He couldn’t make eye contact with me. He simply looked at the floor and shook his head no. “I’ll try calling them again after you sign. I promise.”
I still signed the thing. I don’t think I’ve ever felt lower, more ashamed, and more stupid. I betrayed everyone in my family who had pleaded with me to be patient. I was going against what my gut was telling me. As soon as I made the last
r
in my last name, he became deliriously giddy.
“You’re gonna make so much money,” he exclaimed. “Trust me. This is gonna be great. Let’s go have dinner! I’m buying.”
We went out to a steak house, and in the middle of the meal he smiled and with a shrug said, “Well, why don’t I try giving Harlem a call?” He excused himself and went to the pay phones in the lobby. Almost immediately, he came back and sat down giggling maniacally. “You got it!” He was ecstatic. “Finally we got some news! You got the show!” Surprise. Surprise.
Under normal circumstances, that would have called for a bottle of champagne. All my hard work, writing, self-promotion, persistence, saving money to move back to New York���it had all culminated in reaching my goal: to be on TV. But I felt like I’d cheated. I excused myself from the table, walked outside, and started sobbing. Just like De Niro playing Jake LaMotta in
Raging Bull
, I punched the brick walls. I was a sucker.
Later that night, I hopped on a train to pick up my car and drive to Dee’s place. I desperately tried to think positively. And slowly, it sank in that no matter how crappy this deal was, I was still going to be on TV. I’d somehow make it work on my terms. I became reenergized, cranking metal from the car stereo and pumping my fists out the window.
Out of all the people in my family, something made me want to tell Eddie first. Not to show him up for suggesting I join the National Guard, but to make him proud. And, okay, maybe to tell him, “I told you so.” I wanted him to know that he never had to worry about me now. In a year I’d be taking care of him and the rest of the family, no doubt about it.
I quietly went into Dee’s apartment. It was around one fifteen in the morning, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t contain myself as I began to dial Eddie’s number. My heart began to pound. I kept imagining Eddie’s big hearty giggle, which was a lot like mine, only deeper. “Good for you!” he’d say. My fidgeting with the phone woke Dee up.
“Who are you calling? ” she asked. “It’s late.”
“Eddie,” I said, cradling the receiver on my shoulder. “I got the show!”
“You did? ” She smiled. “Awesome!” Then she clicked the base of the phone and hung up the call. “Eddie’s got three kids,” she said.
“Dee,” I said, “I’m going to be on TV!
Real
TV!”
“It can wait until morning; that’s only five hours from now,” Dee said. “Call him at six thirty A.M., he’ll be up early.”
“All right, all right, all right,” I said disgustedly. “I just really wanted him to know tonight. I’m one less person he’s gotta worry about, Dee.”
“He’ll be so happy to hear that,” she said. “In the morning!”
We fell asleep, and Dee’s phone started ringing at five thirty A.M. The answering machine picked it up. “Jimmy? ” my niece Denise cried out. “It’s Eddie! Eddie’s dead! Pick up the phone!”
I groggily picked up the phone. “What’s going on? ” I asked, confused.
“Eddie died of a heart attack last night.”
Kristen’s passing was heavy. It was jarring to me to see a peer pass away, to be reminded that we can be taken at any time. But Eddie’s dying was far more profound. It was gutting. I’d learned from Denise that he’d passed around one fifteen A.M., right around the time I would have been calling him. Just like that my jubilation over my great TV show and my complaining about my shitty contract didn’t mean zilch. Reality was back open for business.
What sticks with me to this day is that I might have been trying to call while Eddie was dying. Do you call that a coincidence? I could have done any number of things after learning I got the TV show, but calling Eddie after one A.M. was at the top of the list. Why? I could have stayed up all night and celebrated. I could have driven out to Phil’s place. But something compelled me to call at that particular time. Why? Don’t ask me. I know I couldn’t have prevented Eddie from dying, but something compelled me to reach out.
My entire family was devastated. I went up to his house and found my mom sobbing uncontrollably.
“When I see Lefty,” she bawled, “I’m going to slap him right in the face. Right in the face.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?” I asked. Lefty was Eddie’s father, who’d been killed two months before his service in World War II ended, having never met his son.
“He told me in a dream he was coming to take him,” Mom cried.
I was sure my mom was having a mental breakdown. “What do you mean he told you in a dream? ”
“I had a dream two weeks ago,” Mom explained through sobs. “It was raining and Lefty was in a tunnel. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Doris. But it’s time for me to be with my son.’”
The day Eddie was buried, I went to Dorene’s house to take a nap. As I fell asleep, I felt like I entered a world that we might recognize only when our time is up. Some people may write this off as a dream, exhaustion, or whatever, but Eddie appeared to me, plain as day. He was standing on the lawn at my grandma’s house—a place I hadn’t seen since I was five years old. Calmness and contentment washed over me. Eddie was wearing his usual: khakis, a blue oxford shirt and tie, loafers. He was carrying his navy blue blazer over his shoulder, and he was constantly pushing up his glasses with his finger.
“Check on the boys for me,” he said with a smile. “They’ll be fine, but let them know you’re there for them and don’t worry about Mom. She’s got you to lean on if she needs.”
I assured him I would. He smiled and turned to leave, and I stopped him and said, “Wait, wait, don’t leave! What about you?”
“I’m super,” he replied convincingly and calmly. “I am just super.” Then he giggled and poof, he was gone. I immediately woke up. All I could think was, “He came to me in a dream,” just like you always hear about but never believe. Now I believed for sure. There was nothing to fear. You can call me a wacko or a freak, but you’ll never be able to take this moment away from me or explain it. It’s real. It happened.
Chapter 6
From Harlem, It’s the
Uptown Comedy Club
So I had my first TV gig. Eddie had just died and my family was looking for something positive. One of us had made it. Everyone wanted to know about the TV show, but I didn’t feel very comfortable talking about it because the timing was horrible. It was like, “Hey, Eddie’s dead, but I’m on TV. Let’s party.” No thanks. Beyond that, I hated my manager, the Rat, but I was now contractually obligated to him for four years; Dee and I were engaged, but my working twelve-to-fourteen-hour days, an hour and fifteen minutes from our New Jersey home, immediately strained our relationship; and the TV gig itself, while great, wasn’t going to pay me for at least the first three months I worked on it.
If someone had told me when I was a kid that one day I would be going to work in Harlem, my thoughts would have revolved around dying in a shocking and painful way the second I arrived. By the time I was an adult and had seen a little bit of the world, I was nothing but excited to go to Harlem. In August of 1992 I headed there with an open mind to do a new sketch comedy show,
Uptown Comedy Club.
And any concerns I may have had were alleviated from the get-go by the two brothers producing the show, Kevin and André Brown. (André unfortunately passed away a few years ago, but you might know Kevin as Dot Com from
30 Rock.
)
Uptown Comedy Club
was their first time putting together a televised comedy show, and even though the Browns had help from the people who ran
Showtime at the Apollo,
it felt a little like they’d just lucked into this TV thing and were racing to produce it before it got taken away from them.
For starters, the place where we rehearsed and filmed the show wasn’t a proper studio but their club, the Uptown Comedy Club (naturally), on 125th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem. By day it doubled as their karate studio. The Browns were renaissance men; they performed, they produced, and they were totally ripped badasses obsessed with teaching the discipline and art of karate to Harlem kids. If any cast members got to the club early, we’d just have to wait for karate class to end. It was fascinating watching them spar—just a whirl of arms and legs under perfect control—but it also inevitably led to their trying to convince me to join in, which I wisely refused every time.
The show was raw as could be. There were no wardrobe people, nor any hair and makeup people. We had no dressing rooms, just clothing racks we’d change behind. The club had a small stage, and back behind it there were hallways where we’d sit on the floor and write sketches for twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. We had no typewriters, just pens and notebooks. And when we taped in front of a live audience on Saturdays we had no cue cards; you just had to rely on your memory.
But I trusted the Browns with everything, because above all else, they stressed unity, and they were fiercely protective of their show. To this day, I wish I still had producers like that. What they lacked in experience they made up for in sheer humanity and effort. They were at the club every minute, and occasionally they’d sit us down for impromptu talks that went way beyond the work we were doing.
“There’s no guarantee it’s going to happen,” André would say, pacing back and forth in front of the stage. “No one owes you anything. But how are you going to carry yourself if you get famous? What are you going to be like? Will your family still recognize you? Trust you? Depend on you? What are you doing this for?”
The Browns schooled us on life, character, ambition, and the ghetto, along with juicy show business stuff. I remember sitting in the club one afternoon with Tracy Morgan, who joined about seven episodes into the season, when the Browns walked in, having just returned from Los Angeles on business. We both got up to greet them.
“Stay sitting down, okay?” Kevin said. “’Cause this is gonna be heavy.”
“Oh, man,” André said, laughing. “Hang on to your hats.”
“Hollywood was
crazy,
” Kevin added.
André continued. “We were at a party, and people were talking about seeing [some very famous comedians and an equally famous basketball player, all of whom I’m still too freaked out to mention] all chicken-hawking.”
Immediately, all the black guys on the cast started laughing.
“C’mon, man,” a tall, skinny comic known only as Ye-Ye said. He and a guy named Macio were my writing partners most of the time. Ye-Ye was a couple of years younger than me and he always had a shit-eating grin on his face like he’d just done something bad and only he knew about it. “Now you’re just making up stories!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. I had no idea what the heck they were even talking about. “What’s chicken-hawking?”
“You sayin’ you don’t know?” another comic said to me.
“No idea.”
“Whew,” he said, and ran his hand across his forehead, then burst out laughing. “That’s a relief.” Then the whole room erupted with laughter.
“Chicken-hawking is when you cruise around and pick up transvestites,” André explained.
“What?” I said, befuddled. There was no way. One of the guys had been my hero forever. If he were into that stuff, surely I would have heard about it. “No way,” I said. “I’m not that gullible.”
Kevin liked to joke about the sexual predilections of these celebrities. He went on to say, “You guys have no clue what Hollywood is all about. It’s phony. Smoke and mirrors. A charade. You’ve got guys picking up transvestites. Famous actors you could never in your wildest dreams imagine living in the closet, all ’cause they don’t want to rock the boat. They’re chasing that fame.”
I guess I was lucky that I had no burning desire for transvestites competing with my desire for fame.
The show was hard to find, initially, on the cable dial, but with syndication it grew and grew. Early on, though, people I knew were skeptical. “What’s up with your
show
?” they’d ask, not believing it was ever going to see the light of day.
In all, there were about a dozen of us on the cast. Me and a guy named Rob Magnotti were the only white people. We were all so eager to be a part of the experience—and were all spending so much time together—that racial issues were mainly something that happened on the street, outside the walls of the club. But there were of course some cultural clashes.
When Ye-Ye and I first sat down to work, it was like an armadillo and a cat meeting for the first time and studying one another. He’d never spent that much time with a white person before, and I’d never spent that much time with a black person before.
“Why is your hair like that?” he’d say, making a curious face. “Do you use a blow-dryer? It’s so straight.”
“Why do you use a pick in your hair?” I’d respond. “You pick it and pick it and it always looks the same to me.”
After a while I was simply a member of the cast. So much so that no one had a problem listing their complaints about white people when I was around.
And most of the time I’d find myself agreeing with them, because the more time I spent in Harlem, the more I could see the experience that black people were living. Keep in mind that this is the Harlem of the early nineties, where there were no million-dollar condos and gentrifying white folks. I certainly saw some bad behavior up there, but a lot more good, and I was curious as to why the good had always been kept from me growing up.
I liked Harlem, and it didn’t take long to feel a part of the neighborhood. Every day, when I would park my car around the corner from the club, I’d walk by two black women sitting on their porch right across the street from the chicken and waffles place where I liked to eat. Sometimes we’d talk, and if not, then they’d at least give me a shout-out, like, “Hey, what’s up, white boy,” or “Don’t worry about your car, white boy, we’ll keep an eye on it for you,” then they’d laugh and laugh. When they found out I was on the show, they’d say, “You gonna make them laugh today, white boy?” I loved it.