I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up

by D. L. Hughley

  At some point in the following days, the government even called me investigating whether Jesse had used funds improperly. Obviously, I played dumb. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Talk to my lawyer.” I kept my mouth shut about the whole thing—with one glaring exception.

  In 2002, Jesse got mad about some of the jokes Cedric the Entertainer made in Barbershop. One of the lines that bothered him was a quip about how Martin Luther King “got more ass than a toilet seat.” Now, let’s be honest. No one who admires King thinks that his alleged womanizing detracts from his accomplishments. The people who do bring that up are only using it as an excuse to denigrate a man whose goals they have always opposed. Besides which: It’s a joke.

  I was at the Trumpet Awards in Atlanta that year, and so was Jesse. He was standing near me when he started being very vocal about the film and how offensive it was. He wanted them to censor some of the dialogue. He was complaining loud enough for me to hear him.

  “Well,” I interjected, “some people need to not have those kinds of moral views.” Meaning, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

  He’s no dummy. He instantly knew what I was talking about, and he dropped the matter right then and there. I maintain that if he hadn’t had “Reverend” in front of his name, none of that stuff would have mattered—and his downfall would not have been as severe as it has been. That title provided a moral component to his views, but it also held him to a higher standard.

  Back then, there wasn’t the concentration on people being exposed to everything that you did. There wasn’t TMZ or Media Takeout or all these kinds of blogs that exposed behind-the-scenes goings-on. Even someone as well-known as Jesse Jackson could still have some auspice of anonymity in certain contexts, which I am sure he took advantage of for years. So when it came out publicly that he was saying one thing and doing another, people were disappointed. He was very well regarded in the black community. Many white people, of course, thought his comeuppance was long overdue. The animus toward him in certain pockets was intense. Bill O’Reilly basically made his name by taking Jesse Jackson to task on the air, for example.

  Yet the proposition that Jesse Jackson was shameless in his actions was demonstrably false. When all his dirty laundry got aired in public, it was shame that immobilized him. He didn’t sweep it under the rug, make an insincere apology, and pretend nothing of importance had happened. He really fell back in his public persona—and that allowed Al Sharpton to basically take Jesse Jackson’s place.

  If Jesse Jackson was a reduction of Martin Luther King, then Al Sharpton was a reduction of Jesse Jackson. He was a copy of a copy. When Sharpton started out, he was less crisp, less focused, less sure, less sharp than Jackson was. But as their careers went on, they sort of switched roles. Jesse went down and Sharpton got more nuanced and much more sophisticated. The copy actually started to be crisper than the original. Sharpton transitioned from being this black-radical marcher to someone who wants to talk about education with Newt Gingrich and meets with Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton would not have been caught dead with the early Al Sharpton, the fat man in sweatsuits and gold chains. Newt Gingrich probably wouldn’t even have wanted to be in the same state.

  I watch Sharpton’s television show all the time. Clearly, he is trying to be seen as much more than a civil rights leader nowadays. The more Sharpton becomes a statesman, the more of a dance he is going to have to do. He is always going to have to work his answers so that people who have loved and supported him for years will be comfortable—or at the very least, not put off. You can’t be a civil rights leader/political player and not have that connection to your base. But as you broaden your appeal, you necessarily broaden your focus. It wasn’t “black rights” for Martin Luther King: It was a human rights issue. It was something everyone could get behind, even though the problem was primarily hurting one group in particular.

  That’s why I think that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have focused so much on racial discrimination as a cause. The 1960s were the last time we had a national consensus on race. They were probably the only time we had a national consensus on race. Those who opposed this consensus had their views driven out of civilized discourse. A person can openly argue for colonies on the moon, shutting down every U.S. embassy abroad, and defaulting on the national debt. But racist views have to be couched in code words and deceit. So to fight discrimination is a winning fight, because no one will fight with you openly.

  But the consensus means that the fight has been won, at least ideologically. Of course racism is a huge problem, but it’s not the only problem—and it’s not the biggest problem. It doesn’t stop black women from going to school in record numbers, for example.

  If there’s a problem with a company that discriminates, that shit doesn’t fly anymore when exposed to scrutiny. It’s very easy to point the finger when the danger is external. “Us versus them” is a common human mindset.

  But what about when the dangers are internal? Civil rights leaders can’t be as candid. They can’t alienate their own audience or they will lose their power. We are at a point in America when every community, every person, can create their own reality. If something makes you uncomfortable, you can successfully avoid hearing it. The thing is, it is truths that make a person feel uncomfortable. Some part of your mind registers the fact they are trying to deny, and that’s where the unease creeps in.

  I am not a civil rights leader. My constituency is fluid, and I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself. If the NAACP types often want to suppress what they see on the screen, it’s no wonder they are uncomfortable with what they see on the streets. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.

  NOT even the most virulent racist would argue that older black men are as involved with unsavory activity as younger black men. Clearly, age has something to do with the problem. What is it that all young people of all races have in common? They’re fucking stupid. And if stupid kids are encouraged to act in stupid ways, then they will act in stupid ways. I myself learned one of these very stupid ways of acting at a young age. I learned it the same way many kids learn their stupid ideas: on the school bus.

  It doesn’t matter what your background is: Every kid in America knows the seating hierarchy of the bus. The youngest and the nerdiest kids have to sit in the front. The farther you sit from the bus driver, the cooler you are. But that school bus could be a very dangerous place. People would be bopping you in the head and messing with you, so you had to have some protection. That’s why, in seventh grade, nerdy li’l Darryl Hughley planted his black ass directly behind the driver every single day. I was so far up that dude’s butt, I could have charged him for a colonoscopy.

  On the other end of the bus, way in the very back row, sat Catherine Bogatz. That part of the bus was so different that it wasn’t even a seat anymore; it was more like a long bench for the rulers of the bus kingdom. Gorgeous Catherine sat right in the middle of that bench like the queen that she was. She was stunning. To this day she remains the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.

  Our bus driver was very young, about nineteen or twenty, and wore these half gloves that all the broads dug. He was clearly new at the job, because he had the shitty route that nobody wanted. It was my route—and Catherine’s route. Back in those days, radio stations worked on a cycle and you knew what song would come on when. So every day on that bus, we heard the song “Gloria” by a group called Enchantment.

  Whenever “Gloria” came on, I was under the belief that Catherine and I had an unspoken deal: I would look at her with utter adoration, and she’d cut her eyes a little bit and give me a smile in return. Even though it wasn’t even a real smile but more like a smirk, it fucking made my day. It was like the queen was acknowledging that I existed. It was beautiful. It fueled me.

  So one day, “Gloria” started playing. I did what I was supposed to do and turned around and looked at Catherine. She saw me and yel
led down the length of the entire school bus, “What are you looking at, motherfucker? Stop looking at me, you nappy-headed fucker!” Everyone on the bus laughed. It was the most graphic representation of the power of a woman over a man’s psyche that I would ever experience.

  The driver tilted the mirror back so he could see me and said, “It’s all right, little man.”

  The bus driver knew what I had yet to learn: I was what I later identified as a “pussy-later” type of cat. The black community is probably 90 percent pussy-now guys. They’re the guys who won’t go to school; dudes who sell a little weed or dope on the side; people who quit school to rap. Or they’re going to be basketball stars. Or they get a college scholarship but don’t go to class—so they get kicked out. Or they get a job, complain about it, and are always quitting. When these guys get money, they buy rims and shit that will impress broads. They’re Eddie from The Five Heartbeats, the lead singer all the ladies loved.

  There’s pressure to be a pussy-now type of dude. When you’re young, the whole thing is being cool to the people around you. It’s very hard to realize the costs of being a pussy-now dude—especially when you’re getting all that pussy and when everyone thinks you’re the greatest.

  Pussy-now dudes play checkers. But pussy-later dudes play chess. One is short-range: “Jump the king—I’m the shit now!” The other has long-range implications, where every move predicates and decides the next set of options. You have to think steps ahead. That’s how life is! It’s like choosing retirement funds or college funds, deciding which choices will enrich you and which won’t. When you make a mistake, there are ways to recuperate from it. It takes a whole bunch of bad shots to try to get to a goal. The whole game is about trying to minimize the bad shots, not trying to have great ones. That’s what pussy-now guys don’t get.

  When you look at your life, you’ve got some really shitty days, some fucking spectacular days, and most days you don’t remember. You remember the great ones and the really shitty ones—and you’ve had more shitty days than you’ve had great ones. But the great ones make up for it. You live for them great days, like a sunny day in a New York City winter. Those great days are spaced out, and you can only have so many in your lifetime. That’s why these pussy-now-type dudes burn out so quickly. They use up all those great days very early on.

  When I was growing up, there were a lot of kids that had to be home when the streetlights came on. It was a universal, totally black experience across the country. In the winter it was early, and in the summer it came later. But whatever the season, when it got dark, you got your ass home. When those lights came on, you saw everybody literally breaking toward the house. But then there was that dude who never had to be home, and everybody thought he was cool.

  That dude is the one who ends up going to jail. Now he doesn’t have a home to go to at all. Jesse got to stay up all hours of the night, and all the girls liked Jesse. Now Jesse is homeless. Those pussy-now dudes are cool from junior high to high school. Seven years! In terms of a life, that’s nothing. Yet those seven years are all they live for. They come to the high school reunion. They hit you up on Facebook with old high school pictures and memories. Everybody remembers pussy-now type dudes. They had all the fresh shit, went to all the parties, got to stay out late. Everybody loved them. Pussy-later motherfuckers, people don’t even know. “He went to this school? I never saw that motherfucker because he was in the library.”

  When you’re a kid, pussy-now is where it’s at in my community. I used to hang around with these pussy-now dudes, hoping it would rub off on me. They managed to teach me a lot about life. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I felt bad for them. These dudes had low riders and money and broads. I could never figure out why I felt bad for them; it didn’t make any sense. I wanted to be them! All through life, those dudes guided me. They’d do shit and tell me, “Nah, nigga. You go home. This ain’t your thing.” Even they knew I wasn’t cut out for it—before I knew. They kept me away from all the bullshit that they did.

  One time, when I was twelve or thirteen, I wanted some money. I asked this cat if I could sell some weed for him. In front of all the other dudes, he said, “Nigga, you ain’t built for this shit.” Everybody laughed, and I thought he was disrespecting me. Later on, he gave me twenty dollars. I thought he was fucking with me some more. But it was actually respect, and I didn’t even know it. I wasn’t built for that. He was saying I was above what he was doing. That was a compliment, and I didn’t fucking get it.

  I wanted to be a pussy-now type of dude more than anything. I wanted pussy and I wanted it now. To lose my virginity I had to fuck a girl who was hideous, that’s how bad it was. It wasn’t romantic: I just needed to get this thing off. I never masturbated, but I sure had dreams. In the dreams, it was so spectacular that I was like, Wait until I get somebody to do this shit! But all the chicks that inspired my hormones to go crazy, all the Catherine Bogatzes, those bitches wouldn’t have shit to do with me. You’ve got to be cool, or they won’t fuck you. They don’t fuck nobody people don’t think is cool.

  But there was this one girl down the street who would fuck me. So what if she was so hideous that she looked like me? The important thing is that she was a loving human being. She was a sweet woman, and when she gave me some I couldn’t even believe it. Today I realize that I was having my first orgasm with a woman, but I had no idea what was happening at the time. I almost started crying. I loved her so intensely for ten seconds, a feeling of love I can’t even explain. I instantly knew what this sex stuff was about, and I knew that I wanted to be doing it a lot for the rest of my life. In that moment, that she–D.L. was radiant to me. She was beautiful and warm and just everything. But after the ten seconds passed, I literally wanted her to leave. She couldn’t get out quickly enough. I can’t even describe how fast it shifted. I was like, “Oh! Oh! Bitch, leave.”

  I was one of the fortunate pussy-later dudes because I actually managed to get one in. I’m sure a lot of my pussy-later brothers weren’t as fortunate. Take Tiger Woods. When Tiger Woods was in school, he was a buck-toothed chigger playing a white man’s game. No broads were trying to fuck him. His very name must have been sarcastic to them. “How’s it going, Tiger?” Now he gets so much pussy that they write articles keeping track of the number, which is another argument for pussy-later: On average, you’ll end up getting more pussy in the long term.

  This pussy-now/pussy-later dichotomy is one I constantly see validated. These days, I’m friends with John Witherspoon. When people think of John Witherspoon, they often think of his character in Friday talking about how smelly his shits are. But don’t get it twisted: In real life, John Witherspoon is a very fancy dude. I’m sure his shits smell spectacular, like strawberries and champagne.

  John and his wife always have really high-class social events at his house, and my wife always drags me there and to other fancy crap like that. LaDonna’s on the phone asking me to buy tickets to the Pasadena Playhouse so she can see August Wilson’s Fences or whatever the latest bourgie Jack and Jill Links thing is that month. I couldn’t care less about some party for a play, but I love John so I go to his events. When John has his events, his wife takes care of the hostessing and he isn’t even there half the time. He and I will go back to a separate house that he’s built on his property so he can be by himself. He pours me wine that he don’t pour nobody else, and he shows me all sorts of cool shit.

  In 2009, John was having one of these hoity-toity parties. I pulled up, and the dude who was the valet used to be the coolest cat in my neighborhood. I recognized him right away, and he recognized me right away. Now, you know you’re doing bad when you’re a black valet dude in Los Angeles. They’re all Latin. In all the years I’ve been valet parking, I’d only seen one black dude with a red vest on—until I pulled up to John Witherspoon’s house and saw the second.

  It was the most awkward thing imaginable. I didn’t want to give this dude my key and a tip. I was immediately thinking back to hig
h school, when pussy-later me was begging pussy-now him to let me smell his fingers. I loved the dude. I was very glad to see him—just not as a valet. It was hard, but proved my theory.

  Pussy-now-type motherfuckers become valets, janitors, or factory workers. Pussy-later-type motherfuckers have different kinds of gigs. They’re managers. They’re referred to as “your honor” or “Mr. President.” Nobody was really trying to fuck Obama growing up, with those big ears and that goofy smile.

  In 2010 I was getting my hair done in New York. On the TV this cat named Judge Kevin Ross came on. Just like me, Kevin Ross was a pussy-later dude. I know this because he also went to my high school. I said pussy-later-type dudes play chess, and Kevin Ross was literally in the chess club. Kevin was the student-body president of a school where it was all white and Asians—and us. Everybody thought he was a nerd. And we went to school with Japanese kids; we’re talking about smart people from the tap. Kevin grew up to become a superior court judge in Inglewood, and now he’s on TV doing what he did, being exactly him: a pussy-later-type motherfucker.

  White people don’t have to make a choice. They can be pussy-now and pussy-later. JFK, Donald Trump: They had pussy day in and day out. You can be a fucking loser your whole life, and then your father dies and leaves you a company or somebody hires you. But no black dads are dying and leaving real estate empires to their kids. The things young black men have to do to get pussy now are the things that prevent them from getting pussy later. We have to work that much harder just to compete with everybody else. At the end of the day, we have to make the choice: Are we working our minds? Or are we working our dicks?

  There’s this mentality in our community that proclaims, “This is as good as it gets, so I better have it now. I can only have it now.” You don’t think you’re going to live a long time. When I grew up, nobody really thought about going to college. What was the point? Why not go to jail, when there ain’t nothing else out there for you?