Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  Dad was always very fussy about his appearance, as am I. He wouldn’t step out of the house if his shirt wasn’t perfectly pressed. And his hair—or, as we liked to tease him, his hairs. He carefully maintained a dozen or so strands in the middle of his scalp. These he grew long, just the way he did when he had a full head of hair back in the ’50s and ’60s. He’d part the strands dead centre, flip them to each side, and then smooth them back. In his mind, he still had hair like Cary Grant’s. In reality, it was closer to Yul Brynner’s. I have to admit that I might have inherited a hair obsession from Pop. I’ve been known to obsess about haircuts and once flew my barber, Frank, from Woodbridge all the way to Vancouver just to give me a haircut before the Juno Awards.

  With Dad, it wasn’t only the hair. Even in the house, he had to look put together. I can picture him now in his plaid shirt, always over a clean, white undershirt, and his green or white jeans (mind you, he knew to only wear the white ones until Labour Day) with a keychain clipped to one of the belt loops. I would say, “Dad, what are you doing? What’s with the keychain?” and he’d answer, “What? It looks good like that.” He knew he was taking the piss. He knew he looked a bit silly, but he loved being an original.

  He stood straight, chest out, arms back, ready to take on the entire world. And if it was a special night and he and Mom were going out to a dinner or a dance, he’d pull out his best shoes. “Look, I’m wearing my Florsheims!” he’d say, just in case any of us had failed to notice. A quick shine with the horsehair brush, and his burgundy Florsheims were good to go. I can’t say I’m different in this respect either. I’m a label whore and I love my shoes. I buy shoes all the time. You’ll never catch me wearing sneakers that don’t match my jacket, shirt or baseball hat, so don’t even try.

  Dad was all about tolerance and respect. If somebody was older than you, you had to show them respect. We had this drilled into us from a very young age. If I spoke a certain way to an elder or treated someone older the way I treated others my own age, I could expect to be corrected very quickly, in front of the offended party, or get a quick slap to the head. I was brought up with about a million aunties and uncles whom I wouldn’t dare to call by their first names. The protocol when introduced was, “Russell, say hello to Uncle Trevor.” “Hi Uncle … Yes, Uncle … Three bags full, Uncle.” For some reason, Canadians were always Mister or Missus, but Anglo-Indians were Auntie and Uncle. If you came to my house as a kid, or even as a young adult, and you called my dad Eric, you’d be corrected immediately: “That’s Mr. Peters to you, boy.” Call my mom Maureen and she’ll ask, “Did we play marbles in the schoolyard together?” Even into my forties, I can’t imagine calling some of my friends’ parents by their first names, though they ask me to.

  Dad looking good on the dance floor with Mom.

  If it was a special night and he and Mom were going out, he’d pull out his best shoes. “Look, I’m wearing my Florsheims!”

  My friends thought my dad was hilarious, and they’d rib me all the time about the weird things he’d do, which was easy enough for them since they never had to suffer the consequences. Every day, Mom and Dad would have afternoon tea. This was but one more “Anglo” aspect of their Indian-ness. Usually, they’d have it as soon as they got home from work or, as I mentioned before, as part of their Saturday and Sunday afternoon routine. One day, they were at the mall picking up Jamaican beef patties and sausage rolls to have with their tea and Dad called home to me. “Son,” he said, “we’re on our way home. Just put the kettle on so when we get home we’ll have fresh tea.”

  I was hanging out with my friends and wanted to do only the bare minimum. I plugged in the kettle, which already had some water in it. Now, it’s not like I didn’t know better; I knew the importance of four-o’clock tea, but as a kid, I was always looking for the easy way out. My mom and dad came home, made the tea, drank it, and Dad knew right away.

  He asked, “Did you reboil old water?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t put fresh water?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?! Are you mildly retarded or something? Too busy acting the fool with your half-wit friends!”

  My friends were there, watching all this unfold. They couldn’t help but be amused by Dad referring to them as “half-wits” and me as “mildly retarded.” They started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. Then my dad got furious because he thought I was laughing at him, which was disrespectful. “Don’t forget yourself, boy!”

  Then he started chasing me around the house. I couldn’t believe he was so mad about a kettle of water, and I just kept laughing hysterically, and of course that enraged him even more. “Don’t you bloody laugh at me, boy!” In the background was my mother yelling at my dad, “Bus, bus, men!”—which translates from Hindi as “Enough, enough, men.” (“Men” is used by Anglo-Indians, in other phrases too, like “Oof, men!” which is kind of like the Canadian “Oh Christ!” Then there’s “Come on, men!” which is like, “Jeez, let’s go!”)

  Once Dad got a good smack in, he was appeased and went back to his tea, grumbling, “These boys forget themselves … ” —which meant that we’d forgotten our place as children, forgotten to be respectful. Later, we’d have to rehash these sorts of scenes just to make sure I’d understood the lesson. Sometimes I had; sometimes I hadn’t. But I always knew that my dad was watching me, making sure I didn’t slide into mouthiness.

  There was zero room for disrespect. This also applied to disrespecting our mom. If Dad perceived any slight or backtalk at Mom, he’d be all over us. Mom was way more patient, as moms usually are. She’d never rat us out if we’d been rude to her when Dad wasn’t around, because she knew there’d be hell to pay. She wanted to avoid having all of Dad’s drama in the house. Mom loves dirty jokes, and one of the things we loved about her when we were kids is that she’d actually tell them to us. The funny thing was, Dad’s code of respect was so rigid that if Mom “forgot herself” by telling us an off-colour joke, Dad would say, “Maureen!! They’re your sons, not your friends. You’re their mother, for God’s sake!”

  One time, when I was about seven, my brother spilled some milk and my dad was spazzing out on him for his “oafishness” and for being a “clumsy fool.” For some reason, I wasn’t having it; I stepped between them and started yelling and crying, “Don’t you hit my brother!” A bit dramatic, I know, but on this particular occasion, I was hell bent on protecting him.

  But here’s the thing: as much as I joke about getting hit as a child, I can only remember being hit by Dad about three times. I mean, really, if you have to get hit more than three times as a kid and you haven’t figured out what you’re doing wrong, you’re an idiot. I really do believe that kids, especially boys, need a good shot when they get out of line. Those immigrant parents—they’ve got the right idea.

  Of course, Dad did not want to raise idiots, and part of his master plan for us to avoid growing into idiots was teaching us to speak properly. The English language was one of his favourite weapons, and he taught my brother and me how to defend ourselves with it. “Speak clearly!” he’d insist. “Don’t mumble, and don’t butcher the English language!” God forbid we should stumble over a word or use it incorrectly. Whenever I slipped up or made a mistake with a word, I’d be thinking, “Oh shit … Here we go.” At the same time, I’d be smiling to myself because I knew what was coming … and it was always pretty funny how angry he got. I’d hear, “What the hell’s wrong with you?

  Have you been drinking? Maybe you should stop listening to all that bloody rap music and you’d learn to speak properly!”

  I mean really, if you have to get hit more than three times as a kid and you haven’t figured out what you’re doing wrong, you’re an idiot.

  I have to hand it to Dad. I first learned to hone a joke and get every word just right because precision with words was drilled into me at an early age. As I get older, I seem to be morphing into my
dad. I, too, jump all over people when they misspeak. I can’t help it. The funny thing is, I’ve actually seen my friends shake their heads when I do this and say, “Oh shit … Here we go.”

  My dad was a shameless bargain hunter. I know now that every penny he saved was one he could put towards his family, and this is what motivated him to invent all sorts of crackpot money-saving techniques, including his clever “scratch-and-dent” grocery scheme. He used to take us to this grocery store called Usher’s in a seedy neighbourhood in the east end of the city. They had grocery carts full of bashed-up cans and he would always rummage through them. Dented cans or goods with no labels would be marked down with a magic marker. But my dad took these bargains to a whole new level. If he saw something on the shelves that he wanted but that wasn’t in the cart, he would happen to drop it—say, for instance, a can of soup—and then bring it to the cashier, saying, “Excuse me, this can is dented. It should be marked down.” I don’t think we ever had a normal-shaped can in my house, ever. You couldn’t stack anything in the cupboards.

  My dad’s legendary bargain-basement buys extended beyond groceries, once almost costing me my manhood. When I was twenty going on twenty-one, we were living in a bungalow on Epsom Downs Drive in Brampton. (This was my parents’ dream home; they always dreamed of living in a bungalow—I don’t really know why.) My brother and I had the entire basement to ourselves, with our own bedrooms, a living room, bathroom and side entrance. I was going out with this Indian girl (who shall remain nameless) and it was her first time sleeping over. She was in my bedroom, and I remember I went upstairs to say goodnight to Mom and Dad. Dad pulled me aside and said, “Is she sleeping over?”

  “Yes. Is that okay?”

  He said, “Yes,” and then went to his bedroom.

  When I was fifteen he presented me with a book called What the Swedes Teach About Sex.

  He came back and had something in his palm. Dad shook my hand and he said, “Use this.” In my palm he’d placed a red, unlubricated Trojan condom—with 25 cents written on it in magic marker. My dad had bought a condom from the scratch-and-dent cart at the Miracle Mart at the Bramalea City Centre. Needless to say, when I tried to get that sucker on that night, I almost took off half my cock. When I couldn’t take the pain of it any longer, I had to use the old “I just need to know what you feel like” line.

  I don’t recall Dad ever having a direct sex talk with me, though when I was fifteen he presented me with a book called What the Swedes Teach About Sex. “Here,” he said. “Read this.” And that was that. There were no pictures, and I never read it. He never followed up ever again, and that book stayed in the drawers of my old bedroom for the longest time—I mean way into my twenties.

  *The actual book. I still have it.

  Now, I hope you’re starting to get a clearer picture of what Eric Peters was like, but to clarify, I’m not saying here that he was weird or cheap. It’s more that he was always looking for a good deal and a way to save money. And far from being perfect, my dad was someone who refused to abide by all the conventional rules. He was all about getting ahead, and sometimes that meant breaking the rules for the greater good, so that the underdog had a chance of coming out on top. It might surprise you to know, for instance, that my dad stole—under certain circumstances, he thought this was the right thing to do. He wasn’t like a bank robber or anything, but he felt that it was okay to pilfer certain items. He looked at it as though he was sticking it to the man.

  So, taking cues from my dad, as I kid I would steal boxing magazines every month from the Hasty Market convenience store—World Boxing, Ring, KO, among others. I would even steal comic books and give them to my brother. I was so puny back then that I could stuff them down the front of my shirt. I had a concave stomach, so you couldn’t tell they were there.

  I remember once when we were at Food City in the Bramalea City Centre—I was probably about eight years old—and my dad pulled a little heist. You might remember that grocers like Food City used to have this system where the clerks would bag your groceries, put the bags in a big plastic basket and run everything outside for you so you could pull up and load everything into your car instead of having to carry it all back to your parking spot. This time, my dad pulled up to grab his groceries and he saw another basket there full of pop, so he grabbed it too and put it in the car. We high-tailed it out of there with a free case of grape pop. Dad always figured that a chain store’s margins were big enough to allow for this sort of pilfering. He had a Robin Hood mentality and saw corporate giants as the bad guys who were taking away from the little guy. He’d never hesitate to readjust the scales to balance in the little guy’s favour.

  Sometimes Dad would send me on shopping errands by myself. I remember he’d tell me to go and buy some pop, but he’d warn me, “Make sure you get the bottle with the most in it!” There I’d be at the store, carefully comparing all the bottles, because in those days they weren’t all filled up to the same level. I’d return home and present the bottle of pop to my dad and he would study it.

  “Boy, are you blind?” he’d ask. “You’ve cost us at least an extra glass of pop from this half-filled bottle!” He was prone to exaggeration. The next time we were at Food City, he took me to the pop aisle and showed me the difference between the “half-filled bottle” that I’d brought home and the other “full” bottles. The difference was a matter of centimetres.

  “Use your head, not just your eyes,” he liked to say.

  Dad was a Libra on the cusp of Scorpio. Brother and I are both Libras, too. The symbol for Libra is a scale, like a scale of justice, and for Dad, that was more than a symbol: it was a way of life. From a young age, he instilled in me the notion of justice and the difference between right and wrong. He taught us to question authority. He taught us about South Africa and Nelson Mandela, about India and Gandhi, about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Dad knew what it was like to be the underdog, and he knew firsthand that authority isn’t always on the side of good.

  He taught me to question authority: “Don’t just blindly accept things like a sheep,” he’d say. He’d also tell my brother and me never to let the police fingerprint us. He believed the system was weighted against the little guy—whether it was multinational corporations, upper management or the police who wielded the power. “The police are a paramilitary organization that refuse to allow themselves to be questioned by the people they’re charged with protecting.” He was very skeptical of the police and used to tell us stories about one of his first jobs in Canada, when he worked as a radio dispatcher for the force.

  He used to say that if a police officer had accidentally killed somebody innocent, when the body was moved, there’d be half a dozen knives underneath because every cop who’d arrived on the scene would drop a weapon to protect his fellow officer, making the victim look like an aggressor and the police officer look like he’d acted in self-defence. He would hear all the racist chatter over the radio.

  There was one time in the ’70s when the whole family took a trip to the States, and on the way back, in Princeton, New Jersey, we stopped at a diner. We waited in the lobby for the hostess to seat us, but nobody turned our way. Other people entered after us and they were escorted in immediately. This went on for about forty minutes until it became obvious to Mom and Dad that they weren’t being served because of their colour.

  My brother wanted to be a radio announcer when he was younger. Dad discouraged him from pursuing this career. He told my brother that, first of all, there wasn’t anyone who looked like us in radio and that if my brother did get on the air, he’d have to start out in small towns, and small towns were “no place for us.”

  When I first told my parents that I wanted to go into comedy, it wasn’t a really big deal for them. It’s almost like they didn’t get it. I might as well have been four years old and saying to my dad that I wanted to be an astronaut. “That’s nice, son,” he’d say.

  Early in my career, my father did tr
y to persuade me away from it. “First of all, son: you’re not white, you’re not Jewish or even a nee-gro.” Dad liked to use the word Negro, always emphasizing the ee sound. He also used to call black people “coloured.” He knew these words weren’t used anymore, but he loved the wordplay. Using these words was just fun to him.

  “Comedy isn’t a business for us,” he’d say.

  I’d counter every reservation Dad had. “That’s exactly why I’ll make it. There’s nobody like me in this business. We’re different. I’m different.”

  At that time, Dad was working during the day at a job that he hated, while I was home all day and out all night at gigs and then hanging out with my friends. To this day, the lifestyle of a comic or any other performer is difficult to understand if you’ve only known a nine-to-five life. To my Dad, doing stand-up didn’t sound like work at all. He pictured me hanging out in a nightclub and having a few laughs. He’d see me leaving the house at six or seven at night, heading out for a gig. He’d eye me skeptically. There was always a bit of disappointment as he said goodbye. He worried about me driving at night, and his parting words weren’t “Have a good show,” but “You be careful on the roads.”

  Throughout those early years, Dad continued to think my efforts on comedy were wasted. I know that when he died, despite several minor victories in my career along the way, he was still worried about what was to become of me. There was always this sense that he didn’t want me to take on something that I might fail at through no fault of my own. After all, here’s a man who had had big dreams too, who had come to Canada thinking he could do better for himself here.

  Dad at work in his home office, where he’d often write letters to the editor.

  I mentioned earlier that Dad had decided to study journalism shortly after I was born. That’s what he ultimately wanted to be: a journalist. He had been writing letters to the editor for a number of years and publishing articles wherever he could, and after finishing his studies in journalism, he put together his portfolio and submitted it to various newspapers in the hope of securing a job. In 1972, he got a call from The Hamilton Spectator about an opening for a reporter.