by Mike Epps
And there were some great parties. Thanks to him, I was living large and making fancy new friends. Tracy Morgan was doing a show, The Uptown Comedy Club, on TV, and we used to ride with him. Tracy was a star. He had a hat with a propeller on it. Me and Tracy became friends, and one time he was picking me up from T.C.’s and he looked around and started teasing me about how rich I must be living there. I had no money at all and hadn’t really noticed.
“Nigga, do you know where you live at?” Tracy asked me.
“Madison Avenue?” I said. “Does that mean something to you?”
I guess it was pretty nice. The apartment was furnished in the latest style: a green leather couch, glass tables. T.C. also did a makeover on me. I put on some fancy suits and started showing up at clubs and people would say, “Damn, who is this?”
T.C. was a role model to me. We would sit and argue about who was better, Miles Davis or Tupac. I was for Tupac. T.C. turned me on to jazz and I turned him on to rap. We challenged each other in everything: wrestling, basketball, running. T.C. became my best friend. He was a loyal friend. I’ll never forget everything he did for me.
T.C. seemed happy when I was reading books. I’d carry around some big book by Friedrich Nietzsche.
“Did you read it?” T.C. would say.
“Yeah, I’m reading it.”
Then he’d see me a week later, still carrying the same book, bookmark in the same place, and he’d say, “Are you reading that book, or are you just carrying it around to look cool?”
I even started taking acting classes, but I wasn’t learning much. My acting partner in the class didn’t take me seriously at all. There’s an old video of one of our scenes and I’m cracking jokes, getting laughs, and she is rolling her eyes at me.
I learned a lot more at home, where T.C. would set up a little video camera and we’d do scenarios, improvise. T.C. had done drama classes in high school, so he would give me scenes to act out: “You’re going up for parole, Mike.” Sometimes we’d have other guys over, like this comic Ray Grant, and it would be: “You’re his parole officer, Ray.”
I’d get right into it, put on a cap and Malcolm X glasses and get out my copy of Message to the Blackman in America and say, “They say I raped them boys in the penitentiary. I ain’t never done anything to nobody. Sir, all I’m asking for is another chance. I’m good as gold. I joined the Nation and everything. The Nation don’t take no bullshit.”
We were like kids. We’d film these scenes all over T.C.’s building, up on the roof, all over midtown. We’d dress up in wacky costumes (like I’d put on tall black socks, a black leather jacket, and a crazy cowboy hat, plus a purse), pretending to do cocaine deals, passing around baby powder and dollar bills.
When I got a role as an extra on New York Undercover, I was so excited, you’d have thought I got my own TV show. Even if I didn’t get to say anything, it was a big moment.
“Did you see me on TV?” I’d ask all my friends.
“Uh, I saw you walk through the scene,” they’d say.
“That’s right!” I’d say. “You saw me! It’s on and popping! I’m on my way! I’m gonna be a big, big star.”
Never mind that I didn’t get but a small fraction of the shit I auditioned for.
“You’re not getting down, are you, Mike?” T.C. would ask me.
“No way,” I’d say. “Rejection I love. I love them to tell me no. That means when the yes comes it will be that much bigger.”
In the mid-1990s, I got cast in an indie movie called Strays, which was written and directed by and starred Vin Diesel. We filmed a lot over at the Fashion Institute of Technology on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I was so excited, I got a unicycle and would ride it from T.C.’s apartment to the set all the way along Thirty-Fourth Street every day.
I even got a little role in the first season of The Sopranos, playing the boyfriend of a guy who stole a car.
I almost got the lead role in this Def Jam movie How to Be a Player. The director flew in to see me do a show at the Flamingo on the West Side. That was a crazy night: Biggie was there, Puffy, too. I did a tight set, and I was sure I’d nailed the part. Little did I know, Bill Bellamy was already cast as the lead and the director was on his way out of the movie.
Between gigs, though, T.C. would wake me up at some reasonable hour and say, “Get up! Write some jokes!”
Once he even got me a job working demolition. I lasted until noon. T.C. really chewed me out for that, but I was so focused on being a comedian. I was working my ass off—seven shows in a night. I might start at seven p.m. at Catch a Rising Star, then I’d go to the Uptown Comedy Club (lots of New York sportsmen went there). Then I’d take the train out to Long Island to do a club called Nakisaki, then all the way back to Manhattan where I might even get the PATH train to perform around two a.m. at the Sphinx in Roselle, New Jersey.
Some nights I’d be doing a set at the Boston Comedy Club or some shit, and along the back wall there was Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Tracy Morgan, just standing there, watching.
One day I got asked to join something called the Creative Tour, a comedy tour all through the chitlin’ circuit rooms in the South. We hit Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Atlanta, Birmingham, and straight up to Memphis.
Only one problem: My license was suspended and I had no car. T.C. said, “I’ll give you my car and $20 for some gas. Drive like an old lady.”
Well, in that Mazda 929, I rolled from New York to Norfolk, to Richmond, to Charlotte, to Atlanta, to Memphis. Each club was so different from the others. But I learned that it was easier for me to make southern crowds laugh than New York audiences. New York audiences are like dogs. An aggressive dog will walk up to you ready to bite, and if you act scared, he’ll bite harder. In the South, I didn’t stick out so much with my jokes about my rural family—they got me.
Eventually, I was ready to get back to a big city: I felt like I’d graduated from boot camp. But what next? T.C. had an idea: “What are you still doing here?” he said. “You did New York. There ain’t nothing else for you to do here. You’re ready to go to L.A.”
“I’m not ready,” I said. “Dave Chappelle told me, ‘Don’t go to Hollywood until they ask for you.’” Dave had a nice place out on the West Coast. He seemed to know what was up.
“Maybe Dave wants you to stay here so he’ll get all the jobs,” T.C. said.
The only thing left that I hadn’t done in New York was Saturday Night Live, and that was never an option for me. It just wasn’t my scene; I’m too untraditional. So I started to think that maybe L.A. was the answer.
My friend Red Grant out in L.A. told me that I could stay with him. I had been to California, but only to the Bay Area for a comedy competition.
A lot of people in New York have an unreal perception of Hollywood. I’d heard so many people talk bad about it. When you hear that all the time, then you already got your nose turned up before you even land, like, Fuck this place. You don’t give it a chance.
But T.C. and Red talked me into it. They told me—and it would turn out they were right—that if you’re in the business, Hollywood is the true land of milk and honey. And it’s also one place that looks more at what you do than where you came from. It’s one of the only places in America that they’ll let anybody in if they’re talented. You can be in a nursing home full of old people, and if you got a good script, they’ll buy it. I’d learned everything I could from the New York clubs, but L.A. was calling me.
I bought another bus ticket.
I thought my life over so many times on that bus ride from New York to California, just as I had done on the bus from Atlanta to New York. The weather outside was lousy, then it was fine: sleet, snow, rain, sun. Sundown. Sunup. I saw mountains and lakes and deserts. I rolled through states I had never been through.
Then, in Missouri, police pulled the bus over. When I saw the lights, I was scared as hell. They’re gonna come get me for some old shit, I thought. Would I ever truly escape?<
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When they boarded the bus, they walked directly toward me. I was scared to death. I tensed up as they got to my row. Then they kept walking and snatched some guy right behind me.
Damn, man, I thought, we came so far, and got so far to go.
12
An Audition and a Funeral
When I arrived in Hollywood in 1998, it felt to me like a whole new world.
I knew I might be here for a while—at least, I hoped so. First, I moved in with my guy Red. We started trying to write movie scripts together and we went out together each night to comedy clubs. People were really happy to see me in L.A. “Man, you should have been here for years!” they’d say.
I auditioned during the day and did comedy at night. I’d always loved movies, so I wanted to get film work. It took me a long time to figure out auditions. Once I realized that auditions were just a room with a person in it, things got easier. All I had to do was meet that person, or those few people, and see if we could get along. I mean, I was ready: I had the skills, I just didn’t understand the audition process right off. I came in trying to be the character all the way, right away. Sometimes you don’t have to be a character when you’re auditioning—you can just be you, and you can find your way into the part. That’s one of the strongest positions you can come from, just being yourself and getting them to like who you are. Then they have faith that when push comes to shove, you guys can work it out about how exactly to play the role.
I’ll tell you something that never got easier, though: the competition. One of the crazy things about auditioning is you walk in and you see your peers in there all sitting in the waiting room. Guys you know and are friends with. Everyone’s sitting there, looking at each other like Who’s going to get this?
Most of your competition is friendly until someone asks the dreaded question, “What you reading for?” If you’re reading for the same part, an iron wall comes down. And all of a sudden it’s time for the game face and a look that says, Talk to you later. Obviously, we can be friends again one day, but we ain’t friends right now.
When the pressure was off, though, L.A. people sure knew how to have fun. One time I was at a cookout at a big apartment complex with my guy T.C. There was a big pool in the center courtyard. I kept looking from the apartments to the pool, from the pool to the apartments. I knew what I had to do; it had to be done.
“Hey, Mike is missing,” I heard T.C. say a few minutes later. “Where’s Mike?”
“Here I am!” I yelled, and I jumped off the third tier of the apartment complex into the pool, sending a huge cannonball of water up into the party. I got out of the pool and everyone was laughing, yelling, “You crazy, man! You’re fucking crazy!”
The first movie I booked in L.A. was called 3 Strikes, directed by DJ Pooh. The movie is about a guy who’s just gotten out of jail and is trying to stay out but is in a tough spot, because he already has two strikes against him and the state has a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule.
When I met DJ Pooh, he said, “Damn, man! I wish I could have cast you as the lead role, but it’s already cast. I’ll get you something, though.” I really didn’t care how big the role was. I just wanted to be working. I ripped that cameo.
“I’m in Hollywood now!” I said to myself as I rode down Sunset. This town is gonna make you or break you, I thought, and it feels so far like it’s making me. Right away, I loved it there. Honestly, doing all those comedy rooms in L.A. was a piece of cake compared to New York, where I’d had to ride three trains to get to gigs every night. In L.A., I’d just drive and I didn’t even have to park, because everywhere had valet service. California was all sunshine and flowers.
I was feeling good, too, because I had a lot of good friends and my family seemed so happy for me. One time I was staying with my sister, Julie, and her son, and I realized after I left to go get on a plane that I’d left a bag of money in the closet. Old habits die hard: For a long time I didn’t trust banks and would carry all my movie cash around.
I was in a panic when I called Julie. “Please tell me I left the money there. I can’t find—”
“Calm down,” Julie said. “It’s right where you left it in the closet.” She never opened it, counted it, took anything out of it.
Those are the kind of people I need in my life. I was so glad I’d left my thief friends behind, because they’d have taken and spent that money by the time I’d gotten to the airport.
I was working the clubs all the time, every night, and auditioning during the day, looking for my big break. But I found time to have some fun, too. You know, they had all kinds of beautiful girls who used to just come to the comedy clubs. One in particular, Elena, became something: We’d hang out at her apartment a lot. She liked my Indiana accent.
And I made some great friends. My favorite was this tough guy named Comic Strip. He was always chewing gum and looked like a cartoon character; that’s how he got his name. He was a great guy with a good heart. And when I hung out with him, it was all good times and parties.
Comic Strip knew all the bad guys in town, but he tried to get me to stay away from them.
“Mike,” he’d say, “what the fuck are you doing hanging with these guys? You’re trying to do something with your life. You don’t know what the fuck they involved in. If somebody comes back to get them, they gonna get you, too.”
But I couldn’t help it: The bad guys were so fun, and I felt comfortable around them. In particular, I was hanging down on Crenshaw at this guy’s house, which was an after-hours spot. He was really smart and respected and loved in L.A. I used to go over there and get high and cry—all mouth twitching and eyes flickering—and he’d say, “Motherfucker, don’t come over here and get high no more, ’cause you don’t know how to handle it.”
The coke wasn’t the problem; my mind was the problem. The shit that was going on in there didn’t mix good with cocaine, you know. I didn’t know why I was still doing cocaine, even. It would make me depressed. Cocaine only really worked for me the way it’s supposed to about three days after I’d come down from it. That’s when my fucking creativity was crazy. It felt like it just opened my mind up. I’d come up with jokes. But on either side of that moment, it was depressing, man.
Meanwhile, at the clubs, I found the crowds to be so different in L.A.—way more lighthearted compared to New Yorkers. I would come out and go onstage and kill. You could tell the comics who hadn’t been through the New York clubs, too, because they were way greener. It made me glad I’d come up the way I had, because it let me take everything in stride when I did festivals like Laffapalooza.
Laffapalooza—America’s Urban International Comedy Arts Festival—was run by Jamie Foxx, Marcus King, and his wife, Jaime Rucker King, and it all hung together thanks to their road manager. When we had been on the Def Jam tour together, that guy had rooted for me. “That dude, that’s the next Richard Pryor,” he said, and that’s how I got the Laffapalooza gig.
Around the same time I met Niles Kirchner, who was working at King Entertainment for Marcus and Jaime. I wasn’t sure Marcus King and them really wanted the company to manage me, but Niles thought I’d be good, so they let him take me on as a client but made it clear, “He’s on you, Niles.”
I was still wild as fuck. I’d had other managers before, but most thought my personality was up and down. No shit. Anyway, it was hard for me to get representation, and things didn’t really last until Niles came along. I think it’s because he’s from L.A. He’s a black guy, but he went to Beverly Hills High, so he was around nothing but white kids. He was the closest thing to a white guy that I could get—a black guy who understood white people. I was, like, “You know what? I haven’t met a white person that understood me.” So here I got this black guy that knows white people way better than I do.
So there I am at Laffapalooza, and I fucking killed. Niles was looking for how to turn that success into something more, and at the time everyone knew that Ice Cube was looking for a guy to replace Chri
s Tucker for the next Friday movie. Every black actor on earth wanted that part.
Niles set up a time for me to audition in front of Ice Cube at the Comedy Store.
I killed it.
Then they had me in again. I killed it.
Again. Killed it.
Still, though, no offer. I started to go a little crazy. I thought I was gonna get it on the first day. I didn’t know you had to do it a million times for a role.
So I’m killing myself trying to get this part, and then Elena drops a bomb: She told me she was pregnant.
The timing wasn’t great. I was just trying so hard to make it. And I was already paying child support on Bria and missing her. I didn’t think Elena and I were going to get married, and it made me sick to think about having two kids out there I wasn’t seeing all the time. But as soon as I saw my daughter Makayla, I was just so grateful to have her. She’s the spitting image of me; she’s like my twin.
Now that I had two daughters to support, the pressure was really on to get that part in Next Friday. This was no time to mess around. Week after week, though, they kept having me in and still I wasn’t getting that part. I was starting to freak the fuck out.
Then more shocking news: Out of nowhere, my little buddy Comic Strip got killed. Someone shot him in L.A. I’d seen him right before it happened. I couldn’t believe that was it, that he was gone.
I went from Comic Strip’s funeral to yet another audition for the fucking Next Friday movie. T.C. and I drove straight to the studio from Forest Lawn, crying like shit, drinking Hennessy, changing clothes in the parking lot.
I thought I was close to having the role. This could turn things around, I thought. I could do it for Comic Strip. But when I walked up to the building, I saw every actor in the world who looked like me out there practicing my lines. Wayans brothers. Wayans cousins. Wayans acquaintances. Fucking everyone.
“Is this some fucking joke?” I said to T.C. “I just left my homie’s funeral and I’m back to square one on this thing? And now I gotta go there and be funny?”