Homey Don't Play That! Page 3

  He also became a target for abuse. As a defense mechanism, he developed a sharp, unforgiving sense of humor. When kids would play “the dozens” on the playground, snapping each other with “Yo Mama” jokes and the like, nobody wanted to play with Damon, who channeled his insecurities into his verbal jousts. “They knew they couldn’t talk about my shoe. If they did, it’d turn ugly and the game was over.”

  Damon got in lots of fights, even though he didn’t like and wasn’t particularly good at fighting. It didn’t help that he was a small kid well into his teens. While Keenen grew to over six feet tall by sixteen, Damon was under five feet past his fourteenth birthday.

  “The doctors thought he was going to be a midget,” Keenen said. “He was literally my little brother. I looked after him and he looked up to me.”

  Damon’s height and his physical disabilities seemed to create a certain neediness in him. “All I really wanted was to be accepted and not talked about,” he said. As he grew into a teenager, he hung around some rough dudes, smoked a lot of weed, dabbled in petty crime, and eventually dropped out of school during tenth grade. “I never had any goals,” he said. “I just wanted to survive.”

  For the Wayans kids, fistfights were a pretty regular feature of life in Chelsea. As Keenen pointed out, the Fulton Houses were “one of the first integrated projects in Manhattan, and the racial tension was unbelievable.” Unbelievable but not unusual. This was the late sixties and early seventies, when the nightly news was cataloguing landmarks and setbacks on the road to racial harmony on a near-daily basis: Congress passes the Voting Rights Act; the Supreme Court strikes down laws against miscegenation and welcomes its first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall; Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis; Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is murdered by law enforcement officers as he sleeps; and two New York City cops are gunned down on an East Village sidewalk by members of the Black Liberation Army. It was like Newton’s Third Law, with bullets: For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. Progress and regress. A vicious cycle.

  The Fulton Houses were certainly subject to these larger forces. In his younger years, Keenen said, the epithet “nigger” was thrown pretty freely at him by white residents. “Every time I’d go outside someone would call me a nigger,” he said. On one occasion, after some older kids on the corner had shouted, “Get out of here, li’l nigger!” at him, he came home upset. His mother offered some peculiar advice for her young son.

  “You go back out there and if they call you ‘nigger’ again, you tell them to call you ‘Mr. Nigger’!” she told him. Keenen returned to the corner emboldened with a sense of righteous purpose. When the same teenagers spotted him, one called out, “I thought I told you to get out of here, you little nigger!” Keenen puffed his chest out and followed his mom’s counsel. His tormentors went silent for a second then burst into laughs. Then came the rejiggered fusillade of racial slurs: “Mr. Nigger,” “Dr. Jungle Bunny,” “Professor Coon.” It was an early lesson in the absurdities of racism. “I’m just like, ‘I guess Mom’s thing didn’t work,’ ” he said, laughing about it, many years later.

  More commonly, problems between Puerto Rican, Irish, and African-American kids in the Fulton Houses were settled with fists.

  “You had three of the toughest groups who had never interrelated to each other at all put into this eight-square-block housing development,” Keenen said. “Everybody came with their issues and baggage and resentments. It was hell. You walked out the door, you fought.”

  As Damon recalled, their mother counseled that there was safety in numbers. “There’s no reason why we should lose a fight,” she told them. “There’s ten of you against one, and if you ain’t helping your brother, then I’m beating your ass.”

  If one Wayans was in a fight, they were all there, even the girls. Keenen recalled a long-running feud with another family, the Andersons. “Damon got into a fight with the youngest. He went and got his brother. Soon, I was fighting with the middle kid. Then Dwayne was fighting with the older brother. It went on for four years after school.”

  By the time Shawn and Marlon were growing up, a lot of the racial animosity in the projects had subsided, but Marlon, like Damon before him, had a mouth and an audacity that belied his slight frame.

  “I would always find the biggest dude, then ‘pop,’ one punch and turn around and go ‘Shaaaaaawn!’ ” At which point, Shawn and other family members would join the fray. “My sister would kick him, my nephew would bite him,” Marlon recalled. “It was like fighting an octopus. Everybody would jump in.”

  Which is not to say that they won every fight. In his book, Bootleg, Damon recalled watching Keenen getting beat up by a white kid as “the worst day of my life.” From a young age, Keenen had studied and practiced karate—or “the arts,” as he sometimes called it back then. He took it all very seriously, and for a spell had taken to wearing Chinese slippers. When Damon heard a white kid making fun of said slippers, he dutifully reported the transgression back to Keenen.

  “I told Keenen that he had to defend his karate shoes. I figured it was a win-win situation and I’d enjoy seeing Keenen beat on the white boy.”

  Neighborhood kids gathered around Keenen and his slipper-slandering aggressor for the showdown. Then Keenen started to take off his shirt—standard prefight procedure for black kids in the Fulton Projects at the time, according to Damon—“when this white boy just hauled off and started whuppin’ his ass,” Damon recalled. “It looked like one of those hockey fights. Keenen couldn’t even get one punch off ’cause his arms were stuck in his shirt. I wanted to help out, but I was in such shock because it all happened so fast. Before I knew it, Keenen was lying on the ground in a bloody pulp with his shirt still pulled over his head, crying.”

  But like soldiers who’d defended each other side by side on a battlefield, all the fighting, and just surviving, day to day, in the face of poverty, racism, kids making fun of your slippers, and a mom who insisted you kiss your brothers on the mouth had an impact. “It bonded us more than any typical family,” Keenen said.

  2

  “Keenen Was Always the Pioneer”

  When Keenen was young, his mother sometimes snuck into his bedroom late at night and woke him up. “That little skinny boy is on TV,” she’d whisper. That’s what she called Richard Pryor. That little skinny boy. She didn’t know his name but knew her son loved him. Every time Pryor was on television, clowning with Ed Sullivan or Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson or Dinah Shore, Keenen scrambled to watch. (Unlike his wife, Howell didn’t really support his children’s burgeoning yen for comedy the same way. He dished out spankings when he found his kids listening to Pryor and Redd Foxx albums. “He’d beat us, but we’d take the beating,” Damon said. “That’s how funny Pryor was.”)

  The decade in which Keenen and his siblings were falling for Pryor was an artistically tumultuous one for the pioneering comedian. He had grown up in abject poverty in Peoria, Illinois, living for many years in a brothel where his mother serviced clients and his grandmother was the madam. During his early forays into comedy, Pryor presented himself as “Richie Pryor,” a somewhat goofy peddler of largely inoffensive observational humor and physical comedy. His act was solid—he performed on television, he booked lucrative shows in Vegas—it just wasn’t him. Similarities to Bill Cosby, who, by that time, was already white America’s favorite black comedian, were noted by many, including Cosby himself.

  As the now infamous legend goes, Pryor had a cathartic onstage breakdown at the Aladdin in Las Vegas in September 1967: He looked out at the almost exclusively white crowd, which included Dean Martin, then muttered to himself, “What the fuck am I doing here?” and walked off to find the real “Richard Pryor”—the one who’d draw from the wellspring of his harrowing childhood and deliver knife-edged jokes that assaulted America’s racial fault lines.

  The truth is more nuanced. Signs of Pryor’s growing disenchantment with his act (and himself) wer
e evident long before his shows at the Aladdin. At a gig opening for singer Trini López, Pryor lay on the floor and delivered his entire set facing the club’s ceiling, ignoring the crowd. At the Cafe Wha?, in New York, he attacked a heckler with a plastic fork. As Scott Saul describes in his book Becoming Richard Pryor, the incident at the Aladdin hotel was actually two separate incidents that occurred over the course of about ten days. On opening night, seven minutes into his set, Pryor did, in fact, walk offstage, get in his car, and drive to Los Angeles. In his own memoir, Pryor writes, “I didn’t know who Richard Pryor was. And in that flash of introspection when I was unable to find an answer, I crashed.” But after a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, Pryor returned to the Aladdin to fulfill his contract. He was eventually fired for repeatedly cursing onstage.

  While the incidents are now seen as the turning point in Pryor’s career, the transformation was far from immediate. He continued appearing on staid television programs and even performing in Vegas before he stepped off the showbiz hamster wheel and moved to a small one-room apartment in Berkeley, California, in 1971. There, he began hanging around black bohemian intellectuals like Claude Brown and Ishmael Reed, and militant Black Panther leaders such as Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Awash in the city’s countercultural vibe, the writings of Malcolm X, and the music of Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye, Pryor deconstructed his own act then put it back together anew. When he re-emerged, a comedy revolution was set in motion.

  That revolution was foundational for Keenen, as well as for his siblings, but it was only a part of his early comedy education. As a kid, Keenen watched Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show nearly every night, sometimes sitting in his grandfather’s lap. He was also a big fan of The Carol Burnett Show, Laugh-In, The Jackie Gleason Show, and I Love Lucy, all of which, in their own ways, would exert a substantive influence on In Living Color.

  During the sixties, when Keenen, Kim, and Damon were first discovering comedy, television was mostly a wasteland for black comics—or African-Americans in general. After the cancellation of The Amos ’n Andy Show in 1953, under pressure from the NAACP, who felt—not without cause—that the show reinforced negative stereotypes of black people, African-American comedy pretty much disappeared from television for more than a decade. In 1965, Cosby briefly interrupted that streak, first with a starring role for three years on I Spy, then in 1969 with his early sitcom The Bill Cosby Show, but it wasn’t really until 1970, beginning with the debut of Flip, the successful, hour-long comedy-variety show hosted by comedian Flip Wilson, that the prevailing winds shifted.

  Wilson, while not the comedy insurrectionist Pryor was, was nonetheless revolutionary in his own way. He spurned a million-dollar check up front from NBC and insisted instead on ownership of his own show. His faith in himself paid off handsomely: The show was a massive hit, and once Wilson walked away from it in 1974, he was able to retire and retreat from public view. Keenen may not have been hip to the financial backstory behind Wilson’s deal—after all, he was twelve when Flip debuted—but he was an avowed fan.

  Flip’s success prepped the ground for a slow trickle of black sitcoms. First, in 1972, was Sanford and Son, starring Redd Foxx as a junkshop owner; two years later came Good Times, featuring a young comic named Jimmie Walker, which focused on an African-American family struggling to make ends meet in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago; a year after that, The Jeffersons spun off from the gleefully controversial sitcom All in the Family. Each of these shows, though, was the product of the same white executive producer, Norman Lear.

  Opportunities for black actors in mainstream Hollywood movies during this period were scant. But by the early seventies, a parallel film industry sprung up of low-budget so-called blaxploitation films. Coming at the tail end of the civil rights era, films like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Superfly, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Mack, and Three the Hard Way presented the world through a distinctly racial lens: black heroes unapologetically fighting the white establishment. These films were, for better and worse, a product of their times. The earnest hopes of the sixties had begun to curdle into something harder, angrier. Martin and Malcolm were both dead by assassins’ bullets, but in the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and other advocates preaching “Black Power,” it seemed that Malcolm’s vision—as well as that of Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, and Angela Davis—was the one that was ascendant.

  Blaxploitation wasn’t bound by any single genre but was nearly always soaked in gratuitous sex and violence. The point wasn’t realism, necessarily, but that the extremes portrayed in these films—a hyper-violent, two-tiered world, divided by color, with venal, greedy white men pulling the levers of power—certainly felt real for much of black America. The belief that the right black hero, through a combination of strength, smarts, sex appeal, and general badass-ery could, at least momentarily, tilt these otherwise weighted scales in their own direction was understandably appealing. The films spawned a generation of stars including Richard Roundtree, Rudy Ray Moore, Fred Williamson, Bernie Casey, Jim Brown, and Pam Grier, and gave black comics like Pryor, Cosby, Foxx, Wilson, and Godfrey Cambridge some of their first film roles. However, by the late seventies, civil rights groups—the NAACP, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among others—were concerned that blaxploitation traded on old, backward stereotypes (which, to be fair, it often did) and helped stop the movement dead.

  Keenen saw a lot of these films as a teenager and in his twenties. Years later, he lamented their disappearance. “It caused a lot of really talented people to lose work and slighted a lot of great accomplishments made in that time period. Politics came into play because we were very sensitive to how we wanted to be seen on-screen. We had fought so hard in terms of civil rights—people were sensitive about anything which seemed to undermine that even remotely.” He would not only absorb a love and appreciation for these films but also note the lessons behind their downfall.

  Keenen was drawn more instinctively to comedy than drama. He has cited his introduction to Pryor as the moment he first wanted to be a comedian, but much like Pryor’s own awakening, it was almost certainly a more gradual process. Once, during a family gathering, back when the Wayanses were still living in Harlem, Keenen put on his father’s clothes and staggered around with a wine bottle, pretending to be a drunk. As he told an interviewer in 2013, that was the first time he remembered getting an adult laugh. “I was hooked after that.” After the family moved to Chelsea, he’d sometimes sit in the relative quiet of his bedroom closet and “dream about being a comedian.” But for a long time, he kept his showbiz dreams a closely guarded secret.

  When it came time for high school, those performer inclinations began sneaking to the surface. Keenen ventured out of the neighborhood to Seward Park, a high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The school was housed in a large, seven-story, block-long monolith built in 1929. In the late sixties, future Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt began working as an English teacher there. In his book Teacher Man, McCourt paints a picture of Seward Park as an overcrowded, chaotic melting pot of mostly black, Latino, and Asian kids. Kevin Bright, who later produced the In Living Color pilot (and, more famously, Friends), graduated from Seward Park three years before Keenen and describes it as “the New York City public high school you got lumped into if you weren’t smart enough to get in a specialized high school like Stuyvesant or Bronx High School of Science.” Bright recalled a shootout in the cafeteria between Asian gang members during his time there.

  A generation earlier, the school had churned out a pretty impressive roster of future actors and actresses, including Tony Curtis, Estelle Getty, Zero Mostel, Walter Matthau, and Jerry Stiller. But Keenen never took a drama class, never auditioned for a school play. “I didn’t know anything about performing or show business,” Keenen said. “I was just a guy that when my friends would get high, they’d come get me to make them laugh.” He crafted jokes and characters for his friends
. Around them, Keenen could relax and turn on the charm, but being the center of attention didn’t come naturally. “People who knew me would say, ‘I never thought this guy would be a comedian.’ Most people I went to high school with didn’t have any idea. In big groups, I was always very shy and quiet.”

  Similarly, Damon, who attended a different high school, Murry Bergtraum, showed little interest in drama programs. It was their younger sister Kim, who also went to Seward Park, who was the family’s resident performer.

  “I came out of the womb, got smacked on the butt, and said, ‘I’m going to be an actress,’ ” Kim said. “As far back as I can remember, I always knew what I was going to do.”

  Kim was the one putting on shows in the living room, dressed in her mom’s hats and wigs. She was a fixture in every school musical, every community play, and every children’s dance recital in lower Manhattan. She was constantly hanging around the Hudson Guild, a community center several blocks north of the Fulton Houses that offered art and drama classes, and put on local productions. As Keenen recalled, “Where I had this secret dream to be in show business, Kim had this desperate dream.”

  Because of the family’s financial hardships, Kim often couldn’t afford the appropriate accoutrements for all of her extracurricular activities, so she’d improvise. When one production required angel wings and tap shoes, Kim and Vi fashioned a wire hanger and some old curtains into the former, and fastened bottle tops to the bottoms of her shoes to take care of the latter.

  “We go to the play,” Keenen recalled, laughing, years later, “and she is literally skidding across the floor, banging into everybody because she has no grip on the bottoms of these shoes.” Episodes such as these would inspire one of Kim’s most memorable characters on In Living Color, the ferociously ambitious but equally untalented child actor, Lil’ Magic.