by Bernie Mac
“I’ve been here since high school, my whole got-damn life,” he said, signaling for another drink. “They’re going to get rid of me.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “But if you drink like this every day, they’ll get rid of you for sure.”
A few days later I’m at a new Dock’s, and they say my name on the radio. “This Saturday at The Last Laugh, Bernie Mac!”
These new motherfuckers I work with are looking at me, and suddenly I’m hearing that old refrain: “Why you working here, man? You famous. You on the radio.”
“I like it here,” I said. “And I need the money.”
I went to The Last Laugh on Saturday, as advertised, and I killed.
“Black women somethin’ else. I love me some black women. But black women, boy, they want to be your mama, your father, your pastor, and your boss, too. They want to tell you what to do all the got-damn time. You go out to eat, they want to order for you, too. ‘He’ll have the salad.’ Salad? Salad, my ass! Don’t be ordering for me, girl! I’m hungrier than a motherfucka! ‘And some iced tea.’ Iced tea? Don’t fuck with me, woman! I want to get drunk tonight.”
Following Monday, the phone rang at Dock’s. Someone at A.K.A. wanted to know if I was available Saturday night.
When I got off the phone, the brothers I worked with were looking at me.
“So you a comedian, huh?”
“I do my thing.”
“You think you funny, huh?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
“I don’t think you funny. I think Chris Rock funny.”
Chris Rock had been discovered in a comedy club, and he’d made his film debut a couple of years earlier, with Eddie Murphy, in the sequel to Beverly Hills Cop.
“I think Chris is funny, too,” I said.
“You just jealous,” the other guy said. “You wish you was half as funny as Chris Rock.”
Human nature! What is it about most people? It’s like they want to bring you down. And for no reason!
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not jealous.”
I’d been cured of jealousy many years back. Was over at our apartment above the Burning Bush Baptist Church. I was maybe ten years old. One of my little cousins came over for Sunday dinner, and my mother hugged him so tight I ran off in tears. She came to my room to get me.
“What’s wrong, Bean?” she asked.
“Why you hug him like that?” I said, still crying. “I’m your son, not him.”
“You think I only got so many hugs in me?” she asked. “You think if I give him a hug, there’ll be one less hug for you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hugs aren’t like pieces of pie, son. Plenty of hugs to go around.”
“Made me feel bad,” I said.
She wiped my tears and broke it down for me. Told me about jealousy. About envy. Told me about Cain and Abel, and how they ended up when they let those feelings get to them. “Jealousy and envy are just like anger,” she said. “The most hurt you’re doing is to yourself.”
I wish more people in the world knew my mother’s lesson. But it seems like most people can’t help themselves. Even when they’re on top, they don’t want anyone else making it. They want to be on top forever. They don’t ask themselves where they’re going to be when they’re dead.
Swear to God, I can’t figure it out. You don’t get nothin’ from wishing ill on anyone, but most people still do it. Can’t help themselves.
I got back to the apartment—another got-damn red note on the door—and I showered and went off to Dingbats. I had a lousy night. Don’t know why. Letting shit get to me, I guess.
“Before I discovered girls, I didn’t believe in no cleanliness. I was a nasty muh’fucka. I was the type of nigga who’d turn his drawers inside out instead of putting on a new pair. Get up in the mornin’, too lazy to brush my teeth—so I’d take my fingernail and scrape that muh’fucking plaque right off.”
Nothing. Maybe a small smile in the third row. So I tried something else:
“Black people, we pay our bills when the fuck we ready to pay. And we never pay all the bill. The bill’s eighty dollars, we’ll give you thirty. Why? Because we got to smoke. We got to drink. If you don’t drink or smoke, black folks think something’s wrong with you.”
But I couldn’t make it happen with that audience. Maybe they had a lot of bills to pay. Or dirty drawers. Or both.
Went home after the show and tossed and turned all night. Woke up late the next morning, Sunday, still in a bad mood.
“Where’s Je’Niece?” I asked Rhonda.
“She’s out front, playing.”
Je’Niece was already eleven years old—this was the summer of 1989—a tall, beautiful girl. We kept her on a tight leash. She was allowed to play outside, but she couldn’t go beyond the corner. I ate something and went to look for my little girl. She wasn’t where she was supposed to be. I went down to the corner and into the next block and back again. I went to houses of neighbors we knew. No Je’Niece. My heart was pounding like a motherfucker.
Just then a car pulled up at the curb. A woman was behind the wheel, and she had three girls with her. One of the girls was Je’Niece. She got out, and she looked worried. She had good reason to look worried.
“Where the hell you been, girl?” I snapped, fit to be tied.
And the woman in the car called out, “Oh, Mr. McCullough, please don’t be mad. It’s all my fault. I took the girls to the store.”
I didn’t even listen to that woman. I grabbed Je’Niece and took her inside and already had my belt off by the time we were through the door. And I started whaling on that girl. She was crying, but I didn’t hear her; I didn’t want to hear her.
Next thing I know, Rhonda’s there, grabbing my arm, trying to get between us. She’s in my face, screaming—“That’s enough, Bernard!”—and I could sure enough hear her. But I didn’t stop. I pushed her out of the way and kept hitting Je’Niece, determined to teach her a lesson.
Then Rhonda came at me again, jumping on me, and again I pushed her away. And she came at me a third time, WHAM!—hit me hard in the chest. And I was so gone with rage by now that I hit her back; hit her so hard she spun around and bounced off the wall and fell to the ground.
Then everything went quiet for me. I don’t know what it was. I must’ve been in shock or something. I could hear Je’Niece crying behind me and saw Rhonda on the floor there, whimpering, and I just got-damn shut down. I walked out. I wanted to get the hell out of there.
I walked and I kept walking, and I ended up on the East Side, at the home of Pat Cattenhead, an old friend of the family.
“Hey, Bean,” she said. She hadn’t yet noticed the sour look on my face. “What brings you around?”
“I had a fight with Rhonda,” I said.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
Pat closed the front door behind me. She asked if I was hungry, and I said I wasn’t hungry, and could I spend the night. She went off to get fresh sheets.
The morning after the fight, I left Pat’s house and went to work at Dock’s, and at the end of my shift I went back to my own house and got my stuff. I got everything. I was steamed. It was over.
Rhonda was at work, and Boops was still in school—so I didn’t have to deal with either of them.
I got back to Pat’s and the phone was ringing and it was Rhonda, calling for me. I didn’t want to talk to her. Pat said, “Bernie, don’t be a fool. You’ve been together too long for it to end like this.”
“No,” I said. “Tell her I’m through.”
And Pat said, “If you’re so tough, tell her yourself.” So I got on the phone and Rhonda right off said that Boops was asking for me. And I could hear her in back, “Is he coming home, Mama?” And Rhonda said for her to ask me herself and handed her the phone. And Boops got on the phone and said, “Daddy, I’m sorry about yesterday. Please come home. I miss you.”
And if you have children, well, I guess I don’t need to tell you what that did to me.
Then Rhonda got back on the phone and said, “Look, Bern—yesterday, it was crazy. We all went a little crazy. Come home and we’ll work it out.”
I said I didn’t know if I wanted to work it out, and I hung up. I can be a stubborn sumbitch. And Pat was looking at me, and she said, “Bernie, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I never got into your business before. But I have to tell you: You’re wrong on this one. If you don’t go back to Rhonda, don’t come back here.”
At work the next day, I called Rhonda and told her I’d be coming by later. To talk. And I went. And I tried to act tough, but inside I knew I was to blame just as much as Rhonda. I was ashamed; I had struck my wife in front of my child. I realized it was the shame that had made me run, and I apologized, and Rhonda cried, and Je’Niece cried, and I cried. And we were a family again.
In bed that night, after we got Boops to sleep, I told Rhonda that I loved her, and that I would never quit her. And she told me the same thing. And we knew we were going to be okay.
In the morning, when I left for work, there was another red note on the door about the bills being unpaid. I called the landlord and said I was tired of these red notes. And when I got back from work that night, there was a gas bill for three hundred dollars, addressed to me, Bernard McCullough. I called the landlord about that, too, saying it couldn’t be right, and he said it wasn’t his problem.
So I called Big Nigger and told him to come over and bring some tools. And he came over and we took the bolts off that door in the kitchen, and sure enough, it was just like I thought. The whole building was hooked to one gas line: mine. I was paying everybody’s heat. I called the landlord and told him I wasn’t paying the got-damn bill and that if he didn’t take care of it I would report him. He said some things I won’t repeat, and I used some choice words of my own, and when I hung up I told Rhonda we were moving.
“Good,” she said.
I found another place on 101st and King, but the day before we were gonna move, the landlord sent some of his goons over. I was alone in the apartment, packing stuff, and they walked in—three big motherfuckers—and decided to teach me a lesson. I can throw a punch, I’ll tell you, and I can take a punch. (If my brother, Darryl, taught me one thing, it’s how to stand a beating.) But these three were too much for me. They busted me up good. And when they heard the police sirens, they quick tore out the back.
I went into the bedroom, for my gun. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I guess I wanted to be ready for them if they came back. When I stepped out into the hall, though, the cops was already there.
“Put that gun down,” the one cop said.
I put the gun down, and they came in and cuffed me.
“You got a license for that gun?”
Is that what you call a rhetorical question?
“No, sir,” I said. “If you’ll just let me explain, there was—”
But they didn’t let me explain. They took me down to the precinct and locked me up, and they gave me my one phone call. I called Big Nigger. I told him to please go over to the apartment and make sure these motherfuckers didn’t come back, because I had a bad feeling about them.
“What about you?” he said.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “They can’t hold me. But please call over to Dock’s and tell them what happened.”
“Okay, Bean,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
By the time Big Nigger got to my place, the sons of bitches had tossed all our worldly possessions into the street, including every last stick of furniture. And they’d taken anything of value, which wasn’t much.
Some of the neighbors knew us and liked us, so they saved what they could and kept the bigger furniture in their yards for us. It was a decent thing to do.
Rhonda arrived home to this mess and somehow kept herself from falling apart. She went and got Je’Niece from school and took her over to her mother’s.
The next morning, Big Nigger and A.V. rented a pickup and got our stuff from the neighbors and put everything in storage. I got out of jail that afternoon and went over to Rhonda’s family and they couldn’t believe how I looked. The three goons had really done a job on my face. One of my eyes was swollen shut and my upper lip was about the size of a fist. I looked like the got-damn Elephant Man.
“Oh, Bernard, Bernard—what we gonna do?” Rhonda asked.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
Her folks said we could stay there for a few days, till the new place over on King Drive was ready. And then I looked up and noticed what time it was.
“Damn,” I said. “I got to be at the Dayton Gang at eight-thirty.”
“What?” Rhonda said. “Are you crazy? You’re not going on any stage lookin’ like that!”
Well, you know what they say: The show must go on.
So I went over to the Dayton Gang. Emcee saw my face and about fell over backward. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I said, grinning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
When I walked out onstage, the audience looked confused. They were laughing before I opened my mouth. They thought my face was part of my act. But then I told what happened, and I made it funny. I was up there for almost two hours, talkin’ about real pain; talking about my life; talking about the things inside me.
And maybe for the first time I saw how we’re all pretty much the same under the skin. That when you reach down, way deep down to the things that are most intimate and personal, that’s when you connect with other people. Because they have the same feelings deep inside them. The same fears and hopes and dreams.
I was up there for two life-changing hours, telling my stories and spinning them for laughs. I was telling it like it was. Being honest. Yeah, that was it. For the first time in my life, I was doing honest comedy.
“DIDN’T MATTER THAT NO ONE HAD EVER HEARD OF ME; IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, AND THEY WERE THERE TO BE ENTERTAINED.”
14
YOU QUICK, BOY. MAN HITS YOU, YOU HIT BACK.
That night at the Dayton Gang, up there onstage looking like the Elephant Man, I got three standing ovations. Count ’em. Three.
And on my way home, as I thought about what had happened to me, how I’d been transformed, I realized that everything in life really does happen for a reason.
I felt like calling up my landlord and thanking him. I felt like tracking down the three goons who’d beat me up and buying them a round of drinks. These men had pushed me to a whole new level. I owed them.
I was amazed at how solid I felt. It was like I’d been to a whole new place—a different planet. And I couldn’t get the audience’s laughter out of my head. I said to myself, If I don’t do this full-time, I’m gonna die.
When I think back on it, the 1980s were about people being funny. Every empty theater, every storefront, every coffee shop—everyone was a comedian.
This was especially true of blacks. Harlem had the Uptown Comedy Club. Washington, D.C., had the Comedy Connection. There was Terminal D in Newark. Chicago—my hometown—had the Cotton Club. And Los Angeles had the Comedy Act Theater, which was said to be the wildest in the bunch.
Everybody wanted to get in on the comedy action, even towns you never heard of, and suddenly there was a big boom—clubs were poppin’ up left and right. That was a lucky break for me, because they didn’t have enough talent to fill them, and suddenly I was getting called to Ohio and Iowa and all sorts of little places that weren’t even on the map. They were happy to have me, too. There I was on the marquee: Bernie Mac! Tonight! One Night Only! Didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of me; it was Saturday night, and they were there to be entertained.
And brother, I took every gig I got. They didn’t pay much, but that didn’t matter, either. They were giving me a chance to hone my craft, to become a comedian. And I was going to work it for all I could.
Of course, by the end of the decade, I was still at Dock’s, but I had a feeling my fish-fryin’ days were numbered. A new company had been brought in to try to make sense of the bookkeeping, just like Kevin Carter’d said, and the future looked kind of grim.
Kevin himself got moved to a different Dock’s, far from home. The original owners tried to help him—he’d been there his whole life—but his drinking got worse than ever. He started not showing up for work, always with some lame excuse, and pretty soon they let him go.
It went from bad to worse. He lost his house, his mother, his health. I went to see him. I got him a job through a guy I knew at the Board of Education, but he drank himself out of it. Rhonda’s sister got him something at a department store, but he didn’t last the week. The man had given up on himself.
It was sad. Dock’s had been his whole life. His whole identity was wrapped up in Dock’s. He didn’t know himself outside of Dock’s. It made me see how that happens to so many people in our society. They lose their jobs or they retire and they don’t know who they are anymore. It cripples them. And it certainly crippled Kevin.
I kept hooking up with him, trying to help, but all he ever wanted was money for drink. He’d pretend he was listening to you, and he said all the right things—that he was going to change; that he would get help with the alcohol—but he only said it to get a few bucks to spend on drink. It was useless. I don’t have to tell you how it ended.
By this time, late in 1989, I didn’t exactly own Chicago, but I was on my way. So I decided to fly out to Los Angeles to make the rounds. The Laugh Factory. The Improv. The Comedy Store. I did okay. Hits and misses. Maybe more misses than hits, though, on account I was watching my step. I was a big fish in Chicago, but in L.A.—well, not that many people had even heard of me.
Still, I got up there; did my thing: “You see these fucked-up hairdos our women be wearing? Look like chandeliers. And when they get their hair done, brother—you ain’t gettin’ no pussy. That hair gotta last, man. Black women, when they get their hair done, they got it planned. If they get it done on Thursday, you ain’t getting pussy all weekend. Not till it starts itching, anyway. Maybe by the following Wednesday. That’s right: When you see them take a pencil to that high, hard hair, when you see them poking and scratching around in there, that’s a good sign. That mean you’re going to be gettin’ some pokin’ of your own.”