Becoming Richard Pryor (14 page)

Richard hung on for a while nonetheless. Like many black GIs, he picked up some basic German on his jaunts into town, where he found comfort in the arms of fräuleins who were not local to Baumholder but who’d traveled there because they sensed an opportunity. The local priests and burghers might have labeled all such women prostitutes, but their motives were decidedly mixed. Some took cash for specified sexual services. Others formed liaisons with black GIs that lasted as long as their partner’s tour of duty. A few landed a spouse and a ticket to America. For Richard, who was familiar with what it meant to live in such a ripely compromised world, the red-light districts adjacent to his army base probably felt more like home than the base itself.

With one German fräulein, Richard had a sexual experience he would never forget. It was an experiment in rebellion, a refusal of his uncle Dickie’s solemn advice: “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whatever you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.” Richard asked the woman if he could go down on her, and she said yes. The experience was “a revelation, something that changed my life, because until then, my family only fucked in one position—up and down.” Having strayed from the Pryor family nest, he was straying from its mores, too.

S
even months after the “
Chingada madre
” incident, Richard was booted from the army for good. Yet his own account of the trouble is so out of kilter with the testimony lodged in the official record that one is tempted to say that, on the night of July 9, 1960, when Richard
drew a switchblade on a specialist fourth class, he did so enveloped in the fog of war.

According to Richard, his unit had been watching the film
Imitation of Life
—a lush melodrama of the time, starring army pinup Lana Turner—when a white soldier “laughed at the wrong spots.”
Imitation of Life
is a film that, unusually for its time, smuggles a profound story about racial ambivalence and self-loathing into what appears, at first, to be a simple morality tale about a negligent white mother. In its last half, most of its energy flows into the saga of Sarah Jane, a light-skinned young black woman who, leaving home, passes for white so that she can chase dreams of white glamour: being a showgirl in a glossy production, having a well-off white boyfriend. Her quest ends tragically, with her black mother dying from the heartbreak of their separation.

Laughing at
Imitation of Life
was equivalent to laughing at the sorrows of black life—or of Richard’s. Didn’t he, like the character of Sarah Jane, long to shake off the fate of a hardscrabble life? Didn’t he dream, like her, of achieving escape velocity as a star? And didn’t he understand, from his failed courtship of Margaret Ruth to his most recent trysts in Germany, the pull of romance across the color line? Small wonder that he would have been willing to risk his army career, in effect, to defend the film’s honor.

According to Richard’s memoir, a friend of his started slugging the white GI who had laughed at the film. A crowd gathered outside the enlisted men’s club to watch the fight. But when it became clear that the white GI would win, Richard reached into his pocket, drew out a switchblade, and stabbed the white GI six or seven times in the back—to no effect. The white GI appeared indestructible. Petrified, Richard ran away and flung his knife into the bushes. Soon after, an MP arrived at Richard’s barracks, accused him of having stabbed a fellow soldier, and tossed him in the stockade.

The army’s version of the tale is considerably less colorful, lacking as it does any testimony from Richard. According to the military, Private Pryor had, for no reason, stabbed a Specialist Fourth Class in the chest outside the enlisted men’s club. The stabbed specialist had
pursued and caught Pryor, but Pryor had jerked away and fled, only to return a few minutes later to issue a threat: “Man, you hit me. I have a long knife, and when you come out, I’m going to cut you!”

The absence of Richard’s testimony from the official record is no happenstance. Like other soldiers brought up on discipline charges, Richard chose to sacrifice any legal representation and leave the service “under honorable conditions” rather than face a court-martial and possible prison time. Black soldiers were particularly liable to land in this predicament: a decade later, the NAACP charged that military stockades in Germany resembled prisons in America, with blacks making up more than half of inmates.

For the army, Richard’s “elimination” was an open-and-shut case. He “has a history of violence,” wrote the major who commanded his unit. “His retention in the service would be detrimental to unit moral[e] and the personal saf[e]ty of the men forced into contact with him.” Richard had performed poorly in all three units where he served, the major added, and had “been counseled and corrected without avail.” He was an inveterate troublemaker, and an unpopular one at that: “He does not get along with other men and he continually feels he is being ‘picked on.’” Race often went unmentioned in reports like these, as commanding officers were likely to be blamed for racial friction between their troops but were simply doing their job when they eliminated unsuitable men from their unit. Richard’s file was no exception. By the evidence it contained, Richard had a persecution complex.

Confined to a cell with a concrete floor, a single lightbulb, and little else, Richard had plenty of time to ponder what he would do after his service ended. He was held in Baumholder for a full month after the stabbing incident, during which time he was given another physical. He ticked off a host of ailments: eye trouble, shortness of breath, pain in his chest, heart palpitations, leg cramps, motion sickness, stuttering, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. The army had taken a rail-thin teenager, put meat on his bones, and turned him into a mess of a man.

But in one regard, the army had cleared Richard’s head and straightened his vision. At his exit physical, he was asked to list his occupation. On two previous occasions, he had responded to that prompt by referring to his work with his father and uncle, and had called himself a truck driver. This time, he looked to his future more than his past. He took up the pen and wrote, in the wobbly script that reflected his interrupted schooling, “actor.”

Changing jobs: Pryor’s “occupation” upon entering the US Army in 1959, and upon exiting it in 1960.

(Courtesy of Jennifer Pryor)

Peoria, 1960–1962

R
ichard Pryor had plenty to mull over on the long trip from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to his father’s home in downtown Peoria. His discharge from the army on August 27, 1960, was just the latest in a chain of humiliations and rejections that stretched as far back as his nineteen-year-old mind could reach—to the straight-edged Mr. Fink, the obtuse Miss Dempsey, the nuns who ejected him from their school, the coach who kicked him off the basketball team, the teenager who sexually abused him in the alley, the father who beat him, the mother who abandoned him. He arrived in Peoria with twenty-five days of back pay in his pocket and used the money to play the part of the conquering hero. He took his half-sister Barbara to a movie, then called a cab to whisk her home, even though she lived just three blocks away. He broke out a few snatches of German to impress local girls. If everyone assumed that he had prospered from his time in the service, he was not going to disabuse them of the illusion.

The money went only so far. Soon enough, Richard was back under Buck’s roof, living in an expanded household that included his uncle Dickie and half-sister Barbara in addition to his father and stepmother. Ann had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth, and the family struggled to make ends meet. When Buck and Dickie couldn’t find much work as truckers, it was Ann herself who took up the slack, going out into the cold and returning with a white man in tow, whom she led into a bedroom so they could close the deal. While she turned tricks, Buck sat quietly in the front room—counting the money in his head, perhaps. A little while later, Ann would emerge
with “just enough [money] to fix us some food for that day,” Barbara recalled. “She’d put out a big pot of chicken—I don’t know what it was, but it was good—and we’d live on that for two or three days.” With money so tight, Buck looked down on his underemployed son, and his son looked away. They barely talked to each other directly.

Since he didn’t have the resources to get his own apartment, Richard simply made himself scarce. On weekends, he often slept on the couch of his friend William Bradley, curled up in a black trench coat. There he became acquainted with his five-year-old half-sister Sharon, who was Bradley’s stepdaughter and one of Buck’s four “outside children.” (Buck had no relationship with Sharon at the time.) “I came up to him and he gave me a hug,” Sharon said, remembering her initial encounter with Richard. “That was the first time I had ever known what thirty-five cents was. It was a quarter and a dime, and that was all he had in his pocket.”

With so little money to his name, Richard warmed to the kindness of this alternate family. He ate spaghetti at their house and performed amateur magic tricks for Sharon and her brothers and sisters. An aficionado, even in his young adulthood, of cartoons such as
Woody Woodpecker
and
Baby Huey
, he would loll in the Bradley family’s living room on Saturday mornings in front of their TV set, or escort Sharon and her siblings to the Rialto Theater, where a local weatherman hosted an auction called “Bids for the Kids”: kids would collect milk cartons to earn points, then pool their points to bid for a bicycle or toy. Sharon and her siblings were always disappointed, never able to win the prizes they coveted, but for Richard the auction was merely the run-up to the main event, a morning of nonstop cartoons. “We had to sit there through all them cartoons while Richard was laughing, laughing at everything,” Sharon grumbled in retrospect.

One of the gifts of Richard’s childhood, which translated into one of the strengths of his comedy, was that he had no snobbery; he moved easily between vastly different worlds. If, on some mornings, he spent time with his friend’s children, during the afternoons and evenings he frequented the Blue Shadow, a tavern famous for serving
a hangover-cure chili so spicy that its mere aroma sent customers into a sweat. There he held down a stool with his friend Wilbur Harp, the rare black man in Peoria who was openly gay and openly effeminate in his manner.

In the wee hours of the night, Richard might wander over to the Villa, a large club outside the Peoria city limits, run by his buddy Hank Hansen. With its mixed-race house band, the Villa drew a lively and mixed crowd, but for Richard the real action was in the casita that served as a gambling house out back. The scene was a comedy sketch waiting to happen. Among the
dramatis personae
were “Big Irma” Anderson, a huge lady who used “Kiss my ass, nigger!” as the equivalent of “Hello”; Sylvester “Weasel” Williams, for whom insults were a prelude to a hustle (“You funny in that hat . . . That hat went out with Dick Tracy. You can go look funny if you want to, but I got a hat out in the car that’s a bitch”); and an older, unnamed black man who stood on the fringe of the gambling but made more noise than anyone else (“Now what you gonna do, nigger?! You done fucked up the game!”). Richard observed later that Hank’s Place was “a beautiful place with beautiful people. Everybody was an individual.”

When he couldn’t afford a stool at a tavern or a stake at a table, Richard simply took up residence on the streets of Peoria. He remained loyal to the sweet white wine of his teenage years, the citrus-flavored Silver Satin. And he discovered that the street, like the back room at the Villa, was full of characters, none more compelling than a grizzled drifter known as “Preacher” Brown. Brown spent much of his day walking and talking around Peoria, often ending up in the heart of its soul district—near Pop’s Pool Hall and Wade’s Inn, a country kitchen that served up a fine plate of beans and neck bones. Brown was social but did not socialize, exactly: he wasn’t the sort to drink with a close-knit group of friends on the street corner. Instead he preached with a bottle in his hand, stopping traffic, schooling youngsters in their no-good ways, and telling stories about his illustrious past.

A decade later, Preacher Brown would manifest onstage as one of Richard’s breakthrough characters, “the wino”: