Free Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by Joe Henry, David Henry Page A

America that had imagined itself, in the years following the Second World War, to be modern and sufficiently settled: dreams had been assigned and sanctioned—handed out along with your honorable service discharge—and involved new cars, office jobs, pretty wives, and obedient children. But once upon the shore of 1960, it was clear that its sandy banks were trembling and perilous, and that the way forward was dark and overgrown with vines. The boiler room beneath the nation’s freshly paved surface was clanging and giving off wisps of rancid steam following decades of brutal violence, deep resentment, and the denying of the very humanity of great segments of the country’s population. And now, an imposing and abstractly treacherous cold war pushed back from the idealized future. In a quick few years, a stout crop of popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power: My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie, Th e Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched— they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, and once the mask slipped, there would be no way of ever securing it back in place.
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    By the middle sixties, the bohemian subculture would become so pervasive that no longer would the flustered secretaries and pressed businessmen cross the street to avoid bearded confrontation, but, rather, tour buses filled with middle Americans would crawl along Cornelius and West Fourth streets, craning for a glimpse of the dirty and drugged radicals they’d read about in Time magazine. This transformation had begun a scant few years earlier, centered in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, a grubby and baby-faced young folksinger named Bob Dylan was still nicking songs and banter from established acts like Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, sharing cigarettes and kitchen scraps with Tiny Tim in the basement of the Cafe Wha? Painters Red Grooms and Bob Thompson were hustling canvases up Sixth Avenue in a scavenged baby carriage, and dressing sets for the impromptu theater pieces they helped stage in an empty shoe store. Ornette Coleman might be dressed in a burlap sack—like Moses being chased instead of followed—while Sun Ra paraded his Myth Science Arkestra along East Third Street like a barnstorming baseball team trying to drum up business en route to their weekly Monday night gig at Slug’s.
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    Into this constantly shifting scene stepped Richard Pryor—straight from the Chitlin’ Circuit and the fading theaters of skittish northern and midwestern towns that had years before shaken off the dust of vaudeville and the swing era but found little in the grainy, flickering glow of distant television screens to take its place.
    Looking back on the scene, screenwriter Buck Henry could remember, in his mind’s eye, walking along Bleecker or MacDougal streets late at night and seeing in every doorway someone who would later be famous. On any given night that autumn of 1963, a club hopper might see the top four stand-up comics of all time—(1) Richard Pryor, (2) George Carlin, (3) Lenny Bruce, (4) Woody Allen, as ranked by Comedy Central in 2005—within blocks of each other working the basket houses, where performers passed a basket or a hat to collect their pay, or appearing in all-night cafes housed in crumbling basements where patrons were requested to applaud by snapping their fingers rather than clapping their hands so as not to incur the wrath of apartment dwellers farther up the airshaft who were trying to sleep.
    As outrageous as the Village characters believed themselves to be, however, they would have turned few heads among the players Richard encountered out on the Circuit, in the days before he made it to New York.
    There was the hotel in Toronto favored by gay