Becoming Richard Pryor (13 page)

Richard, according to his act a decade later, would wait “until three minutes before eleven” to head home, “so that the guys would think [he] was brave.” A block from home, a police car would come screeching to the curb.

The sketch was an absurdist scenario, not a transcription of Peoria reality, but it captured something crucial about how Richard experienced his years after his expulsion from Central. He felt himself a harmless soul mistaken for a criminal, a victim of impossible demands, a son who could expect absolutely no sympathy from his father. The entrapment was so total that, from the proper angle, it made a darn good joke.

O
n April 13, 1959, Richard Pryor went to Chicago and reported for his induction into the U.S. Army. For black teenagers in Peoria, the army promised a steady paycheck and, better still, passage to the wide world beyond their families and their hometown. For Richard, the army offered him a chance to be a man, finally, and to escape the dead-end routines of a city he knew all too well. Peoria felt like a closed circuit: a third of its restaurants still refused to serve black customers, and around this time Richard himself was turned away from the Pantry, a downtown fixture, when he tried to get a hamburger with friends after a late-night movie. He regularly spent half his take-home pay at a tavern next to his grandmother’s home, enjoying a steady diet of pickled pig’s feet, ice-cold beer, and barroom palaver. In a best-case scenario, he speculated, he might move up to a job at Caterpillar and achieve a semblance of financial stability. The formula for the good life in Peoria: “Work, pension, die.”

Meanwhile, Richard had met returning black GIs who crowed about the freedom of life overseas. “Yes, I was in Deutschland and it was a gas.” “Man, when I was in Germany, I had three white chicks!” The army was easy to romanticize from afar. His friend Matt Clark had lied about his age so that he could suit up for the army at age sixteen. Richard was only four months past his eighteenth birthday when he volunteered. He had little clue where that decision would take him.

At his induction, Richard took a battery of aptitude tests and swore that he wasn’t a member of any subversive organizations. He claimed he was in good physical and mental health, suffering from nothing more than occasional cramps in his legs. The army physician noted that Richard had flat feet and, at five foot ten, was terribly skinny, at 126 pounds, but judged him ready for service. The army signed him up for a two-year tour of duty and shuttled him off to the Ozarks—boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, which specialized in training the army’s construction-oriented Corps of Engineers, and was known among black GIs to be “one of the most racist bases in the country.” Richard was being tracked, as he had been in Peoria, into the role of general laborer.

In the summer of 1959, Richard enrolled in “basic combat training,” or what he called “kill class.” “It really blew my mind,” he said later, “because I thought the Army was things like hunting, camping, a little fishing”—summer camp with guns. The naïf was soon schooled: “I learned to kill from a guy who killed in World War II, and then they couldn’t stop him. So they gave him a job.
‘Can’t let him on the streets, so we’ll let him train these guys for World War III
.’”

In a late-1960s routine, Pryor would re-create his kill class, turning his instructor into a cartoon of the wounded warrior. “When I was in World War II, I killed some and I was killed some,” the corporal barks. “That’s right, I was wounded thirty-two times.” The corporal urges Private Pryor to demonstrate a “leg-thrust kick to the groin,” and the reluctant but eager-to-please Richard obliges by administering a killer kick to the corporal’s own groin. “Class dismissed,” the corporal squeaks.

There was a good deal of wishful thinking behind this routine, and some psychic payback, too. During basic training, Richard was not kicking the army in the balls; he was cracking under its discipline. In mid-August, he submitted to another physical, and this time he reported that he suffered from motion sickness, vision problems, depression, nerves, difficulties with teachers, and those persistent leg cramps. He was hardly in shipshape condition on the eve of being shipped out. Perhaps because he was deemed less than A-grade material for the front, the army formally assigned him to a specific support duty, one that would keep him out of high-risk situations. His job? Plumber. Some military men might have exulted that they were not going to be thrown into combat, but Richard took his new assignment in a spirit of ripe irony: “Once again I was covered in shit.”

O
n September 3, 1959, Richard embarked from an army terminal in Brooklyn and, ten days later, arrived in the port of Bremerhaven, West Germany. Like many of the thirty thousand black GIs deployed annually in Germany in the 1950s, he came there with an appetite for adventure and with the hope that he was putting an ocean’s distance
between himself and Jim Crow. Some black GIs, like those Pryor had met in Peoria, found Germany a charmed place. Colin Powell, America’s best-known black soldier, came to Germany a year before Pryor and remembered that “For black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in West Germany, was not hell.”

Powell, though, had served in Gelnhausen, a picturesque town not far from Frankfurt. Richard was dispatched to southwest garrison towns in the former Nazi stronghold of the Rhineland-Palatinate, desolate places that now welcomed the American military presence as before they had welcomed the Nazis. According to Richard, three days before his job was to start, he phoned the sergeant who was to be his commanding officer and advised him that he was going to report for work on Monday. “It’s about time you got here, boy,” the sergeant replied in a southern accent. “I’ve been working with one of those niggers and he’s stolen everything that isn’t nailed down.” “Oh, God,” Richard thought to himself—and kept thinking to himself all weekend long. When he reported for work, the sergeant couldn’t believe his eyes. “You Private Pryor? The guy I talked to on the telephone? I hope you don’t get upset about anything I say. You can ask all the people around here, especially the colored folks. They know I’m a nice guy.”

Kaiserslautern’s commanding officers hailed largely from the South, and while the army had been officially desegregated in 1954, the Kaiserslautern base felt to its black soldiers as if it were ruled by a Mississippi-ish double standard. A white soldier who showed up late for duty might get a free pass, but a black soldier who did the same would get disciplined and perhaps demoted—part of a system that managed to keep blacks in the lower ranks. Many black GIs felt intensely isolated: they were struggling against the same discrimination
they faced at home, but without their family or larger community to offer distraction or support. It was not an easy place to be a black comedian, either. When, in 1958, the black entertainer Timmie Rogers arrived late for a show in Kaiserslautern, one major became so incensed that he slugged Rogers and kicked him while he was on the floor, breaking a rib. The major claimed that he’d been provoked, that Rogers had insulted him by asking, “What’s the matter, man?”—not “What’s the matter, officer?” These were the sorts of men to whom Richard reported.

The surrounding towns of the Rhineland-Palatinate offered no easy social escape. Upon their arrival in the area, white GIs had threatened German bar owners with an economic boycott if they served a drop to blacks, and the bar owners acceded to the pressure. The same Germans who had earlier embraced the Nazi Party, which made “miscegenation” punishable by death, and who now made the Rhineland-Palatinate the only German state to have a proud neo-Nazi in its legislature, found segregation quite palatable. As a result, these garrison towns had two sets of bars—one for white GIs, another for their black counterparts. In Kaiserslautern the black bars were confined to a single street, known as “Little Harlem.” And while, by the late-1950s, white GIs might freely carouse with German women, black GI bars were often raided by American military police and German authorities. Any German woman who frequented a black GI bar was assumed to be a prostitute and so could be hauled off to jail. (Kaiserslautern’s Little Harlem was also known as “Bimbo City.”) In one town, three-quarters of women prosecuted for prostitution were in the company of black GIs—an astonishing figure, given that blacks were only 15 percent of the army population. Even steady girlfriends of black GIs had a hard time escaping punishment.

Private Pryor stumbled into this German version of Jim Crow when he visited a local club early in his tour of duty. Before he could order his first beer, two white soldiers started scuffling. Then he heard someone yell “Nigger!” and looked around, only to discover that he was the only black person in the bar. The scuffle had shifted its focus
to him. He ran upstairs to escape the fight and, landing in a room where the club’s strippers changed their clothes, begged for help from the first girl he met. Her face twisted into a sour expression. She told him, “Get out of here. I call police.” Soon after, the MPs arrived. Richard sneaked outside and scrambled back to his barracks, one step ahead of the law.

It was an all-too-typical incident in these southwestern garrison towns. Many barroom brawls were the result of a new black recruit wandering into a place where he was not welcome—not by white GIs and not by German civilians. When military police arrived at the scene of an interracial fight, they responded by tracking down the black GI and beating him into submission; Richard was lucky to escape a rendezvous with their nightsticks. At least once, not long before his arrival in the area, the violence between black and white soldiers had exploded into a full-fledged race riot. On New Year’s Eve in 1955, in the neighboring town of Baumholder (where Richard would soon be transferred), hundreds of white and black GIs clashed in the town’s center until “blood was running in the gutter,” according to the local police chief. Scores were wounded, and an unknown number of soldiers died in the melee—unknown because the military command refused to release information about the incident.

A month after his arrival in Germany, Richard went to the dispensary at his base. He feared that he was losing his mind: he was being woken up in the middle of the night by horrible dreams. The dispensary recommended that he be transferred to the army hospital nearby and given an emergency psychiatric consult. The army psychiatrist reassured him that he was normal: it was normal for a soldier to worry and lose sleep. He suggested that Richard return for a follow-up exam, but he never did.

On December 9 he was transferred out of Kaiserslautern and sent thirty-five miles away, to Baumholder, known variously as the Siberia of Germany (in recognition of its remoteness and cold winters) or, more simply, as the nation’s armpit. It was a cow town whose peasants still hauled goods on horse-drawn wagons. Soldiers stationed in Baumholder
fell into a numbing routine: rise and shine, reveille, long jogs, classroom drills, three meals, and occasional visits into the town at night. Richard seems to have coped with the stress by smoking and eating. By the time he left the service, eight months later, he was up to one and half packs a day and had gained twenty-six pounds from his first physical.

In Baumholder, Richard’s military career unraveled. He was assigned to a job so dull that it was grueling to endure: maintaining a Nike missile up a hill on the fringe of the camp, far from any mess halls or amenities. Soldiers in missile battalions were there to push the red buttons if an emergency arose, but mostly they just sat around and dithered in the “ready room,” a barracks with bunks and a lounge area. For Richard, the missile battalion’s plumber, the only emergency he could anticipate was a stopped-up toilet. His enthusiasm for the service waned. On January 4, 1960—the first Monday after New Year’s Eve weekend—he missed morning reveille and was slapped with the punishment of seven days’ restriction to the missile area and a distant mess hall. On January 12, just after serving the last day of his restriction order, he missed formation and was given two weeks of extra duty, an extra shift at the end of each endless day.

Richard never cottoned to boredom: he had an antic personality that created high drama out of thin air. In the late afternoon of January 24, one hour before he was to begin his overtime shift, he started insulting the corporal of the guard in the ready room.

“Gringo monkey!” he yelled. “
Chingada madre!
”

Why Richard called his superior officer a “gringo” and a “motherfucker” in Spanish will always retain an element of mystery. Maybe Richard had been posing as a Puerto Rican recruit to dodge the worst of army racism—he suggested as much in a later routine—and perhaps the Spanish obscenity was part of the masquerade. The insult may have baffled the man who was its target, too: the army record does not report any response from him.

“Are you tired of living?” Richard sneered as a follow-up. The man asked what he meant by that. “Maybe you’ll die tonight,” Richard answered.

For his less than deferential behavior, Richard was disciplined officially and demoted a grade. In the paperwork, the captain in charge of Richard’s unit laid the groundwork for an eventual discharge from the army. Private Pryor, he wrote, “lacks the ability to perform his duties as expected of a good soldier.” And then, piling on: “Further, this individual lacks effectiveness in performing his assigned duty as a plumber.” In the eyes of the army, Richard was good for nothing, a nuisance.