“Ain’t you Mr. Atchley?!?” Dude was smoking a cigarette and had a porkpie hat on. He was some version of criminal security. At a crack house. In Oakland, California.
The director yelled cut.
It was a television show called Midnight Caller, on NBC, and the show’s star was Gary Cole. The guest star? Single named fella they used to call Leon. Christ from a Madonna video if your memory goes back that far. It was Season 1, episode 12 and the show was called “The Fall” and it followed a formerly promising young basketball player as he loses it all to…crack.
“Who are YOU?” I step into frame, a bald and well-muscled presence. At a crack house. In Oakland, California.
Now Cole, a crusading radio DJ and Leon’s former basketball coach, are on a rescue mission of mercy. They retrieve Leon from aforementioned crack house. On the soundtrack you can hear ToneLoc’s “Wild Thing” playing. Because: of course.
Leon, method all of the way, scares the crap out of the crew on the next set up when he comes trundling out of the house and struggles down the stairs, apparently deep in some version of an anti-intervention crack haze. My crack guard compatriot says by way of recognition, “Man, you know who that was? That was Skate Fillmore. In his day he could really sky!”
For the record my next line was “Well today must be his day because he’s SKY HIGH NOW.”
Also for the record, my next line never made the final cut. Mostly on account of me losing it and laughing my ass off at the abject ridiculousness of the line along with the set up in total. And I wasn’t alone. The entire crew was laughing at me laughing at the line’s complete inability to do justice to drug addiction, the problems of the “inner city” and what “Black” people might actually sound like.
After three takes and increasing levels of laughter the director warned me to play it straight or he “wouldn’t be able to use it,” which made sense to me as it was, as it stood, completely unusable. Even before I opened my mouth.
[W]as he any more or less culpable than I was since I took the same paycheck for the same show that so gleefully codified Black dysfunction?
But before this, during a break, I asked my co-crack house guard if he had gone to college. And he had. A good one at that. Then I said, “you know you could do that line, as an actor hired to act, anyway you wanted to.”
He indicated that this he knew. Moreover, that he understood the umbrage I was taking at us doing this Stepin Fetchit shit.
“Action,” the director yelled and then, straight away, “Ain’t you Mr. Atchley?!?”
I got it. Like the scene in Empires of the Sun when the Japanese soldiers in a POW camp tell a British soldier to lift a rock and cave his head when he refuses to do so, and then John Malkovich jumps from the train to, the Brit thinks, help him.
But…Malkovich lifts the rock instead.
Dude was just trying to stay employed. And was he any more or less culpable than I was since I took the same paycheck for the same show that so gleefully codified Black dysfunction?
Well, during Obama’s run up to his first stint as President I got tapped by The Root to write about racism in America. I went on to say that racism was a fiction, albeit a powerful fiction, that people were more in love with than they were any sort of actual racism, either understood or analyzed. While this was before the endless extrajudicial killings of Black folks under the color of authority that was never my point. My point was the one that fueled James Baldwin when he went ex-pat: America was never going to be fixed so stop worrying about it and get yourself to a cafe in Paris while you can (or at least before Marine Le Pen wins their election).
In the end though, The Root liked the piece so much that they never spoke to me again. And after running the piece just long enough to justify having paid me for it, they shitcanned it.
So much for me and writing about race. But then two things happened. One was a writer named J. Bennett in an interview with a Black woman heavy metal singer expressed some dismay that I, though I was unnamed in the piece I knew it was me, didn’t write more about race. He seemed to think my contribution would be valuable or, at the very least, enlightening. And two was my mother in last week’s sub stack where she stated that she was chagrined by Chris Rock’s “anti-blackness”.
“Thank you. Now I know I’m not crazy,” he says, and if I say that I wasn’t crying, he was crying, I’d be both wrong and right.
So I followed the bread crumbs and I remember, in talking to Rock when I interviewed him about “the old New York” we both grew up in, him saying “well let me put it this way: I was mugged twice when Dinkins was mayor. Never under Giuliani.” Dinkins was the largely ineffective former mayor of New York. Who was Black. And who also never got the appropriate level of credit for putting into place stuff that Giuliani later took credit for vis a vis anti-crime measures.
Rock, for his part though, in his recently released book talks about horrible bullying he endured being both small and Black in a largely white school. Then there’s also the bit in one of his past comedy routines where he dares the white folks in the audience to admit that they wouldn’t want to trade places with him, even though he’s rich, because he’s not white.
Or more specifically because he was Black.
You see, if you hadn’t been able to figure it out, being Black, in America at least, can make you crazy. Like Richard Pryor once said, you have all the existential problems everyone else has AND then you have the whole “Black thing” laid on top of that.
But in just watching Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul, a documentary whose Oscar win was all but overshadowed by the kind of “crazy” public display that stands as both proof of a kind crazy, as well as making you feel very much so, had a great set piece right at documentary end.
Actor and producer Musa Jackson starts to cry at seeing some of the concert footage that was shot at a Harlem festival when he was there as a child. He articulates a love for a time that, though he doesn’t say it, when people spoke of Black self-love they did so with not even a scintilla of cynicism. I know. I remember it too.
“Thank you. Now I know I’m not crazy,” he says, and if I say that I wasn’t crying, he was crying, I’d be both wrong and right.
Because like Captain America says in 1969’s Easy Rider and of which we both seem painfully aware, “we blew it.”
See, America has perfected the art of self-hatred. Would anything else explain the cosmetic industry, gay politicians passing anti-LGBTQ legislation, or even the death rate in Chicago for people under 30? New York mayor Eric Adams has tried in unloading on drill music, music that very specifically addresses each and every aspect of both this self-hatred and Black dysfunction, in song after song, but he’s wide of the mark in blaming the puppets and not the puppet makers who may or may not also be the puppet masters.
But this appetite to laugh the hardest at that which hurts us the most, confuses me. Dave Chappelle left his show because he got the sense that one of the crew laughed at his joke about a Black pixie in Black Face that would try to get Black people to act in stereotypically Black ways, for the wrong reasons.
But laughter is generally involuntary, besides which, what were the right reasons? So I cop to Bad Brains on this one from their song “I And I Survive”: my living it ain’t very funny.
And, in the end I still defend my take on racism that got me invited and then disinvited by The Root but with a proviso. Satan may not exist but, after all of the bodies are tallied, this hardly matters right? Our belief is all we need to act for or against.
So what I’m going to choose to believe? That us loving us, as we are and in the presence of the machinery that would have us do anything but, is the highest order of the day.
And if you read this far I’d just like to say “thank you. Now I know I’m not crazy.”
Bruh. You know what's most impressive about this piece? That you were able to write paragraphs about it. It's so complex to me that I either don't talk about it, or once I start, I can't stop and then I realize it's gone everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At that's when the only sensible guidance is that each individual should focus on the quality they bring to their immediate personal connections.
Maybe the fact that, in contrast to the 60s/70s, we can't even *pretend* to broad-brush the African American culture, experience, challenges, and direction is progress.