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

predecessors.”
    Skinny and bearded, Richard Pryor holds the stage of a dark basement club, its brick walls lending it the air of a boiler room fallout shelter where a small crowd nervously laughs and awaits an all-clear of something from somewhere. Steaks and peppers are listed for sale on a chalkboard behind him; chicken curry, beer.
    There is a silence that follows each jab of a phrase, the mostly white audience puzzled and uncomfortable as Richard sticks and moves, looks for his way inside . . . talking aches and pains, winos and whores and politicians and pimps; catching the clap, and having sucked another man’s dick. These are not jokes he tells but character sketches and vignettes that spool out and surprise like a tablecloth snatched off a birdcage, revealing no living bird but something furry and feral in its place, uncomfortably large for its quarters, grunting and pissing.
    Richard seems not to register the quiet and discomfort, or he pays it no mind. He keeps watch over his shoulder, is patient and slow as he lets out his line. He weaves fractured scenes above the heads of those in attendance but seems rarely to glance their way. He is already seeing beyond; over them; out.
    * When Bob Dylan and the Band reinvented the song during the raucous 1967 recording sessions in West Saugerties, New York, that would come to be known as The Basement Tapes, Dylan changed the title to “Open the Door, Homer,” even while keeping “Open the door, Richard” as the song’s refrain, because, it is said, the Band’s keyboardist Richard Manuel detested the original song, having been taunted with the phrase his whole life. And Allen Ginsberg, no less, declared that “Open the Door, Richard” had influenced his poetry during the pivotal road trips he took with Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s: “I would say ‘Open the Door, Richard’ opened the door to a new sound and music, to new consciousness.”

“THERE’S A BAD MUTHAFUCKA COMIN’ YOUR WAY”

    In his 1995 memoir Pryor Convictions, Richard told how his grandfather Roy Pryor had been crushed in the coupling of two boxcars while working for the railroad in the 1920s—an incident that should have killed any man on the spot. Instead, Richard tells us, the cars parted, his grandfather made his way to a tavern, downed a drink, and then died.
    Nothing miraculous about that, Richard explained. The man wanted a drink.
    Richard apparently had confused his paternal grandfather, LeRoy Pryor, with his maternal great-grandfather, Richard Carter, whose obituary appeared in the Decatur Daily Review of September 20, 1925:
    RICHARD CARTER DIES OF INJURIES
    Colored Man Crushed between Cars
    Richard Carter of 1144 South Jackson street died at 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon at the Wabash Employee’s hospital from injuries received earlier in the day, when he was crushed between two cars. He was fifty-five years old.
    Mr. Carter was one of the well-known colored men of Decatur. He had been here many years and was well liked by those who knew him. He had been employed in the yards of the Wabash roundhouse for a long time. About 11 o’clock Saturday forenoon he was crushed between some cars that were switching in the yards and was so badly injured that he died five hours later.
    Richard’s grandmother, Rithie Marie Carter, was one of seven children born to Richard Carter and the former Julia Isabelle Piper. She was born sometime in 1899, perhaps in New Orleans, shortly before her family joined the great migration up the Mississippi early in the century. This first wave of African American migrants, employed as musicians or servants on northbound riverboats, jumped ship in the comparatively free Midwest, and Illinois seemed especially appealing. Marie’s family settled in Decatur. *
    Marie married LeRoy (or Roy) Pryor, a janitor and apartment building caretaker, in Decatur on a Saturday evening in August of 1914 at the home of Elder T. S. Hendershott, pastor of the Church of the Living