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

wrestlers where, after watching them try to murder each other in the ring, Richard was dumbfounded to see the same guys kissing and holding hands in the lobby.
    There was the club where Richard opened for a wrestling bear who guzzled beer between bouts. One night when the furry star had a few too many, he pinned a terrified Richard to the floor backstage and gently began stroking him.
    There was the Casablanca in Youngstown, Ohio, where Richard, upon learning from a tearful Satin Doll that the performers weren’t going to be paid, came to the rescue by pulling a starter pistol on the club’s reputedly mobbed-up Lebanese owners (reimagined as Italian for Live on the Sunset Strip and again in Jo Jo Dancer ) and demanded their share of the take.
    There was the female impersonator who enticed Richard with a bit of quid pro quo. He was relieved to find, when push came to shove, that she was in fact a she, passing as a female impersonator.
    In Pittsburgh, he served thirty-five days of a ninety-day sentence handed down for assaulting a singer he had been seeing. Richard never denied the charge. He’d been talking trash about the woman behind her back, playing the pimp and bragging that she’d been giving him money. When she confronted him backstage, he claimed preemptive self-defense. “I thought she was going to do some serious damage to me so I beat her ass first.” It turned out her father was connected. When the cops burst into the rooming house in the middle of the night, Richard feared they’d come to work him over. But, he concluded, they must have felt sorry for this skinny kid with no muscles, trembling in his underwear. Instead, they gave him time to get dressed and then hauled him downtown.
    In jail, he struck up a conversation with a fellow inmate who, it turned out, knew his aunt Mexcine and only had a few days left to serve. Upon his release, the inmate contacted Mexcine and she sent Richard twenty dollars, which he parlayed into seventy by playing the numbers. That was enough to buy his way out of jail and out into the freezing cold.
    Back on the street, Richard heard that Sammy Davis Jr. was in town. He found his hotel and stationed himself in a chair at the end of the hallway hoping for a chance to meet the man who, along with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, formed a holy trinity of African American performers of the day.
    A hotel security cop gave him the once-over but didn’t question his reason for being there. And while no one would ever mistake the twenty-two-year-old Richard Pryor for hired muscle, it might have made sense because Davis had faced continual threats of assassination, lynching, and theater bombings ever since his marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt in 1960, a barrage that only intensified when their daughter, Tracey, was born a year later.
    Once or twice, Davis peeked out to see if the skinny guy in the chair was still there. After several hours, someone from Davis’s entourage brought Richard a plate of food. The next morning, as Davis was leaving, Richard rose from his chair. “What’s happening?” Davis said. The two would become great friends a decade hence, but for now Davis smoked and nodded as Richard stammered out a brief résumé and asked if maybe he would give him a job. Davis gave him a cigarette and some encouragement. “But he was so jive,” Richard wrote. “Didn’t mind being a star one bit. It was a beautiful thing to see.”
    And then there was the hooker in Baltimore who invited Richard home with her after his show at the Playboy Club. “I want you to hear something,” she said, and pulled out a translucent red vinyl LP from its jacket, set the phonograph arm down on side one of Lenny Bruce, American, and for once, Richard forgot all about the pussy.
    On the second track, Lenny set the scene wherein a nine-year-old kid inadvertently discovers the mind-altering properties of model airplane glue. Lenny next followed the kid into a toy store where he