Everybody listened to what happened. My grandmother. My dad. Viola. My aunts and uncles. They then taught me the lesson you learn after leaving school.
“It’s okay,” my dad said. “But I’ll tell you this. If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.”
Dinner that night was my last free meal. The next day I began looking for a job.
As a fourteen-year-old high school dropout, I had low expectations. I begged local shop owners, and eventually I got a job cleaning a strip club. Sweeping and mopping. My problem was that I liked the show more than I did the work. The club’s owner complained to Uncle Dickie, who confronted me.
“He says the girls lie down on the stage and get all dirty,” Dickie explained to me. “What’s the matter, boy?”
“I can do the sweeping,” I said. “But I can’t do no mopping. My arms too skinny.”
Next, I shined shoes at the Pierre Marquette Hotel. I enjoyed that. I thought I was Numero Uno. I made the shine cloth crack like a bullwhip. Told jokes. The money was easy and the conversation good.
But I fell in with some bad guys who persuaded me there was an easier way to make money. By stealing it. One afternoon, we targeted a small grocery store in the neighborhood. As one guy went in and distracted the owner, another guy and I opened the cash register and grabbed the coins from the box. Nothing fancy. Plain old till tapping. Except I dropped the coins. My friends ran. The owner calmly walked toward me, shaking his head in disgust.
“Boy, what the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
I froze and saw my future.
“We’ve got your son down here at headquarters. What about it?”
“Fuck him.”
I’d be praying something would happen to him on the way down to the station. But he always showed up.
“I’m going to get you out, nigger. But then I’m gonna kick your ass.”
My hands went straight up. There was nothing in them. I did one of those looks that said, “Who? Me?”
“Yes, nigger. I’m talking to you. Put that money back.”
I put the coins back real nice, as if that would make it like nothing ever happened.
“I’m gonna tell your daddy,” he threatened.
My so-called friends stood outside, looking through the window and laughing.
“And don’t come back here no more,” the owner added.
That hurt. Because that was my local store. I went there all the time.
About then Dickie was picked up for dope and went to jail. I remember when the cops got him: he was holding a big box of counterfeit money. Right before they cuffed him, he set it on top of a garbage can. Real calm. They never bothered to check it.
He went to prison in Michigan. He did about three years and came out a changed man.
He said to me, “Richard, I can only tell you one thing about prison.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t ever go.”
After racking balls at Pop’s Pool Hall and driving a truck for my dad’s carting business, I finally got my first serious job at one of the local packing companies. I shook and folded hides and loaded them on the trains that took them to Chicago, where they were turned into shoes, coats, bags, and shit. It was nasty work. All the shit that got on me during the day, the rock salt, water and whatnot, froze in the cold. By quitting time, my pants were as stiff as a board.
But the job was mine. I made monies. I had the jingle-jangle of possibilities in my pocket.
One day I heard about a better-paying position cutting beef. I went upstairs to where they did that shit to investigate. However, as soon as I saw guys hitting the fucking bulls in the head with sledgehammers, I knew I couldn’t handle it. Neither could I handle dealing with those bulls while they were alive. As I stood there, one of them escaped.
Guess he had other ideas.
I saw him look at that sledgehammer and say, “What? Excuse me, what’s going on?”
Suddenly, he charged out of his stall, ran through the shop, upstairs and downstairs, snorting and kicking and butting everything in his path. Then he got outside. The police finally had to shoot this motherfucker because he was running down the street with one thing on his mind: What motherfucker ordered steak?
I spent about half my pay at Yakov’s Liquor Store, where I ate pickled pig’s feet, drank ice-cold beer, and bullshitted about the future. I didn’t expect to stay employed at the packing company forever. Eventually, I figured on buying a pair of steel-toed shoes and punching a clock at the Caterpillar tractor company. Work, pension, die. In between, I’d get fucked up and watch TV and chase pussy.
Getting some pussy beats anything. I ain’t lying. Coming is a lot of fun. I never got no pussy when I was a legal teenager. You had to sing to get pussy. Be one of those niggers on the corner who sang. I couldn’t sing.
Besides, the girls weren’t giving no pussy in the fifties. It was very seldom you got any parts of pussy. You’d be tongue kissing and your dick got harder than the times in ’29. Nuts would go up into your stomach and you said, “Oh, baby, you gotta give me something now.”
“I’m not giving anything,” she said. “I’m on my period.”
“You’re on your period again? You gonna bleed to death, bitch.”
At seventeen, I started fucking regularly. One was an attractive little package.
She and I used to hide out in the garage of a house my family owned on Goodwin. It wasn’t the Playboy Mansion, but it was kind of our private place.
It was pure fun.
I used to wrestle with her for two hours. That’s when those rubber panties came out—those long rubber panties. And every time I’d get a grip, she’d move and I’d lose my grip and have to wrestle two more hours. And by the time I’d got them, I was too tired. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Then her father would catch us. There’d be a knock at the door. “What are you doing here, Mr. Pryor?”
“Oh, nothing. Just sitting here on the couch with my pants off.”
I fell in love with that girl. Fell hard.
But then I loved falling in love.
Looking back, that turned out to be my curse. Falling in love, you know. It was never enough.
In late 1956, she took all the fun out of what we had going. She said she was pregnant.
For a moment, I thought the baby was mine. But she had slept with lots of people, including my dad. Nine months later she gave birth to a little girl. My Aunt Maxine reassured me that the baby wasn’t mine.
This was revelatory, a weight off my back.
I was like, “Oh, somebody else claimed it?”
She said, “Yeah. I was out in the chicken shack and someone else said it was his baby.”
Well, that was all the excuse I needed. The little girl grew up with her mother and grandmother in Peoria. I saw her occasionally, and eventually we got to know each other. Not an ideal relationship. Just a fact of life.
In 1958, I volunteered for the Army. I ask myself why I did something like that, a chickenshit like me.
I was serving my country. It was either that or six months.
I wanted out of Peoria. I wanted to see something different. No place in particular. Just beyond, you know.
I took the train to Chicago, went to the induction office, and spent the day taking tests. I must’ve done okay, because right after, I was sworn in. They gave me a free round-trip train ticket that got me home and back to Chicago.
To me, that was exciting shit.
Basic training was at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. I received eight weeks of plumbing school.
Once again I was covered in shit.
I went to kill class. Turned me around. I thought the Army was like hunting, camping, a little fishing. But I learned to kill from a guy who killed in World War II, and then they couldn’t stop him. So they gave him a job.
“Can’t let him on the streets, so we’ll let him train these guys for World War III.”
Then my papers came in, and I was transferred to Idar-Oberstein in Germany. For an eighteen-year-old who’d never been farther than Springfield or Bloomington, it was exciting. Idar-Oberstein sounded like an exotic woman.
Then reality. I called my sergeant and told him I was on my way to the base.
“I’m so happy you’re coming,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Yeah,” he laughed, “I’ve been working with a nigger for the last three years.”
Uh-oh, I thought.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Well, I’m glad I’m here, too, sir. Yes, sir.”
I expected Germany to be a little freer, but the Frauleins were skinny rather than fat, and when I ventured to the section where all the bars were located, I found that out of like 150 bars only three let in blacks. Why should you have been surprised, Rich? Well, I was, because I thought all that shit was behind me.
Unfortunately, I met a woman whose boyfriend was a bartender in one of the white bars, and one night I went there. Her boyfriend, who usually called the MPs on me, wasn’t working that night, so I had a chance. But before I ordered my first beer, a fight broke out between two US soldiers, and before I knew it, I heard someone cry out, “Nigger!”
I glanced around. There was no one else of any color there but me. I ran upstairs, where the strippers changed clothes, begging the first girl I saw to help. She gave me a look of hate that I knew too well from back home.
“Get out of here,” she said in a heavily accented voice.
“You don’t understand. They’re fighting down there.”
“Get out of here. I call police.”
The MPs arrived at the same time I snuck outside and ran back to the barracks. I never forgot that stripper, though.
Of course, you never forget the cruel ones.
But there were other, kinder women, thank God.
My kind of women. The kind who liked to fuck. This one woman let me give her head, which was a revelation, something that changed my life, because until then, my family only fucked in one position—up and down.
My uncle had said, “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whatever you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.”
I couldn’t wait to kiss the pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else. Woman had to beat me off.
“It’s enough! It’s enough. Two days!”
Eventually, the Army turned me into a vicious killing machine. The transformation occurred in full one weekend night as our unit watched the movie Imitation of Life. This white soldier laughed at the wrong spots. Several of us finally took exception, including a big black soldier, who got into a slugfest with the white guy.
But my guy was a dumb motherfucker in terms of fighting. The white boy seriously hurt my guy’s ass.
A crowd gathered. People wanted blood. We’d spent months training for combat, but this turned into the biggest battle anyone had come close to, and I knew my guy was going down if something didn’t happen.
From within the crowd of soldiers, I reached into my pocket and drew out a switchblade. Pushed the button.
Flifft!
No one but me suspected anything. I waited for the right moment. Then I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times. He didn’t stop, though. You know? He kept throwing punches. As soon as I realized he wasn’t going down, I ran the opposite direction, tossing the knife into the bushes on my way to the barracks.
A while later, the white dude came in accompanied by an angry-looking MP. I peeked at the white guy’s back. His T-shirt was shredded from my stabbing and soaked with blood. I thought, Goddamn, I did that and he didn’t even stop. Didn’t even feel it. Why didn’t he feel it?
He stared at me like that bull from the packing plant where I’d worked. Then he tore off his shirt.
“See what you did to me, chickenshit?” he said.
“Wasn’t me.”
He said, “Yes, it was. You’re the one. See all these holes? You’re the asshole nigger who did this.”
“No, I didn’t do it.”
My denials meant shit. An MP threw my ass in jail. There wasn’t anything in that cell except for me, the cement floor, and a single, annoying lightbulb. I fell onto the cot and began to think seriously about getting the fuck out of jail and the Army.
The base commander agreed. He was on the verge of retirement, and the last thing he wanted to deal with was a silly enlisted man fucking up regulations.
I was lucky. Lucky I didn’t kill that white guy and luckier still that they didn’t kill me.
Because back then, the way things were, few people outside of Peoria would’ve missed one more dead black man.