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

the house comedian at Mike and Mike’s Show Lounge and his place was a favorite hangout for black entertainers on the Chitlin’ Circuit passing through town.
    Richard worked himself into the circle, shyly hanging back, content to listen to the veterans talk trash and tell their stories of life on the circuit and to dream of the day when he would be one of them. “I don’t know exactly when it happened, but suddenly he was always there,” LeRoy remembered. “We would say to each other, ‘Isn’t he the politest little fella?’ He was about seventeen, I guess—real thin then.” Eventually Richard got up enough nerve to ask if he could look though LeRoy’s prized gag books. LeRoy was flattered. “I had a lot of material for him to look at—wrote most of it myself. It was mostly stand-up material. He used to sit for hours going through my scripts and books and gags.”
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    At seventeen, Richard fell in love with a girl named Susan whom he described as a Sophia Loren–type from a poor family. They made a secret love nest in the garage of a house his family owned on Goodwin. “She wore me out,” Richard told Spin magazine in 1988. Susan’s orgasms were so intense, he claimed, that “when she would come, she would faint. I thought I killed her.” The fun ended, as it often would for Richard, when his girlfriend got pregnant. He went home in tears, he told Barbara Walters in a 1980 interview. “My mother said, ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ Father says, ‘There ain’t nothing wrong with him, he got some girl pregnant.’ ” This rattled Richard all the more. Did his father know everything he did? In this case, his father knew because the girl had told him so herself. Buck had been sleeping with her, too. (Richard’s aunt Mexcine cryptically assured him the child was not his. “I was out in the chicken shack,” she told him, “and someone else said it was his baby.”)
    Richard was not present when Susan gave birth to a daughter, Renee, in April 1957. Later in life he came to accept Renee, reasoning that, even if she were not his daughter, she was likely his half sister. Either way, she was family.
    His more immediate response was to flee Peoria and enlist in the army.
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    Military service would not provide the easy way out Richard had imagined. The first time he tried, after bragging to everyone he knew that he was going off to Chicago to join up, he flunked the entrance exam and they sent him back home. He was so embarrassed, he told Janet Maslin of the New York Times, he hid in the house for months. When he did venture out, he wore a costume uniform. It fooled his friends but not their parents.
    On his second try at enlisting, he got in. After spending eight weeks of basic training in plumbing school—covered in shit, once again—at Fort Leonard Wood, he shipped out to the military installation in Baumholder, Germany, just south of Idar-Oberstein , then the largest concentration of American troops outside the United States. The soldiers’ collective buying power had brought about an infusion of bars, dancehalls, and sex-trade workers, prompting the West German government to declare the region a “moral disaster area.”
    No great student of world history, Richard had supposed that racial attitudes would be more enlightened in Germany. The bars and clubs there, he quickly discovered, were even more segregated than they had been in Peoria. “Out of like 150 bars,” he wrote, “only three let in blacks.” The worst of it came from his fellow soldiers. Cornered by three guys wielding tire irons in the armory one day, Richard made good use of his basic training. Much to their surprise, he grabbed a length of lead pipe and bashed one of them over the head. (“Really?” David Felton asked him in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview. “An enemy or one of ours?” “No, a white cat,” Richard said. “One of yours.”)
    Although Richard had gone into the army with the idea of