Maybe You Never Cry Again (19 page)

It was sad. That kid was a mess. That kid was a walking TV commercial: STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM DRUGS.

I was about to leave—the place was worse than a zoo—but something just came over me. I raised my voice to those three kids and got all bug-eyed and loud and crazy and put some order into that house.

“You kids better show some got-damn respect around here if you don't want to end up in three different orphanages! I ain't lyin'. Uncle Bernie don't stand for this shit!”

It worked, brother. You don't scare Bernie Mac off a stage. (Well, maybe
once.
) I can handle three snot-nosed little bastards any old time. I wasn't about to see them ruin the lives of my goodhearted friends.

And my friends—they was so grateful. Woman was crying. “Mac Man,” she said, wiping the tears, “I wish you could stay. This is the first moment of peace we've had in weeks.” But I couldn't stay. So I told her: “You get your ass over to Sears, the sports department. They have some baseball bats over there that are just the thing to put a kid's mind right.”

Man, them tears turned to laughter. She was laughing so hard I could hear that laughter ringing in my ears all the way home. Got my brain churning. I sat my ass down and began to write. I took that experience, and my own experiences with Je'Niece and Toya and Toya's little girl, and it opened up a whole new world of comedy for me.

Next time I was up onstage, I started tellin' about these noisy, fucked-up kids, and I had people rolling in the aisles. Why? Because most of them had noisy, fucked-up kids of their own. That's why. That's what kids
is:
noisy and fucked up.

And it taught me all over again about honest comedy. The most personal is the most universal. People are more alike than they know. Maybe not everybody got fucked-up kids, but everybody for damn sure got fucked-up families!

 

In 1996 I landed a recurring role on
Moesha,
as Brandy's uncle Bernie. More camera time, more learnin'.
Another chance to improve myself.
It was the first TV show that focused on the life of a black teen, and every minute on that show was a pleasure.

Then Spike Lee called and put me in
Get on the Bus.
The story followed several black men on a cross-country bus trip to the Million Man March. The characters included a laid-off aircraft worker, a former gangbanger, a Hollywood actor, a cop who is of mixed racial background, a white bus driver, and me, a businessman. On the trip out we mixed it up, talking about manhood, religion, politics, race, and the march itself.

It was a serious movie, and it needed some comic relief, and I was going to be the comic relief. At the end of the day, though, the seriousness and the comic relief didn't jibe, and I ended up on the cutting-room floor. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It happened. I met Spike and Charles Dutton and Ossie Davis and Andre Braugher and worked on my chops as an actor. And that's what it's about, brother: The Work.

 

Back and forth. More planes. More frequent flyer miles than I can use up in a lifetime.

I did a little movie in Chicago,
Reasons,
about a drug dealer. But it never got released.

Next,
Don't Be a Menace…
with Shawn Wayans and his brother Marlon. I played a black racist police officer, and I still remember my favorite line: “I hate Whoopi Goldberg's lips, I hate the back of Forest Whitaker's neck, and most of all I hate that black ass Wesley Snipes.”

I shot three movies in '97,
Booty Call, B.A.P.S.,
and
How to Be a Player,
and they all had one thing in common: They were small roles that were played real big in the trailers. And that's when it occurred to me. These producers were
smart.
I had a fan base that stretched from New York to Los Angeles, and they wanted to fill seats with my fans. Okay. Fine. You want to pimp me, go ahead and pimp me. I'm here to work, brother.

And that's what I did. You take what you get and you do the best you can with it. You work it. Work, work, work. I'm a man, not a kid. I'm not here for the girls or the fast cars or to pose for pictures. I'm here to make myself a better actor and a better man. So, yeah, brother, like the song says,
I wanna spread the news, that if it feel this good gettin' used, oh, you just keep on using me, until you use me up.

 

Then I got a nice, serious role, on
Don King: Only in America,
and it put things into perspective for me. I didn't have to take everything that was offered. There was some good stuff out there. What I had to do was convince people I was right for it.

The next time I got a call for a movie I didn't want to do, I found the strength to say no. And there was hell to pay. “
No?
You sayin' no to me, motherfucker? Who gave you your start? Where would you be without me? I'm asking you to do this one little thing for me, and you think you're too fucking good for my movie?”

No, brother. Not too good. Everything comes to an end, and I'm ready to move on. I'm like a shark, see. I'm not interested in messin' with you. I just want to keep moving; moving is how I survive.

 

So, yes—it was time for a change. I'm a Chicago boy, and I had a Chicago team, but the game was being played largely in Los Angeles. So I made the rounds of the agencies and took a gamble on Steven Greener, a manager at 3 Arts Entertainment. I'd met him on
Above the Rim
—he'd been one of the producers—and I liked what he had to say. He knew the business inside out, he understood the politics, he knew it was his job to shield me from the politics and let me do my work, and he knew what my career needed: stronger roles, a chance to grow.

I signed on.

Greener then put me in touch with David Schiff, at the United Talent Agency, and Schiff introduced me to the three principal players on his team: Ruthanne Secunda, Josh Pollack, and Marty Bowen.

We were off to the races.

Only the races would have to wait.

Because a few days after the team was in place, I got a phone call from Walter Latham.

Let me tell you about this cat Walter Latham. I met him in 1998, when he was twenty-eight years old. He was six-six, a former basketball star at East Carolina University, but his real love was comedy.

One day, back in 1992, he borrowed $4,000 from his mother and staged his very first comedy show. He was only twenty-two years old, but he knew there was a black audience out there that wanted more than hip-hop and Saturday-night TV. And he was dead right.

Before long, this smart kid was booking comedy shows all over South Carolina. Then he decided to go national.

 

The Kings of Comedy
was Walt's idea all the way. He wanted to do a show that was bigger than any show he'd ever done before. He wanted it to be urban, black, and bare-bones: good comedy on the cheap.

The
KOC
tour went on to become the most successful comedy act in America, and the seventh most successful concert tour ever. It grossed nineteen million dollars in 1998, the first year out, pulling down an average of $450,000 per concert. By the end of its two-year run, that number had doubled, to thirty-seven million dollars.

And it was practically pure profit. Overhead didn't come any lower.

That first year, there was just the three of us: Steve Harvey, who had his own show on the WB
(The Steve Harvey Show),
Cedric Kyles, a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer, and me, Bernie Mac. Guy Torry was the emcee, and D. L. Hughley didn't join up till 1999.

 

The first time I went out in front of an audience that size was truly something. Don't get me wrong, I'd done routines in front of large audiences—all of us had cut our teeth on standup—but we're talking
stadiums
here, brother. We're talking
fifteen thousand
people.

About forty-five minutes before I was due onstage, I went off with Rhonda and we held hands and bowed our heads in prayer. I always pray before a show. After that, I need about thirty minutes to get in character, so I keep to myself and let that character come forth.

Then it was time.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Bernie Mac!”

The curtain parted and I stepped out onstage, and man, it was unreal. The crowd, the noise, the giant monitors. This was
it,
man. I'd been preparing for this moment my whole life, and I was so overwhelmed that for a moment there, my legs turned to jelly. But the moment passed, and I found myself center stage, mike in hand, with the fans winding down, getting quiet, looking at me, waiting to be entertained.

Show us what you got, motherfucker. Make us laugh.

Like I told you, black audiences are
tough.
But you get that first laugh—that big roar, filling an entire stadium—and it's like a shot of pure adrenaline.

So I'm off and runnin':

“I got three new kids. At forty years of age, the
fuck
I need three new children for? Two, four, and six. These my sister's kids. State was going to take them away, and I intervened. Yeah, my sister on drugs. I said it and I ain't ashamed. Some of your family fucked up, too…

“I'm sitting in court, I should have sat there like my brother did. My brother ain't say a damned word. He just turned his got-damned head. When they said they was going to give the kids over to the state, he turned his head. But I had to get my self-righteous ass up: ‘Naw. This ain't right. We're family. We got to stick together.' If I'd known what these bastards was like, boy, they'd be in orphanages right now.

“Man, that two-year-old—she a sumnabitch. That heifer been here before. Two-year-olds don't use words like ‘inconsequential.' She's an apostle for the devil, I tell ya! One day I was combing her hair looking for some numbers.

“And the four-year-old—my sister must have been getting real high when she was conceived, because she don't say nothing; she just
look
at you. I told her the other day, ‘Heffa, if a fire break out, you better learn how to whistle or something. Or you gon' be a burnt-up bitch.' I ain't got time to be going into no fire looking for somebody like this. She just stare at you.

“And the six-year-old cry like a sumbitch. But the two-year-old has control over the six-year-old's mind. I ain't lying. Whatever the two-year-old tells the six-year-old to do, he do it…

“Kids! The world is messed up. I'm just saying what you're afraid to say! Kids make me
sick,
motherfucker. I can't stand those sumbitches. I'm not talking about kids from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties; I'm talking about these nineties got-damned kids. Ooh, these sumbitches. I can't
stand
them. Ever since they changed the rules to stop you from hitting these fuckers, I lost interest in them. These some bad sumbitches with they small asses. They ain't got no respect for nobody.”

Sound familiar? It should, for a couple of reasons. One, you know the story: I done told you about Toya and her kid, and about my friends who inherited those three little devils. And two, you're hearing the foundations of
The Bernie Mac Show.
This right here, this was the beginning of that show.

The laughter. I tell you—nothing quite as
sweet.

I see some people down in the front row, one woman looking shocked, mouth wide open. And I say, “What you looking at me like that for, girl? You know it's the truth! Bernie Mac just say what you want to say but can't.”

And this really gets them. Because that's the way it is, brother.

“When a kid gets one years old, I believe you got the right to hit 'em in the throat or stomach.”

That really brings them down. Audience is roaring now. Guy in the front row just fell out of his seat.

People come by after the show for autographs. “That shit for real, brother?”

Come on, people! It's humor. I'm just trying to show you that you're not alone. World is fucked up, difficult; we all got problems. But hit a kid in the throat? I don't think so, friend. You don't beat a child. That don't teach nothin' but anger and hate.

Of course—and I know you're going to crucify me for saying this—I'm not totally against a little light smackin' now and then. If you've tried everything—if the little sumbitch is being so defiant and so disrespectful and so out of control that he might be harming himself or those around him—well, it's time to bring out the belt. Yeah, I said it: You can take your Political Correctness crap and shove it. It makes me sick. As a parent, I will smack my kid if I want to. I'm not going to smack him to hurt him, but I'm going to smack him because he needs to shift direction—and he needs to do it
now,
motherfucker. You ain't hurting your kid if you smack him right. You giving him guidance. You saving his got-damn life. And nobody going to tell me there's anything wrong with that.

But is that me up onstage? Threatenin' to clip a one-year-old in the throat? People, please. I got an evil twin inside me, just like you, but I got mine under control.

 

I was the least known of the three original kings, and I also happened to be the one with the least family-friendly material. You know me: I've been called the reigning champ of
motherfucka.
You done heard it already: “When I see
that
motherfucka, he better have my
mother
fucking money, or I'ma bust him upside his
mother
fucking head, mother
fucka.
”

And sure. We're all different; we all have our own style; each one of us sees the world in his own uniquely comedic way. That's what makes the world go round, brother. But we also knew one thing above all others: We knew going in that the show had to be about the three of us. We all had to do well. The show worked only if we all succeeded.

And it succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Sold out, motherfucker! Sold out all over again! Sold out three got-damn nights in a row!

Of course, if you were white, you wouldn't know it. The white media ignored us. You'd have thought there was a blackout on the
Kings.

In 1998 thirty-four thousand people saw us at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. But the
Washington Post
didn't review the show.

In New York City we sold out Radio City Music Hall two nights in a row. But you didn't hear a peep about it in the white press.

If I saw a white face in the audience, bright as a cotton shirt, I'd think to myself,
That's a brave motherfucker!

We went across the country and back again. We sold out 15,000-seat arenas from Oakland to Atlanta and everywhere in between. We sold out Chicago's United Center, New York's Madison Square Garden, then went back to D.C.'s MCI Center and sold out two more shows.

As one reporter put it, we were the
Biggest Show Business Phenomenon Most White People Didn't Even Know About.
And that's the truth. If you were white, you didn't hear about us until long after we'd packed up and gone home; in fact, if Spike Lee hadn't put the show on film, you likely would've never heard of us at all.

We shot the whole film in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the space of two days: February 26 and 27, 2000. It was a tiny, all-digital production, with a budget of only three million dollars. Spike's
cameras were everywhere, onstage and off. He showed us clowning before the show, playing poker, and horsing around on a basketball court behind the auditorium.

Of course, there was a lot of showbiz in those sequences. By the time Spike Lee got to North Carolina, politics had reared its ugly head. Steve Harvey started feeling
The Kings
was his show. Don't ask me why. So mostly we didn't hang together backstage, like you saw in the film. Not me, anyway; as you know, I prefer to be on my own.

And that time on the basketball court, when I said that stuff about getting a TV show, what you missed is the question: “Bernie,” Spike asked me, right there from behind the camera, “America's waiting on you. How come you got no TV show? Your buddies here have shows of their own. What about you?” So I played along. I looked right at the camera and said, “Do I have a television show?” I got to acting all hot and aggressive. “No. You know why? Because you're scared of me, that's why. Scared I'm going to say something.” Then I got all weepy and whiny: “White folks, I don't mean it. I'm just playin'. If you give me a chance, I'll take the WB. I'll take UPN. I'll take USA. Give me a chance to show you…America, GIVE ME A SITCOM!”

I wasn't honestly even thinking about a TV show. And neither was America, I imagine. For sure nobody thought I was the next Bill Cosby. And I can't say I blame them. I think
The Original Kings of Comedy
probably scared the hell out of a lot of white people.

The Kings
was pure black. Conception, marketing, performance—whole thing was geared to blacks. It was more of that Def Jam thing again: by blacks, for blacks.

When the film came out, white America didn't know what to make of it. They kept talking about us “black comics.” I guess that makes Billy Crystal a “white comic,” though I never thought about him in those terms. I never thought comedy was about color. And
I believe Dick Gregory said it best: “I've got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.”

That's what I wanted to be: a colored funny man. And it was Spike Lee's question that got me thinking:
Why didn't I have a got-damn sitcom?
I was funny. I was
beyond
funny. I called Steven Greener, back in Hollywood, and told him I wanted to do mainstream television. Greener said he'd get to work on it.

A few weeks later, I ran into Damon Wayans and told him I was looking for a TV show of my very own. “I ain't scared of them,” I said, meaning white America.

And he said, “Hell, Bernie—maybe you ain't scared of them, but they scared of
you.
”

That'd be funny if it wasn't so unfunny.

 

This country—there's always a lot of angry talk behind closed doors.
Nigger can't get a break. We worse off than ever. This country going to shit.
But I don't buy into that shit. I try to see people as individuals. When you see people in terms of race or religion, that's when the trouble starts.

I don't understand why people work so hard at pointing out our differences; we should be celebrating the things we have in common. More blood has been spilled over religious differences than over anything else in history. If you don't believe me, brother, take a good look around you, take a look at what's going on in the world right here, right now.

And this ain't no apologist talking. I know who did what to whom. I know all about slaves. I come from a long line of slaves myself. Slavery is in my bones.

But am I a slave now?

Give it up, brother.

Every ethnic group has been oppressed. Can't keep using that. Can't keep bringing up the past. We were
all
slaves. Asians were slaves. Mexicans, Indians. Israelites were slaves. Filipinos—they
sold those people for
rice,
man. And the Egyptians, they had those muh'fuckas on posts, whipping 'em and shit, throwing salt on their backs. “That
sting,
motherfucker. Want me to row this got-damned boat, better cut that shit out!”

Yeah, there's racists out there. There's every kind of racist for every kind of group. But it ain't just a color thing. It's humanity. People are
harsh.
They thick-headed, hardwired. No amount of tinkering is going to change the way some people think. Don't tell me. I know. I've been beat the hell down as much as the next guy, and the biggest beating I've taken has been at the hands of my very own people.

Go ahead. Take me to task for saying that. But it's the truth, brother. And that's what I'm giving you: nothin' but the truth.