Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by Joe Henry, David Henry Read Free Book Online Page A

did.”
    Richard worked whatever odd jobs he could find, mostly through family connections: driving a truck for his father’s carting company or racking balls for tips at Pop’s Pool Hall at the corner of Sixth and Sheridan. Anytime Richard failed to show up for rehearsal at the community center, Pop’s Pool Hall was the first place Miss Whittaker would look. The place would fall silent when she walked in—more out of disapproval than respect, she felt—and Uncle Dickie would say, “Fine. Take him, take him.”
    “When you walked in that joint to get me,” Richard told her later, “they’d be cussin’ and fussin’, and you’d walk in and that place would be just like a church.” Guys who had pool cues “raised in the air to strike somebody would suddenly freeze,” she said. “Then the minute I’d leave they’d go back to whatever they were doing.”
    She could not have known then that his pool-hall loitering would be every bit as essential to his developing genius as the hours he spent rehearsing at the community center. He watched everyone, soaking it all up, holding it in store for future use.
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    In 1956, Miss Whittaker turned thirty. Having dedicated herself to the Carver Community Center for a full eight years, time seemed to be passing her by. She left Peoria for New York City to take a shot at her lifelong dream of appearing on Broadway. It didn’t take her long to decide she wasn’t cut out for the fierce competition on the Great White Way. She eventually returned to her post in Peoria, but her absence came at a time that made Richard’s life seem all the more desolate.
    After a stint shining shoes at the Hotel Père Marquette, Richard landed his first real job in a meatpacking plant as a shaker of cowhides. It was grueling and foul-smelling work, folding and loading the heavy hides onto railroad cars bound for Chicago. At the end of each shift he would walk home—or more frequently to Yakov’s Liquor Store —his fingers cramped and frozen and his trousers crusted stiff with slaughterhouse slime.
    Richard spent his free time at Yakov’s, washing down pickled pigs feet with ice cold beer and contemplating a bleak future which, he began to fear, might well mean buying a pair of steel-toed shoes and lugging a lunch pail to and from the Caterpillar plant five days a week , spending his evenings and his pay “watching TV, getting fucked up, and chasing pussy. Work, pension, die.”
    One day at the plant, Richard went upstairs to inquire about a better-paying job that had opened up in the beef-cutting department. He took one look at the men in their blood-slicked rubber aprons knocking the brains out of cattle with sledgehammers and changed his mind—as did one of the bulls waiting its turn in line: the bull suddenly bucked free of his stall and, in Richard’s account, “ran through the shop, upstairs and downstairs, snorting and butting and kicking everything in his path.” Police finally shot the bull as it ran down the street. Perhaps Richard saw parallels between the bull’s circumstances and his own.
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    Gamely attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, Richard entered a Golden Gloves boxing competition. “He won his first fight in the first round,” Buck later told a newspaper reporter. “And I think he did it by telling a joke, which made the guy double up. And then he punched him out.” If true, that would mark the pinnacle of his brief career.
    “I always boxed them niggers that looked like they’d just killed their parents. You know, them rough niggers that could strike a match on the palm of their hand. Niggers would come and be beatin’ themselves up. I’d say, ‘Well, he don’t give a fuck about me. He’s beatin’ his own ass!”
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    As luck would have it, Richard ’s stepmother operated an establishment on North Aiken Street right next door to Ray LeRoy, “the George Burns of Peoria.” LeRoy worked a steady gig as