This willingness to seek out humor in uncomfortable places would become Chris’s trademark, an impulse he credits Sam Kinison with inspiring. Because Chris is black, the tendency is to automatically place him in the Dick Gregory/Bill Cosby/Richard Pryor tradition, but Kinison, who Chris knew well in LA as a young comic, was a defining influence. Kinison, an ex-minister turned sacrilegious stand-up, took on God as well as man before his death in 1992, and this informed Chris’s comic philosophy.
As I suggested, Chris’s journey to artistic maturity was a bumpy one. From that first time he visited my apartment to CB4’s premiere in March 1993, he had several revelatory moments. In 1990 he auditioned for and won a spot on Saturday Night Live, a dream of his since the days when Eddie Murphy had used the show as a launching pad in the early eighties. The SNL check allowed him to move first into a small apartment, and then to two increasingly larger duplexes, within walking distance of me in Fort Greene. He used almost half of his first-year salary of ninety thousand dollars to buy a little red Corvette. As he once noted, “Between taxes and the cost of living, that meant I put myself in debt.” Still, he loved that car, and would drive it, top down, through Brooklyn and Manhattan eyeing girls and blasting Prince.
The journey from my living room to getting CB4 made actually involves two intertwined narratives: One is the nuts and bolts of our film-business education; the other was spending much of 1990 through 1993 in Los Angeles before, during, and after the riots there. That our dream was to make a film about a nasty hip-hop group residing in a low-rent suburban California town made it inevitable that our professional efforts and the anger of the city would intersect.
On one sales trip in late ’89 we attended an LL Cool J show at the Universal Amphitheater. It was a young LA crowd, and as racially mixed as this city could get. As Uncle L was performing, a posse of, maybe, fifteen Crips, their blue colors no longer camouflaged under black caps, jackets, and jeans, revealed themselves. Not long afterward a scuffle ensues, and a brother in a white Le Coq Sportif sweat suit goes down. Chris and I have backstage passes, and the journalist in me drives me backstage.
Four security guards carry him through a side door and lay him on the ground. He’s dark skinned, about six feet tall, with short hair, but at that moment his most distinguishing characteristic is a large red dent in his left temple. His nose and mouth, like his once white jacket, are dripping with blood.
Back inside the amphitheater the show goes on. I had found that rap crowds, from the earliest shows in Harlem right through its expansion nationwide, usually managed to ignore or emotionally distance themselves from any violence at the shows. They paid their money, and they expected their money’s worth. The audience remains cool even as the Crips march down toward the front of the stage, each man grasping the shoulder of the man ahead of him. A team of fifteen security men, with thick necks and wearing white Ts, blocks them just before they reach the standing section right in front of LL. With the house lights raised and security now alert, the Crips stand on chairs and flash their gang signs toward the stage as LL rips through “Rock the Bells.”
Back then it was hard for an East Coast dude like me to understand the “why” of the Bloods and the Crips. We’d had gangs in New York, on and off, for decades. But we had nothing as all-consuming and relentless as these two SoCal institutions. Considering that we were doing a parody film about a rap group from outside LA, I felt I needed to at least visit the spiritual home of West Coast rap (and its gangsta philosophy), CPT, aka Compton, California. I met a comely Creole hostess at a West Hollywood bistro who had family out there. She offered to give me a guided tour. So one Saturday afternoon in 1990 I made my first trip to the home of Snoop Dogg.
It was a forty-minute ride from West Hollywood on the Harbor Freeway, an ugly piece of eight-lane highway that likely was obsolete by the time its concrete dried. A left turn off it takes you right into two police cars parked midstreet. It’s just a minor traffic accident but, after listening to N.W.A.’s first two albums, I expected the worst.
Rolling down Wilmington Boulevard, our car crosses the expanse of dirt and the train tracks featured in Straight Outta Compton. In a couple of blocks we hit a residential area with a car or two in the parking spaces, one of them usually a late seventies or early eighties make. Middle-aged black folk, a great many of them retirees who’ve lived in Compton one or two decades, live in single-story houses. There are a few mobile homes around as well. We visit my guide’s aunt Dee Dee, a humorous parent of two and grandmother of seven, who’s got the AC on blast as she watches The Young and the Restless.
Aunt Dee relocated out here in 1952 from Louisiana. There were jobs in the factories open to blacks, and she found the whites, while largely racist, were too busy enjoying the surf to be interested in lynchings. By the end of the fifties all nine of her brothers and sisters had followed her west, settling in with decent jobs that supported their growing families.
But in the seventies, the economy began to slow, and the local gangs, part of the SoCal culture since after World War II, started growing. Guns, either hunting rifles or old army revolvers, had always been around. In a city like Compton, with deep southern and western roots, gun control had never been on the agenda. However, in the last decade crack had come to the CPT, and everything had gotten meaner. Aunt Dee Dee said her neighborhood was usually quiet, in large part because there weren’t any teens around. Any children we saw playing in the front yard did so “only when one of their grandparents can sit out there with them.” When it was time for us to go, she asked, “Where you going? Don’t just be driving around out there. It’s dangerous out there.”
At about 2:00 P.M. on a weekday the streets of Compton are fairly empty, though pedestrian traffic isn’t exactly what Cali’s about. Clusters of people, mostly men thirty years old and up, hang outside variety and liquor stores, looking much like unemployed folk in any other (African) American ’hood. We drive past Dr. Martin Luther King Hospital on Wilmington Boulevard, a place of urban legend, where it’s said the army trains medics because of all the mini-AK-47 victims it treats.
Despite that sad fact, and the nihilistic images of the city spewed by Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and others about Compton, I saw no drive-bys and very few young men who fit the “gangsta, gangsta” rhetoric. But there was one tense moment. As I cruised by a beat-down house near the Watts Tower, a shirtless brother wearing a Raiders cap, a drippy Jheri curl, and black jeans stepped out of the shade of his porch and into the sun to stare at our car, which was moving slowly up his block. Truth is, I was the one who was acting suspicious, peering at him like an animal at the zoo, afraid of getting too close, yet fascinated nonetheless.
Ultimately, what I got out of the trip was how isolated Compton felt compared to the ghettos I knew in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast. Sunburned and semidesolate, Compton felt a long way from jobs, entertainment, and anything like the carefree California experience of legend. It felt segregated and forgotten, a self-contained enclave where the imaginations of MCs and the simmering anger of the streets had combined in an unexpected way to turn its limitations into a rebellious, national myth. It sure wasn’t a nice place to visit, and I was damn glad I hadn’t, by accident of birth, grown up there.
In the background, hovering like a darkening cloud, was the Rodney King beating and trial. You didn’t need to be listening to N.W.A. or Ice-T to know that the black community of Los Angeles had fear and contempt for the LAPD and all elements of the county’s law enforcement. It was a popular topic of conversation, and most locals of color, whether they lived in Inglewood or Baldwin Hills, had a bitter story or two. All during the Rodney King trial Chris and I were taking our meetings, doing rewrites, and dancing the Hollywood shuffle so hard and fast that in the spring of 1992 we felt close to getting a green light from Universal Pictures.
Which is why we were at Kennedy Airport the morning after the riot started, waiting two hours on a delayed flight to Los Angeles. To this day I’m not sure how
I convinced Chris to get on that plane with me. The night before on CNN you could see stores being torched, gun shops being robbed of their deadly contents, and the beating of a white trucker by angry blacks (only later did it come to light that four black folks had rescued him). Mayor Tom Bradley, ex-cop and longtime city leader, went to the influential First A.M.E. and tried to stuff a verbal pacifier in the mouths of the discontented, but it was no match for what the Simi Valley jury had unleashed.
“There’ll be an additional fifteen minutes or so on our flight today,” the pilot announced as we passed over Philadelphia. “We have to go around the back way into LA—because of the ruckus going on there all flights were delayed.”
As the plane came over the city about 2:30 P.M., smoke billowed up from two, three, four, seven spots out the left-side windows. On the right side I saw four others. As the plane passed over the Coliseum, a huge plume of ashy black air floated up under our right wing. We got a beautiful view of the coastline when the airship curved out over the Pacific Ocean—a route determined, I later found out, by South Central residents taking potshots at arriving planes.
As we sat on the ground for twenty-five minutes, a flight attendant told me the Beverly Center had been closed because of looting, which was significant to me for two reasons: one, that LA landmark was in an overwhelmingly white part of town, suggesting that all the robberies were being carried out by people of color; two, it meant that La Cienega Boulevard, the usual route to our hotel, was a hot spot. She also said that curfews were in effect throughout LA County.
Curbside at LAX, an Arab cabbie approached us cautiously, asking, “Where are you going?” When I told him the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset in West Hollywood, he wondered if we really wanted to stay there. It seemed that there were reports of motorists being pulled out of their cars on La Cienega south of the Beverly Center. I told him he could go any way he wanted, but I was insistent on my destination because I knew that the Mondrian provided a panoramic view of the city.
After rolling up Robertson from Culver City up to West Hollywood, and then across Sunset Boulevard, we reached the hotel, where things looked normal. From the Mondrian’s restaurant terrace one can see west from the power towers of Century City across lower parts of Beverly Hills, the Wilshire District, Mid-City, Korea-town, and the cluster of skyscrapers that define downtown. Beyond those areas, some in hills, some not, were places like Inglewood, Ladera Heights, and Baldwin Hills.
For two hours I sipped cranberry juice while I watched fires rage, and then smolder. I’d count out nineteen fires, and by the time I’d run my finger across the sky, there would be two or three new ones. Hovering above the city was a thick, gray rainbow of smoke that stretched from midway in the sky down to the ground, with spirals of smoke rising like miniature tornadoes.
All around me dowdy white couples, flaxen-haired models, and hip dudes in snakeskin boots stood and pointed at them. Fire engines screamed below us. The vibe I received from the other guests was chilly. Adversity usually breeds fellowship, but no camaraderie came my way.
Friday night, a few days after the riot, and Sunset Strip is as quiet as a tomb. Chris and I hit the hotel gym, and then stand out front in our shorts, marveling at the stillness on a street we’ve hung out on so often. Across the street is the Comedy Store, a place whose stage Chris has walked on scores of times. He wonders how much money Pauly Shore’s mother is losing.
A taxi driver sleeps in his cab. Two parking attendants chill and talk. A black hotel manager in a blue blazer walks out, looks around, and says hello. About five minutes later four county sheriffs walk up the driveway, and two blue-blazered hotel staffers greet them. The group glances our way, and one sheriff, a tall brother with a glistening dome, says, “I know him. That’s Chris Rock, the actor.” Five minutes later the sheriffs are gone. Riot or no riot, celebrity still meant something in LA.
On June 9 Chris and I were back at the Mondrian. Frustrated that we were still in limbo, he drove us out to the Santa Monica pier, where we played skittle and ice hockey. By the time we arrived back at the hotel there was a message from our friend and producing mentor Sean Daniel. We’d been given the green light.
So the rest of the year I worked in LA and lived at that hotel, on the often frivolous enterprise of filmmaking, backdropped by the fact that we shot much of the movie on avenues that had been on fire a few months earlier. Adams Boulevard, for example, on one end had beautiful Craftsman homes in which we shot for a day or two, but on the other end it looked as depressing as the streets of Compton.
Our fictional Locash, California, was constructed of gritty streets in LA and Culver City, and in a particularly hot, nasty little Valley town called Panorama City, a place so dry and baked, I’m convinced no cloud has ever flown over it. Though CB4 was a foul-mouthed farce, there’s more than a little truth to the desperation that underlies it. Chris and I were anxious to prove we could make movies (which, truthfully, we weren’t successful at doing), and the city itself was a little disoriented, none too happy to be the center of such negative attention, but unable to truly address its own discontents.
The movie opened in March ’93, and I’d trek between Brooklyn and LA heavily over the next two years, growing frustrated with my efforts to build a viable career as a screenwriter, but slowly reconnecting with my life as a journalist and author. Back in Fort Greene things were evolving. Between his film work, his Saturday Night Live tenure, and most profoundly, his breakthrough Bring the Pain special on HBO, Chris couldn’t eat breakfast in peace at Mike’s diner on DeKalb anymore, much less walk over the few blocks from his carriage house. Driving in the convertible made no sense, so it had to be ditched. People sought out his place to take photos outside. Much like the explosion Spike had ignited in Fort Greene a decade earlier, Chris became part of the lore of what, at the time, seemed a black cultural mecca.
Within a few years Chris’s heightened celebrity would force him to move to Jersey. Spike would move to the posh Upper East Side. A lot of my peers who’d moved into the neighborhood around the same time I had had either moved to the suburbs or California. No more meetings at Cino’s on Fulton Street, or house parties among people my age. Younger people and newer artists were moving in. Over on Fulton Street a spoken-word scene was hot at the new Brooklyn Moon Café, where you could see then unknown talents like Mos Def and Erykah Badu declaim poetry for an audience that finger snapped in appreciation (to keep the people living upstairs from complaining). Writers like Kevin Powell, Toure, and Colson Whitehead were building their reps living on the same streets Richard Wright had once strolled.
Things were changing in my world and mostly for the best. Using some of my movie money, I’d helped my mother move back to Newport News, Virginia, the town she’d abandoned for Brooklyn before I was born. Equally important was that she’d taken Ebony and Leigh with her, giving them a chance to grow in an area where grass, clean air, and trips to the all-American mall were commonplace. My mother and nieces would still face many challenges adjusting to a slower-paced suburban lifestyle, but this relocation, which was actually part of a historic shift of African Americans from northern big cities back to smaller southern communities, gave them all a safer, healthier life and me much-appreciated peace of mind.
I thought about moving too. Maybe get a place in Manhattan or go out to LA to capitalize on a growing movie career. My landlord wouldn’t sell me the building nor would they invest in keeping the property up. Instead of moving out of Fort Greene, I moved to a similar apartment, on Fort Greene Place, around the corner from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and closer to the subway.
My last day in 19 Willoughby was incredibly sad. I knew that place was where I’d grown into an adult, blossomed as an artist, and made most of my deepest friendships. I would never be that young, ambitious, or naive again. That special twenties growth period, that time you remember fondly for the rest of your life, was over.
With all my furniture moved out, the place was as empty as the day I’d m
oved in. But it didn’t feel empty. I could still feel it all—the books, the conversations, the sex, the laughter, the mistakes, and the dreams that had kept me up so many nights. I lit a small candle, placed it in a saucer in the center of the room, and closed the door.
LIFE SUPPORT
The morning sun poured in through the big back windows of my dining room on Fort Greene Place. I sat at my long black lacquer dining table toying with a video camera. I had it aimed at a sun-splashed chair I’d set up by a corner window. My sister was coming over, and we were going to talk, not have a fight or an argument. I wasn’t hiding my valuables. I wasn’t anxious that she’d ask me for money or, by signing some papers, to participate in some scam. We were going to talk just like a brother and sister should. It was the morning my career and my family history would truly come together.
I was going to interview my sister on camera, which is not how most siblings communicate, but considering our recent history, this was a huge step forward. It meant that after years of tension and silence, I was going to listen to her and try to see the world through her eyes. I hadn’t done that in years. Years? Maybe never.
My buzzer rang and I went downstairs to the front door. I didn’t kiss Andrea and she didn’t kiss me. It had been a long time since we’d been physically affectionate with each other, but the chaste hug we shared was still progress. I closed the door and followed her upstairs.
Interviewing her was the best way I knew to find out about her, as goofy and impersonal as it sounds. Moreover, I thought that in her journey maybe there was a documentary or screenplay. Maybe I could turn her struggle into something artistic, connecting my two Brooklyns through Andrea.
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