Black is the New White

by Paul Mooney

  The school has a double standard for its plays. The drama teachers want only white kids to perform. I audition and get rejected.

  “Paul, we just don’t have a part for you.” A polite rejection, but I see right through it. I don’t have the complexion for the protection. White people like to think their skin color protects them. I don’t have it, so they can ignore me. I’m dancing on the top-rated teen TV show, and you don’t have a part for me?

  But I always have to be onstage. I always have to guerrilla my shit. In direct opposition to the drama teachers, I start my own talent show. I do a skit based on Little Red Riding Hood, and I play the wolf, of course. I look out at the school audience, and whoever isn’t laughing their guts out is shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.

  That’s how I like it. You either laugh, or you get uptight.

  I have sex with Karen, the drama department’s major star, and she gets pregnant. No more school plays for her. She gives birth to our daughter, Lisa. I am not out of high school yet, and I have three children.

  As the 1960s dawn, I’m getting more and more restless. Dance Party is great and my first taste of celebrity is sweet, but suddenly Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco—the whole place seems too small to hold me. I look around for options. I attend a local community college, but that seems more small-time than ever.

  The Dance Party gig ends abruptly when I get drafted into the army and sent to West Germany. I think maybe that will satisfy my thirst for the wider world, but I learn quickly that there’s nothing more claustrophobic than the U.S. Army. I had sergeants constantly on my jock.

  My main army claim to fame is integrating the base swimming pools. They make me a lifeguard. The little kids who come to the pools look up at me, sitting all regal on my life-guard’s throne, and they give me shit.

  “That nigger’s the boss?” one kid says.

  My sergeant is there. “Anybody calls my nigger a nigger,” he barks out, “and they’re going to answer to me!”

  Thanks, Sarge. But he scares the fuck out of the kids, and they’re respectful after that.

  It’s the early 1960s. Vietnam is starting to ramp up. Black kids die by the dozens over there. Pretty soon it will be by the hundreds, finally by the thousands. My sergeant attaches me to a new unit.

  Airbone.

  “You black motherfucker,” he says, “we’re going to throw you out of an airplane!”

  In the Army now: Me in civilian clothes when I am in the service in Germany

  Airborne means combat. Combat means death.

  Hambone saves me once again. I win a base talent contest with the same hambone routine I do in the movie theaters of Oakland. Suddenly I’m part of an army entertainment troupe that tours all over Germany.

  Dancing for my supper is something I get used to. But the U.S. Army is the only force that is evil and fucked-up enough to make me dance for my life. I get through my two-year hitch with enough hard-won experience to know what the acronym FTA means when, years later in 1972, I join an anti-war comedy troupe with the name FTA.

  Fuck the Army.

  The military machine vomits me back onto the streets of Oakland. I am right back where I started.

  I’m going out with a girl who works at a North Beach bar that used to be called Mona’s and now is called Ann’s 440 Club, at 440 on Broadway off the Embarcadero. Later on, Ann’s is a beatnik place. But when I go there, it is catering to tough butch lesbians and their femme girlfriends.

  Ann Dee, the big, blowsy blond lady who runs it, is really Angela DeSpirito, a singer. She has acts on the club’s small stage, singers mostly—Johnny Mathis gets his start there—but some comics, too.

  I visit my girlfriend one night while she’s waitressing at Ann’s. I want to make sure none of the butches misunderstand and think that she is available.

  I get struck by lightning as I sit at the bar.

  Not literally, of course. It’s just that there’s a stand-up comic that night who’s doing his act. His name is Lenny Bruce, and he is already doing the riff that is going to get him busted.

  To is a preposition and come is a verb. I’ve heard these two words my whole life. As a kid when my folks thought I was sleeping. “Didja come? Huh? Didja? I came, did you come?”

  I stumble out of Ann’s a changed man. I have always been funny. There is no way that I could grow up in the Ealy family without learning how to make people laugh. But what Lenny does is something new. He talks onstage like the people around me talk in real life. Plus his laughs have bite. His routines have switchblades concealed inside them.

  I am not going to tell you that I see Lenny Bruce and right away chart my course in life. But he infects me with the virus that night at Ann’s.

  Later on I’m in the audience with George Carlin at the Jazz Workshop show where Lenny gets arrested for obscenity for the first time, for doing the same “didja come?” routine and also for saying “Cocksucker” in public. That switchblade is so sharp it sometimes cuts the person who holds it. For refusing to tell the police his name, Carlin goes to jail, too, in solidarity with Lenny. For all his obscenity raps and lefty political riffs, the one thing the mainstream hates about Lenny is he puts race out there in public. He knew that would get them, and it did.

  I start to see all the stand-up I can. Mort Sahl and Woody Allen come through town and perform at the hungry i. A local guy named Ronnie Schell does his act at smaller clubs. Carlin is just starting to happen. He’s a little older than I am, but he and I bond over his days in the air force stationed in my old hometown of Shreveport.

  Suddenly, black comics are breaking out into the mainstream. I make pilgrimages to see Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, as well as legendary acts such as the great Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx.

  I’m young and brimming with arrogance. I figure if they can do it, so can I. I help found a black improv group that we eventually call the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs. We perform anywhere, in the back rooms of bars, in small clubs, in living rooms.

  Improv is the most exhilarating and terrifying thing I ever do. I am up there on a tightrope without a net. It doesn’t help that we do outrageous political comedy.

  One of our Bedbug routines is my old youthful fantasy, riffing on how it would be if black people took over. We have the African-American Gestapo going door to door. We have Sammy Davis, Jr., hiding Britt Ekland in the basement as though she is Anne Frank.

  Again, just like in the hambone dance contests, I kill. The Yankee Doodle Bedbugs are like a black version of the Committee, years before the Committee improv group ever forms up in North Beach. I learn once again that applause is love.

  I get the itch, and there’s only one place I can go to scratch it.

  Hollywood.

  Joe Gilbert and Eddie Brown are in the same class as me at Berkeley High. They are the best singers in school. Joe has a pretty tenor and Eddie is lower, like a baritone. They harmonize on gospel songs. Everybody likes them.

  I connect with them because Joe is a transplant from Louisiana just like me. The Louisiana-to-Berkeley mafia. You can tell if a person has Louisiana roots because he will pronounce the name of the state in three syllables, as if it’s the name of a slutty girl: “Loose Anna.”

  At the Berkeley High talent show that I organize as a blow against segregated drama department school plays, Joe and Eddie do a version of an old spiritual. “There’s a meeting here tonight/There’s a meeting here tonight/I can tell by your friendly face/That there’s a meeting here tonight.”

  I think it is the corniest shit I have ever heard, but after the audience votes, they come in first place. Joe and Eddie start to appear at clubs like the hungry i and the Purple Onion. The North Beach beatniks snap their fingers and eat it up.

  The folk-song movement is gaining momentum. A group called the Weavers hits the top ten by doing an old Lead Belly song called “Goodnight, Irene.” That wakes everyone up to the commercial possibilities of folk music.

  Joe and Eddie do folk ve
rsions of black spirituals, as well as all-out Weavers-style folkie stuff like the Jewish army marching song “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.” Believe me, you haven’t had your head twisted around like it twists when you hear a couple of black dudes from the South singing their hearts out in Hebrew.

  Joe is a lot like Richard Pryor. The same crazy energy, the same complexion, the same ugly-cute looks. Women love them some Joe Gilbert. The late 1960s are probably the only days in the history of the world when singing a folk song can get you laid.

  I am always hanging out at Joe and Eddie’s shows, partly because they are my friends and partly because their gigs attract hippie women who believe in free love. One night Joe and Eddie get me drunk and lure me up onstage.

  It’s my first solo stand-up comedy routine ever, the first one I do in public anyway, not counting just standing around the kitchen table as a kid cracking up the Ealy household. As it turns out, not a word out of my mouth that evening is mine.

  I am so blitzed and so unprepared that I go on autopilot. I do Ronnie Schell’s whole act, practically word for word. Same jokes, same patter, everything. I pop my stand-up cherry with another man’s dick. If Ronnie’s in the audience, I get sued.

  But he’s not, and I don’t. I even get a few laughs.

  Ronnie Schell goes on from the San Francisco stand-up scene to play Corporal Duke Slater, Jim Nabors’s pussy-hound barracks mate in Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. I catch a glimpse of him on Nick at Nite or TV Land, and I still feel guilty.

  Joe and Eddie are all excited that night because there is an agent in the audience who tells them he’ll see their act again if they come to Los Angeles. If he likes it the second time around, he says, he’ll see what he can do for them.

  They head to L.A. the same week. The agent likes them fine. Doug Weston of the Troubadour schedules them. It looks as though they are on their way. But the agent asks, “That comic I saw you with, what about him? Where’s Mooney?”

  “We can get him down here, no problem,” Joe says hurriedly. He and Eddie head back up to Oakland to pack up their things and move south. They call me up and tell me I have to come to Los Angeles with them.

  We hatch a plan. I am hot for Hollywood. We’ll all go together, we decide, three Berkeley High kids busting out of their hometown and into show business. We will road-trip south in my baby blue 1959 Bonneville convertible, tailfins sweeping off the back like a Cadillac. I name the car Hilda, and Hilda will take us to L.A.

  It is spring 1963. Gregory Peck wins an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Bull Connor is spraying black kids with high-pressure fire hoses in Birmingham. Lee Harvey Oswald is back in the United States from the Soviet Union and makes his first assassination attempt, shooting and missing a U.S. Army major general named Edwin Walker. Next time around, on a Friday in November in Dallas, he’ll have some help.

  This drive is the flip side of the L.A.-to-Oakland trip Richard Pryor and I will make six years later. I steer Hilda south onto Interstate 5, Oakland to L.A. I have luggage piled up in the front passenger’s seat beside me.

  In the backseat, Joe and Eddie harmonize, running through their entire repertoire of folk songs. They ain’t agonna study war no more. They are breaking rocks on the chain gang. They are poor boys being ruined in the house of the rising sun. “I done laid around, and played around/In this ole town too long.”

  Even though the thought of strangling Joe and Eddie occurs to me more than once over the course of the ten-hour trip, I’m feeling too happy. My whole life, I’ve been heading for Hollywood. I’m weightless, driving through the California night in a convertible. Free.

  I know now that I probably should not have been so serene. Given the immense scale of racism and the depths of bigotry that I encounter in Hollywood, I should have come to town packing a little more heat than a backseat folk duo.

  HOLLYWOOD

  CHAPTER 11

  I always depend on the kindness of women. In Los Angeles, my half sister Carol and I rent a two-bedroom bungalow in a run-down motel on Sunset. The wrong end of Sunset, far away from the Strip.

  Carol is doing wigs, huge creations that turn heads. She already knows everybody in town. She is good friends with Tammi Terrell, the singer. A Philly girl, not even twenty when I meet her, she’s a slip of a thing with a big childlike eyes and a bigger voice.

  Tammi makes her first record when she is sixteen years old. She keeps on getting “discovered,” first by James Brown and then, later on, by Berry Gordy, Jr., who pairs her in a series of duets with Marvin Gaye doing Ashford & Simpson songs. When I meet her, she has only a few years to live. She’ll be dead from a brain tumor by the end of the decade.

  At the bungalow, she’s just Tammi, just another one of Carol’s friends. Our place is a clearinghouse for black acts passing through Hollywood. They all crash with us. I remember coming in late one night and finding Gladys Knight’s brother and cousins snoring on the floor of our living room.

  Bubba Knight and cousins Langston George, Ed Patten, and Bill Guest are the Pips, Gladys’s backup singers. They are just coming off their R&B hits “Every Beat of My Heart” and “Letter Full of Tears,” but they still have to crash on the floor with friends.

  Midnight train: Me and Gladys Knight, but without the Pips

  Gladys is off having babies in Atlanta. The Pips are touring on their own. That’s the glamorous life of musicians for you.

  I wake up early the next afternoon to the sounds of the Pips harmonizing. “Every beat of my heart/Tears me further apart.”

  It’s Joe and Eddie all over again. At least it’s R&B and not folk music.

  Carol and I make rent any which way we can. We are always scrambling. I take a job selling shoes at the Joseph Magnin department store. A blond girl named Candy Marer works there, too. She is always getting visits from this pop-eyed geek with a watery mouth. He looks like a rickety Icha-bod Crane.

  “Candy, who’s that ugly-ass old man who is always visiting you?” I ask.

  She’s affronted. “I’m going to marry that ugly-ass old man,” she huffs. She does, and she becomes Candy Spelling, wife of Aaron Spelling, the most successful TV producer ever.

  Diane DeMarko, the Global sisters, Alice—everybody comes down from the Bay Area to try to make it in L.A. We’re all taking odd jobs, going to auditions, tearing ass out to nightclubs every evening. We should have been a dance crew—Mooney and the Killer Women.

  Hollywood isn’t a late-night town. Everyone always has early calls. But I’m so young that I can dance all night and then show up at an audition looking fresh as a daisy. I’m the first one of the crew to break through.

  It’s not much, just a commercial for Vote toothpaste, a brand that’s now long gone. “Vote for Vote,” I say, and flash my pearly whites. I keep my teeth white by not bullshitting but by keeping it real. It pays off. I remember my first royalty paycheck of $56. It doesn’t sound like much, but back then the monthly rent on the two-bedroom bungalow on Sunset is $75.

  All we have to do is make enough to pay for the phone and the rent. We can go without food. We live on air. We don’t care about eating.

  The stand-up itch still burns my jock, so I scratch it by auditioning for the Second City improv group touring company. I do some of my Yankee Bedbug stuff, and they like it, and suddenly I’m in.

  The first member of the company I get to know is Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Racism—I mean, Everybody Loves Raymond’s Peter Boyle. I tell people that I go back so far in Hollywood that I know Peter Boyle when he has hair. I’m back on the improv tightrope. Chico and the Man’s Avery Shreiber is in the company with us, and the three of us do a lot of skits together.

  Second City doesn’t pay, so I run away and join the circus. Literally. The Gatti-Charles Circus advertises for a ringmaster. I don’t hesitate. I don’t ask myself if I even know what a ringmaster does. It’s money, so I call the number and sweet-talk them on the phone.

  They are surprised when I show up. I guess I d
idn’t sound black on the telephone. But they get over their shock, and I become the world’s first black circus ringmaster.

  The best thing about the gig is the costume. I wear a tight pink jacket with brass buttons, cut like an English fox-hunting coat. I get my breeches a size too small so they are tighter than tight, and I polish my thigh-high boots to a sheen. The whole package is finished off with a satin top hat. Step right up! Once again, I am styling! I wish Mama could see me now.

  We start in Southern California, then tour east to Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas. Gatti-Charles is the creation of a furry mustache that masquerades as a man. Its name is Major Gatti. He is one of those honorary majors, just like Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, is an honorary colonel.

  The circus is small, not three-ring but one ring. Gatti pulls together all the animals from popular TV shows and movies. That’s the draw. The lions from Daktari. Peggy, the chimp from Bedtime for Bonzo. Bamboo Harvester, the palomino that played Mister Ed. We have everyone but Lassie.

  At least, Major Gatti says the animals are movie stars. Who knows if they are or not? It’s not like we are going to check hoofprints to see if they are the real thing.

  I don’t have many dealings with the stock. I look the elephants in the eye and I instantly see that they know what’s going on. They know they’re slaves.

  Back then I don’t know shit about Indian or African elephants. I look Jumbo in the eye and I say, “We come from the same place, Africa.” I say, “Only a white man could look at you and think, ‘Circus,’ or ‘Theme park.’”

  White men always like to ride. They like to believe they are born in the saddle. Down in San Diego at SeaWorld, they ride killer whales. “Weeee-haaaaa!”

  I find riding animals about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.

  Watching how the white handlers act with the animals in the circus makes me think they’re all crazy. They will stick their heads in a lion’s mouth. I’m thinking, Is that some freak shit, or what? Always trying to control what shouldn’t be controlled. The white man’s motto: Must control every-thing—always.