CHAPTER 33
I know it’s coming, but when it happens, I’m still not prepared for Richard’s death. Ever since Symeon is murdered, I have a sense of foreboding. The last years of Richard’s life are so painful to watch that I feel guilty for wishing the good Lord would just take him to rest. MS is pure evil. It breaks a man down into a baby again.
I find it hard to keep the real Richard in my mind the way I want to remember him, laughing during a roast on The Richard Pryor Show, hanging out at Redd Foxx’s club, singing Motown at the top of our lungs on the drive north from L.A. to Berkeley.
F*ck the world. F*ck the world for being poorer without Richard Pryor in it.
Things keep happening that I want Richard to see, that I want Richard to react to. I am doing a Showtime at the Apollo episode when they actually stop the whole shit and censor my ass offstage. “Hey, Richard,” I say to his memory, “this ain’t the old Apollo that we know.” The theater is owned by Time Warner now, and they don’t like me criticizing a sitting president. It might interfere with their lobbying efforts in Washington.
F*ck the Bushes. I hate the whole family. Like that mother of his, she looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box …
They pull my ass right off the stage. The whole show stops for a motherf*cking hour over that shit. “What happened?” I keep asking. “You offended an executive from Time Warner,” somebody tells me. “What? Who?” I never get a straight answer, and I resolve never to play the Apollo again until I am satisfied.
After the dust settles I have a thought that’s going to be with me the rest of my life: I wish Richard were here to see this shit. I want to call him. We would laugh about the bullshit the way we always do.
I have the same thought when Michael Richards goes berserk onstage at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. He’s pissed because of some loud audience members. First he says, “Look at the stupid Mexicans and blacks being loud up there.” Then he derails completely.
Richards: Shut up! Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a f*cking fork up your ass! You can talk, you can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now, motherf*cker. Throw his ass out! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!
Female audience member: Oh my god.
Richards: A nigger! Look, there’s a nigger!
[Audience gasps audibly.]
Richards: What’s the matter? Is this too much for you to handle? They’re going to arrest me for calling a black man a nigger? [off the audience member leaving] Wait a minute—where’s he going?
Audience member, leaving: That was uncalled-for, you f*cking cracker-ass motherf*cker.
Richards: Cracker-ass? You calling me cracker-ass, nigger?
Audience member, leaving: We’ve had it. We’ve had it.
Richards: That’s what happens when you interrupt the white man, don’t you know?
Yeah, Michael, we know. Listening to the exchange, I’m sucked right back to 1975 on Saturday Night Live, with Richard and Chevy Chase going at it in my word-association job-interview routine.
Cheap motherf*cker!
F*cking white boy!
Nigger!
Cracker-ass!
Thirty-one years later, it’s still going down in real life. I’ve known Michael Richards for a long time. I see him around the clubs in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. He is friendly and never strikes me as racist. But scratch a white man and you’ll hear a bigot scream.
Seeing Michael Richards reveal his inner racist makes me reconsider my own use of the word. Richard gives up the N word in his act after a trip to Africa in spring 1979. “You know, Mooney, I looked all around in Kenya, and you know what? I didn’t see no niggers. I was sitting in the lobby in the hotel in Nairobi, and a voice inside me asks, ‘What do you see?’ I see all kinds of people. ‘Do you see any niggers?’ No, I don’t see any niggers. And I started crying, Paul. Right there in the lobby.”
Richard has always been an old softie. So he stops using the word onstage. I don’t. I figure I’ve been called “nigger” so many times, I can damn well use it whenever I want. But it starts to die in my mouth a little bit when I see all the comics and rappers coming up, using it like a crutch.
Some people try to run a game that nigger and nigga are two different words. That one is okay, the other one isn’t. But I know that if you spell it with an -er or an -a, it’s all the same. It’s as though flinging the word nigger around is all they take from Richard and me, as though that’s all we are. They don’t get it.
When Michael Richards runs that shit, I figure it’s time. Michael calls me up and asks me what the f*ck he should do. I tell him he has to face up to it. I go on a CNN show about the incident and announce that I am giving up the word on-stage. “Instead of ‘What’s up, my nigger,’ I’m going to say, ‘What’s up, my Michael Richards.’”
Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton summon me to a summit with Michael at the Hollywood Hilton. Michael is beside himself. He doesn’t know if I was going to hit him or hug him.
“Help me, Paul,” he pleads. “I got crazy people calling me up, telling me how much they agree with me! I don’t want to be Ku Klux Klan!”
At the meeting, I forgive Michael. I’m sincere. I figure he’s been away from stand-up too long, acting the fool on Seinfeld. Stand-up is unforgiving. You can’t go away from it. You lose your edge. It’s like Jesse James putting up his guns. You can’t just jump back into it. You’ll get killed.