Becoming Richard Pryor (37 page)

All these new friends were artists who, like Richard, had found a way to turn the language of the streets into the language of art, but more than Richard, they could step back and give an intellectual account of their style. Claude Brown in
Esquire
in 1968: “Perhaps the most soulful word in the world is ‘nigger.’ . . .’Nigger’ has virtually as many shades of meaning in Colored English as the demonstrative pronoun ‘that,’ prior to application to a noun.” Ishmael Reed, in the introduction to a 1970 anthology
19
Necromancers from Now
: “[T]he great restive underground language rising from the American slums and fringe communities is the real American poetry and prose.”

The old justifications Richard had given for his act—getting paid, making people laugh—seemed tired and worn out by comparison. He grappled with his limitations. “I don’t think I have a style yet, that’s what I’m working on,” he told
Good Times
. “Something special. A tone. I blow good but I haven’t got the tone yet.” In the meantime, he introduced himself by way of a disclaimer: “People think I’m funny. But that shit ain’t true. I ain’t funny. I’m a serious mother.”

Not long after meeting Cecil Brown, Richard stopped crashing at Alan Farley’s apartment and moved a few blocks away, to a $110-a-month rental in a dingy clapboard rooming house where the doors were secured by padlocks. He had a bed, some clothes, a TV, a portable record player, and a single copy of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which he spun over and over until he considered it “the soundtrack for my life.” He hibernated and retreated into himself, trying to unriddle his life’s inner mystery. He read and reread the collected speeches of Malcolm X, whose story of ascetic self-transformation reverberated in him. Malcolm stood as an emblem of the courage that Richard hoped to gather. A week after his Mandrake’s gig, he recorded an arresting riff on Farley’s tape recorder:

A
nd what was Richard, holed up in his bare apartment, to do about the shit going down all around him? He had largely given up on TV work, his main vehicle for reaching a larger audience, explaining to a Bay Area interviewer that being on TV was “like drinking out of two cups.” (The reference was to Paul’s stern warning in 1 Corinthians 10:21, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils.”) He took a more relaxed attitude to booking gigs, trying to escape the Hollywood mentality: “I’m using the money, the money ain’t using me.” And perhaps because he was now surrounded by writers, he made an unprecedented commitment to writing, experimenting with genres he had never before tackled, in an effort to express new thoughts, new visions, new tones. It was, he later reflected, “the freest time of my life.”

Sometimes he’d sit down by himself, “very high”—in his words—
“on cocaine and whiskey and insecurity and guilt,” and try to improvise poetry into being. A snatch of one stream-of-consciousness poem, recorded in the fall of 1971, captures the blend of disillusionment and yearning, exhaustion and ambition, that filled Richard during this interval. His voice on the recording is scratchy and eerie, like a phone call from beyond the grave:

If life was an “endless bloody dream,” Richard was pursuing a certain wakefulness within it. The boy who had grown up in a brothel was looking to be reborn in a state of purity—to find that, in his heart, he had “no crimes, no sins, no guilts.” He withdrew all claim on the “things that have been willed to me”: for the would-be ascetic, less was more; the man without possessions was free to be full of life. Yet Richard’s performance of the poem, his graveyard voice, pulled against the triumphant message. It was as if he recognized that there might be wisdom in renouncing the world, but not so much in the way of pleasure.

In fact, “pleasure” was far from the center of the creative work Richard produced in Berkeley, starting with a number of film scenarios he devised in the wake of seeing director Melvin Van Peebles’s
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
. With his wild fable of black payback, Peebles succeeded where Richard failed with
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
. The film—about a professional sex stud who kills two policemen in
defense of a Black Panther, screws his way out of handcuffs, then screws his way out of the clutches of a female biker gang—was the surprise hit of 1971, taking in over five million dollars and launching the blaxploitation boom. The movie divided black critics fiercely: Huey Newton celebrated it as “the first truly revolutionary Black film made . . . by a Black man,” while
Ebony
’s Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote, in a crisp takedown of its politics, that “F***ing will not set you free. If f***ing freed, black people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.”

Richard watched
Sweetback
over and over. “I was sad I wasn’t in it. I envied the people that had parts in it,” he said at the time. Then he praised the “phenomenal” movie with a resonant analogy: “That was as exciting to me as it must have been to Walter Cronkite when the cat landed on the moon.” Van Peebles was a black Neil Armstrong, planting a flag in
terra incognita
, a spot formerly thought unreachable; Richard was exulting in the transmission from a world away.

Sweetback
revived Richard’s dreams of being a filmmaker. He brainstormed one day, on Alan Farley’s tape recorder, a short film titled
The Assassin
, set five years into an apocalyptic race war. The film would follow a day in the life of a black guerrilla, stalking through a forest and armed with a rifle, bayonet, and hand grenades. The guerrilla is implacable, indifferent. He sees two white children picking flowers in a meadow and garrotes them with a wire before killing their mother and father, too. He steals into an army stockade where he sees seventeen bodies, people accused of anti-American activities, swinging in the breeze, then kills the army officers responsible. At sundown he sees a white female hippie taking a bath naked in a stream; she dreamily invites him to smoke some grass and lay her. He kisses her, then stabs her in the stomach with the bayonet. Finally, he walks to the top of a mountain, surveys his world, and says to himself, “There be mornings,” before falling asleep and beginning the cycle anew.

The Assassin
was not much—a creative burp that came out of Richard’s political dyspepsia, reflecting his hunger to be righteous
and his sense of being utterly alone. He invested more energy into
This Can’t Be Happening to Me
, his first attempt to translate his Peoria upbringing into film. The screenplay survives only in fragments, but those pieces suggest how, as Richard delved into the enigma of his identity, he was brooding over the scenes of his childhood, tinting them with a tripped-out imagination that made his projected film cousin to a midnight movie like
El Topo
. If the Richard Pryor of the mid-1960s underplayed the difficulties of his childhood, and if the Richard Pryor of the late 1960s turned them to comedic account, the Richard Pryor of the early 1970s, in Berkeley, remade them into a show of horrors. His feelings of humiliation and loss ran like a bright red thread through whatever he wrote.

The screenplay begins with the teenage Richard stabbed in a chaotic fight in his grandmother Marie’s brothel. Shocked at seeing her grandson wounded, Marie fires her gun “in fear and excitement,” but the bullet goes wild; she literally shoots Richard in the back, killing him. Before he passes into oblivion, though, the scenes of Richard’s life flash painfully before his eyes: his mother servicing a john while his father spies on the scene from a keyhole; visiting a priest after being kicked out of parochial school for having a mother who works as a prostitute. “Why is this happening to me?” he asks during the latter. Doves perch all over the priest’s head and body, covering him with their excrement; the priest answers Richard’s appeal gravely and hesitantly, spitting out bird droppings every few words. When the camera pulls away from the shit-spattered priest, we see that, as he has been dispensing sober advice, he has also been masturbating into a vat of holy water.

In its last act—Richard’s funeral and wake—
This Can’t Be Happening to Me
strikes a different, calmer note. If the earlier scenes are brutalizing, seeking to traumatize the viewer as Richard has been traumatized, these are suffused with resignation. We see a diamond-ringed preacher eulogizing Richard, then pull back to discover the church empty except for the preacher and a naked Richard. The scene takes up the eternal gnawing question “Will they be sorry when I’m gone?,”
and answers it in the negative. There is nothing left for Richard but to cremate himself. He walks into a furnace and comes out as ash.

In the screenplay’s final scene, Richard at last gets a proper send-off when the preacher gathers together Richard’s friends—“pimps, whores, dudes”—and mixes his ashes into ten pounds of cocaine. Everyone snorts and reminisces. Richard, reconstituted and now wearing what’s described as a “Super Nigger” outfit, looks on with satisfaction. But the “Super Nigger” costume, we discover, is merely another version of a clown suit. Richard announces, “Everyone knows Super Niggers can’t fly,” and shambles off toward the darkness. When he turns his back to the camera, he reveals that his suit has a large hole at his rear end. He departs bare-assed from his life, and his film.

This Can’t Be Happening to Me
never happened; it ended up in some producer’s slush pile, if it ended anywhere at all. But the screenplay stands as a revealing X-ray into the mind of Richard during his Berkeley sojourn. He might still wear a “Super Nigger” suit, but he no longer believed in the bravado of the act. He was reconnecting with the fragility he’d felt as a child and lingering with it, searching for answers and finding only more questions.

A
s the final scene of
This Can’t Be Happening
to Me
suggests, Richard never quite gave up
all
the things willed to him in the world. In Berkeley he kept his cocaine close, while being extremely generous with it. Claude Brown remembered a drug dealer visiting Richard with a fresh shipment and asking, “How much you want?”—to which Richard replied, “How much you got? Just leave it there. I’ll see you tomorrow.” The cocaine was so pure that the two of them needed to steady themselves with shots of overproof rum when they snorted it or else they’d lose their grip. “We’d be up at dawn and going for two or three days,” Brown said. “I used to have to keep away from him to get some sleep.” On his benders, Richard took to wearing an old kimono, wooden sandals, and the conical hat of a rice farmer, looking, in his words, “like a deranged wizard.” At one point on Telegraph
Avenue, he popped a quarter into a newspaper kiosk, removed all the newspapers, and then tried handing them off to pedestrians nearby. When they wouldn’t take the papers, he started throwing them—at people, at cars. Someone familiar with the neighborhood’s denizens might have mistaken him for one of the Persian Fuckers.

Yet in his stage act at the time, Richard was honing one of his greatest routines, a sharp and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction. Berkeley may not have released him from his drug habit, but it gave him enough critical distance on it to distill the life of an addict into a riveting version of his “Wino and Junkie” routine. The ironic stance of his intellectual friends, who claimed the authority of street knowledge but refused to be reduced to their blackness, resonated in his stage act. Asked by an interviewer how he found his material, Richard lit on a curious comparison: “You know how Dracula has to suck blood? I go out and get vibes, find out what it’s about. Revitalize, re-energize myself, get back with the people. I get high. I suck up the vibes.” Like some benign vampire, Richard was a boundary crosser—of the streets and beyond the streets at once.

Richard’s “Wino and Junkie” was his showstopper for years to come, and it is both as experimental and as finely calibrated as anything he ever performed in his stage act. The routine always began with the familiar character of the wino, whose low social position is no bar to his braggadocio. For two or five or ten minutes, Richard would play this self-proclaimed “people-ologist” of the ghetto, spinning off unbelievable riffs on how he had worked for the FBI, or how he knew, from personal experience of the man, that Jesus could never have risen from the grave (“Shit—he wouldn’t get up in the morning”).

Then the routine would hang and take on a more unpredictable rhythm, as if it were losing itself in the confusions of the street:

[
Picks something off his pants
]

[
Suddenly becomes animated and fluid as he mimics the wino’s efforts to direct cars like a traffic cop
.]