CHAPTER 5
I love jokes. I love gags. I love punch lines. That’s who I am.
I know this puts me totally out of step with the times. Every stand-up comic in the universe nowadays runs away from jokes like they are the Black Plague. (Why was the plague black? Didn’t it kill mostly white people? Shouldn’t it be called the White Plague?) Jokes are old-fashioned. Comics do situations now. But I love jokes because they’re street.
Tell a joke, and if it’s a good joke, it turns into a virus. Spreads faster than a flu. If there actually ever is a real Killer Joke, we’ll all be dead. It’ll hit us quicker than a jab from Ali’s right hand.
Walking down One-Two-Five in Harlem, corner of Lenox, I hear a street peddler tell a joke to a B.I.D. lady. I keep walking, and before I get two blocks, I hear a stumble-bum tell the same joke to a little audience of hustlers outside the Uptown Wine Pantry near Madison. Punch lines travel quicker than I can walk.
Jokes are the original Internet. They connect people.
Jokes travel through time, too. A joke dies and it lies there asleep and then someone comes along and spills water on it and it comes alive again.
The original joke is all God’s. It’s the gag he’s playing on each and every one of us. It’s called life. God’s joke is the funniest of all. An oldie but goodie. The Big Bang is the Big Punch Line.
A joke once freed a slave. This is true. Master is moaning to his house servant, “I’m so homely, I’m so homely, my face could crack a sink. No woman will look at me. I go out, I scare the horses.”
Slave shakes his head in sympathy and keeps on sweeping the parlor floor. “I know what you can do,” slave says.
“You do?” says the master, overjoyed. “Tell me!”
Slave smiles, shakes his head, and sweeps.
“You tell me the answer,” Master says, “I’ll free you right away.”
That perks the slave up and makes him stop his broom.
“Tell me,” Master pleads. “How can I stop this homely face of mine from scaring people?”
“All right, I’ll tell you—you can keep your ugly ass at home!”
Comedians don’t tell jokes. Not anymore. The only people who tell jokes are me and police and sanit-men and salesmen and B.I.D. ladies and long-haul truckers and nurses and exterminators and stumble-bums and addicts and jet-jocks and golfers and car mechanics and frat boys and children.
Children tell jokes. We’ve got to listen to the children.
A seven-year-old comes into her parents’ bedroom with her little six-year-old friend. Her mom and dad are in bed, and they’re tearing it up, Mom giving Dad head like she’s Monica and he’s Bill. Hoovering it down like she could suck the chrome off a hubcap.
Seven-year-old turns to her friend and says, “Can you be-lieve it? And they give me an ass-whipping for sucking my thumb!”
Listen to the children. Listen to the children!
Twelve-year-old kid goes into his parents’ bedroom and sees his mom and dad really going at it. Dad’s got Mom spread-eagled and he’s pounding her like a pile driver. Dad looks over his shoulder and sees the kid and laughs. Heh, heh, heh. Haw!
A month later the dad comes into the kid’s bedroom, the kid’s got Grandma spread-eagled and he’s really giving it to her, wailing away. Dad freaks out. Kid looks over his shoulder at Dad, says, “See, it’s not so f*cking funny when it’s your mama.”
Listen to the children. Listen to the children!
So jokes are who I am. If Richard is leaving jokes behind, should I be worried? Will there be no more seeing Richard kill with the jokes I wrote for him? No more gold watches slipped onto my wrist out of gratitude for giving him a great punch line? Most of all, no more feeling the high five from God for making him laugh?
But at Maverick’s Flat back in 1969, I don’t think about that at all. I’m too busy laughing.
At this point, Richard’s making maybe $50,000 a year. (He’s blowing about a hundred dollars a day on coke.) He has an album, Richard Pryor, out from Reprise that year. He’s been on TV, he’s appeared in Las Vegas. Richard’s been in films—a shitty flop of a film called The Busy Body, plus a war movie called The Green Berets, with his hero John Wayne, in which his role was left on the cutting-room floor. But at least he has movie credits under his belt.
None of the rest of us at Redd’s and Maverick’s have been in the movies or on TV or played Vegas or have albums. If you have an album, you aren’t supposed to be slumming in South Central. A record is a ticket out. If you have a comedy album to your credit, you’re supposed to be on the Strip or, better yet, onstage in a Las Vegas casino lounge.
But an album doesn’t satisfy Richard. Even though the first track of his first album is called “Super Nigger,” it’s still an album of his Bill Cosby routines. Even “Super Nigger” itself is more or less a Bill Cosby routine, only with a little more edge. Clark Washington, a.k.a. Super Nigger, is a janitor with superpowers. He is “able to see through everything except whitey.”
I know if I had an album, a Las Vegas date, or a film role, I’d let myself be happy for at least a little while. Those are the kinds of shots that every stand-up wants to nail. It’s what we are all working for. It kills us that Richard has it and it can’t make him happy. In fact, it looks like having an album under his belt just makes him even more discontented.
I think about the song “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It” from the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business. “If I gave you the moon, you’d grow tired of it soon.”
That is Richard Pryor to a T.
I know from hunting with my granddaddy Preston Ealy that the most dangerous time to be around a snake is right after it sheds its skin. It gets nasty and unpredictable. Richard around this period is jumpy, excitable, and restless. He’s climbing the walls in Los Angeles. He’s bored with it.
“Mooney, I’m losing my motherf*cking mind.” It’s not the first time he says that to me.
We’re parked up the street from Maverick’s, at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard, only back then it’s still just Santa Barbara Avenue.
I’m always up front in the audience at Richard’s shows. He likes to hear my laugh. I watch him every night, then he comes offstage and we sit down and go over every little gesture, every word, every nuance. That’s what we’re doing parked up the street from Maverick’s.
Dawn is coming up. The best time in L.A., before all the cars get on the road and the smog hits. Richard drinks from his constant companion, his comforter and security blanket, his bottle of Courvoisier. He pours the brandy into a little paper cup. It fuels a diatribe about his life.
“I’m going crazy,” he says again. “This city is driving me nuts.”
“So let’s leave,” I say.
“Yeah, right,” he says. “Same old, same old, all over the goddamn country.”
“I got to go up home,” I say. “Oakland, see Mama, do some clubs. You need to split town for a while, that’s where you should go.”
“Oakland.”
“Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco.”
“Hippies.” He laughs. “Them flower chicks don’t wear bras, let their titties hang out.”
I say, “That bothers you?” He laughs again and shakes his head.
“You know what?” I say. “Whatever Oakland is, it ain’t L.A.”
He looks over at me, and I can tell that I have him half-convinced. “It ain’t L.A.,” he repeats softly.
A week later we are rolling up Interstate 5 in my blue Buick. I can see a load lift off Richard’s shoulders as Los Angeles slips backward in the rearview mirror. A Motown song, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” comes on the radio, and we both sing along. “Please don’t leave me, girl, don’t you go.”
Pretty soon we’re howling out the lyrics. Then we switch off the radio and Richard starts singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” as we pass through Grapevine, California. He’s got a quavering voice and can’t really hold a note, so I help him along.
Then we go into “My Girl” and “Stop (In the Name of Love),” then practically the whole damn Motown catalog. I’m driving the Buick and Richard’s driving his bottle of Courvoisier. I’m getting better mileage than he is.
We start making up fake Motown songs and sing those at the top of our lungs, too. “I gotta girl/My girl’s sweet as cream/Every time I see my girl/I let out a scream.”
Then we scream our heads off.
Outside in the real world, Richard Nixon runs for president. U.S. Marines kill and get killed in Vietnam. Thurgood Marshall sits as the first black man on the Supreme Court. In Mexico City, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise the black-power salute on the medals podium at the Olympics.
All that is happening, but Richard and I are untouchable rolling north on I-5. The dark comes down before the full ugliness of California’s Central Valley can hit us. I fall silent. Richard continues tunelessly humming Motown and muttering “F*ck L.A.” after nearly every sip of brandy he takes.
He’s riding toward a new life.
I’m driving toward an old one.
Mama.
Home.