by Mike Epps
Through all these years, my mother’s voice has always been in my head keeping me safe, telling me one day it would be okay. She always wanted better for us, but for a lot of our childhood I think she just didn’t know how to make it better.
Still, even though she was always struggling, my mother taught me so much about how to have manners and how to survive. I know how to cook because of my mom. It blows people’s minds. They don’t expect me to know how to cook. An urban comedian guy. But I can cook. I know how to work on cars, too. My mom was always all for us learning as much as we could about everything.
We had it really rough for a really long time, but she found ways to make it okay for us—to get us fed, to let us know we were loved. For all the horrible shit in my childhood, thanks to her, it wasn’t all bad. If you have people around you like her, and if you can figure out a survival strategy, you can get by. I always say, even though I grew up dirt-poor, my life wasn’t just one thing. It was a gumbo, a collage. And she raised me to be sensitive. That made me not so good at hard crime, but it made me a better person and it let me find my real talents.
I love my mom so much. I can smell her scent even when I’m not around her. I can’t even describe it. It’s like flowers. Or air. It’s just my mother.
And she helps me whenever I’m struggling. My mom has always told me: “You want to deal with something? Go to bed.” Every day, she said, life repeats itself. When you sleep, it’s like you die for eight hours. Then, in the morning, you come back to life and you get another chance.
Life is a redemption. Every single day you get redeemed. All you got to do to be saved is go to bed. Every time I go to her with a problem, she says the same thing: “Go to bed. Go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll get another chance. Tomorrow it will be different.”
Without her voice in my head, I’d be dead now. My mother most of all taught me a lot about people. She always said that you can’t change who people are. You either have to love them and accept them, or don’t fuck with them at all. You can’t stay in a person’s life and change them.
She used to always tell me, “You haven’t lived so long,” and I never knew what that meant. She was basically saying that you never live long enough. You don’t have to sit in the shade. You’ll learn till you die, and you haven’t lived long enough to understand everything. I hear so many people talking about wanting to make it. Unfortunately, you never really make it. Or you do, and then you just live to fight another day, right?
16
Hollywood Is Stephen Decatur High School
When I was younger and bill collectors would call the house, I would mimic a white man’s voice. It was an important skill to have.
“Why, yes, sir, that check is in the mail!” I would say in my crisp, white-person voice. “Well, ma’am, I’m afraid that woman no longer lives here. How sorry I am you are having trouble collecting from her!”
I’ve often been asked, first in school and later in auditions, if I know how to talk without using slang. Of course I do—that’s the voice black men use in a job interview, or when they’re talking to the boss, or dealing with a judge. That’s the bullshit you have to use when you get pulled over by the cops. When you see those lights, especially when you know you have some guns or drugs in the car, you think, Time to talk like a white person. Maybe he’ll let me drive away. He comes up to the window, you smile, and say, “Good evening, Officer!” and then you pray.
Remembering who you are and what your soul is can be hard in Hollywood. I try to stay true to myself. I once walked off the set of a TV show because they had us shooting at a real slave plantation. In the scene I had to get into bed with a white girl, but when I got to the set, it just didn’t feel right. I was looking out into the woods and it was like ghosts of former slaves were haunting me. I took a break and called my grandmother to tell her.
“You leave, baby,” she said. “You don’t need that money.”
And I ran like an escaping slave off that set.
I’ve always hated people who wanted to be popular. Hollywood reminds me of Stephen Decatur High School so much. The kids in high school who were at the popular table were always people that didn’t have no real talent. People like that weren’t shit to me. That’s how Hollywood is to me, too. The people who are just funny enough or talented enough are the ones who are popular. But the best ones are always somewhere else.
In the fall of 2016, I wound up in Montreal, Canada, playing Dr. Chris Salgado in the Death Wish remake starring Bruce Willis. Now, there weren’t a lot of black doctors living around us back in Indianapolis when I was growing up, but I was able to play a doctor because very early on I learned how to transform myself into someone who could get by in any situation.
So I used the skills I honed figuring out how to talk to cops and judges and lawyers to pretend to be a doctor—but now, one thing is different: Now that I’m an adult, I know I can be articulate as myself. I don’t have to play a white person. I can talk like a smart, doctor version of myself without necessarily pretending to be white. It sounds like a small difference. To me, it’s huge.
Filming Death Wish in Canada during the 2016 U.S. election was especially refreshing because I got to see America and its politics from the outside.
I love America, but being in Canada made me think about how free I am and also to ask some questions like: Is it really free? The answer is no—you gotta pay something for it. And growing up black is still detrimental to a person’s safety. Racism is all over the world, but I think you can feel it more in America.
Growing up in segregated Indiana, I used to be intimidated by people from bigger cities. But when I was hanging out in Montreal, I realized something else: Being from Indiana made me who I am—and I’m no less than anyone else. In fact, I think about people I used to look up to and I realize that now I’ve seen more of the world than they probably ever will.
As a comedian and actor, I’ve been all over the world. I ran through L.A. and New York like water. I ran through Detroit, too. Where you belong is about heart and individuality and it has nothing to do with landscapes or where on the map you start. It’s not about where you’re from; it’s all about who you were born to be.
I tell kids all the time: If you can’t imagine it, it’s hard to get there. You have to have a really advanced imagination. If you don’t dream it, it won’t happen. On that bus from Atlanta to New York, all I did was keep dreaming, my head mashed against the greasy window, coming up through the Appalachian Mountains, up the East Coast. And it got to be where the whole world started to seem like a dream to me. Awake or asleep, it was all the same: I was just dreaming.
I have to remind myself that a lot of people in the business went into it wanting to be famous. Not me. Because of how I grew up, I never expected to have anything, and I can work with whatever I have. If I get two dollars, I’ll have more fun than somebody with a hundred. I’ve never been that type of person who’s greedy for fame or money. I got into this for just one reason: because I really enjoyed making people laugh. I enjoyed it so much, I realized I couldn’t live without it.
Still, you have to be strong to make it in Hollywood, because you get rejected all the time. Like when he made Ride Along, Ice Cube traded me in for Kevin Hart—that Webster-size motherfucker!
Then there was the time Katt Williams tried to diss me and I gave it right back. He is one crazy, firecracker motherfucker. He and I were about to do another movie together, and beforehand I showed up at a show we were going to do together, and he was in front of the theater waiting for me, doing that pacing thing of his.
Instead of saying hi, he yelled, “You couldn’t drive up in a newer car?” Then: “You got my old jokes in that big trunk?”
“No,” I said. “I got a little kid in there who could beat you up just like that seventh grader you tried to take in Gainesville.” (He’d just lost a fight to a child and it was all over YouTube.)
We’ve battled a lot over the years, and because we had street peo
ple around us, it could have gotten ugly. But while I’m writing this, we’re getting ready to star together in a sequel to Meet the Blacks.
Shit talking is just part of the game. It’s fun. Here’s some more of it:
Remember when Dave Chappelle got all that money and went to Africa? Just so everyone knows, you give me fifty million dollars, I promise not to go to Africa. I will go to the mall, yes. I will go to the car dealership. Africa? Naw.
Who else? Ice-T. Ice-T did some mighty bad acting on Law & Order. Every episode they only give him, like, two lines and then you don’t see Ice-T again until the end: “Homicide says three kids are missing. We still don’t know what happened.” And out.
I can laugh at myself, too, though. You know, I had a network TV show for about five minutes. People went from calling out “Uncle Buck!” to “What the fuck . . . happened to your motherfucking TV show?”
I was test-driving a new car when I got the news that it got canceled.
“What do you think?” the salesman said.
“I think I can’t afford this car anymore,” I said.
I still feel out of place in Hollywood. When I go to awards shows, I don’t know what to do with myself. I usually find a corner and just lean on a wall. I can tell people are scared of me, and that’s an uncomfortable feeling. They’re either afraid of me or they don’t take me seriously. (I don’t know which is worse.) Coming from where I come from, the worst thing is not being respected. The only reason why I want a motherfucker to be scared of me is so you won’t disrespect me. That’s where all my tough shit comes from. I don’t want you taking advantage of me.
So if I’m mean, that’s why. I’ve been mean in my life because of that. And people misunderstand me for that. They look at it, like, Damn, he’s an asshole.
Well, earlier this week I came in the door nice and three people took advantage of me. (No names, but they know who the fuck I’m talking about.) Shit, everybody in the business knows who I’m talking about. I’m talking about basically everyone. So tomorrow I’m gonna be an asshole, because I don’t want to be taken advantage of again.
I wonder if it would be different if I was 350 pounds, or if I was five-two, if I wasn’t just a strong, fit, six-foot-two-inch black man. I wonder what I’d have to look like for people to actually see who I really am, to see my feelings, and my compassion as a person. Because the way it is now, people are judging me off how I look and how my confidence is through the roof, and they can’t see that at the same time I’m insecure. So I got enough confidence to stay in the business, but maybe I’m too insecure to become the biggest star.
Hell. All I know is sometimes I feel like I gotta dumb down around people. But it’s a lose-lose proposition. If my personality is too big, I scare people off. But when I dumb down, they take advantage of me. How the fuck do you win? I don’t know what to do. There’s no happy medium.
Truth is, there’s a double standard for guys like me. The good shit that I do, no one says shit about it. So I’m, like, Damn, does the business want me to be a bad boy, or what? I gotta walk around this motherfucker on eggshells, because there’s this invisible sorority of people that you get in trouble with, you know? You’ll get in trouble with these people if you do anything. So just don’t do shit. Lean on the wall. Try not to talk.
Throughout my whole career, I been giving back. I go to juvenile detention centers, talk to kids, feed the homeless. Does anyone ever say anything about it? Naw. But then one time in Detroit, one of the million shows I did last year, somebody brought a damn kangaroo on the stage, and that shit went viral. What happened was that this exotic animal handler who lives in Detroit said he wanted to come to the show. I’d seen him on Instagram. He’s a guy who brings exotic animals to places like the projects where there are no zoos. For some kids in Detroit, this is all the zoo they have. And the guy had recently been all over Instagram walking a kangaroo around the city. He and his kangaroo were local celebrities at this point. I said sure.
I was psyched to have him and his kangaroo there backstage. That kangaroo was strong and healthy and seemed as happy and well cared for as could be. I got to feed it a banana and everything. I thought, This is a real fun thing. The animal seemed so chill that when he said maybe at some point in the show, the kangaroo could run across the back of the stage and I could turn around like What’s going on?! I said that sounded fun. We thought it could be a good laugh, especially because that kangaroo was famous in Detroit.
Well, I went out and did the show. The kangaroo never did come out, but that was fine, because the show was nonstop. Great show. At the end, I’d said good-bye to the crowd, good-bye to the host, and then I came out for one last good-night. They started playing a song by the Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley, which made the crowd go crazy, and I was dancing through the final good-bye.
Then, all of a sudden, the kangaroo guy is there on the stage with his kangaroo. From where I was, it seemed like the kangaroo and his keeper were dancing, too. After a few seconds, I got closer to them and the kangaroo took a swipe at me and I made a big show of running off the stage. And that was the end of that. I don’t even think that animal had a minute of stage time. And I had no indication from where I stood that it was unhappy or scared at all, or that anyone was upset about it being there. After all, this was a professional zookeeper. The kangaroo was used to being in strange situations.
But later that night I went online and saw that video of me onstage with the kangaroo was everywhere, along with coverage like I killed somebody. Online, I was getting death threats, getting accused of being an animal abuser, of torturing animals, of all sorts of fucked-up things. These people online were talking about wanting to put me in prison for cruelty to animals.
I felt horrible. I’ve been an animal lover my whole life. I’ve done a lot of work for them, too, including with Jennifer Pryor on her Pryor’s Planet initiative to help animals. As an animal lover who’s taken great care of pets and worked on their behalf for decades, I was so upset that anyone thought I would willingly make an animal upset. And I was mad at myself for letting the whole thing happen. I got why people were mad. When I watched that one-minute video, I could see the kangaroo looked freaked out, and it made me feel so bad. Real sorry. I came out and apologized to the kangaroo and to everyone else, and I donated money to groups that work for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Then I went on TMZ and apologized more.
That said, I also felt sick about how that one minute of a local zookeeper bringing a wild animal onstage is now the only thing a lot of people know about me. I hated that those seconds seemed to get so much attention, while the days and weeks I’ve spent trying to call attention to various causes, like inner-city poverty and mass incarceration and even animal preservation, have hardly ever gotten one line of press.
I’m supposed to be funny and good at what I do. But when I do something really, really good, like a turkey drive back in my old hood with the Bembrys, getting food on everyone’s tables, it’s like a couple people look at it and say, “Aw, that was nice.” But when I do something even a little bad, that shit is all over the press, all over the world. People commenting that I should get shot for it. Why do they seem so glad when I screw up? It’s like they were upset I was succeeding, like it messed with their feelings about how things were supposed to go, and when I fall down at all, they’re, like, Thank God, now everything makes sense again.
It sucks to feel like everyone’s rooting against you, like you were set up to fail and then people are really convinced that you should fail. I had too good of a heart to be in the streets. I didn’t belong there.
Now that I’m in show business, I feel that way all over again. It’s Stephen Decatur High School. I’m in the special-education class. Everyone else is white, only sometimes I spot my friends from across the hallway. In Hollywood, the only guy like me is Mike Tyson. (Did you know he did time in the same Indiana prison I did?) It’s as if you’re always a suspect. No matter how good I am, I feel like everyone�
�s looking at me like the bad kid in school, just waiting for me to mess up.
Hollywood is tough—but it’s even tougher to be black in Hollywood. This is not our business. I tell black actors and comics that all the time: Don’t ever forget that. That’s like watching a white guy get upset because he’s not treated right in the NBA. I’m, like, That ain’t your game, man. You’re good at it, and you’re in it. But this is a black man’s business, on the court.
Slavery has a long legacy. And what it means in Hollywood is that black people compete with each other. They’re always saying there’s enough for everybody out there, but a lot of time you get black gatekeepers. Black gatekeepers are guys who are really, really rich, made a lot of stuff, but they control all the black people who want to work. You pick one black guy, give him everything, and say, “Go get your people and control ’em. You go act white with them. I’m white, you’re black, you act like me with them.”
I think a lot of stuff is just ordained in your life. I really truly think that us as black people, we are still feeling the effects of slavery. Stuff that wasn’t even taught to us physically or in the presence of somebody, but it’s just deep in us. It’s a white man’s world. Being black in America is dangerous.
No joke.
If you’re black and you’re on an elevator and a white woman starts screaming, you’re going to jail, even if you didn’t do anything, even if she just saw a mouse and that’s why she’s screaming. If you were in the vicinity and you look like me, it’s a given: You will do at least three years. If, that is, you don’t mysteriously die on the way there.
I know for a fact that white people don’t understand what we go through. There’s no way in hell that a white person can know. Ain’t no way in hell. Every day before I left for school, I’d be told, “Let the Lord bless you or the mortuary gonna dress you.”
I’ve never met a white person who heard that when they were heading out the door to go to school.