Black is the New White Read online

  Only Richard could burn himself up and still be able to crack jokes about how his ass resembles his face. When we’re writing the script, I keep thinking I am going too far, that Richard will draw the line somewhere. He never does. That’s some ballsy shit. Richard is fearless all the way through Jo Jo Dancer, confronting the episodes of his life that dog him. Nuts in a vise.

  This boy ain’t shit! That line has to be what is echoing somewhere in Richard’s head, right at the moment when he pours 151-proof rum over himself. It’s an awful curse to give to a young child. As fucked-up as Richard is from his child-hood—and his craziness runs long and deep—I always think the real miracle is that he can laugh at his life at all.

  CHAPTER 28

  Yvonne wants her own business, so I set her up in a juice bar way down on the eastern end of Sunset. We call it Mooney’s Juices Plus, and we name all the drinks after everyone we know. The Richard Pryor. The Rick James. The Eddie Murphy. We throw a grand opening, but Richard doesn’t show up.

  He’s pissed off because I didn’t tell him ahead of time that I was planning on opening the spot—like a child, jealous of secrets being kept from him. The whole juice-bar business represents something in my life that he doesn’t know about. I don’t mean to spring it on him, but I’m busy, and it just happens. It’s Yvonne’s thing. It reminds me of the time Yvonne and I buy a brand-new Cadillac. When we drive up to Northridge in it to see Richard, he reacts as though we’ve somehow pissed him off by not telling him about the car beforehand. I think he feels his life is out of control enough as it is. He doesn’t need surprises from his friends.

  But Mooney’s juice bar does okay without Richard’s help. A lot of Hollywood folk come by to buy. Denzel Washington, Debbie Allen, Rick James, Diahann Carroll, and Bette Midler are all customers. But in the same way it happens for a lot of couples, the new business marks the end of my marriage to Yvonne. It’s like a cliché. Start a new business, move into a new house—sure enough, it’ll bust up your relationship.

  Healthy business: Yvonne in our shop in Hollywood, Mooney’s Juices

  Yvonne and I used to live near a rich white couple who have broken up but still live together. They’re separated, but friends. She lives upstairs in their house, he lives downstairs. They invite us over to dinner every once in a while.

  Yvonne and I tell each other that’s how we always want to be. Those people are the coolest. Everyone who breaks up and hates on each other—that’s bullshit. We want to be cool with it. No messy divorce-court battles. We stay friends, just like the upstairs-downstairs neighbor couple. We concentrate on our children.

  It’s a crazy mash-up of a family, but somehow it works. My daughter Lisa is a big part of our lives. I bring her down from Oakland every summer to live with me. I also get to know my oldest sons, Daryl and Duane, much better than I ever did before. They are living in Los Angeles now, so I see them fairly often. One time, I bring the star of one of their favorite horror films, the rat-based fright flick, Willard, up to their bedroom to wish them good night. When they see Willard himself, the actor Bruce Davison, come into the room, they freak out.

  The other kids are all crazy about the youngest member of the brood, Symeon, the last child Yvonne and I have before we break up. Symeon looks more like Yvonne, while Shane and Spring look like me. Symeon, like Symeon the Righteous from the Bible. The other kids always make a big deal of him, he’s their little pet.

  One evening we’re out as a family at El Coyote, the famous Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. Five-year-old Symeon solemnly checks out the patio, which is dominated by gay males, laughing and drinking. He turns to me.

  “Daddy, where are all the mommies?” The whole family cracks up laughing. Out of the mouth of babes.

  All the kids have their daddy’s show business blood in their veins. Duane and Daryl are already making noise that they want to follow their old man into comedy. Right around this time, Shane lands a role in the second-generation Roots series, making his family proud.

  This is the hardest period of my friendship with Richard. He goes all scattered and remote on me. Finally, he tells me what’s up with him. The tingly feeling he has in his limbs, which we always wrote off as nerve damage from the fire, winds up being the first signs of multiple sclerosis. The dreaded MS. A disease that slowly attacks the nerve cells in your brain and spinal cord, so that you get more and more messed up, until you can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t live. There’s no cure.

  MS happens at different rates for different people, and Richard is convinced he will have the slow kind. He’s got healthy years ahead of him, he tells me. It doesn’t work out that way. From the middle of the 1980s onward, MS steals a little more from Richard, week by week, month by month. If I don’t see him for a little while, and then I go up to Northridge, I am always shocked by the change. My best friend is falling apart right in front of my eyes.

  “MS is a motherfucker, Mr. Mooney,” he says. “I wouldn’t wish it on Annette Funicello.” There are rumors back then that the Beach Blanket Bingo actress has MS, too.

  “I know why God gave me MS,” Richard says. “I was a bad guy. I was into drugs. But how could God give it to Annette Funicello? She never did nothing bad. She’s a Mouse-keteer! I mean, come on, God!”

  As Richard is fading, other comics are coming up who idolize him. I first meet Eddie Murphy in New York in 1985, on the set of Richard’s movie Brewster’s Millions. Eddie’s been on Saturday Night Live since the early 1980s. By the time I meet him, he has already broken out as a big movie star in 48 Hrs., Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop. He comes onto the set as a guest of Richard’s costar on Brewster’s, John Candy.

  Richard and Eddie huddle up right away. Eddie is telling him how he’s been following Richard’s every move since he was a little kid on Long Island. John Candy looks over to them and frets. He’s jealous of their instant friendship.

  “Richard hates me,” Candy says.

  “Richard doesn’t hate you,” I say to him, although I know for a fact that Richard cannot stand the man. It’s Chevy Chase all over again.

  “He never talks to me like that,” Candy says, looking over at Eddie and Richard together.

  “You ain’t black,” I say to him, giving him a blinding glimpse of the obvious. I make some excuse and leave the needy fat man to himself.

  I occasionally feel resentment from my professional contacts because of my closeness with Richard. Eddie Murphy and I talk about it. “I have Caesar’s ear, and they don’t like that,” I say. I’m one of the few people who can go up and see Richard whenever, wherever.

  “I know that I used to hate you,” Eddie says. “I was always seeing you with stars, and I got mad at you.”

  “People dislike you when you have Caesar’s ear. They can’t get to the king, so they get pissed at you.”

  Later on, Richard asks me about Murphy. “You don’t like him,” he says.

  “What’s there to like?” I say. “He’s just a kid.” I harbor a secret grudge because I feel as though Eddie has lifted some of my material, or at least did some shit that was similar to mine. Comics always feel that way whether justified or not. It’s a chronic condition with us.

  I wonder if all alpha males hate on one another at the start. Richard and I don’t get along the first time we meet, either, when he tries to lay that orgy shit on me. It takes a while. Same with Eddie. But we go on to become real friends.

  “Now Mr. Mooney can get his money from Eddie,” Richard says. He says it sort of mock bitterly, like he’s half-hurt and half-relieved that I don’t have to rely on his broke-down ass for employment.

  Meanwhile, Eddie has a beef with Keenan Wayans, another comic who is coming up just then. Keenan gets into Eddie’s shit over some material each of them claims as his own. They talk about suing each other. I step in between them.

  “Don’t do it,” I tell Eddie and Keenan both. “It’s black-on-black crime, brothers. Black people fighting, you know white people love the shit o
ut of that.”

  They resolve their differences out of court, and I wind up working with both of them. For his Raw tour in 1987, Eddie invites me to open for him.

  I say, “I’m a comic, and you’re a comic, and you want me to open for you?”

  “That’s right,” he says.

  Keepin’ it Raw: Me with Eddie Murphy and his wife, Nicole Mitchell Murphy

  It’s never been done before. The hard-and-fast showbiz tradition is to mix music and comedy. If the headliner is a comic, you open with a musical act. Richard always has Patti LaBelle open for him. Elvis headlines, and he puts Sammy Shore as the first act.

  Eddie’s on Oprah, and she asks him who his favorite comic is. “Paul Mooney,” he says. I have to laugh at the look of terror, disgust, and fascination that crosses Oprah’s face at that moment. I am always fucking with her in my act.

  Eddie and I go out on the nationwide Raw tour, and we kill. I can tell I am keeping him sharp. He calls the tour “Raw” because Bill Cosby gets down on him publicly, calling his language too raw. Eddie definitely doesn’t tone it down in response. Somebody counts up the number of times fuck is used in the movie version of his Raw act, and it turns out it’s the most ever in a film since the Al Pacino gangster flick Scarface.

  On the tour bus, they nickname me Indian and Vampire because they never see me sleep. “I have to stay awake and watch this white man drive this bus,” I tell them. Any time I close my eyes, I get bus-plunge visions. It’s all from my experience as an eighth-month fetus in the womb, getting roller-coastered on a road in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  When the Wayans brothers get their own show on Fox in 1990, they call it In Living Color. Fox is still trying to break the grip of the Big Three networks back then, so it’s open to edgier material than NBC, ABC, and CBS. For the show’s ensemble, the Wayans hire some people who go on to be stars, like Jim Carrey, David Alan Grier, and Jamie Foxx.

  I don’t want to come aboard as a staff writer. But the Wayans create the character of Homey D. Clown off a riff of mine. Homey is a children’s party clown who performs the job as part of a prison work-release program. He doesn’t take any shit from kids or grown-ups. He’s the oppressed figure who is comically vocal about his status.

  In one sketch, Jim Carrey leads a Boy Scout–style group to a party with Homey.

  Jim Carrey (as scout leader): Do you mind if I use a check to pay for this?

  Damon Wayans (as Homey D. Clown): Oh, you want to pay me with a check, huh? And have me stand in line at some damned bank in a clown outfit, degrading and shaming myself to cash your little peanuts? I don’t think so. Homey don’t play that.

  Damon slurs the line “your little peanuts” so it sounds like “your little penis.”

  Homey has a motto, which may as well be words to live by for every comedian who doesn’t want to play the coon. “Homey may be a clown,” Damon says in character more than once, “but he don’t make a fool out of himself.”

  In Living Color is a phenomenon for Fox, delivering the young viewers the network craves. “Homey don’t play that” becomes another of my catchphrases to go national. Richard loves the show. We sometimes watch it together at his place in Northridge. It feels as though our pigeons are coming home to roost. The momentum we started on The Richard Pryor Show is playing out with Eddie Murphy, the Wayanses, and other comics like Dave Chappelle. At the same time that the MS slowly takes away Richard’s ability to talk, new voices are coming up.

  The black pack: Arsenio Hall, me, Eddie Murphy, Robert Townsend, and Keenan Ivory Wayans

  CHAPTER 29

  In spring 1992, a month after the riot against the Rodney King verdicts burns down half of Los Angeles, I’m in the green room at the Pantages Theater at Hollywood and Vine. One of the promoters of the show approaches me with a request.

  “Mr. Mooney,” he says, actually wringing his hands like he’s in a silent movie—probably Birth of a Nation, “could you please not mention race?”

  I marvel that there’s a person on the face of God’s green earth who would have the total lack of sense to say something like that to me. It’s like someone coming up and saying, “Could you please not breathe?” Who does this imbecile think I am?

  I’m not one of those people out there burning down stores or boosting TVs. But I see enough LAPD bullshit in my life to know that this moment is a long time coming. L.A. police are the worst in the world. They’re outnumbered, and they know it, so they have to act all heavy-handed to make their presence known.

  Richard rents a house in Bel Air to get away from the Northridge craziness. We go up there to work. I leave the house late one night, but the streets are like a maze up there. I’m driving around lost for fifteen minutes. I see a car full of white people, and I think they’re lost, too. They trail me for a little while. I finally make it down to Sunset and turn east. I approach the dogleg at the start of the Strip, right where Tower Records is back then, and there’s a police roadblock waiting for me.

  What the shit is this?

  “Some citizen called it in,” the cop tells me as he’s checking my ID.

  “Some citizen? What am I? I’m a citizen. What do you think I am, a baseball bat?”

  This is a total no-no in LAPD copland. No back talk, and no black talk. The police will wear a black person out.

  “Are you on probation or parole?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be offended. We ask everybody that. Does the owner of the car know that you have it?”

  “What? I’m the owner of this car!”

  “Where are you going?”

  This bullshit is annoying me. “I’m going to drive until I run out of gas. You want to follow me?”

  He gives me the stink-eye and tells me to drive off. There are two LAPD rules that every black second-class citizen of Los Angeles knows. One: you mouth off, you get run in. Two: you flee from a cop, you get a beatdown. That’s what happened to Rodney. He got beat because he ran. He broke the unwritten rule of the LAPD.

  I’ve been at a traffic stop in Beverly Hills where the cop reaches across the driver and another passenger, both women, to ask me for my ID. Just me, not the two white women I’m with—and I’m not even driving. I’ve been hauled out of a store in Hollywood in manacles, taken to the station house, and then told it is all a big mistake. No apologies, no nothing, just a curt, “You’re free to go.”

  “I’m free to go? Then take me back to the store in handcuffs, uncuff me in front of everybody and apologize! You handcuffed me in public, now make it right in public, too!”

  No back talk, Negro.

  Yes, it might be all new to you, but it’s real old for me. For white people, watching the Rodney King video is like a world premiere movie. “Oh, I didn’t know the nice policemen did that.” For black people, it’s a rerun. It’s been in syndication for a long time. We’ve seen it all before.

  After the King verdict, Richard and I meet up at the Bel Air rental house to watch the fires downtown and in Pico-Union. I think about The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: “I’ll take you to burn, burn, burn, burn, burn!” And of the slogan during the riots of the 1960s: “Burn, baby, burn!” Yes, we’ve seen it all before. You can only put pressure on people for so long before they explode.

  A month later, at the Pantages that night, the nervous promoter practically follows me onstage. “So will you please not mention race? Please? Mr. Mooney?”

  I go out and check the crowd. Black people and brave white people—my kind of audience.

  “They don’t want me to talk about race!” The first words out of my mouth.

  The audience members scream. They scream!

  “You all got matches? Here, I got some, if you don’t have any.” I toss out a half-dozen books of matches to the crowd.

  They scream. They scream!

  Who says you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater?

  I’m just keeping it real. And my kind of audience likes it real.

  Back then, I’m
living with a white girl, Lori Petty, the actress. Keanu Reeves’s surfer girl in Point Break. Kit Keller, Geena Davis’s character’s little sister, in A League of Their Own. Tank Girl. Lori’s the coolest. During the riots, she’s quoting George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic—“Let’s go downtown and blow the roof off of this sucker!”

  Lori and I are together for five good years, until we fall out on the set of a movie we’re both acting in, a Pauly Shore comedy called In the Army Now. That film kills more than our relationship. Mitzi’s son Pauly sees his career pretty much left for dead after it, too.

  I am too busy to notice whether or not my film career is tanking. I finally come out with my first album, Race. It’s good timing, right after the riots. I do a lot of my stand-up routines that feature the same upside-down view of the world that I learn back in childhood, from the “Mama getting her ass whupped” story that makes me laugh so hard.

  A lot of times, I just take a black situation and turn it upside down by putting white people in it. The most popular singing group in the country back then is from a god-damned TV commercial (ain’t America great?). The California Raisins. The cartoon dried fruit sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with Jimi Hendrix’s old drummer, Buddy Miles, on vocals. On my album Race, I go off on the whole California Raisin phenomenon.

  White folks’ favorite TV commercial is that you got to be a little shriveled-up wrinkled black raisin. Little nigger raisin with a hat, they think that shit is cute. [White folk voice] “Oh, look at the cute nigger raisin!” … They’ve gone nigger-raisin crazy. They made Ray Charles … and Michael Jackson goddamned raisins … They’ve gone nigger-fucking-raisin crazy. And the shit ain’t cute. I bet if I get me some goddamned marshmallows, and put some arms and legs on the goddamned marshmallows, and let ’em sing “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” they won’t think that shit is so goddamned cute! No, it won’t be cute then! White people will call up and bitch and shit. “I’m not a goddamned marshmallow! What kind of crazy nigger wrote this commercial?”