As it happens, richard pryor and the reporter met only once: on the page. When, in the spring of 1998, the reporter began collecting information about the comedian for his article—which ran in a national magazine the following winter—by conducting various interviews, listening to Pryor’s old routines on audiotape or CD, scanning critical studies and biographies for details about the star’s personal life and business dealings, and so on, it gradually became clear to him that if the finished piece was to reflect anything of the numerous turns Richard Pryor’s mind had taken over the course of his life and career, the reporter’s writing would have to be as nonlinear as one of Pryor’s better monologues: a joke with no end, with a number of punch lines, and not a little political content.
But that piece was not to be. The reporter was lousy with responsibility. He reasoned that since he had pitched one assignment—to write a credible portrait of the by then almost entirely silent, reclusive artist—he could not hand in something else.
And yet, as the reporter gathered more and more facts about Richard Pryor, they seemed to add up to less and less on the page. For after many years of reporting what this or that maker of modern culture—such as it was—had done and how they had done it, the reporter felt he could no longer do this: arrange quotes in a manner meant to satisfy a magazine or newspaper’s idea of the truth, which he had always considered specious anyway. Nor did the reporter feel he could continue doing this: interviewing makers of modern culture—such as they were—as if he cared, or as if they made a difference to his way of thinking. At one point, the reporter had cared. Years passed, and then he did not. In between, the reporter lost sight of the kind of writing he wanted to accomplish when he first started out: fact that had the penumbra of fiction. But there was no home for such writing once the reporter started publishing in the early nineteen-nineties. Even the “alternative” newspapers and magazines he wrote for wanted fact upon fact, as if no one believed the world they lived in.
Several years before meeting Richard Pryor on the page, the reporter had tried—as an alternative to journalism—to write a novel. But he found the form as limiting as fact: there was no truth in it. It had always been that way: when the reporter read fiction, he wanted the novel under review to include the truth of the world. And when he read fact, he wished the writer had imbued it with something of the truth of their imagination. What the reporter did not know how to do: create an admixture of fact and fiction in an extended work that defied both genres. Then he began to think about Richard Pryor, who, in his work, had done nothing but.
The reporter knew of no greater modern practitioner or melder of journalistic ethos and the morality inherent in fiction than Richard Pryor. The comedian’s work and life were rife with such issues. “Tell me the truth so I can look at these lies,” one made-up Richard Pryor character said to another through the real Richard Pryor, once.
In monologue after monologue, using a variety of different-sounding voices, Richard Pryor portrayed characters that represented the truth of the world, or the truth of the world as his characters saw it. He was everything: a junkie talking to a straight black man who will not help him. A white woman talking to her black lover. His heart talking to himself. His own Daddy talking to a younger and no less sad and horny Richard Pryor. A German shepherd. He had also played a monkey, the monkey’s dick, and a white movie executive. Once he was even the entire continent of Africa. Maybe he could play a reporter.
Pryor appealed to the reporter as a subject for another, equally salient reason: his silence. By the spring of 1998, when the reporter started to research and write his piece, eventually called “A Pryor Love,” Richard Pryor’s speech was severely limited by MS; he could not be interviewed. If anyone wanted to write about him, they would have to make him up, to some extent.
At first, the reporter reveled in Richard Pryor’s silence. He loved the thought of not having to interview the artist and then check transcripts of what he actually said against what he might have intended. But the reporter would have to fill Richard Pryor’s silence with something. What that something was, he did not know. After the initial rush of imagining what Richard Pryor might say, the reporter froze: he was not free enough in his mind to record it. Journalism had rendered his perceptibility speechless. So he reverted back to the facts. About what Richard Pryor ate and when, the number of women he slapped or married, and so on.
As the reporter set about trying to build a narrative based on the facts available to him, Richard Pryor set about trying to destroy them. He demanded the reporter look beyond his already heavily documented life and incorporate something of his own imagination in the piece. Fair was fair. Hadn’t he—Richard Pryor—made a spectacle of himself in order to reveal certain truths about himself in the world?
The very idea frightened the reporter. Which is why Richard Pryor made the suggestion in the first place: to shock and inspire him. After all, Richard Pryor’s best work had grown out of, or was an expression of, fright: over the way women behaved, over the way white people behaved, over how cocaine made him behave.
Now he wanted to be afraid of the reporter. Or, rather, surprised by. Having lived in the reporter’s mind since the spring of 1998—Pryor now shared a room with him in lower Manhattan; not much was in it except old magazines, a computer, and a telephone. For years and years after they met, Richard Pryor and the reporter lived with no one else, so the comedian knew just how nasty his imagination was. Richard Pryor wondered why the reporter didn’t exploit his imagination along with the facts in order to say something new or, at any rate, hitherto unsaid about Richard Pryor? Maybe the reporter could write about what a sensitive louse Richard Pryor was, or how lousy America was with other Richard Pryors, guys who, failing to find a mic, found the needle. To that end, Richard Pryor—or, at least, the one who lived in the reporter’s mind—suggested this: that the reporter simply use his name—Richard Pryor—and make the rest of him up. Would that free the reporter to say what Richard Pryor knew he wanted to say? That colored men like Richard Pryor, like the reporter, were political by birth; that, for them, reading newspapers, let alone writing for them, was a strange enterprise since they were so often that very news’ targets? The truth is, Richard Pryor would not settle for being defined by facts alone. To do so would be to negate the spirit behind his entire body of work, wherein an existentially freaked guy named Richard Pryor always told lies to get at the truth.
