by David Henry
The movie sucks. I don’t care ’cause I got paid . . . Gene Wilder is a fag . . . All I want is to leave Tucson alive . . . I didn’t get caught yesterday buying seven pounds of cocaine in front of eight policemen. They can’t catch me! I’m a lucky, black, greasy motherfucker . . . I’m happy because Sidney Poitier is directing a ten-million-dollar movie and it don’t mean shit. They spent four billion dollars on the Americans who went to Iran, and they crashed. Eight people died and they was all black.
Even when he seems on the verge of giving the desired answer to a question, he renders the take unusable by slouching in his chair and throttling his cupped hand above his crotch, miming jacking off. There is plenty of laughter on camera and off. Even though the day is wasted, everyone is having a jolly time. Even Richard, although his eyes say he is dying inside.
Jennifer Lee accompanied him to Tucson for location filming at the Arizona State Prison. As usual, he rented a private house several miles away from the rest of the cast and crew. At this point, he prized any and every opportunity to be off by himself so he could smoke.
Jennifer read aloud to him from the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” while he refilled his pipe and kept a wary eye on the demons that prowled the room where they slept. It freaked her out the way he would point to them, show her where they were, and describe in such calm and precise detail exactly what they looked like and what they were doing. She watched with growing alarm as his bloodshot eyes followed their movements around the room. Soon enough, because she was sharing his pipe, she began seeing them, too. And they were exactly as he had described them.
Richard and his friend Charles Weldon, who was also in Stir Crazy, kept the party going once they got back to L.A. After an especially debauched night with perhaps a half-dozen hookers—including a pair of twins who couldn’t keep up with them, Weldon remembers—they decided to give AA a try. They sat through part of a meeting, listening to people weep and talk about the degrading things they’d done in exchange for drugs or drug money. One woman told of stealing her parents’ television. Richard had a routine about that. At one point they just looked at each other and said, in effect, “Shit, we ain’t got no problem. Not compared to these people.” They got up and left, went out and scored.
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One night at the Northridge house, Jennifer looked out the window and saw all these caped dwarves and goblins—a whole army of them—moving through the bushes, coming after her. She became so terrified, she called the police and frantically led the bemused officers on a search of the area outside the house. Jennifer actually grabbed the flashlight away from one of them and shined it underneath the bushes to show them where the goblins were. “But my dark creatures have disappeared,” she writes, “and so, obviously, has my mind.”
Weeks later, she and Richard were clutching each other as they made their way through the house in a paranoid delirium. They saw—they both saw—the orange face of the devil glowing in the dark at the top of the stairs outside Richard’s office looking down at them.
In what would become an almost-nightly ritual, Richard swore off smoking, smashed his glass pipe, then went out the next morning to buy a bigger and better one.
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By springtime, Richard was unable to go five minutes without freebasing. He tried. He set down his pipe, looked at the clock, and told himself, “I’m not doing anymore freebase for the next five minutes.” But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t wait that long. If he couldn’t go five minutes without freebase, what could he do? What was left? He’d come to the end of something he couldn’t see past.
On June 7, Richard confided to Jennifer that he’d seen himself as the devil. An orange-colored skeletal creature came walking through the wall like a ghost. It looked just like him. Richard spoke to it. He asked the apparition if it really was his own self he was seeing. “Yes, I’m you,” the devil said to him, then walked back through the wall.
—————
Late in the day of June 9, 1980, after weeks of nonstop freebasing, Richard doused himself with 150-proof rum and flicked his Bic lighter, resulting in third-degree burns over more than half his body. Put bluntly, after he’d smoked every bit of cocaine he could find, he smoked himself.
Friends were called to the house throughout the earlier part of that day to come do something—anything—to help him. Jim Brown, Paul Mooney, and Jennifer Lee all found him cowering in his bedroom like the Kafka character Gregor Samsa, scurrying from the light they let in, racing for the dark places, and hissing at them to get the fuck out and leave him alone.
—————
Kathy McKee doesn’t remember who called her to come over that day. Probably Rashon, or maybe his housekeeper, Mercy, or Richard’s aunt Dee. They were all there.
Kathy always had a calming effect on Richard, but on this day he was too far gone. She walked into his room and there he sat “with that damn base pipe glued to his hand. He was completely one hundred percent out of his mind. It was terrible. You couldn’t communicate with him anymore. You know that if he doesn’t put that base pipe down and go to the hospital and get some help, there’s no way he’s coming out of this. You have to understand,” she says, “freebase isn’t like doing cocaine. You can’t think of it that way. Everybody at that time was doing coke. Sammy Davis did coke. Johnny Carson did coke. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, everybody did. But once he got on that damn base pipe”—the anger still rises in her voice some thirty-five years later—“that was it. There’s no coming back from that. Like AIDS in the gay community, base took people down. People died.”
Kathy described for us how Richard used a cotton swab on the end of a wooden stick—like the throat swabs they use at the doctor’s office—and he would dip that into 151 rum or 200-proof grain alcohol and light that with a lighter.
He would light the swab and use that as a flame torch to light the pipe. I really don’t know the reason behind that, but I would imagine it’s because it wasn’t toxic to light the pipe with rum like it would be with lighter fluid. You’d be inhaling lighter fluid. Richard was dipping that cotton flame torch into the rum bottle—151-proof rum! Plus he’s high, he’s out of his mind. And, you know, after three days on a binge, or whatever it was, that’s a pretty risky thing to do, because if that torch is hot, or still lit by mistake, and you dip it down in that bottle, you’ve now got a molotov cocktail.
“I told him—the last thing I said to him was, “Richard, at least pour that rum in a cup.”
—————
Richard, in his book, describes descending into serious dementia, a surreal darkness of hallucinations and voices—people from his past outside his window, on the other side of his door, taunting him, mocking his weakness. When he ran out of dope, he debated his options, then reached for a bottle of rum and doused himself. It seemed like a good idea. He wasn’t scared. Neither did he feel inner peace. “I was in a place called There.”
It took three tries for his Bic to catch—just as his cousin opened the door to look in on him. Richard says he tried to wrap himself in a comforter to put out the flames, but he couldn’t pick it up. It wouldn’t move. “I must have gone into shock,” he writes, “because I didn’t feel anything.”
His aunt Dee came in and yelled at his cousin to “Smother him!” In his delirium, Richard thought she meant “Suffocate him” as in “Put the sorry motherfucker out of his misery.”
He could have rolled on the floor, says Kathy McKee. The shower was right there off the bedroom. But there was also a window. He crashed through it and headed toward the street.
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Officers Richard Zielinski and Carl Helm, responding to a call just after 8:00 p.m., saw Richard running along Parthenia Street, trailing smoke. The identity of the burning man had been confirmed.
Officer Zielinski jumped out of the patrol car and began jogging alongside him. He noted that the weave of his polyester shirt had melted into his raw flesh.
“Richar
d, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“I’m going to the hospital. Just show me where it is.”
“Why don’t you just stop and wait for—“
“I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll die.”
Zielinski didn’t argue the point. He simply assured Richard that help was on the way and that he would stay with him until the ambulance arrived.
“I really fucked up, man. Please, God, give me another chance. I know I did wrong, but there’s a lot of good in me. Haven’t I brought happiness to anyone in this world?”
“Sure you have,” Zielinski told him. “We all love your stuff.”
Richard paused briefly in front of the San Fernando Valley Christian School, nearly a mile from his house, then took off again, turning the corner and heading south on Hayvenhurst Avenue where, some time later, an ambulance caught up to him.
—————
Richard gave multiple accounts of how the fire started, most of them attempts to vouch for the well-meaning explanations put out by his friends and management—covering for those who were covering for him.
In one, Richard admitted that he had been freebasing the day before but had run out of base. (Think we’ll be freebasing tonight? We’re not? Well, what the heck.) So he and an unidentified “partner”—perhaps Rashon, perhaps some phantasmal character, the product of a hallucination—were drinking the highly volatile rum he generally used to fire up the base. He went to light a cigarette and—POOF!
Tony DiDominico, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, confirmed that overproof rum, properly atomized, with a very hot ignition force, would indeed ignite. “But a violent explosion? A flash fire? I don’t think so.”
—————
In the version Rashon told, he and Richard were in the living room, in a haze, drinking the high-octane rum and watching something on TV about the Vietnam War. A monk sat down in a public square, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself ablaze.
Said Rashon to Richard, “You have to have a lot of courage to light that shit.” To which Pryor replied, “You have to have more courage not to flinch when you light it!”
Rashon laughed. He got up, went to the kitchen, then heard a scream. “I opened the door and out comes this ball of fire. And I sidestepped it, because I seen a knife in his hand, and I know when you’re in that state, there’s nothing I could do. But he did pour the shit on himself, and he did light it. It was no accident.”
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Late that night, the waiting area in the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital was overfilled with Richard’s children, aunts, uncles, and an assemblage of ex-wives and girlfriends, all of whom rose in unison when a hospital rep came out and called for “Mrs. Pryor.”
Jennifer Lee was shut out. Richard refused to see her and she found herself ostracized by his family members camped in the waiting area because she told the doctors that Richard had been freebasing earlier in the day. That information, one doctor told her, according to her own account, saved his life.
No charges were filed. Someone had gone into Richard’s house and cleared out any drug paraphernalia before investigators arrived. The only apparent evidence of what had taken place in that room consisted of a singed bedspread and a patch of scorched paint on one of the walls.
—————
Richard’s “accident” prompted an article on the dangerous new drug craze in the June 30 issue of People, written without byline by Peter Lester, a friend of Jennifer Lee’s who telephoned her days after the fire, quizzing her on the basic mechanics of freebasing and Richard’s consumption habits. He failed to inform her until the end of their conversation that he had been taping it. Freebasing—or baseballing as the article claims it was also known—derives from the process of using ether to “free” the alkaloid cocaine (or “base”) from the additives and impurities typically found in drugs sold on the street. Powdered cocaine is dissolved in ether to separate extraneous matter, leaving a rock-hard piece of pure coke. Users then apply a flame to the pure coke and inhale the vapors.
A hit of freebase delivers a thirty-second rush followed by a minute or two of what is described as unimaginable euphoria. The high ends with a crash and an insatiable desire to get it back. The high is frequently followed by depression. The urge to have more grows stronger and stronger the more one smokes.
“Freebase gets into the brain and produces a maximal high, and that is what’s so compelling about it,” said Dr. Sidney Cohen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. After repeated use, freebase can cause critical changes in consciousness such as paranoia or schizophrenic psychosis. “Some people think they’re more creative when they freebase,” Dr. Cohen said. “Certainly they get ideas in their heads that they normally wouldn’t.” Chronic users often become delusional. UCLA research psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel said he had witnessed a delirious freebaser clawing the skin off his own arms in the belief that they were host to a nest of slithering white snakes.
Siegel estimated that some users freebased up to thirty grams of cocaine in a single day—with a then-street-value of approximately $2,500—and it wasn’t unusual for some to spend $250,000 a year. One other thing: while alcohol, pot, even snorted coke tend to be casually shared in convivial settings, freebase, Dr. Seigel warned, is a loner’s drug.
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Doctors Richard Grossman and Jack Grossman, resident plastic surgeons and burn specialists at Sherman Oaks, initially gave Richard a one-in-three chance of survival. His entire upper body, including his torso, back, chest, arms, neck, and parts of his face, had been severely burned.
As soon as the risk of infection had subsided enough to allow visitors, Mooney went to Richard’s room and found his friend lying unbandaged so as to allow his oozing third-degree burns sufficient time to air out in preparation for the coming skin grafts.
“We managed to save his face,” Dr. Jack Grossman told Vernon Scott of United Press International, “but the burns on his ears are so extensive the cartilage is visible.”
Said his brother Dr. Richard Grossman, “There is virtually no skin on his torso. You can see the raw muscle tissue, fat tissue . . . If you saw our patient without his dressings, you would faint. Most people would.”
Paul Mooney did not.
He had his own theory about the fire, which was this: Richard’s money and success made him feel so white that he had tried to burn himself black. One might just as reasonably argue that he had tried to dispense with the skin issue altogether. Either way, it was a bust.
Mooney put on his bravest face and his most solemn German accent.
“Dr. Frankenstein,” he said, “the operation did not succeed.”
It hurt to laugh, but when did it not?
After all of it—the spent shell of self-loathing, the match and fire, the smoldering streak from Parthenia Street to Hayvenhurst Avenue, the months of denial and therapy and recuperation—Richard returns to his home in Northridge. It’s like he’s a ghost returning to a place he is vaguely certain used to be his. His friends and family, having given him up for gone, have looted the place of everything they could carry: stereos, television sets, jewelry, furniture, family pictures, lamps, and rugs. “Motherfuckers had a fire sale,” is what it looks like.
The hollow rooms, airless and hot, echo his footsteps. Dust bunnies stir in his wake as he tosses aside a pile of rumpled sheets, steps over an abandoned extension cord. He goes to the back room, into the rear closet. Its ill-fit molding gives way at the floor and he pries up a short corner board with his boot, as easy as a kid’s thick puzzle piece to reveal his secret, secret stash, still there. He closes his eyes and offers up a prayer . . . Of thanksgiving? For deliverance? He makes himself comfortable on the floor and begins one step at a time. Pipe. Rock. Rum. Lighter. Light.
PART FIVE
“THE PART OF ME THAT WANTED TO DIE DID”
For me, the three geniuses of comedy are Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor bef
ore the fire.
—Franklyn Ajaye
Several times a day doctors and staff at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles lowered Richard into a whirlpool bath where hot water and antiseptics washed over his body. Next they painted his torso with a silver sulfa cream to fight infection. Twice a day, for up to two hours at a time, they slid him into a cylindrical hyperbaric chamber that tripled the normal atmospheric pressure, thereby forcing pure oxygen into his body to speed the healing process.
Despite the excruciating treatments, Mooney reported that Richard was happier at Sherman Oaks than he had been in quite a long while. Having (presumably) no access to vodka or cocaine, his demons were malnourished, had grown too weak to intervene.
After six weeks of skin grafts, plastic surgery, and physical therapy, Richard was released on July 24 and taken directly to do an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC’s Good Morning America. Sitting there, nearly bald, his skin patchy and discolored with fresh scar tissue, he repeated the ridiculous story that he and his partner—did no one ever ask who?—were in his bedroom, talking bullshit, talking about life, drinking overproof rum. It spilled. His partner got up to get a towel from the bathroom to wipe it up. Richard lit a cigarette, igniting the spilled rum and himself along with it.
“Were you on drugs?”
“No. I do drugs. I’ve done drugs, you know that. I’ve talked about it, but I wasn’t on drugs then.”
“People think that you were freebasing co—”
“Yeah, but you can’t blow up yourself freebasing.”
Not until their follow-up interview in 1986 did he admit that he had been lying to her, that the fire had been the culmination of a weeks-long freebasing binge, and that, no, it had not been an accident. He admitted, too, that within three weeks of leaving Sherman Oaks he was back freebasing again.
Walters leaned forward with a furrowed brow like a scolding mother.
“Richard! Why?”
He needed it, he said. Starting a new life was scary.