Taking Stock of Chris Rock's Cock

We're among friends, right? So we can speak...frankly?

“Yes, there are some backs on the street which cry for the knife.” — Mirbeau

There was a guy. Just one guy. Standing at the end of the hallway on the left side of the House of Blues in Las Vegas. He had an iPad. Or a clipboard. The memory fails here, but the text on my phone said that this was the guy.

We went up to him and introduced ourselves. Silently he scanned the list in his hand before nodding and pressing a button on a remote he held in his other hand. What had seemed to be a solid wall behind him parted to reveal an elevator. And so, we were IN.

Where? Some sort of exclusive club that a high roller had made it clear he wanted me to see. He, himself, was an interesting cat. Kept sending me pictures of his girlfriend, as guys will sometimes do to show that they are not “gay”. In each photo she had fewer and fewer clothes on. This also seemed to be part of the equation somehow even if he had no plans to be there tonight. This was to be understood as purely a product of his largesse.

But the club itself? It cost an ungodly amount of money to be a member. Like American Express black card shit. Consequently once you were there it was chill, outside of the gaggles of high rollers for whom it was not enough just to be there. They had to win being there. As the evening would have it, we fell in with one such fellow. And his entourage. None of whom we had ever met before.

The guys I rolled with shot me looks of significance. Looks of warning…And then finally, in response to my smile, looks of resignation.

He was amused by our louche ways and later in his stretch limo, surrounded by hangers-on he told jokes. Jokes that weren’t particularly funny but were clearly part of the drill because the hangers-on laughed too long, and by a measure, way too hard.

Until: “I’ve got a joke,” I said from the far end of the limo. The guys I rolled with shot me looks of significance. Looks of warning, which I smiled at. And then finally, in response to my smile, looks of resignation.

“Go ahead…tell it!” The Big Shot waved his hand magnanimously, and the girls fell against him, amused because he was amused.

“What’s got two hands and a pineapple in it?”

My friends bowed their heads. They didn’t know where this was going. But they knew me well enough to know that it wasn’t going to be any place good. You see the jungle is all over the place and it’s riven with weather systems crosshatched with race, class, cash, and like Tony Montana once famously stated: balls.

“I don’t know!” He chuckled, lights in his eyes dancing because the monkeys were doing what the monkeys are supposed to do. “What?”

“Your ASSHOLE!” And just like forever, like ever since I was a kid, I laughed my ass off. There were tears in my eyes while the dummy hangers on tried to figure out how to read all of this. He was trying to figure out how to read all of this. I mean we had been so nice.

“I don’t get it,” he said, and I laughed even harder.

“Of course you don’t,” I choked between spastically drawn breaths. “It’s, um, post-modern….”

“In fact I find it kind of disturbing,” he said, which renewed my laughter.

“I wish Smith had killed him up there.” And putting a period at the end of that sentence, she concluded, “I hate Chris Rock.”

After I stopped laughing, we rode the rest of the way to the Wynn in silence. Thirty seconds after the limo pulled up, the Big Shot and his entourage, were gone. They had ditched us and we stood in the empty lobby trying to plan next steps.

“Fuck that guy,” was my coda. In perpetuity. For all cats like this and specifically in situations like this.

So, now, you have to know that, of course, I wasn’t watching the OSCARS. If ever there was an event with FUCK THAT GUY written all over it, that was it. Hadn’t seen the movies, didn’t care about the cavalcade of self-congratulation/promotion. Right up until South Philly’s luckiest guy in the world, Will Smith, smacked the fuck out of Chris Rock, the luckiest guy from Brooklyn Not Named Spike.

Then the world…exploded. Not like the very real explosions generating the even more real loss of life and limb in Ukraine, but more along the lines of every single one of the applied semioticians in media and beyond who were trying to figure out what this meant.

Were we talking race? Feminism? Privilege? Scientology? Swinging? The world had divided itself against the normal tropes trying to figure out if they were Team Will or Team Rock, and then later in the public analysis, as people remembered, Team Jada.

But while I didn’t know “Will & Jada” from jack, I had interviewed Chris Rock up in Harlem on the set of his remake of Heaven Can Wait. I also have a gaggle of friends who are stand-up comics. I found Rock, during the interview, one of the more interesting people I had ever interviewed. Shy, quiet and painfully deliberative, he’d stare at me, sometimes for up to 10 seconds or so, before answering questions.

Did I like him? People always wanted to know. He made no part of himself available for this to happen really, but I found him…harmless? And more importantly I believe stand-up comedy to be one of the most difficult art forms around, Gallagher notwithstanding.

But then this: “I wish he had stabbed him to death up there!” My mother was holding nothing back.

Which “he”?

“I wish Smith had killed him up there.” And putting a period at the end of that sentence, she concluded, “I hate Chris Rock.”

But I’ve endured the endless, soul deadening display of TMI from the Smiths and the Smith offspring for the better part of the last four years…all of this dovetailing with the age of The Thin-Skinned for a perfect storm of stupid.

Her take had been unvoiced, either to me or elsewhere in the media in general, and it was conspiratorial. #OscarsSoWhite had been a bonafide civil rights movement that every single Black person of note had signed off on, she said, refusing to cross the invisible picket line. Until a “white man’s nigger” in Rock broke it.

And the first joke of the evening of the OSCAR strike he broke? He attacked the Smiths. Furthermore, in her eyes, his career has been replete with Black anti-blackness and she’s had enough and figured the Smiths did too.

But I’ve endured the endless, soul deadening display of TMI from the Smiths and the Smith offspring for the better part of the last four years. Having forgotten that silence is golden, they’ve held forth on their sex lives, preferences, the minutiae (did Jada and Chris have an affair, we breathlessly intoned, when they made Madagascar?!?!) that makes private lives much less private. And all of this dovetailing with the age of The Thin-Skinned for a perfect storm of stupid.

Laughter is involuntary and Will laughed at first until activated by a frown from Jada. He slapped Chris, and Chris rolled with it. Then a parade of pathetic. Speeches, tears, “getting Jiggy wit it” at a post-party for multimillionaires and suddenly I hated them all.

Not for anything they had done but for what they all failed to do.

“Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way” said Col. Willard in Apocalypse Now, and this is how they offended the g-ds and me right after.

You see I’ve slapped a few folks in my day. Usually fired by a just indignation, and their sometimes explicit request that I do so (“DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO!” they said to me in Brussels by way of a dare, as they sang the love song of a slapper). And in almost every case “all the way” is just where it went.

PA stacks were toppled. Cops were called. Side beefs broke out. Tables were overturned (there’s a reason I’ve not been invited back to the Bammies or the Grammys). No one knew what they were seeing and what it all meant but they knew it meant something. In all its broken ugliness. If only: this is what broken ugliness feels like.

But these…celebrities…so desperate for notice, approval, validation…deferred to what specifically rules this world (and its credo). You see the show must go on. Right? Riggghhhttt.

And here I thought for even (or just) one second we would see something real instead of scripted apologies, blame jockeying, identity skirmishes, the gossip hum and the inevitable make-nice discussions about how we should/could all get along.

Ughhhh…

But hey…what has two hands and a pineapple in it?