Unsuccessful Thug

by Mike Epps

  Not long before he died, Bernie Mac did a movie with Samuel L. Jackson called Soul Men (slogan: “Out of Sync. Never out of Style”) about two soul legends who get back together for a show at the Apollo. Bernie was funny as hell; I was so happy to have a role in that movie, just so I could meet him and learn from him. Between sets we would sit and talk. I had him on the floor because I did impressions of comics from Chicago that he came up with.

  “Give me some advice,” I told him.

  “Cover your own ass,” he told me. “Or someone else will. Take care of your mind, body, and”—I thought he was going to say soul—“your money.”

  Shooting the first Hangover movie, in which I played mistakenly kidnapped “Black Doug,” was like being around a bunch of guys hanging out after school. They were just cracking each other up. I don’t think anyone knew that movie was going to be as huge as it was. I got brought back as Black Doug not long after in The Hangover Part III. Those guys showed back up having made some money and they had better haircuts, nicer clothes, and cuter girlfriends.

  Around that time, I got a serious role in a movie called Sparkle, directed by Salim Akil. The movie was about a young girl group from Detroit in the 1960s. I think a lot of people in Hollywood don’t understand that I’m just a better serious actor than I am a comedian. This was a chance for me to show my shit, you know? And I do a lot of homework on the character. I reach back into my past. I knew so many big personalities growing up that it’s easy for me to tap into a role. I still have all those people from my old neighborhood, all those people’s voices and walks and histories, all at my fingertips.

  We shot Sparkle in Detroit in the wintertime, so it was cold as hell, but I was so grateful every minute I was there. One of the greatest things about it was that Whitney Houston was in it.

  This shit they said about Whitney being sort of crazy? She was a total pro from what I saw. And she was magic. That voice! Jesus, in person it’s even more amazing than you think it’s going to be. Once I walked by her trailer and out of the window I heard her doing a duet with Michael Jackson to “Remember the Time.” He was coming out of speakers, but it sounded like he was right there in the room with her. I still get chills when I think about that.

  One of my favorite movies I’ve ever made was All About the Benjamins, another film with Ice Cube. T.C. had gone around trying to get someone to make that movie for a while. He and the writer went in to meet with Magic Johnson to see if he’d be in it, too.

  “Who’s going to star?” someone on Magic’s staff asked.

  “Mike Epps,” T.C. said.

  “What’s he been in?” they asked.

  “Next Friday and Bait,” T.C. said.

  “That’s one and a half movies,” said the staffer.

  (Magic turned the movie down—he did a movie with Mos Def and Queen Latifah instead.)

  But Ice Cube was in, so it was all good. We shot the movie down in Miami. I had so much fun on that set, but sometimes it was at the expense of my fellow actors. For a start, they bring in a really professional actor to play Mr. Sheldon. He’s a thespian.

  As the cameras roll, I start improvising, and the professional actor hates it.

  “Cut,” says Kevin Bray, the director.

  The Mr. Sheldon actor says, “Are we changing the lines?”

  Everyone else liked what I was doing, though. Bray said to him, “You deliver the lines the way you want to and so will Mike.”

  So the guy delivers his lines.

  I improvise again: “Mr. Sheldon, Imma quit coming here. Imma start going to Dwight!”

  “Dwight who?” the actor says, exasperated.

  “Dah white around your lips!”

  (He had a white beard and mustache, get it?)

  They kept it in the final film.

  While we were filming that movie, I got a call from a friend of mine back in Indianapolis.

  “You know that old house you’re always talking about? The one on Thirty-Third and Carrollton? It’s up for sale.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I got to have that shit.”

  I got a broker, and the broker went to the owner. The neighborhood had come up a little bit, so I ended up spending about $80,000 on it. But I bought it. Finally.

  I went to Indianapolis. It was eerie, pushing my way through the fence, walking into the yard. I opened the front door and walked inside. That’s where Chaney and I wrestled. That’s where my mom fed us SpaghettiOs. That’s where we watched TV and I saw Eddie Murphy do Buckwheat for the first time.

  I went to my mom’s house and told her I had a surprise for her. I drove her to the Carrollton house.

  “This is your house now, Mom,” I said. “You can live here again. No one is ever going to take it from you. It’s ours. We own that shit.”

  “You bought this house, Mike?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You bought it with the money you made in Hollywood?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I bought this house with the money I made acting. I want you to live here again. I’m giving you the house. It’s yours.”

  She was quiet for a minute.

  “I’m real proud of you,” she said. “That’s real sweet of you.” Then she got quiet. “But, Mike, I’m sorry, I ain’t moving in there. That time is gone, baby. I can’t relive none of that shit. I ain’t doing it.”

  Where I remembered wrestling for fun with Chaney, she remembered fights with Reggie. She remembered worrying about her kids having enough to eat.

  I was sad she didn’t want to be there, but I understood. That was a dark time in our lives. I wanted to fix it, but it’s not so easy. Instead, I gave the house to my sister, Julie, and her son to live in. And I kept buying up property in the neighborhood.

  My grandmother had moved out of her house and retired to Florida. She had sold the house to one of the guys who went to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses with her, a brother named Marvin Johnson. He’d told my grandmother, “If you ever want this house back, I’ll sell it to you.”

  I called him up.

  “Hey, Marvin,” I said. “Ms. Anna Walker wants the house back.”

  I moved my aunt into that one.

  I bought the whole block and a lot across the street. Every movie meant another house.

  Owning property for me is about saying I made it. I became somebody. Those deeds mean a lot to me. I guess it’s because I came from that neighborhood, made it out of there, and now get to go back and say, You don’t own me anymore, Mapleton. I own you.

  Back when I was a kid there, me and my friends, we didn’t get a lot of recognition for who we were. In fact, there was nobody there to give us recognition. If we were great, we didn’t know it, because nobody told us. Going back there now, taking care of people, that lets me say those people were great and maybe I was, too.

  15

  A Moment for the Women in My Life

  I’ve always been a lover. The women in my life, I must say, have really contributed to my madness and my happiness. I could remember dating this girl, Jo-Jo, in junior high school. I could have had a kid when I was fourteen or fifteen, but it just didn’t work out that way. I like ladies, what can I say? Not a lot that’s appropriate for a book, you know?

  But anyway, in 2006, I thought it might be time to settle down some, marry my girl Mechelle.

  I met Mechelle one day while I was walking around the Fox Hills Mall. This was in the early 2000s, when I was doing the Friday movies. I was living in L.A., out by the airport. So I’m at the mall, probably walking off a hangover, and I saw her right off. She was shopping with her friend, and I walked up to them in a store. I’ll never forget her friend thought that I was going over to talk to her, but I wanted to talk to Mechelle. It was a little awkward. I had to be, like, “Sorry, not you. Your friend.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked Mechelle.

  “Houston,” she said. “You?”

  “Indiana.”

  “My dad’s from Indiana!” sh
e said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “And his name is Mike, too.”

  “Wow!” I said.

  We had a connection right then. And then we dated for a while, and really fell in love.

  Still, it was hard deciding to get married.

  I’m a romantic. I’ve always had this woman in my mind that I wanted that I’d never met. All the girls that I’ve seen weren’t the woman that I had pictured in my mind. Only I can see this imaginary woman. I get glimpses of her in my head. You keep trying to get as close as you can to that imaginary woman. And with my wife, I thought I finally was really close.

  Looking back, there were some warning signs. I did have some fears, you know, like that she said she wanted to be an actress. Being in a relationship with somebody that wants to be something, it’s a lot of responsibility on you, you know? You need to help them. I felt like I had to help her with her career.

  Another fear I had was that I felt like she didn’t want me to have anything to do with my friends back in Indiana. That made it hard for me to have a relationship with my family, too. She didn’t seem to want me doing anything for, or even with, them.

  “I don’t know what you’re going back there for,” Mechelle said when I said I wanted to go visit Indianapolis. “There’s nothing there.”

  But Mechelle was a beautiful person. She seemed like the woman for me, so we decided to have a big wedding. I paid for my family and her family to all go to Hawaii for it. It was the biggest, most expensive wedding ever.

  It rained.

  “I heard rain on your wedding day means good luck,” Mechelle said.

  Well, it wasn’t.

  We had some good times and two amazing daughters together: Moriah, who’s five years younger than Makayla, and Madison, who was born two years after Moriah. They’re smart and beautiful, and I’m the luckiest father in the world. They’re extensions of my mother. They remind me so much of her. When you have kids, you try to figure out who they’re going to be. You can’t really figure it out while they’re still young. But you see glimpses. And I see so many glimpses of my mom.

  But long story short, eleven years after we got married, Mechelle and I got divorced, in September 2017. We’d been separated since June of 2015. She’s my kids’ mother, so I don’t want to say anything bad about her. And I wasn’t a great husband, I’ll admit it.

  The thing that’s hard, though, is our two young daughters. I hated leaving the house where they live.

  If you’re keeping score, that’s right: I now have four beautiful daughters. Four. I don’t know how I didn’t have any sons. Maybe fucking while wearing dress socks? Four girls—can you believe it? It used to bother me, like an ego thing, that I didn’t have any boys. Where is the mini-me? But now I know it’s a blessing. It’s made me a better man. For so many years, I was talking shit about bitches and hoes, not respecting women like I should have. Now I look at my girls, and I see so clearly that I have to throw that sort of talk away.

  Some of my daughters have just started dating now. And I have to deal with something people told me for years but that I didn’t want to believe: Girls find guys who are like their fathers. So now my daughters are bringing these guys home, and I do not like the looks of them, and it’s because they look like me: “Daddy, meet you!”

  One time I knew this dude my daughter brought home had weed. I could just tell. I thought about lecturing him or throwing him out of the house . . . but I really needed some weed. So I asked him if he had any.

  “No, of course not, Mr. Epps,” he said.

  I was walking out of the room and right before I got out of the door he said, “But I know where to get some.”

  I turned back around.

  “Is it good?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s loud.”

  “How the hell you know the word loud?” I said. But I gave him some money and he came back . . . five minutes later. Yeah, he totally knew where to get some—his fucking glove compartment.

  When my daughter stopped dating him, it was a relief. She doesn’t need to be running around with bad kids like that. Sure miss that pot, though.

  I’ve had to learn to be a good father. I didn’t know what it looked like, a good father who was there all the time. So many men in the black community take off. My dad did it; when I became a father the first time, I did it, too: I for sure wasn’t around enough when Bria was little. That’s a real source of regret for me. Then I got married and I thought I wouldn’t do it this time.

  But I did. I did it even though I knew firsthand how much it sucks growing up without your dad around all the time. I’m sorry my dad wasn’t there much when I was growing up. And I’m trying really hard to be there for my kids now as much as I can be even though I’m not with their mom anymore.

  I’d still get married again. And I still really want to be a good father, a good role model. I’m trying to make it up. I talk to them every day. I check their Instagram all the time to see what they’re up to. I give them help when they need it.

  I got tested on this when my daughter Bria had a daughter, Skylar. Skylar’s the cutest thing in the world. Bria will dress Skylar up and put makeup on her and she looks 45. Talks like it, too. She’s so smart.

  Skylar’s dad left. The difference is: Bria has me. I told my daughter, “I’m going to take care of you and that baby.” And I do.

  What’s crazy, though, is that if I hadn’t left her and her mom when I did, to go to New York and try to be a comedian, I don’t think I ever would have gotten famous, and then I never would have made enough money to take care of my family now.

  It was the wrong choice and the right choice at the same time. That’s why this stuff is so confusing. You never really get out of school, you know what I mean? The only difference is that you’re an adult now. School was very, very challenging for me because it wasn’t fun enough, and I want life to be fun now, too, only sometimes I have to be a grown-up and deal with hard shit.

  Being a grown-up has given me a lot of love and respect for my mom. I always thought I knew who my mother was until I became an adult and I started to realize how hard things were for her and how brave she was. And I started to learn more about her childhood and more about the family, and to see what she was up against.

  My mom’s still in Indianapolis. And know what’s crazy? My mother and my stepdad Reggie are still married—they’ve just been separated since right around when my baby brother was born (and he’s now thirty-seven). My sister and brothers and I think of all our dads, he’s the last one she should still be married to, given the way it ended and everything, but you know, these things are complicated.

  My mom’s got a lot of health problems. She has chronic COPD, asthma, and bronchitis. But she’s hanging in there. Not too long ago, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which explained some things we’d always wondered about. Sometimes she’d just say crazy shit. Julie, especially, had a lot of fights with her back in the day. She’d say things to Julie and later not remember she said them. How could my mom say those things when we knew her to be so sweet? Well, the diagnosis made it make sense. And now she gets shots for that and is a lot more stable.

  My grandmother’s living the good life down in Florida now, too. She’s about ninety. I fixed up her old house real nice. I brought it back to its original design, made it pretty beautiful. My auntie runs a home day care there now.

  My brothers and sister are doing good. I mean, we all have a lot of scars. As you might imagine, I think it messed Nathan up pretty bad being left like that and raised separate from his full brother, Aaron. But we’re all doing surprisingly well, all things considered.

  Chaney works at a juvenile court, if you can believe that. Every day he sees kids like he and I were. Well, like I was. He was always a good kid. The stuff he tells me about the Indiana kids today is crazy. He’s still my fan and still my friend.

  Chaney’s over at our dad’s place a lot these days. Tommie Sr. isn’t in the b
est of health since he had a stroke, though he takes care of himself much better now than he used to—no drinking anymore or any of that.

  My brother John has been married for twenty-five years and has two beautiful kids in college. He was working as a printer for twenty-seven years (he even got me a job there once; I lasted a day), before that industry tanked. Now he’s a surface miner, working with sand and gravel. He’s a good, hardworking man.

  My sister, Julie, takes my mother for her shots and does everything else for her, too. Julie’s so good at taking care of people. When Julie first moved into the old house at Carrollton after I bought it and my mom didn’t want to live there, it was hard on her, reliving those days. She almost left. But now she’s settled in. She works part-time in customer service.

  Julie took care of her father, Robert, when he was sick and dying of bone cancer, and now she takes care of our mom. I try to make sure Julie’s taking care of herself, too. It’s so easy when you’re taking care of people all the time to forget to take care of yourself. I especially see women in our community do this all the time. I got her a gym membership, and she says it’s helping her feel stronger. Julie always says that “the Good Book, the Bible, it says you reap what you sow, and you have to watch how you treat people.” I hope that’s true for her sake, because she’s done so much good, and she deserves good things.