Consider The Alternative
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 9, 2000; Page C01

"Come on up to my office," Dick Gregory says, then he climbs the steps
into
the lobby of the Capital Hilton.

He picks out a little cocktail table and lays down the two heavy bags
he's
toting. One is stuffed with his reading matter for the day--several
pounds
of newspapers from around the world--and the other is filled with his
daily
diet, dozens of bottles of juices and potions and herbs.
The veteran comedian/activist/nutrition theorist walks to the hotel
bar and
greets the barmaid with a cheery hello. She's got her back to him and
as
she turns around, she's saying, "The bar is closed." Then she
recognizes
him and smiles. "Oh, hello, Mr. Gregory, what would you like?"
Gregory, a man who doesn't drink alcohol, or even soda pop, and eats
almost
nothing, orders a bottle of spring water--no ice, please--then returns
to the table.
He's comfortable here. He has two homes--one in Plymouth, Mass., where
his
wife, Lillian, lives, and an apartment in Northwest Washington--but he
really lives
in hotels. He's traveling most of the time, to speaking gigs
or rallies or demonstrations, but when he's in Washington, you can
find him
in the Hilton lobby, reading, talking, getting ready to hit the road
again.
He sits down. He smiles. His hair and beard are gray now but he looks
good--thin but not gaunt, and full of pep. He's fresh from his daily
eight-mile walk through Rock Creek Park, which takes him about an hour
and
a half--not bad for a 67-year-old man who was diagnosed last year with
lymphoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer.
Gregory says the cancer doesn't scare him, but it was a wake-up call
for
his friends. They decided it was time to organize a gala tribute to
him.
It'll take place tonight at the Kennedy Center. Bill Cosby will be
there.
So will Stevie Wonder and Sinbad and Cicely Tyson and Isaac Hayes and
Ossie
Davis and Ruby Dee and a lot of Gregory's old friends from the civil
rights
movement. Plus his wife and their 10 kids and six grandchildren.
"I'm just thrilled," Gregory says. These days, he sees his old friends
mostly at funerals, which gets kind of gloomy. "But this is gonna be a
joyous occasion."
Still, he's a comedian--and he's Dick Gregory--so he can't resist
adding a
bit of dark humor. "The reason some people are coming is that they
think
I'm dying," he says, grinning. "They wouldn't buy tickets if they knew
I
was walking eight miles a day."

Active Activist

Right from the get-go, Dick Gregory moved fast.
He grew up in St. Louis during the Depression, son of a single mother
who
worked cleaning white folks' houses, and he ran so fast that he won a
track
scholarship to Southern Illinois University. His wit was quick, too,
and in
the late '50s, after a stint in the Army, he became a comedian,
getting
uneasy laughs by mocking racism:
"Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white
waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.'
I said,
'that's all right, I don't eat colored people--no way! Bring me a
fried chicken."
It was a new kind of black comedy. "He taught us how to laugh at the
enemy
and not at ourselves," says actor Ossie Davis.
Gregory was edgy and he was hot. By the early '60s, he was making
$5,000 a
night playing nightclubs. But the civil rights movement was blazing
across
the South and Gregory figured that was more important than comedy. So
he'd
cancel gigs to go march in Mississippi and Alabama and he seemed to
spend
more time in jail cells than in nightclubs.
The movement changed his life. He stopped smoking and drinking. He
stopped
eating meat. He fasted for months to protest the Vietnam War.
In 1968, he ran as a write-in candidate for president and got in
trouble
with the U.S. Treasury Department for issuing a campaign leaflet in
the
size and shape of a dollar bill, with his own face replacing George
Washington's. The feds said it was illegal to put out facsimiles of
U.S.
currency. Gregory replied, quite convincingly, that dollar bills
bearing a
black man's picture could never pass for money in the United States.
When the '60s ended, a lot of activists returned to regular life but
Gregory just kept on going. He fasted against nuclear power. He ran
across
the country to protest world hunger. He traveled to Iran in 1979, when
Americans were taken hostage, and he fasted there, too.
In the '80s, he touted his own diet and health potions--"Formula Four
X"
and "Slenderella"--and earned publicity by escorting a group of obese
people to Congress to lobby for the creation of a National Institute
of
Obesity and Weight Management. And he kept demonstrating, kept getting
busted. Sometimes, he took his kids along.
"When I was 8 years old, I was locked up with him in Louisiana," says
his
son, Christian Gregory, now 30, a chiropractor in Washington. "By the
age
of 10, I had a rap sheet."
In the new millennium, he's still at it, flying to Kentucky to demand
the
hiring of black school principals, and protesting police brutality in
New
York and Detroit and Prince George's County.
"You've heard of a runner's high? Well, he gets an activist's high,"
Christian Gregory says. "The moment the phone rings and somebody says
they're about to boycott or demonstrate, they don't even have to ask,
he's
on his way."

Theories and Practice

Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gregory reaches into his knapsack. He
extracts
a few copies of his new book, a memoir titled "Callus on My Soul,"
then
starts unloading a slew of tiny bottles, many of them topped with
eyedroppers.
"This is cayenne pepper, very hot," he says, putting down one bottle.
"This
is my liver cleanser," he says, putting down another. "This is maple
syrup.
. . . This is mushrooms. . . . This is lymph cleanser. . . . This is
green
tea. . . . This is olive leaf. . . . This is apricot pits--laetrile.
You
can't buy it in the United States. I have to go to Mexico to get that.
Where there's cancer cells, it'll just choke it."
Maybe, maybe not. The Food and Drug Administration probably wouldn't
agree,
but Gregory doesn't care. He's determined to fight his cancer with
alternative medicines. So far, it's working, he says. "My cancer is 80
percent controlled. My inner system is built up from the herbs and the
walking I do every day."
He believes in health food, but not so much that he can't joke about
it.
"I'm at this vegetarian conference," he says, "and I said, 'Hitler was
a
vegetarian and Martin Luther King would eat the heart out of a cow.
When
Martin Luther King showed up, chickens would fly as high as eagles to
get
away from him. But who would you rather live with, King or Hitler?' "
He
smiles. "So food isn't everything."
By now, he's off on one of his free-flowing monologues, hopping from
topic
to topic. He has a lot of theories, many of them elaborate conspiracy
theories. King was killed by the government, he says. So was Robert
Kennedy. And John Kennedy. And John Kennedy Jr., who was murdered,
Gregory
says, because he was using his magazine to investigate the deaths of
his
father and uncle.
"I think they took him out," he says.
Who took him out?
"Whoever the people are who control the system," he says. "The same
people
who took out John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy."
But not the same people who took out Princess Diana. No, she was
killed by
the British royal family, which feared that she would marry her
boyfriend,
Dodi Al Fayed, who was Egyptian, which means he was part black, which
freaked out the royals.
"If you think the British royal family is gonna allow a king of
England who
has a half-brother who has African blood," he says, "you're out of
your mind!"
Gregory promotes these theories--and others--on the radio almost
daily,
calling friendly deejays in Chicago, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale as
well
as station WOL-AM in Lanham. He has gained a following and now some of
his
fans have advanced their own conspiracy theory--that Gregory's cancer
was
caused by the FBI irradiating him back in the '60s because of his
attacks
on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Gregory doesn't endorse that theory, but he doesn't deny it, either.
"I don't know," he says. "But I'm suspicious."
Opposition Attracts

Ossie Davis has a theory about his friend's conspiracy theories.
"Dick's theories are, I suppose, sublimations of the fears that he's
faced
that he couldn't admit to himself," Davis says. "Dick is brave, but
brave
people are not without fear. Dick overcame his fears perhaps by
driving
them deep down inside. Of course, this is 10-cent psychologizing, but
maybe
his theories are sublimated reactions to the fears he has been exposed
to."
Davis, who has known Gregory for nearly 40 years, also has a theory
about
his friend's seemingly obsessive need to protest. "Some people are
energized by being in opposition, by having an enemy," he says. "I
think
Dick is one of those people. They see things that need to be done and
they
can't live with themselves if they don't go do it.
Of course, that way of life was not easy for Gregory's wife and
children.
"He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family,"
says
Christian Gregory. "It was a hard pill to swallow."
In 1973, when he was still making big bucks doing comedy, Gregory
bought a
400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. It was a refuge for Lillian and the
kids--and for him on those few occasions when he was there. But in
1991, he
could no longer make the mortgage payments and the farm was
repossessed.
Gregory called from Washington, where he was making a speech, to
apologize
to Lillian.
"We will be fine," she told him, and she moved to an apartment nearby.
After 41 years of marriage, they are still together--although seldom
in the
same place.
"We talk probably four or five or six times a day," she says. "That's
the
way it's been for most of our marriage. It wouldn't work for most
people,
but it works for us. . . . I support him 100 percent."
She's thrilled about the Kennedy Center tribute--"It probably should
have
happened a long time ago"--but she will not make a speech. "I don't do
any
public speaking at all," she says.
Tickets for the tribute cost $100 and the proceeds will go to Gregory.
His
friends hope that a nice nest egg will permit him to turn down the
college
speaking gigs that constitute his main source of income, and maybe
rest a bit.
"I'd like to see him slow down and take a little time to reflect,"
says
Christian Gregory. But he's not optimistic that his father will do
that
anytime soon. "If he had a million dollars, he'd do more, because he
could
afford to do more."
Davis figures that only the Grim Reaper can slow his old friend down.
"Eventually, death will catch him, but it will have to catch him in
motion," he says. "I'm going to this [tribute] to say, 'We love you.
Will
you hold still long enough to let us kiss you, you big galoot?' "

Birthday Plans

In the Hilton lobby, Gregory orders an herbal tea and when it arrives,
he
loads it up with dollops from the various herbal potions from his
backpack.
Soon, the air reeks with a pungent medicinal smell. He sips his
concoction
and says he's planning to start a new fast on Oct. 12, his 68th
birthday.
"I'm not going to eat any solid food and I'm going celibate until we
get a
grip on police brutality," he says.
He promises not to eat or have sex until Congress passes a law
requiring
every cop and FBI and CIA agent to have a license for his gun. That
way, he
says, if the cop is brutal, his gun license can be revoked. "For the
first
time, they'll have something to lose," he says.
He figures his fast will inspire others to fast, which will make
America's
turkey farmers worry about selling their birds come Thanksgiving.
"They'll
get on the phone and talk to the politicians," he says.
If that doesn't work, he'll just keep fasting. "When I get down to 92
pounds,
the world press will get involved because they'll think I'm gonna
die."
The subject of police brutality brings a flash of anger to his eyes
for the
first time all day. "Living in this country is just like living in
Nazi
Germany if you're black," he says bitterly.
But he doesn't stay mad long. A moment later, he's joking again, off
on a
comic riff about American Indians and the Washington Redskins.
"I wish the Indians would take some of that casino money and buy the
Redskins," he says, grinning mischievously, "and rename the team the
NiggerHonkies. Then we'd see how people like that."
(c) 2000 The Washington Post Company