Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  There was one time when we made pâté and he put me in charge. The pâté had liquor in it, and he had to be very careful when he pulled out liquor in class because it was supposed to go in the food, not down our throats. Mr. Kolar took me and a couple others to a food show at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. One of the head chefs from the Four Seasons tasted the pâté I’d made and said it was one of the best he’d ever tasted. The guy started talking to Kolar because they knew each other, and then Kolar was like, “Russell, this guy wants to give you a job!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. When you’re done high school, you should definitely look into it.”

  Obviously, I never did, but I was really flattered. It was the first time somebody said that I was good at something.

  Above and beyond teaching us kids how to cook, Fred taught us about demeanour, about thinking about others and putting yourself in their shoes before you decide to act out or judge. That’s a pretty incredible lesson to have passed along. To this day, I still keep in touch with Fred, a man who was an inspiration for me when I was a small, brown, mouthy teen, and who remains an inspiration and a friend to this day.

  Mr. Kolar and me, backstage at the Air Canada Centre, 2007.

  North Peel was a turning point in my life. That school gave me a sense of community and belonging. That isn’t to say I was an angel during that time. I became the kind of guy who, if you needed something, anything, I’d be able to get it for you. If you needed a leather jacket, I knew somebody who worked at the mall who could get it for you. A stereo? I could get you one cheap. I was always the link between demand and supply.

  This reputation and ability to get stuff ultimately led me to supplying drugs. I needed money, so I started selling small amounts of hash and weed to people I knew. To be honest, all I wanted was to make enough to go to Burger King and McDonald’s when I felt like it. And I wasn’t doing drugs myself; I wasn’t some thug operating as part of a cartel, either. I was just a guy who knew where to get stuff and knew people who wanted it—mostly white-collar people who didn’t want to risk pulling up at a corner somewhere to buy recreational drugs.

  I wasn’t a very good dealer. My supplier knew that I didn’t do any drugs, so he could trust me to move small amounts on consignment. One day—actually my first day selling drugs—I picked up an ounce of black hash from him and took it back home. In the basement of my parents’ house I chopped the ounce into dime pieces, wrapped them in tinfoil and went off to sell them. I sold a dime to the older brother of a friend. He took the hash, left, and thirty minutes later came back to see me.

  I was the only drug dealer around with a return policy.

  “I don’t want it. Give me my money back,” he demanded.

  “Uhm … okay,” I said. I was the only drug dealer around with a return policy.

  So he handed the dime back to me and I gave him back his twenty bucks. He left, and I started to wonder about what he’d given me. I opened the foil and the hash looked the same, felt the same. Black hash is black on the outside and brown in the middle … but it didn’t smell right. I broke the piece open and yes, it looked brown in the middle. Hmmm … I didn’t know what it was supposed to taste like, but I touched the piece to my tongue anyway. It was sweet … kind of tasted like licorice—because it was licorice. Nibs. He had used the black hash, gotten a full refund and given me back a Nibs.

  I ultimately stopped selling drugs because I wasn’t making any real money off of it. There was nothing cool about selling and I was just taking a huge risk carrying drugs around with me. I was no Tony Montana and I knew it, so I quit.

  Sometimes I think about how things could have turned out for me, how things could have gone differently. Marlon and I used to hang with this guy named Mike Boudreau. The three of us were tight. We even went to the prom together because none of us could get dates. Dad let me borrow his car, a burgundy Cutlass Ciera. Marlon had brought his ghetto blaster because Dad’s car never had a cassette deck. After the prom, the three of us drove around Brampton, playing “Plug Tunin’” by De La Soul and “Small Time Hustler” by the Dismasters. We kept singing along with and rewinding that track over and over because it was so dope. We had a great time together.

  A year or two after we graduated, Mike was dating this girl and they broke up. Then either she or her parents told him not to come around anymore. Mike wasn’t having that. One night he broke into her parents’ house and made his way to their bedroom. He proceeded to stab the father to death and then stabbed the girl’s mother in the eye. He just went crazy. He then tried to kidnap his ex-girlfriend and ended up getting caught in Lexington, Kentucky.

  There was another friend of ours, Richard Smith, a.k.a. Superman, who used to break into cars and steal stereos. One night, he was breaking into cars in Major Oaks Park at Highway 410 and Williams Parkway, which was a popular place to go “parking.” He opened the door of one of the cars parked there to find a couple making out in the backseat. The guy in the car started freaking out and got into a fight with Rich. In the course of the scuffle, Richard ended up stabbing the guy and the guy died. Richard went to jail for murder.

  Then there was Norman, a kid I knew from North Peel. He used to smoke a lot of weed. One day, he and his dad got into an argument. Norman beat his father to death, then propped him in a chair, sat down beside him in the living room and watched TV. When people say that weed doesn’t mess you up, I say, “I beg to differ.”

  And then there was Peter Mann. Dad and I actually went to his house a few times to watch fights because he had a satellite dish and got HBO. Peter was a big boxing fan. I remember we watched Michael Nunn knock out Sumbu Kalambay in under two minutes in 1989. One day, he told me he was going to kill his ex-girlfriend. At the time, I thought he was talking shit. He went and stabbed her the next day. He didn’t kill her, though. Then jumped on a plane and flew to England. He’d had it all planned out. He was eventually caught in India, where he had disguised himself by growing a beard and wearing a turban.

  I know it’s weird to have been around this many people who have committed such heinous acts. It’s definitely not normal, unless you grew up in the projects or a ghetto in the States. I knew all of these guys, and I knew them as good people. I’m not condoning or justifying what they did, but I can’t help but remember the good parts of them. That’s the way I am. I can’t help but see the good in people, even when I know that they’re not all good. Every now and then I’ll run into someone who knows someone who went to visit one of these guys in jail and they’ll say, “Hey Russell, so-and-so said you’re really popular in the joint.”

  The fact that this shit was all around me really freaks me out. In fact, my entire family has been shaken by all this violence because in some cases, it has hit too close to home. In 1995, I came home one night at about two or three in the morning and Dad was in his office. I said, “What are you doing up?” and he started crying and told me my cousin Andrew had been killed. Andrew had been working in the Dominican Republic. He used to host these poker games with friends in the building where he lived. One night, one of his friends parked in another guy’s parking spot (somebody he’d already had a few run-ins with) and the guy went ballistic. Andrew went downstairs to talk to the guy, and as soon as he stepped out the front door, the guy pulled out a gun and shot him straight through the heart. Andrew had it all. He was good-looking, funny as hell and totally charming. He was the one person who encouraged me to become a comic. He was murdered when he was only thirty-two years old. It was the first time I had to deal with a death this close in the family, and to be honest, I don’t know how I dealt with it.

  After my grandparents divorced, my mother was estranged from her father for sixteen-plus years. They reconnected in the mid-’70s after her father emigrated to Australia with his second wife. Mom and my grandfather had only just reconnected. He had even sent her a care package from Australia—boomerangs, stuffed animals, Australian thermometers … My grandfather worked as a security
guard in the Walton’s department store in Sydney, and one day a young couple came in and started shoplifting. My grandfather saw them. He followed them outside and confronted the guy. The guy then proceeded to attack him. He beat my grandfather and knocked him to the ground, where he began kicking him. Nobody came to my grandfather’s aid, and the couple got away. My grandfather managed to get himself back inside the department store, where he started to complain of chest pains. They called an ambulance for him, and he died of a heart attack in the ambulance on the way to the hospital as a result of the beating he’d received. The guy who beat my grandfather never went to jail for murder because there was never enough evidence to convict him.

  The entire spectre of murder is a little too close to me for my own liking. It’s not just knowing those who’ve committed these crimes, but knowing those who have been taken away so senselessly by them. The loss changes the way you see your loved ones and the world around you. I thought that after my cousin Andrew was taken away from us my association with this kind of tragedy would be over, but it wasn’t the case.

  After graduating from North Peel in ’89, I applied to Sheridan College in Brampton. I didn’t really want to go to college, because I didn’t like school to begin with. But after applying, I learned that Sheridan wouldn’t even accept my high school diploma because they didn’t recognize my high school as acceptable. I remember thinking this was all just bullshit, that I’d agonized through math and English courses for four years only to find out that they weren’t even good enough for a post-secondary education.

  So what did I do? I kept really quiet about it, and when my dad gave me the money to go to school, I just headed off to college without actually being enrolled in any classes. My dad would send money off for my tuition, and when the refunds would come in the mail, I’d intercept them, take the money and spend it on other stuff.

  But here’s the thing: it’s not like I just sat around on the couch all day. I did go to college, technically. I’d get up in the morning, then take all my records to campus with me. Sheridan had a radio station with a whole DJ setup, and I would DJ for that station all day long. That was the extent of my college education. DJ Russell on the air at the Brampton campus of Sheridan College.

  “DJ Russell.”

  There is no shame involved in anything I did back then. I feel like I defended myself when I was picked on, made fun of, or even when I was quietly underestimated. I did what I had to do. No remorse. Actually, I remember those days fondly, because they made me who I am today. I don’t feel scarred from that time in my life, probably because I’ve become successful since, and so, in a lot of ways, I’m able to see the past for what it was and move on.

  In ’97, I went back to Chinguacousy for a high school reunion. I had already done a little bit of TV, and admittedly, when I went back there, I was a really arrogant asshole. I felt like I had something to prove, and seeing the faces of those who’d treated me like garbage—who’d literally thrown me in the garbage—brought it all back home. But I’m glad to say that that anger didn’t last.

  I HATE the word Paki. It’s my “N” word. In case you don’t know it, it’s the slang term used against Indians, Pakistanis and sometimes Arabs—or anyone else from that part of the world. It started being used in England in the ’70s and made its way to Canada and other parts of the Commonwealth.

  The word Paki is one of those words that has been directed my way through all of my formative years; it’s a word that followed me until I was about eighteen, and it’s a word that’s really hard to forget. I’m pleased to say that nowadays, Paki is not a word I hear all that often—it’s faded into the background—but there are still some assholes who use it, cowards who most often will say it when they’re just out of hearing range, always behind your back and rarely to your face. These days, it’s a word used only when there are no Pakis around.

  I associate the term with stigma and venom; it still really makes my stomach churn when I hear people using it. I don’t even like it when Indian people say it. And I don’t like it used, even if it’s in a “nice” way. For instance, sometimes someone around me will say something like “I saw a really good Paki comic at a club last night,” and I’ll be fuming. Because here’s the thing: if that person had seen a black comic, they would never say, “I saw a really good nigger comic last night.” No way. And there’s still something in that usage that is pointing to a person’s feelings of superiority, as if they’re subtly suggesting that it’s amazing that a Paki might actually be good at something or might even be better at it than a “non-Paki.” Just a few years ago, I was in a restaurant and a guy actually said to me, “Hey, you’re that guy who does those Paki jokes!” I couldn’t believe my ears. I just stared at him like, “Are you fucking serious?” So let’s get this straight, once and for all: there’s simply no right time or way for that word to be used.

  When I was growing up and was called a Paki a lot, I learned really fast that being Pakistani has nothing to do with the power of the insult. Amazingly, your parents could be from Sri Lanka, Trinidad or, in my case, India … and you were still a Paki. Paki became an umbrella term for anyone who was brown, and the intent, no matter where you were from, was to make you feel like a piece of shit. There was never any good association with the word. You never heard, “Hey, that guy’s a great Paki!” I don’t know if Pakistani people have tried to reclaim the word for themselves, but for me, to this day, every time I hear it, I feel someone’s picking at a scab.

  Now, I’m just five years old, I’m getting sprayed with a garden hose and I don’t even have a clue what a Paki is.

  So here’s where I let you in on why. To do this, I need to take you back to the Gates of Bramalea, the complex of townhouses where I grew up. It was the summer of ’75, and wee Russell Peters, five years old, was riding his bicycle through the neighbourhood. Just a kid on a bike on a nice summer day, and I rode past this house on the corner, very close to where I lived. Out on the front lawn was one of the neighbours, Mr. Gould, and he was watering his lawn with a garden hose. As I rode past, the man said to me—a five-year-old child on a bike—“Go home, you fuckin’ Paki.” And before I knew what was going on, he’d pointed the hose at me.

  Now, I’m just five years old, I’m getting sprayed with a garden hose and I don’t even have a clue what a Paki is. I was completely innocent. So in my child’s mind, I looked for a way to comprehend what was going on, and so I thought to myself, Mr. Gould, our nice neighbour, is doing me a favour. He’s pointing a hose of cold water at me because it’s hot outside and he’s helping me cool off.

  A lot of racial abuse was directed at me as a kid, but it took a long time for me to comprehend what it all meant in the big picture. Meanwhile, my mom didn’t really experience firsthand what I was going through—and that was weird, too. I mean, my mom’s a hell of a lot more Indian than I am—she was born and raised in India but happens to have fair skin—and then there’s me, born in Canada, and I’m the one being picked on for being from somewhere else.

  On any given day, my mom would go to the bakery on Dupont Street or wherever else she needed to go; sometimes the staff in the stores would speak to her in Italian or Maltese, other times in Portuguese. They had no idea who they were talking to, so more often than not, they just kind of assumed she was one of them. I never had that feeling when I was on the streets; if I went into an Italian shop, it was clear to everyone that I was not Italian. When I went to Mom as a kid to tell her I’d been called a Paki, her response was, “Well, you just turn around and tell them that you’re from India, and you’re not a Paki. So there.” For her, the problem was easily solved by offering a simple geography lesson, but even then, I knew there was more going on beneath the surface.

  Here’s a strange fact: as a kid, there were times when I never really felt close to my mom. It’s hard for me to even say that because I adore her and now I’m totally a mama’s boy. I actually feel I share a lot more traits with Mom than with anyone else in the f
amily. Still, when I was young, I almost harboured resentment against her because she used to yell at me when I was a pain in the ass. I’d gotten used to being yelled at outside the home for my skin colour, so as a kid I just kind of assumed my mom was yelling at me for the same reason—for not being white. So I kind of had this little psychological problem. I don’t think I really got close to my mom until I was a teenager and was old enough to realize she had had good reasons to discipline me when I was young, reasons that had nothing to do with skin tone.

  In my teenage years, things kind of built up inside me, and because I didn’t have much of an outlet for my rage, I eventually turned to revenge as a way of dealing with some of the bad shit that had been directed at me. Gould, my racist neighbour, was always there in the background. After he turned that hose on me when I was five and called me a “fuckin’ Paki.”

  One night, I was walking back home through the Gates of Bramalea townhouses with Willie. I don’t know why, but for some reason the entire episode of Mr. Anglo-Saxon Gould calling me a fuckin’ Paki kept flashing through my mind. I’d come to know the Gould family over the years. They had two kids: a girl my brother’s age, and a boy who was just one year older than me.