I’d never been to a place as white as Plainfield. I was used to city living and black folks. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who looked like the first thing they did when they rolled out of bed in the morning was go milk a cow. I was worried about how my kids would fit in at schools where they would be the only black kids in the class. It turned out Junebug was fine. He got himself some little white friends named Ethan and Conner who didn’t seem to notice the color of his skin. Nikia, a high school senior, got called “nigger” his first week of school and had to kick a white boy’s ass to straighten him out. Michaela was eight years old when we moved. She was sensitive and would lay in the cut, watching and listening, cataloging a list of insults and offenses that she’d hold against those kids until the day she graduated from high school.
Out of everybody in the family, the person who had to make the biggest adjustment to white suburban life was me. I’d never told anyone, not even Michael, about the number-one lesson Mama taught me about white folks. “They better than you,” she said one afternoon when we were home watching The Price Is Right. I was ten years old. “Remember what I’m telling you, girl. White folks is better than you. Make sure you never look them in the eye.”
It wasn’t the first time Mama had given me this particular piece of slavery-times advice. And it stuck with me, growing into a fear I carried all the way to Plainfield. Even though we moved into a nice house in the suburbs with ducks swimming in a little pond outside our front door, I felt uncomfortable every time I left home. Everywhere I looked was a white face smiling back at me. I was so intimidated it was hard for me to speak. A big redheaded guy once stopped me in a grocery store and mentioned that he thought our boys were on the same football team. I could barely fix my mouth to tell him yes. All I could think of was how stupid I must sound. It was all I could do to nod and look away.
That’s why it took every ounce of courage I had for me to walk into Morty’s Comedy Joint, on the north side of town. Morty’s wasn’t like the urban rooms I was used to playing where comics had to fight for attention with the TV blasting full volume behind the bar. At Morty’s, the audience came ready to listen. And they were patient, even with comics who liked to take their time. Like, let’s say you wanted to tell a joke about going to the drugstore. At Morty’s you could walk the audience up and down the drugstore aisles, riffing about Dulcolax, stupid-ass greeting cards, and how come they don’t make size “extra small” condoms, before you dropped the punch line. At an urban club, a comic would hit the stage and yell, “I told my girl, ‘If you bleeding you better call 911 because I ain’t buying no muthafuckin’ tampons!’” and that was the whole damn joke.
At Morty’s I’d hang out by the bar watching other comics’ sets and wait for a chance to go up. Sometimes Avery, the manager, would be there. He looked just like one of the Three Stooges, with a round face and bald head. Pretty soon, we got to talking. I told him how I got pregnant at thirteen, got paid selling crack, and dropped five thousand dollars on a custom paint job for my Cadillac. One night Avery said, “Why are you back here telling me all this? You need to put these stories onstage.”
I didn’t think a bunch of middle-class white folks would relate to my life, but Avery kept insisting. One night I finally decided to give it a shot.
“Hi, y’all,” I said, looking out into the audience. “I’m a mom. How many of y’all are parents? I had my kids early. Any of you guys had your kids early, too? Like fifth or sixth grade?” I told jokes about being a teenage mother and struggling to survive. I talked about Mama’s baptism hustle and the way she’d fire her pistol in the house. “I wish I was lying,” I said, “but this shit is true.”
I couldn’t believe it. Not only did I get some good laughs; the more personal I was, the more folks connected. One night after a show a blond lady carrying a Louis Vuitton purse and wearing big-ass diamond earrings came up to me and leaned in close. “I’ve been through what you went though,” she whispered.
“Your mama made you pickpocket from drunks?” I asked.
“No. I got pregnant when I was thirteen,” she said. “Those child-molesting assholes are everywhere.”
All those times Mama told me white folks were better than me had me thinking white people all lived the easy life. But that woman isn’t the only one who’s come up to me after a show to tell me about her shitty childhood or her drug-addicted parents. I was a grown woman before I found out black folks aren’t the only ones who have hard times. Everybody’s got a struggle. Nobody gets through this life easy.
It turns out comedy and selling drugs have a lot in common. You need to be quick, work hard, and give people what they want. But to make it in comedy, you also need a break. Back in the day, a comic could go on The Tonight Show and their career would take off overnight. But the industry changed. By the 2010s, it was all about podcasts. Every comic had one, and everyone wanted to be a guest. Except me. I didn’t know shit about podcasting, until the summer of 2014 when comedian Eddie Ifft was looking for a guest and a friend of his, a comic from Indianapolis, recommended me. Eddie and I spent an hour talking shit about cops and drugs and black people. I guess word got out that I had some good stories to tell, because I started getting invites from all over: comics Ari Shaffir, Bert Kreischer, Joey “Coco” Diaz, Tom Segura, and Christina Pazsitzky all had me on their podcasts. Even Joe Rogan, who is famous for keeping guests on for three hours talking about outer space and hallucinogenic drugs, invited me on his show. Sometimes I felt like these white boys were using me as a ghetto tour guide so they could learn about a place they’d be too scared to visit in real life. But other times, it felt like I was opening their eyes to a reality they needed to see.
I’d been doing the podcast circuit a few months when I got a message on Twitter that changed everything. It was from Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast is one of the biggest in the game. “My fans have been asking for you,” he said. Marc wanted to know if I’d come out to Highland Park, California, and do his show.
I was nervous as hell when I walked into Marc’s garage, where he records his podcast. I’d heard that Louis C.K. had cried during an interview with Marc, I was worried about what he was going to ask me. Then I looked around. The place was filled with books, coffee cups, weird little knickknacks, and framed photographs and drawings covering every wall. It’s hard to feel intimidated in a place that looks like the home-furnishing section at the Goodwill.
“This is nice,” I said, sitting down.
Marc asked me where I grew up and the next thing I knew I was telling him about Derrick, Mama, and Granddaddy’s bootleg house. I even told him about calling President Jimmy Carter the “N” word and giving him a cheeseburger for free. “I wonder if he remembers me,” I said to Marc.
“I would hope so,” he said. “If anything, for the free cheeseburger.”