by Mike Epps
You know, we didn’t realize how good we could fight until we got in a fight with someone outside the house and it was so easy. My brothers and I looked at each other like Who knew? After that, we started getting into the street fights. It was hard to avoid them, to be honest: Everyone seemed to want to fight all the time, even when you just wanted to go have a good time.
After school one afternoon when I was about thirteen, fourteen, I was out at the skating rink with my girl and my friend Jeff and some other guys. I’m a really good roller skater, always have been. Jeff was on this whole hyper no-matter-what-we’re-gonna-get-our-respect trip at the time.
So I’m skating, holding my girl’s left hand with my right hand, and suddenly some guy takes her other hand.
Jeff yells, “Mike, what the fuck’s going on? Isn’t that your girl?” He was acting like we had to get respect. Sure enough, I hit the guy in his mouth and he went down.
Then all his friends and all our friends get into it. Before we know it, we’re getting pounded against the arcade games.
Then here comes Officer Charles Martin. He grabbed me out of the fray by the back of my collar and by the belt of my pants, literally picked me up and carried me out of there and chucked me onto the sidewalk. Jeff was still getting pounded inside, so Officer Martin did me a favor, really, even though I hated that he could literally pick me up and throw me.
Then there was the time I took Chaney with me to this place called St. Nick’s, a club that was a hangout for one of these other gangs we didn’t like.
I knew there was a couple of guys particularly mad at me. Something about a girl, probably. But whatever: They were always jumping my ass, and they didn’t fight fair. I wanted to show them who was boss.
When they saw Chaney and me walk into that club, one of them said, “Oh, man, we been wanting to get you for a long time.”
But I had a surprise for them. I pulled out a gun.
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Chaney yelled. He had no idea I had it.
Unfortunately, one of these other guys pulls out a gun, too. That was enough for us: Chaney and I look at each other, and just start running. I’m not the best runner, and Chaney’s really not fast, either. Within a couple blocks, the gang members start gaining on us, so I did the only thing I could: I fired over my shoulder in their general direction.
But those crazy motherfuckers must have known I didn’t want to actually shoot them, because they kept chasing us.
Chaney sees what he thinks is a police car and yells, “Cops!”
I throw the gun into the bushes. Then I realize it’s just a plain old Crown Victoria, not a police cruiser at all.
“That’s not even a police car!” I yell at Chaney. “You stupid ass!”
So now these guys are gaining on us and I’m scrambling, trying to find where I threw the gun.
“Found it!” I yell when my hand closes over the gun.
Chaney and I take off again and go through all these back roads and down railroad tracks, hiding in bushes, dodging and weaving. Even after we’ve lost them, we keep running and hiding. Finally, we get home.
Chaney’s pissed, though. “What the fuck was that, man?” he says to me.
“‘That’?” I said. “That was fun.”
Chaney couldn’t handle that much fun, so I went back to my original plan: trying to get guys from the other gangs to like me. And I figured the best way to do it was to make them laugh. You’d see these guys from other gangs sitting out in the park. I’d go up to them and start talking shit about all these other guys we knew, and before I knew it, those same guys who’d tried to kill us a week before would be laughing. They’d say, “Damn, Mike, I hated your ass, but you know what? You’re pretty funny.”
It was a survival skill, being able to make people laugh. That was my only hope, because these kids would chase the shit out of us and really no one could help us.
I was still really hungry all the time, so I kept stealing food. I kept getting in trouble. I also couldn’t walk away from all the fights.
And the punishments got worse and worse.
What got me locked up the first time was fighting with these other guys over a girl. I’ve always liked girls not from my neighborhood. The guys from the other neighborhood didn’t like it, of course, and they often made that clear to me and clear to her.
I don’t even remember the girl’s name, to be honest with you, but she had an ex-boyfriend named Moony who kept fucking with her, and I did not like it. That was the one thing about me: Fuck with me, I’m not usually going to pull out any gangsta shit. But if you mess with my girlfriend, I’ll kick your ass. In the streets they call guys like me “tender dick.”
I guess I was fourteen, fifteen. The way it went down was this: At this club in downtown Indianapolis, I ran into Moony. My buddy Little Rickie snatched his belt off and hit one of Moony’s little dudes in the forehead: Pow! With that, everybody started fighting, and we were all kicked out of the club.
But it wasn’t over. I tricked a friend into going and getting his daddy’s .357, and I had this buddy who showed up with a chain and lock. We didn’t need the gun: This guy hit this dude Moony with this chain so hard, man, I mean, it was crazy. That big old chain with a lock on the end of it fractured this guy’s face; blood was running all through Moony’s Jheri curls and down his face.
Eventually the police showed up and chased us. I ran hard. And I’ll never forget, the cop was chasing me and he was bragging on his high school shit. He was, like, “I’m gonna catch you! I ran a four-four in Northwest High School! I went to all-state!”
And sure enough, when he caught me he got on top of me and slapped me all upside the head.
So it was back to juvie court for me. I wasn’t the one that even hit Moony, but the parents of the guy who did said I’d masterminded it, so it escalated, and that’s how I wound up in the juvenile detention center.
When we finally got there, I was sad, man. I was, like, Damn, I can’t believe I’m fucked-up, I’m in juvenile center for the first time.
The first thing they did was use bug spray in the crack of our ass, and under our arms, and then our private parts. (A lot of kids came in there with lice and all kinds of shit.) It should have scared me straight, but it did not.
When I got out a few weeks later, I went right back to stealing. This was the 1980s, and cocaine hit the scene big-time. A lot of the older guys had a connection out of L.A., and they’d use younger kids to help with the dealing, so they wouldn’t be on the front lines.
But for me it proved all too easy to sell to undercover cops. I couldn’t figure out why everyone I knew was dealing, but I was the only one who seemed to ever get caught.
“You’re pretty smart,” my brother John said. “You’re just not smarter than the cops.”
(John was really smart. He may have dabbled in some shit, but he always kept a job and he spent time with his girlfriend rather than with gang guys.)
Back then, everyone stole shit out of cars, too. Then, at some age, it got to be that once you were already in the car, why not steal the car, too? I learned early how to do it. All you needed was a screwdriver to crack the ignition.
But it didn’t always go so well. I bought a stolen car once and went and picked this girl up in it. It was a brand-new Chrysler New Yorker, only with a screwdriver where the ignition key should have been.
“Oh, that’s a nice car, this is,” the girl said.
“It’s my momma’s,” I said.
Honestly, though, she should have known the car was stolen, ’cause I had a towel wrapped around the steering column and the whole screwdriver thing.
I don’t remember why, but the police pulled us over and, sure enough, they locked me and her up. This girl had never been in jail before, and she was crying. We both had to go to court the next morning. I saw her in the jail line, and she was just walking and crying. I called her name and she just looked at me and started crying harder and wailed.
I
n court, her mother cussed me out.
“Why the fuck would you get my daughter in trouble?!” she yelled. “You ain’t shit! Don’t ever come over to my house again!”
They charged me with joy-riding. I was back in juvenile hall and put on this thing called suspended commitment. It meant that if I got in trouble again, then I would automatically go back to Indiana Boys’ School, aka kid prison.
They even tried putting me on a “scared straight” program, but it didn’t work on me, because I already knew all the older guys who were in jail.
Dominic Amy had finally gotten caught, after years of running my neighborhood. He was a big dude, like six-four, 240—he looked like Will Smith, but giant and street—and you could tell he was in charge of the jail. Because of how big he was, they were using Amy to scare kids straight; but when he got to me, he just talked normal, asking about people we knew in common. The counselors were mad I wasn’t more scared; in fact, it was more like a happy reunion.
“You don’t need to be in this program,” one of the counselors said. “You know these guys and you already know this is where your ass is gonna end up being when you get grown.”
“Ah, fuck you,” I said. “Whatever.”
Pretty soon, I did something to fuck my probation up, and they did indeed send me to Indiana Boys’ School in Plainfield. I was there for three months.
Indiana Boys’ School is where Charles Manson had been sent as a kid. There were some notorious little kids in that place when I was there, too. These little motherfuckers made me look like a choirboy.
At first, I thought Indiana Boys’ School was going to be like camp. I already knew the place: I’d visited a friend there, and it looked like he was having fun. The kids got to run around outside and play games, or so I thought. But the truth was it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.
We were put in little dormitory buildings where they had steel doors that locked. There was a dayroom where you’d come out of your two-man cell. The food was pretty good—biscuits and gravy and bananas—and this kind of Kool-Aid that we called Peter Soft, because we were sure it kept inmates from getting erections.
The truth was that place was worse than prison. You had to fight every day—stare down the baddest muhfuckas. Once again I had to work hard to make friends in order to survive. And once again I got people to laugh, got the tough kids to like me.
On Sunday your family would come to see you, bring you chicken. You could sit in the cafeteria with your family, talk about how you were doing. But every other day, all day, you were just trying to survive. It was like a horror movie, because you’d think you got everything under control and then some new thing would jump out and scare the shit out of you. I couldn’t wait to get out.
When I did, we went back to moving all over the city. As soon as my mother painted a new place, chased the roaches away, and got it comfortable, we’d get evicted and back to grandmother’s house we’d go.
Being at our grandmother’s was fun for us kids. We always had music, and cousins to play with, and good food on the table: It was like one big sleepover party at times, especially when my aunt Anita would sing—and she could really sing. But when I look back now, I can see that—while it was a lot of fun for us there—for our grandmother it must have been so hard, with that house filled with loud, crazy kids. So many mouths to feed, and as ever I didn’t help our case. My grandmother would make homemade candy and I would always eat it all—she never knew what happened to it. You know how bad I was? Not only would I not confess that I’d eaten the candy, I’d help her look for it. Eventually I got caught in the act. I got whupped for that, you better believe that.
Finally, with my grandmother at her wits’ end, my mom moved us into a new place, a high-rise building, with a great view . . . of all the crackheads and pimps. Ironically enough, our hitting bottom meant living high above the city.
6
The TV Show on Central
We wound up in the high-rise Sherwood Tower, Section 8, and my mom, who still had her pride, refused to call them projects.
For a while, my mom, my brothers, my sister, and I all lived in an efficiency apartment together, then we moved to the very top floor—the penthouse! But it sure didn’t look like the apartments we saw on TV. This was no Jeffersons penthouse.
In our not-so-deluxe apartment in the sky, we watched TV a lot. We especially loved seeing comedians on TV. We stayed up late to watch Saturday Night Live and whatever specials came on the networks. All day, Chaney and I would repeat lines to each other like “Buckwheat has just been shot! I repeat: Buckwheat has just been shot!”
I never thought I could do comedy for a living. Chaney and I used to watch comedy shows, and my family and friends sometimes used to say, “Man, Mike, when you get older, you should do that shit. You’re way funnier than some of them guys.”
“Yeah,” I’d say, “I should.”
But I never imagined I could be one of those guys. It was almost, like, “You should be Superman when you grow up” and I was, like, “Yeah, for sure I should. I’ll get right on that.”
Eddie Murphy’s 1987 special Raw was the most incredible shit. I’ll never forget that. Murph was the man back then. (He still is.) And Richard Pryor was a god. We also watched Benny Hill, all that shit. If there were jokes, we were there.
One good thing about watching so much TV was that after a while it gets hard to see the difference between TV and life. Just how we used to make children’s TV characters into real-life ones, once again I started to see our whole life as like a TV show. This was a little bit before Law & Order, but the TV show we lived in was kind of like Law & Order, only we were on the side of the bad guys. If we saw some Jerry Orbach–looking motherfucker showing up in our neighborhood, we knew it wasn’t going to end well.
When there was nothing on our little apartment TV to watch, I’d go to watch the best show in town, the one on Central Avenue, which was like Main Street for crime. A guy named Frank ran Central Avenue and, man, he was a hustler. I used to watch him go grab the stash, tell cars to pull over, run up to them, sling the weed. Cars were lined up; they were selling weed like it was legal back then. Some days there’d be a shoot-out, too—pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. The cops pretty much kept away.
Those Central Avenue characters were so great, though—I found them so entertaining. When you’re in a neighborhood with different types of people like that, it’s easy for you to grab a character and run with it. I’d do impressions of them, pick up how they talked and how they moved, then try it out on Chaney or whoever else would watch.
I remember one guy, an older hustler called Jitterbug. Jitterbug was known as the Godfather, the kingpin of the neighborhood. He even put the word GODFATHER in giant letters on his belt buckle. (I think every kid in the neighborhood wanted to have a belt buckle like that someday.)
Then there were the prostitutes. They loved me. They pinched my cheeks and gave me dollars for candy, telling me I was cute and funny.
“You’re going to be my daddy when you grow up!” they’d say to me. “I’ll bring you some money!”
I thought that sounded pretty good, but I knew it would be years before I could be a real pimp. No one was going to be intimidated by a scrawny kid. And I wanted to make money now.
And so the ladies helped me out. Sometimes they’d take guys into the basement and tell me so I could go rob their cars. So while the guys were going up in the elevators to the ladies’ apartments, we were going down in the elevators to steal the johns’ car radios and wallets.
The best part was: These johns wouldn’t report it, because then they’d have to explain what they were doing parked in that neighborhood for an hour in the middle of the day. There wasn’t exactly a scenic overlook on that block.
For real, though, I think it was watching all the people in that neighborhood that made me a performer. It was the best show in town. My heroes in my neighborhood were people who had faults, but they were great people. I mean, check out th
is motley cast of characters:
One guy who dressed like a real pimp who lived nearby was named Leneral—spelled General but with an L. He must have changed his pimp clothes fifty times a day. What kind of walk-in closet must he have had? Do you know how much space fur coats take up? Leneral had, by my count, five hundred of them.
Then there was this drug kingpin dude who was like the mayor of the building: He knew everything that was going on. One day, we saw him fighting out front with this pimp from the building.
“Quick,” our mom said, “let’s get inside, but slowly, so we don’t attract their attention.”
We had made it through the front door when we saw the dealer reaching for something in his pants.
“Oh shit!” Chaney yelled. He’d made it to the elevator and was pushing the button like Go, go, go. My mother and my little brother Nathan and I were behind him, so I pushed them down and we lay there while we heard blam, blam, blam.
Once the gunfire stopped, we stayed low and made it to the staircase and started running up the stairs. We caught up with Chaney, who was running down to make sure we were okay.
I was worried about the drug kingpin, and I was glad to hear he survived. The other guy did die, though. We heard later that he ran but they found him half a block away. He’d collapsed and bled to death.
Then there was a guy in our neighborhood named Duke who used to be a basketball star at Arsenal Technical High School. He was all-American, but when his mother died he lost his mind. He ended up on meds and used to just wander around the neighborhood, waiting on his disability check. Everybody knew him, and he still got some respect because he’d been a sports star.
“Duke!” I’d shout when I saw him.