CHAPTER 14
The stretch in Berkeley is Richard’s time in the wilderness. He’s like Jesus, going out into the desert and meeting the devil. For Richard, the devil takes the form of a white powder from Bolivia. And unlike Jesus, Richard doesn’t conquer his devil. He makes friends with it.
Richard cannot stay in Berkeley if it’s a dry town. Luckily for him, the Bay Area is a big port of entry, with freighters docking every day, many of them with kilos of cocaine hidden in their holds. He finds it just as easy to score in Berkeley as he did in L.A. In that sense, at least, all is right with Richard’s world.
He holes up in a shitty little studio apartment on the west side, near the marina. The interstate pounds by within shouting distance. He loves it. It’s like he’s 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.
The fundamental truth about Richard during his year in the Berkeley wilderness is that he’s sick to death of white folks, white jive, white culture. He feels like it’s killing him. He has to get out from under it just to survive as a man. It’s his “f*ck it all” period.
I bring him by to meet Mama. He loves the fact that she steadfastly remains at 18th Street, in the middle of the Oakland ghetto. Mama likes Richard. She fixes him my favorite dish, neck bones and butter beans.
“Those are the best neck bones I ever ate,” he says.
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. His grandfather, just like Daddy Preston, is a hunter. He and I are raised by our grandparents in similar households, but in totally different circumstances.
As a child, Richard has a much harder time of it. He’s not in a warm, protected environment of family, like I am. He gets molested when he’s five years old. He’s got all the brothel bullshit to put up with.
But he chows down on possum, rabbit, whistle pig, fat-back, garden greens, and chitterlings like the best of us. Black folks develop a taste for food like this in slave times. The massa always takes the choice cuts for himself. We are left with the 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.
Richard recognizes Mama and Daddy instantly. From his childhood, they are familiar figures to him. He grows up along the Chicago River, a tributary on one end of the Mississippi River, just like I grow up along the Red River, a tributary on the other end. It’s like we are twins from different families.
The main difference is Richard needs more love than I do. He needs assurance. He’s vulnerable. I get so much love from Mama growing up that I am set for life. So I don’t need to look for approval so much. I am self-contained. Richard isn’t, and that’s the source of a lot of trouble and a lot of good at the same time.
I hold on to who I am. When you know who you are, it’s harder for people to f*ck with you. Hollywood is dangerous because the great hobby they have in that town is f*cking with other people. Building you up, knocking you down, until finally you are destroyed. They all want to create you and mold you.
Richard and I talk about Frankenstein all the time. We are always riffing on the old movie, because we know that Hollywood has the Frankenstein syndrome. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, producers want to stitch together body parts and build their own stars, their own monsters. If you don’t watch out in this town, you wind up with someone else’s dick attached to your crotch.
But just like in the Frankenstein story, the monster always hates the doctor. In the black-and-white original Frankenstein movie, the one with Boris Karloff as the monster, the doctor has all the dialogue: “Now I know what it feels like to be God! … The brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!”
Dr. Frankenstein talks throughout the whole movie. The monster says only one thing: “Aaaah!” But less is more.
I always thought of Frankenstein’s monster as a black man. All the white people are always chasing him. “Get him! Get him!” That crowd of cracker-ass villagers with torches is a lynch mob. The monster runs exactly like the caricature of a black man running from a mob, wild-eyed, grunting like an animal.
“Aaaah!”
The villagers are terrified of him, just like crackers are terrified of the black man (“What’s that? Who’s out there? Niggerstein! Is it him?”) And when they catch him, he whups villager ass, just like a black man. He throws motherf*ckers all over the place.
“Aaaah!”
The thing is, in the movie, all you remember is the monster. Who remembers the doctor? Karloff becomes a big star. But Colin Clive? He stays a nobody.
Hollywood is the Frankenstein story blown up into a whole industry—the movie business.
On the drive up to Berkeley, in between hollering out those Motown songs, Richard tells me that the people around him sometimes appear to him as devils.
“I’m in a meeting down in motherf*cking Hollywood, Mr. Mooney, and I ain’t kidding, all I see is horns and tails! Really! All these folks around me got cloven feet and forked tongues!”
So while he’s in Berkeley, Richard is a Frankenstein’s monster who becomes a hermit. Richard goes into that rat hole of an apartment and doesn’t come out for a few weeks. He does some surgery on his own ass, cutting off the body parts that Dr. Hollywood grafted onto him.
He’s got two things to sustain him—Marvin Gaye and Malcolm X. All he does is listen to music and read Malcolm all day long. That’s the winter of “What’s Going On,” Marvin’s masterpiece. Richard has it on his turntable and puts it on repeat. “Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying.”
The song is something new out of Motown. It talks about the here and now. I know Marvin really does have a brother in Vietnam. Plus he’s sick over the death of Tammi Terrell, the sweet little Philly soul singer who used to hang out at our bungalow on Sunset, gone at age twenty-four. If she’d lived, she’d have been bigger than Whitney, a super-star.
So out of all this pain comes a work of genius. I hear “What’s Going On” everywhere, coming out of car radios and stereo speakers. Number one on the R&B charts, of course, but when I look at the pop charts, it’s stuck at number two behind this pop number by Three Dog Night called “Joy to the World.”
I think, yeah, that figures. “Joy to the World” is catchier than hell, but it ignores what’s going on around me on the streets. “Joy to the World” is like everything that Richard is trying to get away from by hiding out in Berkeley. Mindless white-world pop froth. “What’s Going On” is everything he’s moving toward; genius and keeping it real. But the wider Billboard pop-chart world ain’t ready to embrace it.
It’s maddening. Vegas gatekeepers don’t want to hear bullshit and ass spoken out loud from their stages, much less nigger and motherf*cker. This is what they want: “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea/Joy to you and me.”
Like I said, catchy song. But it just ain’t where our heads are at right at the moment.
I’m staying at Mama’s on 18th Street. I go up to Berkeley to check in with Richard every once in a while, make sure he’s all right, hasn’t lit himself on fire with a base pipe. For a few weeks I’m the only human being he sees outside of food-delivery boys.
“I got to go back to L.A.,” I say. Richard is so over L.A. at that moment, he looks at me like I’m saying I have to go visit the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, brush up on my evil.
“You all right?” I ask.
He bristles. “Yeah, man, sure, I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Just asking,” I say, and I leave Richard in the wilderness and drive down to L.A. I figure my goal now is just to get known. That’s how you do it in Hollywood—you get known first and succeed later.