Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir
Read Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir Online
Authors: Jimmie Walker,Sal Manna
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 - I’m from the Ghetto
Chapter 3 - Stand-up for the Panthers
Chapter 4 - Making It in New York
Chapter 8 - Freddie, Richard, Andy, Mitzi, and Budd
Chapter 9 - A Black Sheep among Black People
Chapter 10 - The Late-Night War
To my mother
and to my friend who I miss
every day of my life,
Steve Landesberg
Foreword
By David Brenner
IN 1969 THERE WERE MAYBE TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE IN AMERICA WHO earned their living solely as stand-up comedians—that is, doing stand-up paid for their shelter, food, clothing, and other necessities. There hadn’t been a new face for about six years. But then, in New York City, a group of fresh, young men and women appeared on the comedy scene, including yours truly.
The members of this small wave of uniquely funny people met each other while performing in clubs in Greenwich Village, the West Side, the Upper East Side, Brooklyn, and wherever someone would let us tell jokes for no money, just for laughs, or, oftentimes, for no laughs. Some became stars; others didn’t. One of those who did was Jimmie Walker.
I met Jimmie in an Upper West Side club named the African Room. I had gone there in hopes of doing a set. On stage was someone I had not seen before in the few months I had been doing comedy. After he came off stage, we talked. I invited him to come with me to other clubs to work out and to meet and join our little clique of stand-up comedians.
Now, here’s the never-told-before story of the dyn-o-mite advice I gave him. (Yes, he heard me say that word in my act, often with that strange inflection. It’s okay. Time heals.) You see, Jimmie was then a very short, very fat, very white man, but all he talked about on stage was what it was like to be black and live in a black neighborhood. It made no sense. Audiences hissed and threw things at him, usually hard-boiled eggs. It was disheartening. He was about to give up comedy. That’s when I stepped in to put him on the road to stardom.
We were leaving the Camelot, an open-all-night, greasy-spoon restaurant where comedians would meet for breakfast and commiserate about bad sets we had that night or try to borrow money from the hookers. After breakfast, everyone split. As Jimmie and I stood outside asking passersby for spare change, I turned, put my hand down on his fat shoulder, looked down at him, straight into his bright, blue eyes, and said, “The problem with you is your physical presence. You want to be a star?” He nodded. I continued, “Then lose the whale blubber, add inches of height to that dwarf-sized body of yours, and, most importantly, get dark! Become a black man! They’re coming into style. Join them!”
He did everything I told him to do, sometimes to exaggerated lengths, such as overdoing his little, upturned nose, making the mouth too big—and let’s not get into the too loud laugh. Ugh! He dropped way too much weight, and he went way, way overboard on the darkening. But he was now a tall, thin, black comedian—and now his jokes killed. He didn’t remain a one-trick pony either, like so many comedians today do. He was too smart, too well versed, and too funny to be limited. A black star rose in the comedy heavens.
What has pissed me off over the years is hearing black comedians make fun of Jimmie, referring to him as a Stepin Fetchit type. Totally unfounded. What they should acknowledge is that if it weren’t for Jimmie Walker busting through, thanks to
Good Times
, TV’s white, glass ceiling, they would still be black, but they wouldn’t be comedians.
Now, turn the page and read about one of my funniest and most beloved friends.
1
Our Times
I’m from the ghetto. I’m here on the exchange program. You can imagine what they sent back there.
THAT WAS THE FIRST JOKE I EVER TOLD ON NATIONAL TELEVISION, on
Jack Paar Tonite
in 1973. Fortunately the audience laughed. That was all I needed, and for the rest of my performance I killed—as comedians say when they do very well. Little did I realize how much truth there was in that one joke.
A few years earlier I had opened community rallies around the country for the Black Panthers. But I was considered “too black” for television.
Then, a couple years after
Paar
, I became the first young black sitcom star in TV history—the Black Fonzie. But soon after the revolution was televised, I was accused of “cooning it up.” In the end I became too black and not black enough, too funny and not funny enough—all at the same time.
They were good times and bad times. They were my times. They were our times.
In 1975, I had this bit:
I think pretty soon there is going to be a black president. Inaugural theme be playing the “Theme from
Shaft
.” Prez pulls up—white El Dorado, white bucket seats, bubble top. Prez gets out, tilts his beaver-skin hat to the side, braids
flowing
down his shoulders, looks at the crowd, and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, I am very happy to be elected president of these great United States. But moreover, I am even happier to be elected the first black president of these great United States. Right now, I’d like to give you the Inaugural Address, but
first . . .
the number for today: 7-5-6. You got it? Then you the vice president!”
It only took thirty-three years for my “prediction” to come true, though our first black president did not come from the streets and was not running a numbers racket—other than the federal budget. I would have loved to see him on Inauguration Day in a beaver-skin hat and braids though.
America, it is time to get real. The time has come to blow up the myths, the stereotypes, the political correctness, the hypocrisy of our modern life. And it is time to once again laugh at ourselves and at each other. That’s right,
at
each other.
Lots of new thangs coming out about black history. Found out there were black cavemen. They dug up a three-million-year-old
Cadillac . . .
. two payments still due.
Years after first telling that joke (when it was cool to say “thang”), black people still laugh at those lines. White people just feel guilty because they want to laugh. But we should all be laughing at that joke—especially when I’m on stage telling it! Am I right, people? As comedian Godfrey Cambridge once said, “If two men are laughing at each other, nobody gets stabbed.”
What I have understood my entire life is that I am an individual. Each of us is an individual. Each of us makes choices in life, and we are responsible for those choices. Blaming our race, our parents, our economic status—whatever—is common today. But they are all excuses for not coming to grips with our own lives and our freedom to choose.
I had a violent father and grew up in the ghetto, but I did not become a drug addict. I was the son of folks from Selma, Alabama, but I did not hate white people. I was a child of the ’60s, but I did not put flowers in my hair. I enjoyed sudden enormous fame, but I did not do a celebrity crash and burn. Why not?
Because of the choices I made. I believe that, ultimately, every one of us is free to choose. Even though I am black, I am free. I believe that each of us is free, free at first and free at last.
I’m from the ghetto. I’m here on the exchange program. You can imagine what they sent back there.
2
I’m from the Ghetto
I WAS ABOUT TEN YEARS OLD WHEN MY FATHER WALKED INTO OUR apartment in the Melrose projects with his girlfriend. His wife, Lorena, my mother, was sitting in the living room with me and my younger sister, Beverly.
“See, this is what you’re supposed to look like,” my father said to my mother, proudly showing off the other woman, well dressed, light skinned with ruby red lips, her hair black with fashionably blonde streaks. “You need to look like this,” he told my mother. “That’s why you’re not worth anything.”
My mom did not object. Instead, she offered the other woman a cup of coffee.
When the visit was over, my father and his girlfriend—I never forgot her name: Faye from Fayetteville, North Carolina—got in his ’56 Buick, which we were never allowed to ride in, and drove off for a golfing vacation down South.
I’m sure moving north to New York City seemed exciting and promising when my parents moved there after getting married in Selma. But by the time I was born in 1947 at New York Hospital in Manhattan, dad was already “Daddy Dearest.” Even a child knows that you do not hurt people like he would my mother. Even a child like me knew that my father, James Carter Walker, the man after whom I was named—I was a Junior—was a horrid person, a real nasty guy. But there was little anyone could do to help. White people had money to get marriage counseling. Black folks just tried to survive.
My first memory is of being three or four years old and standing on a stool in the kitchen when we were living in Brooklyn before moving to the projects. My mother was boiling water on the stove to make grits or boil tea, and I watched her. Then one of the legs of the stool broke. I reached up to grab hold of something and pulled the pot of hot water onto me. I screamed and cried as the water scorched my left leg. I didn’t go to a doctor. White people had money for doctors. Black folks just tried to survive. My leg still bears the scars.
My father, a man of small stature—only about 150 pounds—worked as a Red Cap baggage handler at Penn Station. He must have experienced a demeaning feeling of servitude, of always having to smile and ask white folks, “Carry your bags, suh?” and gratefully reply, “Thank you, suh”—especially for a man who grew up in Alabama. Red Caps were not unlike the Pullman porters on the trains themselves, who were so anonymous that customers called every one of them “George.” They were not even worthy of individual names. Still, being a Red Cap was one of the better jobs available to black men at the time, with most of their income from tips.
The highlight of his life was when the Count Basie or Duke Ellington bands came to the train station on their way in or out of town and he handled their baggage. He would rave about them—how they dressed and how generous they were, giving him a huge five- or ten-dollar tip. Those were the few times I saw him happy, and those were among the few extended conversations I remember ever having with him.
My mother had to fight to move us from Brooklyn and into the Melrose projects in the South Bronx. The projects were a step up. They didn’t take everybody. That’s right, people, there was a waiting list to get into the ghetto! The neighborhood was mostly black and Puerto Rican but with a couple of white families too. They probably got lost and just couldn’t find their way out.
My father was a Red Cap for more than thirty years, yet he did not support us. Mom had to pay the rent—$53 a month—for the three-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the fourteen-story housing project on 156th Street and Morris Avenue in one of the country’s poorest ghettos. She worked three minimum-wage jobs: during the day as a school cafeteria aide and cleaning houses and then the night shift at a printer, where she collated pages for books. Despite all that labor, we were on and off the welfare rolls and taking government handouts of cheese and powdered milk. I did not know what welfare was, but I could tell from the looks on the faces of the other people waiting in line for “government assistance” that to be there was embarrassing. As a kid, I didn’t know we were “poor” because everybody I knew was in the same boat. But I was always happy when those months would come along that I would not have to stand in that line holding my mother’s hand. I knew even then that welfare was a train to nowhere.