Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - Our Times

  Chapter 2 - I’m from the Ghetto

  Chapter 3 - Stand-up for the Panthers

  Chapter 4 - Making It in New York

  Chapter 5 - Kid Dyn-o-mite!

  Chapter 6 - I Am Not J. J.

  Chapter 7 - The Whipping Boy

  Chapter 8 - Freddie, Richard, Andy, Mitzi, and Budd

  Chapter 9 - A Black Sheep among Black People

  Chapter 10 - The Late-Night War

  Chapter 11 - The N-Word

  Chapter 12 - On the Road

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  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.

  One day when I was about nine years old I ran out of my bedroom to find my father pounding my mother, his fists to her face, to her body, like a boxer. I didn’t know what happened to instigate the situation. When she was on the floor, he stomped on her with his shoes. He was in a rage. She pulled herself up and ran out of the apartment. I watched as she reached the stairwell and then he followed her down the stairs. He hit her every step of the way, one punch breaking her jaw. He yelled at her as she cried and struggled to escape from him. My sister wanted to fight him, but she was too little, just seven years old. So she ran to him and hung on to his leg, trying to stop him from going after my mother anymore. I was scared, not knowing what I should do. My mother was getting beat up! I ran after them as they headed down the stairs. When they reached the building entrance, he finally stopped, got into his car, and drove away.

  The police came. One of them was a white cop, and it was the first time I ever heard a white person be nice to a black person. My mother was bleeding and in bad shape, and he felt for her. He wanted to help. He said, “Tell me where he is and I will go get him. Tell me where he went.”

  She wouldn’t tell him. Then she went to the emergency room and they wired her jaw shut.

  Later, during another incident, my father broke her jaw again. Again, the police came.

  “We’re not going to file charges if you’re not going to cooperate,” one of the cops told my mother. “We want you to tell the truth and not back out when we go to court.”

  My mom was silent. I too said nothing. I wasn’t shy, but I wasn’t outgoing either. My sister did all the talking and explained everything that happened.

  They were used to seeing domestic abuse in my neighborhood, most of it because of drunken husbands. Strangely enough, despite my father’s terrible violence, he wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t do drugs. He was actually sober when he did these things, which made his behavior even more vicious because he was completely coherent. Understandably, the cops did not want to waste their time on this case if my mom was not going to press charges and testify and go all the way.

  She said she would not. Back then, even when wives were pounded and paralyzed, women rarely left their men. But there was more. This is hard to believe—and it was hard for me to believe even then—but she loved him.

  That did not matter to me. I hated him. I wanted him gone. Though he never struck me or my sister, I dreaded every moment he was there. Thankfully, he was not home most of the time. Every now and then he would stay a day or so. Usually he came by on Sunday night to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. If I had known I would never see him again, I would have been a happy child.

  With him not around much and my mother working almost around the clock, my sister and I were latchkey kids, spending a lot of time in the apartment by ourselves. I wasn’t into reading or studying, but I loved watching television, from news programs and interview shows like David Susskind’s to comedy shows like The Honeymooners and listening to the transistor radio for music and other talk shows. I was never into wild fiction or fantasy. Even a sitcom like The Honeymooners had its grim and gritty edge.

  With summer, when we otherwise would be around all the time while on vacation from school, my mother got us out of the house and out of the line of fire of dad’s rampages. She’d send us down South to Birmingham to stay with one of her sisters—my four-foot-six, drinkin’, smokin’, pistol-packin’ Aunt Inez. Even my father would get shaky when Inez visited us in New York. Right in front of the kids, Inez would tell my mother, “You’re a fool putting up with that man.” She was tough.

  When we stayed with her in Birmingham, Aunt Inez would have me and my sister walk two miles to the grocery store in ninety-degree heat for a carton of Camels—every single day. The grocer was a white man, so if there was a white person there, even if he or she was behind us in line, we had to wait until that person was served first. That would never happen in the Br
onx!

  Going South, the culture shock was enormous. When I first saw “Black Only” drinking fountains, I didn’t even know what that meant. What I did know was that they were dirty, so I drank out of the white fountain. When Aunt Inez caught me, she slapped the shit out of me.

  “Do not ever do that again! You’re lucky nobody saw you! People would kill you for doing that!”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not for you.”

  “Water’s coming out. What’s the difference?”

  “You drink out of this other one, you hear me?”

  The most shocking thing was when Aunt Inez crossed paths with white people in public. In New York you would tell someone what you thought right to their face. Even my mother would tell me, “Why don’t you tuck in your lips?” or “Lighten up, why you so dark?” She didn’t mean to be funny; she was telling the truth. But in the South a woman like Aunt Inez, who despised white people like only someone raised in Alabama can, transformed into the sweetest of angels in front of them.

  “Miss Jones, we sho’ happy to see you,” Aunt Inez would say. “You are the nicest people to us.”

  Out of earshot, she would warn us, “These are the Joneses. You got to be nice to them and you got to know how to speak right to them.”

  Aunt Inez was some sort of housekeeper, and sometimes she would take us along when she had to go to a white person’s home to watch over their kids. The white kids would talk to us in the kitchen—we weren’t allowed into the rest of the house. They wanted to know about New York and what it was like living there.

  Afterward, we’d tell Aunt Inez we were talking to them and she’d be so excited. “Oh my God, you got a chance to talk to the Jones kids! They will be going to the University of Alabama, and they are going to be big people around here.”