Black is the New White Read online

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. Motherfucker 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 fucked 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 motherfuckin’ 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 pussy.

  “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 pussy 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 tryi
ng 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. “Motherfucker 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.

  CHAPTER 17

  For the next ten years, all through the stand-up boom of the 1970s, the Comedy Store on Sunset becomes my main base of operations.

  Sammy Shore, a geeky-looking old-style comedian with curly hair and a fleshy nose, opens the club. It’s his spot, but he’s never there. He’s always on the road. He’s a warm-up comic, the guy who comes on before the big act and gets the audience going. His main gig is opening for Elvis in Vegas. He likes to call himself the Man Who Makes Elvis Laugh.

  In Sammy’s absence, his wife, Mitzi, works the door. When it opens, the club isn’t even a room. It’s a bin. Just a space hollowed out of the huge Ciro’s building. There are no amenities, no decorations.

  But it’s not tucked away in Beverly Hills like Ye Little Club, it’s right there on the dogleg of the Strip, between the Whisky and all the other rock clubs to the west and the Chateau Marmont to the east.

  Mitzi is a good businesswoman. She keeps enlarging the club. The first space is known as the Original Room, and when she takes over the whole building, she opens the Main Room. Then she makes room for a small space, originally designated for female comics, and calls it the Belly Room.

  Gradually, during the course of May 1972, Mitzi warms the place up. She hangs ferns. She puts a painting behind the bar. The decorative style goes from meat-packing warehouse to 1970s nightclub. A sign on the wall reads THE JOKES ARE FREE, THE DRINKS ARE 75 CENTS.

  Minding the Store: Robin Williams, Mitzi Shore, and me at the Comedy Store

  Sammy Shore going on the road is the best thing that ever happens to comedy in L.A. If the Comedy Store were left up to him, I’m sure it would go out of business. He is a gag man, not a businessman. His wife is the powerhouse. She is always there, at her post at the cash register, playing mother hen to the comics. The lady knows what she’s doing.

  “I do it all for the comics,” she says, and a lot of the performers who show up are emotionally needy and love her mothering.

  One small example: Mitzi gives away cigarettes to nervous comedians. It’s a brilliant ministrategy for running a comedy club. Stand-ups love them some cigarettes. Most of them smoke like the goal of their life is to get lung cancer. Mitzi hands out bubble gum, too, and if comics are really nervous, they take both. The devil is in the details.

  Sammy Shore comes back to his own club after being on the road for a month. He doesn’t recognize the place. He tells his wife he wants to do a show.

  “I’ll see if I can fit you in tomorrow night,” Mitzi says.

  Sammy sees which way the wind is blowing, both in his club and in the marriage. He and Mitzi divorce by the time the year is out. In the settlement, Mitzi gets the club.

  She’s got the club, but she still needs the laughs. If there’s one performance that makes the Store a success, it’s in June 1972, when Richard decides to try out new material two months after the club opens.

  He begins his act by giving notice that things have changed with him. He’s a new comic. He goes straight for the white people in the audience:

  I notice on the nights in the clubs here, like, white people come out early on Saturday night, and go home, and leave it to the niggers. It’s great to think that we can all sit in the same club together, white and black, and not understand each other. It’s amazing, it can only happen in America.

  Once he gets rolling, it’s the new Richard, born in Berkeley, midwifed by Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye.

  I used to be running from the cops and shit, ’cause we had a curfew. Niggers had to be home by eleven, Negroes by twelve. White cops worked at night, and if they caught you, your ass would be in trouble. “Get your hands up, black boy!” “I didn’t do nothing!” “Shut up and get your hands up against the wall.” “There ain’t no wall.” “Find one.” But I used to love getting arrested in Peoria on Saturday night because if you got in the lineup, that was like being in show business. ’Cause, like, all the ugly white girls who couldn’t get any, say niggers raped them.

  All the copycat Cosby bullshit burns off Richard while he is in Berkeley. It’s like he’s firing up some base. He gets rid of all the impurities. This is the pure shit.

  Richard has already put some of these routines on record, his second album, Craps (After Hours). It is mostly recorded at Red Foxx’s and other South Central black clubs. You can pick out my laugh on the tracks, booming out, backing Richard up. This shit is funny.

  With Richard’s appearance, the Store turns a corner. It becomes a hip club for celebrities. Richard is a stand-up comic who wants to be a movie star, but in the Store I see movie star after movie star wishing they were comedians, long before there is any actor-turned-rapper or rapper-turned-actor or child-star-turned-tramp or tramp-turned-child-star. Comics are sexy, comics are the rage. And the Store is our lair.

  Film, TV, and music stars turn up at the Store all the time, people such as Goldie Hawn, Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Donny Osmond, the Captain & Tenille, and Lee Majors, from the Six Million Dollar Man, comes in with his girlfriend, Farrah Fawcett.

  Farrah and I recognize each other from an encounter at a traffic light on Sunset a few years before. I am always seeing celebrities in their cars in L.A. I get the strangest stare from Michael Jackson on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s like he’s trying to run a Vulcan mind meld on my ass.

  This time, I tap my horn as I pull up alongside another convertible at a stoplight on Sunset. A pretty girl with windblown honey-colored hair is in the car next to mine, sitting in the driver’s seat as though it were a throne at a beauty pageant. This is a year before she becomes well known.

  The two of us, both cars with their tops down, alone at the red. That’s enough of an introduction in Hollywood.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hi,” Farrah says.

  “Are you an actress?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Done anything?”

  “Not yet.” She smiles. Megawatt teeth.

  “Whoa!” I pull down my sun visor and shade my eyes as a joke. She laughs.

  “Hollywood is going to eat you alive,” I say. “This town is going to eat you alive, girl!”

  She laughs again. “I hope so,” she says.

  “What’
s your name?”

  “Farrah Fawcett.”

  Using my Miss Amerae powers, I make the light turn green. I greenlight Farrah Fawcett. Lovingly, with the deepest of regrets, we pull away and go our separate ways.

  Next time I see her it’s on TV. The bad guy points a gun at her and she kicks it out of his hand. The next time I see her after that, she’s in the audience at the Store, sitting next to Lee Majors and laughing at my routine.

  When Richard leaves the Comedy Store after his act, going off in search of drugs, I stay behind and play Whack-A-Mole on white people. I usually make sure I go on after midnight, since that’s when the black folks come out, like they’re vampires.

  My audience. Black people and brave white people.

  You know, white people are sensitive. They’re like little white rabbits. They’ll leave. They’ll get the fuck out of a place. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” Then you got them ballsy white people. “This nigger doesn’t intimidate me. I’ll stay till the sun rises! We’ll see if this is a nigger vampire!”

  The Comedy Store still doesn’t know what kind of club it is. There are all these hungry young comics like me and Richard, plus a lot of the New York guys like Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze, Gabe Kaplan, and Steve Landesberg. They’re transplants. New York used to be the capital of comedy. Now it’s L.A.

  Then there are all these older professionals, guys who came up in the Borscht Belt and have been doing their schticks for years. They can’t figure out young audiences and they’re so tour addled that half the time they don’t know what the hell city they’re in. They just trot out the same setups and punch lines. They all want to be in Vegas.

  Mitzi is all about mentoring us young comics and easing the old guys out. For one thing, she knows the young ones are less likely to complain about not getting paid. None of us are paid during our first years at the Store. We work for free, for bubble gum and cigarettes.

  Mitzi has it in her mind that we are “workshopping” our acts. The payoff will come some other time, from someone else, from TV, somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s not from her.