I’m driving through a snowstorm on an empty gas tank and my girl friend’s mother wants Scotch. My girl friend’s brothers and sisters are hollering for food. And I’m figuring like mad. Got five dollars. It’s supposed to be dollar night at the drive-in movie, which leaves me four dollars to grandstand with. Plenty for hot dogs. But a bottle of Scotch can wipe me out. It’s their car, and if they want a tankful of gas out of me, that’ll wipe me out, too. But if I take a chance, and we run dry and I have to call a cab . . .
“We better stop and get some gas, Dick,” says Maryann’s mother.
“You’re so right, I’m looking for a station now,” I say, passing one on each side of the road.
Every traffic light winks at me as if to say, “If you’re lucky, you’ll get arrested.” I jump every light, but nothing happens. Never find a cop when you want one.
“Gas station, there’s a gas station,” yells one of the four little kids in the back.
I pull in alongside the pump and lean out. “Fill her up, baby.”
Then I jump out of the car and run to the back. “Just one dollar’s worth, please.”
Through the window I can see Maryann’s mother talking away at her daughter in the front of the car. The four little kids are rubbing their hungry bellies in the back seat. They are all very impressed to be going out with such a big entertainer. Dick Gregory, master of ceremonies and star comic of the Esquire Show Lounge of Chicago, buys his suits at Lytton’s and has his own apartment.
I get back into the car looking very put out.
“What’s wrong, Dick?”
“Hell, I didn’t like that man’s attitude. I never spend my money with a man whose attitude I don’t like.”
“You’re so right,” says the mother. “Why I was telling Maryann only yesterday that . . .”
Now if I can get Maryann off alone and explain the situation to her I’m all right. I don’t have to be phony with her. Of course, it would never dawn on me to embarrass the girl in front of her folks. Besides, people just don’t like to know that such a big entertainer makes thirty dollars a week, buys his clothes on the credit of a landlady who works nights at a drugstore, and rents a basement room.
“Sure is cold,” says the mother.
“We’re almost there, get us some good hot coffee.”
“Some Scotch would warm us much faster, Dick.”
“Liquor store, there’s a liquor store,” yells a kid.
Like God strung it down from heaven, right across the highway, is this big sign: LAST LIQUOR STORE BEFORE DRIVE-IN. Even I can’t miss it, and I’m trying.
I pull over and get out. I’ve never bought whiskey before. I walk right up to the guy behind the counter.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see the sign: SPECIAL ON SCOTCH—$1.25 A PINT. I’m saved. Maryann and I won’t drink. Her mother can have the whole pint. I run back to the car.
“Didn’t they have any cups, Dick?” asks Maryann’s mother.
Things are very tight now. Got two dollars and fifty cents, and something tells me I read the newspaper wrong, just my luck it’s not dollar night after all. By the time we pull up to the box office I’m in a cold sweat despite the freezing weather. I’m sure it’s not dollar night.
“That will be one dollar, mister.”
“What the hell you mean, the paper said one dollar.”
“That’s just what I said, mister, one dollar.”
Now I’m scared again. The only other time I’d been to a drive-in movie was two years ago, in college. How did the driver do it? Where do you park? Where do you get the speaker and the heater?
“We’re holding up traffic, Dick.”
It’s no trouble at all, and I’m so thankful I give the kids the rest of the money to buy hot dogs and soda. My stomach is turning over, and my hands are still shaking, and thank God everybody’s quiet now, watching the movie, and I can close my eyes and figure out how I got here in the first place.
It had been a short trip, that train ride from Carbondale to Chicago, but some of the days that followed were very long. Presley had left his roominghouse, with no forwarding address, but his landlady let me stay there for a few days, until I got a Christmas job at the Post Office and a hotel room. I kept flipping the letters to Mississippi in the foreign slot, but I held the job until January. I hadn’t made any friends in Chicago and I couldn’t get another job. I was on my way back to the train station, with no destination in mind, when I ran into a guy I had run track with back in high school. I remember standing on a windy corner, getting colder and colder, just talking to keep from going to that station. I told the guy about college, about the Army, about Lieutenant Jim Ellis. . . .
“You mean Tank Ellis, the football player?” said the guy. “Man, I was over his house last night on a party.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Fifty-one oh three Wabash.”
I started running.
When Jim Ellis’ door opened, things began to open up for me in Chicago. He treated me like a long-lost brother and he got me a job with him out at Ford Aircraft. After work, we’d go to the park together and run to get him in condition for the pro football tryouts in the spring. I ran and I ran and it felt good as that old machine started to get into shape. I was beating Jim every day. He wasn’t a track man, but it’s a nice feeling to beat an All-American. Jim had a fast, hip crowd that threw a lot of parties, and I was swinging with people that liked me and my jokes. When Jim left for summer camp, I started running with the University of Chicago track team and made more friends, like Herbert Jubert and Ira Murchison. Murch was the fastest 100-yard-dash man in the world and had records to prove it. I started seeing Presley, who was a door-to-door salesman, and Ron, my youngest brother, who was a track star at the University of Notre Dame. And in September I moved in with Ozelle and William Underwood, a young couple who had a basement room to rent. They treated me like a member of the family. I lost the Ford job in October, but it wasn’t so bad. Whenever I was depressed, I could put on that track suit and run. After a while, I fell into the habit I had in high school—running early in the morning and at night when people were going and coming from work. I wanted to be seen.
I had a good Christmas with the Underwoods that year, and I was able to call St. Louis and tell Dolores and Garland and Pauline I was doing all right, and take the train to visit Ron in South Bend. But then January came and I was still out of work, and there was something about unemployment compensation that began to remind me of relief: The way they made you stand in line, the way they narrowed their eyes when they asked questions. I was getting more and more depressed, and there seemed to be less and less time to run it out of my system. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t getting anywhere. And then, on a Saturday night in late January, I hooked up with the monster again. In a night club.
Ozelle and William were having some people over that night and I slipped out early. I didn’t feel social. I caught a double-feature, and just started walking, up streets I didn’t remember, into a South Side neighborhood I had never seen before. There was a little neighborhood night club on a corner, jukebox and entertainment on the weekends. The place was packed with Saturday-night faces, happy faces. I walked in. The master of ceremonies was the comic, and his material was blue and old, but after a while I was laughing too, and I had forgotten the reason I was out that night. After the show, I went backstage and told the man how much I had enjoyed his routine. We started talking, and I told him I was a comedian, too. I gave him my last five dollars, and he let me follow his act on the next show.
“Got a man here that’s supposed to be funny,” he said to the crowd. “Let’s bring him on and find out.”
I went out there scared, and I wasn’t funny at first. I started talking and creating and I don’t remember what I said, but after a while I was getting respectful laughs. The M.C. came out and took the microphone back. “You’re a real funny man,” he said. “You’ll go far in show business.”
I wasn’t sure then if he was being sarcastic or not, but I figured I had done pretty well getting even weak laughs on clean material after following his blue jokes.
The next Saturday night I went to another Negro night club, the Esquire Show Lounge. I slipped Flash Evans, the M.C., five dollars, and this time I got a nice introduction and I followed the band’s first set. I gave a masterpiece of a show that night. I just felt right and cool, and the crowd had come to laugh.
I never let them stop laughing, hit them hard and fast with jokes on processed hair and outer space and marijuana and integration and the numbers racket and long white Cadillacs and The Man downtown, and my dumb cousin and my mother-in-law, and the world situation. By the time I stopped my handkerchief was soaked and I had run out of cigarettes and I felt like I had passed them all, snatched them off like weeds, and broken the tape. When I came offstage the owner of the Esquire took me in a corner. The cheap son-of-a-bitch let me buy myself a drink, and asked me if I’d like to start as M.C. in two weeks. Friday Saturday, and Sunday. Ten dollars a night. I sat there and I looked at that man and I couldn’t believe him. He said it again. I didn’t know how I was going to wait until my opening night.
It came, finally, and I wasn’t funny at all. It’s one thing to be funny when you’re a guest on another man’s stage, something else again when it’s your stage and you have to be funny night after night. My training began, now, but it was beautiful because the people in the Esquire were like a new family, the customers in the Esquire were like the student body when I was president of the class, and the women looked up to me as the big entertainer. For a girl like Maryann, I was the biggest entertainer she knew.
“Dick, wake up now, the movie’s over.”
“Wasn’t sleeping, baby.” I’m not about to tell her her I was starring in a little movie of my own.
I start the car and slip it into gear and the tires just whine. We don’t move. First, second, reverse, first again. We’re stuck in the snow. I get out of the car and walk around it. The back tires have spun themselves deep into the ice and slush. A lot of other cars at the drive-in are stuck, too. Seven white boys, mean-looking cats in jeans and boots and black leather jackets with a million zippers, are pushing the cars out, I watch them. They swagger up to a car whose tires are spinning and one of them says, “Okay, mister, you’re next. Five bucks.” They get their five, and they all get around the car and push it out toward the gate. Then they turn to another car. If the first car gets stuck again before it gets out on the highway, the seven cats will push it again—for another five. I don’t even have a dime. I get back into the car.
“We’re hungry,” say the little kids in the back. I have to get them home quick. The tires whine some more.
“Okay, mister, you’re next. Five bucks.”
“Thanks anyway,” I say, “I think I can get it out myself.”
The windshield is steamed up, and the tires spin and whine some more.
“It’s getting awfully cold, Dick,” says Maryann’s mother. “Why don’t you let those boys push us out?”
“I regard this as a personal challenge, man over the forces of nature,” I tell her.
“We hungry,” say the kids.
“Man must triumph over nature. I must get this car out myself or perish in the attempt,” I say.
“But it’s only snow,” says Maryann’s mother.
“Yeah, but it’s white snow,” I say. A very good line, but no one laughs. The tires keep spinning.
“Well, you’re ruining the tires,” says Maryann’s mother, angry now.
Then I get out of the car, and I walk over to the seven white cats with all their zippers. I might as well be a fool out here than in that car. I just look at them, and I say: “How in the world can you start out right and end up wrong? I’m not trying to steal anything and I’m not trying to do anything shady, but this is what happened. . . .”
And they stand there quietly in the snow, around me in a circle, and people are shouting and honking their horns and waving money. I explain the whole thing to them, I tell them the whole story about my girl’s car and her mother and the gasoline and the Scotch and the hot dogs and dollar day, and they look at each other and nod their heads and the biggest of those cats says: “Get back in your car, mister, and roll down your windows so we can get a grip.”
And I am almost crying as they are pushing, pushing for a friend, a hundred yards, then another hundred yards, out of the spin holes and past the box office and out the gate and they wave as I drive onto the highway and I lean out and yell: “Thanks, baby,” like I just laid fifty dollars apiece on them. And now I’m driving down the highway and I look down on my lap and there’s a five-dollar bill there that one of those beautiful cats slipped through the open window while he was pushing the car.
“We better get some gas,” I say to Maryann’s mother. “How much you want?”
“Just enough to get home on.”
I’m smiling and laughing and crying and telling jokes as I pull alongside that beautiful pump, and when the attendant runs out I just turn my head and say: “Fill ’er up, baby, all the way up, and don’t forget to check the oil.”