Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Kaiserslautern’s commanding officers hailed largely from the South, and while the army had been officially desegregated in 1954, the Kaiserslautern base felt to its black soldiers as if it were ruled by a Mississippi-ish double standard. A white soldier who showed up late for duty might get a free pass, but a black soldier who did the same would get disciplined and perhaps demoted—part of a system that managed to keep blacks in the lower ranks. Many black GIs felt intensely isolated: they were struggling against the same discrimination they faced at home, but without their family or larger community to offer distraction or support. It was not an easy place to be a black comedian, either. When, in 1958, the black entertainer Timmie Rogers arrived late for a show in Kaiserslautern, one major became so incensed that he slugged Rogers and kicked him while he was on the floor, breaking a rib. The major claimed that he’d been provoked, that Rogers had insulted him by asking, “What’s the matter, man?”—not “What’s the matter, officer?” These were the sorts of men to whom Richard reported.

  The surrounding towns of the Rhineland-Palatinate offered no easy social escape. Upon their arrival in the area, white GIs had threatened German bar owners with an economic boycott if they served a drop to blacks, and the bar owners acceded to the pressure. The same Germans who had earlier embraced the Nazi Party, which made “miscegenation” punishable by death, and who now made the Rhineland-Palatinate the only German state to have a proud neo-Nazi in its legislature, found segregation quite palatable. As a result, these garrison towns had two sets of bars—one for white GIs, another for their black counterparts. In Kaiserslautern the black bars were confined to a single street, known as “Little Harlem.” And while, by the late-1950s, white GIs might freely carouse with German women, black GI bars were often raided by American military police and German authorities. Any German woman who frequented a black GI bar was assumed to be a prostitute and so could be hauled off to jail. (Kaiserslautern’s Little Harlem was also known as “Bimbo City.”) In one town, three-quarters of women prosecuted for prostitution were in the company of black GIs—an astonishing figure, given that blacks were only 15 percent of the army population. Even steady girlfriends of black GIs had a hard time escaping punishment.

  Private Pryor stumbled into this German version of Jim Crow when he visited a local club early in his tour of duty. Before he could order his first beer, two white soldiers started scuffling. Then he heard someone yell “Nigger!” and looked around, only to discover that he was the only black person in the bar. The scuffle had shifted its focus to him. He ran upstairs to escape the fight and, landing in a room where the club’s strippers changed their clothes, begged for help from the first girl he met. Her face twisted into a sour expression. She told him, “Get out of here. I call police.” Soon after, the MPs arrived. Richard sneaked outside and scrambled back to his barracks, one step ahead of the law.

  It was an all-too-typical incident in these southwestern garrison towns. Many barroom brawls were the result of a new black recruit wandering into a place where he was not welcome—not by white GIs and not by German civilians. When military police arrived at the scene of an interracial fight, they responded by tracking down the black GI and beating him into submission; Richard was lucky to escape a rendezvous with their nightsticks. At least once, not long before his arrival in the area, the violence between black and white soldiers had exploded into a full-fledged race riot. On New Year’s Eve in 1955, in the neighboring town of Baumholder (where Richard would soon be transferred), hundreds of white and black GIs clashed in the town’s center until “blood was running in the gutter,” according to the local police chief. Scores were wounded, and an unknown number of soldiers died in the melee—unknown because the military command refused to release information about the incident.

  A month after his arrival in Germany, Richard went to the dispensary at his base. He feared that he was losing his mind: he was being woken up in the middle of the night by horrible dreams. The dispensary recommended that he be transferred to the army hospital nearby and given an emergency psychiatric consult. The army psychiatrist reassured him that he was normal: it was normal for a soldier to worry and lose sleep. He suggested that Richard return for a follow-up exam, but he never did.

  On December 9 he was transferred out of Kaiserslautern and sent thirty-five miles away, to Baumholder, known variously as the Siberia of Germany (in recognition of its remoteness and cold winters) or, more simply, as the nation’s armpit. It was a cow town whose peasants still hauled goods on horse-drawn wagons. Soldiers stationed in Baumholder fell into a numbing routine: rise and shine, reveille, long jogs, classroom drills, three meals, and occasional visits into the town at night. Richard seems to have coped with the stress by smoking and eating. By the time he left the service, eight months later, he was up to one and half packs a day and had gained twenty-six pounds from his first physical.

  In Baumholder, Richard’s military career unraveled. He was assigned to a job so dull that it was grueling to endure: maintaining a Nike missile up a hill on the fringe of the camp, far from any mess halls or amenities. Soldiers in missile battalions were there to push the red buttons if an emergency arose, but mostly they just sat around and dithered in the “ready room,” a barracks with bunks and a lounge area. For Richard, the missile battalion’s plumber, the only emergency he could anticipate was a stopped-up toilet. His enthusiasm for the service waned. On January 4, 1960—the first Monday after New Year’s Eve weekend—he missed morning reveille and was slapped with the punishment of seven days’ restriction to the missile area and a distant mess hall. On January 12, just after serving the last day of his restriction order, he missed formation and was given two weeks of extra duty, an extra shift at the end of each endless day.

  Richard never cottoned to boredom: he had an antic personality that created high drama out of thin air. In the late afternoon of January 24, one hour before he was to begin his overtime shift, he started insulting the corporal of the guard in the ready room.

  “Gringo monkey!” he yelled. “Chingada madre!”

  Why Richard called his superior officer a “gringo” and a “motherfucker” in Spanish will always retain an element of mystery. Maybe Richard had been posing as a Puerto Rican recruit to dodge the worst of army racism—he suggested as much in a later routine—and perhaps the Spanish obscenity was part of the masquerade. The insult may have baffled the man who was its target, too: the army record does not report any response from him.

  “Are you tired of living?” Richard sneered as a follow-up. The man asked what he meant by that. “Maybe you’ll die tonight,” Richard answered.

  For his less than deferential behavior, Richard was disciplined officially and demoted a grade. In the paperwork, the captain in charge of Richard’s unit laid the groundwork for an eventual discharge from the army. Private Pryor, he wrote, “lacks the ability to perform his duties as expected of a good soldier.” And then, piling on: “Further, this individual lacks effectiveness in performing his assigned duty as a plumber.” In the eyes of the army, Richard was good for nothing, a nuisance.

  Richard hung on for a while nonetheless. Like many black GIs, he picked up some basic German on his jaunts into town, where he found comfort in the arms of fräuleins who were not local to Baumholder but who’d traveled there because they sensed an opportunity. The local priests and burghers might have labeled all such women prostitutes, but their motives were decidedly mixed. Some took cash for specified sexual services. Others formed liaisons with black GIs that lasted as long as their partner’s tour of duty. A few landed a spouse and a ticket to America. For Richard, who was familiar with what it meant to live in such a ripely compromised world, the red-light districts adjacent to his army base probably felt more like home than the base itself.

  With one German fräulein, Richard had a sexual experience he would never forget. It was an experiment in rebellion, a refusal of his uncle Dickie’s solemn advice: “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whateve
r you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.” Richard asked the woman if he could go down on her, and she said yes. The experience was “a revelation, something that changed my life, because until then, my family only fucked in one position—up and down.” Having strayed from the Pryor family nest, he was straying from its mores, too.

  Seven months after the “Chingada madre” incident, Richard was booted from the army for good. Yet his own account of the trouble is so out of kilter with the testimony lodged in the official record that one is tempted to say that, on the night of July 9, 1960, when Richard drew a switchblade on a specialist fourth class, he did so enveloped in the fog of war.

  According to Richard, his unit had been watching the film Imitation of Life—a lush melodrama of the time, starring army pinup Lana Turner—when a white soldier “laughed at the wrong spots.” Imitation of Life is a film that, unusually for its time, smuggles a profound story about racial ambivalence and self-loathing into what appears, at first, to be a simple morality tale about a negligent white mother. In its last half, most of its energy flows into the saga of Sarah Jane, a light-skinned young black woman who, leaving home, passes for white so that she can chase dreams of white glamour: being a showgirl in a glossy production, having a well-off white boyfriend. Her quest ends tragically, with her black mother dying from the heartbreak of their separation.

  Laughing at Imitation of Life was equivalent to laughing at the sorrows of black life—or of Richard’s. Didn’t he, like the character of Sarah Jane, long to shake off the fate of a hardscrabble life? Didn’t he dream, like her, of achieving escape velocity as a star? And didn’t he understand, from his failed courtship of Margaret Ruth to his most recent trysts in Germany, the pull of romance across the color line? Small wonder that he would have been willing to risk his army career, in effect, to defend the film’s honor.

  According to Richard’s memoir, a friend of his started slugging the white GI who had laughed at the film. A crowd gathered outside the enlisted men’s club to watch the fight. But when it became clear that the white GI would win, Richard reached into his pocket, drew out a switchblade, and stabbed the white GI six or seven times in the back—to no effect. The white GI appeared indestructible. Petrified, Richard ran away and flung his knife into the bushes. Soon after, an MP arrived at Richard’s barracks, accused him of having stabbed a fellow soldier, and tossed him in the stockade.

  The army’s version of the tale is considerably less colorful, lacking as it does any testimony from Richard. According to the military, Private Pryor had, for no reason, stabbed a Specialist Fourth Class in the chest outside the enlisted men’s club. The stabbed specialist had pursued and caught Pryor, but Pryor had jerked away and fled, only to return a few minutes later to issue a threat: “Man, you hit me. I have a long knife, and when you come out, I’m going to cut you!”

  The absence of Richard’s testimony from the official record is no happenstance. Like other soldiers brought up on discipline charges, Richard chose to sacrifice any legal representation and leave the service “under honorable conditions” rather than face a court-martial and possible prison time. Black soldiers were particularly liable to land in this predicament: a decade later, the NAACP charged that military stockades in Germany resembled prisons in America, with blacks making up more than half of inmates.

  For the army, Richard’s “elimination” was an open-and-shut case. He “has a history of violence,” wrote the major who commanded his unit. “His retention in the service would be detrimental to unit moral[e] and the personal saf[e]ty of the men forced into contact with him.” Richard had performed poorly in all three units where he served, the major added, and had “been counseled and corrected without avail.” He was an inveterate troublemaker, and an unpopular one at that: “He does not get along with other men and he continually feels he is being ‘picked on.’” Race often went unmentioned in reports like these, as commanding officers were likely to be blamed for racial friction between their troops but were simply doing their job when they eliminated unsuitable men from their unit. Richard’s file was no exception. By the evidence it contained, Richard had a persecution complex.

  Confined to a cell with a concrete floor, a single lightbulb, and little else, Richard had plenty of time to ponder what he would do after his service ended. He was held in Baumholder for a full month after the stabbing incident, during which time he was given another physical. He ticked off a host of ailments: eye trouble, shortness of breath, pain in his chest, heart palpitations, leg cramps, motion sickness, stuttering, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. The army had taken a rail-thin teenager, put meat on his bones, and turned him into a mess of a man.

  But in one regard, the army had cleared Richard’s head and straightened his vision. At his exit physical, he was asked to list his occupation. On two previous occasions, he had responded to that prompt by referring to his work with his father and uncle, and had called himself a truck driver. This time, he looked to his future more than his past. He took up the pen and wrote, in the wobbly script that reflected his interrupted schooling, “actor.”

  Changing jobs: Pryor’s “occupation” upon entering the US Army in 1959, and upon exiting it in 1960.

  (Courtesy of Jennifer Pryor)

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  The Measure of a Man

  Peoria, 1960–1962

  Richard Pryor had plenty to mull over on the long trip from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to his father’s home in downtown Peoria. His discharge from the army on August 27, 1960, was just the latest in a chain of humiliations and rejections that stretched as far back as his nineteen-year-old mind could reach—to the straight-edged Mr. Fink, the obtuse Miss Dempsey, the nuns who ejected him from their school, the coach who kicked him off the basketball team, the teenager who sexually abused him in the alley, the father who beat him, the mother who abandoned him. He arrived in Peoria with twenty-five days of back pay in his pocket and used the money to play the part of the conquering hero. He took his half-sister Barbara to a movie, then called a cab to whisk her home, even though she lived just three blocks away. He broke out a few snatches of German to impress local girls. If everyone assumed that he had prospered from his time in the service, he was not going to disabuse them of the illusion.

  The money went only so far. Soon enough, Richard was back under Buck’s roof, living in an expanded household that included his uncle Dickie and half-sister Barbara in addition to his father and stepmother. Ann had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth, and the family struggled to make ends meet. When Buck and Dickie couldn’t find much work as truckers, it was Ann herself who took up the slack, going out into the cold and returning with a white man in tow, whom she led into a bedroom so they could close the deal. While she turned tricks, Buck sat quietly in the front room—counting the money in his head, perhaps. A little while later, Ann would emerge with “just enough [money] to fix us some food for that day,” Barbara recalled. “She’d put out a big pot of chicken—I don’t know what it was, but it was good—and we’d live on that for two or three days.” With money so tight, Buck looked down on his underemployed son, and his son looked away. They barely talked to each other directly.

  Since he didn’t have the resources to get his own apartment, Richard simply made himself scarce. On weekends, he often slept on the couch of his friend William Bradley, curled up in a black trench coat. There he became acquainted with his five-year-old half-sister Sharon, who was Bradley’s stepdaughter and one of Buck’s four “outside children.” (Buck had no relationship with Sharon at the time.) “I came up to him and he gave me a hug,” Sharon said, remembering her initial encounter with Richard. “That was the first time I had ever known what thirty-five cents was. It was a quarter and a dime, and that was all he had in his pocket.”

  With so little money to his name, Richard warmed to the kindness of this alternate family. He ate spaghetti at their house and performed amateur magic tricks for Sharon and her brothers and sisters. An aficionado, e
ven in his young adulthood, of cartoons such as Woody Woodpecker and Baby Huey, he would loll in the Bradley family’s living room on Saturday mornings in front of their TV set, or escort Sharon and her siblings to the Rialto Theater, where a local weatherman hosted an auction called “Bids for the Kids”: kids would collect milk cartons to earn points, then pool their points to bid for a bicycle or toy. Sharon and her siblings were always disappointed, never able to win the prizes they coveted, but for Richard the auction was merely the run-up to the main event, a morning of nonstop cartoons. “We had to sit there through all them cartoons while Richard was laughing, laughing at everything,” Sharon grumbled in retrospect.

  One of the gifts of Richard’s childhood, which translated into one of the strengths of his comedy, was that he had no snobbery; he moved easily between vastly different worlds. If, on some mornings, he spent time with his friend’s children, during the afternoons and evenings he frequented the Blue Shadow, a tavern famous for serving a hangover-cure chili so spicy that its mere aroma sent customers into a sweat. There he held down a stool with his friend Wilbur Harp, the rare black man in Peoria who was openly gay and openly effeminate in his manner.