I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (20 page)

At some point in the following days, the government even called me investigating whether Jesse had used funds improperly. Obviously, I played dumb. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Talk to my lawyer.” I kept my mouth shut about the whole thing—with one glaring exception.

In 2002, Jesse got mad about some of the jokes Cedric the Entertainer made in
Barbershop
. One of the lines that bothered him was a quip about how Martin Luther King “got more ass than a toilet seat.” Now, let’s be honest. No one who admires King thinks that his alleged womanizing detracts from his accomplishments. The people who
do
bring that up are only using it as an excuse to denigrate a man whose goals they have always opposed. Besides which:
It’s a joke
.

I was at the Trumpet Awards in Atlanta that year, and so was Jesse. He was standing near me when he started being very vocal about the film and how offensive it was. He wanted them to censor some of the dialogue. He was complaining loud enough for me to hear him.

“Well,” I interjected, “
some
people need to not have those kinds of moral views.” Meaning, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

He’s no dummy. He instantly knew what I was talking about, and he dropped the matter right then and there. I maintain that if he hadn’t had “Reverend” in front of his name, none of that stuff
would have mattered—and his downfall would not have been as severe as it has been. That title provided a moral component to his views, but it also held him to a higher standard.

Back then, there wasn’t the concentration on people being exposed to everything that you did. There wasn’t TMZ or Media Takeout or all these kinds of blogs that exposed behind-the-scenes goings-on. Even someone as well-known as Jesse Jackson could still have some auspice of anonymity in certain contexts, which I am sure he took advantage of for years. So when it came out publicly that he was saying one thing and doing another, people were disappointed. He was very well regarded in the black community. Many white people, of course, thought his comeuppance was long overdue. The animus toward him in certain pockets was intense. Bill O’Reilly basically made his name by taking Jesse Jackson to task on the air, for example.

Yet the proposition that Jesse Jackson was shameless in his actions was demonstrably false. When all his dirty laundry got aired in public, it was
shame
that immobilized him. He didn’t sweep it under the rug, make an insincere apology, and pretend nothing of importance had happened. He really fell back in his public persona—and that allowed Al Sharpton to basically take Jesse Jackson’s place.

If Jesse Jackson was a reduction of Martin Luther King, then Al Sharpton was a reduction of Jesse Jackson. He was a copy of a copy. When Sharpton started out, he was less crisp, less focused, less sure, less sharp than Jackson was. But as their careers went on, they sort of switched roles. Jesse went down and Sharpton got more nuanced and much more sophisticated. The copy actually started to be crisper than the original. Sharpton transitioned from being this
black-radical marcher to someone who wants to talk about education with Newt Gingrich and meets with Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton would not have been caught dead with the early Al Sharpton, the fat man in sweatsuits and gold chains. Newt Gingrich probably wouldn’t even have wanted to be in the same
state
.

I watch Sharpton’s television show all the time. Clearly, he is trying to be seen as much more than a civil rights leader nowadays. The more Sharpton becomes a statesman, the more of a dance he is going to have to do. He is always going to have to work his answers so that people who have loved and supported him for years will be comfortable—or at the very least, not put off. You can’t be a civil rights leader/political player and not have that connection to your base. But as you broaden your appeal, you necessarily broaden your focus. It wasn’t “black rights” for Martin Luther King: It was a
human
rights issue. It was something
everyone
could get behind, even though the problem was primarily hurting one group in particular.

That’s why I think that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have focused so much on racial discrimination as a cause. The 1960s were the last time we had a national consensus on race. They were probably the
only
time we had a national consensus on race. Those who opposed this consensus had their views driven out of civilized discourse. A person can openly argue for colonies on the moon, shutting down every U.S. embassy abroad, and defaulting on the national debt. But racist views have to be couched in code words and deceit. So to fight discrimination is a winning fight, because no one will fight with you openly.

But the consensus means that the fight has been
won
, at least ideologically. Of course racism is a huge problem, but it’s not the only problem—and it’s not the biggest problem. It doesn’t stop black women from going to school in record numbers, for example.

If there’s a problem with a company that discriminates, that shit doesn’t fly anymore when exposed to scrutiny. It’s very easy to point the finger when the danger is external. “Us versus them” is a common human mindset.

But what about when the dangers are
internal
? Civil rights leaders can’t be as candid. They can’t alienate their own audience or they will lose their power. We are at a point in America when every community, every
person
, can create their own reality. If something makes you uncomfortable, you can successfully avoid hearing it. The thing is, it is
truths
that make a person feel uncomfortable. Some part of your mind registers the fact they are trying to deny, and that’s where the unease creeps in.

I am not a civil rights leader. My constituency is fluid, and I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself. If the NAACP types often want to suppress what they see on the
screen
, it’s no wonder they are uncomfortable with what they see on the
streets
. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.

N
OT
even the most virulent racist would argue that older black men are as involved with unsavory activity as younger black men. Clearly,
age
has something to do with the problem. What is it that all young people of
all
races have in common?
They’re fucking stupid
. And if stupid kids are encouraged to act in stupid ways, then they
will
act in stupid ways. I myself learned one of these very stupid ways of acting at a young age. I learned it the same way many kids learn their stupid ideas: on the school bus.

It doesn’t matter what your background is:
Every
kid in America
knows the seating hierarchy of the bus. The youngest and the nerdiest kids have to sit in the front. The farther you sit from the bus driver, the cooler you are. But that school bus could be a very dangerous place. People would be bopping you in the head and messing with you, so you had to have some protection. That’s why, in seventh grade, nerdy li’l Darryl Hughley planted his black ass directly behind the driver every single day. I was so far up that dude’s butt, I could have charged him for a colonoscopy.

On the other end of the bus,
way
in the very back row, sat Catherine Bogatz. That part of the bus was so different that it wasn’t even a seat anymore; it was more like a long bench for the rulers of the bus kingdom. Gorgeous Catherine sat right in the middle of that bench like the queen that she was. She was
stunning
. To this day she remains the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.

Our bus driver was very young, about nineteen or twenty, and wore these half gloves that all the broads dug. He was clearly new at the job, because he had the shitty route that nobody wanted. It was my route—and Catherine’s route. Back in those days, radio stations worked on a cycle and you knew what song would come on when. So every day on that bus, we heard the song “Gloria” by a group called Enchantment.

Whenever “Gloria” came on, I was under the belief that Catherine and I had an unspoken deal: I would look at her with utter adoration, and she’d cut her eyes a little bit and give me a smile in return. Even though it wasn’t even a
real
smile but more like a smirk, it fucking made my day. It was like the queen was acknowledging that I existed. It was
beautiful
. It fueled me.

So one day, “Gloria” started playing. I did what I was supposed to do and turned around and looked at Catherine. She saw me and yelled down the length of the entire school bus, “What are you looking at, motherfucker? Stop looking at me, you nappy-headed
fucker!” Everyone on the bus laughed. It was the most graphic representation of the power of a woman over a man’s psyche that I would ever experience.

The driver tilted the mirror back so he could see me and said, “It’s all right, little man.”

The bus driver knew what I had yet to learn: I was what I later identified as a “pussy-later” type of cat. The black community is probably 90 percent pussy-
now
guys. They’re the guys who won’t go to school; dudes who sell a little weed or dope on the side; people who quit school to rap. Or they’re going to be basketball stars. Or they get a college scholarship but don’t go to class—so they get kicked out. Or they get a job, complain about it, and are always quitting. When these guys get money, they buy rims and shit that will impress broads. They’re Eddie from
The Five Heartbeats
, the lead singer all the ladies loved.

There’s
pressure
to be a pussy-now type of dude. When you’re young, the whole thing is being cool to the people around you. It’s very hard to realize the costs of being a pussy-now dude—especially when you’re getting all that pussy and when everyone thinks you’re the greatest.

Pussy-now dudes play checkers. But pussy-
later
dudes play chess. One is short-range: “
Jump the king—I’m the shit now!
” The other has long-range implications, where every move predicates and decides the next set of options. You have to think steps ahead. That’s how life is! It’s like choosing retirement funds or college funds, deciding which choices will enrich you and which won’t. When you make a mistake, there are ways to recuperate from it. It takes a whole bunch of bad shots to try to get to a goal. The whole game is about trying to minimize the bad shots,
not
trying to have great ones. That’s what pussy-now guys don’t get.

When you look at your life, you’ve got some really shitty days,
some fucking
spectacular
days, and most days you don’t remember. You remember the great ones and the really shitty ones—and you’ve had more shitty days than you’ve had great ones. But the great ones make up for it. You
live
for them great days, like a sunny day in a New York City winter. Those great days are spaced out, and you can only have so many in your lifetime. That’s why these pussy-now-type dudes burn out so quickly. They use up all those great days very early on.

When I was growing up, there were a lot of kids that had to be home when the streetlights came on. It was a universal, totally black experience across the country. In the winter it was early, and in the summer it came later. But whatever the season, when it got dark, you got your ass home. When those lights came on, you saw everybody literally breaking toward the house. But then there was that dude who never had to be home, and
everybody
thought he was cool.

That dude is the one who ends up going to jail. Now he doesn’t have a home to go to at all. Jesse got to stay up all hours of the night, and all the girls liked Jesse. Now Jesse is homeless. Those pussy-now dudes are cool from junior high to high school. Seven years! In terms of a life, that’s
nothing
. Yet those seven years are all they live for. They come to the high school reunion. They hit you up on Facebook with old high school pictures and memories. Everybody remembers pussy-now type dudes. They had all the fresh shit, went to all the parties, got to stay out late. Everybody loved them. Pussy-later motherfuckers, people don’t even know. “He went to this school? I never saw that motherfucker because he was in the library.”