Becoming Richard Pryor (12 page)

Ultimately, she just had to promise him the spotlight—the role of emcee at the regular talent shows she organized. These shows were a main event for Peoria’s young blacks. Carver’s auditorium would be packed with hundreds of kids, all straining to see who would win the prize for best singing or music group. Local gangs would even settle their rivalries at the shows: a singing group from the old projects would battle against a singing group from the new projects, and the
outcome would determine which gang could hold its head high the next day. Richard loved the crowd—it was his first time performing his comedy for a large black audience—and the crowd loved him back. In little time, he’d built up a following. At his first show as emcee, he simply had five minutes, enough time for a riff or two. Then Juliette decided to design the shows around Richard, who was in a class of his own, the only comedian at the center. “The kids would come to rehearsal like you would expect them to come to a performance. The auditorium would be packed,” Juliette recalled.

At the later talent shows, perhaps because he had more time to extend himself and perhaps because he drew on his recent work with the Youth Theater Guild, Richard started taking on characters more fully. He did “impressions” of well-known figures from the community, and the audience howled in recognition of how Richard captured their quirks and body language. His favorite character, though, was an invention of his own: a black superhero too poor to buy his own suit, who went to rummage sales and put one together out of used pantyhose, a cape (which he stole), and a pair of shoes that were clownishly large: “The Rummage Sale Ranger.” Like Juliette Whittaker, who built her stage out of tossed-out orange crates, the Rummage Sale Ranger made an art out of making do. He was the comic book hero of Richard’s imagination and a mirror for everything he adored about the improvisational spirit of Juliette.

“Miss Whittaker was just a magic lady,” Richard said in a 1974 interview, a note of wonder creeping into his voice. “She just makes you feel like there’s something in life.” He loved her tutelage, but his own capacity for troublemaking soon pushed him out of it.

Peoria and the Army, 1956–1960

I
n September 1955, Richard transferred to Central High for ninth grade and found himself back in a nearly all-white environment, one of 9 blacks in a class of 340 students, most of whom hailed from Peoria’s affluent bluff. All Central’s teachers, administrators, and even its custodians and cafeteria staff were white. Still, there were fewer brawls at Central than at Roosevelt or Trewyn, and Richard at first adapted to its controlled environment, buoyed by his experiences two miles away in Carver’s afterschool programs. “Richard had something he could really get into,” said Juliette Whittaker, “a positive approach to himself. He was being appreciated [at Carver], and that minimized the problems he was having in class.” In the fall of 1955, he earned by far his best marks since second grade: a passel of Cs and the first A ever to appear on his transcript, in Physical Education—a subject, perhaps more than any other, in which it was possible to get an A for effort.

At the same time, Richard hit a hard, unyielding wall at Central in the person of his science teacher, Mr. Fink. A former air force colonel who still experimented with model airplanes, Walter Fink brought a military sensibility to the domain of the classroom. Standing perfectly rigid and tall, Fink looked like a sharp-nosed Gregory Peck. He was the straightest of straight arrows, a man who “didn’t put up with foolishness,” in the words of Richard’s friend Loren Cornish. Richard, meanwhile, was foolishness incarnate, the clown in permanent residence in the classroom’s back row, always cracking wise, desperate to keep his classmates in stitches.

One day in mid-March 1956, Mr. Fink reached his limit: he interrupted a Pryor performance by seizing Richard by the scruff of his neck and removing him bodily from the classroom. Richard, in response, took a swing at him. That punch was grounds for Richard’s expulsion from Central High. Richard lasted 129 days in ninth grade—82 more than Frank Sinatra, who endured only two restive months in high school, and roughly the same interval as Roseanne Barr, a comic whom Richard later inspired to take the stage. At age fifteen, he was done with his formal education.

Though Richard couldn’t help but take the expulsion personally, as a verdict on his fitness for school, in another sense the expulsion wasn’t personal at all. It was business as usual—Peoria’s educational machine separating the wheat from the chaff or, more precisely, the white from the black. None of the eight other blacks who entered Central with Richard were still there by the end of eleventh grade. Whether because they left school voluntarily to join the working world or, like Richard, ran afoul of school authorities, black teens in Peoria were extremely unlikely to finish high school. A black population of over ten thousand produced a paltry crop of thirty high school graduates per year, reflecting a dropout rate higher than ghetto-bound Chicago’s, even.

Buck absorbed the news of his son’s expulsion without registering the faintest surprise. “It’s okay,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this. If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.” Richard had a grace period of exactly one family dinner. The next day, he needed to find work; he would no longer be free to develop his muse at the Carver Center in the afternoons. He had skipped ahead to his statistical fate as a black male, born in Peoria in the 1940s: backbreaking work, and not enough of it to earn a good living. A mid-1950s survey of employment in Peoria discovered that blacks were overrepresented in only two occupations, as laundresses and janitors, where they cleaned up the messes left by others. There was exactly one black doctor and one black engineer in Peoria, and no black accountants, lawyers, or writers. Having completed only eighth grade, Richard
looked extremely unlikely to finesse his way out of the world of manual labor.

He started by working as a janitor at a strip club, but soon lost the job when the club’s manager noticed the women rising from the stage with dirt and grit stippling their bodies. “I can do the sweeping, but I can’t do no mopping,” Richard admitted. “My arms too skinny.”

He lasted longer at the shoeshine station of the Hotel Pere Marquette, a downtown showpiece designed by the same architect who had conceived New York’s Ritz-Carlton and Harvard’s Widener Memorial Library. The architecture of the Pere Marquette, with its high-domed grand lobby, marble staircase, and crystal chandeliers, captured the ambitious, free-for-all spirit of Peoria in the 1920s. At the hotel, Richard bent over the shoes of conventioneers and, in his recollection, “made the shine cloth crack like a bullwhip.” He entertained his customers with jokes and banter, and even enjoyed himself a bit. But he knew he had only a bootblack’s upturned view of the glamour around him. He told friends that he always dreamed of having enough money to take a meal at the hotel’s restaurant, whose tables looked onto Main Street through large picture windows. He yearned to be the man whose shoes were being polished, the man who sat above the crowd.

Richard loved getting paid and feeling “the jingle-jangle of possibilities in my pocket”; he sensed himself growing into independence. But to his grandmother and father, he was a mere teenage boy, still living at home and still to be handled as a child. Over and again, Richard declared that his grandmother and father needed to treat him with respect—and over and again, they whittled him down to size. Once, his grandmother told him to clean a skillet, as had been the custom. Richard refused, and added preemptively, “Hey Mama, don’t hit me no more. I’m a
man
!” Marie asked, “Yeah, nigger?” then answered her own question by grabbing the skillet and cracking Richard on the head with it.

On another occasion, Buck found Richard in the housing projects, so drunk that he defied his father when Buck ordered him into
his car. Two decades after the incident, Marie relished its denouement on
The Mike Douglas Show
:

Tellingly, when Marie spun out this story on the talk show, Richard exploded in laughter next to her, wiping tears from his eyes. It was as if he recognized the paradox of his childhood: that when Marie punished her grandson for pretending to be the man he wasn’t, she made him into the man he became.

Buck remained a more baleful antagonist, the epitome of brute force to the teenage Richard. In
Live in Concert
(1979), Richard re-created a faceoff with Buck over the state of his manhood. Threatened with a beating, he announced to Buck, with a breaking voice, “I’m not takin’ any more ass-whupping. This is it!” Buck replied, “What? You a man now, motherfucker?”—and like Marie, he didn’t wait for an answer to the question.

Understandably, Richard added a dose of magical realism to the tale, bouncing around the stage with his arms stiff at his side, as if his chest
had the power to swallow Buck’s fist. The unreality took the edge off the pain.

Still, it may have been a different side of Buck, the sexual cynic, that wounded the teenage Richard the most. Around the summer of 1956, Richard met a girl his age, “an attractive little package,” and managed to turn his parents’ garage into a bare-bones lovers’ hideaway. A few months later, she told Richard she was pregnant, and he crumpled emotionally: he was eager to fall in love, but not ready to be a father. He ran into his house in a panic and broke the news to Buck. His stepmother Ann rushed into the dining room, saw the tears on Richard’s face, and asked, “What’s wrong with the boy, Bucky?” Buck answered, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with him. Got some girl pregnant.” Richard started heaving with sobs.

At that point Buck and Ann took Richard into the living room and convened a family meeting, where Buck, who himself had fathered four children out of wedlock, questioned whether the child was Richard’s. Richard decided to follow the path that his father had himself followed. A baby girl was born in April 1957, but Richard kept his distance.

By the time of the baby’s birth, Richard appears to have left behind his job as a shoeshine at the Pere Marquette and turned to more demanding physical work. For a while, he helped his father and uncle with their recently launched trucking business. On one memorable job, his uncle drove a truck loaded with coal and dumped it onto the street; Richard’s task was to shovel the coal into a cellar. “I never knew there was so much coal in the world. From then on, I stuck to oil heat,” he quipped a decade later. After his trucking job, he found steady work at a local slaughterhouse, shaking and folding hides and loading them onto Chicago-bound trains. “It was nasty work,” Richard observed. “All the shit that got on me during the day, the rock salt, water and whatnot, froze in the cold. By quitting time, my pants were as stiff as a board.”

Belittled at home and ground down at work, Richard spent as much time as possible with his posse of black friends, woofing away the hours on the streets of Peoria. Richard was the kid with the frail body and the smart mouth: he radiated fear even when he wasn’t in
the orbit of his family, and he radiated sass even though he lacked the physique to back it up. If you gave him a ride on your scooter, he would start crying when the scooter accelerated too fast for his comfort. He needed a shield like his friend Matt Clark, a solidly built kid who, a decade before, had bonded with Richard over their shared love of cowboys. Clark knew how to handle himself in a crowd, having grown up in a family of seventeen kids, and he could intercede when Richard’s mouth rubbed other kids the wrong way. The two had, in Clark’s estimation, “the perfect friendship. I protected him from danger, and he made me laugh.”

Richard practiced his stand-up routines wherever he could. Though he looked to many like a garden-variety cutup, he dreamed big: he made his barber cut his hair so that he looked more like Harry Belafonte, one of America’s first black matinee idols. He stationed himself in front of his uncle Herman’s pool hall and told jokes with enough flair that passersby would sometimes linger for half an hour or more. Often he hung out with his friends at State Park, in the center of downtown Peoria, performing for an audience that appreciated his material but never gave him a free pass. They shared bottles of Silver Satin, a cheap and sweet white wine, and watched movies that the city projected on the wall of the neighboring Lincoln School. State Park was their preferred locale for a simple reason: it had clear sight lines that allowed Richard and his friends to spot any police cars before the cops could reach them and bust them for violating the eleven o’clock curfew.

The curfew was, for black teenagers, an ever-present threat—a nightly reminder that, just by trying to have a good time, they risked being hauled into custody by the police. Because they tended to gather indoors and outside the curfew’s enforcement area downtown, white teens were not much affected by it; the law plainly targeted young black teens like Richard, who hung out on the downtown streets. Thirty minutes before the curfew, horns in the housing projects would blare a reminder. At eleven o’clock, police cars would sweep through downtown, and black teens would scatter and run.
They lived in fear that they’d be picked up and hauled “down to the river”—the Illinois River, which curved around the edge of downtown—and take a beating there. They were right to be afraid: the policemen, who were themselves black and Arab-American (and thus not allowed to patrol the white parts of town), wanted to scare the kids straight. They would bring a curfew violator to the river, ask him to “drink it,” then dunk his head in the water.