Read Online Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by Joe Henry, David Henry - Free Book Online Page B

the wrong group. So I said one day to my wife, ‘Okay, that’s it—he goes.’ That’s probably the best thing we ever did for him—make him go out on his own.”
    In either case, Richard grabbed up a few clothes, stuffed twenty dollars in his pocket, and hit the streets. He was twenty-two.
    By law, Richard was still married to Patricia. He was father to a year-old son and possibly a five-year-old daughter who was just as likely his half sister. Yet the only thing keeping him in Peoria, he said, was the price of a bus ticket.
    When Richard told his woes to a troupe of mostly transvestite dancers and backup singers performing with the headliner at Collins Corner, they invited him to come along with them to their next gig at the Faust Club in St. Louis.
    “I couldn’t believe my luck,” he wrote. “One minute kicked out of the house, no prospects. The next I was on the road in show business.”
    Before leaving town he went and said good-bye to Miss Whittaker a t the Carver Community Center. Recalling his decision years later, she would say, “I guess he did what Gauguin did.” She may or may not have been the only resident of Peoria who would have compared Richard to the nineteenth-century postimpressionist French painter who abandoned his family and homeland to pursue his muse in the South Sea Islands, but she is likely the only one who would’ve made the comparison a favorable one.
    “I believe there was a gift given to me, probably when I was a child,” Richard would say. “That God searched me out and found me and said, ‘Try that one.’ Somebody said, ‘Uh? That one?’ And God said, ‘Try him, I’m telling you there’s something about him.’ ” Or, as he explained it after a few months on the road to a hostile audience in Youngstown, Ohio, “Hey, y’all can boo me now. But in a couple of years I’m gonna be a star and you dumb niggers will still be sittin’ here.”
    Richard was ready to shake the dust of Peoria off his feet. He would go out there and show them all. The ones who’d told him he wasn’t shit. Not least of all, his father.
    He pawned a typewriter he’d borrowed from his half sister Barbara Jean for bus fare and, unbeknownst to Patricia, had their son’s name legally changed to Richard Franklin Pryor Jr.
    “Does the champ know this is a benefit?!”
    Richard Pryor climbs into a ring with Muhammad Ali who, in answer to Richard’s clowning and faux preening, theatrically scowls and mouths carefully constructed words from deep in his corner: “I’m going to kick your ass.”
    Two equally implausible characters, each of whose rise now feels as inevitable as it once seemed implausible; both slipping through the cracks of trauma and circumstance that helped define an era even as they failed to contain the men they marked; both escaping, skipping out onto a wire—or beneath one—that was sharp, swaying, and electrified. Like Parker and Miles and Dylan and Picasso and Malcolm, they picked at a lock only to find the door already free and swinging, dark and unguarded; sneaking in and onto a vacant seat that had never really been wholly occupied.
    Ali literally beat his chosen new name free from the lips of Ernie Terrell who had clamped down on it and refused its utterance and legitimacy. And then he finished him.
    Richard made Ed Sullivan’s stage a back alley wherein he leaned and hid out, flashing anger and grief; sucking down self-loathing even before it was forced upon him; setting the place on fire and giving away the whole of his secret heart for nothing.
    *  While acknowledging the significance of Dick Gregory’s appearance on the show, Paar clarified in his memoir P.S. Jack Paar that the first black performer to sit on The Tonight Show couch had been Diahann Carroll. The young ingénue and singer, who vaulted to stardom on Broadway at the age of nineteen in Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s 1954 musical House of Flowers, appeared on the show no fewer than fourteen times