Suddenly we understood why Mom had started calling my brother by his middle name: The name Robert had become a reminder of all my dad’s affairs. My brother was the first of his children, but almost every other one was born while he and my mom were together.
Meanwhile, Torrei was pregnant again. Coming right after the loss of my mom, it felt like a sign to keep building the next generation of Harts. “We gotta get a house,” I told Torrei. “That’s what we need to be a family: a real home. That’ll fix everything.”
With the money I had left from Fool’s Gold, I rented a house on Lemona Avenue in Sherman Oaks for forty-five hundred dollars a month. And instantly the relationship changed: Instead of arguing in an apartment, we were arguing in a house.
Torrei named our son Hendrix, to do a run on the Hs for our kids’ names, and I got in Kevin as his middle name: Hendrix Kevin Hart. By trying to give the same name to all my kids, I guess I was more like my dad than I thought.
Then the inevitable happened. I had to get back on the road, and the shit hit the fan: “You’re never here!” “I’m gonna find me a job, and you stay home with the baby!” “All you do is party with your friends!”
I left for the airport, with the usual thoughts running through my head. Oh well, I’m gonna get served a big shit sandwich for taking off to do more shows, and I’ll eat it. But I’m not gonna stop focusing on what I believe is gonna change my life and get us financially secure and give a good education to our kids.
In New York, I’d had very little real-world experience to talk about on stage. But now I had the one thing that comes to all people with age: more baggage. I was trapped in an unhappy marriage with an angry wife, two beautiful children, and bills that I couldn’t afford to pay. I had problems and a struggle that were relatable to many people, and I was living them out at a level so intense that I didn’t need to exaggerate a thing.
I didn’t have a voice in my relationship, but I had a voice on stage. I could speak my mind, acknowledge the insanity of my situation, and be understood on such a raw, uncomfortable level that it elicited knowing laughter. I was careful, though, never to humiliate or belittle Torrei, but instead to make me—my reactions, my cowardice, my inability to be the man in the relationship—the butt of the jokes.
All this set up a vicious cycle: The better I got at comedy, the more bookings I got. The more bookings I got, the worse things got at home. The worse things got at home, the better I got at comedy.
Before long, my set was forty minutes of solid material. I invited Dave to a show, and he was blown away. “I think you’re ready to do an hour-long special,” he said afterward.
An hour-long special is the holy grail of stand-up. Do a tight sixty and you get to join the annals of giants: Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert, George Carlin’s Jammin’ in New York, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, Bill Hicks’s Relentless, Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain, Dave Chappelle’s Killin’ Them Softly.
I told Dave that I didn’t want to pour my heart and soul into something, only to have some executive’s assistant calling two days before it’s supposed to air and saying, “We decided this isn’t right for us and we own all the rights, so no one’s ever gonna see it.”
I wanted to own it. I wanted to control it. I wanted to do it myself.
The only problem was that I couldn’t actually afford to do it myself. So while Dave worked on finding someone to help finance it, I kept touring and wrecking my marriage.
72
* * *
REMEMBER WHEN I SAID I HAD TWO HUSTLERS WORKING FOR ME? THAT WAS A BAD IDEA. I GOT HUSTLED. WHAT DID I EXPECT, REALLY?
While I was building my special, Terrence Lock cooked up a plan to make me—and him—better money.
“I know you hate those package shows Glenn has been putting you on,” he told me as we sat backstage at another empty theater, “so let’s put together one that features you and has enough big names that it will sell out those theaters. You can do twenty dates in a month and walk away with two hundred thousand dollars, easy.”
Terrence and Nate lined up six other comedians they represented and knew. Each of us stood to make six figures from the whole road show. Terrence said he had collected the guaranteed money up front so that nothing would go wrong.
He was doing such a good job that I let Glenn go and I went all in with Terrence and Nate.
Just before the tour was supposed to start, I reached out to Terrence for my first check so I could make my nut—and learned that only a nut would trust Terrence Lock with his money. He didn’t answer the phone that day, the next day, or the next year. No one could find him anywhere. This motherfucker had disappeared—along with the money he’d supposedly collected.
The tour fell apart and everyone went their separate ways, pissed off. I didn’t see Terrence’s face again for eight years. When I did, I found out he’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He didn’t say anything about the missing money, but I figure he hadn’t been insured. If he had just told us, I’m sure everyone would have helped him.
After Terrence disappeared, I found myself in a familiar situation: home, car, and tax payments due; nothing in my pockets; and another box-office failure. Fool’s Gold launched and quickly sank even deeper than the buried treasure in the film. Critics destroyed the movie, most giving it one star. They called it “stupid,” “tedious,” and “excruciatingly lame.”
I was out with Nate one night, talking about ways to make more money, and he said: “Hey, look, I can do all that for you, you know. I’m a hard worker. I’ll put cash in your pocket, man.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I can make calls on your behalf—book gigs for you, man. I can bring you dates. Allow me to hustle for you, know what I’m saying? Damn.”
This was one of those right-or-left moments: I could either make a decision based on what everyone else said about Nate or I could trust a guy who had been tirelessly busting his ass for me.
I decided to trust him. “Okay, do your thing.”
“Damn, Kev, you won’t regret it. Give me six months, and I’ll get you double what you’re making. Shit, I’m not shitting you, shit.”
Immediately, Nate started hustling. He had me doing bars, banquets, marching-band rehearsals, even a pimp-and-ho convention. I don’t know how he was finding half that shit, but I was paying my bills on time and putting food on the table, so I didn’t ask.
But then I noticed that I’d walk into gigs and everyone would be pissed at me: the booker, the owner, the host, the waitstaff. They’d all be looking at me like I was a volcano that might erupt at any moment.