I Am the New Black Part 4

You didn't know I could heal white people with the touch of my hand, did you?

I even look fast, don't I? The track team, 1985.

Me with Coach Bert Blanco at DeWitt Clinton High School.

Better late than never: receiving my honorary diploma and football jersey from DeWitt Clinton High School, 2002.

The best way to reach kids is to visit schools.

I'm gonna be one hot grandmother someday: me as Maya Angelou on SNL in 2002.

Me with my Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi, Lorney Lorne Michaels.

Lorne is my Yoda, but I'm Yoda's Yoda: me imitating Sam Jackson on SNL in 2002.

Not quite how it really went down: on the set of The Tracy Morgan Show, 2003.

Me with Spoonie Luv from up above, at the premiere of Crank Yankers, 2002.

SNL Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, 2003.

I know what's under your s.h.i.+rt, Mrs. Jackson: me as Brian Fellow on SNL in 2004.

I am one foxy female: with Chris Rock in The Longest Yard, 2005.

Ladies, control yourselves: Tracy Jordan during the 30 Rock pilot.

It's amazing when actors do things like lose height for a role: me and Marlon Wayans in Little Man.

Alec, are we toasting to the Emmy nominations or the Golden Globes?

I look like a lesbian version of Prince: with Jane Krakowski and Lonny Ross on 30 Rock, 2006.

The party can start now: at the Screen Actors Guild Awards with Scott Adsit (behind my hand), Grizz Chapman, Kevin Powell (behind my arm), Judah Friedlander (in the hat), me, and Kevin Brown.

Yes we did! Giving the acceptance speech on behalf of 30 Rock at the Golden Globes, 2009.

I told you I look good as a blonde: in the Big Love skit with Casey Wilson, Michaela Watkins, Abby Elliott, and Jason Sudeikis on the night I came back to SNL as host, 2009.

Sabina and me, 2004.

My family: Gitrid, Malcolm, me, Tracy junior, and Sabina at the Little Man premiere, 2006.

- Once I got my first check from NBC for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I had enough money to move my family out of the the South Bronx, out of the ghetto, for good. We moved the day after my birthday, on November 11, 1996, at four o'clock in the morning. I celebrated my birthday at this club and restaurant, Jimmy's Bronx Cafe. I left when they closed, went right home-Sabina had packed us all up-and we were gone by six in the morning. Anybody who's lived in the ghetto knows that you don't move during the daytime. Here's why: You don't want anyone knowing you're leaving, and you don't want anyone knowing where you're going. You don't want anybody seeing your s.h.i.+t and knowing where they can get their hands on it. If they see you moving out, you can be d.a.m.n sure they'll be sitting there on the sidewalk with an adding machine, totaling up how much they can get when they rob your new place. The Morgans were out of that apartment in two hours in the dead of night. No one in that neighborhood knew we were gone for at least two months.

It really was time for us to go. Forget about me being on TV and having more money; it was getting uglier in our neighborhood every day. I'm just glad we could leave before our kids got any older. In the nineties, the hood had more money coming in than ever. The economy was doing well, so there was more money at every level of society, and hip-hop had become a legitimate money-making industry by then too. But all that progress only made motherf.u.c.kers hungrier. No one was satisfied with being average anymore. As soon as someone saw a cat he came up with get on, he demanded the same for himself. It didn't matter that he couldn't rap like his boy could, he wanted what his boy had. That's why we got a lot of dead rappers and a lot of other dead motherf.u.c.kers too.

In the nineties, the neighbor part of our neighborhoods got capped and all that was left behind was the hood. And the hood is no place to raise a family if you've got a choice. I'm blessed to have had a choice. I wanted a better life for my family; I wanted my kids to have all the chances I never had.

We moved to Riverdale, which is still in the Bronx, but a whole world away. The first thing I noticed was that white people don't think sidewalks are trash cans! It was the first time I'd seen clean pavements in my life! And there were people walking on it, smiling, just going for a stroll. I'd never gone on a walk for no reason, with no destination, in my entire life. I tried it, just walking around, taking in the sights, and I realized it was pretty nice. It relaxed me, much more than it relaxed all the nice Jewish people I smiled at whenever I toured the neighborhood. They would check their pockets and look around for cops when they saw me, but that didn't bother me. I just smiled at them as wide as I could. I wasn't going to let them make me feel funny. I was going to make sure they felt funny for trying to make me feel funny. Does that make sense to you? It should! Hi, nice Jewish people! It's a beautiful day! I'm black and I live next to you!

In all seriousness, it was a major culture shock for me and my family. We got some evil looks from our neighbors, and school was much different for the kids. But we just looked at ourselves as the Jeffersons, moving on up whether the neighbors liked it or not. It was the first time, but not the last, that my home life and my work life went through big transitions at the same time. Sabina and I were learning new things, but episodes in our lives didn't end with laughs and a lesson learned. At home we were figuring out what it meant to live in a white neighborhood, and at work I was figuring out what it meant to live in white comedy. It took me about two days to realize that white funny ain't just black funny in makeup. I knew I was going to have to find my place at home and at work. I was on a planet I'd never visited before, and I did not know the customs of these aliens.

I showed up at SNL with a lifetime of ghetto experience and years of making it happen in the world of black comedy. I came from Def Jam, from Martin, from appearances on Live at the Apollo and in black-oriented comedy clubs around the country. Everyone I knew had stopped watching SNL when Eddie Murphy left-and that meant me too. That is probably why Marci and Lorne brought me in, because I'm real-life ghetto. Choosing me for the cast was like giving white America a dose of BET. But SNL wasn't ready for that, not at first, that's for sure. They must have known they wanted a part of it, but they didn't know what it really meant. It took a while for us to get used to each other.

Four months after I got into stand-up professionally I was on TV, and that was because there were so many urban vehicles for black comedy at the time that are now long gone. I was part of a movement and a community and a moment. Put it this way: I used to do routines as fat Michael Jackson from the projects, and they killed wherever I went. I made fun of the tragedy of the ghetto and was used to audiences who found that funny. I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to SNL, those motherf.u.c.kers just felt bad for me. None of the cast I came up with saw this future for me. No, sir. All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That b.i.t.c.h can't even get arrested. None of them laughed at Biscuit when I did him then, but if I did it for them now, I bet you a million they'd say it's funny. It's all right; I don't mind. It's hard to get mainstream America to catch up. Mainstream America has just learned the words to Sugarhill's "Rapper's Delight"! And we don't do that s.h.i.+t no more! Jay-Z and Lil Wayne don't sound like that! No one sounds like that no more!

Making a place for myself in the SNL scheme took some time. I knew the score; this was a white show and I was the token black guy. That didn't bother me; I was used to those odds. Of course Will Ferrell fit in every sketch they'd ever come up with, but not me. That's just how it was, so my answer to that was being as funny as a motherf.u.c.ker whenever I got the ball. Those weeks when my sketches made it to air, I made sure those minutes belonged to me. I didn't care who was in my sketch, I was going to eat their lunch! I was out to steal their thunder. When I got my shot at the basket, I drove the lane and dunked. I'd sink threes from the baseline and bring those rebounds down throwing elbows left and right. I was going to win; I didn't care how.

It didn't matter to me if I only had a one-line drive-by or an entire sketch. It didn't matter if it was the first sketch of the night or the very last one that no one even watches. I gave it everything I had, every time. And eventually people took notice of me. In the pitch meetings, people started to pay more attention to what I had to say. The writers started to connect with my ideas and take the time to write them up. I found my way into the system through patience and perseverance.

When I started getting regular airtime and feeling like I was part of the team, my SNL world changed. I was still coming from somewhere different, but I started to team up with a few of the writers, and for the first time I understood what it meant to collaborate. That's a whole other form of creativity that stand-up cannot teach you. Writing with someone is very rewarding when you both see eye to eye. A rough idea that's halfway funny can blossom into full-blown funny within just a few minutes if it's bounced off the right minds. This realization opened up new ways for me to think about comedy, and with that advantage on my side, the writers and I started to come up with regular characters.

Once you develop recurring characters, Sat.u.r.day Night Live becomes the show Lorne designed it to be: a showcase for emerging comic talent. The first big character of mine that became a regular was Brian Fellow. One night, Sabina and I were lying in bed and she was telling me about this gay guy she knew in high school named Fellow. I never met him, but what you see in the character is what I took from her description. I was cracking up just listening to her talk about him, so I knew there was something there I could use. I brought it in to SNL and pitched him.

"Here's something I want to do," I said. "It's a guy named Brian Fellow. He's like this ..." I started acting gay and everyone laughed. "I'm Brian Fellow and you're not!" I kept saying.

I said he was this weird gay dude who imagined stuff in his head and thought he knew everything. My man Tim Herlihy picked right up on that s.h.i.+t. (Tim writes for Adam Sandler, by the way.) He saw a bigger picture. I don't know where he got the idea, but he thought Brian Fellow should host an animal talk show. That sent the room into hysterical laughter. A delusional gay guy interviewing animals? What the f.u.c.k is that, Tim? I loved it, I knew it was gold, but I had to look at Tim and say, "What is wrong with you, dude?"

Tim and I got to work on writing it up, and the first thing we did was record the theme song to the show, which we named Brian Fellow's Safari Planet. If I thought it was a good idea before, now I knew it was a hit. It takes a lot to make me think something is weird, so when I do, I know it's hilarious. Brian Fellow is a gay, self-centered, paranoid host of an animal talk show. And he only has a sixth-grade education too. The best thing about Brian's sketches was the voice-overs-that's where I could show how insane he really was. Brian worries about animals stealing his wallet and credit cards. He worries about animals talking s.h.i.+t about him. He's ridiculous! That character allowed me to say things that were nothing but completely absurd.

Another one of my regular characters was Woodrow. He was my first attempt at playing tragedy and comedy at the same time, which is something I always thought Eddie Murphy did so well on SNL. Eddie's character Mister Robinson was funny as h.e.l.l, but he was also sad; when he joked about being poor and avoiding Mr. Landlord, the message beneath the surface was real. Mister Robinson's situation was like too many everyday people's, which made the comedy a little bit uncomfortable to watch.

That kind of humor was nothing new; it was the formula Richard Pryor invented and lived better than anyone ever will. He's the ultimate; the rest of us are just paying tribute. When I came up with Woodrow, it was my chance to pay tribute to Richard and Eddie in some small way. I wanted him to be an evolution of what Eddie had done on SNL, but sadder and stranger. So I thought: "What's worse than living in the ghetto? That's easy-living in a sewer!"

Woodrow became my version of Oscar the Grouch. In every skit he would almost succeed, but in the end he would always fail at getting the girl, usually played by an attractive female host. Woodrow was the saddest clown I could imagine. He was never getting out of the sewer and he was never getting anything he wanted, no matter how close he came. I saw him as being in the same category as the more socially conscious comedy that SNL did back in the seventies. Go back and watch it all; you'll see what I'm talking about.

Another character I enjoyed getting on the air regularly was Dominican Lou. He was my way of letting all Americans know that Dominicans are here and they're not going anywhere. If America wasn't going to hire them, I sure as h.e.l.l was going to play one because I grew up around them. He was my salute to the Dominican nation in this diverse town we call New York. Dominican Lou was the superintendent of an apartment building who thought he owned the place just because he had the keys to every door. He's the kind of character who would stand outside the building with a can of beer and tell you you couldn't park in front because it was his spot and his building. He was the kind of guy who you would see every day for five years but if you asked him to let you into the building because you forgot your keys, he'd say, "Who you? You no live heeere." Lou's funny like that.

For me, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was like being Alice in Wonderland. I was out of place from the start, and the further down that rabbit hole I fell, the more fantastic the ride became. The show consumed all of my creativity, and I loved it. Every week there was variety, and not knowing what was around the corner kept it fresh for me. It kept me learning; it kept me on my toes.

But that wasn't the only thing that kept me alert. Being the black guy on the show put me in a different category, in my mind at least. Like I said, I couldn't mess around. I felt like any mistake I made might be my last. I didn't feel like I had the freedom to blunder. Look in the books-there have never been a lot of black guys on SNL, and there still aren't. I believe that even today, on mainstream shows, outside of the urban television market, black people on TV are held to a higher standard. I certainly felt that way on SNL. I never thought it would be okay for me to break character like Jimmy Fallon and all of them did. That thought never crossed my mind, because I would have seen it as a failure on my part, and I thought others might see it that way too.

It's funny, I look back on some of the shows that inspired me and inspired so many comedy writers, from the best of them, like Tina Fey, to the guys in the trenches coming up, and they are the complete opposite of what flies for mainstream television comedy today. The shows that inspired me were things like Sanford and Son and Good Times and Diff'rent Strokes. If a network put a show like any of those on today, the NAACP would be all over them. They'd have a landslide lawsuit on their hands. Think about Diff'rent Strokes: a show about two black kids from Harlem being raised by an old white guy. The politically correct nation we have become would find that wrong twenty-four ways to Sunday. The truth is, everybody is too sensitive today. That PC s.h.i.+t is killing comedy. And that's why I love being on 30 Rock. I'm jumping ahead, but you want to know the moment when I knew we had a hit on our hands? When I read the script for the episode in the first season called "The C Word," which was about sensitivity training. Tina's got b.a.l.l.s, because we did a whole show about saying the word n.i.g.g.e.r! And it was bleeped out on purpose, but we all said it during the filming, and you could read our lips. We need to get back to the days of Archie Bunker, when they openly made fun of racism. That's healthy if you ask me. We are living in an age where someone like Michael Jackson went so far to show us that we're all the same inside that he changed his f.u.c.king skin color.

Anyway, after a while, I fell in with a few great writers at SNL who understood me more than anyone else had, and they made my career by giving me the chance to s.h.i.+ne. They saw my range, and more important, they taught me to stretch it. I have to thank T. Sean Shannon and Andrew Steele, my dark horses, who got me before anyone else did. I hooked up with those two, and they gave me the material that showcased my funny. So did Paula Pell and, of course, Tina Fey. Once Tina and I got together, it was over. Tina wasn't scared to come into my world and find the funny up in there. She's that kind of cool. Tina Fey, you know most of all what you did for me. Look at me, Tina Fey! I have to say it now and I'll say it again: I LOVE YOU, GIRL. I will always rock with you because you know my voice better than I do sometimes.

At SNL we were all definitely a family. It was compet.i.tive, but there was a camaraderie that everyone was a part of. It was very special to me, working there. It wasn't like The Waltons or The Brady Bunch, and we didn't have pajama parties or hang out like it was a dorm, but we did have a kind of family. And the head of it was my Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi, Lorne Michaels. He gave me my shot at real, national fame, and how much I owe him is self-explanatory. He changed my life and my kids' lives. They say that every Jewish man has got to love one n.i.g.g.e.r in his life. I'm glad Lorne Michaels chose me.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't really friends with many of my castmates at SNL, but that doesn't mean that I didn't roll up into SNL and all those after parties with my own friends. My time on SNL marked the beginning of my days rolling with an entourage that was much, much too big. I'd go out with about thirty people when I could. I used to come up in every club surrounded by felons. I had this felon named Young G.o.d around me, I had Pumpkin, I had motherf.u.c.kers named Guilty all around me. And I always brought D. Nice, who was just straight trouble. The rest of the cast never f.u.c.ked with me. I can't imagine why.

One time, though, I did get a lot of them to come to an after party that friends of mine were throwing. If you're a fan of 30 Rock and you've seen the episode where Liz Lemon goes out all night with Tracy Jordan and follows him to the After-After-After-After Party, this night is where Tina got all that from.

Friends of mine were running this illegal strip club they called the Loft. It was in an office s.p.a.ce they'd rented and converted into an after-the-after-party spot. They put a stage in it, they put a few futons all around, and they'd get strippers and girls to come and do shows. You'd walk in there and get your d.i.c.k sucked, there was usually some f.u.c.king going on, and there was liquor and couches everywhere. But this place was just a regular apartment s.p.a.ce, so the bar was really just the kitchen, and there was only one bathroom, which usually got stopped up at some point because of all kinds of s.h.i.+t getting stuffed in there. I invited everyone to go down there one week. And Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and a few others came along.

I didn't tell any of them what they were in for, so it was all cool when we got there. At first, as they got their drinks and sipped them and talked, they thought it was just a private party. Then these two girls came out onstage and started going down on each other and that just shut it down. All the grips and crew guys from SNL were standing around and loving it, but my castmates took one look at that, turned right around, and rushed out of there. They were all a bunch of Ivy League f.a.ggots and we'd taken it to the streets. They might have left, but it was all that anybody talked about around the show for the next week. None of them ever came back, but me and my boys did it for another two weeks at least.

Actually, one cast member really got into it. This party started late and kept going strong right into the morning. The next day around noon, I got a call from the guy running the party.

"Yo, Tray, what's up?"

"Nothing. I'm getting some rest," I said. "What's goin' on?" "Yo, I can't get your man to leave."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "Who? D. Nice?"

"No, man, the fat guy from your show!"

"Who? Horatio?"

"Yeah, man, that's him," he said. "He's still here. He's sitting on a couch with two girls. He's been smoking a cigar and just talking to them for hours. He's the only one here, man, and he won't leave."

Being on Sat.u.r.day Night Live made me addicted to fame. And that is the worst drug known to man. I got hooked on the "oohs" and "aahs," and once I did, I did whatever it took to chase them. On- and offstage, in and out of work, I needed that attention. Having cameras around didn't even matter to me after a while; once I was somewhat known-not even full-blown famous-I had to be the center of everyone's attention no matter where I was.

Fame will twist your vision. All of a sudden, I was that naive kid back on set at Martin, scared to death that I'd fail unless I made everyone laugh all the time. And just like I did back then, I turned to the bottle and used alcohol to keep my confidence up and my crazy level high. Drinking became my free pa.s.s to entertain wherever I was, 247. I wasn't an alcoholic; I kept liquor and champagne in my house for years without touching it, because I didn't need it at home. I never even thought about it there. But when I was out, which was every night, I needed my drinks.

The more of a television personality I became-someone everyone in the audience thought they knew-the more I felt I had a character to play, even in my real life. In my mind, my importance and my fame depended on making sure I did what people expected of me. I was famous, wasn't I? I'm Tracy Morgan! I'm a comedian and I'm on TV! I'm supposed to be out at the clubs all night every night, right? Dancing more than you because I have more fun than anybody does! That's the kind of thing I was telling myself every night after my third vodka and juice.

Everyone was drinking, so I had to drink more. I'd ball with bottles every time I came through the door. If I didn't, I wasn't succeeding at being this entertainer called Tracy Morgan. I had to be on in public, I had to be as insane as I ever was on TV and be myself at the same time. I wanted to live out loud and advertise my success. Lots of Belvedere vodka, preferably drunk straight from the bottle, was the best way to get to that place. I wasn't going to be anything less than a spectacle when I stepped out in a club.

After too many afternoons waking up with a hangover, not even sure how I got home at all, I just got tired of it. It was played out to me. I looked in the mirror and just grew up. Well, not really. I grew up for a minute and stopped that s.h.i.+t. And then I forgot that moment of clarity and dove headfirst into the whirlpool again. The second time I learned my lesson because I got the message loud and clear: If I kept on living like that, I'd die, and I'd probably kill someone on the way. You can't get high without coming down. It's a simple idea even a child can understand. But that don't make it any easier when it happens. It took two DUIs and being strapped with an ankle bracelet, plus having to face a list of health problems I'd tried to ignore, to get me to pay attention, all while I enjoyed the greatest success I'd ever known.

Eddie works with the honesty of Richard and Redd, but he knows how to do it without exposing too much of himself. He took the greatest elements of that head-on comedy and used them to become a rock star. He came from the same school as them, got the same degree, but it was twenty years later, a time when there were more jobs. If Richard was like a vice president of Xerox, Eddie was like the CEO of Apple. Every comedian who gets paid $20 million a movie owes it to Eddie. He made it possible for a comedian to be a pop icon, hands down. And he deserves it-he's go so much talent, from the singing, to his impersonations, to his acting. He can do it all.

I'm somewhere I never thought I'd be. I'm in my forties, I'm comfortable, and I'm proud of myself. I'm a good father, I'm an independent man, I've got money, and I didn't have to do a nickel or a dime in the penitentiary to get here. I've already done more than I ever expected-and I'm just getting started.

I still have many goals in life, but there is one I think I can reach without a struggle now that I've got my mind and my body straight: I just want my forties to be good. I want them to be calm, productive, healthy-just good. My thirties were turbulent. They were like flying through a lightning storm on the way to spring break in Cancun: You're having fun because you're already partying on your way to an even bigger party, but you're getting tossed all over the place, you're about to throw up your Hennessy all over some girl, and there's a chance your plane might crash. The ups and downs in my thirties wore me out. Part of it was youth, but at the time I thought all that action was what it meant to be a success in show business. In my mind, it was proof of success, a status symbol, like a platinum chain on a rapper. It didn't matter if that guy spent his whole alb.u.m advance on that thing-he has to have it if he wants to ball. I thought being famous meant I was supposed to be at the center of that kind of storm; it was proof that I had the skills to pay the bills.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I realize that's bulls.h.i.+t. You can be known all the world over and still have a normal, fulfilling home life. You don't have to be a nightclub Superman. You can do the best work of your life as an entertainer without all of the madness. That s.h.i.+t is just a distraction, anyway-none of it inspires you or feeds your talent. Just because someone acts ent.i.tled, like they should be treated as someone special, doesn't mean that they are.

Normal celebrities exist, but they're mighty rare. If you only look at the universe of gossip websites and TV shows to comprehend the nature of American celebrity, you would think that normal celebrities are mythical creatures like unicorns and leprechauns. You don't usually hear about the entertainers who live quietly, away from the paparazzi. Instead you hear about the ones who crash cars while cheating with tranny hookers. Why the media treats every celebrity f.u.c.kup like it's the first time somebody famous has behaved that way mystifies me. Doesn't anyone see a pattern here? Celebrities need attention fixes, and people pay attention to outrageous behavior, so celebrities get outrageous. That's what it is at its most basic; once you add the psychology of being creative to the mix, you've got all kinds of motives to act out.

But it's not just celebrities-look at reality television. Regular people are willing to do anything to get their fifteen minutes of fame these days. They'll eat garbage to win a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter on some show where the prize money won't last them a year after taxes. Girls will get naked and cover themselves in meat if some washed-up rock star tells them to on VH1. A lot of people would rather do anything than work hard, and they see fame as an easy way to do nothing, so they chase it like drug dealers chase paper. The kind of easy fame that comes from reality TV has made fame crackheads out of people who might have had a normal life, and it's made people without talent think they can be stars. When a person who wants to be famous gets famous, no one should be surprised when that person gets crazy. Handing fame to someone like that is like giving a drug addict your bank card and PIN. You'd better change your address and close your account, because you've got a f.u.c.ked-up situation on your hands.

Listen, we're all free to do what we want with our lives-celebrities even more so because if they've got a decent career, they've got enough money to buy freedom. But living crazy don't make you talented. Living crazy on television just makes you a clown and a footnote. It makes you a YouTube video that no one will remember in a year. Talent is something else; it comes from inside you. It is a gift given to you by G.o.d, but it's up to you to use it. You have to nurture it; you can't just wait for your talent to work its magic on your own and make everything in your life okay. You have to work to perfect it. You may think crazy behavior is expected of famous people, but if you live life to fulfill other people's expectations, you're not even living. You're dead. You're a f.u.c.king zombie and a robot.

I look back on my turbulent thirties like I'm looking at pictures from someone else's spring break. Some of those pictures are dirty too! I learned a valuable lesson in those days: When you're seventeen, you think you know it all; when you're twenty-five, you know you know it all; when you're thirty-five, you think you'll do it all; and when you're forty, you finally realize the truth-you don't know s.h.i.+t! That's the greatest knowledge a man can have. Once every man accepts it, our world will be a better place. It's a big world, and if you go through it feeling like you know nothing, you'll be ready to learn something each and every day you're alive.

When you're on TV, people demand things from you, and last time I checked, life for the average person was already pretty f.u.c.king demanding. When you're on TV, people act like a girl who turns to you in bed and says, "Make me come. Right now! Make me come!" You're there, you're chilling. You've already done it with her, and you're enjoying some peace and quiet. You're like a sports car that's been taken out on the highway and put back in the garage. When a woman turns to me like that, I snap right back: "Girl, how the f.u.c.k am I going to make you come if you're not willing to do that s.h.i.+t on your own?" I'm no monster, we can collaborate on it, you know, but there's something everyone's got to realize, no matter what the situation is: I get paid to perform! And after I've given it my all, especially after putting in a long week on set, I sure as h.e.l.l don't want to put in an encore performance at home in bed. Ladies, you must understand this.

I have a rule for my life: I don't demand anything I can't get myself. I think everybody should follow the same rule, whether we're talking about o.r.g.a.s.ms or dollar bills. I just want to be paid what I deserve for my work. Demanding what you don't deserve and you can't get yourself? That's rude. As long as I meet my audience's expectations, I'm doing my job, wherever I am.

Let's get back to my story. You'll see why I had to get all that stuff off my chest, because the period of my life after SNL was when all of those themes played out in my biopic.

When I decided to leave Sat.u.r.day Night Live in 2003, I was taking the chance I had to take. By then, Will Ferrell had left, Molly Shannon had left, and I was one of the only ones left from the cla.s.s I came up with. New people started joining the cast, and even though I was at the top of the food chain, I got the feeling that I had to move on.

I could easily have stayed there, but I didn't want to be one of those guys who hung around too long. For d.a.m.n sure I didn't want to be one of those motherf.u.c.kers who just disappeared forever. I'll never forget my little sister, Asia, telling me after I'd been on the show for a while, "You've got to promise me something. Don't be there too long, Tracy. Keep challenging yourself and trying new things. Don't get too comfortable." That was hard to hear coming from my little sister, but she was right. She knew that sometimes people on SNL stay too long and get scared of taking a chance on anything else because they're used to the money. When they finally leave, they have no idea what to do to get that kind of guaranteed paycheck elsewhere, and often their moment has pa.s.sed. I wasn't any different, but I wasn't scared. It had been a nice run, but it was time to grow up and leave Daddy's house. In the end I left right on time, in my lucky number seventh year.

Doors had started opening for me thanks to Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but I was no Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler. I wasn't an easy fit for the movies. Six years later motherf.u.c.kers are just now realizing who I am and what to do with me. I always tell people that it took fifteen or sixteen years for it to happen for me overnight, so maybe in fifty years people will still be figuring out how to use my talents in this business. G.o.d is never there when we want Him to be, but He's always right on time. You must have faith, but you've got to meet Him halfway. If you think my success happened by chance, you probably believe Rick Ross was really a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger. Man, I wish Biggie was still around-he'd have put the Dirty South on hold for at least ten years. Rick Ross would still be a corrections officer eating Swanson's TV dinners.

In my last year at SNL, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, and I realized I wanted to do my own TV show. So I developed the idea for The Tracy Morgan Show. It was a sitcom based on the time when my brother Paris, my sister, Asia, and I lived with our father, Jimmy, and our stepmom, Gwen. My whole family is funny as h.e.l.l; I'm not the only one who's got it, so I planned to draw situations and characters from my early family life. Most of the Morgans are all the good kind of crazy in their own way, so I had a lot to work with.

The formula for the show was perfect: It would be true-life funny set against the realistic backdrop of a low-income household like the one I was raised in. Imagine Married with Children and Roseanne mixed up with What's Happening!! and Sanford and Son. The idea as I pitched it was good, so it got picked up by NBC while I was heading into the last half of my final season on SNL. Lorne Michaels signed on as executive producer, and we were ready to roll.

By my second year at SNL I was feeling like my manager, Barry Katz, had taken me as far as he could; I needed a new team. When I did The Chris Rock Show in its first season, I met Dave Miner, a manager with 3 Arts Entertainment, and that was it. I liked him, and I felt like he could take me to the next level. Miner and his partner, Dave Becky, courted me for about a week, and then I signed on with the company. They are still with me today. They built me up and prepared me to handle my own sitcom and everything that's come since then. But even when we landed the sitcom deal, I still wasn't satisfied.

"You've got your own show, Tracy. What more do you want?" they'd ask me.

"Another zero at the end of my check."

"That will happen eventually; you have to trust us."

They were right in the end, but it was a long ride to get here.

It's been nonstop too. We went almost directly from SNL into preproduction on The Tracy Morgan Show. We shot it on the NBC lot in Los Angeles, so I had to move my wife and kids across the country just weeks after I stopped working in studio 8H at 30 Rock. That wasn't an easy transition for the Morgans.

My kids didn't want to leave their friends, and Sabina hated L.A. from the minute the plane touched down. The weather was nice but she didn't care; suns.h.i.+ne and swimming pools meant nothing to her. Everyday living out there was just too different for us. We weren't used to getting into a car every time we needed a roll of toilet paper. Traffic was a whole other animal. We'd seen traffic living in the Bronx-every time there was a home game at Yankee Stadium, it was b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper. But that s.h.i.+t is like a slow traffic day in Los Angeles, where people sit in their cars for hours, barely moving, just to get to work. You spend half of your day in a car trying to get somewhere-usually more time than you ever spend wherever it is you're going. Sabina wanted none of that. And it wasn't just the inconveniences; she wanted to leave L.A. because it was too artificial for her. I got love for L.A. because L.A. got love for me. I had my reason to be there, but Sabina didn't fit in and she didn't want to. She didn't want to see our kids grow up there either. It didn't help that I had to go right to work and couldn't be around so we could all adjust to it together. For some reason she misses it now; she still lives in New York but always talks about going out to the West Coast again. I think if our youngest son wasn't happy in school here, she'd probably take her divorce settlement and move out there. It's a sure sign of how much Sabina has changed since then.

My professional life also required getting used to. Even with my own show on NBC, Los Angeles was no cakewalk. I had a great paycheck and a chance at being a prime- time star, but around the studio I was the new kid in town, and I wasn't anything like the other kids. A lot of the comedians I met felt like I didn't deserve to be the star of a sitcom-and I'm talking about the supporting cast of my own show! Some of them didn't even try to hide it. Their att.i.tude was that they'd been out there struggling, trying to get on a network production for years, and there I was flying in from New York, already on top of the heap. I wasn't part of the L.A. comedy scene, and I had everything they wanted. I'd hear them talking about it right there in the hallways and in the dressing rooms next to mine. Encountering jealousy and backstabbing like that on my own set was very discouraging. But that was only the beginning.

In the end, The Tracy Morgan Show that aired wasn't even my show anymore. The producers took it out of my hands because they thought that my original vision was going to damage my career-at least, that's what they told me. They also reminded me that they had more experience in this than I did. It was just like what the Republicans tried to do to Obama during the election; all they kept talking about was his lack of experience. This society is just not used to seeing black people in positions of power. No one has the experience of being a president until he is one. Unless we're talking about an election where both candidates have been president before, that is a ridiculous argument. There's an element of trust involved; you have to look at the candidate and make a leap of faith. The people who doubted me didn't believe in that.

But that's how it goes down on TV a lot of the time. There are so many people in power who put in their two cents and change things, and a lot of the time those people are the least creative links in the chain. They don't understand the show they've got; they're out of touch with the world and insulated by the bubble of the entertainment industry. They base their decisions on marketing and test groups, and doing that makes everything predictable and safe. I tried to fight for my original vision, to keep the spirit of it alive, but everyone was against me. After a while, I just gave up.

The show's creators, Jim O'Doherty and David Israel, turned it into a false idea of what it's like to be a black family. Instead of keeping the focus on my life growing up, which was poor and tough but full of laughs and love, they s.h.i.+fted it to my present-day life. My television family became a more middle-cla.s.s family dealing with everyday ordinary s.h.i.+t. The humor was average at best, and the situations were very familiar-there was nothing in it that hadn't been done in white shows and black shows a million times before. The Tracy Morgan Show became a modernized Cosby Show, where the father was a mechanic instead of a doctor. That was not my idea at all. The last thing I wanted to do was try to find humor in my adult home life; that story was just happening. I wanted to tell a story about the past, because that's what I knew. I wanted to tell a story about the ghetto. There was no way these two visions for the show could coexist. Jim O'Doherty didn't know what the f.u.c.k he was doing, and he didn't bother to ask me my thoughts.

We shot the eighteen episodes the network ordered. After sixteen of them aired, NBC pulled it. No one from our production even told me. Here's how I found out: I was waiting for the show to come on one night and a f.u.c.king infomercial came on instead. The next day I got a call from my managers and learned the truth. I felt like I was the only one who wasn't surprised when the show got canceled. All these white people had no idea what they did wrong and why their formula didn't work. I'll tell you why: Because they don't know what it's like to be black!

That's show business, and it's gotten even worse since then. There are so many forms of entertainment for people on the Internet today that networks and movie studios don't know what to do. They put out all that reality programming because people never seem to get tired of seeing other people doing dumb s.h.i.+t or living some life that's worse than their own. And when it comes to sitcoms and dramas, they throw s.h.i.+t up against the wall just to see if it sticks. If you stick right off the bat, you stick. If you don't, you're gone and never mentioned again.

The only way to survive is to stay on top of your team. I learned that early, back when I was just looking to book stand-up gigs outside of the Bronx. Managers and agents have many careers to look after, but you've only got one. I stay on top of everyone working for me to make sure they're doing everything they can to keep me on top. If an agent tells you they're going to take a chance on you, it's bulls.h.i.+t-you're the one taking a chance on him. If you find one you think has your back, you might spend a few years listening to his advice, following his orders, going on auditions, and taking meetings, trusting that he understands the game and how you're gonna win it. Then maybe one of his other clients lands a role that you could have done and you see your agent spend all his time milking that success. Or maybe one day you finally realize that he hasn't done enough for your career and none of those promises came true, but eventually you see what's what-that agent just kept you around in case someone wanted you. The sad truth is that by the time you figure that out, your time might have pa.s.sed. That agent sat on his a.s.s while your big break pa.s.sed you by.

Look, I've got no interest in diversifying. I just want to do what I do. People tell me all the time: "You should open a club!" or "You should open a few barbershops!" Why the f.u.c.k would I do that? That's not my talent. I'm a comedian. What do I know about running a club? Getting kicked out of one-that I know how to do. I see no point in doing a lot of different things because there's no way you'll be good at all of them. Do one thing and do it the best you can. Look at Michael Jordan. He wasn't a bad baseball player, but he was the greatest at basketball, the game he was born to play. And it didn't take him long to go back where he belonged. If G.o.d gives you a talent, you've got to honor it by giving it your undivided attention.

I'm not gonna lie: I was hurt when The Tracy Morgan Show got canceled because even though they f.u.c.ked it up, it still was my show and had my name on it. If it had been called Black Mechanic and the Funny Kids, it might have been easier for me to take. Even though the result was so far from the original intention, when all was said and done the show was all right. But the ratings worked against us, and that's all the network people saw. All they cared about was how many people were watching and who those people were. The problem was they aimed my show at an audience it was never going to get. The show I originally planned would have entertained people in the cities, from down-south Louisiana to up-north Detroit. But the producers wanted to make all the white people in the Midwest laugh, so they made it into a parody of a black family that they would recognize. That's not my character, that's not how I get down, and my heart just wasn't in it.

So that was it for my TV show. End of story. I went back to what I knew; I hit the road to pay the bills. I stayed out there for about four years, and in that time everything changed for the Morgan family once again. We stayed in L.A. and got a bit more used to it, but we still weren't happy; we just weren't in our element. And though I love stand-up, professionally I was yearning for something more.

Around this time I met Bradley Lewis, who became my joke writer for a while. He's a great talent-he does stand-up too. I met him in front of the Comedy Store, and we clicked right away. We have chemistry to this day; whenever we are around each other we just make each other laugh. What's up, Brad! Nothing but love, baby.

Life on the road took its toll on me, and once again I started partying full speed. When you feel like you've got nothing to lose and you spend most of your life on the road just to support a family that you hardly ever get to see, you lose sight of reality. You forget your commitments, you forget your roots, you forget your purpose. Whether you're a musician or a comedian, when you're on the road, you don't think of the past or the future after a while-you only think about what you're doing that day, that night. I indulged in everything that came my way.

That was when things began to fall apart in my marriage. Feeling that relations.h.i.+p slip out from under me made me even more desperate and out of control. If Sabina would have agreed to it, I would have found a way for her to be with me on the road all the time. But we couldn't do that. We had a family, we had kids in school; I couldn't drag everyone along with me to every show. That wouldn't have been any kind of life for them. Sabina likes her home and her comfort, and she likes to have her friends and loved ones around her. She had no interest in hotel rooms, comedy clubs, and airplanes. But I had to marry the road to keep us living. If you're out there too long, you get so used to it that you become uncomfortable when you're home. And once that happens, that second marriage has got you; the road becomes your number one girl. The road is nothing but groupies coming around, and there you are, in a hotel all by yourself more nights per year than you're home with your family. s.h.i.+t happens. If it happened to Ray Charles, it was d.a.m.n sure happening to Tracy Morgan.

Every comedy club is a free party if you're the comedian. Booze, drugs, women, whatever you want, it's there. But being back in the clubs was different than it used to be, and I didn't like it. After being on SNL for seven years, the people I met knew who I was and thought they knew s.h.i.+t about me. That scared me to death. When I'm onstage or on TV, I might be the biggest clown you ever saw, but when I'm not, I like my privacy. I've got a complicated home life and a tricky situation with my extended family, and how that all works out is n.o.body's business but my own. I also like cooling out with my friends just like everybody else-it's the only time I can be myself, without anyone expecting anything of me.

I had been on television so long that when I was in a club hanging out, people would come at me like they knew me personally. It was one thing if they were fans telling me they liked something I did, but that wasn't always the case. Some of them came at me trying to get what they could from me. The road got b.u.mpy, but I had to get through it. Stand-up was all I had going aside from a few film walk-ons here and there; it was my bread and b.u.t.ter.

Still hurting from losing my show, I found many different medicines on the comedy circuit. I never drank before my sets, but I always made up for it afterward. Every night I was out there playing hard, even though I should have been on the bench. I'd been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1996, so I had no business drinking so much and thinking an insulin shot would take care of everything. I learned about the diabetes when I woke up one day unable to see. My eyes were open, but I saw nothing at all, just black. I thought I was going blind. Sabina rushed me to the hospital and discovered that I'd been living all that time in need of regular insulin shots. My diet and everything else was starting to close up my blood vessels, including the ones in my eyes. Again, I was ignorant of anything but survival mode. I had just gotten on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and the last thing I was going to let hinder me was some disease. I never took the time to learn about diabetes at all; as soon as the doctor said it wasn't deadly, I just went and forgot about it. I never bothered getting any regular medication for it, I paid no attention to what a diabetic should and shouldn't eat, and I didn't stay disciplined about taking insulin. When I felt sick every once in a while, I'd shoot myself up. I was stupid and I was doing serious damage to my body. But as long as I got through the day and got to work, I figured I was healthy enough.