Black is the New White Page 17

  Take a situation, turn it upside down, like you’re in a bus plunge or you’re an ass-whupper getting ass-whupped. Sometimes to go upside down, all I have to do is keep it real, saying stuff that no one else is saying.

  Because I’m recording, I want to say some good things about white people. Because sometimes white people freak out when they see me. [White folk voice] “He hates us! He doesn’t like us!” I don’t hate you—I hate your parents for having you. [White folk voice] “It’s a chip on his shoulder. He’s bitter.” You folks have names for niggers. White people will label people. You’re dirty when it comes to labeling. ’Cause it will last for years. “The only good Indian is a dead one.” Ain’t that a bitch? “The one thing I hate more than a nigger”—which you can’t imagine what—“is a nigger lover.” It’s true, white folks know how to label you. They fuck white girls up. “Once you go black, you won’t come back.” Come back from where? What, do they fall into some deep black hole?

  Two-thirds of the way through the album, I get down to it, trashing the whole idea of black and white labels.

  You know that Spike Lee movie? What’s that, Jungle Fever? All that is bullshit. I’ll tell you why. There’s no such thing as jungle fever. The white man saw to it that everyone is mixed. Blame it on the white man … Because he did a lot of fucking, okay? … Ain’t no “jungle fever,” we’re too mixed up. Don’t let them run that, they’re four-hundred-and-fifty years too late for jungle fever. [White folk voice] “Oh, it’s all true, we’re all God’s children.” No, we’re all black. Everybody is. It’s the truth, it’s cold, ain’t it? But it’s real. People in America—because black is negative in the Western world—you can’t get them to admit it. They’ll admit they got any blood but black. They’ll admit their mama is anything but black. “Isn’t your mama a goat?” [nod-ding] “Sure she is—that’s why we call her ‘Nana’!” Isn’t your cousin black? [screams]

  Tell me that ain’t keeping it real. The Race album just takes what I’ve been saying onstage in my stand-up act and bottles it. For some people, it’s poison, but for other people, it’s tonic. I know for a lot of white people, it’s a fucking relief to get this shit out in the open. Race earns me my first Grammy nomination.

  Keenan Wayans plays the album to his writers on In Living Color. “This is the kind of jokes I want,” he tells them. “I want Mooney funny.”

  The whole country must like it, because for my next album, America gives me the greatest gift anybody has ever given a comic.

  O.J.

  CHAPTER 30

  There’s a time when every black person I see looks like O.J. to me. It’s the one period when I can say we all look alike. Let me bring you back to the mid-1990s: TV is all O.J., all the time. Same with newspapers and magazines. I spend months O.J.’d out. The coverage bumps Oprah, it bumps the soap operas. It’s a modern-day Othello.

  I see that white Bronco on the freeway on TV, and I’m screaming “Run, run, run!” Because all black men know that if they’re chasing one of us, they’re chasing all of us. He has the gun up to his head, I’m saying, “Please don’t kill us!” Just like Black Bart in Blazing Saddles. When O.J. finally turns himself in, I can finally get some sleep, because I’m not up all night waiting for the LAPD storm troopers to kick in my door.

  Like I say, I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night. I may not know anything about complex shit like the space program, but I do know one thing that’s pretty damned simple.

  O.J. ain’t did that. He ain’t did what they say he did. That boy ain’t did that. No murder weapon, no eye-witness. He’s not guilty in a court of law.

  White folks just want to play blame-a-nigger. Blame a nigger, any nigger. He kills two people and still catches the red-eye? He wasn’t that quick even on the football field. He ran like any good black man will run. We know our history. If the police come through the door with a simple traffic ticket, I know what can happen, and I’d run, too. Any brother will run if he has any sense.

  O.J. is under that illusion of inclusion—he ain’t been black since he is seventeen years old. He’s the only black man in America who can get on any golf course, any time. White America loves that boy.

  But he finally gets what I always describe as “the nigger wake-up call.” We all get it. Michael Jackson gets it when cops bust into his Neverland Ranch and search his bedroom. Oprah gets her nigger wake-up call when she is closed out of that upscale store in Paris. (I blame her. You can’t recognize that woman as being Oprah without makeup. If she doesn’t have her hair done and her makeup on, I wouldn’t let the woman in my own backyard.)

  O.J. finds out but quick that he ain’t white, that he’s a nigger after all. If he wasn’t on camera in the Bronco, they would have found him dead somewhere. The coroner would solemnly testify that he’d broken his neck somehow. Where are all his solid white friends when he is on the run? He has to get his black friend Al to drive him in that Bronco. He has to go back to the ghetto and find someone to help him out, his black friend, his diaper buddy who he grew up with. A nigger wake-up call is the fastest way to see your white friends vanish.

  I see O.J. and Al Cowlings in that Bronco and I have to ask myself: if I am accused of a double ax murder, who can I ask to give me a ride? How about if someone else who is accused of a double ax murder comes to my house and asks me to drive them? Ask yourself. Is there anyone I would do that for?

  In that situation, I might drive Richard around. I might. We’re that tight. I am with him after he shoots up Deborah’s Buick. I am with him when he’s lying in the burn center. But if he kills someone? I don’t know if I could drive with him. In fact, I don’t know if Mama came around that I would go with her. “Here, Mama, here are the car keys. I love you, Mama. Call me when you get to Mexico. See you on Hard Copy.”

  It’s times like these that I miss my friend Richard. He’s still around, but he’s gone. The MS has already taken him. He can’t talk much now, can’t form words, can’t use sign language. I would go up to his house, and I would talk about O.J., trying to get Richard to laugh.

  “Just in case he did do it, I’m sending my résumé to Hertz.”

  Richard laughs, but his laughter immediately turns into a horrible bout of coughing and hacking. When he finally quits, his mouth hangs open, slack and round, like he’s in shock or something. It’s awful to see. When I leave him, I’m grieving.

  O.J. is exactly the kind of thing we’d crack up over, because it lays bare the kind of race shit that America usually keeps so well hidden. It’s that old complexion for the protection bullshit. White people have it, and that means they have the luxury not to think about race except when it suits them. I see a white homeless person on the street, acting the bum in downtown L.A. or somewhere, and I think, What a waste of a white skin. He could use that skin for protection, and instead, he’s throwing it all away.

  Friends to the end: Me with Richard in the last days before MS takes him

  It’s during the O.J. trial that I start to feel how alone I really am. I’ve broken up with Lori. Richard is gone without being gone. I turn more and more to my children.

  I do another album, Master Piece. O.J. is front and center, race is front and center. It is a bad time for black people in America. There are nigger wake-up calls being placed right and left. The fucking mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, kicks it off by being caught on tape smoking crack. James Brown, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, O.J. They all get their wake-up calls. I lay it all out on Master Piece, and sometimes I flip it over and do it upside down, too.

  Michael Jackson went out and married Elvis’s daughter? Go, Michael, go! Elvis Presley’s daughter? I was celebrating. I was getting naked and pouring champagne over myself. Yes, yes, yes! I love you! Elvis Presley’s daughter? Elvis’s daughter? Pimped his ass. Elvis Presley stole so much from black people, it’s about time he gave us something back!

  I record the album in Harlem. I still keep a house in L.A., but I am spending more and more ti
me in the city. I like it there, because they like being black in New York. They’re very comfortable and not in denial. It’s not Hollywood—it’s the neighborhood. It’s where I feel safe.

  I play Master Piece for Richard. He doesn’t get out to the clubs anymore, so all the material is pretty much new to him. He listens, and when I look into his eyes, they glitter and smile. I know he is getting it. But he can’t communicate what he’s feeling. He can’t express himself. There’s good days when he can whisper out a few words, and bad days like this one, when he’s mute, locked into silence by the disease. Richard lives to connect, convey, communicate. That’s when I know the truth: MS is the last demon he’ll ever face. Richard Pryor is in hell.

  BLACK

  CHAPTER 31

  In 2001, my darling youngest son, Symeon, is murdered. It’s a mean, ugly death. He’s shot from close range in a car parked in an alleyway in L.A. The kid who shoots him, somebody he knows and hangs out with, later drives to Las Vegas, checks himself into a hotel, and commits suicide.

  I’m in New York when it happens, and my close friend Eric calls me and tells me that Symeon is gone. My son is in the police station morgue for hours before he is identified. All the morgue knows is that it is holding the body of someone with the last name of Mooney. At first the news organizations think it’s me who has died. My close friend, the actor Glynn Turman, sets the situation straight at the morgue.

  Symeon is always the kind of child who makes things hard on himself. He even whistles backward. In his late adolescence, he falls in with Ramone, the son of my cousin Raquel. Symeon and Ramone add up to a bad combination. The streets kill my son and send Ramone to prison.

  RIP: My son Symeon, who died tragically

  When a child of yours dies, you join a very exclusive club. Your children are supposed to outlive you. That’s the natural order of things. The only ones who really understand are those who have had this particular tragedy befall them. It’s pure torture. The whole family is emotionally wrecked by it. I am only glad that Mama, my dear Mama, is gone so she doesn’t have to feel the pain. She passes away the year before in Oakland, and I am at her bedside.

  Suddenly it seems I am surrounded by death. Nothing feels funny anymore. It’s the most difficult time in my comedy career. I have to work, I have to support my family. But I feel as though I am two separate people. Mooney at the microphone, and Mooney who has to live his life in grief.

  It takes me a long period before I am back on my feet professionally. When Dave Chappelle creates a new sketch comedy TV show on Comedy Central in 2003, I recognize what it is right away. It’s got an informal, just-friends-hanging-out-at-a-party vibe and a familiar edge to it. Chap-pelle’s Show is done as if Playboy After Dark collides with The Richard Pryor Show.

  One way to tell that someone is good is when Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with them. For years, I run into Dave Chappelle on the stand-up scene around the clubs and I see how funny he is. He comes into the Store and asks if he can do a set in front of my audience. When we talk, I always like him personally. I meet his mom, Yvonne, and really like her. Dave is raised in a middle-class household in Washington, D.C., with his father and mother both college professors.

  So of course a smart, funny black man like that has trouble finding his place in Hollywood. He turns down the role of Bubba in the movie Forrest Gump because he sees the de-meaning bullshit behind the character’s shuck-and-jive smile. He gets his own sitcom, Buddies, a spin-off of an appearance on Home Improvement, Tim Allen’s joint, but Dave’s show gets cancelled right away.

  Dave doesn’t come into his own until Chappelle’s Show, which starts out small on cable but blows up huge on DVD. In Living Color, Chappelle’s Show, they all come from The Richard Pryor Show. They grow from it. That ain’t an insult. It’s a natural thing.

  When he sees Chappelle’s Show, Richard talks about “passing the torch” to Dave, which considering his relationship with torches and fire, is pretty funny. He’s not threatened by Dave, and neither am I. The mothership isn’t threatened by all the other ships coming up to it to suck teat.

  Dave puts together an ensemble that includes Charlie Murphy (Eddie’s brother), Bill Burr, and Donnell Rawlings. Dave asks me to write for Chappelle’s Show and I lay out my conditions for him right away. “I’ve been in this business too long,” I tell him. “I can’t get into another bullshit situation where I have producers and executives picking apart my shit.”

  “I won’t let them fuck with your stuff,” Dave promises.

  It ain’t the easiest work in the world, running interference for me with Hollywood people who don’t understand comedy and never will, but Dave does it like a pro. But it’s like I’m seeing Richard’s response to Hollywood playing out in Dave’s experience, too. They’re both comic geniuses. They’re both trying to maneuver through the Hollywood minefield. They both feel stressed out by white people loving their shit so much, as though that means they aren’t keeping it real. And they both wind up fleeing Hollywood for Africa. Seeing the way things turn out, I feel bad that I probably added to Dave’s stress level. But I can only do what I do.

  One thing I like to do is fuck with things that white people consider their own. White folks love them some mysticism. They like funny-ass religions like Buddhism and Scientology because it helps them get out from under the Ten Commandments. They like tarot cards and aliens and all that shit. And they believe in Nostradamus seeing the future. Nostradamus is a French druggist from half a millennium ago, and white people are reading books about him, nodding their heads like he’s Dionne Warwick down at the Psychic Friends Network.

  White people have Nostradamus, so I give Chappelle’s Show Negrodamus. We intro the bit with trippy music and random voices asking questions.

  What’s the meaning of life? Am I going to find a husband? Who is my real father? Does God really exist? [female announcer] For centuries, people have turned to one man for the answers to life’s great mysteries. That man is Negrodamus.

  I come on tricked-out with a burgundy fop hat, a French beard, and a doublet. I field questions from the audience.

  Audience member: Negrodamus, what mistakes did Michael Jackson make before he was arrested?

  Negrodamus: Michael Jackson should not have been a singer. He should have been a priest. That way, he would have just been transferred.

  Audience member: Negrodamus, why is President Bush so sure Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?

  Negrodamus: Because he has the receipt.

  I also fuck with movie review shows like Siskel and Ebert, because none of them ever use a black critic. For “Mooney on Movies,” I ask Dave to hire me the “whitest white girls you can get.” I have blond actresses on either side of me, playing the kind of women whose media-created opinions come out of their mouths totally prefabricated.

  White woman #1: Our first film is Gone With the Wind. This film is an epic romance centering around Scarlett O’Hara, a damsel in distress during the Civil War. It is a must-see, must-own movie. I highly recommend it.

  White woman #2: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve actually seen Gone With the Wind thirteen times since I was ten years old, no kidding.

  Mooney: You must be on crack. I don’t think we’ve seen the same movie. I thought Scarlett was a ho’, because she went to bed with everybody but Mammy. I love Mammy. The best scene in the movie is when Mammy told the people, “Get off my porch, white trash.” I stood and I applauded. I liked every bit of it.

  White woman #2: I liked Mammy. I thought she was great, I thought she had a great role.

  Mooney: It was Hattie McDaniels. Do you know in real life they wouldn’t let Mammy go to the opening? Hollywood goes too far. She’s dead, but everybody comes back to get their money. She came back as Oprah Winfrey.

  A couple of things are going on here. I’m playing a role, a movie critic. Even though the title of the bit is “Mooney on Movies,” I’m not being me. I’m sending up a TV movie critic such as Roger Ebe
rt. Also, I’m getting at something that has happened to me again and again: a white person and a black person encounter the exact same material, and they come away with opposite reactions to it as different as black and white.

  I get more street recognition from Negrodamus and my other characters on Chapelle’s Show than I have ever gotten before. Even with no advertising push behind it, the program is huge. It sells like ice in hell on DVD, moving more than 3 million copies, becoming the best-selling TV show on DVD ever, ahead of even The Simpsons. America is like a thirsty dog at its water bowl. It drinks that shit up. Richard Pryor has been away from the scene too long. But Dave Chap-pelle gives them the next best funnyman.

  As a result of my new high profile, the BET channel folks invite me to appear on their awards show in September 2005. It doesn’t turn out well. They hire Mooney, they get Mooney. Maybe they were under the mistaken impression that they had hired Mickey Rooney. I give my Nigger Wake-Up Call Award, with the nominees being Diana Ross, Lil’ Kim, Michael Jackson, and Oprah Winfrey.

  Diana Ross, Diva! They arrest her for DUI, and she says, “Do you know who I am?” They say, “Yeah, you’re the bitch who’s going to jail!” She’s in the jail hallway [singing “Love’s Hangover”], “If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it, don’t want it.” “Get back in your cell, bitch, and shut up!”

  Diana Ross’s daughter Tracee is in the audience that night, and she runs out of the auditorium crying. I get slammed left and right. My bit is almost completely edited out of the broadcast. I never felt the love at BET, which I call “almost black television,” because I know it’s owned by white folks. But getting fucked with for doing my own comedy is too much. I watch Dave Letterman and Jay Leno every night. They fuck with celebrities and get off scot-free. When folks start calling them down, start criticizing them, then they can start in on me. Until then, don’t bother me. I’ve got shows to do.