Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (7 page)

Richard was ready to shake the dust of Peoria off his feet. He would go out there and show them all. The ones who’d told him he wasn’t shit. Not least of all, his father.

He pawned a typewriter he’d borrowed from his half sister Barbara Jean for bus fare and, unbeknownst to Patricia, had their son’s name legally changed to Richard Franklin Pryor Jr.

“Does the champ know this is a benefit?!”

Richard Pryor climbs into a ring with Muhammad Ali who, in answer to Richard’s clowning and faux preening, theatrically scowls and mouths carefully constructed words from deep in his corner: “I’m going to kick your ass.”

Two equally implausible characters, each of whose rise now feels as inevitable as it once seemed implausible; both slipping through the cracks of trauma and circumstance that helped define an era even as they failed to contain the men they marked; both escaping, skipping out onto a wire—or beneath one—that was sharp, swaying, and electrified. Like Parker and Miles and Dylan and Picasso and Malcolm, they picked at a lock only to find the door already free and swinging, dark and unguarded; sneaking in and onto a vacant seat that had never really been wholly occupied.

Ali literally beat his chosen new name free from the lips of Ernie Terrell who had clamped down on it and refused its utterance and legitimacy. And then he finished him.

Richard made Ed Sullivan’s stage a back alley wherein he leaned and hid out, flashing anger and grief; sucking down self-loathing even before it was forced upon him; setting the place on fire and giving away the whole of his secret heart for nothing.

PART
TWO

“GIVE ME SOME MILK OR ELSE GO HOME”

Down along Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, Richard may have felt like a rube with his Jackie Wilson pompadour and shiny, narrow-cut suit that was perhaps a full size too small, but it took more than that to stand out in Greenwich Village in 1963. You could be anything there, and as such, everyone was unfurling a flag in hopes of staking a claim upon outrage and attention. It didn’t matter your discipline: it was all theater, and the tiny coffee shops were packed with performers—comedians, musicians, monologists, poets—all eager to survey the competition and glean some deft bits of stage business.

Beat poets, visual artists, and jazz musicians had, since the mid-1950s, become such a potent and magnetic presence in the neighborhood that they’d seemingly reset the clocks, filling the dark cafes and narrow ethnic restaurants with dense smoke at odd hours, spilling with their work from dim rooming houses and co-opted storefronts and animating the street corners of early morning hours, blurring the lines between friendly congregation and performance. Over egg rolls and scorched coffee, writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and filmmaker Robert Frank hashed out an informal manifesto, whereby the most gritty and unabashedly personal of experiences would be thinly veiled in their work, if at all. And just north, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, and Al Cohn wandered in and out of the frame of the ever-open-and-revolving door of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s buzzing loft, nodding their heads through sprawling rehearsals of Thelonious Monk’s big band. Smith snapped pictures throughout and kept a reel-to-reel tape recorder endlessly turning, documenting thousands of hours of jam sessions and casual conversation, street noise, radio speeches and staticky baseball games— all with seemingly no thought to judging what of it might be relevant for posterity. At this juncture—where a random satellite photograph revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba, and a crowd member’s silent Super 8 footage served as the only recorded witness to an era-defining assassination—there was almost no such thing as irrelevance: something was happening here, even if you didn’t know what it was.

—————

The last years of the 1950s had left a flooded gully in its wake, like a psychic borderline snaking through an America that had imagined itself, in the years following the Second World War, to be modern and sufficiently settled: dreams had been assigned and sanctioned—handed out along with your honorable service discharge—and involved new cars, office jobs, pretty wives, and obedient children. But once upon the shore of 1960, it was clear that its sandy banks were trembling and perilous, and that the way forward was dark and overgrown with vines. The boiler room beneath the nation’s freshly paved surface was clanging and giving off wisps of rancid steam following decades of brutal violence, deep resentment, and the denying of the very humanity of great segments of the country’s population. And now, an imposing and abstractly treacherous cold war pushed back from the idealized future. In a quick few years, a stout crop of popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power:
My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie,
Th
e Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched—
they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, and once the mask slipped, there would be no way of ever securing it back in place.

—————

By the middle sixties, the bohemian subculture would become so pervasive that no longer would the flustered secretaries and pressed businessmen cross the street to avoid bearded confrontation, but, rather, tour buses filled with middle Americans would crawl along Cornelius and West Fourth streets, craning for a glimpse of the dirty and drugged radicals they’d read about in
Time
magazine. This transformation had begun a scant few years earlier, centered in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, a grubby and baby-faced young folksinger named Bob Dylan was still nicking songs and banter from established acts like Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, sharing cigarettes and kitchen scraps with Tiny Tim in the basement of the Cafe Wha? Painters Red Grooms and Bob Thompson were hustling canvases up Sixth Avenue in a scavenged baby carriage, and dressing sets for the impromptu theater pieces they helped stage in an empty shoe store. Ornette Coleman might be dressed in a burlap sack—like Moses being chased instead of followed—while Sun Ra paraded his Myth Science Arkestra along East Third Street like a barnstorming baseball team trying to drum up business en route to their weekly Monday night gig at Slug’s.

—————

Into this constantly shifting scene stepped Richard Pryor—straight from the Chitlin’ Circuit and the fading theaters of skittish northern and midwestern towns that had years before shaken off the dust of vaudeville and the swing era but found little in the grainy, flickering glow of distant television screens to take its place.

Looking back on the scene, screenwriter Buck Henry could remember, in his mind’s eye, walking along Bleecker or MacDougal streets late at night and seeing in every doorway someone who would later be famous. On any given night that autumn of 1963, a club hopper might see the top four stand-up comics of all time—(1) Richard Pryor, (2) George Carlin, (3) Lenny Bruce, (4) Woody Allen, as ranked by Comedy Central in 2005—within blocks of each other working the basket houses, where performers passed a basket or a hat to collect their pay, or appearing in all-night cafes housed in crumbling basements where patrons were requested to applaud by snapping their fingers rather than clapping their hands so as not to incur the wrath of apartment dwellers farther up the airshaft who were trying to sleep.

As outrageous as the Village characters believed themselves to be, however, they would have turned few heads among the players Richard encountered out on the Circuit, in the days before he made it to New York.

There was the hotel in Toronto favored by gay wrestlers where, after watching them try to murder each other in the ring, Richard was dumbfounded to see the same guys kissing and holding hands in the lobby.

There was the club where Richard opened for a wrestling bear who guzzled beer between bouts. One night when the furry star had a few too many, he pinned a terrified Richard to the floor backstage and gently began stroking him.

There was the Casablanca in Youngstown, Ohio, where Richard, upon learning from a tearful Satin Doll that the performers weren’t going to be paid, came to the rescue by pulling a starter pistol on the club’s reputedly mobbed-up Lebanese owners (reimagined as Italian for
Live on the Sunset Strip
and again in
Jo Jo Dancer
) and demanded their share of the take.

There was the female impersonator who enticed Richard with a bit of quid pro quo. He was relieved to find, when push came to shove, that she was in fact a she, passing as a female impersonator.

In Pittsburgh, he served thirty-five days of a ninety-day sentence handed down for assaulting a singer he had been seeing. Richard never denied the charge. He’d been talking trash about the woman behind her back, playing the pimp and bragging that she’d been giving him money. When she confronted him backstage, he claimed preemptive self-defense. “I thought she was going to do some serious damage to me so I beat her ass first.” It turned out her father was connected. When the cops burst into the rooming house in the middle of the night, Richard feared they’d come to work him over. But, he concluded, they must have felt sorry for this skinny kid with no muscles, trembling in his underwear. Instead, they gave him time to get dressed and then hauled him downtown.

In jail, he struck up a conversation with a fellow inmate who, it turned out, knew his aunt Mexcine and only had a few days left to serve. Upon his release, the inmate contacted Mexcine and she sent Richard twenty dollars, which he parlayed into seventy by playing the numbers. That was enough to buy his way out of jail and out into the freezing cold.

Back on the street, Richard heard that Sammy Davis Jr. was in town. He found his hotel and stationed himself in a chair at the end of the hallway hoping for a chance to meet the man who, along with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, formed a holy trinity of African American performers of the day.

A hotel security cop gave him the once-over but didn’t question his reason for being there. And while no one would ever mistake the twenty-two-year-old Richard Pryor for hired muscle, it might have made sense because Davis had faced continual threats of assassination, lynching, and theater bombings ever since his marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt in 1960, a barrage that only intensified when their daughter, Tracey, was born a year later.

Once or twice, Davis peeked out to see if the skinny guy in the chair was still there. After several hours, someone from Davis’s entourage brought Richard a plate of food. The next morning, as Davis was leaving, Richard rose from his chair. “What’s happening?” Davis said. The two would become great friends a decade hence, but for now Davis smoked and nodded as Richard stammered out a brief résumé and asked if maybe he would give him a job. Davis gave him a cigarette and some encouragement. “But he was so jive,” Richard wrote. “Didn’t mind being a star one bit. It was a beautiful thing to see.”

And then there was the hooker in Baltimore who invited Richard home with her after his show at the Playboy Club. “I want you to hear something,” she said, and pulled out a translucent red vinyl LP from its jacket, set the phonograph arm down on side one of
Lenny Bruce, American,
and for once, Richard forgot all about the pussy.

On the second track, Lenny set the scene wherein a nine-year-old kid inadvertently discovers the mind-altering properties of model airplane glue. Lenny next followed the kid into a toy store where he nonchalantly asks the clerk for a list of innocuous items: a nickel’s worth of pencils, Big Boy tablet, some Jujubes, Tailspin Tommy book, and—slipping this in almost as an afterthought—two thousand tubes of airplane glue.

“That destroyed me,” Richard said. “I went fucking crazy.”

The epiphany of Richard’s first brush with Lenny Bruce was akin to what Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez experienced when he first opened a copy of Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis.
“Holy shit!” is what he said, reliving that moment for an interviewer some thirty years later. “The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.”

Before Lenny Bruce, most comics purchased their jokes from gag writers. And, once those jokes had been performed, there was little recourse against other comics stealing them, so common a practice that Milton Berle, the most famous and highest-paid comic on TV at the time—affectionately known as Uncle Miltie, Mr. Television, Mr. Tuesday Night by viewers—was called the Thief of Bad Gags by his fellow comics. Lenny’s brand of comedy changed all that, effectively trouncing the division of labor between gag writer and comedian, rendering the arrangement hopelessly passé, just as Bob Dylan had done to songsters in tin pan alley. (“Bob Dylan killed popular music,” an old-time recording engineer at Columbia Records’ New York studio was heard to say during an afternoon mastering session in the late 1980s, shaking his head with equal parts admiration and rue. Every songwriter now felt he should sing, and every singer thought he had something to say.) Gag writers and tunesmiths soldiered on, of course, but mainly as remnants of a time that had passed. Comics, like singers—if they wanted to be taken seriously—were expected to do their own stuff.

What Lenny Bruce did was revive the long-neglected tradition of storytellers, balladeers, satirists, and poets who delivered their oratory in the public square. He showed that a comedian standing in front of an audience could roam the same expanse of territory, plumb the same depths of humanity as a novelist, poet, or playwright could sitting over a typewriter.

Richard, in his moment of enlightenment, understood not only the alchemy Lenny practiced, he recognized, too, that he’d already amassed and absorbed everything he needed to work that same spell himself. He knew it better than he knew anything. He’d been learning it all his life from Buck’s emasculating tirades, his grandfather’s tall tales, Uncle Dickie’s boasts, the pool-hall hustlers’ mother-rhymes, the prayers of the revival preacher who tried to cast the devil out of him, and the lies told by whichever wizened Peorian it was who planted the seeds of Mudbone as he sent streams of tobacco juice hissing into the barbecue pit.

Where Lenny was cool and detached, standing on the outside looking in, Richard would crawl inside his characters, actually
become
them, and follow them wherever they might go. Which is why the restrictions of TV performance proved so problematic. “I have to
be
that person,” he told James Alan McPherson in 1975. “I see that man in my mind and go with him. . . . When I do the people, I have to do it true. If I can’t do it, I’ll stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. . . . If I didn’t do characters, it wouldn’t be funny.”