Becoming Richard Pryor (25 page)

The second track of black comedy, infinitely preferable by the lights of
A Time for Laughter
, encompassed the performances that blacks had reserved solely for themselves. “Negro humor has stayed home,” Poitier explained. “And through generations of fermentation it has become a heady wine rarely tasted by the outside world.”
A Time for Laughter
announced that now, in 1967, the time had come for everyone in America to put away the cheap imitations and sample the real stuff. It entered a pool hall, where Redd Foxx was irreverently dressing down the civil rights movement: “Somebody hit you upside the head with an axe handle, and all you’re supposed to do is lay there and hum, ‘We shall overcome’?” It sat in the courtroom of Judge Pigmeat Markham, who delivered his verdict by whacking the plaintiff with a bladder balloon. It dallied in a barbershop, where a manicurist and a Black Muslim bantered freely. If blackface minstrelsy tended to flatten black life into a cartoon of itself,
A Time for Laughter
revealed the variety of the black community and the streetwise wit of those within it.

Richard might genuinely have wondered where he fit into this two-track model of black comedy. Alone among the comics assembled for the special, he was a crossover performer first and foremost, with a taste for physical comedy and surrealism that was easier to link to the hash-brownie spirit of the counterculture than to the “heady wine” of the black tradition. He wasn’t shucking and jiving, exactly, but neither was he in the company of older comics like Foxx, Markham, or Moms Mabley. Nor did he fit in with the more recent
“humor of the revolution.” There was nothing in Richard’s act that compared with the defiance of Dick Gregory, recounting from a jail cell his tussle with a southern cop: “He said, ‘You’ll make this march over my dead body.’ I said, ‘Baby, that wouldn’t be a bad route.’”

On the special, Richard played a version of his frequent
Merv Griffin
persona, the novice out of his depth. Here he was a young funeral director fumbling through the eulogy of a man he never knew, casually taking up a seat on the coffin and crossing his legs to make himself comfortable. Mostly he was a victim of his own improvisatory spirit, his inability to stick with the safety of cliché. “The Lord giveth and he taketh away,” he started. “You might say he’s a sort of an Indian giver. Life is not a bowl of cherries. No, life is just a big bowl and it’s up to us to fill it up with anything we want to fill it with. Now John—he chose to fill his bowl with old beer cans. That’s his bowl!” Richard’s performance was a solid piece of character-based humor, but in its goofy tone, it was also an outlier in the special. As the
Chicago Defender
judged, it “would be equally at home in any color scheme.”

A Time for Laughter
cut Richard to the quick. Observing his fellow comics do their thing, he felt that his career had been missing a dimension. “Working in a show like the Belafonte special has convinced me I’ve got a long way to go to really make it,” he told TV critic Harvey Pack just after the show wrapped.

A few months later, in an
Ebony
interview, Richard chose to speak the truth about his past for the first time with a reporter. Whether he’d experienced some sort of political awakening or had simply grown frustrated by the game he’d been playing, he let go of the usual euphemisms and canned answers. When asked the standard question about where he came from, he answered that he had lived in a brothel until he was fifteen. The interviewer, a black woman, was “shocked by his lie.” Richard laughed hysterically. The reporter implored him to be serious, and he parried by reading the situation perfectly. “Your serious and my serious are two different seriouses,” he told her. It wasn’t just white America that couldn’t absorb, or stomach, the truth of his life.

The interviewer might be forgiven for thinking that Richard was pranking her. In the hours they’d spent together, he had, variously, run into the middle of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine and started directing traffic (for which a motorcycle cop awarded him a ticket); hopped into an empty bathtub fully clothed to demonstrate his creative process; and “proven” that he was making a documentary on dogs by training the lens of his sixteen-millimeter camera on a coil of excrement on his lawn. Still, a more contemplative Richard was poking out of the hijinks. When asked to reflect on his career, he said, “I never thought about not making it,” then paused. “But the
it
has nothing to do with show business. The
it
I’m trying to make is me. Who am I?”

A
fter
A Time for Laughter
, Richard’s life took two dramatic turns. Onstage he delved into the more color-coded parts of his past, developing what
Billboard
called “vignettes of a boyhood in a not-too-genteel neighborhood”: his first sketches on his Peoria circle of friends and their struggles with the curfew date from this period. Personally, he spun into a crisis without compare, in length and severity, with his life’s earlier rough patches. Drifting away from his earlier act as a comedian, he also drifted away from his commitments in toto, consequences be damned.

His relationship with Maxine, nine months pregnant and about to give birth, was the first to go. While she focused on the child-to-be and the future life of their family, he acted as if he had no obligations to her, haunting nightclubs and gambling with friends until the early morning. In his defense, Richard claimed that he “could barely commit to being me. How could I give her more? But the more I said no, the more adamant she became. The only reason we stayed together was because neither of us had any other place to go.” The relationship hit its breaking point when, just a matter of days from having their child, Maxine went on a reconnaissance mission to the Daisy and caught Richard with another woman in his arms. At that, even the adamant Maxine finally threw up her hands.

On April 24, 1967, Maxine was at a friend’s home and, feeling the pangs of labor, was rushed to the hospital; she gave birth soon after. Richard, meanwhile, was in a world of his own—wandering outside that evening, his eyes trained on a gently looming harvest moon that looked like a “big orange balloon” or a “big orange titty” and was teasing him: “Hey, Rich, what’s going on? Why don’t you come and get me?” He jumped in his car and chased the full moon south toward Mexico. He drove as if “holding on to a rope,” and that rope pulled him back to the red-light districts of his past. By the time the moon disappeared in the light of day, Richard was in Tijuana, drinking and partying with a few “pretty little whores.” He was looking to blot out Maxine—her demands, the pressures of building a family—and the partying did the job. For four or five days, he devoted himself to oblivion.

U.S. Customs officers killed his high, and quickly, when at the border they searched his car and person for drugs and found an ounce of pot—part of a crackdown on the Tijuana–San Ysidro border that seized more than sixteen thousand pounds of marijuana in 1967. Richard disputed the charge in his memoir: “I was black and I’m convinced that was the reason I got stopped. . . . There wasn’t even enough to roll a joint.” Whatever the material evidence, he soon found himself in jail, charged with possession of marijuana. Richard stewed in jail for six days before he was reminded, by a deputy, that he had been booked with thousands of dollars on his person, more than enough to post bail. He bought his way out of jail time.

When he arrived back in Los Angeles, it was as the father of a baby girl named Elizabeth—and it was without a place to live. By splitting the first two weeks of their child’s life between a Tijuana brothel and a San Diego jail, Richard had done an unparalleled job of demonstrating his unfitness for parenthood, and Maxine made him leave their Beverly Hills home. He decamped to the Sunset Towers West, a complex that claimed to provide “the most luxurious apartment[s]” on “the famed Sunset Strip,” with “country-resort living” and hotel-quality service for its residents. Richard remembered it, by contrast,
as a “home for a hodgepodge of Hollywood dreamers, schemers, and hustlers,” and he seems to have been dead-on about the desperation in the air. In the year after he lived there, one resident—a producer of
noir
and horror films—shot himself in the head. Another resident, also a Hollywood producer, would later hijack a Chicago-bound plane and demand half a million dollars in small bills and safe harbor in the Bahamas. (He got neither.)

Richard was himself a sharp-elbowed wreck during his stay at the Sunset Towers West. He hooked up with a drug dealer he called Dirty Dick, and it was not unusual for him to snort as much as two hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine a day, or roughly the full amount he commanded for a night’s work. Around 11:30 on the night of July 26, 1967, Richard walked into the lobby of the Towers fresh from a session at Dirty Dick’s and “fairly well fucked up.” He asked for his messages and his mail. Fabian Tholkes, the hotel’s auditor and night clerk, gave him his messages but couldn’t give him his mail right away: the mailbox required his key, which the Towers management had taken from Richard for nonpayment of his rent. Richard was discovering, for the first time, that he had been locked out of his room. Tholkes offered to talk to the manager about the missing key and began to patch through the call, but before he could follow through, an older white woman asked Tholkes for
her
mail. Tholkes made the fateful decision to give Rose Pritcherson her mail before settling the matter of Richard’s key.

In an average tone of voice, Richard muttered a single word:
discrimination
. It was his last restrained action of the night. He reached across the hotel desk, grabbed Tholkes by the necktie until he gagged, and punched the bespectacled clerk in the left eye. The lens shattered, and pieces of glass sliced into Tholkes’s eye. By this point, Sunset Towers manager Wayne Trosper had picked up the phone call from Tholkes. Instead of hearing Tholkes’s voice inquiring about Richard’s mail key, he caught the sound of commotion. Trosper, a former Las Vegas policeman, rushed into the lobby and, seeing Richard only, asked what the trouble was.

“Who are you?” Richard asked back.

“The manager,” Trosper answered. He caught sight of his hotel clerk, slinking in the background with a bloody towel held over his face.

Richard asked Trosper, “How would you like some of the same thing?”

Trosper got off the best line of the evening: “Not in my lobby. I just redid it today.” He laid his suit jacket on a safe—as cautious about his suit as about his renovated hotel—and told Richard not to leave.

Richard went outside and stood on the hotel entrance’s top step. Trosper circled him and stood on the bottom step, blocking his way. The two traded insults.

Without warning, Richard lunged at Trosper and smashed Trosper’s face with his fist. Then he ran to the street and paused at a newspaper vending box. Juiced by the cocaine, Richard picked up the vending box and tried to heave it at Trosper; it was chained to the ground, and clattered at his own feet. The Battle of the Sunset Towers West had progressed from intemperate explosion to blustery farce, with Richard reprising the role of failed weight lifter from his pantomimes. Sirens could be heard approaching from the west.

Richard pulled a knife from his pocket and told Trosper, “I am going to kill you.” He slashed Trosper across his cheek, then pulled out a fork to complete his utensil set. Trosper grabbed Richard’s arms, twisted them backward at the wrists, and removed the fork from one hand and the knife from the other. Weaponless, Richard ran down Sunset Boulevard—and into the arms of the Sheriff’s Department. He was saved, for the night, from his own capacity for making trouble.

It was a night of random wastage that was, in other ways, not random at all. In the army, Richard had rehearsed the threat “I am going to kill you.” At the Café Wha?, he had rehearsed attacking someone with a fork. Throughout his life, he was cursed by the combination of his sensitivity to racial prejudice and his combustible temper. For Richard, “discrimination” could explain so much—how quick Trosper was to lock him out of his room, or how slow Tholkes was to
settle the matter of his mail box key, or how matter-of-factly Trosper handled Richard in the lobby and outside. In cross-examination at a preliminary hearing about the incident, Richard’s lawyer suggested that Trosper had been terminated by the Las Vegas Police Department for police brutality. (The judge never let Trosper answer the allegation.) And in his memoir, Richard claimed that Tholkes taunted him into a fight with “Come on, nigger. Come on and try it.”

The court record, however, does not mention that statement. And it’s also true that, under the influence of cocaine, Richard was not exactly the most reliable narrator. Tholkes ended up with a lacerated cornea and permanent loss of vision in his left eye—an injury disproportionate to the slight Richard suffered, whatever it was. Booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, Richard was silent as Tholkes, Trosper, and Tholkes’s ophthalmologist gave testimony in his preliminary trial. Whether because he was advised against it by his attorney or because he couldn’t, in his current state, give a good account of himself, he was not deposed to offer his side of the story.

T
hree days after his mute performance at the preliminary hearing, Richard ran out of words in a still more perilous location—onstage at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas. It was the primal scene of his comic development, full of shock and shame and feelings of indecent exposure. He would return to the ill-fated act again and again in interviews, as if his failure there held the secret to his future success. In the words of journalist Mark Jacobson, the incident is “the pith of Pryor legend.” But Richard was loose with the details, which has lent an air of mystery to the legend. He dated his crack-up anywhere from 1967 to 1970. Sometimes, as in his memoir, he turned the episode into a story about his own haplessness—how he walked onstage, stared at his audience, wondered whom they were looking at, and walked off to find the answer. Other times, he turned it into a story of half-crazed defiance—how he stripped naked, ran into the casino, jumped onto the 21 table, and announced himself with a single word, “Blackjack.”