Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him Read Online Free PDF Page A

OPEN THE DOOR, HERMAN .
    With the song’s success, Dusty Fletcher emerged from semiretirement to claim authorship, saying he had written the skit after seeing a drunk thrown out of a railroad station bar in South Carolina. The ejected patron, Fletcher recalled, stood out in the street and yelled for the bartender to let him back in.
    Once the song broke, it seemed every singer and band in the country rushed to record it. Within months of McVea’s hit, at least eighteen versions were released by the likes of Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, Dick Haymes, the Pied Pipers, Jo Stafford, Burl Ives, and Bing Crosby. Both Count Basie and nightclub trio the Three Flames scored number-one hits with the song. There was even a Yiddish version by a quartet known as the Yokels.
    But, at the end of the day, “Richard” belongs to Dusty Fletcher. The recordings were mere novelty numbers, whereas Fletcher had honed his stage performance to a work of art incorporating pantomime, pratfalls, and an acrobatic balancing act atop a freestanding ladder. Happily, it was captured twice on film, as a ten-minute short directed by William Forest Crouch, and as a vignette in the Cab Calloway movie Hi-De-Ho.
    Fletcher portrayed his nameless character as a drunk who mutters to himself between shouts up to his unresponsive roommate. In each segment of the routine he peels back layer upon layer of a complicated man gamely soldiering on with his threadbare existence in a harsh, uncaring world.
    Critic Jake Austen notes that Fletcher’s work, like Richard’s, dealt with “fairly horrifying subjects: abject poverty, extreme alcoholism, spousal beating, homicide, and other rib ticklers.” Traces of genetic material from “Open the Door” show up in Richard’s “Wino & Junkie,” the signature piece he developed over a period of several years. It grew along with him, becoming deeper, ever more fearless, and less dependent on jokes. By the time Richard recorded it for his 1974 LP That Nigger’s Crazy, there was nothing overtly funny about it.
    WINO: You better lay off that narcotic, nigger, that shit done made you null and void. I ain’t lyin’, boy. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you straighten up and get a job?
    JUNKIE: Get a job? Motherfucker, you talkin’ to the kid, baby. Shit! I worked five years in a row when I was in the joint pressing them motherfuckin’ license plates. I’m a license plate-pressing motherfucker too, baby. Where a nigger gonna get a job out here pressing license plates?
    Black comics learn their craft on the street corner, Richard once said. “That’s where niggers rehearse. If you want to be a speaker, you rehearse your speeches. You tell your stories. Singers start there. Players run their game. . . . That was my stage.”
    In communities large and small, African Americans found free expression in games of signifying; playing the dozens; and exchanging raunchy, rhyming tall tales of “bad niggers” like Stagolee, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law and trickster characters harking back to High John the Conqueror, Br’er Rabbit, and the Signifying Monkey. Richard found genius in this cosmology of language and humor that, up until that time, had kept sanctuary in barbershops, pool halls, street corners, front porches, and back rooms. Then, to nearly everyone’s dismay, he went and paraded it out in front of company.
    “White folks don’t play enough,” Richard contended. “They don’t relax. They don’t know how to play the dozens . . . nothing.”
    We used to have good sessions sometimes. I remember I came up with a beaut, man. I killed them one day. We was doing it all day to each other, you know? Bang bang—“Your shoes are run over so much looks like your ankles is broke,” and shit like that. And I came up with, I called the motherfucker “The Rummage Sale Ranger,” you know what I mean? ’Cause that’s where he got his clothes. “The Rummage Sale Ranger”—that was a