Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

I picked up a big rock and threw it at his window. Bam!

  So Willie and I were walking by the Gould house, and as I looked up, I saw Gould in his big bay window overlooking the backyard, sitting in his living room, watching TV. I was fifteen and full of angst, and I could still remember so vividly his being such a son of a bitch, so before I could think too much about it, and before Willie could stop me, I picked up a big rock and threw it at his window. Bam! This meteor smashed right through as Gould was watching TV, and he stood up, and I don’t think he saw us because as he went to the window, we bolted. By the time he was outside, we were nowhere to be found.

  The next night, I convinced Willie to return with me to the scene of the crime. I just had to get a good look at that satisfying hole in Gould’s perfect little world. But the bay window had been fixed. Gould had replaced the broken glass.

  Alot has changed since the late ’70s. When we first moved to Brampton, it was still just a bedroom community of Scottish, Irish, English, German and Dutch immigrants. They were scared, which is ultimately what racism and prejudice is all about: fear. They were afraid of the changes that were about to come their way. They only saw the differences between “us” and “them” rather than the similarities. But as is often the case, the more time you spend with people from different backgrounds, the more you find out how similar you are.

  I like to think that my act focuses on the sameness of our differences. I’ve been told by different fans that even though they were Greek or Italian or Lebanese, they too had a father just like mine—they too had an “Indian” father.

  I know that Canadians have come a long way since back then. I see how hard they try to accept new immigrants and cultures when thirty years ago, there’s no way they would have accepted them into their communities.

  There’s always going to be racism. We’ll never get rid of it. It allows one group of people to feel superior to and more powerful than another group of people. I still see it regularly. I’m even guilty of it. I know the one thing that disappoints me these days is when I go back to Brampton and see how segregated it is. I see groups of kids hanging out only along racial lines—Indian kids with Indian kids, Filipinos with Filipinos. I understand this—the group gives everyone a sense of security and sameness—but I feel like those kids are missing out on all the other good stuff that comes from mixing with others. I feel bad for them because once they go out into the world and leave their little bubbles of sameness, they’re going to be playing catch-up and will probably have some issues fitting in and getting along. They’ll be no different from those white kids who didn’t understand me when I first moved to Brampton. They’re going to be afraid and will see only the differences instead of the similarities between all of us.

  IN 1989, I was a nineteen-year-old smart ass. I liked to joke around a lot, especially when I was with my friends and cousins. One day at my cousin Patty’s apartment, I was making her son Andrew laugh. Andrew was a year older than my brother, and they were very close. Andrew was good-looking and charismatic and had a good sense of humour. He said to me, “You’re pretty funny. You should go to Yuk Yuk’s and try doing your jokes on stage.”

  Andrew’s older brother Bruce chimed in, “Yeah. I can see you doing it.”

  I was like, “Okay.” The thought had never crossed my mind, but once Andrew said it out loud, it sounded like a pretty good idea. In retrospect, it reminds me of that scene in Friends, when in a flashback sequence, Chandler tells Monica she should be a chef after she makes him some “righteous mac ‘n’ cheese.” She blurts out, “Okay!”

  I mentioned to my brother that this was something I was thinking of doing. At that time, I was just spinning my wheels. I wasn’t in school. I was working part time, DJing. This was the closest thing I could find to a direction in life. My brother said, “Okay. I’ll take you around to a couple of places and you can check it out.” In September, he took me to watch an amateur night at Yuk Yuk’s, just to see what it was like. A few weeks later, he went to an improv/sketch comedy show called Theatre Sports on Queens Quay near Toronto’s waterfront. I looked at what everyone was doing and said to myself, “I could do this.”

  I went up there with nothing—no bits, no set, not even any premises to build jokes around.

  On Tuesday, November 28, 1989, I stepped on stage for the first time. It was at the Yuk Yuk’s comedy club at Yonge and Eglinton, which unfortunately closed down a few years ago. It was an amateur night with maybe fifty people in the audience. Amateur nights are free, and the audience definitely gets its money’s worth … and not a penny more. Judy Croon MC’d, and Craig McLachlan and Jerry Moore followed with really, really bad impressions. I had a few friends with me. I had zero material. I went up there with nothing—no bits, no set, not even any premises to build jokes around. The club gave me five minutes, and I did two or three. I was just nervous, giggly and shitty. I have no idea what I said or did, but I got a couple of chuckles, and that was enough to get me hooked. I took my couple of chuckles and started to really think about what I needed to do the next time I went on stage. I returned to the club in February or March of 1990. This time, I’d written down some ideas and actually got some pretty good laughs. They gave me five minutes and I did maybe four.

  It would be another four years before I got bumped up from amateur nights to being a feature or opener within the Yuk Yuk’s group of clubs. Within the Yuk Yuk’s clubs, the progression was:

  Amateur Nights (anyone can take the stage)

  Split Middle (two guys do ten minutes each)

  Middle (one guy does twenty minutes)

  Co-feature (two guys do about thirty minutes each)

  Feature (also called a headliner in Canada: one guy does an hour)

  “A” Feature (you’re good)

  “AA” Feature (you’re really good)

  “AAA” Feature (you’re really, really good)

  The pay scale back in the early ’90s was: Middle, $65; MC, $75; “A” Feature, $100; “AA” Feature, $150; and “AAA” Feature, $200.

  During that time, I was picking up gigs anywhere I could. Comedian Howard Dover used to run this gig in Whitby, Ontario, every Tuesday night. The gig was at this mini-putt place, and you’d perform inside this giant golf ball. We’d do the gig for free. In lieu of payment, they’d give us whatever finger foods we wanted off the menu, and then, after the show, they’d open up their go-kart track for us. So a bunch of comics would be driving go-karts around in the middle of the night. This was 1990 and I didn’t have a car, so Marlon used to drive me out to that gig in his 1976 BMW 530i Every Tuesday, he’d drive me the eighty or so kilometres to Whitby so that we could eat free finger foods and drive go-karts. Howard now lives in L.A., and in 2005, when we first got down there, my brother and I hired him to drive us around to our various meetings. He knew his way around and it was pretty helpful for us to be able to get from meeting to meeting without worrying about getting lost.

  One of my early set lists.

  That same year, 1990, I went by Yuk Yuk’s in Mississauga. My material was still pretty lame at this point, but I had put together a little binder with all of my jokes. I’d written them out, word for word, on lined paper. It wasn’t much, but I was pretty proud of that binder. I took that thing with me to every club. It had a Yuk Yuk’s sticker right on the front. Vito, the manager of the club, was a great guy, and he agreed to give me stage time now and again, just for practice. One Saturday night, I was sitting in the greenroom with my notebook right beside me. I was young and less than a year deep in the business. I was all eager and excited. I had no idea yet that comics can be complete assholes.

  So the headline comic, Boyd Coons (at that time he used his real name, which he later changed to Boyd Banks), was sitting back there with me. He was headlining that night. He had achieved a certain notoriety for his so-called edgy comedy material and had had a certain amount of success with some of his TV roles. Banks pointed to my notebook and asked, “So hey, what’s that?” And I responded
with, “Oh, that’s my jokes.” As I said before, I was pretty earnest and somewhat innocent. Then he asked if he could see them. I said, “Oh, sure man,” thinking, This is great. Here we are, two guys in the same business, helping each other out.

  He opened up my binder and started reading my jokes. He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “You’re not fucking going on our show tonight. Not with this shit.” I was totally floored. I mean, here was a comic I recognized, someone I thought would show a little decency toward newcomers on the scene, and he completely trashed my set without even having seen me perform it. Banks used his pull to take me off the bill that night. I bet you that today, he doesn’t even remember that he refused to let me open for him, but I sure haven’t forgotten.

  I picked up other gigs outside of Yuk Yuk’s in small towns all over Ontario—Oshawa, Ajax, Pickering. There was a gig in the basement of a seafood restaurant in Hamilton called The Aquarium. These shows were organized by a woman named Diane, who was married to comedian Chris Pongrac. Diane made you “audition” to see if they were going to work with you. They’d make you fill out an application form, and one of the questions was “Who are your favourite comics?” After the audition and completing the application, Diane would critique your set like some kind of comedy guru. It was ridiculous. Best of all, this was a no-pay gig: your payment was dinner at the restaurant. I do remember that the restaurant had this one dish that I loved, coquille St-Jacques—it was fantastic!

  I also did this Northern Ontario circuit with comedian Rob Trick, who has since become a teacher with Humber College’s comedy program in Toronto, and Rob Evans, who did magic. Evans was also a high school teacher in Oshawa or Ajax. Trick had this Toyota and would drive all of us. I always appreciated Trick hooking me up with these shows, and it was pretty good money at the time. We’d start off with a gig in New Liskeard and spend the night there. The next day there’d be a show at a bar in Little Current, which should have been called “nothing current,” then a gig in Sault Ste. Marie the next night and finally an eight-hour drive from there to Timmins for the final show. The gig in Timmins was in a club called the Hollywood Backlot Studios, which was a comedy club built underneath a video store. The video store and the club were owned by Syd Brooks—maybe the only Jewish guy in Timmins. Syd and his family were very nice to me and even sent me a letter telling me how great it had been to have me at their club and telling me how well I was going to do in the future.

  WHEN I STARTED thinking about writing this book, the subject of sex was one of the first things I thought about. How was I going to talk about it? And how much detail was I going to go into? It’s important to me that I’m honest with my fans, but I also realize that there are a lot of people who will get turned off by too much information on this topic.

  Hopefully, the next few pages of anecdotes about my life as a normal, healthy, heterosexual male won’t be too upsetting for any of the older folks reading this book. I’ve also tried to be a little more PG with the language than I normally would be. If you’re afraid of sex or talking about sex, then skip this chapter.

  I must have been maybe seven years old when I first fell in love. Her name was Connie Furtado. She was Portuguese and the same age as me. We met at a wedding—I don’t remember whose wedding it was, probably someone that worked with my dad. (There were a lot of Portuguese people working at the chicken-processing plant.)

  I was totally in love with Connie, but I can honestly say I don’t know why. It wasn’t so much that there was something about her—her smile, her sense of humour, her knowledge of KISS … Frankly, I have no idea what her smile was like or what she found funny or if she even liked KISS. What did I know? I was seven, for God’s sake. I just remember dancing with her at the wedding and I liked the idea of being with a girl. At that time of my life, I was more in love with the idea of being in love—I was a romantic seven-year-old.

  I must have been maybe seven years old when i first fell in love.

  The whole concept of being a romantic at that age can be traced back to 1978 and the movie Grease. I was a fan of John Travolta because of the show Welcome Back, Kotter. I wanted to see Saturday Night Fever, but I was too young … but I could see Grease. Grease was a big romantic comedy, and I loved it. I really got into the love story between Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsen, and I ended up memorizing all of the dialogue, the dances and the music. Danny and Sandy—that’s love, I thought to myself. It looked really neat to me and I couldn’t wait to be in love myself.

  By the time I reached high school, I had been “in love” many times and seemingly had my heart broken just as often. I would let go of my romantic side after finding myself dumped repeatedly. By the time I was eighteen years old, I was five feet, ten inches tall but only about a hundred and fifty pounds. I was a late bloomer, not only genetically, but sexually. I didn’t necessarily have the sex drive of an eighteen-year-old. I mean, I was sexual, but it was really all about “pleasuring myself” and not someone else. The concept of introducing someone else to this process never entered my mind, until …

  I was seeing this girl—she was half-black and really pretty, with green eyes. I was living on Epsom Downs Drive (the house where my brother and I basically had the entire basement to ourselves). It was a Friday night, the day after my eighteenth birthday, and this girl and I were in my bedroom. From what she said, she was very sexual and had had a very active sex life with her ex-boyfriend, who was also an Indian guy. She really wanted to have sex with me that night, and I figured that I had to lose it at some point, so we went for it.

  I was horrible and didn’t even “finish.” All I kept thinking was, Man, I can’t wait for her to leave so I can “manually relieve myself.” I so wasn’t ready for sex with an actual woman. It would be twelve years before I hit my sexual stride.

  My second time was with this Anglo-Indian girl. She just climbed on top and rode me for an hour. She thought that I was really good at it because I didn’t “finish” as soon as we started. Fact is, I didn’t finish at all. I remember that as soon as she was done, I literally rolled over and called my buddy to find out what he and I were going to do that night. I think she started crying when I got on the phone to make plans. Wow, what an asshole I was.

  I fell in love, real love, for the first time in the summer of 1989. Her name was Sherrie. Actually, it wasn’t, but we’ll call her that. (All the women I’m naming here are aliases, by the way.) I met her at the Anglo-Indian reunion in London, and she was a total babe. I mean, really, she was Anglo-Indian and pretty—she was my ideal girl. I was completely smitten. I was eighteen and was convinced that she was the love of my life. This was it. We were going to last forever. At that age, that’s how you see the world—everything is immediate, dramatic and intense.

  Dancing my heart out, doing the Roger Rabbit at the Anglo-Indian reunion.

  After I got back to Canada, we continued our relationship for a year, talking on the phone and writing letters to each other on an almost daily basis. This was before email, Facebook or Twitter. The whole concept of being so far apart and being able to communicate only via handwritten letters, cards and phone calls added to our “love.” The excitement of getting mail from her was indescribable.

  It was in the autumn of that same year that I started doing stand-up. I remember being so excited after my first open-mike night and calling her to tell her about it. She didn’t really get it, but she was happy for me.

  One year to the day after we first met, I decided to fly to London and surprise her for our anniversary. I borrowed four hundred dollars from my friend Paul Perliss for the ticket and told Sherrie that I was sending her a surprise for our anniversary. When she asked me what it was, I told her, “Don’t worry. It’s a big brown package—you’ll know when it gets there.” I even called her when I landed in England to ask her if it had arrived yet.

  I showed up at her house and knocked on the door. She was shocked to see me, and since we were strictly communicating by letters and phone, th
is face-to-face meeting was a little awkward. We sat around her parents’ family room, talking and looking at photographs. At some point, she put on a video of her at some party. There were her parents, her cousins—oh, look … there she is, dancing … Oh, now she’s dancing with some guy … Oh, look, there she is kissing that same guy. What the fuck? All of a sudden my world came crashing down. She admitted that she’d been seeing the guy in the video for a while and that they were serious. Everything in my world turned to shit. So much for forever. But seriously, what did I expect at eighteen? Sherrie became a Muslim and ended up marrying the guy who replaced me.

  Sherrie became a Muslim and ended up marrying the guy who replaced me.

  After that, I had no game and no confidence. It would be another year and a half before I even thought of kissing another girl. Aside from amateur nights, I was starting to DJ more, mostly at Indian parties. There were these “day dances” at the colleges and clubs, because the Indian girls weren’t allowed to go out at night—and that’s where I met “Brenda.” Brenda was almost the same age as me, and we started seeing each other for about a year and a half. She was Hindu and her parents were crazy-strict. For the entire duration of our relationship, they never even knew I existed or that she had a boyfriend.

  Brenda would stay overnight at my place, despite her parents. She’d tell them that she was staying at her cousin’s place. If her parents called her cousin, her cousin would call my house, and then she’d call her parents back. It was the first time that I was getting laid on a regular basis, and I’d like to think that I was finally getting better at it. At the same time, Brenda and I were both twenty-one and were filled with that kind of crazy twenty-one-year-old psychotic relationship stuff—full of paranoia, jealousy and insecurity.