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later, his father, out of the blue, began singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Richard was mortified. Did his father know, he wondered. And if he did, why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t he cut off Hoss’s dick? Did he think this was funny?
    Richard never asked his father if he knew or why he sang that song. He never mentioned Hoss to anyone until he confessed it in his memoir fifty years later. “Had me a ghost rattling in the attic. It didn’t matter that I lived in a big house behind a gate in Los Angeles, some half a country from the bricks and bars of the old neighborhood. My ass was haunted by the image of Hoss’s dick.” When he returned to Peoria to re-create scenes from his childhood on location for his semiautobiographical movie Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, someone told him that Hoss still lived in town and wanted to see him. “Even though I was a famous and successful comedian, surrounded by big, menacing bodyguards who would’ve killed at the snap of my fingers, I was seized by that old sense of fear of Hoss telling me to suck his dick.” One day during the shoot, Richard came out of his trailer to greet his fans and there was Hoss with his young son, waiting in line for an autograph.
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    Other scenes from young Richard’s early life include:
    Finding a dead baby in a shoebox.
    Seeing his father shoot a client who had cussed out his grandmother. Although Buck emptied the entire magazine of his pistol, not only did the man not die, the multiple gunshot wounds so infuriated him that he dragged himself across the floor and slashed Buck’s leg, leaving him with a lifelong limp.
    Standing on a chair outside a bedroom door and looking in over the transom to see his mother servicing a client.
    Trying to help a man who’d been knifed in the stomach as he stumbled down the street with his guts hanging out. Richard begged the man to lie down and wait for the ambulance, but the man was determined to make it to the liquor store and get himself a half pint.
    Seeing his father go running down their residential street clutching his blood-soaked boxer shorts and screaming for his mother. Gertrude, Richard learned, had ripped Buck’s nutsack off with her fingernails after he had beaten her.
    Yet, when asked, Richard said the most traumatic experience of his early life came when he ventured behind a movie screen at the end of a Little Beaver western and discovered the show had been a trick, an illusion of light and shadow. “I thought Little Beaver would be there, you know, and I wanted to talk to him.”
    During his youth, Richard took refuge in the movies, idolizing Tarzan, John Wayne, Jerry Lewis, and especially matinee cowboy Lash LaRue. Exceptionally skilled at using a bullwhip, Lash dressed all in black and enforced the law with the cool aplomb of a film noir gangster. Richard would salvage the theater’s discarded movie posters and hang them up on his bedroom wall, pasting his own name over that of the leading man’s.
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    After his parents divorced, Richard went to live with his grandmother at 313 North Washington, just two doors down from his father’s home at 317. In between the two houses, at 315, was China Bee’s, the most prosperous whorehouse in town.
    From the time Richard moved in with her at the age of ten, he always called his grandmother “Mama.” To everyone else, by that time, she was Grandma Marie. “Grandma Marie was everybody’s anchor,” says Richard’s onetime sister-in-law, Angie Gordon. “She was the head of it all. Everybody was crazy about her. She looked and talked like Madea. When Tyler Perry came out with Madea, I’m like, ‘God, did he meet Grandma Marie?’ They were just alike.”
    Richard’s religious upbringing, to the extent that he had one, was Catholic. Although Grandmother Marie attended Peoria’s Morning Star Baptist Church, she had been raised in the Creole Catholic tradition and used her influence to enroll