CHAPTER 29
In spring 1992, a month after the riot against the Rodney King verdicts burns down half of Los Angeles, I’m in the green room at the Pantages Theater at Hollywood and Vine. One of the promoters of the show approaches me with a request.
“Mr. Mooney,” he says, actually wringing his hands like he’s in a silent movie—probably Birth of a Nation, “could you please not mention race?”
I marvel that there’s a person on the face of God’s green earth who would have the total lack of sense to say something like that to me. It’s like someone coming up and saying, “Could you please not breathe?” Who does this imbecile think I am?
I’m not one of those people out there burning down stores or boosting TVs. But I see enough LAPD bullshit in my life to know that this moment is a long time coming. L.A. police are the worst in the world. They’re outnumbered, and they know it, so they have to act all heavy-handed to make their presence known.
Richard rents a house in Bel Air to get away from the Northridge craziness. We go up there to work. I leave the house late one night, but the streets are like a maze up there. I’m driving around lost for fifteen minutes. I see a car full of white people, and I think they’re lost, too. They trail me for a little while. I finally make it down to Sunset and turn east. I approach the dogleg at the start of the Strip, right where Tower Records is back then, and there’s a police roadblock waiting for me.
What the shit is this?
“Some citizen called it in,” the cop tells me as he’s checking my ID.
“Some citizen? What am I? I’m a citizen. What do you think I am, a baseball bat?”
This is a total no-no in LAPD copland. No back talk, and no black talk. The police will wear a black person out.
“Are you on probation or parole?”
“What?”
“Don’t be offended. We ask everybody that. Does the owner of the car know that you have it?”
“What? I’m the owner of this car!”
“Where are you going?”
This bullshit is annoying me. “I’m going to drive until I run out of gas. You want to follow me?”
He gives me the stink-eye and tells me to drive off. There are two LAPD rules that every black second-class citizen of Los Angeles knows. One: you mouth off, you get run in. Two: you flee from a cop, you get a beatdown. That’s what happened to Rodney. He got beat because he ran. He broke the unwritten rule of the LAPD.
I’ve been at a traffic stop in Beverly Hills where the cop reaches across the driver and another passenger, both women, to ask me for my ID. Just me, not the two white women I’m with—and I’m not even driving. I’ve been hauled out of a store in Hollywood in manacles, taken to the station house, and then told it is all a big mistake. No apologies, no nothing, just a curt, “You’re free to go.”
“I’m free to go? Then take me back to the store in handcuffs, uncuff me in front of everybody and apologize! You handcuffed me in public, now make it right in public, too!”
No back talk, Negro.
Yes, it might be all new to you, but it’s real old for me. For white people, watching the Rodney King video is like a world premiere movie. “Oh, I didn’t know the nice policemen did that.” For black people, it’s a rerun. It’s been in syndication for a long time. We’ve seen it all before.
After the King verdict, Richard and I meet up at the Bel Air rental house to watch the fires downtown and in Pico-Union. I think about The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: “I’ll take you to burn, burn, burn, burn, burn!” And of the slogan during the riots of the 1960s: “Burn, baby, burn!” Yes, we’ve seen it all before. You can only put pressure on people for so long before they explode.
A month later, at the Pantages that night, the nervous promoter practically follows me onstage. “So will you please not mention race? Please? Mr. Mooney?”
I go out and check the crowd. Black people and brave white people—my kind of audience.
“They don’t want me to talk about race!” The first words out of my mouth.
The audience members scream. They scream!
“You all got matches? Here, I got some, if you don’t have any.” I toss out a half-dozen books of matches to the crowd.
They scream. They scream!
Who says you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater?
I’m just keeping it real. And my kind of audience likes it real.
Back then, I’m living with a white girl, Lori Petty, the actress. Keanu Reeves’s surfer girl in Point Break. Kit Keller, Geena Davis’s character’s little sister, in A League of Their Own. Tank Girl. Lori’s the coolest. During the riots, she’s quoting George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic—“Let’s go downtown and blow the roof off of this sucker!”
Lori and I are together for five good years, until we fall out on the set of a movie we’re both acting in, a Pauly Shore comedy called In the Army Now. That film kills more than our relationship. Mitzi’s son Pauly sees his career pretty much left for dead after it, too.
I am too busy to notice whether or not my film career is tanking. I finally come out with my first album, Race. It’s good timing, right after the riots. I do a lot of my stand-up routines that feature the same upside-down view of the world that I learn back in childhood, from the “Mama getting her ass whupped” story that makes me laugh so hard.
A lot of times, I just take a black situation and turn it upside down by putting white people in it. The most popular singing group in the country back then is from a god-damned TV commercial (ain’t America great?). The California Raisins. The cartoon dried fruit sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with Jimi Hendrix’s old drummer, Buddy Miles, on vocals. On my album Race, I go off on the whole California Raisin phenomenon.
White folks’ favorite TV commercial is that you got to be a little shriveled-up wrinkled black raisin. Little nigger raisin with a hat, they think that shit is cute. [White folk voice] “Oh, look at the cute nigger raisin!” … They’ve gone nigger-raisin crazy. They made Ray Charles … and Michael Jackson goddamned raisins … They’ve gone nigger-f*cking-raisin crazy. And the shit ain’t cute. I bet if I get me some goddamned marshmallows, and put some arms and legs on the goddamned marshmallows, and let ’em sing “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” they won’t think that shit is so goddamned cute! No, it won’t be cute then! White people will call up and bitch and shit. “I’m not a goddamned marshmallow! What kind of crazy nigger wrote this commercial?”
Take a situation, turn it upside down, like you’re in a bus plunge or you’re an ass-whupper getting ass-whupped. Sometimes to go upside down, all I have to do is keep it real, saying stuff that no one else is saying.
Because I’m recording, I want to say some good things about white people. Because sometimes white people freak out when they see me. [White folk voice] “He hates us! He doesn’t like us!” I don’t hate you—I hate your parents for having you. [White folk voice] “It’s a chip on his shoulder. He’s bitter.” You folks have names for niggers. White people will label people. You’re dirty when it comes to labeling. ’Cause it will last for years. “The only good Indian is a dead one.” Ain’t that a bitch? “The one thing I hate more than a nigger”—which you can’t imagine what—“is a nigger lover.” It’s true, white folks know how to label you. They f*ck white girls up. “Once you go black, you won’t come back.” Come back from where? What, do they fall into some deep black hole?
Two-thirds of the way through the album, I get down to it, trashing the whole idea of black and white labels.
You know that Spike Lee movie? What’s that, Jungle Fever? All that is bullshit. I’ll tell you why. There’s no such thing as jungle fever. The white man saw to it that everyone is mixed. Blame it on the white man … Because he did a lot of f*cking, okay? … Ain’t no “jungle fever,” we’re too mixed up. Don’t let them run that, they’re four-hundred-and-fifty years too late for jungle fever. [White folk voice] “Oh, it’s all true, we’re all God’s children.” No, we’re all black. Everybody is. It’s the truth, it’s cold, ain’t it? But it’s real. People in America—because black is negative in the Western world—you can’t get them to admit it. They’ll admit they got any blood but black. They’ll admit their mama is anything but black. “Isn’t your mama a goat?” [nod-ding] “Sure she is—that’s why we call her ‘Nana’!” Isn’t your cousin black? [screams]
Tell me that ain’t keeping it real. The Race album just takes what I’ve been saying onstage in my stand-up act and bottles it. For some people, it’s poison, but for other people, it’s tonic. I know for a lot of white people, it’s a f*cking relief to get this shit out in the open. Race earns me my first Grammy nomination.
Keenan Wayans plays the album to his writers on In Living Color. “This is the kind of jokes I want,” he tells them. “I want Mooney funny.”
The whole country must like it, because for my next album, America gives me the greatest gift anybody has ever given a comic.
O.J.