by Paul Mooney
Racism is a terrible weight to live with. What an awful trip to lay on anyone, but especially on a young child. Whoever dismisses bigotry or underestimates its impact has never lived under the pain. During those years, first at Luther Burbank and later at Berkeley High School, I’m immune in a personal sense. I see examples of racism plenty of times, like slights in class, with teachers ignoring black students to call on their pet white kids. But I myself feel too secure to be touched by anything like that. It just offends my sense of justice.
My anger boils just beneath the surface. I think about someone telling a small kid he’s second-class because he’s black. He’s just an innocent child, and someone sticks a knife into his soul. It’s repellent, and those responsible, and those who stand by and watch it happen, will burn in hell.
Berkeley High School: My yearbook photo
All around me, my friends and acquaintances buckle under the burden of bigotry and prejudice and ignorance. I can look in their eyes and witness it happening. They get haunted. Their eyes tell me what’s going on in their hearts. Well, maybe I am a low piece of shit like they say I am.
That never happens to me. Maybe it’s just the luck of personality or the buffer that Mama’s love gives me. It’s water off my back. But at my junior high school graduation ceremony, I duck out from under my black face for the first time ever.
As usual, a girl is involved. I’m going out with a white girl named Judy. I only talk to her on the phone and at school. Her parents don’t know I am black, because when I call the house, I put on a great white voice.
For graduation, the dress code requires us to wear a black or navy suit. But the rules never apply to me. I insist that my mother buy me a beige suit because I want to stand out.
Even back then, I love fashion. I am fly! Everyone in school knows that I am going to be the only one to wear a light-colored suit. Judy calls me up the night before our graduation, crying. She is scared that her parents will find out that I am black. And since I will be the only one in beige, I know I’ll stand out.
I love Judy so much that when they announce my name to come up and get my diploma, I hide backstage. I never show my face, so her parents won’t see me and find out who I am.
Mama and my mother are furious at me. They don’t know my motives. I think it will make them even more angry if they know what game I am playing. It isn’t until years later that I finally tell them the truth. They had forgotten all about the incident by then, but it sears itself into my memory.
My skulking around backstage doesn’t seem like cowardice to me. I think I am doing it for love.
Other indignities, large and small, assault me at Berkeley High. Every black person in the world has that watershed “nigger” moment, a time when they remember being called the N word. It’s burned deep into our brains. It can never be washed out.
In high school with me are twin white girls, and one of them gives me my very own personal nigger moment. I guess they aren’t identical twins, because her sister is very liberal, but she is racist to the bone. We are in typing class (yes, I type), and when the teacher leaves the room one time, I get up to walk around.
I accidentally kick over the racist twin’s bag, and ever the Mama-trained gentleman, I am going to pick it up and apologize, when this white girl says, “Pick it up!” Like a command.
“What did you say?” I ask her. She looks at me with hate. Her sister puts an arm around her, but Bigot Twin shakes it off.
“Pick up your own goddamn purse,” I say.
“Pick up my purse, nigger!” She slaps my face, hard.
The Lord channels me. I grab her blond stringy hair and drag her toward the window.
Her twin is screaming. Everyone in class is shouting at me.
“Don’t throw her out the window, Mooney! Don’t throw her out!”
The teacher comes back in to see me grabbing a handful of Bigot Twin’s hair. Then it’s the principal’s office, followed by the police station. I am too proud to tell anyone but Mama what triggered me.
Racism is worked into the whole institution of Berkeley High back then. The school officials don’t allow me to work at the yearbook or school newspaper. Again, I don’t mope over the mistreatment. I just go ahead and publish my own guerilla newspaper. It’s a smash hit. I get called to the principal’s office, where the assistant principal says they will suspend me if I continue to publish.
“This is not allowed,” the assistant principal says. He’s a guy whose ugly black horn-rims cover half his face. It is against school policy, he explains, for a student to bootleg a newspaper.
School policy. Yeah, that must be a clause in the rules that they invent just for me, because there ain’t anyone else around who is running a guerrilla publishing operation.
It doesn’t matter to me, and Mr. Horn Rims can tell it doesn’t matter, and that makes him all the more uptight and angry. Mooney must be heeled like a dog. Mooney must be chastened.
But I’m not chastened. Far from it. I am sixteen years old, tall, skinny, and good-looking. Nothing bothers me. On the first day that I legally can, I go down and pass my driver’s test. My mother’s fast lifestyle is good for something. She owns a beautiful canary yellow Ford convertible. Me sitting behind the wheel of that car turns out to be irresistible.
Maybe a little too irresistible. A girl named Toni can’t resist me, and I can’t resist her, either. We have sex in the back of the Ford convertible, parked up in the Oakland hills under the night stars.
Once again, sex equals marriage in my young mind. I immediately conclude I am going to walk down the aisle with Toni. All the boys talk about whom they are going to marry and I always say it will be Toni. She and I are going to be together forever.
Only it doesn’t work out that way. Instead, after a few months, Toni mysteriously disappears from view. She won’t return my calls, either. I am frantic. I can’t understand what is happening. Then I hear through the grapevine that Toni is pregnant.
I am young and terrified. Mama is furious with me, and my mother, too. I never know when Toni gives birth because her family keeps it from me. When I do find out, I am in school and almost die. And then I hear that she has given birth to twins. I collapse, literally, right there in the halls of Berkeley High School.
When I show up at the 18th Street house, Mama makes fun of me by doing a singsong ghetto rhyme.
Annie has a baby in the back of a Caddy
Annie say the baby don’t look like daddy
Annie give her baby a pat on the head
Baby say to Annie my daddy ain’t Ted
Annie has a baby she can’t go to school
Annie say the daddy is a stone-cold fool
She laughs and laughs, and I steam. The situation isn’t much funny to me. Twins! I’m the father of two baby boys! Daryl and Duane Mooney. As the twins grow up, I do see them, but I’m not a big part of their lives, because Toni’s great-grandmother keeps them from me. It’s not until much later, when I move to L.A., that I start to see them regularly.
Toward the end of high school, I fall in with half dozen beautiful women, all in their late teens and all beauty-contest winners. My cousin Alice is one of them, and the Global sisters: Joanne, Sally, and Cynthia. Diane DeMarko is among them, too. She has just won the Miss Albany contest, in a town immediately north of Berkeley. Now she and Alice are up for Miss Oakland.
I am in heaven with these women. Even though none of us are fucking each other, the aura of sex and beauty and youth is intoxicating. Diane has wealthy parents, and we tool around in her little two-seater Mercedes sports car. I take the whole group on forays of what I call “nig-noggin’”—slang for going to black dance halls like the Clef, Bop City, the Long Bar, or the Orbit Room.
The only other male we allow into our group is Huey P. Newton. He’s a long way from being the Black Panther he’s going to become. He and I get along well because he’s another Louisiana boy whose family uproots and moves to Oakland. I know him some in Oakland, bu
t when I move to Berkeley, Huey shows up at Berkeley High, too.
I think Huey transfers schools because he likes me, but he’s really more interested in my cousin Alice. Alice at age seventeen is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen or ever will see. Light, light skin and startling green eyes. The way she carries herself, with a quiet grace, makes her prettiness all the more pronounced.
Huey loves Alice. He wants to marry her. Back then, even though he goes through school, he can’t read. He’s starting his self-education. He carries a copy of Plato’s Republic around everywhere he goes. The dude is struggling, moving his lips as he tries to get through one of the most difficult books of all time.
Our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier.
Whew! That’s some dense shit right there. I think about poor Huey, puzzling his way through it. It’s all Greek to me. But he doesn’t give up. He masters it and goes on to become one of the founders of the Black Panthers.
Back then, though, he is just Huey, the only guy on the block who can compete with me in being handsome. All the girls love them some Huey P. Newton. Alice just accepts his worship and doesn’t go any further with him. I wonder how the course of African-American politics might have changed if my gorgeous cousin Alice would have looked kindly upon Huey’s love pleas.
It ain’t Huey’s time yet, not with Alice, not with Plato, not with the Panthers. It’s still the 1950s. The country is in an Eisenhower-Nixon coma. Ideas about race and culture are frozen solid, as though they’re encased in a block of ice.
Me just being me helps them unfreeze a little.
In 1959, the biggest thing to hit Bay Area television is Dick Stewart’s Dance Party program, broadcast every day except Sunday on KPIX Channel 5, a CBS affiliate. Dance Party’s afternoon time slot goes from low ratings to crazily popular almost overnight.
Dick Stewart is the squareball of all squareballs, a Hollywood big-band crooner who comes back to his hometown of Oakland to host the show. He plays a Jimmy Dorsey song as the theme music for a dance program aimed at teenagers! He’s plastic and tan-fastic, with a big fake showbiz smile, but I like him.
Dance Party features a group of teenagers called “regu-lars,” who appear on every show and dance to the Top 40 tunes of the day. It’s the West Coast answer to Philly’s American Bandstand. Both shows are hosted by guys named Dick. Bandstand goes national a couple years before on ABC.
Tickets to be in the studio for the live Dance Party broad-cast are hard to get, and getting to be a regular is nearly impossible. Naturally, that’s what I set my sights on.
On a Monday morning I skip school and head across the bridge to the KPIX studios on Van Ness in San Francisco. I figure I’ll show up during off hours when the live program isn’t being broadcast, since the staff won’t be so busy then. My strategy works. I walk right into the office and ask a secretary to introduce me to the producer of Dance Party.
It turns out he’s standing right there, a tall, light-haired guy named Dave Parker. “I’d like to dance on the show,” I say.
“We have auditions for that,” Parker says. But I can tell by the way he’s looking me up and down that he’s interested.
“I’ve won about a half dozen dance contests,” I say hurriedly. I run through my resume—the Paramount, the Orinda, every area theater that has a hambone competition.
“You can dance?” he says.
“Oh, I can dance,” I say.
Parker looks at the secretary for a woman’s point of view. She gives him a slight nod.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re in, but you’re on probation.”
It isn’t the last time that my good looks help me skip the grueling, emotionally draining audition process.
“When do I start?”
Parker looks at his wristwatch. “The show goes on in six hours,” he says.
“Today?”
“I’ll see you at three o’clock,” he says, and shakes my hand before disappearing into the interior of the studio.
My girlfriends are all crazy excited, especially Diane De-Marko, who is a dancer, but they’re full of advice for me at the same time. They all want to tell me what to wear, but I know already. I choose a light yellow shirt and a pair of beige linen pants with cream-colored bucks for my outfit. I am stylin’!
The Dance Party set is a cheap plywood mock-up of a soda fountain. The room is a lot smaller than it looks on TV. I show up, the new dancer, amid a couple dozen regulars who all know one another. Most of them are white, but there are black girls and Asian girls, too.
They freak when they see me. Racially freak. They’ve never seen anything like me. The white kids on Dance Party are white as snow. They could drop dead from being white. They are critically white. It sounds like a cliché, but I find out that they cannot keep a beat.
They can be choreographed, but they can’t feel the rhythm the way I can. They hop around like rabbits, doing the dances of the day. The Swim, the Twist, the Mashed Potato, and the Monster Mash. Then the whole dance menagerie: the Monkey, the Chicken, the Roach, the Pony.
Dance Party plays up the romances between the regulars. It’s like a variety show with a little bit of soap opera thrown in. Dick Stewart sets the stage for romantic “silhouette” dances, with designated couples slow dancing beneath a mirrored ball. The audience avidly follows the ups and downs of the teenage romances, and the regulars are all local celebrities.
The hot couple of the day is Lynn Facciola and Frank Pisa. They get fan mail and field autograph requests whenever they go out in public. They are Dance Party’s version of American Bandstand’s superpopular couple, Bob Clayton and Justine Carelli.
But the star of the show is a European-born beauty named Barbara Goutscher. Even though she barely resembles movie star Sandra Dee, she wins a Gidget lookalike contest to get her place on the show (she also wins a date with Gidget’s leading man, James Darren).
Later on, Barbara goes Hollywood and changes her last name to Bouchet. She has a long career in TV and plays Miss Moneypenny in the 1967 satirical Bond film, Casino Royale. I freak out when I happen across an episode of Star Trek and see my old Dance Party regular Barbara playing Kelinda, the Kelvan seductress, and making out with Captain Kirk!
A handful of the regulars come out of Dance Party to go on to Hollywood careers. Barbara Burrus changes her name to Anne Randall and becomes Playboy magazine’s May 1967 Playmate. She eventually winds up marrying the Dance Party host, Dick Stewart.
The whole vibe on set is one of raging teenage hormones. I crack up laughing because Dick Stewart has a habit of staring at the tits of the female regulars who are big chested.
One regular, Archie, falls head over heels for Aasa, a blond ice-queen type. The problem is, Archie is darker skinned, with some Native-American blood in him. He winds up facing off with Aasa’s father on her front lawn, the girl trying to hold her dad back from pummeling her forbidden teenage love.
In this atmosphere, what am I going to do? If I have to dance only with the same two regular girls who are black, it’s going to cut my possibilities way down. I don’t even think about it. Every day I am running with a whole flock of white women, integrated by me and my cousin Alice. Why should Dance Party be any different?
I dance with the black girls, the Asian girls, the white girls. I dance with everyone. It’s natural. It’s not a thought-out move on my part. But in my own way, I’m integrating American television. I get my beautiful cousin Alice on the show. She dances with all the white boys.
Dance Party gets hate mail. “I don’t want some big nigger dancing with white girls!” Vile stuff. I have to credit Dave Parker and Dick Stewart, though. They never backtrack. They can’t. I’m unstoppable. I
am too popular.
American Bandstand, on the other side of the country, practices strict racial separation. It fights against integration fiercely and to the end, like a lady wrestler. That’s the whole subject of John Waters’s Hairspray, the hit movie and Broadway musical.
I meet lots of celebrities on Dance Party. All the big stars appear on the show. Ann-Margret. James Brown. Annette Funicello. Clint Eastwood. Aretha. The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, just days before the plane crash that becomes the day the music died.
“Are you coming back on the show?” I ask Ann-Margret as she sweeps out of the Dance Party studio on a cloud of perfume.
“I don’t know,” she says, giving me her flirtiest smile. “Are you going to be here?”
The one day in my life I wish I could do over is when Sam Cooke comes to the Dance Party studio. That afternoon I am off in Stockton picking peaches. So I never meet the greatest soul singer in the world, and the man who I will play in a movie.
Applause is love, and so is the TV camera. I’m a Dance Party regular, and I feel as though I am the king of California. I get recognized and asked for autographs out on the street.
The closing theme of Dance Party, played at the end of every show, is “Dream” by the Pied Pipers—one of Dick Stewart’s schmaltzy big-band throwbacks. “Dream when the day is through/Dream then they might come true.”
I am living a dream that I didn’t even know I had. The thing about dreams, though, is that when you realize one, it just whets your appetite for an even bigger dream. At the dawn of a new decade, in a lesbian bar in the beatnik area of North Beach, I discover someone who sets me on a whole new path.
CHAPTER 10
In my last year of high school, I date a pretty girl named Karen Perry. She looks like a combination of actresses Lori Petty and Audrey Hepburn. Karen and my cousin Alice are best friends. People always think that they’re sisters. Karen is a great actress herself, and plays the female lead in all the school productions at Berkeley High.