Nigger: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory

Author:Dick Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

II

The Esquire Show Lounge is a big, rectangular room attached to a neighborhood bar on the South Side of Chicago. The room has chrome luncheonette-type tables, and chairs with red plastic seats. The customers buy bottles at the bar and get glasses and paper buckets filled with ice and cherries at their tables. There are red lights around the room, faded murals on the walls, and entertainment on the weekend: an MC, a four-piece band, a shake dancer, some amateur talent now and then, and Guitar Red, an albino Negro who gets more out of an electric guitar than any man has a right to. He even plays with his feet. People come from all over Chicago to hear Guitar Red, and on Saturday nights there were lines around the block. But I was master of ceremonies and I introduced the acts and you had to get past me before you could see Guitar Red. I felt it was my show. And I felt like the Esquire Show Lounge was my home and my stadium.

All week long I would train for that Friday-night show that started my weekend. For the first time since high school, I got that thirsty taste again, waiting each week to go out and crush the world. Only now I didn’t have to beat anybody, I had to make people happy. Every day during the week I’d be working out for that three-day meet: buying comedy records, buying joke books, watching television, listening to people, going to the library and digging into musty old books of humor, and finding out where those comedy records got their material from. I walked downtown and spent money for books and magazines I couldn’t even afford, and along the way I’d hang out in the Walgreen’s at Sixty-third and Cottage Grove and on corners and anywhere people were listening to them talk, trying out thoughts and ideas and jokes on strangers. Ozelle and William would stay up half the night listening to new routines, and Ira Murchison and Herb Jubert and Jim Ellis would tell me what they liked and what they thought should go. I’d go to parties and just talk and create and clown and if something got a good response I’d mark it down in the back of my mind.

Morning, noon, and night, twenty-four hours a day, trying to develop a mind like I once developed a body, watching, listening, talking. Hours and hours of television, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Paar Show, every comedy show, even funny old movies, and then the news shows, the soap operas, the westerns, the series. What makes people laugh, what are people thinking about?

And then you watch the stars, how do they act, how do they dress? I went down to Lytton’s, a big department store in the Loop, and convinced them I was making a hundred dollars a week and had been working for four years. Ozelle and William helped me get clothes on credit. New shoes, new suits, new shirts.

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