PRYOR LOVE

The life and times of America's comic prophet of race.

- HILTON ALS

SKIN FLICK

Winter, 1973. Late afternoon: the entr’acte between dusk and darkness, when the people who conduct their business in the street—numbers runners in gray chesterfields, out-of-work barmaids playing the dozens, adolescents cultivating their cigarette jones and lust, small-time hustlers selling “authentic” gold wristwatches that are platinum bright—look for a place to roost and to drink in the day’s sin. Young black guy, looks like the comedian Richard Pryor, walks into one of his hangouts, Opal’s Silver Spoon Café. A greasy dive with an R. & B. jukebox, it could be in Detroit or in New York, could be anywhere. Opal’s has a proprietor—Opal, a young and wise black woman, who looks like the comedian Lily Tomlin—and a little bell over the door that goes tink-a-link, announcing all the handouts and gimmes who come to sit at Opal’s counter and talk about how needy their respective asses are.

Black guy sits at the counter, and Opal offers him some potato soup—“something nourishing,” she says. Black guy has moist, on-the-verge-of-lying-or-crying eyes and a raggedy Afro. He wears a green fatigue jacket, the kind of jacket brothers brought home from ’Nam, which guys like this guy continue to wear long after they’ve returned home, too shell-shocked or stoned to care much about their haberdashery. Juke—that’s the black guy’s name—is Opal’s baby, flopping about in all them narcotics he’s trying to get off of by taking that methadone, which Juke and Opal pronounce “methadon”—the way two old-timey Southerners would, the way Juke and Opal’s elders might have, if they knew what that shit was, or was for.