefathers. It was handed down to them from our slave-masters. We're talking about a tradition."

Physical abuse seemed like such a natural part of male-female relationships that he was surprised when a few of the women he was pimping refused to put up with it.

"When I was 12 I told my mother, 'Let's go, I'll take care of you.' But she wouldn't leave. I know he loved her and she loved him. They never separated. So I thought, 'OK, that must be love.' So I hit my lady-friends and when they left I was thrown for a loop. I really could not understand what the problem was and there was no one to explain it to me."

He traveled around the country pimping, and earned the name 'Fancy.' There were times he got rich. He was even named Pimp of the Year once in a national competition. But then he'd blow the money on getting high. All in all, he found out the pimping business wasn't all he had hoped.

"I had seen the guys with the fancy cars, but what I hadn't known was that a lot of them were hiding their cars from the repo man, that a lot of them were sleeping in their cars," he said.

The onset of the HIV epidemic put a damper on the business. King, for one, was health conscious and regularly took women to the doctor and gave them condoms.

"Partly it was self-interest, because I would touch them too," he said. "But money changes people and if someone says they'll pay a few more dollars to do it without a condom…I've been tested and thank God I'm negative."

However these changes aren't what caused King to leave the business.

"When a pimp starts to feel emotions, it's time to get out," he said. "They come to you in the middle of the night like a vampire."

He started to feel ashamed in front of his parents.

"It got to the point where my mother wouldn't even let me kiss her, my father wouldn't shake my hand," he said. "You have no idea how emotionally painful that was. It only sent me deeper into my addiction to cover up the pain, because I couldn't let these ladies see that I'm human."

Even worse, he started to feel too much sympathy for the women working for him. And jealousy. "When you start caring about whether she'll make it through the night safely, it's time to go. There's always one you care more about, that's just human. You watch her go through this metamorphosis [getting ready for work] and see her change from Holly to Sparkle and you start asking, 'Did you enjoy that one?'"

He had had enough.

"One day I just threw my alligator shoe at my lady and said, 'Leave.' I thought I was going to jump off a freeway overpass. But then I started thinking what would happen if I jumped and didn't die, I'd be in a wheelchair with no one to push me around. A pimp has no friends. No one's lonelier than a pimp."

So he went to counseling, entered a 12-step program and began to deal with his demons.

"I began to do analysis, to see why I had treated women as prey," he said. Eventually a woman he had known from the streets introduced him to a project organized by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and other Chicago organizations called the Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART). The project brings together survivors of prostitution, residents of areas where prostitution takes place, social service providers, law enforcement and even pimps and johns to develop progressive and inclusive strategies for dealing with prostitution. King connected with the project instantly. He started to put his gift of gab to good use, speaking to various groups about his life and finding his way out.

"I'm providing an example," he said. "I'm a different person now. I made some bad decisions and I stuck with them way too long, but I'm different now. We're all ex-somethings. I'm just more honest about it than most."