Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him Read online

  FURIOUS COOL | RICHARD PRYOR

  AND THE WORLD THAT MADE HIM

  DAVID HENRY AND JOE HENRY

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2013

  For Clare & Melanie

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Intending no disrespect and feeling no need to feign journalistic objectivity, it simply feels false to refer to our subject by anything other than his Christian name. For those of us who first encountered him in the early seventies, he will always be Richard. Even in the days of Nixon, Brautigan, Burton, and Leakey, he was, as the Village Voice’s Greg Tate wrote in memoriam, “the only Richard you could possibly be talking about.”

  And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

  —ANTONIN ARTAUD

  CONTENTS

  Prelude

  Introduction: The Fear of Black Laughter

  PART ONE

  A Native Son of Wistful Vista

  “There’s a Bad Muthafucka Comin’ Your Way”

  Backing Up While Swimming

  “Ain’t That Many of Us to Go Around”

  PART TWO

  “Give Me Some Milk or Else Go Home”

  A Way Out of Here Other Than That Door

  Monday, December 22, 1969

  PART THREE

  There’s a Riot Goin’ On

  The Word Made Flesh

  A Screaming Comes across the Sky

  “Nigger, Come Out of That Black Skin and Be Black, Nigger”

  “Let It Stay Heavy if Not Hard”

  PART FOUR

  “I See That Man in My Mind and Go with Him”

  “There’s a Person Here That’s Possessed”

  “Let’s Get Him before Somebody Else Does”

  Surrender, Richard

  “You Hollywood Faggots Can Kiss My Rich Happy Black Ass”

  “Does It Look Like I’m Smiling to You, Motherfucker?”

  “When You Get off That Stage, There’s a Loneliness That Comes over You”

  “My Mind’s Thinking About Shit I Don’t Want to Be Thinkin’ About”

  PART FIVE

  “The Part of Me That Wanted to Die Did”

  Is Comedy Stand-Up Poetry?

  “I Guess That’s a Smile. I Hope That’s His Face”

  “I’m Finding It Hard Imitating Richard Pryor”

  The Last Temptation of Richard

  Epilogue: Going to Meet the Man

  Joe’s Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  PRELUDE

  He emerges from a side window as though shot from a cannon: exploding free and trailing smoke.

  To anyone passing by, he may appear to be following a daily routine as he bounds around to the front of the house and moves down Hayvenhurst Avenue; yet he is dazed, burning, a dim torch that flares and sputters against the flat glare of a summer afternoon.

  A call has gone out. Sirens begin to sound in the distance. There are few pedestrians on the sidewalk, but several cars stalled in the crawling traffic begin to take notice:

  A man is stumbling alone down the street, disoriented, arms raised, heading west.

  There is smoke rising from his hair and body.

  He looks familiar.

  People cry out when he joins them at a corner, smoldering, waiting to cross. As he moves on between halting cars they call after him, using his first name, as if he were a neighbor or relative.

  Hey, wha—? Richard!

  But he keeps moving.

  Finally, a police cruiser rolls up next to him, keeping pace. When the officers’ shouts get no response, the one in the passenger’s seat vaults from the moving car into the street and begins jogging alongside him, calmly pleading with the burning man to stop.

  “If I stop, I’ll die,” he answers, making odd sense of a moment that refuses any other kind.

  INTRODUCTION | THE FEAR OF BLACK LAUGHTER

  The wise man never laughs but he trembles.

  —Charles Baudelaire

  Laughter is anarchy.

  “Are they laughing at us?” the comfortable people ask whenever they hear the downtrodden cavort and make merry. They know something must be amiss. They can feel it. The tide is turning. The earth is wobbling on its axis. There’s going to be trouble, you can bet your last dollar on it.

  Novelist Ralph Ellison tells the story of a fabled southern town where the whites became so unnerved by expressions of mirth among the black populace they installed “laughing-barrels” labeled FOR COLORED ONLY throughout the town square. Any Negro who felt a laugh coming on was behooved—pro bono publico—to thrust his head into the nearest one and there relieve himself. Presumably, this was a frequent occurrence. These receptacles not only spared “many a black sore behind,” Ellison explained, but “performed the far more important function of providing whites a means of saving face before the confounding, persistent, and embarrassing mystery of black laughter.”

  Paul Mooney will tell you: white folks love jokes about Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Hindus, Africans, Polacks, guineas, Martians, midgets, Eskimos, vampires, anybody but themselves. Even today, when Richard Pryor’s lifelong friend does jokes about white people in his act, he pauses to watch while they gather up their handbags and call for their checks. “There they go,” Mooney tells his audience, “like scared little rabbits. They’ll get the fuck out of a place. White people can’t take it. It ain’t funny when it’s about them.”

  —————

  We tried not to laugh.

  It was a Friday night, August 17, 1973. We had read in the Akron Beacon Journal TV listing that Richard Pryor would be hosting NBC’s The Midnight Special. As the local affiliate’s late news ended, we placed both microphones of our new reel-to-reel stereo tape deck (ordered from the Sears catalog and paid for by tag-team summer lawn mowing, assisted by our pal, Jamie Worrell) up next to the single speaker of our family’s color console TV (still a big deal at the time) and eased our way back to the couch, careful not to make a sound. We didn’t want to spoil the recording. We would laugh later, listening to the playback in our bedroom upstairs.

  As a couple of twelve- and fifteen-year-old white kids—sons of the South and sons of an automotive engineer (himself born of Tennessee dirt farmers who migrated to the Carolina textile mills), living in a semirural township outside of Akron, Ohio, in the early 1970s—Richard’s blunt rants on race ought to have tightened our jaws, left us bristling with indignation. Instead, he did just the opposite. Suburban Ohio alienated us. Richard was a beacon that said, Take heart. Stay human. You are not alone.

  For us, Richard was a gateway artist, opening the door to worlds of music, storytelling, and poetry that had been thriving just out of sight, humming beneath our radar. Suddenly we were awake to how African American culture had shaped everything we knew and loved. We heard it first in the music: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it became clear, desperately coveted the strange fruits of the black man’s Delta. Bob Dylan seized upon those same fruits as a juggler might, keeping them deftly aloft while both blurring and affirming the through-line from blues to beat poetry. Eric Clapton, John Mayall, and Jimmy Page viewed them in awe, faces pressed to the glass of some imaginary museum of natural history. Johnny Winter, John Fogerty, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, Janis Joplin, and Captain Beefheart borrowed it as freely as a neighbor would a cup of sugar.

  Richard Pryor’s genius first blossomed in the steamy whorehouse atmosphere brought north when his grandmother’s generati
on migrated from Louisiana and took root in that most unlikely emblem of middle America, Peoria, Illinois, then a wide-open river town peopled by street-corner storytellers, hustlers, pimps, prostitutes, vaudeville had-beens, high-minded church folk, politicians on the take, itinerant show people, and riverboat tradesmen who all passed through his grandmother’s brothel, his grandfather’s candy store, or his father’s pool hall. By embodying such characters onstage, Richard gave voice to a raucous and jubilant side of life as authentically American as Mark Twain’s but one kept hidden away from the majority of white America.

  His path led him through a dizzying patchwork of transient Americana, from touring all-black clubs on the midwestern Chitlin’ Circuit along with the stripper who inspired Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” crossing paths with “X-rated” comics such as Redd Foxx, LaWanda Page, Mantan Moreland, Moms Mabley, Skillet & LeRoy, to Greenwich Village coffeehouses of the early sixties where he shared billings with the likes of Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, and George Carlin; from Sunday nights on The Ed Sullivan Show and weekday afternoons on Merv Griffin to Rat Pack–era Las Vegas; from trendy West Hollywood clubs in the late sixties and guest roles on sitcoms and TV dramas such as Wild Wild West and The Partridge Family to his self-imposed exile in Berkeley at the dawn of the seventies where he found his authentic, liberated voice through mind-expanding friendships with the founders of the Black Panther Party and San Francisco literati.

  The best of Richard’s immediate predecessors—Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge, Timmie Rogers, Moms Mabley—retreated to relatively safe, homogenized material, scrubbed clean of earthier elements, when we saw them perform for a nationwide audience on afternoon talk shows. But Richard brought out the raw tall tales, mother-rhymes, boasts, toasts, and lies—the “jokes black folks tell on themselves” (Langston Hughes) in the privacy of pool halls, barbershops, barbecue joints, back porches—and paraded them naked out in front of everybody. There was no telling what he might say.

  This was no small breach of the wall. Louie Robinson, writing about Richard’s short-lived NBC variety show in the January 1978 issue of Ebony complained that one could not sit back and relax while watching The Richard Pryor Show. “Instead, you perched on the edge of your seat, ready just in case Richard at any moment did something that would make it necessary for every Black person in America to suddenly drop whatever he or she was doing and run like hell!”

  —————

  At times, both of us have wondered whether Richard Pryor was truly ours to approach, ours to embrace as a game-changing force, ours to hear as a part of our collective heart’s voice, an authentic part of our heritage. When John Cage (another voice in our choir) first began studying Zen Buddhism, he too wondered if it was really his to study. “I don’t worry anymore about that,” Cage came to say, and neither do we. We knew Richard as we did and felt not a racial but a human kinship to his fears and desires, triumphs and failures. Like Dizzy Gillespie said of Charlie Parker, “Bird’s music was a gift, and if you could hear it you could have it.”

  Richard Pryor’s gift was Truth. He turned a gritty corner one day as a young man in Peoria, Illinois, and the Truth was on him like a feral alley cat. And he held on to this cat; made a coat out of it and wore it to New York; hid his secret heart underneath it and opened it like a curtain onstage; wore it when he read Malcolm X, scrapped with Huey P. Newton; when he got high with Miles, sparred with Ali, and went down on Pam Grier. Then he tried to pretend he’d never seen it before . . . swore he didn’t know whose coat it was; gifted it to girlfriends who all threw it back in his face. When he married up with a freebase pipe, he and his glass bride huddled under that coat for days on end. It kept in the vapors and blocked out the sun until, angry and tired, beset by demons and filled with self-loathing, he doused himself with rum and lit the fuse, melting that animal spirit deep into his own. He tried to swear it off, but by then Truth had gotten under his skin, was a part of him, even if he couldn’t live up to its message.

  —————

  We didn’t set out to write the definitive cradle-to-grave biography of Richard Pryor, and haven’t. We chose instead to go exploring, to mine the soil out of which he grew, and map the cultural landscape from which he emerged.

  What we found more inspiring than the romanticized idea of genius that springs fully formed out of thin air is the evidence that Richard found all the materials he would ever need among the hair clippings, blood-clumped sawdust, and cigarette butts he swept up from the barbershops, meatpacking plants, and pool halls—blowing in the wind, as it were—in his native Peoria. He gathered it all together and deliberately, playfully rearranged and assembled that cast-off detritus into something unexpected, beautiful, frightening, and new. (Even the god of our Old Testament shaped creation not out of nothing but out of chaos.) Richard spun his out of straw. And when he held this thing up for all to see, not only did we all recognize and embrace it, we could no longer remember a time when we had been without it. That this gift came from a broken and tragic figure should come as no surprise. It is the cracks, after all—the holes in the firmament—that let in the light.

  The greatest tragedy of Richard Pryor may have been that he was content to be labeled a “comic.” We heard this over and over in our interviews with Richard’s colleagues and idolaters: he was beyond mere comedy. If you read transcripts of his breakthrough routines, you’ll find nothing remotely funny in the words themselves as printed on the page. It was all in his delivery, his empathy, his willingness to give himself fully to the characters he portrayed, and to let them take possession of him—so much so that it seems blasphemous to speak of “other comedians” when discussing Richard Pryor. There are no others. No one else could do onstage what Richard Pryor did. As his friend David Brenner says, “He stands alone.”

  Stories abound from the early days of radio when white comics would trek uptown to the Apollo, pencil and paper in hand, and help themselves to the best gags. One clear mark of Richard’s genius is that his comedy remains absolutely theft-proof. No one else could do his material. No one else would dare.

  We watched in real time as Richard’s genius outstripped the confines of stand-up comedy, ran circles around it, danced on its grave, even while—in the same way a length of rope can let you know about a knot’s design—it was his comic persona that allowed us to see what his genius was all about, which was this: it reflected our flawed and brutal humanity back to us as something we could both love and forgive.

  That it still accomplishes this in his absence is testament to the fact that the truth Richard spoke lived outside of his particular alchemy and his frail, fleeting times. But if truth is luminous, Richard was, for a while, the wiry, fragile filament, humming in a glass bulb. A brilliant and ferocious light danced through him. We laughed in private, as he invited us to, all the while vaguely sensing what novelist Walter Mosley would later state plain: Richard Pryor wasn’t joking.

  PART ONE

  A NATIVE SON OF WISTFUL VISTA

  “Get out!”

  That whispery, strangulated voice belongs to an emaciated and prematurely frail Richard Pryor doing a dead-on impersonation of the demonic spirit from The Amityville Horror. He was in a good mood, playfully dismissing the questions put to him by Peoria Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano backstage at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall on New Year’s Eve 1992 midway through a comeback tour that would prove to be his last.

  Once upon a time a lanky and loose-limbed Richard had bounded onto the stage with acrobatic grace, shape-shifting himself into all manner of people and things: pious preachers, rum-soaked raconteurs, white guys on acid, drunken brawlers, drooling junkies, angry black militants, bullet-punctured automobile tires, an infant at the moment of birth, a deer alerted by the sounds of hunters crunching leaves in the forest, copulating monkeys, police dogs, an especially potent strain of a Vietnamese venereal disease—even his own heart as it threatened to kill him, forcing him down on one knee to beg for his lif
e. But on this night he made his way across the stage in cautious, shuffling steps, flanked by an alert pair of handlers, one on each arm. Universally hailed as the greatest stand-up of all time, he performed this final tour sitting down.

  More than thirty-seven hundred people paid $37.50 apiece to see what reviewers of earlier stops on the tour had warned would be a brief, disjointed performance. During his show at Detroit’s State Theatre, he had struggled to read from cue cards fanned out on the floor in front of him while a onetime fiancée in the audience fought back tears. Kicking off the tour in San Francisco months earlier, he had trembled visibly and slurred his words. And when he segued into his most famous character, the street-wizened Mudbone, he barely needed to alter his voice. After a mere twenty minutes, he had to be assisted off the stage to prolonged applause. People were just happy to see him, to thank him. That was all. But on this particular night in D.C., he showed more of his old self, lasting a full forty-five minutes. He seemed stronger, funnier, as he confronted the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis head-on. “I got some shit here that fucks with me real bad. This is a thing, like, God said to me, ‘Slooow down.’ Well, fuck, I was going that fast?”

  Onstage, the man was fearless, prepared to reveal anything. During his show at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California, a woman in the audience called out, “Does that shit mess with your sex life?” and he ran with it.

  It’s something when your dick be hard, then look at you and laugh and go away and go, “Aw, fuck it.” And it looks like my dick gets scared to death when it sees some pussy. My dick gets hard sometimes, like I get ready to play and masturbate, and my dick will look at me like, “Come on, Rich . . .” It’s a bitch when your dick get hard and there’s nothing you can do but say, “I can remember . . .” And I have it in my hand. I know I’ve got it! And the dick be waiting for me to stroke it so it can die. You guys are laughing but I’m telling you this shit fuck with your johnson!