Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  My friend Yoshi arranged the tickets to the AVNs in January for Vernon, and my girlfriend at the time, actress Sunny Leone, who was also at the awards, made sure that Vernon was taken care of. After the awards, Vernon came down to L.A. and stayed with me for a couple of weeks and we really bonded. We both had non-traditional jobs that gave us a lot of freedom when we weren’t on the road, or in his case, training. Vernon was easy-going and not high-maintenance at all. He didn’t ask for anything and didn’t expect anything. He’d come up poor and now had a lot of people around him, clinging onto him and expecting shit from him. I didn’t expect anything. We both had money, but I would never let him pay for anything. That was something that was completely new to him. He was just so used to picking up the tab whenever he was with his crew. Though he was a five-time world champion, he would never fly himself first class or put himself up in the best hotels. He was practical and realistic. Whenever we were together we’d just hang out and talk shit. I can still hear him now, as we’d walk through the Beverly Center and he’d see some hot chick: “Hey shorty! Holla holla holla!” That shit just made me laugh.

  I can still hear him now, as we’d walk through the Beverly Center and he’d see some hot chick: “Hey shorty! Holla holla holla!”

  On July 24, 2009, I performed the largest indoor comedy show in Just for Laughs history. The show was at the Bell Centre in Montreal and wrapped the summer leg of my Twentieth-Anniversary Tour. It was great and we had a great time at the afterparty, where Spin, Scratch and I all took turns DJing. Just for Laughs even presented me with an award in recognition of the show.

  After the party, I decided to drive home. I was sick of staying in hotels and just wanted to sleep in my own bed in Toronto. I also had a new girlfriend at the time and wanted to see her, too. When I got home, I slept all day Saturday and was still tired, so I went to bed early that night (well, early for me, which would have been around 2 A.M. or so).

  On Sunday I got up early and saw a missed call on my phone from Vernon’s assistant, Armica. She had called at three-thirty in the morning, which was strange. Without even checking the message, I called her back. She started crying and then said that Vernon had been murdered that night, a victim of a carjacking. I don’t remember what I said, but I know I just started bawling like a little baby. My girlfriend had a wedding to go to, so I dropped her home—she was still new at the time, so I did my best to keep it together in front of her.

  When I got back home, I really started freaking out. I was crying uncontrollably. My head felt like a tornado. I paced around the house with my heart racing. I thought I was going crazy. I sat in my Jacuzzi. I sat in my sauna. I put on the Iron Maiden DVD Flight 666 and played it full blast. As the day progressed, I started texting my girlfriend, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here taking care of me?” She simply replied that she was at her friend’s wedding and that there was nothing she could do. She was not comforting or understanding at all.

  That day, the story of Vernon’s murder was on the news and I was getting more details from mutual friends in Atlanta. The night he was killed, he was training at a local gym in Atlanta. He had his eleven-year-old godson with him. At around 11 P.M., after training, he’d stopped at a gas station to put air in one of his tires when a guy came up to him and asked for money. Vernon took out his wallet and the guy snatched it and started running. Vernon reached into his car, grabbed his gun and took off after the guy. He chased him around a corner and shots were exchanged. Vernon was shot seven or eight times with a semi-automatic pistol in the torso, legs and head. His godson had gone into the gas station to get help and wasn’t injured.

  The day I got the news about Vernon, I had tickets to see Richard Cheese’s very funny lounge act at the Phoenix in Toronto. I was really looking forward to the show, but that night I wasn’t in any mood for comedy and just wanted to go home. I hadn’t felt that fucked up since my dad died.

  A week later, my brother and I flew down to Atlanta for Vernon’s funeral. It was a massive event at this huge Baptist church. A lot of boxers were there, including Evander Holyfield. The service was very elaborate, and I was listed as a pallbearer on the memorial booklet. One of Vernon’s friends, Les King, had gone up to the altar to say a few words and I went up with him. I thought that I might say something, too, but as I stood there I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep it together, so I just stood alongside Les silently and then sat back down. I don’t know if it was the kind of send-off that Vernon would have wanted, given how low-key he was.

  Ultimately, that’s what I was mourning: all the stuff that we’d never get to do together.

  I was glad that I went to the funeral. Although I didn’t want to say goodbye to my friend, I knew that I had to and that I’d feel strange if I hadn’t gone. They say that when we mourn someone, we’re not grieving for them, we’re grieving for ourselves. My friendship with Vernon was still new and still growing. We had plans for the future. Ultimately, that’s what I was mourning: all the stuff that we’d never get to do together.

  THE FIRST time I went to India was in 1976, when I was six years old. The whole family spent Christmas in Calcutta with my grandmother, KK, Uncle Maurice, Uncle Roger and his wife at the flat on Elliot Road. My grandmother gave me a cowboy outfit as a Christmas present. It came with a vest, a cowboy hat, a holster and a gun.

  In 1982, we returned to India again. My brother and I stayed with our dad in Burhanpur while Mom went ahead to Calcutta to see her family. While we were in Burhanpur, Dad taught both of us how to use an air rifle to shoot birds and for target practice. He’d take us for long walks into the surrounding hills where he spent his childhood. The hills weren’t as lush as they were when he was younger—most of the trees had been cut down for firewood by the villagers. The servants would come with us. These were the same guys who’d been working for Dad’s family for the past thirty-plus years.

  With the deforestation and dwindling amount of big game in the area, these treks into the hills were more about nostalgia than anything else. The chances of actually seeing a tiger, leopard or cheetah were pretty slight. However, at one point Dad pointed to a paw print in a muddy gulley. “You see that?” he said. “A tiger was just here.”

  Returning to the house from one of these walks, we were crossing a field. As we walked, I heard a hissing sound—ssssssssss. Nobody else heard it but me.

  “Dad! Stop! Stop moving,” I said.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Listen.”

  Everyone froze, and then they heard it too. We all looked down, and right by one of the servants’ feet was an asp, poised to bite. My dad immediately moved to get his gun into position, but I had the air rifle ready and just pointed it downward. “Pop?” My dad nodded and I squeezed off a shot. Somehow, I managed to hit the snake right in the head and kill it on the spot.

  The servants were not only relieved but impressed and treated me like a champ. I didn’t know what they were saying in Urdu, but I know they wanted to carry me home on their shoulders. Dad was impressed, too, which was not a minor accomplishment. I don’t know if the servant realized just how close he came to being shot in the ankle or the foot. It was a lucky shot, and I knew it.

  I loved that in Burhanpur I could be outdoors and run around and explore the compound. But as I’d be leaving the house, my dad would warn me, “Watch out for cobras … and don’t fall in the well!”

  At the house in Burhanpur there was no running water, but there was electricity, which would usually go out in the evenings because of rolling power cuts. Sometimes we’d eat dinner by gaslight and Dad, our grandmother and her brother, Uncle Jumbo, would tell us stories about our grandfather and reminisce about “the old days” when everyone was still alive and the family—my uncles, aunts, cousins and friends from the city who would come and stay with them—would all be together at the house.

  The best analogy I can make to the house in Burhanpur is the family cottage where everybody stayed every summer. There was a massive
tiger skin mounted on the main wall of the dining room, which was the focal point of the house, smack dab in the centre when you walked in from the enclosed verandah. All the bedrooms opened onto it, and the kitchen was at the back. According to my dad, when the house was full there’d be cots in the dining room and all over the house where everyone would sleep. My brother and I shared a bed on one side of the house, where we’d sleep under a mosquito net at night. The toilet was essentially a wooden chair with a hole cut in the bottom, beneath which there’d be an aluminum bucket with a handle. A little aluminum lid sat on top of the hole.

  As I said before, Dad grew up hunting, fishing and camping in the hills around the house. All of the men in the family were known as shikars (hunters) by the local villagers and were often called upon to rid villages of nuisance tigers and other predators. These were usually old animals that couldn’t hunt very well anymore, so they’d wander into villages looking for easier kills—farm animals and humans. As Dad liked to say, “Man is the easiest thing for it to kill.” Dad shot five man-eating tigers over his life, and even though these were problem animals and the kills were sanctioned by the local authorities, he came to regret them later as tigers became an endangered species. He felt a lot of guilt about it. But at the time, it was the villagers who were endangered, not the tigers.

  The villagers looking on after a man-eater was killed.

  Dad loved to tell us about the last tiger that he shot. He kept the skin, with the taxidermied head still attached, its mouth open in a roar, and brought it to Canada with him. From the tip of the tail to the tip of the nose, the skin measures almost twelve feet and is eight feet across. When people came to our house to visit, he’d pull out the tiger skin, spread it across the living room and tell the guests about his last encounter with a man-eater …

  Dad with the last tiger he shot.

  A villager was working in the fields near a local village. He was cutting long grass with a scythe and didn’t see the old tiger sleeping nearby. The tip of his scythe accidentally glanced the sleeping tiger and startled it. Instinctively, the tiger reached up and swatted the villager, knocking his head into his chest cavity. The slightly embellished version of the story goes that the villagers spent a week looking for the guy’s head, only to find it in his ribcage. Given Dad’s reputation, the villagers came to him and asked him to hunt down the decapitating tiger.

  Dad took one of my grandmother’s best goats and tied it to a tree in the jungle where this tiger was said to roam. He set himself up in a machan—a kind of hunting blind you make in a tree so that you can watch for prey from above—and waited for nightfall. After a few hours, the goat suddenly started to get antsy, pacing and bleating loudly. Dad knew that this meant the tiger was close, and he started to get his rifle ready for the shot. There was a full moon that night, and Dad could see the tiger in the clearing, not far from his tree.

  The startled tiger looked up and immediately launched himself into the air, straight for Dad.

  It was low to the ground and ready to pounce on the goat, but Dad realized he didn’t have a clear shot. He grabbed his flashlight and tapped it against the barrel of the rifle. The startled tiger looked up and immediately launched himself into the air, straight for Dad. His rifle ready, Dad squeezed off a single shot that hit the tiger square in the chest, instantly killing it and knocking it to the ground. He waited in the machan for a while, then threw a few stones at the tiger to make sure it was dead before he came down from the tree. His mother was very happy that the goat came back home in one piece.

  Dad remained fascinated by tigers, and all wildlife, for the rest of his life. He made regular donations to the World Wildlife Fund, the SPCA and the Humane Society.

  I have to admit that, on all those trips to India, the dirt and poverty never registered with me. I don’t know why. It almost seemed like, “Okay, so this is how people live in India. It’s just a bit different than Canada.” I played with the servants’ kids who were my age. I didn’t speak Hindi or Urdu and they didn’t speak English. We just kind of ran around the compound—whether at the house in Burhanpur or in the front compound of my grandmother’s apartment in Calcutta. There were also a few Anglo-Indian kids living in the buildings, so I’d play with them too.

  I returned to India in 1998 with my mom. I really wanted to go back and was excited to be there. We stayed with Uncle Maurice in Calcutta (my grandmother and KK had long passed, but Uncle Maurice, Aunty Jennifer and my cousins Steven and Tanya still lived in the same flat). Mom and I shared a bed in the back room—yes, that’s right: at the age of twenty-seven, I shared a bed with my mom. Once again, it goes back to my childhood view of India. The bed had a makeshift mattress, hand-stuffed with coconut hair or straw or something. After my first night on the coconut mattress, I woke up with bruises on my hips, but there was no point complaining. We couldn’t afford a hotel, and I liked that we were staying in the same flat that I’d stayed in when I was six years old.

  I was filled with nostalgia on that trip—memories of running around the apartment, everyone twenty years younger, my grandparents and the sense of family. The trip made me realize how much I loved India. I loved the people, the food, the culture. And the energy was incredible. In cities like Calcutta, every night seemed like Saturday night. When we were there, people would come over and visit during the week and we’d go out all the time. My uncle’s flat hadn’t changed in the sixteen years since my last visit. There was still no running hot water or bathtub or shower—just a concrete floor with a drain in the middle of it. The family keeps a large, red plastic garbage can in the bathroom, and when you wanted to take a shower, they’d scoop out a pot full of water, boil it on the little gas stovetop in the kitchen and then add it to the water in the garbage can and mix cold and hot together. Next, you’d scoop out a mug of lukewarm water and throw it on yourself to get wet, then soap yourself and repeat, splashing yourself until the soap was gone. It may sound like a lot of work, but hey, it’s India and that’s just how it is. The lifestyle of the Anglo-Indians in India isn’t great. While there’s a lot of wealth and a growing middle class, AIs still pretty much live below a middle-class standard. After the Brits left in 1947, we were at loose ends—and the “Indians” reclaimed their country, leaving the Anglo-Indians behind.

  Growing up, I always identified myself as an Indian. People would ask me what I was, and my answer was always “Indian!” I don’t think I’m different from any other first-generation kid identifying myself by where my parents came from. I was born and raised in Canada. The only Indian things about me are my parents and my skin tone. Even my name isn’t “Indian.” Culturally, I’m not Indian at all, and that trip to India in 1998 brought that realization home: I’m Canadian.

  With that in mind, I returned to India in 2007 for my first comedy tour. I wasn’t really sure exactly how my act would go over with the fans there. Let’s face it: a lot of my punchlines up to then had something to do with the Indian accent, and here I was, going to the place where pretty much everyone had that accent. Would they get it? Would they get the jokes about the Chinese and all the other stuff? I had no idea, and I was a bit nervous before I did my first show in Bangalore. I chose comedian Rusty Dooley to open for me on that tour. Rusty’s set consisted of a lot of impersonations from the movies and used props and music. He was completely different from any other opener that I had ever worked with, but I thought he’d be the right guy for India. Rusty had never been outside the U.S. before and was more than a bit uneasy about going to India. I remember him telling me how his mom had begged him not to go. She was afraid he’d catch AIDS and, as she told him, “Nothing’s worth catching the AIDS.”

  When we got to India, he hardly ate anything. At breakfast, he’d just eat the chocolate off the top of the doughnuts. He was terrified of catching some disease. My security guys, Ray Ray and Shake, decided they were going to fuck with him and told him that when he was walking around town, he should walk on the balls of his feet—because, if his
heels touched the ground, he’d catch a flesh-eating disease. He actually did that for about a day until my guys copped to it.

  The shows were all sold out before I got there, and extra shows were being added after I landed—we even did a matinee in Delhi. The first show in Bangalore went great. The audience was smart, sharp and with me on every word and reference. I could relax now. I didn’t have to worry about my act or even change anything. I just did my thing, and the tour went off well.

  In Bombay, there were a few Bollywood stars at the shows. I decided to go off on them and made fun of the movies and their acting, and they loved it. I also stayed at the Taj Hotel on that trip, the exact same one that was attacked by terrorists on November 26, 2008. It was very surreal to watch the building burn on CNN. During those same attacks, the terrorists hit the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay. I had been at the Oberoi exactly one month earlier, shopping at the Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo stores. Now, that really freaked me out. It was only a matter of four weeks from my visit to the day the Oberoi was attacked.

  Despite my “Canadian-ness,” I still feel at home in India. I feel comfortable and connected to my past and to my parents and grandparents.

  IN DECEMBER 2009, I was headlining the Amman Stand-Up Comedy Festival in Amman, Jordan. Now, I know that when you think comedy, you think, “Hey, Amman, Jordan!”—which is exactly why the city puts on the festival. It wants to change the way people see Arabs and the Middle East in general, and I thought it would be pretty cool to support that.

  I’d been told that the king, His Majesty King Abdullah II, was a fan of mine—he’d seen my clips on YouTube. Go figure. The first year I did the fest, he couldn’t make it to my show and called me personally to apologize for not coming. He sent me a beautiful white-gold Jaeger-LeCoultre watch as a thank-you gift for doing the show. Needless to say, I knew I’d be coming back to the festival.