THE STORE
CHAPTER 16
After being holed up in his little efficiency apartment in Berkeley for a while, listening to Marvin Gaye and reading Malcolm X, Richard ventures out—to find dope connections, among other things. He goes around to clubs like the Purple Onion. He comes back and riffs into a tape recorder about talk he hears on the street.
Before, in Hollywood, I never see Richard read a book, but when I visit him, he’s got his nose in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or, more and more, By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm’s collection of speeches. He’s got The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X on his shelf, too.
“I like reading him because he shows me that I’m not out of my mind,” he tells me. “It’s the rest of the world that’s nuts, not us.”
He jokes when I tell him he’s transforming himself. “Yeah,” he says, cackling, “I switched from Courvoisier to vodka.” As far as I can see, the switch doesn’t affect his allegiance to cocaine. He is doing more than ever.
Richard pals around with Claude Brown, author of Man-child in the Promised Land, who introduces him to the poet Ishmael Reed and the Berkeley writer Al Young. He’s going all intellectual on me.
And all political. I connect him up with my old high school pal Huey P. Newton, now a ferocious Black Panther on the FBI watch list. Huey puts Richard in touch with Angela Davis, another figure who scares the shit out of white America back then.
Richard turns his back on white America. The only white America for him is a line of cocaine. He ventures out to a few small clubs in San Francisco, trying out new routines, developing a whole new voice. He appears at Mandrakes, the hungry i (before it closes in 1970), and Basin Street West.
We cross-pollinate each other. This is the same period I appear at Ye Little Club, trying out routines, developing my whole new voice. It’s funny, but running on separate tracks, we both come up with the same thing. We work out a similar way to talk onstage.
It revolves around the word nigger.
Richard already uses nigger onstage, especially at Maverick’s and Redd Foxx’s club. But during his exile in Berkeley, he transforms the word into a weapon. Motherf*cker and nigger battle for pride of place in Richard’s vocabulary. It’s the language of the streets, the words he hears every day around him in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco.
What we both like about the word is that it demonstrates a simple truth. White people cannot say it in front of black people without declaring themselves to be racist.
So when Richard and I use it onstage in front of an audience with both white and black folks in it, we are saying something that white people can’t. It’s forbidden to them, but allowed to us. Ain’t too many things like that. It’s liberating.
I study white audiences. Saying “nigger” in public also lets loose a ripple of nervousness, especially in a mixed crowd, which they deal with by laughing.
At Ye Little Club, I open my act a lot of times the same way: “A bunch of niggers in here now.” It’s like throwing down a gauntlet. Black people laugh out of their recognition of street language, but white folks laugh out of sheer anxiety.
White folks make up the word nigger, and then get nervous when I say it. Ain’t that a bitch? They shouldn’t have made it up! They f*cked up. They even made up a song with it. You know the song I’m talking about. “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo …”
But they change the words when they see black folks around. “Catch a tiger by the toe …”
Tiger? What are they talking about? I’m a ringmaster at the circus, and I know tigers. Tigers don’t have toes, as much as claws. There ain’t no tigers in America. But there are plenty of niggers in America.
I tell white people that I say “nigger” all the time. I say it a hundred times every morning. It makes my teeth white. I say it, white people think it—what a small white world it is!
Niggerniggerniggernigger …
It’s a variation on the Lenny Bruce routine I hear in the lesbian bar in North Beach. Use the word enough, and it loses its power to wound.
If President Kennedy got on television and said, “To-night I’d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,” and he yelled, “Nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger,” at every nigger he saw, until nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, until nigger lost its meaning, then maybe you’d never hear a four-year-old come home crying from school ’cause he got called “nigger.”
Black folks brandishing nigger in public is nothing new. Dick Gregory’s autobiography, Nigger, gets published in 1964, and he says that every time he hears the word, it’s like an advertisment for his book.
I figure it is about time for equal opportunity, since white folks have been spewing “nigger” for centuries. It’s always “nigger” this and “nigger” that. I remember that old racist joke, which carries a sad truth. What do you call a black man with a PhD? White folks call him “nigger,” of course. I guess Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found that out quick enough up in Cambridge.
Every black person on earth has a story. About the time Richard and I start using it with a vengeance onstage in our routines, Michael Jordan is in school and gets suspended for punching out a white girl who calls him “nigger” on a school bus. Tiger Woods is in kindergarten when some kids tie him up and taunt him with the word. Obama, Oprah, everybody has a “nigger” moment.
It’s onstage in Berkeley that I hear the first variation on Richard’s most famous riff, the most telling single use of the word nigger, I think, in the history of the English language.
White folks get a traffic ticket, they pull their car over and say to the cop, “Gee, officer, what can I do for you? Was I speeding?” Nigger got to be coming at it a whole different way. “I am reaching into my pocket for my license. Because I don’t want to be no motherf*ckin’ accident!”
He’s not calling anyone “nigger” here. It’s not a slur, it’s a description. He’s saying the word to describe a class of people in society. The way Richard uses it, nigger becomes a means to call out a whole black reality. It’s a reality where a simple traffic stop can mean death. And cops stop black folks and treat them like niggers all the time. So we know exactly what he is talking about.
Later on, after he puts the routine on his record That Nigger’s Crazy, Richard reacts with pure delight when he hears that, all over the country, street hustlers and skells are imitating his “I am reaching into my pocket” line verbatim when they get picked up by cops. He is imitating reality, and reality turns around and imitates him. That goes beyond keeping it real—that’s keeping it surreal!
While he’s still in Berkeley, Richard auditions for Motown’s Berry Gordy, Jr., for a role in a movie about Billie Holiday’s life. Gordy is just dipping his toe into the film business.
I want to tell Gordy, “No, no, turn back, proud black man! The music business isn’t enough bullshit for you? You got to add Hollywood bullshit to your life, too?”
Richard keeps talking about the film project and how it is going to be his big breakthrough. He lets me read the script. Gordy’s main Motown diva, Diana Ross, is going to play Lady Day. Richard’s part is small and insignificant in the screenplay, which they’re calling Lady Sings the Blues.
It doesn’t matter, since the whole project looks like it’s going down the tubes. Paramount, which Gordy is partnering with, pulls out, and Motown has to pay back the $2 million the studio invested. Gordy tells Richard that the project is delayed a year, which I know is Hollywood-speak for “Ain’t never gonna happen.”
Instead of costarring with a Supreme in a major studio flick, Richard does his own version of my movie F.T.A. when he acts in an antiwar sketch comedy called Dynamite Chicken. Just like Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland are behind F.T.A., John Lennon and Yoko Ono are behind Richard’s film. They get a whole bunch of celebrities to appear, people like Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King, and Yoko herself.
Funnily enough—seeing as how Dynamite Chicken is an antimilitary movie—the movie tanks. Richard throws himself into his three major consolations—vodka, cocaine, and p-ssy.
“I’m doing so much shit, the drug dealers are embarrassed for me,” he says when I visit him in Berkeley. “They look at me with pity in their eyes.”
“Not enough pity for them to stop selling to you,” I say. “Not enough pity in the world for that,” he says, cackling.
I’ve seen a lot of p-ssy hounds, but never one like Richard. He rips through women faster than a rock star. He gets after my cousin Alice. He goes to bed with Diane DeMarko.
“You know, he’s got a big one,” she tells me afterward. She holds her hands out about a foot apart.
“No, I wouldn’t know,” I say. “We’re close, but we ain’t that close.”
Richard reminds me of a frantic kid, running around trying to distract himself. He discovers Asian food and is always dragging me down to San Francisco’s Chinatown. He buys a samurai sword and starts watching kung fu movies obsessively. He wants to make a kung fu movie himself. He wants to write. He wants to act.
I can tell Berkeley is over for him. It’s done the trick. Richard’s energized again. If he keeps up with this frantic bullshit, he’s going to explode. I keep suggesting that stand-up is where it’s at, the only place a black man can speak his mind without Hollywood going all Frankenstein on him.
I hear about a new place on the Strip in L.A., just opened by a couple of old-school schtick comics named Sammy Shore and Rudy De Luca. I tell Richard it’s time for him to come back to Los Angeles. His exile in Berkeley has gone on long enough.
“Come down and do some shows at Sammy Shore’s new club,” I say.
Richard is slated to go to the Apollo in Harlem to debut his new act. He needs a small club to try out material. But Ye Little Club is too little for him.
“What’s the place called?” he asks.
“They’re naming it the Store,” I say.
“Just like the Candy Store,” Richard says.
“You got to watch yourself there,” I say. “Folks are telling me white comics listen to your act, steal your best lines, and open in Vegas with the shit they steal.”
“Ain’t nobody going to steal nothing off me,” Richard says. “Motherf*cker wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
He is right. Richard is never worried about anyone raiding his material. It’s too much his. His delivery puts a stamp on it. Some other comic could do a Richard Pryor routine word for word, and it wouldn’t come out as funny.
He closes down the dumpy Berkeley apartment, emerges from exile, and in spring 1972, we show up at the new club.