Black is the New White Page 15

  I tell Mitzi that the rebellion I warned her about has arrived. Leno and Letterman are furious. Mitzi backs down. Okay, she says, anyone in the Main Room gets a share of the door. But the cat has been let out of the bag. We’re calling ourselves Comedians for Compensation now, and we turn down Mitzi’s compromise. Just like I warned her, once the beef gets out on the street, it turns ugly.

  In March 1979, I help organize a meeting, getting a hundred angry comics together in one room. The result is chaos, like a clown convention. Everybody yells at once. I wonder if this is going to work. Comics cooperating? A disunion union?

  Miraculously, we get our shit together. We bring in a figurehead white boy, Tom Dreesen, a comic and a former union guy, to be the public face of the strike. We organize picket lines, carrying signs that read THE YUK STOPS HERE and NO MONEY AIN’T FUNNY.

  Richard supports the strike and even comes out with me to the picket line. Jimmie Walker, a former Store regular and a huge star from his show Good Times, backs us up, too. Garry Shandling starts out with us but eventually crosses the picket line to perform after Mitzi offers $25 a set for weekends only. And Howie Mandel never honors the strike at all.

  “You’re working, so what do you care about this?” Howie asks me one night as I’m on the picket line.

  “I care because it’s about us,” I say. “The comics.” He stares at me blankly. It’s like trying to explain slavery to a white man. He gets it, but not really. Howie walks past me into the Store. I channel Miss Amerae and level a silent curse at him, wishing that all his hair will fall out and he’ll wind up hosting a stupid game show.

  It is Jay Leno who finally turns the tide. I am out on the picket line every night that spring, mostly alongside my main man Detroit Johnny Witherspoon, who before the strike acts as the emcee for the Store. The two of us are there when one of the strikebreakers pulls his car into the driveway of the Store’s parking lot. Blocked by the picket line, the scab bulls his car forward, and Leno does a pratfall backward. I can tell Jay is taking a fake showbiz flop, but it looks bad enough, and people freak.

  Mitzi is at her usual post, watching the picket line from her big bay window in the Store. I don’t know if she sees Leno fall down, but she finally caves. She agrees to pay all comics who appear at the Store $25 per set.

  The strike ends, and most us go back to work, but the bad blood still flows. Mitzi feels betrayed. She freezes out some of the most active strikers. I get a pass because I tried to talk to her about it before the walk-out went down. She admits me back into her good graces. She’s Mitzi the Mom again.

  But not everybody feels the love. A comic named Steve Lubetkin thinks Mitzi has blackballed him. He’s not getting sets. He goes into a funk. He climbs up to the roof of the Continental Hyatt, right next door to the Store, and jumps off, landing on the ramp to the club’s parking lot after a fourteen-floor fall. His suicide note reads, “My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at the Comedy Store.”

  I know Steve. I don’t believe his suicide has anything to do with the Store. He is always on the edge. If it isn’t the strike that sends him over, then it’s something else.

  The night he jumps, I’m at the Roxy, doing a show. I head to the Store afterward. They tell me a comic jumped, but they get the name wrong, another Steve, a guy I know just got a nose job.

  “Are you sure?” I say. “A guy who just got a nose job won’t mess it up by jumping off a building.” I was right. It was the wrong Steve.

  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 motherfucking 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 clusterfuck 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.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Richard’s in the burn center, and I’m back and forth visiting him all the time. The problem is, when we’re together, we can’t help ourselves from cracking each other up. We cannot not laugh.

  Say that Richard in another lifetime is hiding in the river thicket from the Klan, and he knows that if they hear him, he’s one lynched black man. But he sees a doodlebug that looks at him funny and he laughs out loud. He’s discovered and strung up by the Klan, all because it is impossible for him to keep a laugh inside.

  He laughs more than anyone I ever meet. His laughter is as contagious as a goddamn hospital. When I am with him, everything is funny. A fat man bending over a sandwich case at a deli, sticking his big ass out a mile wide into the aisle, cracks us up. Everything’s funny.

  When Richard is recovering in Northridge, I tell him a joke. I light a match and pass it in the air in front of me. “What’s this?” I ask him. He shakes his head, but he looks as though he knows what’s coming. “Richard Pryor running.”

  He stares at me out of that scarred face. His lips and one ear are all burned, he’s getting grafts off his legs and ass to transfer skin to his upper body. He looks at me and, even in the sorry shape he’s in, he laughs. He laughs because it’s funny. Sick, but funny.

  I witness Richard’s toughness during his burn treatments, procedures where the dead skin has to be scrubbed off with a rough sponge. It’s one of the most painful procedures in all of medicine. Richard bears up under it. When I talk to him, it’s like a paradox. He’s as happy as I’ve seen him in a long while. He can’t drink and drug, so those demons are laid to rest, at least for a little while. He is full of future plans.

  He wants to tell his life story in a movie. He wants to do it all, growing up in Peoria, the chitterling circuit, the marriages, Hollywood. “I want you to help me write it, Paul,” he says.

  I tell him what he should do is a children’s show. He needs a new image after the fire, as far away from drugs and freebasing as he can get. “You think they’ll let me?” he asks. On the face of it, Richard hosting a children’s show is not a slam dunk. People know him for his mouth, with “motherfucker” coming out of it every other second. And they know him as the star who lit himself on fire with the rum he was using as a freebasing solvent.

  But kids love Richard. In almost every episode of The Richard Pryor Show, we have a kid’s segment. He’s a child himself, so he has a natural rapport with children. And actually, the top-grossing Richard Pryor film, beating out even Silver Streak, is The Muppet Movie, where he has a cameo as a balloon vendor.

  CBS loses their long-running Saturday morning kid’s cartoon from Bill Cosby, Fat Albert, so they sign on for Pryor’s Place. It’s an inner-city Sesame Street–style live-action thing with puppets, and we have a good time writing characters for it. My favorite is Chill the musician, who Richard plays in his finest rasta jazzman style. The theme song has a funk groove: “Whoa, oh, let’s get on over to Pryor’s Place/Whoa, oh, we’re gonna party so don’t be late.”

  In later days, when he is back at the bottle, the pipe, and the cigarettes, I hear Richard singing the chorus of that children’s song as he pulls the mirror toward him. He gives me a sly sideways look and laughs. I’m probably the only one present who knows where that line comes from. The rest of the people Richard parties with never get up before noon, so they would never have seen Pryor’s Place.

  But our real work in those days is always on Richard’s biopic. Rocco Urbisci, Richard and I settle into his upstairs office, just down the hall from the bedroom where he set himself on fire, and write the script together. Even though I learned to type in high school, it’s easier for us to have a stenographer in the room. It’s how we work on the Pryor Show, and that’s how we work now. We fling bits around, situations and one-liners, trying to crack each other up. The stenographer lady has a hard time keeping up. If we can make her laugh, we know we’re in the right place.

  Richard is golden in Hollywood because of his concert films. Richard Pryor: Live on Sunset Strip and Richard Pryor: Here and Now both hit big. Audiences are still looking for the same laughs they found when they watched Live in Concert. People love them some Richard Pryor, but they love him best only one way—behind the microphone. His dramatic features, like The Toy (his comeback film after the suicide attempt), don’t do as well.

  His pet project through all this is the movie of his life. What comes out of our script sessions is Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. We come up with a freaky way to put the film together, approaching it as though Richard is cut loose from time, drifting through episodes of his life while he lies dying from burning himself up.

  On set: The producer Rocco Urbisci, Richard, and me during the filming of Jo Jo Dancer

  It’s some of the bravest shit I’ve ever seen anyone do on film. During the shoot, Richard puts himself through the whole fire episode again. The audience actually gets to witness his suicide attempt on-screen, watch him pour the rum over his head, see him light himself on fire.

  Watching him act out that scene in Jo Jo Dancer, I am floored by the level of pain Richard had to be feeling in order to do something so extreme. That is some horrible misery he is in. It’s like he wants to transfer the emotional pain inside of him to physical pain on the outside. When he’s all scarred up and burnt to shit, we get to see what it’s like on the inside of Richard’s skin.

  Not all the scenes are as scarifying as the fire. My favorite parts of the movie are the childhood episodes in the whore-house in Peoria. Richard has so much j
uice in Hollywood that he packs up the whole production to film on location in his old hometown.

  I put a lot of myself into Jo Jo, too. In the scene at the whorehouse where Richard’s mama talks to her friend the psychic, I name the friend Miss Amerae and give her the vibe of my own mama’s voodoo-spell-casting best friend.

  Once again, Richard hands over casting duties to me. I bring in one of my favorite singers, Carmen McRae. Billy Eckstein plays another singer, one with whom the young comic Jo Jo shares a burlesque-show stage. The beautiful Dianne Abbot, Robert DeNiro’s wife, plays Jo Jo’s mother. Paula Kelly acts the part of Richard’s fantasy figure, the Satin Doll, the hooker with a heart of gold, the same character we also put into his TV special. There’s a montage sequence tracked by Richard’s Berkeley theme song, “What’s Going On,” which plays over street scenes and Jo Jo’s rise as a comic.

  But it’s all too close to the bone. Scoey Mitchell is Jo Jo’s father, who puts him down with the exact words Richard heard from LeRoy Pryor during his youth: “This boy ain’t shit and his mama ain’t shit, either!”

  We watch Richard rob his way out of a mob nightclub, destroy the car of one of his wives (“That car’s going to need a tune-up,” cracks his alter ego character, after Richard drives the Cadillac off a cliff), and crawl on his hands and knees trying to pick bits of rock cocaine out of the carpet in his bedroom.

  Richard and I get to write his obituary in Jo Jo Dancer. In the last scene, he puts on his preacher-man voice and does a stand-up riff around his own funeral, pretending to gaze down at his own burnt-up corpse.

  He tore his ass on the freeway of life. The boy was a mess. He run through life like shit run through a goose. And now he rests here with a smile on his face. I guess that’s a smile. I hope that’s his face. You sure that isn’t his ass? It look like his ass! Some people lead with their chin. Life kind of forces you to do that—to lead with your chin. But this man here, he led with his nuts. If his nuts wasn’t in a vise, he wasn’t happy.