I Am the New Black Part 1

I Am the New Black.

Tracy Morgan; Anthony Bozza.

There are many reasons why you might be reading this sentence. You're obviously curious about me, or you wouldn't even be holding this book. That's cool with me, I'm happy about that, Mr. or Mrs. Whoever You Are. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that curiosity might kill cats, but it doesn't kill people. Unless you're curious about doing things like bungee jumping high on crack to see if you really need that harness, curiosity will not kill you! I tell you what will kill you-people will. We've got a long way to go to change that around, but I hope we do. For now, I can say this and I know it's true: Curiosity makes you smarter. Don't fight it! Learn to learn, learn to ask questions. Clearly, you've got questions about me. In this book you'll find some answers.

I have a pretty diverse audience, and that makes me happy-laughter is universal, and I don't differentiate between people at all. Why should I? People are people. There's no reason why one person can't relate to any other person on this planet in some way or another. That's something I didn't have to be taught-I believed that as a kid, and leading the crazy life I've led has done nothing but prove me right to myself. I have friends who are black, white, purple, gay, straight, Martian, yellow, old, and young. I have friends who are animals and a few who I believe to be robots. All of them are people to me. In my mind it's not about what you look like or what you do, it's about who you are inside.

I hope whoever you are inside likes surprises, because I've got a few in store for you here. I'm not a child star, but you could say that I've grown up on TV. I went from being an unknown, down-and-out comic from Brooklyn and the Bronx to being a regular character on a major network comedy called Martin. From there I went on to become the most notable black comic on Sat.u.r.day Night Live since Eddie Murphy. Then I had my own show, The Tracy Morgan Show, and now I'm on 30 Rock. I definitely went from a boy to a man on TV, all on NBC-what up, Lorne Michaels! But here's what you don't know: I was already a man of the streets. I had to be to survive my upbringing.

The version of me you see on TV now and in my feature films is a pretty happy guy, isn't he? Finally, in my personal life, that much is true too-or it's getting there. Happiness, contentment, security-that's all new for me. I've reached my forties and I can finally say that no one except me can take my house away from me. No one but me can put me on the street. But it wasn't always like that. My life growing up was a twisted Bronx version of The Color Purple. It had a much different soundtrack and no trees, but that desperation was the same. At this point in my life I plan for the future. Back then I planned how to get through one day at a time.

Let me make one thing clear right now: I'm not writing this for your sympathy, and I don't feel like any kind of hero. I'm not G.o.d's gift, but my life wasn't dumb luck either. As you'll see, I made a series of choices-some bad, most good-that led me here. I don't want your praise, but I do want to be an example. Not the kind of example the princ.i.p.al suspends for throwing food at the teacher or the cops arrest in front of his friends for spray painting EAT MY a.s.s on the school. I want to be an example of a guy who made something of himself out of nothing. A guy who overcame the odds of a tough childhood, who worked hard, who didn't let his surroundings get the best of him and lead him to jail or the graveyard. Where I ended up-being a comedian, a TV star, and a movie actor-might be unique but my story is not. When a child is born, it's born with a heart of gold, but the way of this world can turn that heart cold. I'm still a good person and I thank G.o.d for that-He's working with me on it.

In many ways, all of you reading this who are like me, who come from what I came from-we are the last of the Mohicans. I've seen so many of the black males I grew up with end up dead or in prison. My closest friends from school who are still living work with me or for me, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that we are all that's left from our old crew. I keep them close because they're the only people I trust.

We grew up in the inner city, New York, in the late seventies and early eighties. We saw the birth of hip-hop right on our front stoop. Those were the good times; we were poor, but for a while there was harmony in our community. And those of us whose homes weren't what they should have been found what we needed in the neighborhood, because back then there were role models to be had. Hanging out on corners wasn't always dangerous-they weren't always just places to sell drugs. Back in my day, generations of families would meet on the street just to be together. Kids like me, from broken homes, used to be able to find family just outside their door, among a network of neighbors. We were all brothers of other mothers back when I was young. But not for long.

As we became teenagers, all of that slipped away. The city turned its back on the Bronx and let the neighborhoods become hoods, fueled by drugs. My backyard became the city's market for crack and heroin, and our people were right there to partic.i.p.ate in every way-as dealers, as addicts, and as statistics day after day. Throughout the eighties and into the nineties, my high school friends and cousins were taken down by drug-related violence. My own family was no different. We were torn apart by drugs and AIDS. I lost a lot of role models to that terrible twosome: dirty needles and a disease society didn't understand. Like a lot of the young men in my neighborhood, I ended up on the streets dealing just to get by. We dropped like dominoes, pushed over by the end of a gun or the tip of a needle.

If you think about it, I really shouldn't be here at all. If you're the kind of person who likes numbers and statistics, I'm the long shot, the lotto Powerball winner. I'm the mutation in the DNA that makes evolution a reality. I am the new black. Once you know a little bit more of my story, you'll probably agree that the odds were against me sitting in a luxury apartment in Manhattan starring in an Emmy-winning series with an Emmy nomination myself, alongside people like Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin on a network like NBC. Given the facts of my life, those of you who like to spend time at the OTB would have put your money on finding me, at my age, curled up in a ball in a corner of the ghetto ready to die if I wasn't dead already. The Emmy nod surprised me: I thought they'd wait a few years to give this black man his trophy. I figured I'd just keep rocking the Golden Globes. I love you, Europe!

I'm not going to lie: I know I've got a natural talent that has seen me through my trials and tribulations. Being funny has been my bulletproof vest. This mouth of mine and my goofy face have kept me from getting shot many times, particularly that one time when I stole a drug dealer's girl. Being funny wasn't a career choice growing up, it was my way out of situations, a way to survive another day. In the end, it also freed me from my environment. It was my pa.s.sport to a larger world that I had no idea existed, even though it was just a few miles south in Manhattan. That world was in the same city, in the same country, a world so many people took for granted, but it was foreign to a guy like me. When I finally moved to a nice community in Riverdale from a run-down apartment next to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, it was like I'd landed on Mars. I had no idea that other people lived without garbage all over their streets. It's crazy to me how in America different people can live just a few miles away from each other but entire worlds apart.

The best thing that ever happened to me was being brought up hard. It's kept me hungry, even though now I've got more than I ever thought I'd see in this lifetime. It doesn't matter how much I acc.u.mulate-I'll be starving for the rest of my life, that's for d.a.m.n sure. They say when opportunity knocks you should let it in and invite it to sit at your table. f.u.c.k that-when opportunity knocks, you should take it captive. Beat that s.h.i.+t down. I've got opportunity tied to a chair in my bas.e.m.e.nt with a ball gag in its mouth. Opportunity ain't even thinking about leaving my house. If you keep quiet for a second, you'll hear it whining.

But success isn't everything. Success can be tough if where you're from can't coexist with where you're at, if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, let me break it down. As Biggie said, "Mo' money, mo' problems," and he was right. He was a big fat genius. When you're on top, it's amazing how many old friends you have! People like to push your b.u.t.tons a little too much: Either they want you to perform for them or they want your money, and they'll take what they want one way or another. My sense of humor is my gift, and I need to protect it, whatever it takes. So I stay out of the street. It makes me sad, but at this point in my life, I can't go back and hang out where I used to live. I cannot have the kinds of negative energy I find there around me. And more than ever, I stay away from people I don't know. Most motherf.u.c.kers are miserable, and misery loves company. f.u.c.k that-misery makes its own company if there's no company around. Misery is a crowd.

The truth is, I've never thought of myself as the Michael Jordan of comedy. And that's a good thing. You know why? Because I'm not. Wasn't that Richard Pryor? Yes, it was. I know what I am: I'm funny! As far as funny goes, I've got big funny! But take it from me because I should know: There's a Tracy Morgan on every block in every neighborhood like the one I came from-that kid who's off-the-wall funny, who takes on characters for any situation, who can entertain you when the s.h.i.+t is going down. Entertaining people is how he gets through life, and watching him live out loud like that makes your day better. At least he hopes so. That guy was me. That guy is me. I'm tough like a rock, and here I am, against all odds, still going strong in your hands and on your TV.

If you know that kid, or, better yet, if you are that kid, I hope that you get out of this book all that I put into it. I hope you're brave enough to be yourself, however different or strange you are. Most of all, I hope you avoid all the wolves and the pitfalls that surround you. If you're born into a situation you didn't ask for, where everything and everyone around you tells you that the easiest thing to do is to fall in line, to follow the crowd straight into danger or a dead end, trust your inner strength. Don't do it. There is always a way out.

It will be a lot of work, believe me. You need to pray to whatever G.o.d you believe in for help. And I'm not gonna lie to you: If and when you get what you want, the struggle doesn't end, because once you're free, there is always someone there waiting to drag you down if you let them. But if you don't let them and you achieve the goal you set for yourself, however big or small, there is nothing better. That is freedom on your own terms. Some people out there probably think I know nothing, but believe me, that is one truth I know. Because I'm living it.

If you're wondering what the t.i.tle of my book might mean, well, before we get started, I'm gonna tell you. I don't mean to speak for all black Americans, and I don't think I am the evolution of my race or anything. Black people might be proud of their own, but if I was ever so arrogant as to say something like that and mean it, I might go down in history as the first black man lynched by black people. And speaking of lynching, I hope you all know that racism is alive and well in this country. Alive and living, I tell you.

Whenever a black comedian achieves a certain level of success, they get asked about racism in the entertainment industry. Every time I see or hear a question like that I think of a joke Damon Wayans did in his stand-up back when he really blew up and earned something like $14 million in a year for the first time. Damon's joke went something like this: Reporters have been asking me, "Damon, now that you have this $14 million, do you think racism still exists?" And I tell them, while I'm counting my money, "Well if'n there is any, suh, I ain't seen none!"

The new black is impossible to define-and so am I, because I am the new black. You know my characters on television and in films, and some of you know my stand-up. Which one of those is me? Who am I? Tracy Jordan? Biscuit? Astronaut Jones? The truth is that I'm all of them. They all live in me and I live through all of them. If you want to know the truth about Tracy Morgan, that truth is that like the new black, I'm impossible to define. Black isn't the absence of color, it's the presence of all colors. That's why I'm the new black. I'm everyone you've seen me be and just myself at the same time.

We are in a new era, with a black president. Racism definitely still exists, and the new black knows this, just like the new black knows that now is the time to stand up. The new black is something that our American society needs at every level, because the new black isn't about race, it's about trying. In this era of the new black, you have to try because there's no more excuses. We've got to take responsibility. We've got to raise our children. And people! This book is going to take your excuses from you. If I could get to where I am from where I came from, so can you. Being the new black means you can get there if you try. No more excuses. If your life is hard, you gotta start laughing so you don't cry, and you've gotta try or you'll get nothing. We can make a change if we put in the work.

Okay, okay, I've gotta stop this train. I'm not about to jump up on a soapbox blaming society and the economy and the white-man government of the United States for all of the hards.h.i.+ps in my life (you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds already know what you did). Seriously, hasn't all that been said already? Don't we all know that s.h.i.+t by now? We do, right? If any of you don't, let me point you to the Interwebs or your local public library, where you'll find nice search engines or sweet ladies with gla.s.ses to help you find material to read.

I'm here to relate my personal experience, because growing up in the inner city as a child of the seventies is a state of mind and a state of being. I am a product of those times, and like many others, I've struggled to get past them. There's no one to blame for the bad habits I brought with me when I left the ghetto, though. I almost let them ruin me. Even though now I see them for what they are, they're never dead and buried. They're a part of me just like the parts that make you laugh when you see me on TV. No one's demons ever die; if you're strong, they stay caged and you become their warden. That's where I'm at. I fight my demons every day, and I've gotten to know them so well, they've got a name: Chico Divine. You'll meet Chico in a little while; he's the life of the party whose a.s.s I still got to bury every morning.

In my opinion, life don't come easy no matter who you are. These past forty years have been crazy, but everything I did was worth it, and I'm nothing but grateful to be here now. Would I do it all again? Stupid question! I've got my health, which is much better now than it used to be, even though I've got diabetes. Sure, I've had a lot of complications from it for someone my age, but I still feel lucky-growing up with a complete ignorance of nutrition, I'd be dead by now if I'd never found a way out of the Bronx. I consider my health a blessing. What else do I have? I've got a career I wouldn't trade for anything. I've got opportunity locked in my bas.e.m.e.nt. I've got three great kids. I've got cars, all that stupid s.h.i.+t. I had a great marriage; after twenty years we split up, but we're still friends. I've a girlfriend who is good to me, and there is no shortage of women I'd like to get pregnant.

And I've got a future now too. That's the one thing I never considered back in Brooklyn in 1975. I've got something to live for past the end of the day, past the end of the week, and past the bills due on the first of the month. As a young man, I expected none of that. As a full-grown man, I appreciate all of it. Even at my craziest, when I forgot all about drinking and driving being illegal and dangerous, I didn't overlook any of those hard-earned privileges.

I hope you're interested in hearing the story of my life, because now that we've talked for a bit, I'm ready to get down to it. Some of the situations you are gonna read about may be pretty regular stuff to some of you, and some of the bulls.h.i.+t, to whatever degree, is probably all too familiar to most of you. Everyone else should know that this story is not all good. There's not a big happy ending waiting for you, rubbed down in oil on a beach in Miami.

Sure there's happiness, if you need to know now. Yeah, I'm a success and I am happy. But the only one celebrating at my party right now is me. As of this moment, I'm estranged from my own mother and most of my family, and I'm not sure that's going to change much. I'm not saying why, I'm just saying that's how it is. It's okay though. I've gotten used to it. I'm an island, kind of like Antigua: hot and humid, definitely a destination of choice if you want to get freaky or just kick back. And pretty isolated.

If there's one thing I hope you take away from your visit to my world, whether you care to read about all I've lived or whether you stop right here, it's this: There are two things that will get you through life, and those things are simple and human and anyone can have them. They're laughter and learning. If they're a part of your life, you will always have a reason to keep living. If anyone out there has found a better way to make this world a better place to be, lay it on me, I'm here. Speak up, because I'm always listening and I'm always eager to learn.

Every good story I know starts at the very beginning, because like that white lady said in The Sound of Music, it's a very good place to start. My story doesn't start the day I was born, because that isn't the very beginning. My story starts years before I was born.

In the 1950s, America decided it was a good idea to try to fight communism in tropical jungles on other side of the world. When JFK was president, he seemed to think we needed to help the Vietnamese, but that ultimately they would need to figure themselves out on their own. Once he died, Lyndon Johnson took office and became the guy who really made a big national issue out of it for us. President Johnson and his administration, in their infinite wisdom, tripled our military presence in Vietnam, basically upping the ante on some crazy idea of President Eisenhower's from about ten years before. I don't understand how anyone can like Ike.

Shouldn't our presidents be given tests for common sense? I'm no military strategist, but I think the people in power from the late fifties through to the seventies were a bunch of paranoid white dudes. In the way that the PTA looks at marijuana as the gateway drug, those guys thought of 'Nam as the gateway to worldwide communism. They told the American people, who at first really bought into this s.h.i.+t, that if we let those communist Russians get stoned on Vietnam, they'd become addicted to takeover. Soon they'd be selling their crackhead philosophy all across Asia and into Europe. Then they'd hook up with their homey Castro in Cuba and have a huge commie cartel poisoning our free democratic minds in America. There'd go the whole d.a.m.n neighborhood. The Russians were supposed to be some kind of new Hitler, and if we didn't get that communism out of 'Nam, we'd be eating Kremlin Nuggets in McDonald's over here in no time.

That was how they sold it. I still think it's crazy. The Russians lived thousands of miles away, where it snowed and they drank vodka and ate potatoes and waited on line for toilet paper all day. They had their ideals, and Lenin and Marx were like their Biggie and Tupac, but I don't think those guys gave a f.u.c.k about Vietnam, or at least not nearly as much as we thought they did. It would be like New York and L.A. fighting over Ohio in the East Coast/West Coast rap wars. Can you see that happening? What the h.e.l.l could either side want with Ohio? A parking lot for their Bentleys?

In the end, our government sent eight million of our young men-that's an entire generation-over to Southeast Asia to serve, and hundreds of thousands came back dead or wounded or too f.u.c.ked up to live right. We don't have much else to show for it, so if you ask me, everything about that war was just wrong. It wasn't the kind of war we could win because there wasn't anything really to fight for! You'd think that after that kind of a blow to America's self-esteem, presidents would be more careful about invading places with complicated histories. Apparently, dudes from Texas whose fathers were president don't learn lessons like that. Anyone who knows anything about Vietnam wouldn't have wasted our country's time and money and lives in Iraq because it's the same kind of war, just this time in a desert. Listen, I wasn't much of a student, but there's one thing I took away from U.S. history cla.s.s: An army of stuffy British redcoats couldn't beat a bunch of hick farmers with holes in their boots because they were fighting in the farmers' own backyards! Was Bush not a baseball fan? Doesn't he know about the home-field advantage? You can't ignore that s.h.i.+t! Ask any cop who's tried to run down a crack-head in his own hood-nine out of ten times, the crackhead won't get caught. He's got the home/hood advantage.

Let me get back to my point, which is that my dad, Jimmy, was one of so many young men who went to Vietnam. He was drafted in 1965 and served four or five tours. Unlike a lot of his friends who went alongside him, he managed to make it back in one piece, physically at least. But just like other survivors, he was torn to pieces inside by what he'd seen and what he'd had to do to survive. My dad was taken from me when I was a teenager, so I didn't get the chance to speak to him man to man about what he lived through, but I got a sense of it from the stories he told.

He tried to always end those stories with something cheerful, because that was the way he looked at life, but you could hear the hards.h.i.+p through it anyway. When my dad would tell me about hard days and sleepless nights in the jungle, he'd spend more time talking about his friends telling jokes and singing Motown songs to get through it together. But one time when I was in high school, he sat me down and really leveled with me. He told me that he'd been a helicopter gunner and that countless times he killed people that he didn't know. He'd watch them fall to the ground hundreds of feet below him every time he pulled that trigger.

"It was war," he said to me, without a smile on his face. "It was b.l.o.o.d.y."

He got real quiet and I couldn't think of anything to say. He was my hero, and I was just trying to picture him, not much older than I was at the time, in a helicopter above a jungle, leaning out the door shooting people every day, just to stay alive.

"I never told you who you're named after, did I, Tray?"

That wasn't what I was expecting to hear. "No, Dad. You and Mom said you just liked the way it sounded."

"Well, we did, but there's more to it," he said.

When my dad got on that army transport plane leaving America headed to Vietnam, he spent the next twenty-four hours or however long it took to get over there sitting next to an Irish guy named Tracy. They were the same age and came from very different backgrounds, but they became real close, considering the circ.u.mstances. They talked about all that they were leaving behind and all that they were going to face. They talked about being scared and how long they thought this war would go on. He said he knew that guy better after one day with him than he did members of his own family. They landed and got their a.s.signments, and the next day my dad's new friend Tracy was dead. He was all in pieces because he stepped on a land mine. He was going home in a body bag after one day in the s.h.i.+t.

"That taught me everything I needed to know about the war," my dad said. "I never forgot that time I spent with him, because all that talking we did put me at ease. I figured that we'd be friends forever, but that's how war is. And that's how you got your name."

I was sad to hear that story but glad too. Because let's face it-Tracy Morgan? That's an Irish female's name. With a name like that, I should have red hair, blue eyes, and big t.i.tties. I should be in a green bikini on a float every March.

When I think of Vietnam or see it referenced in a movie or a script, the first image that comes to mind is my father in his field uniform, fighting in that jungle. As an older man, when I've been faced with challenges, I remember that at seventeen my father went to fight a war on the other side of the world. I look at my girlfriend, Taneisha, whose brother was sent to fight in Iraq. He left home at eighteen. I wonder what he was thinking about as he flew over there. I wonder if his experience was similar to my dad's.

Taneisha told me that her brother slept as much as he could on his way to war. He didn't want to think about it. He tried to avoid it by sleeping, but he couldn't hide from it: On one of his first days there he saw a baby who had been shot in the head lying on the side of the road. Her brother is back home, thank G.o.d, but that is the kind of stuff that he can never forget. He had a hard time readjusting, but he got through it. He goes to church five days a week now.

When I was a kid I'd wake up at night and find my dad walking around the house, patrolling. I'd be on my way to the bathroom and I'd ask him, "Dad, are you all right?" And he'd just stare at me. I don't even know if he knew I was there. He was just in his head, still patrolling, still in Vietnam. He couldn't shake it. I used to break down crying about that, even as a young kid, because I knew at those moments that I'd never have my dad. I could never have my father in his entirety because a huge part of him was never going to be there.

My dad spent a good chunk of his youth in a strange land full of swamps, rice paddies, and mountains, watching villages get burned and children get killed and families get wiped out. He saw his friends from the neighborhood and the friends he made in the army gunned down before his eyes. Every day he fought to survive more than he fought an enemy he could identify. My father wasn't a violent man. He was a musician. He went to Vietnam a boy and came back a man, a very different man than he would have become otherwise. He came back with memories and bad habits that he couldn't shake for a long time. That is the heart and soul of my story, and that is where my very beginning is. It's not a very good place to start. You hear me, Julie Andrews? I learned how to be a man from my father, and because of what his life had done to him, I learned a few other things too. I think I'm just now trying to unlearn some of those lessons or at least see them for what they are-the good, the bad, the all of it. All of the humanity of where I'm coming from has only just become clear to me.

What I'm saying is that my father picked up bad habits over there just like I picked up bad habits in show business. Show business is my Vietnam and this life is the war that I'm fighting. We've all got our wars. We're all victims of our battles because in war n.o.body wins. My father? The only thing that kept him sane was his music, but he died paying the price for his sins anyway.

My father, Jimmy junior, was the oldest child of Jimmy Morgan, Sr., and Roselle Morgan. After him came Macy, Pat, Alvin, Cynthia, and Lorraine; there were six of them. Two of them are already dead-both of the boys died of AIDS that they caught from shooting up with dirty needles. The girls are widows, except for one. There was always music around their house because the Morgans were very religious and sang in the church choir. From a young age, my father showed real talent as a musician. He played piano and keyboards, and he was good. Entirely self-taught, he never knew how to read music, but he could figure out a synthesizer without any manual, that's for sure. My dad was a leader; when he was in bands after the war, he was always the leader, no matter what kind of band it was. I know in my heart that I get my leaders.h.i.+p qualities from him, because all I ever saw him do was arrange everything for everyone around him. That's why I am the way I am. I make sure the people around me have what they need. I saw my dad always yelling at motherf.u.c.kers about being late to rehearsal, and I'm the same way if someone on my s.h.i.+p don't toe the line. My father wrote all the music his bands played; he booked the shows, dealt with the club owners and all that. I saw real quick that if there was something I wanted to make happen, I should learn to do it all myself.

My mother's and father's families lived in the same projects-the Tompkins Houses on Tompkins and Myrtle Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. My father's family lived in apartment 12M, and my mother's lived in 14M. My best friend, Allen, he lived in 13M. It was like one big house-those apartments were right on top of one another, and we ruled those three floors. It was our place on that end of those hallways. We were all poor, but back then life was good out there. Neighbors looked out for each other. It's not like that now because it's all violent and people are only looking for what they can take from each other, not how they can help. But I grew up there in a time when things were a little bit different.

My mother's parents were Dave and Alice Warden, and my mother was the second-oldest in her family, after her sister Patricia, my aunt Pat. She was followed by my uncle Dave, my aunt Brenda, my aunt Robin, my uncle Michael, then my aunt Mich.e.l.le, who died when she was still a baby, and finally my aunt Kim-a family of eight. Their family was quite different from my dad's because they were Jehovah's Witnesses. Not my mother's father-he never went to meetings or church-but my grandmother and a few of my mom's sisters were very into it. Her family was kind and loving, but strict and very, very straightlaced.

My father's parents' home was definitely a looser place to be, with people laughing and hanging around and playing music, while the Wardens' home was like church on Sunday-every day. But I loved it there too. My mom's mother, Alice, was my baby. She was my heart. She was the one who gave me the love. Grandma Alice was more affectionate to me than anyone else was, my parents included. She'd hug me, she'd kiss me, and give me all the attention I really needed as a kid. She died a year before my father did, back when I was in high school, and I was devastated. I was living with my dad up in the Bronx at the time, and I remember coming home from school that day and him telling me she'd died. I broke down right there. And as soon as I got myself together I took the train out to Brooklyn. I had to be in her place with my mom's family right away. Alice Warden was my baby. I dedicated every single race I ran in track and every football game I played to her for the rest of my high school sports career. She was my surrogate mom during the years my mother and I didn't see eye to eye.

My parents met each other just hanging out in that tight little community of their building. They fell in love young and they got started young, just before my dad went off to war. I should be clear about this-they got busy before my father went off to war. That's what I mean when I say they got started. My dad had this habit of getting my mother pregnant every time he was out the door to the army again. Can you blame a motherf.u.c.ker? I'd make sure I got as much p.u.s.s.y as possible before I headed off to h.e.l.l. My dad had his priorities straight.

His children are all the evidence you need to see that I'm not lying. My brother Jimmy was born in 1966, while my dad was away on his first tour. My dad came back, was stationed at a base in New York, and before he was redeployed he went AWOL, ran his a.s.s out to Brooklyn, grabbed my mother by the a.s.s, and made me. A day or two later the MPs showed up and found him, took him away, and off he went again to Vietnam. Now, here's the kind of man my dad was: Later on in life, when I was a teenager, he walked me past the bleachers where I was conceived. That's right. We went to a family reunion at some relative's place out in East New York, and my dad took me for a man-to-man walk. I always liked those moments with him because Jimmy Morgan might have died young, but he was an old soul, full of wisdom. So I'm strolling with him and we're talking and I'm wondering where we're going. I'm waiting for him to drop some science.

"I'm going to show you something," he said as we walked onto the field at the local high school.

I was expecting some kind of inspirational pep talk about track or football, because those were the only things I cared about at the time. I thought maybe he was going to tell me about a great winning moment or a memorable game or something. I was definitely hanging on his every word.

He stopped in front of a set of metal bleachers at the side of the field. "You see these, son?" he asked.

"Yeah, Dad."

"This is where I busted a nut inside your mother and made you," he said. "Oh yeah?"

"We were right under here. I had your mother doggy-style and gave it to her good too. You came right out of me right here under these stands, little man."

"Dad?"

"Yeah, son?"

"I really didn't need to know that s.h.i.+t."

"Well, it's true. A man should know his roots."

My dad taught me how to tell a story. He always brought an unforgettable detail.

Nine months after my parents had s.e.x under the bleachers, on November 10, 1968, I came into the world. The next time my dad was back from Nam, they made my sister, Asia, who was born in 1970, and then my brother Paris, who was born in 1972. It was like clockwork with them, but how could it not be with him always going off and maybe never coming back? It was that now-or-never s.e.x. There's people out there who know what I'm talking about. All you girls who gave a little more than you thought you would because you knew you might never see that man again? You know who you are. All of us in show business or with a little money and a busy schedule know you too. And you should believe us when we tell you that we love you. Because we do.

My father came home in 1975, when the war was over. By that time I was six and very eager to know him. He did his best to fall back into a normal life with my mother and Jim, Asia, Paris, and me, which meant trying to handle privately the worst thing he brought home with him-a heroin problem he couldn't shake. I'm not going to make excuses for him because I was never old enough or mature enough to talk to him seriously about his addiction, but I know that he picked up the habit in Vietnam, and I feel okay saying that I understand how that might have happened. If I woke up every day not knowing how much longer I'd be alive, I'd look for something to numb me out and calm me down. I'm not excusing anything, but I don't hate the man for doing what he had to do to get by. Hate the game, not the player.

I need to take a minute to say this now: Our soldiers in Iraq are coming back damaged in a similar way. It's already happening. If you check your local news, you'll see that some of the first vets to return from Iraq have committed crimes or committed suicide. These young people need help, and I hope that the government has learned a lesson from the Vietnam experience about what happens when our troops come home. We can't expect f.u.c.ked-up motherf.u.c.kers to come back from the front lines and just fit in, generation after generation. Compa.s.sion is only the beginning of what they need. Those guys need help. When my dad came back, no one wanted to hear about what happened to those boys in Vietnam because it ruined the spirit of America. All them rich kids who got to protest the war and take acid and listen to Jimi Hendrix and enjoy all the free love-they forgot something very important while they were seeing their friends' heads turn into giant yellow submarines: Most of the poor young men like my dad who went over there and served didn't ask to go. But to the hippie nation that my dad returned to, everything and everyone related to the war was wrong. Once it was over, no one wanted to talk about it, no matter what side they'd been on. Vietnam was like a big girl everybody in the hood had been with but no one greeted on the street. Vietnam was a fat girl with gonorrhea; it was an embarra.s.sment that n.o.body in America would be able to forget. Society asked those soldiers to suffer things they couldn't handle, all alone, in silence, because society couldn't handle the aftermath.

Not long after my dad returned for good, my parents split up, so my memories of what their marriage was really like aren't all that clear. I know that the one thing that gave him happiness was playing music, and he worked hard to put bands together and make money by spreading some joy that way. Like I said before, my father was a born leader. He was a natural for that role because he was funny-he could get anyone to follow his lead or stop fighting and work together. His sense of humor was disarming in the same way that Richard Pryor's was. He was great at sizing up a situation and talking about the things that no one else in the room was going to mention but everyone knew were there. And he did it by making them all smile. Jimmy Morgan ... man, he was dynamite.

The music he wrote was dynamite too. It was pure R & B, like Rick James and Prince, with a touch of Jimi Hendrix. And he always had great band names: 100% Pure was one; Tuff was another. When I was sixteen, I was his roadie and traveled with him all summer. We toured down the East Coast into the Carolinas, his band playing these little blues clubs. And hands down, my dad was the funniest man on the bus.

This was quite a few years after my parents split up. I was young when he got home from the army, but even I could tell something was wrong. The heroin and the post-traumatic stress ate him up inside and took him further away from my mother and us kids every day. He really couldn't keep it together, and even though my mother loved him, it got to the point where she just couldn't have the drugs around her babies. One time she came home and found my little brother crawling around in his room playing with a needle, and that was that. She kicked my father out that day. They loved each other though, and that breakup wasn't final. They tried to make it work after that. He had to stay somewhere else when he wasn't clean, but when he was, he would move back in with us. She kept hoping they could work it out, but he couldn't kick the s.h.i.+t cold turkey. It took him a few years to get off it.

I remember how upset my mother would be when my dad wouldn't come home. At the time we were living in Coney Island in the Marlboro Houses, apartment 2 on the first floor. It was bad when my dad was gone, but it was worse when he was home. He had these intense nightmares and screamed so loud that he woke up our whole household and sometimes our neighbors too. I remember being in bed next to my brother, both of us crying because Daddy was screaming so loud. We'd hear my mother trying to wake him, talking to him, calling his name, but he wouldn't stop. Our neighbors would knock on the door, and one time they actually came in to try to help, but there was nothing anyone could do. They'd shake my dad. They'd shout, "Jimmy! Jimmy! You're okay! You're here! You're in bed with your wife! You're okay! Jimmy, you're safe!" It didn't help. He'd keep on yelling until whatever horror he was reliving in his dreams finally faded away.

The night terrors were bad enough; with the drugs on top of that, my mother couldn't take it anymore, and once she decided to get her kids out, she moved us back to Tompkins Houses to be near my grandparents. We had an apartment a few floors up from both her folks and my dad's. I didn't see my father for a time after that, but slowly, as he started to get the drugs out of his life, my mother let us see him more often. She was always cool about that. She wanted us to know our dad. Once she was convinced that he was clean and fit to watch us, she would let us spend weekends with him. The two of them couldn't work out their differences, and after a while it became clear that they'd never get back together. That was hard, but at least we were seeing my dad. It got stranger when my mom and dad started dating other people. But the hardest part was not having my dad around me every day as I got older. As a grown man with sons of my own, there's one thing I know for sure: A growing boy needs his dad.

In the black community there's a saying: We raise our daughters but we love our sons. The girls are brought up to make money and get by, and the boys are spoiled. I need every black baby daddy out there to listen to me: That s.h.i.+t has got to change. It's old, man. All you single fathers got to man up. Nothing will ever change for black people in America if men don't realize that no boy can become a man if he doesn't have a dad. I don't care that we have a black president now; it doesn't mean things are going to change for black people. We all need to be the change. Every black man has got to realize that if he's man enough to make a son, he'd better d.a.m.n well be ready to be a dad. If you're not a leader, leave the condom on! It only takes one night to become one, but it takes a lifetime to be one. It takes sperm to be a father, but it takes a heart to be a dad. That's something I can take to the grave-no matter what I've done in life, I've always done right by my kids. All you young men out there, you have to trust me. If you take responsibility for your actions, you will truly be free, knowing you've done the right thing and played the most important role a man can ever play in this thing we call life.

When I was nine or ten, after my parents were living apart, my mother started seeing a guy named Sonny. Right away, I didn't like him. When I got older, I realized why: because he was f.u.c.king my mother! It's simple. Sonny, who was not my father, was f.u.c.king my mother. Until he showed up, I always thought that my mom and dad were going to get back together. I thought they were just taking a vacation from each other. To me, it was just a matter of time before we were all under one roof again. When you're nine, you don't understand what s.e.x is. s.e.x is just what makes babies, so only your mom and dad should be having s.e.x because they made you and your brothers and sisters. That's where my head was at after nine years.

Of course, when I got older I became a motherf.u.c.ker myself so I understood what Sonny was up to hanging around my mom. There was only one reason Sonny was showing up at our door with bags of food and presents: He wanted to f.u.c.k her! I was distracted by the food and the presents-that's why he brought them-but I still knew some s.h.i.+t wasn't right. I was like a dog smelling rotten meat; I just kept doing little circles around Sonny, never taking a bite. Whenever he came over I knew we were gonna eat well, but I wasn't as happy about that as I should have been. Instead it made me angry. I was smelling something that was unfamiliar-the trading of groceries for p.u.s.s.y. Looking back, I don't fault my mother at all. She could have done a h.e.l.l of a lot worse to put food on the table.

Sonny coming by was definitely an awakening for me though. I missed my dad. My older brother, Jim-I love him dearly-had contracted spinal meningitis as a child. By the time he was three years old, he was what anyone would call a cripple. His legs were basically useless. Jim Reality, as we call him, has always walked with two canes. It happened innocently enough. When he and my aunt Kim were little, they played with their toys in the toilet bowl like a lot of kids do, and they both got sick. My family brought them to the hospital. Kim was kept there for a few days, but my brother, the doctors said, was well enough to go home. Kim got better, but Jim got worse. He suffered nerve damage and lost the ability to walk. He and my mother filed a lawsuit that took about twenty years to process, but eventually they settled out of court and Jim got some money. And like you do when you get some money and you live in the ghetto, his family and my mom moved far away, right away. To Ohio. He had to get his family out of the way of danger, because everyone knows what happens in a neighborhood like that when people think you have money. I did the same thing when I got my first check from Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I'm not joking when I tell you that people in the ghetto think that if you're on TV you have a million dollars and that you keep it in your house. They will come to your house to steal it, and they will kill you if that money is not there. And why would it be there? What is this, the 1800s? We have banks now! And debit cards!

By the time I was in ninth grade, Jim had undergone twenty-one surgeries. I was always there afterward to watch him, to help him out and to hold him when he'd cry out in pain as his body healed. I went with him to physical therapy and rehab all throughout our childhood. We were really close, and I was willing to do anything for him. In fact, once we got into high school, I ran track and played football as much for him as I did for me. He was always a sports fan, so I wanted him to feel like he was part of it, through me.

I learned the most important lesson in life from Jim: Nothing is a handicap unless you let it be. He's gone out there and done everything he ever wanted to do. He's full of life-one of the bravest people I've ever met. Even when we were kids, Jim never whined and never used his handicap to gain sympathy or any kind of advantage. He and I shared a room for years, until I left the house, and I never heard him complain or get mad at G.o.d or blame the world for his condition. He's my biggest hero for that reason-he understood his situation in this world right away, and instead of complaining or looking for the easy way out, he adjusted. And his att.i.tude about it has never changed. "This is just the way it is supposed to be for me," he'll tell you, and give you a smile you won't forget. Whenever the stress I have to deal with makes me want to complain, I think of Jim. He keeps me humble; he's always right here in my heart. Thinking about how he navigates life with his problems shuts me up about mine right away. After all, I can't feel too bad for Jim; his legs might not work, but he sure ain't paralyzed below the waist. Jim Reality's got eleven kids! Everything else on him works just fine.

Back on the playground when we were kids though, my older brother didn't play the same role as other kids' older brothers. He could kick some a.s.s, and I saw him do it plenty of times, but he wasn't like this huge protector. I was definitely the kind of kid who invited trouble and got into fights, but I wasn't going to get out of trouble because my older brother could save me. Having a cripple for an older brother was like wearing a sign that said KICK MY a.s.s. Once some bully motherf.u.c.kers saw him coming over to back me up during a fight, they loved it. They thought they could kick my a.s.s, Jim's a.s.s, my sister's a.s.s, and all our friends' a.s.ses, and just walk away free. They'd start laughing. "What the f.u.c.k?" they'd say. "You serious? I got to put this cripple to sleep too?"

That wasn't the case, because once Jim hobbled over to a kid, he could put him to sleep with one punch. Of course he could! He used his arms twice as much as the rest of us-all he needed was to land one punch. But that wasn't always going to happen, so to keep things from getting to that level, I learned to be funny. My brother and I could hold our own in fights when it came to it, but usually I diffused situations because I had perfected my skills at snaps. I made up "yo' mama" jokes for days because back then if you made everyone else laugh at the bully, no matter how big he was, that was better than knocking him out. At nine or ten years old, I started to realize that acting out and entertaining whoever was around had mad benefits. If I was the best cla.s.s clown, I was safe, because being funny gave me power. Girls seemed to like it, and so did guys. And when someone wanted to hurt me, if I stood my ground and made him and everyone else around laugh, I could get myself out of any situation.

So I ran with funny from an early age, making jokes and acting crazy as much as I could. I took my humor as far as it could go, and there were a few times in my youth when I saw that sometimes funny can go too far. Like this one summer-I was eleven, I think-and someone at the public pool in our neighborhood stole my brand-new Pumas. At the time, there was not a d.a.m.n thing in the world that I loved more than those sneakers. I was devastated-and mad as h.e.l.l. But I didn't think about hunting the kid down or beating him up; I thought up a prank to get the thief back, and to make everyone else as mad as I was. Not very mature, but whatever, I was eleven.

I didn't know who stole my sneakers, but in my little boy detective's mind, I knew he was at the pool that day. Everyone I knew loved the pool, so I concluded that kid must love the pool too. There were so many kids there every day that I had no chance of finding him or my sneakers, so only one thing made sense to me. I had to get back at whoever it was by taking away something I knew he liked. I had to shut that pool down. Wasn't going to be any more swimming if I had no sneakers!

The next day, that pool was full of kids. In the middle of the afternoon the sun was blazing and everyone was enjoying the water. That's when I swam out into the middle of the pool and took a s.h.i.+t the size of a Milky Way. I made sure everyone saw it too. I pointed at it and started screaming like I had no idea where it came from.

They shut that place down like the beach in Jaws when them kids swim around with the fake fin! It was no joke, neither; that pool was so big that they had to drain it and treat it with chemicals, and by the time they got it going again, summer was almost over. Kids had nowhere to play for like a month, and it was hot that summer too. But I didn't care; someone stole my Pumas, so I stole their summer. If the party was over for me, the party was over for everybody. That's how I did it back when I was eleven.

I had gotten my revenge, but something else happened that I hadn't planned on. You see, I liked the feeling of s.h.i.+tting in that pool. This became a problem for me. I started s.h.i.+tting everywhere there was water after that. If I saw an open fire hydrant, I'd s.h.i.+t there. I had no shame-in the middle of the street, if water was flowing hard enough, I'd drop the brown shark. Our neighbors had a Slip 'n Slide-for one day. I shut that s.h.i.+t down. You should have seen what it looked like. I shat all up and down it, then slid all around in it and kept s.h.i.+tting. For like two years, I was the CEO of shutting down water on a summer day. I wasn't even a small child at that point, so it was sort of embarra.s.sing. I am so glad I grew out of that. My hotel bills would be astronomical today.

It was pretty immature to drop brown bombs over a pair of sneakers, but that's where my mind was at. Once I got my first taste of p.u.s.s.y though, my focus changed. That was all I cared about, just p.u.s.s.y, girls, and getting more p.u.s.s.y. You've got to understand something: People in the hood are s.e.xually active at an early age because everybody who is old enough is f.u.c.king! That's all you hear before you even know what it means-"This b.i.t.c.h is gonna suck my d.i.c.k" or "I'm gonna f.u.c.k that n.i.g.g.e.r." There's not a whole lot else besides s.e.x that will make you feel better when you've got nothing else in the world. So s.e.x is all around you from the time you're a kid. You realize early on what your mom and dad and all the adults are doing because they can't get any privacy anyway. Apartments are small in the ghetto, and you think them walls keep out the sounds? h.e.l.l no! Everybody knows everybody's business because they can hear everything going on.

Where I'm from we played house a little bit different than a lot of you probably did. We knew by nine or ten that whoever was going to play the dad first was going to hump on the girl playing Mom. I'm not saying we went and had s.e.x, but we were replicating what we saw, and the two kids playing the adults definitely went to "bed" and "Daddy" humped up and down on "Mommy" for a minute. Why do you think I'd fight with my brothers to play Daddy first? s.e.x is a funny thing-it's all hush-hush in the suburbs, but in the ghetto it's everywhere. That's the same reason white men can't dance. Black people dance well because we start early-there's music being played everywhere. White people? They don't start dancing until they get to college, and by then it's too late; the bottom don't move with the top no matter how hard they try. When I first moved to the suburbs I couldn't get over how silent it was every night. I got into all kinds of trouble for playing my stereo in my off-hours. And I was a full-grown man with a lucrative day job.

Anyway, by age eight, I was humping a pillow just about every night, playing house, getting what I could, until the summer just before my mom moved us out of the Marlboro Houses in Coney Island back to Tompkins. That's when I experienced real s.e.x firsthand. I was eight and my brother Jim was ten, and we had a babysitter who gave us each a piece. Now, I know that might seem wrong and insane to a lot of you, but you got to understand what I'm saying: Where I'm from, and where a lot of people in this country are from, we play by another set of rules. Our babysitter was fourteen. My mom had dropped us off at her house, and no one else was there and this girl was h.o.r.n.y and curious. The babysitter went and took a bath, and while she was in there she told my brother to come in and get on top of her. I watched him put his little ding-a-ling in her and after that I got on her and did the same. I don't count that as losing my virginity-I did that when I was twelve-but I guess it was. My brother liked it, but I didn't. I actually cried after that. I remember she gave me a stack of Oreo cookies to keep me quiet. It wasn't the only time it happened either. d.a.m.n. Memories.

Do you people know how powerful p.u.s.s.y is? That s.h.i.+t broke up the Beatles! Yoko Ono broke up the greatest rock-and-roll band ever! One piece of p.u.s.s.y ended it all. She walked into the studio and within a week she had John Lennon saying, "Ringo who? Paul what? We got some guy named George in this group? f.u.c.k rehearsal, I'm banging it out with this Chinese b.i.t.c.h all day." That is what p.u.s.s.y can do. To quote Method Man: Nothing make a man feel better than a woman. And sometimes it becomes a problem.

That early experience was interesting I guess, but once I was twelve, I started bringing little girls my age up to my room to spend the night and keep my feet warm. And from then on I always had to have a piece of p.u.s.s.y around. Even when I was caught up in the middle of a divorce from my wife of twenty years, I felt no different. I still needed a bit of it handy. My divorce was the most traumatic change I've ever experienced-and I still thought about p.u.s.s.y as I was going through it. I've seen all kinds of death and I've had all kinds of health problems, but I can honestly tell you, no matter what was going on, my love for the ladies has never left me, not even for a minute.

I don't mean to just spit that out matter-of-factly, but I'm pretty desensitized to things that might be too much for people of a more protected upbringing to survive. I've seen too much to be shocked by anything. I know a man who has had a kid with a couple of sisters in the same family-that guy is my uncle! That guy is my mother's youngest brother, Michael Warden, who I call Uncle Fatty Love! I've seen people deal drugs at their kitchen table, right there in front of their little kids. I've heard about relatives robbing each other and killing each other over nothing, like it's no big deal. So my inappropriate babysitter is just another childhood memory to me.

Don't get me wrong: I'm desensitized but I'm not insensitive. I'm alive and thinking. I know where I'm from, and that knowledge, plus hard work and a lot of faith, are the reasons I'm here at all. That's my formula for success and the reason why you're reading this. It didn't hurt that I was given a gift and I realized it-my sense of humor. I learned how to put it out there to defend myself, and in return it came to save me. People ask me how I got so funny, and when I answer they get a strange look on their faces. I don't know what they want to hear-you think I got funny watching The Little Rascals? The truth is easy for me to say. I got funny for one reason: I got funny to survive.

Being a teenager is like playing with nitroglycerine. By the time you're twelve or thirteen, you've got a mixture of adult and child on your hands, and it's pretty unstable. Subject it to excessive heat or pressure, and that thing's gonna explode. Even in an ideal life, it's hard to maintain balance when you consider the xfactor of hormones.

When you're a teenager, you throw yourself out there to the world because it's calling for you. You don't care if the world is ready. The only thing that can hold you back is you. If you think you know everything, you might not survive being a teenager. I guarantee that you will think, for at least a year or three, that you know everything. Listen to me, teenagers-you don't! And acting like you do is nothing to be proud of. No matter how smart any of you teenagers think you are, you motherf.u.c.kers don't know s.h.i.+t! You have so much to learn it's crazy. I thought I knew it all, but I didn't know s.h.i.+t. I still didn't know s.h.i.+t well into my twenties and thirties! If I could bottle that teenage confidence and sell that musk, I'd make a fortune. When we're that age we think we're indestructible superheroes, like the Hulk. Teenagers think they can fly! But they can't. They can't even drive!

My friends and I were no different. The only proof we have about who was right and who was wrong today is which of us is still alive. There's one thing for sure when you grow up in the hood: Either you're gonna peak fast and burn out, or you're gonna figure yourself out and survive. If you don't choose, one of the two will happen to you whether you're ready for it or not. And I wouldn't count on being lucky; luck in the hood is like the seasons in Australia-that s.h.i.+t is the opposite of the rest of the world. Even if you just sit on the corner minding your own business, waiting for life to come to you, you might die just like the g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger who goes out looking for trouble every day. In the hood, sitting and waiting around as life goes by is just as much an action as going out there and doing something. They are one and the same. I have done both in my time, and each one has taught me something about this world and how to make my way in it.

As a man, I learned how to handle my pride. That's something that some men never learn. It's a shame too. Pride puts a lot of good men down because it makes them too shortsighted to choose their battles. I figured that one out quick because as crazy as my life was even by the time I was thirteen, I knew this one very important thing: I loved life. I didn't come from much and I had even less, but I knew I didn't want to die, I wanted to live. I wanted to make people laugh, I wanted to kiss pretty girls, I wanted all those things that make us more evolved than the animals. I didn't want to kill no one, and I didn't want to lose my chance at trying to make it one more day because I got involved in some bulls.h.i.+t.

I feel like I'm just now putting together all the lessons I've learned. The first lesson that comes to mind when I think of my teens is the differences between men and women. I'm not talking about boys and girls or birds and bees. I already knew all that. In my teens I really learned about men and women-what that bond means, how they need each other, how they treat each other, for better and for worse. And how neither is all that they can be without the help of the other.