Unsuccessful Thug

by Mike Epps

  In those days, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock were the mainstream guys and all other black comics were just “Def Jam comics.” I was, like, Why is it wrong for us to talk about fucking? That’s what Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor did! Why is it bad when anyone else does it?

  To me, the stigma around Def Comedy Jam comics seemed like just a reason for us to be discriminated against and kept out of the mainstream rooms. But there was a freedom to those shows, too, though, so that felt so good. I’d wind up talking to people in the audience.

  One time, there was this guy who went by the name of Zeus in the front row. He was giving me the stink eye.

  “Who you looking at, dead-eyed motherfucker?” I said to him.

  I kicked my foot in his direction. Then I lost my balance and fell down.

  Well, a few years later Zeus and I would wind up in a movie together. His real name was Tiny Lister, better known as Deebo from the Friday movies and the president in The Fifth Element.

  Once I had that Def Jam credit, my pay shot up, because now at clubs I was “You’ve seen him on Showtime at the Apollo and Def Comedy Jam . . . Mike Epps!”

  I continued to work throughout New York, around guys like Martin Lawrence, who was so funny and raw and came from the streets like I did. I would get gigs paying $100, $175. In fact, black comics made way more money than white comics who were working more mainstream clubs like Boston Comedy Club, Comic Strip Live, and the Comedy Cellar. They still just pay cab fare there.

  I noticed a lot of the white comics could afford to work without getting paid, but not me: I had child support to pay. I had a big-ass receipt book and I had to send Yolanda the money every week. I would go from room to room, bar to bar, and I’d keep working until I had enough. I’d write those checks every time, without fail.

  The vibe at the white clubs also wasn’t really my thing. First of all, I’d find myself always feeling like I needed to dress up. I’d wear a blazer on nights I was going to a white club. And white people celebrate differently. When black folks laugh, they fall out of their chairs and stomp their feet and push each other. At white clubs, at best you’d get a polite titter from the audience. I’d walk off those stages sometimes and I couldn’t tell if I’d done well or not.

  So I had trouble relating in those white clubs. I mean, there are some black guys who understand white people, and there are some black guys who don’t. I really don’t. Whether it was the police or prosecutor or the judge, I just never understood how to accept people as people. You know what I mean? It’s just a stigma in my head. Growing up, I always felt like white people treated my family like they were superior to us. It’s just something in me that I’ve never gotten over. White people have always made me felt like I was doing something wrong.

  Not like I wouldn’t have liked to have tried those white comedy rooms. I did go check them out a lot. I’d see Jeff Ross, Colin Quinn, and Dave Chappelle perform and think, I sure would like to be up there. But I never quite could make it happen. Estee Adoram, the booker at the Comedy Cellar, would let me drop off my headshot, but it was still just a Polaroid, and I sure as hell didn’t have an audition tape.

  Lucien, this permed, skinny little guy who looked like Burt Reynolds, ran Comic Strip Live—the place where Richard Pryor and Chris Rock started—and he invited me to audition for him a million times, but he was hard as nails, and I never got in.

  “Oh, Michael Epps? I’ve heard of you,” he’d say just about every time.

  I’d be like, “Oh, you’ve heard of me? I’ve auditioned for you three times in the last year, motherfucker!”

  No dice.

  Meanwhile, bookers like the Godmother of Comedy, Tina Graham, could get you on a chitlin’ circuit of colleges and bar and grills that actually paid real money. She booked me all the time, and when Bill Bellamy started having success on MTV, she got me to sub for him as host of the Peppermint Lounge. Real tough crowd, but I cracked ’em.

  And from there I started getting college dates, and gigs performing at these cool ski trips that promoters would organize. It was a great setup: They’d hire a bunch of comedians to go to these ski resorts or vacation lodges—like Hunter Mountain or the Poconos—and we’d perform for a bunch of urban audiences.

  None of us knew how to ski, so we’d all just party at the lodge. There would be a hot tub night, pajama parties, all kinds of theme events. Everyone drank and partied on the bus from the city to the place and then the whole weekend, and then on the bus the whole way back.

  But it was really Def Jam that totally changed the game. Thank God for Russell Simmons, because back then there weren’t a lot of black urban comics making it besides Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. He really blazed a new trail.

  I’d always envied artists who grew up in major cities. They had so much opportunity. I felt so strong being from Indiana. It made me feel like Goddamn, I’m from a place. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

  But I still stood out like a sore thumb. I was doing stuff in my accent about parole boards and cornfields and everyone else was doing jokes about cabdrivers and the third rail of the subway.

  They said all these things I’d never heard before.

  They’d say, “There was mad bitches in that club,” and I’d say, “That sounds terrible. Why do I want to go somewhere with angry girls?”

  Everyone in New York was talking about the “super” or the “projects.” My comedy was different, Midwest-driven. For a while I thought I should try to fit in, so I’d talk about New York. It bombed—people thought I was a country bumpkin, that’s for sure.

  The first time I got to do Showtime at the Apollo, the very show I watched back when I was in the county jail, I could hardly believe it. The night before the show, I could not sleep, I was so scared. It was a huge deal for me, and I wanted to kill, but it was terrifying for more than just me wanting to shine: Showtime was famous for the Sandman. He would come out and drag you off if you were no good. That was the last thing I wanted. Walking down 125th Street in New York City, past the African vendors and all the southern black folks, it felt like I was on my way to court to stand trial again.

  In the greenroom backstage, I hung out with Kool Bubba Ice—a guy who did impressions—and Destiny’s Child. Kool Bubba Ice kept saying: “You gotta bring it in the first three minutes!” and “Don’t forget about the Sandman!”

  I’m looking at this motherfucker like I don’t know why you’re telling me what I gotta do. You gotta do the same thing.

  Steve Harvey was the host that night, and I still remember him calling my name to come onstage. When I walked out, the place went fucking crazy. This was it. I was on fire.

  “Sisters,” I said, “you’ll never see me with a white woman.”

  Huge cheer from all the women in the audience.

  “That’s because I bring my white girls out late at night. You’ll be asleep.”

  I killed.

  Right after the show, Steve Harvey was out front sitting in the limo with the door open. “Come with me,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  I was so nervous and afraid. This night was already the biggest thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t handle a heart-to-heart with Steve Harvey, too. Also, I thought of myself as a rebel.

  “Naw, another time,” I said. “I got someplace to go.”

  What an idiot I was. I think it was just all too much for me at the time. And I also think I thought the more rebellious I tried to be, the more attention I would get. And so I made my bed hard all the time. I thought that was the artist’s way.

  I should have jumped in that fucking car.

  Instead, I went to a bar in the Village downstairs from the Greenwich Village Comedy Club and got wasted.

  I owed so many people money that, once I got paid for the Apollo gig, I left town and disappeared for weeks. I went to Indiana, gave Yolanda some money for Bria, and got some overdue dental work.

  I was pretty sure I’d get recognized on the street, too, and that I
’d get a hero’s welcome from my friends. Sure enough, my guy Otis Brown said, “I saw you! You killed it!”

  But that was it. No one else had watched. And especially not Yolanda.

  “Def Jam?” she said. “That ain’t shit. That ain’t shit.”

  Things were terrible between us. My friend Jeff likes to remind me of the time Yolanda came over to my house with a baseball bat when I had another girl over. Luckily, the other girl was incredibly athletic and took the bat from Yolanda, telling her she’d whoop her if she didn’t leave.

  But I can’t be mad at Yolanda. I wasn’t much of a great father at the time. I paid child support and I visited whenever I could, but things were over.

  Once, when I went by to see them, there was this little hustler dude hanging around.

  “I been buying your daughter Pampers!” he said to me.

  Right then and there, I knew the devil was on my ass. I wanted to kill that motherfucker.

  But I knew if I did anything I’d go back to jail, and all I wanted to do was be on the road.

  I was working on my material every day, everywhere I went. Some comics carry around notebooks and craft jokes on the page, but I never do. Sometimes I’ll write a premise on a scrap of paper, like “Police,” and then I’ll just say all the jokes I can think up about the subject. Or if I was at a bar, I would look at the bartender and think: Could I make “Bartender” funny as a premise? What do I have to say about bartenders? What about “Bus Driver?”

  One joke I told was about old men: “There’s nothing like watching two old men fight. When old men get done fighting, there’s a lot of change on the floor.”

  I’ve always told a lot of jokes about my family, especially my grandmother: “My grandmother used to call the police on everybody in the neighborhood. When the police came and got everybody rounded up, she’d go downstairs and say, all wide-eyed, ‘What happened?’

  “Your ass called the police on everybody. That’s what the hell happened.”

  I had it all in my head when I got onstage, but I’d improvise even better jokes in the moment because I was terrified of getting booed off the stage. Most of my best jokes came from fear. And my personality—people always related to me, felt comfortable around me—got me a long way.

  But offstage my life wasn’t so funny.

  I was drinking and doing coke, and I thought I didn’t have a habit because I kept my hair cut. If I had clean clothes on and a good haircut, I thought no one would know I was on drugs. What I failed to realize was that drugs adjust your attitude, not your look.

  There was a guy who lived uptown who used to serve me. I’d call him as soon as I got offstage. He’d call the dope Eddie Murphy, as in “I got that Eddie Murphy outside waiting on you.”

  My highs would make me talk for hours about my feelings. Whoever answered the phone late at night would get it. One time I got high and called my mother: “Mama, I got one question: Why did you fuck Daddy?”

  “You must be high,” she said, and hung up.

  Every time I got high and came down, I’d get sad and start crying until the dope man came back, and I’d say things I wouldn’t have said when I was sober. I thought it was helping me—opening up my third eye—but really it was destroying me. I could have been so much greater than what I was without all the drugs.

  But I needed to drown out all the pain, and I was really insecure. The drugs let me pretend I was someone other than who I was and live my lie better. It made me look and feel bad while I was doing it, sure, but it also gave me an alter ego, and my alter ego was killing it.

  Even when I wasn’t high, I still felt like I was living a dream, a dream I prayed I’d never wake up from. So many years I’d find myself thinking, Is this really real? Did I really come to this? Or am I still living in Indianapolis on Twenty-Third Street and just asleep and dreaming?

  I just had to tell myself to keep going.

  11

  Acting Lessons on Madison Avenue

  Every night I felt like I was getting better. I could feel myself winning over crowds little by little as I improved my jokes and played off of them.

  Here’s an example: One night in the Bronx I did a gig at this place called Jimmy’s Bronx Café. It was Monteria Ivey’s show, “Monty’s Crib.” Monteria was known for snaps like, “His family was so poor they used to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken to lick other people’s fingers.”

  So I got up there for my spot and started talking New York:

  “The Bronx. The Boogie Down Bronx . . . Steel, concrete, bricks and shit . . .” I talked about how kids in other parts of the country get told to go play outside and that means climbing hills and running through fields, but in the city it’s just “Play on the steps!” That’s all they have, like two stairs to play on.

  No one was having it. Quiet crowd. They looked older, so I changed my stuff.

  “We got some older folks here tonight,” I said. I told them I was going to talk about sex anyway, because “Y’all done the same shit that we done when you were our age. My grandmother got thirteen kids by four different men. I know she’s sucked a dick.”

  Now the crowd was starting to laugh.

  “I don’t call you old. I called you settled. Nothing bothers y’all.”

  I talked a lot about my grandmother being two-faced. She’d be sitting on the porch when a girl we knew walked by, and she’d say to me, “Look at that ugly black bitch. I can’t stand her.” And then she’d put on a smile and sing out, “Hi, baby! Don’t you look pretty today!”

  I talked about how my grandmother always talked shit about ’90s women. “Nowadays, girls can’t cook. They only have two, three babies.”

  To which I said: “Who wants to have seventeen kids and cook all the fucking time?”

  At that point, people were laughing hard. And I kept them going. I made fun of people in the crowd: “Look at her running to the bathroom like some little Gremlin motherfucker!”

  This one really killed:

  “The women in New York like to walk up to you and squeeze compliments out of you. They say, ‘I’m getting fat.’ And you’re supposed to say, ‘No, baby! You look so good!’ I don’t play like that. I say, ‘You are. You really are. No wonder. Every time I see you you’re eating.’ Then she says, ‘I’m big-boned.’ To which I say: ‘You’re big-biscuited.’”

  Once I’d said big-biscuited, that crowd was mine. “Women are good, though,” I’d say. “Women are something else. Without women, we’d die. Where would we be without women? Bunch of guys in Timberlands and hoodies, pregnant on the corner, smoking weed . . .”

  Then my time was up, and I left to big applause, a drink ticket, and at least $75. In ten minutes I was making what it took me a week to make at the 7-Eleven back in Naptown.

  I kept thinking, I love New York. Things were going great. I was working all the time, even winning competitions. But I also needed someone to keep me right.

  Just before I was about to move out of Dave’s, he told me he had a friend from Oklahoma City who used to be a street guy, Thomas Cobb “T.C.” Carl grew up in L.A., but his parents are from Oklahoma and that’s where he went to college on a football scholarship and studied business. He came to New York City and was only supposed to stay for two weeks but then stayed for the whole summer. He’d gotten a job at a fancy law firm defending the tobacco industry; the law firm gave him tickets to the ballet, the theater, sports. That’s how he started meeting people in show business, like Dave Klingman and T.K. Kirkland, which is how I got hooked up with him.

  When I met T.C., he was Mike Tyson’s friend, Anthony Michael Hall’s friend, knew Sandra Bullock, he knew all these people. I was a street guy, too, you know, so I think Dave wanted T.C. around to keep an eye on me.

  Dave called T.C. and said he should go see me perform.

  T.C. didn’t know so much about comedy, but I would learn that he knew all about the pitfalls of being famous. He understood about the self-doubt, and the ways suddenly having money can fuc
k with you, and all the ways you can get in trouble.

  The first time he saw me—some place in midtown—he walked in right as I was going onstage. It was still true that no one would mistake me for a New York comic in those days: I came out there with my Indiana accent and a cigarette dangling from my lip.

  I’d say things like “My grandmother did a drive-by—on a tractor” and use words like n’er nother—“My grandmother said, ‘Don’t you get a n’er nother Popsicle out of that freezer!’”

  When I finished that night, T.C. hadn’t stuck around, so I thought he’d hated it. The truth was, he’d left to call Dave.

  “He’s a star,” T.C. had said. “He doesn’t even need jokes. He’s just funny. I fell out! He’s going to be a star.”

  “Yeah,” David said. “He’s going to be a star. But right now he’s still an unsuccessful thug. He’s a criminal, but he’s not smart at it. He needs help. Can you keep an eye on him?”

  We met, and he became my road manager—the best. It’s a friendship that’s lasted for decades.

  I quickly moved into his apartment, and he set me up. When he took me to the grocery store, I loaded up on chicken, vegetables, flour, sugar, rice, and beans.

  “I thought you’d go for the Little Debbies!” T.C. said.

  “No, man,” I said. “I can actually cook. My mama taught me.”

  When I went to Dave’s to pick up my stuff, I left a couple of jackets behind but took my shoes. T.C. took one look at them and insisted I donate them to a homeless shelter. I did so reluctantly. At the shelter, the old guys shuffled into a line to each pick out a pair, see if they fit. When T.C. wasn’t looking, I got into the line myself: I wanted to get my Jordans before anyone else took them.

  “What are you doing?” T.C. said when he saw me nearing the front of the line.

  “I just want my one pair of Jordans back,” I said.

  “No, let them have all the shoes,” T.C. said. “It’s okay. Walk away from the shoes. There will be more shoes in your future. Better shoes. I promise.”

  T.C. didn’t lie—there were more and better shoes.