Private Parts (7 page)

Howard (sex symbol) at the console.

Jackie "the Joke Man," killing time between weekends.

Fred Norris, King of Mars, with stacks of cartridge tapes for playing sound effects and commercials.

Robin, following the top stories, in the world's largest litter box.

A FAN'S-EYE
VIEW

This cartoonist's impression of the show was faxed to me on July 1, 1993.

Black and Blue Like Me

Howard in the 'Hood

Remember the book
Black Like Me?
It was about a reporter who dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the South to experience what it's like to be black. I could have written that book, only I would have called it "Black and
Blue
Like Me." I grew up the only white man in a black neighborhood in Roosevelt, Long Island, a pawn in my mother's little social experiment in integration.

My mother is a wonderful, well-intentioned woman and I love her dearly, but one thing she was always rotten at was picking neighborhoods to live in. When my father started making a decent living with his recording studio, we could have lived almost anywhere on Long Island. But she had to pick Roosevelt, a little one-square-mile town that anybody with any sense would know was ripe for the realtors to start planting black people in. Overnight, there was an exodus of whites from Roosevelt. The Irish, the Poles, the Jews, the Italians -- they all left. But my mother, the martyr, had to stay.

It was amazing. One day I'd go over to a friend's house to play, and the next day I'd go knock on the door and a big black guy would answer.

"Hey man, who you looking for? We be in this house now."
Every day another one of my friends would be gone. Can you imagine how traumatic that is to a kid? But did my mother care? Damn right she
didn't!
She had her nice middle-class black friends. Meanwhile, I was beginning to get the shit beat out of me every day by the welfare recipients who are moving into my neighborhood.

My mother didn't care; she wanted to build my character. Every part of life was about lesson builders -- even the car pool. We used to have a car pool every day to get to school. My mother, always a conscientious neighbor, would drive my classmates a few days a week. Except for me. She thought I needed air. Air and exercise. So I had to walk to school. And this was some walk; it wasn't just around the block. Every day I'd be walking to school with a heavy book bag and I would hear a car horn toot and there was my mother driving my friends, waving at me as she cruised by.

One day, I was walking to school and a bee stung me in the ankle and my foot began to swell. I was limping like a cripple. All of a sudden, my mother drove by. I saw her and I yelled, "MA!"
V-o-o-m.
She went right by. That afternoon, I hobbled home and complained to her and she told me I didn't need a ride. It was good for me to stagger home. This was what made the fiber of a person. Her and her fiber.

Anyway, one day there must have been a typhoon or a blizzard because she gave me a ride to school. I was sitting in the front seat of the car and my three remaining school friends were in the backseat and these guys started making fun of blacks. You know, stupid kid stuff. All of a sudden my mother turned to them and said, "Listen, boys, don't make fun of blacks. I'm part black, you know." There was a stone

Hobble-along Howie, age seven.

Is this woman black?

silence. I was sinking into my seat in the front of the car thinking, "I can't believe my mother just told my only friends she's part black."

"Ma, that's not true," I said.

"Oh, yes, it most certainly is, Howard, and you shouldn't be ashamed of it either," she insisted.

My mother had to pick this forum to make her social statement about racism? The car pool?

By the time I hit seventh grade there were only a handful of white kids left in my school. That's when the beatings began to get regular. And lunchtime was the worst. I think I was providing lunch money for half the school. I'd hide my forty cents of lunch money in my sock, and black guys would come, choke me, rip my shoes off my feet, and take my money. One time I was able to sneak onto the line and actually buy lunch, but this guy Ronald came up to me and said, "I didn't get your lunch money. Think you tricked me?" Then he stuck his big black hand into my salad, scooped the whole thing up into his mouth, and swallowed it. It was like
Lord of the Flies.

The lunch money thing got so bad that none of the white kids could bring money to school. One of my friends started bringing a bag lunch. The only problem was there was this black kid who would grab my friend's bag, and whatever chocolate snacks he had, like chocolate Ring Dings or Devil Dogs, the black kid would always steal. So my friend had a great idea. He took Ex-Lax, a large chunk, scraped off the word
Ex-Lax
on it, and wrapped it in tin foil. The next day the kid came along and swiped the chocolate. About two periods later we saw this kid running out of his next class. He was shitting his fucking brains out. "Yeah, revenge," my friend said.

There was no way to fight these guys. First of all, they traveled in six-packs. They all looked about twenty-five years old in the ninth grade. I don't even know if I had sprouted my first pubic hair, but these guys, who'd been left back at least fifteen times, were almost nineteen years old, with full mustaches and goatees. I would go home and say, "Ma, we love black people but I don't think it's possible to live with them. They hate us. I'm not blaming them for hating us, but why do I have to be the one white person who lives with blacks?"

But my pleas fell on deaf ears. My parents were oblivious to my situation.

I wished Charles Manson were my mother. At least he protected his family. Half of the kids in my school were in a gang called the

Five Percenters, kids from Brooklyn who had moved in. They had dietary laws like Muslims, never ate pork, and hated the white man with a vengeance. These guys would choke me and say, "You'll never live to see your fifteenth birthday" -- nice stuff like that.

I was dealing with mutants who would take their penises out in class. Seriously. And what penises they were. These guys had rhinoceros penises. They would pull them out in shop and play with them. Remember when Clarence Thomas was being confirmed for the Supreme Court and he gave that speech about the hearings being a high-tech lynching because they were bringing up old stereotypes about the size of black men's penises? What is it with him? That's the one good stereotype blacks have. They get rapped on every stereotype -- big lips, talk funny, nappy hair. The stereotype that God gave the black man a big penis is the greatest stereo-

My trusted makeup man Ralph working on my transformation
...me as Clarence Thomas with a wild Afro...and today.

type in the world. I'd like to walk down the street and have every person in the world think I have a big penis.

I tried to assimilate, but it was impossible. I was too tall to hide. I'd talk black talk but that didn't work. They even started up a black-studies program. The only kids who signed up for black studies were the few white kids left in Roosevelt. We all signed up thinking the blacks would like us better, but it didn't matter. We still got the shit beaten out of us. But I loved that black-studies class. Today, I could tell you nine thousand uses for the peanut, all invented by George Washington Carver.

Aside from my black-history education, there were some rewards for being in a school like that. I was one of the brightest kids in the school. I could have been valedictorian of my class. And I'm a dummy! They shipped all the bright black kids to a fancy school in East Meadow, so all the retards were left. In the ninth grade I was mistakenly thrown into a class for kids who came out of Brooklyn and Harlem who didn't know how to read. I got in this class and we were reading a book called
Itsy Bitsy. Itsy Bitsy
has got to be on a first-grade level. I was in ninth grade.

The teacher would say, "Howard, now you read out loud. You had to read out loud.

"Itsy Bitsy was a very little boy, and he..." I was reading, right? The other kids were like, "It-sy bit-sy." All of a sudden, I was like the genius in the class.

I had to put up with a lot of shit in this class, because every dredge was in it. Guys would shake you down. They'd go, "I like your pants," and they'd start to pull your pants off. They'd take your fucking pants! I'd be out of my mind. The teachers were oblivious, they didn't want to know about it. I aced this class, as you could imagine. But, of course, every good thing is ruined. I was about three months into it and I was the teacher's pet. I was a

At my sixth-grade graduation with my sister (left) and mother.

genius. I could do no wrong. I could read
Itsy Bitsy
backward, forward, whatever. I had the friggin' thing memorized.

My mother's good friend Estelle was a substitute teacher at Roosevelt. She called my mother up and said, "Do you know that your son is in a class reading
Itsy Bitsy
?" So now my mother got hold of me.

"Are you reading
Itsy Bitsy
?"

"Yeah."

"Let me see this book,
Itsy Bitsy."
I gave her the book.

"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!" she started screaming.
"ITSY BITSY
! YOU'RE READING THIS IN THE NINTH GRADE?!"

She called up the school; next thing I knew I was in the hardest English class, a new house of horrors.

It had the three white Polish kids who were the only other whites left by then in the school. They were sitting right in front of me. I was kind of feeling as if I was in a white school. The first day in this new class, I was sitting behind these three big Polacks, having a good time reading and everything, and one guy turned around to me, and he said, "Hey, Jew!"

Pow! Smash!
Full fist right into my face. Hard as he could. I couldn't believe it. I finally got away from the blacks and the fucking Polacks were beating me up.

Today you're always reading about kids in the New York City public schools who get caught carrying guns to school. They should have
issued
me a gun to go to that school.

My parents finally realized it was time to move on when Alan, my one black friend, started getting hassled. Alan was a great kid; he would come over to my house and have milk and cookies and we'd play chess. One day, Alan and I were walking home and a bunch of black kids surrounded us. They beat the shit out of Alan for hanging out with a honkie. That was the final straw. My parents put the house up for sale. They decided to move to Rockville Centre. I'll never forget the day we moved. Everyone was crying. It was a real emotional experience. My mother was crying because our next-door neighbor, a really nice old black man, came over and was trying to convince us to stay, that Roosevelt needed white settlers like us. My father was crying because he was giving up a 3 percent VA mortgage on this house. And I was crying because I was afraid that my mother would listen to that old black fool and stay.

It turns out that it wasn't any better in Rockville Centre. I

couldn't adjust at all. I was totally lost in a white community. I felt like Tarzan when they got him out of Africa and brought him back to England. I didn't know how to act around white people. I don't think I talked to anybody for three years. But I was thrilled to be out of Roosevelt. I promised myself that I would never, ever go back. Just thinking about it gives me the shakes. I remember before I married Alison, she would come to visit me in New York and she'd stay at my parents' home in Rockville Centre.

"I really want to go to Roosevelt and see where you lived," Alison decided.

"No, absolutely not." I was insistent. "I will not go to Roosevelt again."

"Why can't we go to Roosevelt?" she pleaded.

"Things could happen. Something could go wrong. Besides, I'm not even sure I know how to get to Roosevelt, I have such a bad sense of direction."

She wasn't buying it.

"Please," she started in with the whine, "I want to see how you grew up. I'm marrying you. I'm in love with you."

"I'll tell you the truth," I said. "I don't care where you grew up. Why do you care where I grew up?"

I finally relented. By now it was dark out.

"Okay, I'll take you to Roosevelt."

We got in the car. I drove a few blocks from my parents' house and made a few turns and then drove around that block about seventeen times. Finally, I pulled up to a house. We were maybe two seconds away from where we started.

"Roll down the window," I instructed Alison. "That's my old house." She had no idea we were still in Rockville Centre.

She peered out the window. She got all misty-eyed.

"That's my neighbor's house. That's my other neighbor's." I'm bullshitting like crazy.

"This is a beautiful community," Alison said. "How does it make you feel to be back here?"

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I just feel funny. But I'm glad you got a chance to see it. Roll the window back up."

Then I drove around the block about seventeen times again and
bingo!
We were back home in Rockville Centre. To this day, Alison thinks she's been to Roosevelt.

My getup for my Black Men Who Look While sketch; hair inspired by Kid 'n Play.

MALCOLM Z-Z-ZS

Spike Lee reminds me of every lame-o I ever met in Roosevelt. He's a troublemaker who complains and bitches about the white man. He's totally unprofessional. You never see Steven Spielberg use race to raise money for pictures.

"The white man don't give me an Oscar nomination," he whines. Why should they? They gave him twenty-eight million to make that shitty Malcolm X movie and he flew all over Africa and went to the pyramids and went way over budget and then he resorted to a standard in the Lee arsenal -- he bitched that the white man
be racists
for not giving him
mo'
money. I feel sorry for those poor jerks at Warner Brothers. He should have kissed their asses for giving him that money. Instead, he had the balls to go to his brothers and sisters in the black community with his little X cap out. He brought in Bill Cosby, Janet Jackson, Michael Jordan, Prince, Magic Johnson, Oprah Winfrey, and all they ponied in was $70,000 combined! What philanthropy! Warners chipped in twenty-eight mil but they were the white devil.