Becoming Richard Pryor (16 page)

The daily grind took its toll on their marriage. Pat cooked up potatoes day after day—boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes—and one day, Richard reached his limit. “I’m sick of potatoes,” he cried, and started beating Pat in frustration. Marie, who, like Pat, had been married in her teens, took the younger woman under her wing. “The next time he hits you,” Marie told her, “you pick up something and hit him back, and he won’t bother you any more.” Pat did as instructed: when Richard exploded next, she grabbed a pan and walloped him so hard that he tottered and fell onto Marie, seated nearby. Marie, in turn, scooted her feet back so that Richard tumbled to the floor. Her baby had to learn his lesson, even if it meant landing hard on his backside.

The lesson didn’t take, despite the fact that Richard was under new pressure to play the role of supportive husband. Pat suffered a miscarriage just after their wedding, then quickly became pregnant again. The two newlyweds were heading, with deliberate speed, for the responsibilities of parenthood. But Richard was easily distracted. At one point, Pat stopped into Harold’s Club to watch her husband perform onstage. He broke into a song and looked in her direction, and Pat brightened at her husband’s serenade. How romantic! Then she realized that his gaze was fixed not on her but on a white woman
sitting at a neighboring table. That was Pat’s breaking point, her own “I’m sick of potatoes” moment. She dragged the other woman into a knockdown fight, toppling over chairs and sending glasses crashing to the nightclub floor. At the end of the week, Richard had even less money than usual to bring home: Harold Parker had garnished most of his pay to cover the damage.

Richard and Pat’s marriage ended, effectively, soon after. Around September 1, 1961—eighty days after their wedding—Pat moved back into her parents’ home on Fourth Street. Richard left his grandmother’s house and returned to his parents’ home. If he was going to be broke, he figured, it was better to be broke downtown, close to the action. He sank deeper into the nightlife offered by Harold’s Club, the Blue Shadow, Hank’s Villa, the Elks Club, Blackie’s Archway, and other Peoria hotspots, sometimes staying out well past sunup. Sonny Stenson, a drummer who worked at Harold’s Club and a slender, smooth operator, introduced him to marijuana and amphetamines. “It’s part of show business,” Sonny said. Richard didn’t need much of a sell: he took instantly to the buzz, the relaxation, offered by pot and the rush offered by uppers. The drugs “eased my pain and insecurity, erased the fear, turned me into a whole new man,” he remembered. “Sometimes I stayed up two or three days straight, feeling so cool and jive.” He loved the uppers so much that he sometimes doubled the dose, which felt great until, on the second or third day of wakefulness, it felt horrible. “There’s an Indian playing a drum inside me. Tell him to stop,” Richard told Sonny. “That’s your heart,” Sonny replied, laughing.

At first, the drugs were merely one ingredient in the jangling carnival of Richard’s days and nights. Unanchored, he drifted from scene to scene—and nearly lost his life one Sunday morning, at the tail end of an extended Saturday night.

On April 1, 1962, Richard and a musician from Harold’s Club were about to exit the Elks Club through its front door when the club’s bouncer, James King, insisted they step back. There was danger waiting outside that door: a sixty-eight-year-old man named Albert
“Goodkid” Charles, who felt he’d been cheated of his money at the club and had now returned with a .12-gauge shotgun in hand. The bouncer—himself a father of five and the leader of the choir and Sunday school of his Baptist church—came onto the front steps of the club and appealed to Charles to put down his gun. Charles replied by shooting him point-blank in the groin. “Goodkid, why did you shoot me?” were King’s last words. The man who had saved Richard’s life was lying in a pool of blood on the steps.

On April 10, a week after the shooting, Richard and Pat’s child, a son, was born. In the hospital, Richard stared at the baby, taking in his features. He told his father that his son “looked like a little ape.”

Buck wasn’t one to gild the lily, either. “So did you,” he said. “Like a little gorilla. That’s what Mama said about you.”

“Yeah?” Richard said under his breath. “Then I guess he’s mine.”

The boy was named after his father: Richard Jr. For a few months, Richard stopped by the home of his in-laws, checking in with Pat and playing games with the baby. But his mind and heart were elsewhere.

O
n May 17, 1962, Harold Parker lost his liquor license, which was tantamount to losing the lease on his nightclub, and Richard was forced to find a new job. Parker had been dogged by the law for several years, but he was effectively nailed when he allegedly bribed a police officer who had written him up for a liquor code violation. (Parker claimed he’d been entrapped.) Peoria mayor Robert Day prosecuted Parker with a vengeance: after the Illinois Liquor Control Commission ruled in favor of Parker in 1961, Day filed a lawsuit against the commission and against Parker. When Day’s lawsuit succeeded, the wild and styled world of Harold’s Club was no more. In a matter of years, the entire vice district of North Washington Street, the seedbed of Richard’s childhood, would be wiped off the map in its entirety. In a striking cultural about-face—the military-industrial complex edging out the underground economy—the Caterpillar Corporation would build its sprawling international headquarters on the block where Harold’s Club had stood. Harold
Parker left Peoria for Chicago, where he died a few years later of a heart attack.

When Harold’s Club shuttered in May 1962, there was still one survivor from the old days: the resourceful Bris Collins, who had operated a tavern at 405 North Washington Street since 1939. Collins and the Pryor family had been tight for decades. When Collins was sent to prison for a year on counterfeiting charges in 1954, Richard’s grandfather Pops took over the operation of the tavern in his absence. Eight years later, Collins repaid the favor by giving Richard a steady job, for seventy-two dollars a week, at Collins Corner, the nightclub he had recently opened on the spot of his old tavern.

Collins may have been, like Harold Parker, a hard-nosed hustler who always made sure to get his cut, but in his own way he was also a pillar of the community, supporting the Carver Center financially and refusing to carry any liquor from Hiram Walker as long as the distillery did not employ blacks outside of menial jobs. Collins Corner was, unlike Harold’s Club, a nightclub oriented primarily to black Peorians. With the exception of the white strippers who straggled into Collins Corner after their own clubs closed for the night, no more than a handful of whites ever wandered in—and when they did, they had to endure an evil eye or two. The house band played jazz in the bebop mode of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but people found a way to dance to it anyway. And despite the intimidating presence of Collins’s three-hundred-pound bouncer, people found a way to tear up the place in barroom brawls, too. Pianist Jimmy Binkley observed that the fights were cinematic in scope, MGM-grade. “Bris Collins would say, ‘Play louder, Jimmy, play louder!’” Binkley recalled. “In the back of the room, they sometimes had two or three fights going on at one time.”

For Richard, Collins Corner was a return to the all-black audience he had last experienced at the Carver Center, loosened up by a liberal dose of alcohol and an even stronger one of working-class irreverence. He continued to refine his characterizations of his wino, his hustler, and his preacher, three stock figures that would have been familiar to
his audience. His comedy was often uproariously physical—as when, after heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson suffered an infamously quick first-round defeat to Sonny Liston in September 1962, he imitated Patterson by tumbling off the foot-high bandstand and rolling into the back of the audience, scattering chairs along the way.

The physical comedy was not simply wacky, though. The best of it expressed his vulnerability, his tenacity, and the depth charge of his resentment, and gave a stronger hint of the comedian to come. It was at Collins Corner that Richard developed his impersonation of “a baby being born,” an extended pantomime in which a spirited baby attempts, and mostly fails, to escape the womb. The baby begins in the fetal position; he touches his face and, in the act of exploring its contours, catches some sticky goo on his fingers. He tries to widen the opening of the womb, and the breach slams shut like a pair of subway doors. He tries again, with trembling hands, and succeeds in catching a glimpse of the outside world—which is a horrible thing; his face assumes an expression of raw terror. Undeterred, he gathers himself and attacks the breach again, and this time it tightens around his neck like a noose. In a rage, he slips out of the noose and assaults the breach again—only to be stuck there, halfway born, his legs in a vise. He starts hearing things: a doctor saying, “Ooh, that’s one ugly baby”; a mother chiming back in agreement. Everything—biology, society—seems to conspire against this poor baby. But rather than admit defeat, he musters his courage and finally clears the breach. His reward for entering the world: he begins his life on the outside with a full-on cry.

At this point in his career, Richard steered clear of talking about his personal life onstage, but this routine offered his psyche in miniature: innocence mixed with cynicism, wonder spiked with fear, anger heated by the sense that he was fundamentally alone. And if we were to substitute “Peoria” for “the womb,” we might see that the birthing sketch was a nakedly autobiographical retelling of the first twenty-two years of his life. Richard had tried hard, in mind and body, to leave the world he’d been born into, and had slammed against barrier after barrier—until it was tempting for him to believe that there was
no escape, just new ways of being mortified and entrapped. The world was a horror show, a noose, a vise, an insult.

In the fall of 1962, despite the fact that Richard was pulling down steady money from his gig at Collins Corner, Buck decided that his son should take on the family business. Like a master guildsman instructing an apprentice, he set up Richard with a prostitute, expecting him to profit from the experience. One day, after earning a little money, the prostitute gave some cash to Richard and asked him to beat her. “Hit me, hit me,” she screamed. Richard didn’t understand that she wanted him to rough her up and show his control, but not hurt her seriously. “She hit me and I started fighting—for my life,” he told an interviewer. “I had no idea what she was talking about. I went berserk. I didn’t know there was any romantic connotation to physical violence.”

The bruised prostitute ran to Buck, who approached Richard, steaming. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked. “You don’t know how to beat a whore.” The apprentice had learned so little from living with his master’s example.

“But she said to hit her,” Richard said in his defense.

For Buck, this remark was the last straw. His son the comic didn’t understand women, didn’t grasp the basics of pimping, and didn’t deserve the indulgence of anyone.

“Get your ass outta here!” Buck said.

Richard scrambled to gather a few things—some clothes, some money, an alto saxophone, a typewriter he’d borrowed from his sister Barbara, under the pretense that he wanted to script a Western with a black cowboy at its center. The screenwriting was put on hold: the typewriter, along with the saxophone, was pawned for some quick cash.

His head swimming, he headed over to Collins Corner and bunked for a while at the club. But where would he go from there? In conversation with his mentor Juliette Whittaker, Richard had confessed that his dream was to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and Whittaker urged him to head east: the stepping-stone to
Ed Sullivan
, she said, was Grossinger’s in the Catskills, not any club in Peoria. Then
one night, all the performers at Collins Corner arrived at the club to discover a nasty surprise. The club had been closed without any notice, an apparent casualty of fiscal mismanagement. The performers looked at one another, stunned, and talked about what to do next. A choreographer of a burlesque revue offered, “Let’s all go to St. Louis. I think I can get a job for all of us.” The musicians in the house band stayed back; they had prospects still in Chicago. Richard told Pat he needed to follow his dream and pointedly did not invite her along for the ride.

When Richard had earlier told his friends, “One day you’ll pay to see me,” they had laughed at his bravado. Now that he was in fact leaving, they expected him to return, humbled, after a few weeks. In their defense, it was hard to foresee a dazzling future for a young man who was leaving home to emcee what turned out to be a
South Pacific
–style burlesque show of female impersonators at a Chitlin Circuit club in East St. Louis.

At Richard’s departure, there was no love lost between him and Buck. Four years later, Buck would brag that kicking Richard out of his house was “probably the best thing we ever did for him—make him go out on his own.” And in a twisted way, he was right: Richard may never have found the courage of his convictions if he had not been cut off from the abusive relationship that defined his childhood. His eviction from his father’s home not only made him desperate; it also gave him his freedom.

For Richard, Peoria would always be the scene of his childhood’s ghosts, of unutterable feelings and unbearable pressures. Peoria had made him and unmade him both. When a Peoria journalist asked him, in 1993, if he had a message for the folks back home, he took on the voice of the demon in the film
The Amityville Horror
and rasped, “
Get out!
” He got out, in late 1962, and for the next decade rarely returned for more than a few days at a time—usually when there were loved ones to bury. He needed to leave Peoria, and needed to keep leaving Peoria, so that he could metabolize what he had experienced there. So he began his journey: as a wayfarer on the road known as the Chitlin Circuit, with no final destination in sight.