Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (4 page)

Time
magazine reported that radio comedians “had only to mention the word Richard on the air to put their studio audiences in stitches.” The phrase became part of the early civil rights movement, as the title of an editorial in the
Los Angeles Sentinel
calling for black representation in city government. In Georgia, college students marched to the state capitol demanding the resignation of segregationist governor Herman Talmadge with banners that read
OPEN THE DOOR, HERMAN
.

With the song’s success, Dusty Fletcher emerged from semiretirement to claim authorship, saying he had written the skit after seeing a drunk thrown out of a railroad station bar in South Carolina. The ejected patron, Fletcher recalled, stood out in the street and yelled for the bartender to let him back in.

Once the song broke, it seemed every singer and band in the country rushed to record it. Within months of McVea’s hit, at least eighteen versions were released by the likes of Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, Dick Haymes, the Pied Pipers, Jo Stafford, Burl Ives, and Bing Crosby. Both Count Basie and nightclub trio the Three Flames scored number-one hits with the song. There was even a Yiddish version by a quartet known as the Yokels.

But, at the end of the day, “Richard” belongs to Dusty Fletcher. The recordings were mere novelty numbers, whereas Fletcher had honed his stage performance to a work of art incorporating pantomime, pratfalls, and an acrobatic balancing act atop a freestanding ladder. Happily, it was captured twice on film, as a ten-minute short directed by William Forest Crouch, and as a vignette in the Cab Calloway movie
Hi-De-Ho.

Fletcher portrayed his nameless character as a drunk who mutters to himself between shouts up to his unresponsive roommate. In each segment of the routine he peels back layer upon layer of a complicated man gamely soldiering on with his threadbare existence in a harsh, uncaring world.

Critic Jake Austen notes that Fletcher’s work, like Richard’s, dealt with “fairly horrifying subjects: abject poverty, extreme alcoholism, spousal beating, homicide, and other rib ticklers.” Traces of genetic material from “Open the Door” show up in Richard’s “Wino & Junkie,” the signature piece he developed over a period of several years. It grew along with him, becoming deeper, ever more fearless, and less dependent on jokes. By the time Richard recorded it for his 1974 LP
That Nigger’s Crazy,
there was nothing overtly funny about it.

WINO:
You better lay off that narcotic, nigger, that shit done made you null and void. I ain’t lyin’, boy. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you straighten up and get a job?

JUNKIE:
Get a job? Motherfucker, you talkin’ to the kid, baby. Shit! I worked five years in a row when I was in the joint pressing them motherfuckin’ license plates. I’m a license plate-pressing motherfucker too, baby. Where a nigger gonna get a job out here pressing license plates?

Black comics learn their craft on the street corner, Richard once said. “That’s where niggers rehearse. If you want to be a speaker, you rehearse your speeches. You tell your stories. Singers start there. Players run their game. . . . That was my stage.”

In communities large and small, African Americans found free expression in games of signifying; playing the dozens; and exchanging raunchy, rhyming tall tales of “bad niggers” like Stagolee, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law and trickster characters harking back to High John the Conqueror, Br’er Rabbit, and the Signifying Monkey. Richard found genius in this cosmology of language and humor that, up until that time, had kept sanctuary in barbershops, pool halls, street corners, front porches, and back rooms. Then, to nearly everyone’s dismay, he went and paraded it out in front of company.

“White folks don’t play enough,” Richard contended. “They don’t relax. They don’t know how to play the dozens . . . nothing.”

We used to have good sessions sometimes. I remember I came up with a beaut, man. I killed them one day. We was doing it all day to each other, you know? Bang bang—“Your shoes are run over so much looks like your
ankles
is broke,” and shit like that. And I came up with, I called the motherfucker “The Rummage Sale Ranger,” you know what I mean? ’Cause that’s where he got his clothes. “The Rummage Sale Ranger”—that was a knockout. I saved that one for the last. That ended it.

Black Panther Party minister of justice H. Rap Brown recalled how he and his friends played the dozens for recreation “the way white folks play Scrabble.”

In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words . . . It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated . . . It was like they were humiliated because they were born Black and then they turned around and got humiliated by their own people, which was really all they had left. But that’s the way it is. Those that feel most humiliated humiliate others.

Playing the dozens—aka mother-rhyming—has been known to turn deadly. Most often, though, in the words of British author and blues scholar Paul Oliver, young men play the dozens to “work off their excesses of spirits in a harmless and cheerfully pornographic blues-singing competition.”

Black humor as practiced in the community or after-hours clubs seldom, if ever, concerned itself with mainstream or non-black existence, either in imitation of it or in reaction to it. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it, these performances carried “an invisible racial warning sticker: For domestic consumption only—export strictly prohibited. . . . You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetuated by the white man are never far from our consciousness.”

Factor in Richard’s observation that “white folks get upset when they see us laughing—‘Wha’d’ya think they’re doing, Martha? Are they laughing at us?’ ” and it’s likely that the one aspect of black humor whites would find most disconcerting (were we privy to hear it) is how largely absent they are. Gates, again, describes a production making the rounds of the Chitlin’ Circuit as recently as 1997: “The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—simply never arises.” What black humor concerns itself with most are the immediate problems and pleasures of everyday life: love, jealousy, sex, death, rivalries, tall tales, intoxication, and food—the same territory covered in the blues and other black music, which, praise be to popular recordings, we have in abundance.

Although the blues has its origins in the music of West Africa, it is unique to the United States. The music entered the United States by the port of New Orleans, then migrated upriver to spawn—mutating, crossbreeding, and adapting to regional conditions as it spread out through the tributaries. All manner of love songs, folk legends, feats of derring-do, murder ballads, conjure tales, ghost stories, courtly European balladry, and blues got passed down and passed around, openly consorting and cross-pollinating with each other.

It was similar to the way the scattered stories and figures that make up
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
had been recited, embellished, and
bowdlerized
by generation upon generation of Ageans before someone like Homer came along with the wit to see what it could be, gathered up all the strands, wound them together, shook them up in his sorcerer’s hat, and pulled out those epic twin pillars of world literature.

So it was with Richard. In the truest Homeric tradition, he soaked up everything around him and, by virtue of wise blood or mother wit, made of it something new. And if it now seems as though that new thing had been there all along, waiting for someone game enough to grab hold and take it for a ride, either to see where it would go or how long one could hang on, that’s because it was.

All of which is just to say, as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale observed
in ascribing the forces that gave rise to the movement, “It was already going on.” And, as Robert Fitzgerald wrote in the postscript to his translation of Homer’s
Odyssey,
“Our poet came late and had supremely gifted predecessors.”

Skinny and bearded, Richard Pryor holds the stage of a dark basement club, its brick walls lending it the air of a boiler room fallout shelter where a small crowd nervously laughs and awaits an all-clear of something from somewhere. Steaks and peppers are listed for sale on a chalkboard behind him; chicken curry, beer.

There is a silence that follows each jab of a phrase, the mostly white audience puzzled and uncomfortable as Richard sticks and moves, looks for his way inside . . . talking aches and pains, winos and whores and politicians and pimps; catching the clap, and having sucked another man’s dick. These are not jokes he tells but character sketches and vignettes that spool out and surprise like a tablecloth snatched off a birdcage, revealing no living bird but something furry and feral in its place, uncomfortably large for its quarters, grunting and pissing.

Richard seems not to register the quiet and discomfort, or he pays it no mind. He keeps watch over his shoulder, is patient and slow as he lets out his line. He weaves fractured scenes above the heads of those in attendance but seems rarely to glance their way. He is already seeing beyond; over them; out.

“THERE’S A BAD MUTHAFUCKA COMIN’ YOUR WAY”

In his 1995 memoir
Pryor Convictions,
Richard told how his grandfather Roy Pryor had been crushed in the coupling of two boxcars while working for the railroad in the 1920s—an incident that should have killed any man on the spot. Instead, Richard tells us, the cars parted, his grandfather made his way to a tavern, downed a drink, and
then
died.

Nothing miraculous about that, Richard explained. The man wanted a drink.

Richard apparently had confused his paternal grandfather, LeRoy Pryor, with his maternal great-grandfather, Richard Carter, whose obituary appeared in the
Decatur Daily Review
of September 20, 1925:

RICHARD CARTER DIES OF INJURIES

Colored Man Crushed between Cars

Richard Carter of 1144 South Jackson street died at 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon at the Wabash Employee’s hospital from injuries received earlier in the day, when he was crushed between two cars. He was fifty-five years old.

Mr. Carter was one of the well-known colored men of Decatur. He had been here many years and was well liked by those who knew him. He had been employed in the yards of the Wabash roundhouse for a long time. About 11 o’clock Saturday forenoon he was crushed between some cars that were switching in the yards and was so badly injured that he died five hours later.

Richard’s grandmother, Rithie Marie Carter, was one of seven children born to Richard Carter and the former Julia Isabelle Piper. She was born sometime in 1899, perhaps in New Orleans, shortly before her family joined the great migration up the Mississippi early in the century. This first wave of African American migrants, employed as musicians or servants on northbound riverboats, jumped ship in the comparatively free Midwest, and Illinois seemed especially appealing. Marie’s family settled in Decatur.
*

Marie married LeRoy (or Roy) Pryor,
a janitor and apartment building caretaker,
in Decatur on a Saturday evening in August of 1914 at the home of Elder T. S. Hendershott, pastor of the Church of the Living God.

Further documented facts of LeRoy Pryor’s life include his birth on March 21, 1889, in Mexico, Missouri; his plea of guilty to a charge of grand larceny in Macon County, Illinois, in 1928; an arrest for disorderly conduct in Decatur in 1931; his registration for military service in 1942 at the age of fifty-three; and his death on January 15, 1946, in Decatur, Illinois.

One final documented event in LeRoy’s life occurred a little more than a year after he and Marie were married, as shown by an item that appeared in the
Decatur Review
of December 6, 1915:

CLAIMED WIFE ATTENDED BALL

Roy Pryor, Colored, Fined for an Assault on Spouse

Roy Pryor, colored, 362 East Main Street, pleaded guilty before Justice J. Edward Saxton Monday morning to the charge of assaulting his wife and threatening to kill her. He was fined $5.30. Pryor’s assault was provoked, it is alleged, by Mrs. Pryor attending a grand ball some place when Pryor wasn’t along.

Marie’s next public notice appeared in the
Decatur Herald
of October 14, 1929, under the headline “Three Are Arrested in Raid Sunday Night,” wherein it was reported that Marie Carter had pleaded guilty to possession of intoxicating liquor, was fined $28.15 by Justice J. G. Allen, and released.

After
divorcing from Le
Roy in 1929, Marie moved with her four children to Peoria where she soon married Thomas “Pop” Bryant and went into business operating a brothel and doing some bootlegging on the side. Pop ran a gambling operation, a candy store, and later, a saloon and pool hall.

Marie’s eldest son, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor Jr. was a Golden Gloves boxing champion in his teens, spent some time traveling between Chicago and East St. Louis, working odd jobs—including a bit of vaudeville singing—then came back to Peoria to take up the family business. He fell in love with Gertrude Thomas, a part-time bookkeeper who also turned tricks in Marie’s brothel, and on December 1, 1940, she gave birth to
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III.
He was called Frankin for the uncle who had prophesied his birth. Thomas, of course, was his mother’s maiden name. And Lennox, he would later learn, had been one of his aunt
Mexcine’s boyfriends.

Richard professed not to know where his mother came up with the name Richard. An odd claim since his father’s younger brother and his great-grandfather on his grandma Marie’s side were both called Richard. Odder still considering that biographies, reference works, even his own press materials, often identify him as Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, although, to reckon him as the third in a line of Richards requires making a few zigzags in his family tree and a slight exception to the rules. No matter.
That piling on of names was heavy enough without a Roman numeral at the end.

—————

With full acknowledgment of how telling were the circumstances, a grown-up Richard Pryor recalled how he had come to recognize the draw and power of physical comedy very early on, when, running across the yard in his new cowboy suit, he slipped in dog shit and set everybody on the front porch howling with laughter. Realizing he was onto something, he got up and did it again. “And,” he would say, “I’ve been slippin’ in shit ever since.”

Richard found he could use his fledgling comic abilities to ingratiate himself with older, tougher kids in the neighborhood or to worm his way out of scrapes with bullies. But not always. At the age of five, while playing alone in an alley behind his house, Richard found himself cornered and sexually molested by a fourteen-year-old bully known as Hoss. Despite his efforts to avoid further encounters with Hoss, the assaults continued. “I felt violated, humiliated, dirty, fearful, and, most of all, ashamed.” The humiliation got even worse when an older kid in the neighborhood pulled him aside and told him he shouldn’t be sucking dick. Who else knew?

At the dinner table a few nights later, his father, out of the blue, began singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Richard was mortified. Did his father know, he wondered. And if he did, why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t he cut off Hoss’s dick? Did he think this was funny?

Richard never asked his father if he knew or why he sang that song. He never mentioned Hoss to anyone until he confessed it in his memoir fifty years later. “Had me a ghost rattling in the attic. It didn’t matter that I lived in a big house behind a gate in Los Angeles, some half a country from the bricks and bars of the old neighborhood. My ass was haunted by the image of Hoss’s dick.” When he returned to Peoria to re-create scenes from his childhood on location for his semiautobiographical movie
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling,
someone told him that Hoss still lived in town and wanted to see him. “Even though I was a famous and successful comedian, surrounded by big, menacing bodyguards who would’ve killed at the snap of my fingers, I was seized by that old sense of fear of Hoss telling me to suck his dick.” One day during the shoot, Richard came out of his trailer to greet his fans and there was Hoss with his young son, waiting in line for an autograph.

—————

Other scenes from young Richard’s early life include:

Finding a dead baby in a shoebox.

Seeing his father shoot a client who had cussed out his grandmother. Although Buck emptied the entire magazine of his pistol, not only did the man not die, the multiple gunshot wounds so infuriated him that he dragged himself across the floor and slashed Buck’s leg, leaving him with a lifelong limp.

Standing on a chair outside a bedroom door and looking in over the transom to see his mother servicing a client.

Trying to help a man who’d been knifed in the stomach as he stumbled down the street with his guts hanging out. Richard begged the man to lie down and wait for the ambulance, but the man was determined to make it to the liquor store and get himself a half pint.

Seeing his father go running down their residential street clutching his blood-soaked boxer shorts and screaming for his mother. Gertrude, Richard learned, had ripped Buck’s nutsack off with her fingernails after he had beaten her.

Yet, when asked, Richard
said the most traumatic experience of his early life came when he ventured behind a movie screen at the end of a Little Beaver western and discovered the show had been a trick, an illusion of light and shadow. “I thought Little Beaver would be there, you know, and I wanted to talk to him.”

During his youth, Richard took refuge in the movies, idolizing Tarzan, John Wayne, Jerry Lewis, and especially matinee cowboy Lash LaRue. Exceptionally
skilled at using a bullwhip,
Lash dressed all in black and enforced the law with the cool aplomb of a film noir gangster. Richard would salvage the theater’s discarded movie posters and hang them up on his bedroom wall, pasting his own name over that of the leading man’s.

—————

After his parents divorced, Richard went to live with his grandmother at 313 North Washington, just two doors down from his father’s home at 317. In between the two houses, at 315, was China Bee’s, the most prosperous whorehouse in town.

From the time Richard moved in with her at the age of ten, he always called his grandmother “Mama.” To everyone else, by that time, she was Grandma Marie. “Grandma Marie was everybody’s anchor,” says Richard’s onetime sister-in-law, Angie Gordon. “She was the head of it all. Everybody was crazy about her. She looked and talked like Madea. When Tyler Perry came out with
Madea,
I’m like, ‘God, did he meet Grandma Marie?’ They were just alike.”

Richard’s religious upbringing, to the extent that he had one, was Catholic. Although Grandmother Marie attended Peoria’s Morning Star Baptist Church, she had been raised in the Creole Catholic tradition and used her influence to enroll Richard in
St. Joseph’s Catholic School
. It didn’t take long before the nuns got wind of how the Pryor family came by their livelihood, and a confused young Richard found himself unceremoniously expelled. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong,” Marie explained, “even though they think they wrote the book.”

Despite his expulsion from
St. Joseph’s
,
Marie insisted he continue going to weekend catechism where, one Saturday, according to Richard, a priest snuck up and gave him “some smooches on the lips.” Richard ran bawling and heaving all the way home. Once his father and uncle Dickie got over their anger at Richard’s story, they saw the financial possibilities and hatched a blackmail scheme. “We’ll collar him,” his father said. The men listened in on an extension while Richard flirted with the priest on the phone—that is, until his grandmother happened to overhear and put a stop to it.

“Richard,” she told him, “you’ve got to understand that everybody’s human. Don’t ever forget it. No matter what they are. Everybody’s human.”

Richard, for his part, remembered this as a bonding experience with his father and found it exciting being the center of attention.

After St. Joseph’s, Richard enrolled in the overwhelmingly white Blaine-Sumner Elementary School. A chronically truant student, Richard was listless and withdrawn in the classroom on the days he did show up. Yet his sixth-grade teacher, Miss Marguerite Yingst, noticed that he enjoyed making other kids laugh on the playground. So she offered him a deal: if he came to school on time every day, he could have ten minutes to perform in front of the class on Friday afternoons. It worked. His classmates loved him, and having a regular time slot challenged him to come up with new material each week. His family had just bought their first television set, so he mimicked the antics of comics like Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis, freely lifting their jokes until other kids in his class got TVs, too. Richard never forgot the Monday morning he arrived at school to find his classmates all abuzz over Sammy Davis Jr.’s performance on Ed Sullivan’s
Toast of the Town
the night before.

“I was jealous,” he said. “It was like I’d been home sick one Friday and some other cat had come in and done my act. Now I knew I was going to have to be even better.”

—————

Richard was expelled from Woodruff High after he threw a punch at a teacher (and missed). He next attended Peoria Central but dropped out after just one semester. If he wasn’t going to school, his father told him, he had to start pulling his own weight. “If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.”

He got his first job mopping floors in a North Washington Street strip club, but did such a poor job the dancers got filthy from writhing on the stage.

Next he tried his hand at robbing stores, but he bungled his first and only attempt when the coins spilled from the register and went rolling all over the floor. Instead of calling the police, the owner kicked him out and threatened to tell his father if he ever came back.

Despite Grandma Marie’s faith in Catholic schooling, she had become a devout Baptist and frequently attended revival meetings in hopes of being cured of her arthritis. She took young Richard with her, believing the preacher could “pray the devil out of him.”