"You do?" says the master, overjoyed. "Tell me!"

Slave smiles, shakes his head, and sweeps.

"You tell me the answer," Master says, "I'll free you right away."

That perks the slave up and makes him stop his broom.

"Tell me," Master pleads. "How can I stop this homely face of mine from scaring people?"

"All right, I'll tell you-you can keep your ugly a.s.s at home!"

Comedians don't tell jokes. Not anymore. The only people who tell jokes are me and police and sanit-men and salesmen and B.I.D. ladies and long-haul truckers and nurses and exterminators and stumble-b.u.ms and addicts and jet-jocks and golfers and car mechanics and frat boys and children.

Children tell jokes. We've got to listen to the children.

A seven-year-old comes into her parents' bedroom with her little six-year-old friend. Her mom and dad are in bed, and they're tearing it up, Mom giving Dad head like she's Monica and he's Bill. Hoovering it down like she could suck the chrome off a hubcap.

Seven-year-old turns to her friend and says, "Can you believe it? And they give me an a.s.s-whipping for sucking my thumb!"

Listen to the children. Listen to the children! Listen to the children!

Twelve-year-old kid goes into his parents' bedroom and sees his mom and dad really going at it. Dad's got Mom spread-eagled and he's pounding her like a pile driver. Dad looks over his shoulder and sees the kid and laughs. Heh, heh, heh. Haw! Haw!

A month later the dad comes into the kid's bedroom, the kid's got Grandma spread-eagled and he's really giving it to her, wailing away. Dad freaks out. Kid looks over his shoulder at Dad, says, "See, it's not so f.u.c.king funny when it's your your mama." mama."

Listen to the children. Listen to the children! Listen to the children!

So jokes are who I am. If Richard is leaving jokes behind, should I be worried? Will there be no more seeing Richard kill with the jokes I wrote for him? No more gold watches slipped onto my wrist out of grat.i.tude for giving him a great punch line? Most of all, no more feeling the high five from G.o.d for making him laugh?

But at Maverick's Flat back in 1969, I don't think about that at all. I'm too busy laughing.

At this point, Richard's making maybe $50,000 a year. (He's blowing about a hundred dollars a day on c.o.ke.) He has an alb.u.m, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor, out from Reprise that year. He's been on TV, he's appeared in Las Vegas. Richard's been in films-a s.h.i.tty flop of a film called out from Reprise that year. He's been on TV, he's appeared in Las Vegas. Richard's been in films-a s.h.i.tty flop of a film called The Busy Body, The Busy Body, plus a war movie called plus a war movie called The Green Berets, The Green Berets, with his hero John Wayne, in which his role was left on the cutting-room floor. But at least he has movie credits under his belt. with his hero John Wayne, in which his role was left on the cutting-room floor. But at least he has movie credits under his belt.

None of the rest of us at Redd's and Maverick's have been in the movies or on TV or played Vegas or have alb.u.ms. If you have an alb.u.m, you aren't supposed to be slumming in South Central. A record is a ticket out. If you have a comedy alb.u.m to your credit, you're supposed to be on the Strip or, better yet, onstage in a Las Vegas casino lounge.

But an alb.u.m doesn't satisfy Richard. Even though the first track of his first alb.u.m is called "Super n.i.g.g.e.r," it's still an alb.u.m of his Bill Cosby routines. Even "Super n.i.g.g.e.r" itself is more or less a Bill Cosby routine, only with a little more edge. Clark Washington, a.k.a. Super n.i.g.g.e.r, is a janitor with superpowers. He is "able to see through everything except whitey."

I know if I had an alb.u.m, a Las Vegas date, or a film role, I'd let myself be happy for at least a little while. Those are the kinds of shots that every stand-up wants to nail. It's what we are all working for. It kills us that Richard has it and it can't make him happy. In fact, it looks like having an alb.u.m under his belt just makes him even more discontented.

I think about the song "After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It" from the movie There's No Business Like Show Business There's No Business Like Show Business. "If I gave you the moon, you'd grow tired of it soon."

That is Richard Pryor to a T.

I know from hunting with my granddaddy Preston Ealy that the most dangerous time to be around a snake is right after it sheds its skin. It gets nasty and unpredictable. Richard around this period is jumpy, excitable, and restless. He's climbing the walls in Los Angeles. He's bored with it.

"Mooney, I'm losing my motherf.u.c.king mind." It's not the first time he says that to me.

We're parked up the street from Maverick's, at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard, only back then it's still just Santa Barbara Avenue.

I'm always up front in the audience at Richard's shows. He likes to hear my laugh. I watch him every night, then he comes offstage and we sit down and go over every little gesture, every word, every nuance. That's what we're doing parked up the street from Maverick's.

Dawn is coming up. The best time in L.A., before all the cars get on the road and the smog hits. Richard drinks from his constant companion, his comforter and security blanket, his bottle of Courvoisier. He pours the brandy into a little paper cup. It fuels a diatribe about his life.

"I'm going crazy," he says again. "This city is driving me nuts."

"So let's leave," I say.

"Yeah, right," he says. "Same old, same old, all over the G.o.dd.a.m.n country."

"I got to go up home," I say. "Oakland, see Mama, do some clubs. You need to split town for a while, that's where you should go."

"Oakland."

"Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco."

"Hippies." He laughs. "Them flower chicks don't wear bras, let their t.i.tties hang out."

I say, "That bothers you?" He laughs again and shakes his head.

"You know what?" I say. "Whatever Oakland is, it ain't L.A."

He looks over at me, and I can tell that I have him half-convinced. "It ain't L.A.," he repeats softly.

A week later we are rolling up Interstate 5 in my blue Buick. I can see a load lift off Richard's shoulders as Los Angeles slips backward in the rearview mirror. A Motown song, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," comes on the radio, and we both sing along. "Please don't leave me, girl, don't you go."

Pretty soon we're howling out the lyrics. Then we switch off the radio and Richard starts singing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" as we pa.s.s through Grapevine, California. He's got a quavering voice and can't really hold a note, so I help him along.

Then we go into "My Girl" and "Stop (In the Name of Love)," then practically the whole d.a.m.n Motown catalog. I'm driving the Buick and Richard's driving his bottle of Courvoisier. I'm getting better mileage than he is.

We start making up fake Motown songs and sing those at the top of our lungs, too. "I gotta girl/My girl's sweet as cream/Every time I see my girl/I let out a scream."

Then we scream our heads off.

Outside in the real world, Richard Nixon runs for president. U.S. Marines kill and get killed in Vietnam. Thurgood Marshall sits as the first black man on the Supreme Court. In Mexico City, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise the black-power salute on the medals podium at the Olympics.

All that is happening, but Richard and I are untouchable rolling north on I-5. The dark comes down before the full ugliness of California's Central Valley can hit us. I fall silent. Richard continues tunelessly humming Motown and muttering "f.u.c.k L.A." after nearly every sip of brandy he takes.

He's riding toward a new life.

I'm driving toward an old one.

Mama.

Home.

MAMA.

CHAPTER 6.

"Oh, h.e.l.l no!"

Those are my first words. I'm in the womb and I'm screaming out loud, bubbling up the placenta juice, because my world is turning upside down, a.s.s backward, and all-out crazy.

I remember this like it was yesterday. Even if I am a third-trimester fetus at the time.

One minute I am floating safe and warm in my mom's belly. Next second it's like I'm in a blender. Everything's all shook up.

What are you doing, girl, going on a roller coaster when you're sixteen years old and eight months pregnant? I think. I think.

LaVoya Ealy. My mom, my home away from home for the first nine months. Beautiful fresh girlfriend to my dad, George Gladney, basketball star in Shreveport, Louisiana. Just as young as she is.

Carrying me inside her belly, LaVoya's riding on a bus in the shadow of Shreveport's Texas Street Bridge over the Red River. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, 1941, only MLK is like twelve years old then and n.o.body knows he's a prophet yet.

The bus driver suddenly gets high or falls asleep or has a stroke or experiences the rapture and drives right off the road. The world turns over and over. Pretty little pregnant teenager banging around like a cue ball on the inside of an upside-down downtown bus.

"h.e.l.l, no!" My first words. My first curse against the world. My tiny fist raised in black-power protest, in the womb.

It shakes me up. All I can say is that, looking at the evidence of how my life turns out, I know that something something did it. Something sets me on a path that isn't like any road anybody else in the world is traveling. did it. Something sets me on a path that isn't like any road anybody else in the world is traveling.

I might as well blame a bus accident that happens before I am born.

My mom's family says that us surviving, me and my mom, is a miracle. They are shocked LaVoya isn't dead, shocked that the unborn-fetus me ain't miscarried all over the highway like some b.l.o.o.d.y crime scene.

Five weeks later I am birthed out into the world. Against my consent. Still upside down and loopy, a bus-plunge baby, funny as s.h.i.t and born to shock people.

Shreveport, Louisiana. The deep, deep South. So deep the Confederates there keep right on fighting for weeks after the Civil War ends. Shreveport is where Jefferson Davis is running to when they catch his a.s.s. One of the last die-hard outposts of the Old South.

Back then, Shreveport is what we used to call a "bourgeois" town, meaning a hateful, racist place. Huddie Ledbetter, the great blues singer Lead Belly, hung out a lot in Shreveport.

Lead Belly has a song called "The Bourgeois Blues" that I always think about when I think about Shreveport. Yeah, Lead Belly's song is about Washington, D.C., but he could just as well be singing about Shreveport in the 1940s: "Them white folks ... they know how/To call a colored man a n.i.g.g.e.r just to see him bow."

Shreveport is also where the great soul singer Sam Cooke gets arrested in 1963 for making a public disturbance, trying to check into a whites-only Holiday Inn. Cooke pulls up in a $60,000 Maserati, with his band following in a Cadillac limo, and they won't let him in. Racists are such stone-cold imbeciles.

NEGRO B BAND L LEADER H HELD IN S SHREVEPORT, reads the New York Times New York Times headline the next day. The whole incident is Old South all the way. headline the next day. The whole incident is Old South all the way.

By 1963, I am long gone from Shreve-town, but fifteen years later I wind up playing Sam Cooke in the movie The Buddy Holly Story. The Buddy Holly Story. By then the story of Sam Cooke's run-in with a.s.shole crackers has taken on the status of legend, and Shreveport has earned its reputation as a racist place. By then the story of Sam Cooke's run-in with a.s.shole crackers has taken on the status of legend, and Shreveport has earned its reputation as a racist place.

I leave Louisiana when I am seven years old, but while I'm there I'm not thinking of racism or bourgeois towns or anything like that. I remember my time in Louisiana as though it is surrounded by a golden haze.

A golden haze of family.

A golden haze of Mama.

The key person in my life is my grandmother, my mother's mother, Aimay Ealy, whom everyone inside and outside the family calls Mama. She is the spitting image of the actress Esther Rolle and even embraces some of Esther's no-nonsense characteristics. It's like I am raised by Florida Evans from the TV show Good Times Good Times. Only I'm not Jimmie Walker.

Mama is the boldest of the bold. No one messes with Mama, and I am her favorite. It is her love during my childhood that shelters me, creates me, molds me into the man I am today. I could never endure the racism and prejudice in Hollywood if not for the strength and character she gives to me.

I am born in a house with a midwife. That's how everyone does it back then. Only women are in the room. The menfolk get kicked out. Everyone is screaming, "Good Lord, here comes Ealy's kid!"

That year, 1941, is the same year a scientist creates plutonium for the first time. Me and plutonium, born simultaneously, both with designs to blow up the world.

Starting at a very young age, too young for me even to remember, I am treated like a very special child. I'm not sure if it is because of my looks, my voice, or my personality, but I am shrouded in some kind of special gold haze, completely protected from racism and prejudice.

My memory of Mama in Shreveport is of an amazing, strong woman. She is really pet.i.te but carries herself as though she is ten feet tall. She is so tough, she sleeps with a hammer. Every night, she crawls into bed with a two-pound roofing hammer snugged up against her. Just in case.

Mama raises everyone's kids in town-her own kids, the neighborhood kids, and eventually her grandkids. LaVoya and George are sixteen still, practically babies themselves, so instead of standing by and watching babies raise a baby, Mama takes over. She cares for some white folks in Shreveport, too, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and minding their children.

I have to laugh when I go to downtown Shreveport with Mama. She catches some white kids misbehaving, she whoops their a.s.ses and makes them go home. They are scared to death of her. It tickles me. That is one of Mama's supreme lessons. Ain't n.o.body thinking they're better than us when Mama is in the picture.

Mama wakes up every morning pondering whose a.s.s she is going to whoop. Mama is always whooping a.s.s. My a.s.s, your a.s.s, the neighbor kid's a.s.s. That is her reputation.

"I'm pa.s.sing out lollipops and whoopin's," she says, "and I'm fresh out of lollipops."

Mama tells me a story from when she's young, and she runs away from home. She has a bandanna tied to a stick with a supply of food inside it.

"I only get as far at the cotton patch," Mama says. "Then I get scared and run back home."

And when she returns, her own mama gives Mama an a.s.s-whooping for running away from home.

Hearing that story makes me laugh the hardest I ever laugh as a kid. I make her tell it to me again and again. The idea of Mama, the ultimate a.s.s-whooper, getting a whoopin' herself, makes me laugh until my gut hurts.

I think this is what makes me a comic. The world going upside down and b.u.t.t backward plants the seed of all my comedy, still to this day. Mama giving an a.s.s-whoopin' ain't funny, because it's expected. Mama getting getting an a.s.s-whoopin', now that's hilarious. I learn early on that flipping the world b.u.t.t backward and saying the unexpected in the punch line is funny. an a.s.s-whoopin', now that's hilarious. I learn early on that flipping the world b.u.t.t backward and saying the unexpected in the punch line is funny.

Mama's husband is Preston Ealy, a Jamaican with Caddo and European blood in him. I call him Daddy. He looks like Jane Fonda's daddy, Henry. Daddy Preston is a hunter. He goes out after small game nearly every day, bringing back food for the family stew pot.

Daddy: Preston Ealy, my grandfather and a great outdoorsman Later on in my life, when Richard Pryor is going crazy shooting up his own house, I am able to go up there and deal with him and all his guns because of my experiences as a child hunting with Daddy Preston. He gives me my good grounding in weaponry. It comes in handy.

My Shreveport life is all Mama and Daddy and uncles and aunts and cousins. And the Church. Daddy Preston's brother, my uncle Shank, is a minister. His other brother, Uncle Tip, is a deacon and an outrageous drunk.

Mama's best friend in Shreveport is this witch lady, Miss Amerae. She is Creole and looks Indian. She makes her own potions and poultices. Miss Amerae practices voodoo and can predict the future.

Miss Amerae is like the boogie-woman of my childhood. She scares the pants off me. She chews tobacco and spits it out in big spouts of brown phlegm. She speaks in broken French.

"I can make a snake kiss a chicken and a cat kiss a dog!" she says. She tells us her five husbands all get sick and die after eating mushrooms. Her sixth husband won't eat mushrooms, so he conveniently "falls" off a cliff.

Miss Amerae has no children, but she does have a pet goat named Willie. I wake up with nightmares when I'm five years old, thinking about Willie's Satan eyes. Whenever Mama sends me over to her house to borrow baking soda or snuff or pig's feet or whatever, I face off with Willie. He looks at me like he's going to take my soul.

I slip past Willie, go inside, and politely say, "Hi, Miss Amerae." I never look at her. I stare at the floor. Miss Amerae gives me what Mama wants. I say, "Bye, Miss Amerae." I don't want to make that woman mad at me.

When we misbehave, Mama says she's going to get Miss Amerae to put a spell on us if we don't act right. Women around town go to Miss Amerae for abortions. I hear everyone talking about it. White folks, black folks, Indians, they all go to Miss Amerae to get fixed. She knows where all the bodies are buried. A few of them are buried in her own backyard.