by Scott Saul
If the rejection of “Uncle Tom Wants You Dead, Nigger” by The Great American Dream Machine was one sign that Richard’s Bay Area sensibility had trouble traveling outside the Bay Area, another was his late-April gig at the Improv, his old New York City stomping ground, in front of a largely white audience. Richard was approached by Improv regular Michael Blum, a young would-be director, who asked Richard if he might film a show for a sample reel, something that Blum could shop around to get more work for himself. Richard agreed.
In Blum’s film, released fourteen years later under the title Live and Smokin’, Richard is jittery, his face beaded with flop sweat, as he rolls out material that slayed mixed audiences at Basin Street West. According to Blum, “the room was filled with a lot of people who looked up to Richard” but remembered him as “a sweetie with these all-white gloves”; they were blindsided by the Richard of ‘Craps.’ When Richard describes how the white johns of his childhood were conned by the faked enthusiasm of the black prostitutes he knew, the crowd reacts with befuddled silence. When he riffs on sexual taboos—how a fringe benefit of “being a Negro” was “fucking white girls,” how he tried to keep his sex with gay queens on the down low—he is met with murmurs, side talk. “This ain’t as funny as we thought it would be,” he observes.
Richard was usually a master at curing a sour atmosphere in a room. At other shows, when audiences sat stone-faced to provocations like “Remember the old days, when giving head wasn’t cool?”, he might snap back with “Oops! Guess those days ain’t old!,” throw out his body in an ironic buck-and-wing, and save the moment. He could be cruelly ingenious, too, at silencing hecklers. When one woman kept complaining about a jibe of his, he performed an elaborate pantomime in which he grabbed, stomped, shredded, and pulverized her; sprinkled her into make-believe rolling papers and smoked her; then finished her off by announcing, “This ain’t shit!” to the hoots of the crowd.
At the Improv show captured in Live and Smokin’, though, Richard seemed at a loss. After some audience members made a move to leave, he cracked, “I hate to see folks leave when I be talking. I hope y’all get raped by black folks with clap, and ain’t nothin’ worse than the black clap.” The cruelty was there, but the ingenuity was not. Richard needed an audience who knew how to play off him, who would follow his cues even if it meant that everyone was staggering and tripping, fumbling for a foothold together. At the Improv, he staggered alone.
On the night of May 21, 1971, Richard was caught in another jam: stuck on a delayed flight from New York City, unable to reach a gig at Mandrake’s, the music club just a half mile from Alan Farley’s apartment in the Berkeley Flats. Unbeknownst to Richard, he was also running late for a rendezvous with his Berkeley destiny, the clock ticking down to an encounter that would both ground him and help set him free as a black artist.
Mandrake’s itself was another case study in the interracial give-and-take of the counterculture. Its owner was Mary Moore, a white woman married to a black jazz saxophonist. Named after a root fabled for its magical properties, the club paid tribute to the black roots of American music, its programming a mix of the best jazz and blues artists (Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker) and groove-oriented bands (Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Country Joe and the Fish) that drew a younger, whiter audience. Whatever the music, the club’s atmosphere was loose, feel-good, participatory: the audience prided itself on being adventurous. A week before, jazzman Roland Kirk walked out the door while still blowing on his saxophone, and the audience followed him into the street and around the block, happy to have discovered their very own Pied Piper.
It was a good crowd for Richard, in other words. But where was he? Mary Moore called to the stage Country Joe McDonald, who found a guitar and tore into “Louie, Louie,” trading the song’s famously unintelligible lyrics with a delighted audience.
In the middle of “Louie, Louie,” Country Joe was cut off; Richard had manifested himself. “A slim shadow slipped on to the stage,” recalled novelist Cecil Brown. “He then crossed the stage into the little spotlight and came out of the shadow. . . . We fell under the spell of Richard’s voices.” For Brown, who was teaching English classes at UC Berkeley at the time and had never seen Richard perform, the show was a revelation: here was a brilliant satirist in the line of Juvenal, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain. And yet he was also a living, breathing link to the black oral tradition, a descendant of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, an avatar who took folklore and made it dynamic and new. Brown felt a special connection: “I was one of the only blacks in the audience and Pryor glanced over at me through the entire routine as if I were a witness to what he was telling this white audience.”
After the show, Brown followed Richard to the parking lot, looking the picture of hipness himself, with his black leather jacket, black knitted cap, and “Free Huey” button. They clasped hands in the Black Power handshake.
“How long are you going to be performing in Berkeley?” Brown asked.
“I live here now,” Richard replied, upbeat. “You can come by and hang out with me.”
The friendship would be a consequential one, cutting a window onto a new reality for Richard. Brown was, like Alan Farley, extremely well educated (with an MA in English from the University of Chicago), but unlike Farley, he shared with Richard a raucous and fearless sense of humor: the two were fellow provocateurs, with a common affection for the con man, the player, the teller of tall tales. Brown had recently published The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, an incendiary novel that the New York Times described as “a nightmare dreamed on a bed of nails.” The novel’s protagonist, George Washington, was cousin to Richard’s Super Nigger, a mischief maker in the age of Black Power, living by the motto “All is jive.” He jives his way from Harlem to Copenhagen, mastering his world through lies, put-ons, and superior cocksmanship, until he realizes he has been screwing himself all the while, surrendering to other people’s fictions of him. Trying to let go of his final illusions, he dreams of publishing a book seven hundred pages long, with each page blank except for the phrase “KISS MY BLACK ASS” and a footnote on the bottom reading “MY BLACK BALLS TOO.” Jiveass was extremely piquant—“flimflamboyantly erotic,” in the words of the Times—and it struck an exposed cultural nerve. For a brief period in 1970, Brown was the writer of the moment, fielding raves for his best-selling novel, appearing on The Tonight Show with Bill Cosby and Jane Fonda, and selling the book’s screen rights. His house in the Berkeley hills hosted the sort of parties that brought together novelists and actors, professors in tweeds and hipsters in beads.
Brown and Richard became running buddies, and through Brown, Richard was drawn into a circle of black intellectuals who breathed in the Bay Area’s bohemian spirit: Ishmael Reed, Claude Brown (no relation to Cecil), Al Young, and others. “He had never been around highly educated, professional black writers and artists of that stature,” reflected his Berkeley friend Joan Thornell. “I think he was fascinated by that.” Richard noted later that his new friends were “uncompromisingly black,” but it was perhaps more important that they were uncompromisingly artists, dexterously exploring the tangle of sex and race in American life, and lobbing rhetorical bombs at the pieties of the left and the right.
Chief among the bomb throwers was Reed, a free-ranging satirist who spoofed black literature classics like Invisible Man in his first novel (The Free-Lance Pallbearers), parodied the Western genre in his second (Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down), and was in the middle of writing a third (Mumbo Jumbo) that turned the detective novel inside out. Richard and Reed traded notes, giving themselves an education that, in Reed’s words, “was not on the curriculums when we were going to school.” As part of that education, Reed gave Richard a biography of Bert Williams, the black vaudevillian who wore blackface but imbued his act with pathos and complex hilarity. Richard felt a special connection, too, with Claude Brown, author of the best-selling Manchild in the Promised Land, the
autobiographical story of a Harlem boy who is pulled out of his childhood and into a life of drug dealing and petty crime. Richard and Brown’s friendship began with a 3:00 a.m. phone call placed from Cecil Brown’s home, in which Richard came on the line with the impertinent question “Hey, motherfucker—is all that shit (in Manchild) true?”
All these new friends were artists who, like Richard, had found a way to turn the language of the streets into the language of art, but more than Richard, they could step back and give an intellectual account of their style. Claude Brown in Esquire in 1968: “Perhaps the most soulful word in the world is ‘nigger.’ . . .’Nigger’ has virtually as many shades of meaning in Colored English as the demonstrative pronoun ‘that,’ prior to application to a noun.” Ishmael Reed, in the introduction to a 1970 anthology 19 Necromancers from Now: “[T]he great restive underground language rising from the American slums and fringe communities is the real American poetry and prose.”
The old justifications Richard had given for his act—getting paid, making people laugh—seemed tired and worn out by comparison. He grappled with his limitations. “I don’t think I have a style yet, that’s what I’m working on,” he told Good Times. “Something special. A tone. I blow good but I haven’t got the tone yet.” In the meantime, he introduced himself by way of a disclaimer: “People think I’m funny. But that shit ain’t true. I ain’t funny. I’m a serious mother.”
Not long after meeting Cecil Brown, Richard stopped crashing at Alan Farley’s apartment and moved a few blocks away, to a $110-a-month rental in a dingy clapboard rooming house where the doors were secured by padlocks. He had a bed, some clothes, a TV, a portable record player, and a single copy of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which he spun over and over until he considered it “the soundtrack for my life.” He hibernated and retreated into himself, trying to unriddle his life’s inner mystery. He read and reread the collected speeches of Malcolm X, whose story of ascetic self-transformation reverberated in him. Malcolm stood as an emblem of the courage that Richard hoped to gather. A week after his Mandrake’s gig, he recorded an arresting riff on Farley’s tape recorder:
Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man and Hercules don’t scare me. The FBI, the Anti-American Committee, J. Edgar Hoover, President Nixon, President Johnson . . . the Bank of Manhattan, Chase Manhattan, Rockefeller—none of these people scares me. What scares me is that one day my son will ask me, “What did you do, daddy, when the shit was going down?”
And what was Richard, holed up in his bare apartment, to do about the shit going down all around him? He had largely given up on TV work, his main vehicle for reaching a larger audience, explaining to a Bay Area interviewer that being on TV was “like drinking out of two cups.” (The reference was to Paul’s stern warning in 1 Corinthians 10:21, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils.”) He took a more relaxed attitude to booking gigs, trying to escape the Hollywood mentality: “I’m using the money, the money ain’t using me.” And perhaps because he was now surrounded by writers, he made an unprecedented commitment to writing, experimenting with genres he had never before tackled, in an effort to express new thoughts, new visions, new tones. It was, he later reflected, “the freest time of my life.”
Sometimes he’d sit down by himself, “very high”—in his words—“on cocaine and whiskey and insecurity and guilt,” and try to improvise poetry into being. A snatch of one stream-of-consciousness poem, recorded in the fall of 1971, captures the blend of disillusionment and yearning, exhaustion and ambition, that filled Richard during this interval. His voice on the recording is scratchy and eerie, like a phone call from beyond the grave:
Back up on myself and dim the lights
Poetic justice stems from my lips . . .
A fading car goes by, it whispers in my voice
A creakiness untold that I haven’t heard before
A challenge to me to stay here who I am
To be, to live, to realize
Not to justify, not to inherit,
I lay claim to all and nothing
I survived from my will,
My will to survive in life’s endless bloody dream.
If life was an “endless bloody dream,” Richard was pursuing a certain wakefulness within it. The boy who had grown up in a brothel was looking to be reborn in a state of purity—to find that, in his heart, he had “no crimes, no sins, no guilts.” He withdrew all claim on the “things that have been willed to me”: for the would-be ascetic, less was more; the man without possessions was free to be full of life. Yet Richard’s performance of the poem, his graveyard voice, pulled against the triumphant message. It was as if he recognized that there might be wisdom in renouncing the world, but not so much in the way of pleasure.
In fact, “pleasure” was far from the center of the creative work Richard produced in Berkeley, starting with a number of film scenarios he devised in the wake of seeing director Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. With his wild fable of black payback, Peebles succeeded where Richard failed with Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. The film—about a professional sex stud who kills two policemen in defense of a Black Panther, screws his way out of handcuffs, then screws his way out of the clutches of a female biker gang—was the surprise hit of 1971, taking in over five million dollars and launching the blaxploitation boom. The movie divided black critics fiercely: Huey Newton celebrated it as “the first truly revolutionary Black film made . . . by a Black man,” while Ebony’s Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote, in a crisp takedown of its politics, that “F***ing will not set you free. If f***ing freed, black people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.”
Richard watched Sweetback over and over. “I was sad I wasn’t in it. I envied the people that had parts in it,” he said at the time. Then he praised the “phenomenal” movie with a resonant analogy: “That was as exciting to me as it must have been to Walter Cronkite when the cat landed on the moon.” Van Peebles was a black Neil Armstrong, planting a flag in terra incognita, a spot formerly thought unreachable; Richard was exulting in the transmission from a world away.
Sweetback revived Richard’s dreams of being a filmmaker. He brainstormed one day, on Alan Farley’s tape recorder, a short film titled The Assassin, set five years into an apocalyptic race war. The film would follow a day in the life of a black guerrilla, stalking through a forest and armed with a rifle, bayonet, and hand grenades. The guerrilla is implacable, indifferent. He sees two white children picking flowers in a meadow and garrotes them with a wire before killing their mother and father, too. He steals into an army stockade where he sees seventeen bodies, people accused of anti-American activities, swinging in the breeze, then kills the army officers responsible. At sundown he sees a white female hippie taking a bath naked in a stream; she dreamily invites him to smoke some grass and lay her. He kisses her, then stabs her in the stomach with the bayonet. Finally, he walks to the top of a mountain, surveys his world, and says to himself, “There be mornings,” before falling asleep and beginning the cycle anew.
The Assassin was not much—a creative burp that came out of Richard’s political dyspepsia, reflecting his hunger to be righteous and his sense of being utterly alone. He invested more energy into This Can’t Be Happening to Me, his first attempt to translate his Peoria upbringing into film. The screenplay survives only in fragments, but those pieces suggest how, as Richard delved into the enigma of his identity, he was brooding over the scenes of his childhood, tinting them with a tripped-out imagination that made his projected film cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo. If the Richard Pryor of the mid-1960s underplayed the difficulties of his childhood, and if the Richard Pryor of the late 1960s turned them to comedic account, the Richard Pryor of the early 1970s, in Berkeley, remade them into a show of horrors. His feelings of humiliation and loss ran like a bright red thread through whatever he wrote.
The screenplay begins with the teenage Richard stabbed in a chaotic fight in hi
s grandmother Marie’s brothel. Shocked at seeing her grandson wounded, Marie fires her gun “in fear and excitement,” but the bullet goes wild; she literally shoots Richard in the back, killing him. Before he passes into oblivion, though, the scenes of Richard’s life flash painfully before his eyes: his mother servicing a john while his father spies on the scene from a keyhole; visiting a priest after being kicked out of parochial school for having a mother who works as a prostitute. “Why is this happening to me?” he asks during the latter. Doves perch all over the priest’s head and body, covering him with their excrement; the priest answers Richard’s appeal gravely and hesitantly, spitting out bird droppings every few words. When the camera pulls away from the shit-spattered priest, we see that, as he has been dispensing sober advice, he has also been masturbating into a vat of holy water.
In its last act—Richard’s funeral and wake—This Can’t Be Happening to Me strikes a different, calmer note. If the earlier scenes are brutalizing, seeking to traumatize the viewer as Richard has been traumatized, these are suffused with resignation. We see a diamond-ringed preacher eulogizing Richard, then pull back to discover the church empty except for the preacher and a naked Richard. The scene takes up the eternal gnawing question “Will they be sorry when I’m gone?,” and answers it in the negative. There is nothing left for Richard but to cremate himself. He walks into a furnace and comes out as ash.