There Goes My Social Life

by Stacey Dash

  The mother also reacted very strongly to the news: “Republican? . . . No! . . . We don’t do that, Dre! We are compassionate liberals who believe in tolerance, acceptance, open-”

  Then the dad interrupted: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But we’re black, alright? That’s all that matters. We’re black.”

  With its heavy-handed reinforcement of cultural stereotypes, Black-ish was no Cosby Show.

  I often think back to how much fun I had on the set with the Cosby actors, and even afterward. On the last day of taping, Bill pulled me aside.

  “Would you like to come to my house sometime for dinner?” he said. “Camille and I would love to host you.”

  I couldn’t believe it! One of the most famous men in America was asking me to dinner at his house. It actually choked me up a bit. I figured Bill could tell that I didn’t have a male figure in my life, that I was adrift. He was well known for asking the child actors on the show how they were doing academically and taking an interest in their success. He was so lovely to show concern for me—even though I was just there for one episode.

  A couple of nights later, I jumped in a cab and went to the Cosby townhouse on the East Side.

  Camille welcomed me warmly. One of the first things I noticed was the fresh-cut flowers in vases scattered elegantly throughout their home. On the set of The Cosby Show, I noticed, there were fresh flowers everywhere as well—delivered even on rehearsal days. I heard that Cosby had asked for real flowers—not fake—even though viewers at home wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (This was before high-definition screens.) He wanted the set to feel like a real home . . . and, I was beginning to see, his real home. I could tell that as soon as Camille showed me around. It was tastefully decorated, with antiques, beloved portraits hanging on the walls, a stunning art collection, and simple yet elegant furniture. It was so welcoming.

  After we ate, we moved into the living room.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Camille asked.

  And then we talked. I wish I could remember the topic of conversation, but I was so enamored with the whole feeling of the place it was hard to pay attention. It was almost as if I’d gone back in time . . . back to a place when everything seemed hopeful and loving, when Americans had a sense of adventure and wide-eyed optimism. At the Cosby house, I felt like good things were possible, like people were industrious, like education could bring people out of poverty, like life was truly and richly beautiful.

  But there was one part of the conversation I’ll never forget. “You are responsible for your life. You are responsible,” Cosby said to me. Then, he added, “No excuses.”

  I’m sure whatever else was said was just as encouraging, because the conversation made me feel like I was going in the right direction. There I was, in the middle of Manhattan, talking to this man and woman who’d really made it in America, as the raspy sounds of a saxophone and piano emanated from their stereo and the smell of the delicious dinner we’d just eaten still hung in the air.

  But there was something else in the air that night . . . a feeling with which I was utterly unfamiliar: the warmth of an intact family. When I saw how Bill and Camille acted with each other, it was hard not to stare. I didn’t know how well-adjusted married people interacted. I had no idea what it should look like. Even my grandparents—whom I loved, and who seemed more stable than my parents—had issues. My grandfather was a Latin lover and always had other women on the side. My poor Gram, who never drove a car in her life, had no recourse. She must’ve just looked the other way. So watching the Cosbys interact—playful, smart, affectionate—was like watching a National Geographic special. This is what happily married people look like in their natural habitat. I couldn’t look away.

  Years later, when I heard Cosby had been accused of drugging women to rape them, I immediately thought this can’t be true. Cosby represented something amazing—something I never had: a strong father in a loving family. Sure, that was all on television and not real life, but my “real life” intersected with his show at a very challenging time for me. When he and his lovely wife spoke words of encouragement to me, I felt like it set the stage for my career and even my life. I guess that’s why I refused to believe the women who kept coming out of the woodwork and why I decided to speak out to say that he had treated me as a gentleman would.

  But now? Now, I realize I was wrong. We know that Cosby—America’s dad—was just wrong. A predator.

  When I think of Cosby now, I think of Uncle Freddy—two men who affected my life in a positive way, but who left wreckage behind them. The evil, terrible, unspeakable acts they did cannot be ignored. I’m not sure why we want to elevate certain people and believe they are better than they are. Maybe for the same reason we hope we’re better than we are.

  Either way, the Cosby family was just as messed up as my real family . . . and that strikes me as profoundly sad.

  EIGHT

  SEARCHING FOR A FAIRY TALE

  I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home—you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

  —Angelina Jolie

  Ladies, here’s what I learned the hard way. Don’t have an affair with a married man: as the saying goes, what he did with you, he will do to you.

  But I guess none of us ever expects to be the other woman. I imagined my life with a stable husband and two kids, but I had absolutely no blueprint for that kind of life. I’d been taught to do cocaine, not to date well. I’d been taught to party, not to marry well.

  When liberals talk about sexual freedom, they don’t understand how tightly marriage is bound to economic prosperity. In fact, do you know what the number one indicator of poverty is in America? It’s not race, it’s not educational level, it’s whether or not your parents are still married.

  Here are the very painful statistics: In America, the poverty rate for single parents with children in 2009 was 37.1 percent. For married couples with children, it was 6.8 percent. In other words, being raised in a married family reduces a child’s chances of poverty by about 82 percent.1

  I, of course, came from a “broken home,” which leads to welfare dependence. No one wants to be on welfare. I’m proud I grew up in the South Bronx, and I’m thankful for the lessons it taught me. After seeing up close the devastation of broken marriages, drugs, and really bad choices (by myself included), I realize that nobody wants to live like that. Nobody wants to be a hustler, pimp, a dealer, or on welfare. Where I came from, if you were on welfare you were a lamb to the slaughter. You were used. You were the drug runner. You were the dope fiend. You were the lazy person. You were talked about. You were teased. Because welfare was so stigmatized, people did other things—usually illegal—to make ends meet.

  Hustlers, at least, were respected . . . even if their activities were not necessarily legal.

  The poor want to work for their money, they want healthy marriages, they want children.

  But in a world of broken marriages, they lack the ability to actually pull it off.

  I made a decision about sex—“family values,” if you will—that cost me severely for the rest of my life. After The Cosby Show, I was excited about my career, was a little heady with the prospects of my future, and maybe a bit too confident. When I met a man who was already married, I should’ve gone on by. But I didn’t. I lingered. I flirted. And eventually, I ended up having an affair with a married man name Axel.

  He seemed to be created for trouble—tall, dark, and hand-some—and it felt like he could undress me by simply lifting his eyebrow. Okay, he wasn’t tall. In fact, he was short—maybe 5'10"—and I could tell that he worked out at the gym to get strong so he’d appear bigger than he actually was. In addition to being muscular, he was affectionate, possessive, and tough. He had the swagger. When I was with him, I felt like nothing could happen to me. At first, we kept it quiet—sneaking off
together to steal time. Eventually, however, we got more brazen and ended up living together at 81st and York. I did all of this behind my family’s back, because I knew they would be furious.

  Suddenly, I was the “other woman,” but—I told myself—maybe a bit more than just that. Axel had a place with me, after all, and I was sure he’d be leaving his wife soon enough. He had a silky smooth way of talking to me that took me to another place. Everything was wonderful for about four months, but then he started acting suspiciously. He wouldn’t come home, and he wouldn’t give me any explanation.

  “Where were you?” I asked him one morning after he hadn’t come home the night before. “What were you doing?” But he was not to be questioned. He slapped the shit out of me and knocked me across the room. I was shocked but stood up and shook off the pain.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, running over to me. He put his hands on my face, looked into my eyes, and said again, “I’m so sorry.”

  Gradually, things got worse. When we fought—which happened more and more—he punched me. He was strategic about it, though. He’d hit me on every part of my body other than my face. Sometimes I couldn’t walk for weeks, but people couldn’t tell I was being beaten.

  “I’ll never do it again. I love you,” he said. “I’ll never do it again.”

  I believed him, until I didn’t. By the time I realized that my “new normal” was getting the shit beat out of me by another woman’s husband, it was too late. We were no longer having a fling, a romance that could be snuffed out as quickly as it had been ignited. By this time he had become maniacal and obsessed. He considered me just a possession. And who was I to argue? A runaway? A girl whose own parents had given her away to strangers? A girl whose own mom had mocked her failed suicide? A girl whose mentor had been arrested for pimping out prostitutes, one of whom he killed? I didn’t feel worthy enough to challenge him.

  When Axel’s wife found out about me, she confronted me in a grocery store. I just told her I was sorry. That’s all I could say. I truly was. I was sorry I had thought Axel could protect me. I was sorry I didn’t leave the first time he hit me. I was just sorry.

  It’s hard to imagine how thoroughly I had messed up my life in a mere nineteen years. I told myself that things would change if we could start over somewhere new. “Let’s get away from here,” I suggested one day to Axel. “Let’s go to California so I can work on my career.”

  “California?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s where it’s at,” I said. “I can pursue my acting, and we can get away from it all.”

  We decided to make the move, but before we left I heard through the grapevine that my mother was living with her drug dealer and was in bad shape. As much as had happened between us, I still loved her. I wanted the best for her. In fact, I had that same feeling that I did when I once saw her in a fight on the street when I was a little girl. I had an overwhelming desire to help her, to fight for her. Plus at this point my brother was fifteen, still in high school, and I knew no one was taking care of him.

  Axel and I did a little investigating and discovered where exactly this drug dealer lived. One afternoon we went to his corner, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door. When the door opened, we came face to face with the dealer. He looked at us from head to toe.

  “I’m here for my mom,” I said, barging right in. The drug dealer shrugged and went and sat down at the coffee table in front of a big plate of cocaine. While I started going up the stairs, I saw him lean over the plate and begin snorting.

  “Axel, stay here and make sure he doesn’t move.”

  “Hello?” I called out. “Mommy?” I heard some noise in a room, so I steeled my nerves and walked through the door. The room was pitch black. All I could hear were the sounds of her muffled crying. I got to her bed and reached out to her. When my hands touched her body, I gasped. She felt like a skeleton.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Oh my God, where’s the light? Turn on the light! Where’s the light!?”

  I fumbled around in the dark until I found a lamp on the side table. It took all of the courage I could muster to turn on the light. When I clicked on the switch, I saw that her eyes were sunken, her bones were protruding, and she was as thin as I’d ever seen another person. Worse, she had no nose—the cartilage between her nostrils was gone.

  I began to cry, but there was no time for that now. “Axel! Axel!! Come up here. We have to take her to the hospital.”

  “We can’t!” he said. “She’s hysterical.”

  So was I. “We have no choice!” I screamed. Axel gently wrapped my mother in a blanket, picked her up, and took her to the hospital. When we got there, the doctor took one look at her and said, “Had you not brought her, she’d be dead.”

  I convinced my stepfather, who was in denial about her condition, to put her in rehab in Florida for six months. That’s all I knew to do. She came out clean, but started using alcohol and drugs almost immediately.

  Our gamble to move to California paid off. I had my agent send out feelers for movies. Immediately he arranged for me to audition for Moving, a film about a man named Arlo who gets a promotion and has to move his family from New Jersey to Idaho.

  I auditioned for the role of his daughter.

  “This is your first big movie audition,” my agent told me, but I didn’t need him to remind me of that. I was nervous enough. “Here are your sides.”

  “A sixteen-year-old?” I asked as I read the description of my character. “But I’m twenty!”

  “If you get this role with Richard Pryor, you’ll be whatever age they tell you to be,” he said. “This is a huge opportunity!”

  I went to the audition and got to read my lines with Richard Pryor, the dad character, then Beverly Todd, the mom character. Richard was so much smaller than I had imagined, meek, and quiet. Turns out I had great chemistry with Richard and Beverly; I was thrilled when my agent told me that I’d gotten the role. My character didn’t want to leave New Jersey, so she sabotaged the move by messing up the house sale.

  I loved filming Moving with my co-stars Beverly Todd, Randy Quaid, Dana Carvey, and Rodney Dangerfield. My favorite scene involved a swear jar. In the film, the family was attempting to stop cursing by using a jar that sat in the kitchen. Every time anyone cursed, they had to drop in some coins. When we were at the dinner table, I said a curse word.

  “Okay, put a dollar in the swear jar,” Beverly scolded.

  I took the swear jar, put it on the table, and stuffed all of the money from my pocket into the jar. With that taken care of, I went on a profanity-filled tirade about why I wasn’t moving to Boise before storming out of the room.

  In the movie, Richard was an ordinary guy who gets pushed beyond his limits by movers, his employers, and crazy neighbors. In reality, however, he was kind, almost shy, and had a super sweet demeanor to him. He had a soft-spokenness to him that made you feel like you should lean in to make sure you weren’t missing anything.

  One day, he mentioned that he was going to go to the races.

  “I love horses! Would you believe my Indian name is Running Horse? I’m part Indian.” Back then no one said “Native American.”

  His eyes lit up. “Does that mean you’re good at picking horses?”

  “We can find out!”

  During the days we’d shoot scenes with our wonderful cast. But in the afternoon lulls, Richard and I began sneaking off the set and heading off to the tracks at Santa Anita.

  “Win, place, or show?” Richard asked me, standing in the Upper Clubhouse. The man in the window—an older gentleman with bushy eyebrows—smiled patiently. He seemed to know Richard.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “If you put cash on FoxFace to show,” he explained, “you get paid if he’s in the top three. If you put it on place, you’ll collect if he’s in the top two. If you say he’ll win, then you only get money if he comes across that line first.”

  “To win, of course,” I said con
fidently, though the only thing I knew about that horse was that I loved its name. It wasn’t my money.

  “To win,” Richard said to the bookie. He reached into his wallet, got out two hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to the man in the window.

  Then he turned to his body guard. “I think she can pick ’em. Did you see him in the paddock? The way he’s bucking. He’s wild. I like him.”

  It was 1987 when we were placing bets on horses we knew nothing about. By this time, Pryor had already won an Emmy and five Grammys. Though he’d begun his career by modeling himself on Cosby, Pryor was quite a different man—he took on issues of race and inserted profanity into just about everything. When he hosted Saturday Night Live, the worried producers instituted a five-second delay because they had no idea what he’d say. His albums were so provocatively named that people couldn’t even refer to them in polite company. But in 1983 he signed a five-year deal with Columbia Pictures that resulted in softer and more mainstream films like Superman III, Brewster’s Millions, and Moving. He could act, but he didn’t have a very scientific method of selecting horses. If he placed money on a horse and won, he’d laugh. If he lost, he’d laugh even more.

  “I’m going to count on you to pick the winners,” he said.

  Though it was fun to be on set, there was something both calming and invigorating about the tracks—the schedule, the energy, the atmosphere. The horses ran one race every half hour. There was win-place-show wagering, a daily double, a pick six, and a couple of exactas. It was predictable, and we studied the racing forms and the behavior of the horse between the races. I barely glanced at the stats on the thoroughbreds and just went on the way they bucked in the gate, the colors of the jockey’s silks, and just plain ole instinct. We would always come back with a little extra money if I picked the horse. Somehow, I always picked the winners.