Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (2 page)

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 life. 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!

There’s something that happens to your bladder. I can be out on Sunset talking with eight or nine womens and I start pissin’. That shit be running down my boots . . . I say, “Damn, baby . . .” She say, “It’s alright.” How come people always say it’s alright when it ain’t them? And you have piss trailing a mile and a half.

After the D.C. show, Richard’s face lit up when an assistant introduced Luciano to him backstage.

“Really? You’re from the
Star
?”

Up close, he seemed smaller than he had on stage. His fifty-one-year-old body scarred by third-degree burns and ravaged by the early onset of multiple sclerosis, his rheumy eyes magnified by oversized glasses that dwarfed his shrunken but still-iconic face. The star seemed genuinely awed that a writer from his hometown paper would come all this way to see his show.

Within moments, though, a swarm of hangers-on invaded the room and he was back on again, performing for the benefit of the room, cracking one-liners in answer to Luciano’s questions, killing any chance for a genuine exchange between the two.

Asked about his health, Richard deadpanned, “I’m gonna die one day.”

“Do you feel happy?”

“I’m here,” he said, “so I’m all right.”

And so on.

That final question Luciano put to him was this: “Do you have any message for the folks back in Peoria?”

Richard answered in his horror-movie rasp: “Get
out!
”

That was it. Get out.

—————

“My home’s in Peoria,” he told a sparse crowd at the hungry i in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1966. “Whatever you think of when you hear the name, that’s what it’s like.”

Usually, people applaud when an entertainer mentions his hometown. If it’s Brooklyn, the crowd goes wild. But Peoria? “Last night,” he told them, “somebody threw up.”

Peoria. That famously average embodiment of
Middle
American values, t
hree-time winner of the National Civic League’s All-America City Award. Peoria has long been a demographer’s dream, a city-sized applause meter reliably registering what the great unwashed will embrace or believe, what they will buy and what they won’t. As the largest city on the Illinois River, it was a major stop for musicians and vaudeville troupes traveling between Chicago and St. Louis.
In the days of vaudeville the old saw was that if an act went over in Peoria, it would play anywhere. Hence,
“Will it play in Peoria?” became a catchphrase of the uniquely American theatrical phenomenon that evolved out of blackface minstrelsy, medicine shows, olio, and dime museums and provided a livelihood for itinerant jugglers, plate spinners, ventriloquists, crooners, baggy-pant comics, acrobats, barbershop quartets, hoochie-coochie dancers, human oddities, and animal acts for nearly a century, roughly from the mid-1800s through the 1930s when radio stole America’s heart away and held it hostage in front rooms and parlors. Unlike vaudeville itself, the phrase has endured on Madison Avenue and in political campaigns.

Peoria prided itself in being seen as a model city, a coded phrase that meant, “We have our Negroes under control,” Richard would often say. Yet things were decidedly more lax on North Washington Street where Richard spent his childhood. Hookers, winos, gamblers, musicians, politicians, and street-corner men populated both Pop’s Pool Hall, owned by his grandfather, and the brothels run by his grandmother. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Peoria was awash in gambling halls, speakeasies, whorehouses, and corruption, a haven for gangsters and bootleggers. Known as Roaring Peoria,
it was “a wide-open river town in the old meaning of the word,” says retired police chief Allen Andrews.

—————

In a 1977
New York Times
profile headlined “Richard Pryor, King of the Scene Stealers,” author Joyce Maynard wrote, “Pryor has been given to saying that he was raised in a brothel, which is evidently not the case.”

Maynard gave no reason for doubting the stories Richard told of his upbringing, but she wasn’t the only one. Perhaps the idea that a red-light district could prosper openly in America’s model city during the wholesome Eisenhower era simply beggared belief. Yet a federal report issued in the early 1950s cataloged 132 brothels operating in and around Peoria’s “Aiken Alley” alone.

Aiken Alley was not an alley at all but the popular name given to a notorious stretch of Aiken Avenue that ran west from Briss Collins’s tavern at the corner of Franklin and Jefferson, down to where it intersected with Reed Street.

Whorehouses such as the ones Richard’s grandmother ran weren’t just outlets for illicit sex; they were part of the fabric that held African American neighborhoods together. Playwright and performance artist Jovelyn Richards learned the lore of brothels from one of those prostitutes who went by the name of Satin Doll, immortalized in song by Duke Ellington.

The madam and the other ladies took care of the community around them, of the families of the women whose men didn’t have steady work . . . The madam would pay the grocery store to deliver eggs and milk to families, and loved the fact they didn’t know where these were coming from, that they could make up their own stories about how the box of groceries or the coal got to be on the front porch.

As a child of the fifties, Richard felt a mind-messing disconnect between his own surroundings and life as depicted on TV shows such as
Th
e Life of Riley
and
Father Knows Best.
“On television people talked about having happy lives,” he wrote in
Pryor Convictions,
“but in the world in which I grew up, happiness was a moment rather than a state of being. . . . It never stayed long enough for you to get to know it good. Just a taste here and there. A kiss, a sniff, a stroke, a snort.”

The gleaming postwar automobiles, big as boats, favored by the city’s upper crust, would likely have drawn attention in a neighborhood like Richard’s had they not been such a commonplace sight parked along the curb. Onstage, years later, Richard would recall playing in his front yard when some untouchable white man would “drive up and say, ‘Hello, little boy, is your mother home? I want a blow job.’

“That,” said Richard, “was our mayor.”

The joke was barely an exaggeration. Mayor Edward Nelson “Dearie” Woodruff, who served eleven terms as Peoria’s mayor over the course of nineteen elections spanning forty-two years, presided over a brazen administration that imposed a strict schedule of “fines” for various illegalities, including, but not limited to, gambling and prostitution. The mayor famously defended the city’s thriving brothel trade by saying, “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.” One December, when the city council authorized a crackdown on the red-light district, the mayor objected on moral grounds, arguing that it would be “unchristian” to shutter the brothels so close to Christmas.

To give Peoria its due, let it be said that Abraham Lincoln publicly denounced slavery for the first time in a speech delivered there in 1854. The first African American ever to vote in the United States cast his ballot in Peoria on April 4, 1870. The original mold strain for penicillin was discovered in Peoria. And, in 1945, early civil rights activist Rev. C. T. Vivian joined forces with Barton Hunter, a white minister at West Bluff Christian Church, in leading a nonviolent direct-action campaign to integrate Bishop’s Cafeteria on Main Street. Vivian and Hunter organized their efforts a full decade before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks’s refusal to comply with a Jim Crow law that required her to give up her seat to a white man. That she did so on Richard Pryor’s fifteenth birthday hardly seems worth noting, but there it is. As John Cage said: “Everything we come across is to the point.”

Peoria is also the city where Paul Robeson was banned from performing a concert just two days after the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited him a Communist Party sympathizer, where a fourteen-year-old Charles Manson served his first jail time for robbing a grocery store, and where Richard Pryor’s 1993 comeback tour abruptly fizzled out for lack of ticket sales.

Buoyed by big turnouts elsewhere along the tour and by the outpouring of affection from his audiences, Richard agreed to an additional string of midwestern dates. Among them was a June 11 show at the Peoria Civic Center, marking what would be his first hometown performance in nearly twenty years. But, then, just three days before the date, Richard abruptly canceled the show, along with the remainder of his tour. Clearly stung by
reports of sluggish tickets sales (civic center spokeswoman Amy Blain declined to say how many of the twenty-five-dollar seats had been sold)
, Richard’s spokespeople offered up the hastily concocted excuse that he
needed time to prepare for an upcoming television appearance. Transparently false because his next TV role didn’t come until 1995 when he received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a multiple sclerosis patient on an episode of the CBS hospital drama
Chicago Hope.

—————

Peoria has yet to make peace with Richard, his street-level profanity, his frank sexuality, his fury, or his wanton drug use. Even today, the town barely acknowledges him.

In October 2001, while Richard languished in deteriorating health in his Encino, California, home, confined to a wheelchair where he spent his days watching a DVD of
The Silence of the Lambs
on repeat play, the Peoria City Council begrudgingly voted 6–5 in favor of renaming a seven-block stretch of a nondescript residential street Richard Pryor Place. In 2011, more than a half decade after Richard’s death, when Phil Luciano wrote a column suggesting that the city choose a more fitting site to commemorate its most famous son—the city’s new arts center, perhaps, or a major thoroughfare—his readers responded thus:

I have a perfect suggestion: Match a memorial with his mind and his mouth. In other words, find a nice sewer somewhere and name it after him. —Wally