FIRE
CHAPTER 26
The night Richard burns himself up I am at a club in Long Beach. I get the news later, from Mitzi at the close of my first set, four hours after the fire happens. It’s past midnight when I drive up to Sherman Oaks Hospital.
“It’s the pipe,” I tell Mitzi. “It’s the motherf*cking base pipe.”
Richard has always smoked coke, even way back. But the whole elaborate freebasing procedure only comes into play big-time at the end of the 1970s. He soaks the raw cocaine in some sort of solvent, usually 200-proof grain alcohol or 151 rum. Then he burns off the impurities. What’s left is a rock of pure coke. He smokes that, and he gets a high that he loves more than life.
When I show up in Sherman Oaks, there’s already a clusterf*ck of media vans parked around the hospital. The reporters are like hungry wolves. They howl for any scrap of information. “Mooney! Mooney! Paul!” yell a few who recognize me as I run the gauntlet. Then the ones who don’t know me take up the call. “Mooney! Mooney!”
Richard is actually at the burn center across the street from the hospital. Inside, a collection of friends and relatives gathers in a private lounge. As soon as I walk in, I get hit with it. Omigod, I think, this is a death watch. Jim Brown is there, and Richard’s Aunt Dee, both of whom are at the house when Richard ignites himself. Jennifer Lee, his main woman at the time, is shut out from the inner circle for some reason, but she talks to me.
I am in total shock. I’m freaked out. I think my friend is dead. I’m like a zombie.
It’s a time of rumors. I sort out the truth, mostly by talking to Jim. Richard shut himself in his master bedroom at around eight o’clock that evening. Fifteen minutes later, there’s a loud pop and Richard comes tearing ass out of the room, smoking and on fire.
Aunt Dee stamps out the flames in the bedroom and dashes after Richard. He has run out of the house, down the driveway, and out onto the street, trying to outdistance his demons. His whole upper body is messed up. He’s got a melted piece of his polyester shirt stuck to his chest.
Aunt Dee doesn’t catch up to him until he’s a full mile from the house, down Parthenia Street and onto Hayven-hurst. A couple of LAPD traffic cops are with him. They get involved because the sight of a burning movie star has naturally stopped traffic. But Richard doesn’t want to quit. He runs until the ambulance comes. They have to toss a medicated sheet around him, one they use for burn victims, to get him to stop.
He’s got third-degree burns over the top half of his body. The doctors give him a one-in-three chance to live.
Whenever a friend falls sick or gets hurt, all I want to know is what happened. It’s like knowing the details will help somehow. It never does, really, but that’s always my first reaction. What happened? Give me chapter and verse. That first night all we hear are rumors. Richard’s brain-dead. Drug dealers set him on fire. I know the truth. It is the pipe. I know it before anyone tells me.
I see him only days later, when the risk of infection has lessened and they allow him visitors. He ain’t all bandaged up, because they have to let the burns air out. He’s lying in a special burn-victim bed. It’s too early for the doctors to apply the skin grafts.
I walk in and I say, “Dr. Frankenstein.”
I start laughing. Richard starts laughing. I can tell it hurts him to laugh, but he does it anyway.
“Dr. Frankenstein,” I say, “the operation did not succeed.” We both laugh our asses off.
All through the month of June, I visit him almost every day. Jim Brown is there, nearly camped out, and an actor friend of Richard’s named Stan Shaw, who he met on the set of a Motown production about black baseball, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. Richard’s exwives—Deborah and Shelley—are around, too. Jennifer Lee remains an outcast because Richard believes she told the police he had been freebasing.
He had been freebasing, of course, but he doesn’t want the Gestapo LAPD to know it. The rum that he is using to burn the impurities from the coke ignites the fire that burns him. In those days, half of Los Angeles is freebasing. It’s like the new thing.
I tell all my black friends to stay away from freebasing. I know that with the word “free” in it, it’s not for us.
Everybody in Richard’s inner circle always uses the same word. Accident. As in, “I heard about the accident from …” “He was in serious danger of infection right after the accident …” “It’s been a week since the accident …”
I go along, but I don’t buy it. I’ve seen too much of Rich-ard’s behavior to believe in accidents. The man’s been committing slow-motion suicide ever since I’ve known him, and suddenly he has an accident? Drug use of the kind Richard indulges in is always suicidal, pure and simple. Or impure and unsimple.
Every time Richard makes an insane, messed-up move, I always respond by saying the same thing. I say it when he shoots up Deborah’s car, and I say it when he won’t rest after his heart attack. I wind up saying it to Richard at least a half dozen times over the course of our friendship.
“Stop trying to rush death,” I tell him. “Just wait. It’s coming to you. You don’t have to rush it.”
How does that rum get all over Richard? Does he spill it on himself by “accident”? Or is he totally psychotic and pours it over his own head before lighting himself on fire? Whether it is a spill or a pour that sets him ablaze, Richard’s trying to kill himself up there alone in his master bedroom in Northridge. He’s trying to commit suicide.
I don’t tell anyone this at the burn center, and I sure as hell don’t talk to anyone like Jim Brown about it, but I have my own private theory about the fire.
Richard wants to burn himself black.
I’ve never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor. For him, it’s a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self.
Richard is more successful than ever. Deep in his mind, that means he’s more white than ever. He can’t fight his way out of this bind. He loves the money, he loves the approval and women and celebrity, but it costs him his soul. So he lights himself on fire. He’s freebasing himself, burning off the white impurities. He figures he can only be real if he’s a cinder. Let Hollywood try to cast him then.
When shrinks talk to suicidal people who have survived their attempts, you know what they find? They talk to a leaper, say, one who lands on an awning or something and somehow survives. The leaper says, “You know, doc, as soon as I jumped out that fourteenth-floor window, I had this overpowering thought. ‘I don’t want to die.’”
Steve Lubetkin probably has that same thought as he’s tumbling down off the Continental Hyatt to the Comedy Store parking lot. I know Richard has that thought as soon as the flames engulf him. That’s why he runs. He decides he wants to live after all.
The LAPD traffic cops who first approach ask him to stop running. “I can’t,” Richard says. “If I stop, I’ll die.”