by Mike Epps
Yolanda picked her name. We didn’t talk about why she chose that name, but I think I know why. I wanted to be a comic, and Eddie Murphy had a daughter named Bria—I think that’s why. I still had dreams of being in comedy, but the most important thing now was to get money for diapers.
Yolanda’s auntie, Aunt Janet, who lived in Atlanta, offered to help. Aunt Janet said she could help me get a job working for the City of Atlanta and let me stay with her for a while. That sounded good to me. Even though it would mean being away from Yolanda and Bria, I was happy to have a reason to get out of Indianapolis, to try my luck in a new city.
Right before I left, I went to see my sister, Julie, my second mama. She was babysitting Bria that day, so we took turns holding her while we talked. I told Julie I wanted more for myself and for my daughter, and that what I really wanted to do was be a stand-up comic. I said that I was going to work like hell to do it, that I thought maybe I could be a star and then I could raise Bria right.
“You’ll do it,” Julie said, “because you need to do it. Now, get out of town and make yourself a better life, because you’re not going to have it here. Please don’t stay here and end up messing your life up, Michael.”
God, how I needed to hear that. It was like water in a desert. It’s what I’d longed to hear back from all those agent letters I sent: Don’t worry. You’ll make it. You’ll be okay.
Julie was raising her own baby, my little nephew, alone, and so she was on welfare. Even so, she reached into her purse and handed me a book of food stamps. She gave me a hug and promised to help look after Bria while I was away.
I left Indianapolis with $85 in food stamps, a Walkman with two cassettes, and a broken .38 pistol (it only fired every third time you pulled the trigger), bound for Atlanta.
Yolanda’s aunt, Aunt Janet, was as good as her word: She let me stay with her and got me that job working for the city. Problem was, it was a job fixing sewers—an actual shitty job.
The job was not great, but I was just trying to survive. I’d been to prison, and anything was better than prison. Doing time was like being buried alive: At least when you’re in a sewer you knew you could come back up for air again when your shift was over.
In my spare time, I was able to do what I really wanted to: work on my comedy.
I’d done my research and learned that the best club in Atlanta was the Comedy Act Theater. The place was owned by a guy named Michael Williams, and he was famous for booking the most incredible black comics. He made a way for everybody (the club launched Chris Tucker, for one). Williams put me off a few times, but I knew I’d keep coming back and asking him until he said yes, so I didn’t take it hard.
I was in awe of how much talent there was at that club. I went all the time, trying to catch as many sets as I could, and to meet the comics afterward, funny people like Earthquake, Chris Charles, a girl named Chocolate, Wanda Smith, Black Boy. I met this guy Nard Holston who was another up-and-coming comic, and we became good friends.
Finally, Williams let me go up onstage for open mike night. And I killed.
So I got to go up again. And again. And again.
And I never turned back. I started tearing their ass up every time at that club. Still, I had to grow. That’s what a lot of people that are in the business that are new don’t understand. You have to grow in this business. Even if you’re a raw, funny guy, you have to put the work in and build up the stamina and the material. But I was working hard every day and I felt myself getting better every time. Even if I got booed, I learned from it. My jokes were getting better. My delivery was getting better.
I was also picking up some extra cash for performing here and there. I made my first $50 in Alabama when Nard and I got a gig there. Making that money sure felt good, and it was a lot more fun than hours in the sewer.
Speaking of which, I stopped showing up to work on Fridays, because it conflicted with my comedy schedule. That didn’t prevent me stopping by on Friday afternoon to pick up my weekly check, though. They fucking loved that, as I’m sure you can imagine. In fact, they fired me once, but then the following week they hired me back because they said I was good for morale. When I wasn’t there, the guys didn’t laugh at all, apparently, and they worked way slower. I was flattered, but I also really wanted to get to a place where I could quit that job and still make my child support payment for Bria.
Most of the other comics had day jobs or waited tables, and they were all broke like me, but that didn’t stop us dreaming of making it big. We all told each other not to give up, and those other Atlanta comics became like my new brothers and sisters. The older guys were a different case, though: They gave us no love. In fact, they were vicious.
“You young motherfuckers think you’re about to come in here and take our spots!” they’d spit. “Fuck you. You ain’t funny.”
One day I was doing a set and I was killing. Once I’d finished, I came offstage to see T.K. Kirkland. T.K. looked kind of like a street guy, but he was from New Jersey, and at Arizona State he’d gotten a college degree in communications. He had been on the scene forever, and he was filled with swagger and energy. Everyone always wanted him to emcee everything. That day he said to me, “You funny as a motherfucker.”
“Yeah?” I said. I thought he was a bad motherfucker. To me, he was awesome.
“I like your raw shit,” I said, “‘My name is T to the motherfucking K and get your ass in the car.’”
“Man, you could really make it,” T.K. said. “You’re really good! But you ain’t gonna make it in Atlanta. You think Atlanta’s poppin’, and it is, but if you want to make it—to really make it—you have to go to L.A. or New York.” Then he added: “And if you want my advice, don’t go to L.A. You need boot camp first. You need to train for this shit.”
A lot of people will give you advice when you’re starting out, but not a lot of them will actually back that advice up with action. But T.K. did: He put me on the phone with an agent he knew named Dave Klingman. I didn’t know if I could trust some white guy from New York, but T.K. sold me on him, saying he was tough as shit.
I pictured a gangster, a tough guy who would push his way into clubs and put me up on the stage, tell everyone to shut up and listen. I liked it.
Eventually I got to talk to Dave on the phone and he asked me for a headshot.
Now, me being from the hood, headshot didn’t mean the same thing: I flashed back to the Russian roulette games and all the other times I’d almost gotten shot. Dave must have sensed my confusion, because he said, “It’s a photo.”
“Oh, I can get you one of those,” I said. Dave also said if I was serious about comedy, I should move to New York.
I was serious about comedy, but the timing was about as bad as it could have been. Bria was still so little, and new fatherhood wasn’t going too well. Trying to be a superstar doesn’t really go well with having a baby momma. I was sorry as fuck not to be there for her. But at the time I felt like I was doing what was right, and what would help everyone in the long run.
Then we got word that the Comedy Act Theater was closing. That was all I had going for me in Atlanta, so I got together with a bunch of the other comics—five others, including Bruce Bruce, Small Fry, and Nard—and we hatched a plan. We’d all move to New York City together, do clubs together, help one another out.
I had $1,500 from my sewer job tax refund. The other guys had some savings. We all made a plan to meet at the Greyhound station, ride up to New York together, make a go of it.
The day came. I showed up bright and early at the Greyhound terminal; I was the first one there. I bought my ticket and went to the gate and waited.
As it got closer and closer to departure time, I started to realize that not one of those five other muhfuckas was going to show up.
I waited until it was boarding time. That’s when I was sure no one else was coming with me. Should I bail, too?
Fuck it, no. I went up to the driver and handed over my ticket.
Getting on that bus all alone, I felt crazy. Who did I think I was? I was leaving the South, all my friends, moving even further away from my little baby girl. For what? For a dream. For an idea.
The bus pulled out of the station heading toward New York. This was before cell phones, so I had nothing to do but listen to music on my Walkman and look out the window. Hurtling toward the big city on that bus those twelve hours, I kept thinking I might be making the biggest mistake. I felt as alone as I’ve ever been in my whole life. No one around me knew what I was feeling, or cared. I was all by myself with my fear and my dreams. The bus just kept heading northeast, into the rising sun.
10
Biting into the Big Apple—with a Broken Tooth
And then I woke up from a long dream on that Greyhound bus and I was arriving at New York’s bus station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
It was 1994, and the city was still pretty grimy. People often say the Port Authority is where dreams go to die—it’s not the prettiest place in the world—but that’s where my dream came alive. My mom had showed me so many movies and played me so many songs about New York as a kid that I felt like I had already been to New York City, even though this was my first time.
At the bus station, I called Dave Klingman and asked him to come pick me up. This was it! I was about to meet my new agent. From then, I figured, it was only a matter of days before I’d be famous. Before I’d left Atlanta, I’d psyched myself up. I was good; I knew it. Soon, New York would know it, too. I stood there for a while, buzzing with excitement, looking around for a limo to roll up and some baller with a pinkie ring to get out of it.
After an hour or so, I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned around and found myself eye to eye with . . . nobody. Then I looked down. Standing there was this little guy who looked like Danny DeVito.
“You’re Dave?” I said, obviously disappointed. “You don’t look like a Jewish gangster.”
“I’m not a gangster,” he said with a laugh. “Who told you that? I am Jewish, if that helps.”
We got in the car and went driving through slush and snow. When I saw the skyscrapers, it blew my mind. Damn! I thought, shaking my head. I made it. That was it. I thought I’d already made it, right then.
Dave pointed to the big buildings. “Say you’re going to own all of that,” he said. “Say you’re going to run this city doing comedy.”
That seemed pretty dumb, but I said, “Okay, sure.” So I said it in the car. “I’m going to run this city doing comedy. I’m going to own all this.” I said it a couple times, until I started to believe it. “I’m going to own that building, and that one, too. And that store. And that building . . .”
Really, the most I was hoping for was to make it to Def Jam so I could prove everyone wrong, to show everyone that I wasn’t just some thug—that I was somebody.
Dave took me to a hotel down on the West Side Highway. This was the 1990s, and the West Side Highway had no artisanal ice cream stands, only transgender hookers leaning into cars. The hotel’s name was HOTEL. Just that: HOTEL. Behind the desk was a little Chinese guy. He charged me $35 a night, for which I got a room, a blanket, a toothbrush, and a towel.
Damn, I thought. Am I in prison again?
This hotel was beat down. The room was so small, I had to put the luggage under the bed first, then lie down. I had to share a bathroom with everyone in the hotel, and it was filthy, full of needles and syringes.
And at that point I realized I probably had not made it big quite yet.
It was time to work.
Dave picked me up the next day and took me to a comedy club in Brooklyn. Those were the days when Russell Simmons was producing the HBO comedy show Def Comedy Jam. From 1992 to 1997, it was huge. And who do I see in that Brooklyn club? All these comics I saw on TV, on Def Comedy Jam: A.G. White, Royale Watkins, Cortez, who was funny as fuck. When Cortez gets done talking about your momma, you think, Wow, is my mom really like that?
Dave signed me up. This room was so fucking small, it might have seated eighty people. “Motherfuckers!” Cortez was shouting onstage. “Look at this motherfucker right here! Your lips so big, you could whisper in your own ear!”
The crowd was going crazy.
Then it was my turn.
“This next guy . . .” the MC said, “. . . you ain’t seen in shit! I don’t know who the fuck he is! From Atlanta, Mike Epps!”
I just started talking, in this country slur. My first two jokes got a little chuckle. Third one cracked ’em. Pow. Fourth one cracked ’em. Pow.
“You’re pretty good,” Dave said when I got offstage.
The next night we went to the Proper Café in Queens. A tough Queens crowd. Drug dealers sitting in the audience. Fly chicks.
I did jokes about my family, like: “I had a cousin so country that he had a cornbread wedding cake. Seventeen layers.”
Cracked ’em.
Then Dave took me to a place called the Peppermint Lounge, in East Orange, out in New Jersey. Bill Bellamy was the host. Naughty by Nature, Queen Latifah in the audience.
I did impressions of Ice-T, Tone Lōc, X Clan. I’d do anything for a laugh.
Cracked ’em.
I called back to Indianapolis. “Mom,” I said. “I made it.”
But things weren’t quite that good. The whole time I’d been in New York, I’d been hanging out by pay phones, arguing with my daughter’s mother, Yolanda, until I was down to my last five dollars in quarters. I tried to tell her that this was for all of us, not just me. That I had a shot. That it was going to work out.
“You got a brand-new baby and you’re up there trying to be fucking famous?” Yolanda would yell. “Fuck you!” And then she would hang up.
I heard all those quarters roll into the back of the phone. My last five dollars—gone.
“Mike,” Dave said, when I told him I was out of money, “you’re really good, but you’re still green. It’s going to take a while before you’re really good at what you’re doing. I’m going to have to send you back.”
Quietly, I packed my bags and Dave drove me back to the Port Authority.
I was in tears. I couldn’t believe I had to go home. Maybe Yolanda was right. Maybe I was nothing. Maybe I would never be anything.
Adding insult to injury, this whole time in New York I’d had a busted tooth, because I’d gotten in a fight in Douglass Park in Indianapolis and ended up with this one tooth that was just hanging on by a thread. Now I’d never be able to afford to get it fixed. I’d never get to go anywhere or do anything. I’d be stuck in Indianapolis for the rest of my life. I’d been terrible at being a thug. Now I was going to have to go back to that life I sucked at, and I’d probably end up killed or in jail again.
I got out of the car. I started walking toward the terminal, slumped over, carrying my bags. By now I was sobbing loudly.
As I reached for the door to the Port Authority, I heard a voice behind me.
“Oh, Jesus!” Dave said, finally, calling me back. “Listen, you can come and stay with me for two weeks. Two weeks! But you have to find a job.”
I moved onto his couch and stayed there for two years.
At one time Dave had managed all these great people, like John Leguizamo, Sandra Bullock, Guillermo Díaz, and Anthony Michael Hall (with whom I would later write a movie about being fake Muslims in prison, called Don’t Go Fakin’ Your Assalamu Alaikum, that for some reason still hasn’t gotten made yet). It seemed to me that Dave couldn’t keep these clients once they got famous, because he wasn’t part of a big organization and just worked out of his apartment. But he taught me so much. He and I became best friends, and he could really make me laugh. He was often the only white person in a club, and he’d totally stick out because of that and because of how he dressed, always in a sports jacket. If you gave him a hard time about it, he’d say, “I have to dress like this. I’m the manager.”
Dave never had any kids, and he had for sure never been that close to a black kid in his lif
e. It was the closest I’d ever been to a white man since the penitentiary. We were an unlikely father-son team.
We really were family, right down to the little fights we’d have around the house. For example, I kept noticing that every time he got back from the supermarket, the fridge would have watermelon in it.
“Why do you keep eating my watermelon?” he finally asked me one day.
“I thought you were being racist,” I said. “I was eating it to teach you a lesson.”
“No,” he said. “I just really love watermelon.”
“Well,” I said, “in that case, next time you better bring enough for both of us, motherfucker.”
Then, a big break: Bob Sumner, who discovered Steve Harvey, Ricky Harris, and a ton of other great guys, recruited me for a Def Comedy Jam show that was shooting in Times Square. Def Comedy Jam gave black urban comics a way to make real money.
I got on Def Jam relatively early, jumped the line, because the way they chose the comics was originality. And no one else was like me.
I went down great with the Def Jam crowd. Russell Simmons, who cofounded Def Jam with Rick Rubin, capitalized on a sure thing: There were a bunch of funny motherfuckers already on the black circuit. Some of our greatest comics came from the chitlin’ circuit, that bunch of venues around the U.S. that black acts could perform at during segregation and that even after integration were extra-friendly to African-American talent. Still, just about immediately, Def Jam comics got stigmatized for being raunchy. There was something to it: To do Def Jam, the more gutbucket you were, the louder the response you’d get.
Def Jam was a TV credit, which was crucial, but it came with some baggage. You’d hear: “Oh, he’s just a Def Jam comic.” Another term for that: “pussy-fuck comics.” People thought Def Jam was synonymous with “Yo momma this, yo momma that, fuck you.”