Like all junkies, Gary is a baby; he lives in his mother’s basement, so he doesn’t pay rent. After he gets high, he likes to read his books: books on chemistry, religion, history. Book knowledge has made him feel funny ever since he was a kid, different from everyone else in his neighborhood, most of whom didn’t read and grew up on drugs, including his former wife, Fran, who had a junkie’s contempt for Gary from the very beginning and, also from the beginning, a distrust, a steady hatred for what he tried to give her before he started getting high: love, a bit of security, a home. Which is what Gary knew growing up, before drugs.
But Fran couldn’t deal. Sometimes, when they were married, she’d grab his cock roughly and sit on it. He would have preferred inserting it into her lovingly, but that journey of love always disgusted Fran, especially since she knew that Gary was always worried about whether or not he was hurting her. Sensing his worry, Fran shat on it, and
then she shat on his cock. Gary had a sap’s heart and didn’t know that the worst part of loving those who do not want to be loved is this: denying them the instant intimacy of fucking, leaving, and never seeing them again, so you live on in their imagination without the further burden of touch. Gary never realized that if only he’d thrown Fran onto a pile of empty crab shells from time to time, they’d still be together. Stunned by pain, she’d be too distracted to notice his love, which made her think of piles of sick. In the sick, there were chunks of options. That was the worst.
Gary let Fran have her own life. She had never had that before. Everyone she had ever known growing up—friends, family—lived a kind of predetermined existence: get up and drink and then scramble for the next drink; get up and snort or shoot, and then knock in the head of some old lady with just enough change in her purse so you can have the same day the next day, and the day after.
They got married in 1983, a few years after they graduated from high school. They were married—or rather, they lived together as Mr. and Mrs. McCullough—for eight years. Then Fran left. In the beginning, Gary gave Fran her own pocket change. After that, he gave her any number of other things: a nice house, a little boy, some nice outfits. In those years he worked security; he always had at least two jobs, plus he invested what he made. Gary thought he and Fran were living a love story.
Fran never thought so. By giving her everything he thought she should have and more, he opened up the world to her. She had the luxury of picking and choosing what she might like for herself. But what Gary didn’t know was that no one likes living with options. It
makes you feel motherless. Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do. To resist or accept the perfection in that is one way to get through life. That is the work of an actress: No, I will not hold the teacup that way as I walk across the stage. Or should I? Why tilt my head just so to catch that light in this movie scene? But perhaps, dear director, you are right. I am less equivocal than most actors, because I am less interested in the game of approval than most. I never say to the director: If I do X, will you love me? Because I know they won’t.
Directors used to hurt me. When I worked in front of the camera, I generally disagreed with any and all interpretations of my body, since their interpretations are just that—some white boy saying that the distribution of my weight on a given mark is wrong. When I was younger, I’d shift my weight from one leg to another, stick my left hip out, try not to be obtrusive, someone with flesh, even though I was being paid to be seen. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized my being colored had something to do with my being off the mark; that is, the colored body is a kind of joke, like the kind Richard would tell about black pussy taking a walk in America. He’d say: Say there, labia too plump, clit too long, people drowning in pussy juice, better wrap that shit up and look for Jesus before I throw up. Richard would have said that in any number of his voices—it’s the only way he could make a character, through his voices. Most of the voices he became famous for were just imitations of the people we knew while we were growing up; they weren’t acting. I guess he used his body some, used it to show how ridiculous coloredness looks in the context of America; sometimes he could look like a coat hanger hanging on an empty clothesline blowing around in someone’s front yard and you could see
white people looking at the hanger from their living room window all scared and mesmerized. Or sometimes he could look like a hamburger on a griddle with bean sprouts and hairy tendrils sticking out of its burnt surface, assaulting Americans with fat and weirdness—their worst fears. In any case, what Richard was trying to show based on my telling him stories about the unequal distribution of my weight on the set was that by now it doesn’t matter what coloredness looks like, or how it presents itself; it stopped belonging to its body a long time ago, after it was co-opted by Jesus, drugs, biographers, audiences who deluge you with their dreams and expectations—which are, in turn, defined by politics, weather, whatever—and whatever directors have to say about it.
To compensate, the colored spirit became bigger, as if that would protect us. We empathize with all bodies, not having one ourselves. We empathize with all audiences, always being one ourselves. That can be the making of an actress—accepting that one is everyone and no one. I’ve learned from a brother that, in the end, if you’re colored, your fame makes not the slightest difference in terms of how you are seen or not seen by the world, let alone yourself.
A friend who edits books told me this story: Once, the music impresario Quincy Jones was running around pitching his life story to a bunch of publishers. His agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, was in tow. So Quincy is pitching his life story to a roomful of editors, and Swifty interrupts and says, “Why don’t you tell that other story about your life, Sidney?” Meaning Poitier. Nothing’s changed much, certainly
when it comes to the Negro in Hollywood. If you’re colored, you have to handle things for yourself.
That’s what I did. I became myself when I began to tell directors that I couldn’t agree with what was being made of me, since I knew they didn’t know what to make of me. So let’s start somewhere else, I’d suggest to these directors, like with the text, a little improvisation, some sense-memory exercises about a brother. As a result of my candor, I worked less in front of the camera, even less onstage, but when I did, I felt my pores open up when I missed my mark. I was alive to myself. Resisting the direction I needed, I became the character I needed to be—for myself.
Maybe it’s better as a joke, though: the body dragging itself through experiences directed by a reality not your own. If Richard’s life shows you anything, it’s how white people can make you crazy by saying what you are: too fat, too lazy, too loving, too dangerous, too close, too political, too silent, too druggy, too talkative, too generous, too loud, too drunk, too strong, too sensitive, too cruel. That’s what Richard’s success is based on, a little bit if not a great deal: recounting what the body has seen and felt when certain people can’t see or feel you at all.
The trouble with Richard, though, is that he became rich and powerful doing what he did, which contradicts the beauty he found in his nothingness. If you become well-known because of an act of invisibility, you’re fucked, because your fame makes you part of the quotidian. You can’t really make theater out of these contradictions unless you’re an actor, which Richard never was. An actor can sort all of that out and make it clear to an audience just where the confusion begins and ends. Richard just lived in it—all colored and crazy. Add to
that earning a lot of money for being yourself, which makes no sense to the colored soul at all—money as a reward for being nothing?—and you end up a nasty joke, a jogging matchstick. You know how it goes: What does this lit matchstick look like, standing upright and then moving across the counter? Richard Pryor jogging.
In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans—to be told what to do. When we were little, Richard looked to me for that—I always thought that was because I was his older sister. But that’s not it, not entirely. You can see it in children and their need to be disciplined. Children stamp on flowers to show the blooms who’s stronger, and then look to their parents for their punishment. It’s the limits we impose on children that help them define who they are.
Sometimes you can find direction in a marriage. At least, that’s what Fran was hoping for. In order to become herself, or rather, be herself, Fran wanted to be told what to do so she could hate it. She was like that lyric in the song: “You know I do it better when I’m being opposed.” She was my kind of actress.
For Fran, a day was not a day unless there was a little killing in it, some rip-offs of the jack-offs. In the last years of her brief marriage to Gary—1989 to 1991—she worked as an operator for the phone company, but she partied more than she showed up for work. Mostly
she liked to stay at home, snorting whatever and spitting invectives at her kid, whom she would sometimes forget to feed.
Sitting in the split-level house Gary had bought for her a few years into their marriage (she had covered nearly all the floors in blue shag carpeting), she wanted something to happen—a firm hand across her face, say. Something more directly cruel than the bullshit Gary gave her, something to make their life together seem more real, beat-up, tangible. Gary did hit her once or twice when she filled the house with drug trash, but what was that to her when she knew his heart wasn’t in it? He’d never go out into the world and do a little killing himself. And what kind of husband was that? She would have licked his stank fingers if there were little murders on the tips of them.
The truth of the matter is, Gary was fixed in his dual roles, as a success and as an underdog. He worked hard and did well not only because he wanted to take care of his wife and mother, but because he wanted to wrest from those women all the love they had stored up—the love that he perceived the world didn’t want. It never occurred to him that some colored women can be foul, too, being human.
Think back to Richard and our Mama. Not our mother, who barely raised us, but our grandmother, who did. She was as ugly as red mud and as tall as a pile of buffalo dung. Richard attached love to that pile; he kept throwing himself onto it, never mind the filth. Gary was like that with any colored person who came his way, especially women, even though the people who knew him made him feel embarrassed by what his love could yield: not love in return, but competition. Generally speaking, people felt morally diminished by his concern—his goodness—and so, fearing that they could not better
it, or even live up to it, were compelled to behave as badly as possible in his presence, borrowing money they could never repay, going after girls Gary found attractive, telling him lies, asking for help they didn’t need, telling him he was an ass loaded with books, trashing his secrets. We were a quartet, Gary and Fran and Richard and I.
When Gary got his job at the plant in Baltimore, word spread that he wasn’t really black. What black man in his right mind would want to be an overseer at a shitty company in a small town? He reminded his coworkers of the old days in the fields. They said he was just like a house nigger, a spy always asking after his coworkers’ wives and children with trouble in mind. He was always lending the new guys money until the company cut their first check, or going to the hospital to visit other guys who got laid up on the job, bending down to smell the flowers he’d sent them on his own dime. What kind of human was that?
The problem with seeing all colored people as a tribe that he, Gary, some ghetto Jesus of infinite heart and thorns, wanted to bundle up, throw on the back of a mule, and take to the promised land with its water sprinklers, shag carpeting, and aboveground pools, was that his love would never make any of them different. Fran was the only one to join him in his promised land, and she hated it there. By being outrageous and foul and dressing her foulness up with perfume and wit, she made him differentiate between herself and the other colored people he wanted to love and save. She was an artist. She could stand outside of her sadness and comment on it with contempt. Hatred was
her art. Gary had never known colored people like Fran when he was growing up; at least he didn’t want to remember that he had. He kept coming back to his dream of saving her in the way one always comes back to one’s desire, which is always riddled by absurdity.
From the first, Gary had been thought absurd, especially by his daddy, who learned to distrust his son when it became clear he had a heart; that turned Mr. McCullough’s stomach. But since his father liked the taste of his own bile—a daddy taste, or rather, the acid of son-hate that defines Daddy as a smell—Gary thought he was giving his father what he wanted just by existing so he could have someone to hate.
As a boy, Gary thought he could save his mother, who worked so hard for him, by making money, helping her around the house, being different than a daddy. As the youngest McCullough in spirit if not age (he had two younger siblings), Gary would jump out of bed first, his heart beating fast and his mouth wet with the desire to do good. Daddy always felt little Gary was trying to show him up by making the beds, sweeping up, taking the sour laundry to the wash, but he wasn’t; he was just working toward a certain repetition he wanted for the rest of his life: his mother having a look at how he had tidied up (even dusting her alabaster Jesus, and her bust of John F. Kennedy), taking him in her arms, pressing his head into her warm bosom, and then saying those two words of love: “Oh, my!”