Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  At the same time, Richard hit a hard, unyielding wall at Central in the person of his science teacher, Mr. Fink. A former air force colonel who still experimented with model airplanes, Walter Fink brought a military sensibility to the domain of the classroom. Standing perfectly rigid and tall, Fink looked like a sharp-nosed Gregory Peck. He was the straightest of straight arrows, a man who “didn’t put up with foolishness,” in the words of Richard’s friend Loren Cornish. Richard, meanwhile, was foolishness incarnate, the clown in permanent residence in the classroom’s back row, always cracking wise, desperate to keep his classmates in stitches.

  One day in mid-March 1956, Mr. Fink reached his limit: he interrupted a Pryor performance by seizing Richard by the scruff of his neck and removing him bodily from the classroom. Richard, in response, took a swing at him. That punch was grounds for Richard’s expulsion from Central High. Richard lasted 129 days in ninth grade—82 more than Frank Sinatra, who endured only two restive months in high school, and roughly the same interval as Roseanne Barr, a comic whom Richard later inspired to take the stage. At age fifteen, he was done with his formal education.

  Though Richard couldn’t help but take the expulsion personally, as a verdict on his fitness for school, in another sense the expulsion wasn’t personal at all. It was business as usual—Peoria’s educational machine separating the wheat from the chaff or, more precisely, the white from the black. None of the eight other blacks who entered Central with Richard were still there by the end of eleventh grade. Whether because they left school voluntarily to join the working world or, like Richard, ran afoul of school authorities, black teens in Peoria were extremely unlikely to finish high school. A black population of over ten thousand produced a paltry crop of thirty high school graduates per year, reflecting a dropout rate higher than ghetto-bound Chicago’s, even.

  Buck absorbed the news of his son’s expulsion without registering the faintest surprise. “It’s okay,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this. If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.” Richard had a grace period of exactly one family dinner. The next day, he needed to find work; he would no longer be free to develop his muse at the Carver Center in the afternoons. He had skipped ahead to his statistical fate as a black male, born in Peoria in the 1940s: backbreaking work, and not enough of it to earn a good living. A mid-1950s survey of employment in Peoria discovered that blacks were overrepresented in only two occupations, as laundresses and janitors, where they cleaned up the messes left by others. There was exactly one black doctor and one black engineer in Peoria, and no black accountants, lawyers, or writers. Having completed only eighth grade, Richard looked extremely unlikely to finesse his way out of the world of manual labor.

  He started by working as a janitor at a strip club, but soon lost the job when the club’s manager noticed the women rising from the stage with dirt and grit stippling their bodies. “I can do the sweeping, but I can’t do no mopping,” Richard admitted. “My arms too skinny.”

  He lasted longer at the shoeshine station of the Hotel Pere Marquette, a downtown showpiece designed by the same architect who had conceived New York’s Ritz-Carlton and Harvard’s Widener Memorial Library. The architecture of the Pere Marquette, with its high-domed grand lobby, marble staircase, and crystal chandeliers, captured the ambitious, free-for-all spirit of Peoria in the 1920s. At the hotel, Richard bent over the shoes of conventioneers and, in his recollection, “made the shine cloth crack like a bullwhip.” He entertained his customers with jokes and banter, and even enjoyed himself a bit. But he knew he had only a bootblack’s upturned view of the glamour around him. He told friends that he always dreamed of having enough money to take a meal at the hotel’s restaurant, whose tables looked onto Main Street through large picture windows. He yearned to be the man whose shoes were being polished, the man who sat above the crowd.

  Richard loved getting paid and feeling “the jingle-jangle of possibilities in my pocket”; he sensed himself growing into independence. But to his grandmother and father, he was a mere teenage boy, still living at home and still to be handled as a child. Over and again, Richard declared that his grandmother and father needed to treat him with respect—and over and again, they whittled him down to size. Once, his grandmother told him to clean a skillet, as had been the custom. Richard refused, and added preemptively, “Hey Mama, don’t hit me no more. I’m a man!” Marie asked, “Yeah, nigger?” then answered her own question by grabbing the skillet and cracking Richard on the head with it.

  On another occasion, Buck found Richard in the housing projects, so drunk that he defied his father when Buck ordered him into his car. Two decades after the incident, Marie relished its denouement on The Mike Douglas Show:

  So I’m sitting on the front porch. The car drove up, I see two people in there. Bucky said, “Come on, get out of here!” And [Richard] come out, reeling and rocking, he was so drunk . . .

  I looked at him and said, “What are you doing drunk?”

  He said, “I wanted to drink some wine, and I drank some wine.”

  I said, “You did, did you?” So I dragged him, I said, “I’m going to take care of you, I’m going to tear you to pieces.”

  I grabbed him and throwed him on the dining room table, and got me an ironing cord. And I wore him out.

  Tellingly, when Marie spun out this story on the talk show, Richard exploded in laughter next to her, wiping tears from his eyes. It was as if he recognized the paradox of his childhood: that when Marie punished her grandson for pretending to be the man he wasn’t, she made him into the man he became.

  Buck remained a more baleful antagonist, the epitome of brute force to the teenage Richard. In Live in Concert (1979), Richard re-created a faceoff with Buck over the state of his manhood. Threatened with a beating, he announced to Buck, with a breaking voice, “I’m not takin’ any more ass-whupping. This is it!” Buck replied, “What? You a man now, motherfucker?”—and like Marie, he didn’t wait for an answer to the question.

  He hit me in the chest—hard.

  He hit me so hard my chest caved in and wrapped around his fist, and I held on to it with my chest [look of excruciating pain].

  I would not let go so he could hit my ass again. And everywhere he moved his arm, I was hanging on.

  Understandably, Richard added a dose of magical realism to the tale, bouncing around the stage with his arms stiff at his side, as if his chest had the power to swallow Buck’s fist. The unreality took the edge off the pain.

  Still, it may have been a different side of Buck, the sexual cynic, that wounded the teenage Richard the most. Around the summer of 1956, Richard met a girl his age, “an attractive little package,” and managed to turn his parents’ garage into a bare-bones lovers’ hideaway. A few months later, she told Richard she was pregnant, and he crumpled emotionally: he was eager to fall in love, but not ready to be a father. He ran into his house in a panic and broke the news to Buck. His stepmother Ann rushed into the dining room, saw the tears on Richard’s face, and asked, “What’s wrong with the boy, Bucky?” Buck answered, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with him. Got some girl pregnant.” Richard started heaving with sobs.

  At that point Buck and Ann took Richard into the living room and convened a family meeting, where Buck, who himself had fathered four children out of wedlock, questioned whether the child was Richard’s. Richard decided to follow the path that his father had himself followed. A baby girl was born in April 1957, but Richard kept his distance.

  By the time of the baby’s birth, Richard appears to have left behind his job as a shoeshine at the Pere Marquette and turned to more demanding physical work. For a while, he helped his father and uncle with their recently launched trucking business. On one memorable job, his uncle drove a truck loaded with coal and dumped it onto the street; Richard’s task was to shovel the coal into a cellar. “I never knew there was so much coal in the world. From then on, I stuck to oil heat,” he quipped a decade later. After his trucking job,
he found steady work at a local slaughterhouse, shaking and folding hides and loading them onto Chicago-bound trains. “It was nasty work,” Richard observed. “All the shit that got on me during the day, the rock salt, water and whatnot, froze in the cold. By quitting time, my pants were as stiff as a board.”

  Belittled at home and ground down at work, Richard spent as much time as possible with his posse of black friends, woofing away the hours on the streets of Peoria. Richard was the kid with the frail body and the smart mouth: he radiated fear even when he wasn’t in the orbit of his family, and he radiated sass even though he lacked the physique to back it up. If you gave him a ride on your scooter, he would start crying when the scooter accelerated too fast for his comfort. He needed a shield like his friend Matt Clark, a solidly built kid who, a decade before, had bonded with Richard over their shared love of cowboys. Clark knew how to handle himself in a crowd, having grown up in a family of seventeen kids, and he could intercede when Richard’s mouth rubbed other kids the wrong way. The two had, in Clark’s estimation, “the perfect friendship. I protected him from danger, and he made me laugh.”

  Richard practiced his stand-up routines wherever he could. Though he looked to many like a garden-variety cutup, he dreamed big: he made his barber cut his hair so that he looked more like Harry Belafonte, one of America’s first black matinee idols. He stationed himself in front of his uncle Herman’s pool hall and told jokes with enough flair that passersby would sometimes linger for half an hour or more. Often he hung out with his friends at State Park, in the center of downtown Peoria, performing for an audience that appreciated his material but never gave him a free pass. They shared bottles of Silver Satin, a cheap and sweet white wine, and watched movies that the city projected on the wall of the neighboring Lincoln School. State Park was their preferred locale for a simple reason: it had clear sight lines that allowed Richard and his friends to spot any police cars before the cops could reach them and bust them for violating the eleven o’clock curfew.

  The curfew was, for black teenagers, an ever-present threat—a nightly reminder that, just by trying to have a good time, they risked being hauled into custody by the police. Because they tended to gather indoors and outside the curfew’s enforcement area downtown, white teens were not much affected by it; the law plainly targeted young black teens like Richard, who hung out on the downtown streets. Thirty minutes before the curfew, horns in the housing projects would blare a reminder. At eleven o’clock, police cars would sweep through downtown, and black teens would scatter and run. They lived in fear that they’d be picked up and hauled “down to the river”—the Illinois River, which curved around the edge of downtown—and take a beating there. They were right to be afraid: the policemen, who were themselves black and Arab-American (and thus not allowed to patrol the white parts of town), wanted to scare the kids straight. They would bring a curfew violator to the river, ask him to “drink it,” then dunk his head in the water.

  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.

  “Get your hands up, black boy!”

  “I didn’t do nothin’!”

  “Shut up, punk, and put your hands against the wall!”

  “There ain’t no wall!”

  “Find one!”

  “Put the handcuffs on him, Fred.”

  And they’d put the handcuffs on me. And I was really skinny and they’d slip off. And the guy would get mad.

  “Put them on his ankles, his chest, or something!”

  And they’d handcuff my thighs—and hop me to the car.

  Then they’d call my father up . . .

  “Mr. Pryor, we have your son here in jail. What would you say we do with him?”

  “Let him escape and shoot him in the back.”

  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.

  On 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.”

  On 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.”