Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  All the guys had their best move, and mine was a shuffle. I’d start on my knees and then spin around really fast, all the while smashing my one knee against the ground. One day, my knees really swelled up and I thought, I can’t do that anymore. Another time, I was practising in the gym at Georges Vanier, and I was doing a stand-up dive. I would stand up and just dive straight to the ground and go into the worm. I was really good at it—until one day I hit wrong and my legs bent over me. For about a minute, I thought I was paralyzed. I have never felt that kind of pain in my life.

  That summer of ’84 was the best of my life. I was breakdancing and I was cool and I was meeting chicks for the first time. I had no idea how miserable I was about to become once September arrived and I found myself at Chinguacousy Secondary School, a.k.a. Ching, in Brampton. The transition did not go well. I was the smallest kid in the class—like crazy small and scrawny—and, of course, I was brown. A lot of people may think I had problems just because I was Indian. That was a problem, but it wasn’t the problem. My size made me an easy target for the bullies, who then threw in a touch of racism to top it off. I was easy to pick on and had kind of an outgoing personality. And definitely, I had kind of a smart mouth. Guys would say something to me and I’d say something back, and that didn’t make the situation any better. I would talk back just to be clever or funny, and these guys weren’t clever or funny. What they were was violent.

  I remember walking home and just bawling my ass off, pretty much every day, actually. I got called a Paki all the fucking time.

  When I arrived as a “minor niner” in Ching’s halls, the bullying increased to the point where I was punched in the head, spit on and even kicked in the stomach with Kodiak boots. I remember leaving Ching crying a lot—not that I’d let people see me crying, but I remember walking home and just bawling my ass off, pretty much every day, actually. I got called a Paki all the fucking time. A couple of times I would start making friends with a girl and then, as we walked home, I might be holding her hand or even kissing her, and then one of her friends would see us and say something to her like “What are you doing with that fucking Paki?” That would be the end of things between us.

  One afternoon, I was right by the water fountain close to the library when these five black guys picked me up, really high, and they were going to put me into a garbage can head first. That incident wasn’t racially motivated; it was just straight-up bullying. They were holding me up, and then somebody yelled, “Principal’s coming!” and they just dropped me onto the ground, right on my back—bam. I got up and went crazy and started swinging the garbage can at them. They were laughing and just sort of scattered away.

  I still remember all the times I would come home from school in Grade 9 and tell my parents, “That guy called me a Paki again today.” And my dad would ask, “What’s this kid’s last name?”

  “Jankowski,” I said.

  “So he’s Polish … You go back to school tomorrow, and you go up to that boy and you tell him he’s a Polack and that Polacks do this, that and the other. That’s what you do. And if that doesn’t work, you punch him right in the mouth.”

  And I’d say to my dad, “Yeah. Okay …”

  My dad always recommended words before weapons, and that’s what he was trying to get at here—not that he never resorted to violence. Believe me, he did. Dad would tell me stories about when he was a kid in boarding school. Some classmate was teasing him in front of a bunch of people and my dad was embarrassed. He waited, and then one day, when the bully was the only one left in the shower—it was a communal shower—he marched in there with this little club (a miniature pine baseball bat about twelve to eighteen inches long) and smashed the guy across the face with it. He broke the kid’s nose. Then he turned around and left. The bully never said a word to him again. My dad took that little club with him to Canada in the ’60s. I remember seeing that thing my whole life. He used to keep it right beside his bed when he was sleeping in case somebody broke into the house.

  The bottom line is that my dad was a genuine, old-school tough guy. He had that in him. It wasn’t like he was faking it or it was machismo. It wasn’t like it was second nature for him, either. If he was going to let that side of him out, he’d think long and hard beforehand. And when I was a kid, he was encouraging me to be the same way: to devise a plan to protect myself, and then to carry it through.

  I never ended up following his advice, though. The problem was I just wasn’t a confrontational kid. Even now, as an adult, I’m actually not that confrontational. As a kid, I did appreciate my dad’s outrage and his efforts to help me deal with the bullies myself. The truth of the matter is that what I was dealing with was pure ignorance, ignorance at the most basic level, and you can’t use logic against an ignoramus. It just doesn’t work.

  I also never wanted my father to be involved because, deep down, part of me felt like we really were second-class citizens. I always felt that I was prey and that my dad was prey, too. I was scared that if we did something about the bullying, if we brought it to the authorities—say the police, for instance—they would take the side of the perpetrator. I didn’t want to put my parents through that, especially not my dad, so I just put up with a lot of nasty shit. I knew it wasn’t fair; I knew it wasn’t right. But I also knew that you can’t fight fire with fire. You have to find a different way.

  Things at Ching were getting pretty bad through Grade 9; the only fun I had was out of school. I was very, very unhappy there. Looking back, I could almost say I was depressed. I didn’t have any friends in school; they were all at other schools and I felt totally alone. I was having troubles getting my credits. I got 13 per cent in typing in Grade 9. I was never a studious guy. Mom used to beg me to pass my courses. She’d say, “Just get 50 per cent. Just don’t fail.” And I would try … but I would still fail. Something inside of me just told me that everything they were teaching me was completely irrelevant. It meant nothing to me. And the teachers … A good teacher knows how to teach everybody. But at Ching, it was all just reciting, and focusing on the kids who were already getting it, instead of helping those who weren’t, like me. That’s something I really hate, and now in my comedy, I make sure that people, normal people, are going to get my jokes. I want everyone, even the guy at the back of the room, to be in on the joke with me and not to feel left out.

  I want everyone, even the guy at the back of the room, to be in on the joke with me and not to feel left out.

  By Grade 10, right near the end of the year, a guidance counsellor, Mr. Flannery, called me into his office. He started speaking to me reeeee-eeallly slooooooowly. He said, “What do you like to do? Is there anything you like, Russell?” He was literally talking to me as if something wasn’t clicking in my head. I was thinking, What’s wrong with this guy? What do you want from me, dude? I was fifteen years old and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, so I just answered, “I don’t know.” And then I think I told him I liked to … cook? And he went, “Oh, really? Let me take you on a tour of North Peel and show you what they can offer you.” North Peel is a trade school that all the kids in the ’hood referred to as the “school for retards.”

  That’s how I ended up at North Peel—because a guidance counsellor at Chinguacousy thought I was slooooow. North Peel had a reputation as a tough school, and I was already sick of getting my ass whooped by a bunch of losers. The time had come for me to defend myself. So, in September of ’86, I took up boxing. My good friend Willie was an incredible boxer. He was the most elusive fighter you’ve ever seen in your life. He was practically impossible to hit. If Willie had stayed focused on fighting and hadn’t been so punch drunk at such a young age, he could’ve really been somebody big. I had known Willie since early elementary school, and we had been in high school together at Ching. Dad convinced me to go to the gym with Willie, so I did. It was Champion Gym, owned and run by John Melich, right behind the Latin Quarter on Melanie Drive in Brampton. Willie and I were the yo
ungest guys at the gym, and there we were learning to box with John, Dwight Fraser and Rick Souce. Dwight and Rick were the big dogs in the gym. They were pros. Dwight actually fought in the ’84 Olympics.

  When I first started boxing, I didn’t even know how to throw a punch. It took me a good few weeks—if not months—just to learn how to throw a left jab. John wouldn’t let us use our right hands at all. I just worked my left hand, did a lot of shadowboxing, skipping and hitting the bags. And once I kind of got the rhythm with my left hand, maybe about five months later, I went into the ring for the first time to spar with Willie, who was an incredible fighter. When Willie and I sparred for the first time, it was also the first time they’d put sparring gloves on me; they were so heavy—they weighed about a pound each—and I was such a small kid. As soon as I went to throw a punch, my arm just dropped straight down. So I was in the ring with Willie and couldn’t hit him for the life of me. He’d been boxing his whole life. He was avoiding punches, and I’d miss him literally by a milli-metre. He would move just enough not to get hit. His footwork, his upper-body work, were incredible. Fortunately for me, Willie was actually a very gentle guy, and when he punched me, he’d go really light. Maybe that’s why he never pursued boxing professionally, because he never had that killer instinct. Inside and outside of the ring, he was just a good human being.

  Marlon had also started training at the gym with us. He was having a lot of trouble with his left jab. He couldn’t quite coordinate it properly, so John Melich made Marlon put his right arm behind his back and spar with this guy Ramon. Because Marlon was fighting with only the one hand, Ramon kept landing punches on him. He just kept hitting him and hitting him. Marlon was getting angrier and angrier, until he unleashed this massive right arm and knocked Ramon across the ring, where he collapsed in the corner and started bawling. Marlon has the most incredible strength you’ve ever seen.

  Willie’s uncle, Gary Blackburn, was at the gym with us and started training us too. We would go to the matches that Melich would promote and Dwight and Rick would fight in. I was in the gym pretty much constantly and was progressing well. Melich liked my jab. He liked the way I punched and moved, and one day he said to me, “Kid, I’m gonna get you a fight in a couple of weeks.” I didn’t want to fight. I definitely didn’t want to become a pro boxer. I just wanted to learn how to defend myself. So when Melich said that, I stopped going to the gym for the next three weeks. When I eventually showed up again, he said, “What happened to you? You embarrassed me.” I made up some excuse about being busy. John tried again to put me in the ring as an amateur, and I didn’t show up again. After a while, he got the hint.

  In total, I went to that gym for about three or four years—every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for three hours. In the ’90s, I stopped. I had gotten everything I wanted out of boxing and didn’t want to do it professionally. I would go back every now and then and the guys there would treat me like I had never left and work me really hard. I’d be like, “Jesus, guys, I haven’t been here in six months. Give me a break.” One time I had to spar with this giant Jamaican guy who was a heavyweight—225 pounds, strong as an ox and dumb as shit. At the time, I probably weighed about 150 pounds. Melich said, “Russell, this guy’s sparring partner didn’t show up, so do you want to go in the ring?”

  I said, “No.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s just working on his defence.” When a guy’s working on defence, you’re supposed to hit him and he’s supposed to just move out of the way without hitting you back.

  I asked, “Are you sure?” and Melich said, “Yeah, just defence.” So I went in the ring and started hitting the guy. Me and my big mouth started talking shit to him, saying things like, “Man, you suck! Look at me! I’m not even good and I’m hitting you.” I was talking all kinds of shit, and then the guy saw an opening and gave me a body shot. It dropped me immediately.

  So, that’s how I learned to fight, and that’s how I learned to protect myself at North Peel—so I wouldn’t be bullied there the way I had been at Ching. People can say what they want about North Peel, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. People there treated me like an equal, and there was no racism. It was a much blacker school, but these kids weren’t trying to fit in with the white guys and the jocks. These were real ’hood kids—hardened, bad-ass kids. But I fared a lot better with the bad-asses than with the bullies. The major difference between bullies and bad-asses, as I was about to learn, is that bullies are all bark and no bite. They’ll pick on you only if they think they can, but if there’s a chance of them actually getting hurt, they back off really fast. Bad-asses, on the other hand, will never do that. If they know they can beat you, they’ll beat you. Bad-asses don’t even bother picking on you, but if you mess with them, you’re in big trouble.

  I learned these distinctions early on at North Peel Secondary School. Consequently, I got in only two fights there. The first time, this guy kept calling me a fag. Every time I passed him in the hallway, he said it again. Finally, it was just me and him in the hallway, and after warning him to stop, he said the word one more time. “What did you say?” I asked, and I pushed him against the locker—boom, boom. I hit him, two left hooks in the ribs … and I cracked them. His mom came to the school the next day to complain about what I’d done to her son.

  The second fight was with this Croatian kid, a big dude who kept mocking me about this girl who had dumped me. I really liked her. She was the prettiest girl in the school. I was already feeling crappy about losing the girl, and then this guy had to rub it in. Everybody was standing at the foot of the stairwell and he said he knew tae kwon do or something, and I said, “Shut the fuck up!” and started punching him, but not very hard. He started laughing then, and I got really mad. In my head I was thinking, You have to do something now or he’s gonna kick your ass.

  So I grabbed him by his shirt, and I heard it rip. I don’t know where I got the strength, but the next thing I knew, I had lifted him up and thrown him across the stairwell. His legs hit the railing and his head hit the wall. He was lying there on the floor, stunned, and then he said, “What’s your problem, man?” I yelled back the corniest thing—“That’s what happens when you fuck with me!”—and continued up the stairs past him like an idiot. That’s pretty much how I transformed from being bullied to becoming one of the so-called bad-asses, and from that time on, I had a much easier time of things in school.

  I only do jokes about stuff I really care about.

  But here’s something weird: whenever I got into fights, my ass would twitch. My ass cheek would literally start jumping the same way some guys can move their pecs. My butt cheek would just go nuts. It was a bizarre nervous thing. To this day, my butt starts to do that if I get nervous. Fortunately, I’m a bit more confident with my skills now, and at age forty, you really shouldn’t be fighting people anyhow. The only things I fight now are colds … and maybe arthritis.

  It was at North Peel that I started to hang out with a whole bunch of other guys who had things in common with me. They were mostly of Caribbean descent and were mostly black, but we got along. They were teenagers, just like me, but kids who were maybe a little bit poorer than most. Some of my friends at that time were not necessarily broke, but they were not walking into a really nice house at the end of the day.

  Apart from actually having a social life with kids who had my back, North Peel also saved my ass academically. It was there where teachers respected me and considered my potential for the first time, and they replaced some of my awkwardness with true confidence. That’s why I do jokes about North Peel to this day: I only do jokes about stuff I really care about.

  There were two teachers at North Peel who rank among the most committed people I have ever met: Mr. Kolar and Ms. Kelly. Technically speaking, Ms. Kelly wasn’t even my teacher, but I would often skip my classes and go hang out in her sewing class just because she was the coolest woman in the world. Her class was one of the few places in the school where I could
be who I was and do what I wanted … and it didn’t hurt that her class was full of chicks. I’d walk in and just be myself and make them laugh. In some ways, Ms. Kelly’s sewing class was one of my first audiences. I never learned to sew on a button, but it was nice to feel that for once a teacher actually liked the fact that I was hanging around.

  And then there was my chef teacher, Fred Kolar, who inspired me to follow my dreams, even though at the time I didn’t have a clue what those dreams were. I mean, how can you figure out your future when the adults around you say you can’t focus, you’re up to no good and you’re really not going to get anywhere? But then there was Mr. Kolar, and he’s one of these people who remind you that anyone can do a job, but it takes a special person—a real professional—to give it everything they’ve got. This was a man who chose to teach as a vocation, and let’s face it, it’s not like teachers are in it for the amazing paycheque.

  Fred Kolar is a guy who goes above and beyond. Here’s a guy who is a world-class chef, at one time the head of the Escoffier Society, and he decided that wasn’t enough, that he wanted to help kids. In Fred’s class, everyone was treated as an individual, no matter how messed up they were—and believe me, there were some pretty messed-up kids in our class. He was the first teacher I ever had who would swear at the students when we would screw up the food we were cooking. He’d be like, “What the fuck are you doing?” But he always did this in the right way, never to make you feel like shit. It was because he cared.