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

making it his career, he spent the majority of his two-year stint in the stockade for stabbing a fellow soldier. Prior to his incarceration, he had a love affair with a married woman, a poignant encounter that stayed with him for the rest of his life—so much so that he ruminated on the relationship in the closing pages of his autobiography.
    And, as he told Felton in that same Rolling Stone interview, the army was where he learned to eat pussy. “I gave some head for the first time in my life when I was in Germany. That was an experience. I’ll never forget how it felt on my head, her pussy . . . her hairs and all . . . I knew I would be doing it again.“
    If it seems improbable that a man of Richard’s upbringing would be a cunnilingual virgin at the age of eighteen, consider the African American male’s well-documented aversion to going down on a woman. As he described it on That Nigger’s Crazy: “My family only fucked in one position—up and down. My uncle 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.” And this from . . . Is It Something I Said? : “Niggers will not admit to giving up no head. ( in character ) ‘Uh-uh. Noooo. Not the kid! Uh-uh. Nah, I ain’t no termite.’ Be lying their ass off. And black women like head, but they won’t kiss you afterwards.”
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    Richard got his first taste of success outside of Miss Whittaker’s theater group by performing in amateur shows on the base , developing a routine on army life in which he assumed the role of an incomprehensible drill sergeant, which he included on his first Warner Bros. LP, Richard Pryor. But then came the first of what would be a career-spanning string of self-inflicted derailments. During a screening of the Douglas Sirk movie Imitation of Life, a melodramatic tear-jerker about a struggling black woman whose light-skinned daughter rejects her in order to pass for white , a white soldier in Richard’s unit began laughing a little too loudly at inappropriate times.
    As Richard told it, another black soldier started the fight but proved to be “a dumb motherfucker in terms of fighting. The white boy seriously hurt my guy’s ass.” Richard pulled a switchblade and waited for the right moment. “I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times. He didn’t stop, though. . . . As soon as I realized he wasn’t going down, I ran in the opposite direction, tossing the knife into the bushes.”
    Richard was fingered for the assault by the victim himself who marched into the barracks later that night, still wearing his shredded and blood-soaked T-shirt, accompanied by an MP. Richard spent the remainder of his stint in an army prison, receiving an early discharge courtesy of a base commander on the verge of retirement who couldn’t be bothered with some “silly enlisted man fucking up regulations.”
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    His envisioned military career cut short and again at loose ends, Richard got a job singing and doing impersonations at Harold’s Club, a black-and-tan joint (patronized by whites and blacks alike) on Washington Street back in Peoria. Richard claimed he’d had to lie his way onstage at Harold’s Club by telling owner Harold Parker he could sing and play piano. His command of the keyboard may have been limited to few simple chords, but his soon-to-be sister-in-law says he had a beautiful voice.
    Kelly Jay & the Jamies, a Ronnie Hawkins–inspired rockabilly band out of Toronto—an earlier incarnation, the Consuls, had featured future Hawks (and later Band) guitarist Robbie Robertson— frequently played Harold’s Club in the early 1960s . Drummer Peter De Remigis remembers Richard as a mellow, Brook Benton–styled singer who emceed the shows and sometimes told jokes.
    Another Canadian band, Freddie Tieken and the Rockers (featuring Little Richard’s sometime