by David Henry
By nightfall, as they descended into the Central Valley, Mooney got quiet and just listened as Richard went on humming off-tune in the dark and, with each sip of Courvoisier, muttering, “Fuck L.A.”
BALLAD OF A THIN MAN
It’s good to feel the cloying hand of Los Angeles relax its grip, speeding north into the desert. Rather than snake their way along the scenic coast highway, Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney opt instead for the straighter vein of Interstate 5, which takes them quickly over the hills, through the grapevine, and into the cooked flatlands . . . past trailer parks, truck stops, power dams, slaughterhouse holding pens, and many miles of little else. The route offers no sea breezes or glimpses of spouting whales, but they can gun the motor and keep an easy watch for the highway patrol who pay less late-hour heed to this inland stretch than to the quaint beach hamlets. Anyway, it is dark, and a dome of stars arcs above them as they sail, top down, singing along to the radio.
Richard sinks lower into the passenger’s seat, nursing a bottle and protecting a continuous string of cigarettes from the wind. Ahead is Berkeley, a series of boldly drawn blurred lines where poets, Black Panthers, tripping musicians, cross-dressers, co-ed radicals, and shaggy scientists launch their test balloons into the ether, their near-religious ferocity largely unmatched by the goal-oriented ethos that keeps the City of Angels to the south staunchly on the grid.
Past three in the morning, and still two hours from the Bay, the music has gone silent, the only thing on the radio call-in program where desert dwellers trade UFO abduction theories.
Richard has gone quiet, too. The fear that had gripped him in L.A. slips from his shoulders like a boxer’s robe, only to be replaced by a new one, as he edges himself further onto a tightrope where the fix of the far-end’s tether is wholly unknowable.
“Baby, everything is alright, uptight, out of sight,” sings Paul Mooney.
Richard lets loose the tail end of his cigarette, lofting it straight above his head and into the wind. It skips with a shower of sparks on the dark flat road behind them.
* Longtime girlfriend and onetime fiancée Kathy McKee was always suspicious of any gift Richard gave her. He was so sneaky and so deceitful, she says, that unless he actually went with her into a store and bought her something that she picked out herself, she just took it for granted that the fur coat he offered up from his closet or the diamond bracelet he pulled from his pocket had previously belonged to some other girlfriend. He always seemed to have one or two such gifts on hand. McKee herself, on the occasion of one of their several breakups, left behind a twelve-thousand-dollar Siberian silver fox cape that a previous boyfriend had bought for her in Hong Kong. She never saw it again. Richard’s house was a virtual fur and jewelry exchange/bazaar. She lost the fox cape but gained a black mink coat she saw hanging on a doorknob in his house in Beverly Hills. “Oh, you like that coat?” Richard said. “It’s yours.”
PART THREE
THERE’S A RIOT GOIN’ ON
Like Jesus to the wilderness, Robert Johnson to the crossroads, and Malcolm X to Mecca, Richard went to Berkeley.
Berkeley, 1971. A hotbed of free love, psychedelic drugs, and black power. A conflation of scenes as drawn by M. C. Escher, an anthill of revolutionary movements, inverted and swarming in the same space and time; working at cross-purposes and each consumed with such single-mindedness they scarcely noticed the others’ presence, let alone the possibility or strength of joining forces: the acid-tripping hippies helmed by Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead, academia’s free speech movement, militant African American groups like SSAC (Soul Students Advisory Council). They were all talking revolution.
Mostly, that’s all it was. Talk. While Kesey and the Dead spiraled deeper into a satisfied self-indulgence, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale—flanked by a few badass cats they recruited off the block—came strutting into an SSAC meeting with shouldered weapons on Malcolm X’s birthday (Huey’s idea). The leadership freaked at the prospect of actually practicing what they’d preached. So Huey and Bobby resigned the SSAC, went off on their own, and formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
This was the scene Pryor and Mooney walked in on.
For Mooney, it was a trip back home, a return to his past, a chance to recharge and reconnect. For Richard, it was an escape, a way forward, a self-imposed exile to purge himself of the vicious Hollywood-Vegas talk-show cycle eating away at his soul.
Richard set himself up in a $110-a-month apartment on the city’s west side at the edge of the freeway just blocks from the marina (where, Mooney noted, freighters would dock every day with kilos of smuggled cocaine stowed away in their holds). He furnished his place with little else but a bare mattress on the floor, a portable TV, record player, a few books, typewriter, and tape recorder.
There Richard got busy, spending his days holed up in his apartment, writing, desperate to release the “world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes screaming inside my head.” Richard would describe this hiatus, which stretched into two years, as “the freest time in my life,” marking his full flowering as an artist: “Berkeley was a circus of exciting, extreme, colorful, militant ideas. Drugs. Hippies. Black Panthers. Antiwar protests. Experimentation. Music, theater, poetry. I was like a lightning rod. I absorbed bits of everything while forging my own uncharted path.”
When he ventured out, he wandered the street wearing sandals, a kimono, and a conical hat that made him look, in his words, like a “deranged wizard.”
This was Richard’s “fuck it all” period, says Mooney, “denying himself for the sake of his art. His job, as he sees it, is to find a way out of the box that white people want to keep him in. He feels like it’s killing him. He has to get out from under it just to survive as a man.” House, career, clothes, women, friends—he cast them all aside. If he expected to “find his lost soul,” he needed to cast off all but the bare essentials, to renounce the past in order to discover the future.
No one except Mooney knew how to find Richard. No one entered his orbit he didn’t want to let in. The ones he did admit would include the brightest stars of the Bay area’s literary renaissance, foremost among them novelist Cecil Brown, author of The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, who would become Richard’s longtime running buddy and screenplay collaborator; Angela Davis; Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), poet Al Young (The Song Turning Back into Itself); and Ishmael Reed, who Richard considered one of the most honest people he ever met.
Reed’s years-ahead-of-hip-hop technique was to mix and sample borrowings from pop culture—a then-unheard-of practice in the realm of novel writing or anywhere else, for that matter—to create his gumbo-styled prose. Reed characterizes the technique as a defining force running through all of African American culture, making use of gathered scraps to create something whole.
Mooney, on one of his frequent visits to check in on Richard, could see that he was going through a profound transformation, “going all intellectual on me.” The most apparent evidence of this was that he had switched from Courvoisier—emperor Napoleon’s preferred brand of cognac—to a more proletariat vodka. Either went well with cocaine.
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Cocaine, coffee, cigarettes, and vodka notwithstanding, Richard’s main sources of sustenance were Marvin Gaye’s just-released LP What’s Going On and the published speeches of Malcolm X. “All he does,” Mooney writes, “is listen to music and read Malcolm X all day long.”
As Richard had grown weary of entertaining Vegas and talk show audiences with his Cosby-lite material while the streets of U.S. cities and college campuses were billowing smoke, so too did Marvin Gaye yearn to move beyond the infectious pop confections churned out by the Motown hit machine. In June 1970, Gaye recorded ”What’s Going On,” a song cowritten by his label mate Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops, and Al Cleveland. The record was backed with Gaye’s own song, “God Is Love.” But Motown president Berry Gordy Jr. refused to release the single. Neither
track had that “Motown sound.” So Gaye essentially went on strike, refusing to record any more material until Gordy relented, which he finally did, in January 1971. The record was an immediate success. Gaye recorded the rest of the album in just ten days in March, and Motown released it on May 21.
Although Gaye addressed a world of hopelessness in the face of poverty, urban decay, environmental blight, war (Gaye’s younger brother, Frankie, had recently returned from a three-year hitch in Vietnam), and police brutality, the LP’s title track was not phrased as a question—there is not a single question mark to be found anywhere in the lyric—but issued as a statement. This is what’s going on. Listen and you will know.
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When Richard first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, at Shelley’s insisting, he lamented that he hadn’t been paying attention when Malcolm was alive and addressing crowds on the streets of Harlem just a subway ride uptown from his Greenwich Village flat. But reading Malcolm’s speeches gave him a jolt, a shock to the system. Even in cold print, Richard felt the cadences and rhythms, the visceral way Malcolm connected with and played off of his audiences, and—not nearly enough credit or attention has been given to this—his comic timing and scathing sense of humor. Malcolm saw little advantage in repressing his hostility, although he was always civil. He politely declined an invitation to share a stage with George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Neither would he address a rally for the KKK despite its leadership’s eager embrace of his calls for segregation. Things had gone topsy-turvy. Time was needed to sort it all out. Most jarring for neophytes listening to recordings of his speeches is how joyfully funny Malcolm was. He elicits a surprising amount of laughter from his audiences, usually accompanied by startled gasps of recognition. (In a Newsweek review of Growing Up X, the 2002 memoir by Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, writer Curtis Harris favorably compares Malcolm’s comedic style to Richard Pryor’s.) Richard also enjoyed reading Malcolm because “he shows me I’m not out of my mind.” Here, for example, in his speech “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm lays out the distinction between slavery-era “house Negroes” and “field Negroes.”
The house Negroes, they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food—what he left. If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick!
That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.
The Negro in the field caught hell. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call them chitlins nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts . . . The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut. He wore old, castoff clothes . . . When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze.
You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro.
You don’t hear field Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “the government is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro [saying] “Our government!” I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant. “Our astronauts. Our Navy.” That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind.
Malcolm, it should be remembered, admonished his followers to get off welfare, to break the chains of dependency by cleansing themselves of drugs and alcohol—when you unscrew the cap on a bottle of liquor, he reminded them, that’s a government seal you’re breaking—to form their own businesses and to patronize each other’s.
“Of all of our studies, history is most prepared to reward all research,” Malcolm often said, and “the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books.” He spoke with equal passion of the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and colonial America, of how the Viet Minh overthrew the French at Dien Bien Phu while at the same time exhorting his followers to heed the examples of free enterprise as practiced by General Motors and the F. W. Woolworth Company.
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After a time, Mooney became anxious to resume his career in L.A., even if he had misgivings about leaving his friend in Berkeley, holed up all alone in that “shitty little studio apartment” where he might go for weeks on end without seeing anyone except coke dealers and food-delivery boys. Before leaving town, Mooney made sure Richard had at least a few acquaintances he could reach out to. So he took Richard to meet his mama, who still lived in his old Oakland neighborhood on Eighteenth Street. She fed them a meal of butter beans and neck bones that Richard declared the best he’d ever eaten in his life. As Mooney recalls:
Mama thinks he’s fooling with her but he’s not. That meal isn’t the first beef neck bones Richard eats in his life . . . He chows down on possum, rabbit, whistle pig, fat-back, garden greens and chitterlings like the best of us. Black folks developed a taste for food like this in slave times. The massa always takes the choice cuts for himself. We are left with snouts, ears, neck bones, feet, rectums, and intestines. But we make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The discarded cuts turn out to be the best eating.
Mooney also introduced Richard to his old high school pal, Black Panther Party minister of defense Huey P. Newton. Newton graduated from Berkeley High a functional illiterate but then doggedly taught himself to read by struggling through Plato’s Republic, plowing all the way through it no fewer than five times until he understood it. The book, and his accomplishment in learning to read it, fueled his aspirations to become a political leader.
By the time he and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in October of 1966, Huey Newton had completed two years of law school and was well known on campus for his spirited discussions on the finer points of constitutional law. Bobby Seale was an engineering design major who had spent three years in the air force doing structural repair on high-performance aircraft and had worked on the Gemini missile program. Yet the press and political forces portrayed the Panthers as armed hoodlums and drug thugs who roamed the streets looking to gun down white people. J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence unit regarded even the Panthers’ free breakfast program a threat to national security. The free breakfast program, which by 1969 served more than ten thousand Oakland children every morning before they went to school, was but one of the party’s “survival programs,” along with clothing and food giveaways, escort services for the elderly, and health care services that included testing for sickle-cell anemia.
Still, the only thing that mattered to the media and to a majority of Americans—the only thing they knew about the Panthers, apparently—was that they had guns. At that time, white America could scarcely imagine anything scarier than “armed Negroes.”
The scariest thing they couldn’t have imagined would be Negroes with unconcealed weapons operating out in the open and entirely within the law—angry young militants brazenly availing themselves of their legal and constitutional rights the same as everyone else. “They were registered guns,” Newton pointed out. “Just like the NRA’s guns. Just like Charlton Heston’s guns.”
This wasn’t what the Establishment had in mind when they advised minorities to work for change within the system. They meant casting ballots—with proper ID and no outstanding warrants—every couple of years for either candidate R or candidate D. That didn’t mean exercise your rights to peaceably assemble, to engage in free speech, or bear arms and, when challenged, demand the courts to either uphold those rights or announce to the whole world, point-blank, that those rights didn’t apply to people like you. But that’s what they did.
Here, as they so often did, the Panthers followed the example set by Malcolm X, who, through the auspices of his Organizatio
n for Afro-American Unity, dedicated what was left of his brief life toward bringing charges of human rights violations against the U.S. government before the United Nations. Malcolm didn’t expect a reversal of fortune, he wasn’t asking for reparations. At that point, he hoped for nothing more than an acknowledgment of what had been done, a public reckoning of how the United States had made itself the most powerful nation on earth and at what cost. It remained, in his eyes, the only way anyone involved could ever get over.
Exercising their constitutional right to bear arms was but one weapon in the Panthers’ arsenal. Along with their guns, they carried tape recorders, cameras, and law books as they patrolled the streets on their mission to “police the police,” to observe and document law enforcement’s volatile interactions with Oakland’s black citizenry.
Prominent white leaders were willing to concede, for the record, that even though there was no legal basis for denying African Americans their full civil rights and liberties, society was simply not ready for an upheaval of such seismic proportions. In other words, blacks would just have to wait until whites were ready to grant them their rights, although none were prepared to say just when that might be.
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Huey, Bobby, Stokely, Hubert, Eldridge, Sherwin—who would’ve guessed that such bookish, even nerdy-sounding names could strike apprehension and fear in the hearts of white America more than midway through what was supposed to be its greatest century?
Congress went so far as to pass a law against the party’s minister of justice Hubert “H. Rap” Brown—the “Rap Brown” Federal Anti-Riot Act, tacked onto a fair housing law at the last minute by Senator Strom Thurmond, making it illegal to travel from one state to another, write a letter, make a telephone call, or speak on radio or television with the intent of encouraging any person to participate in a riot.