I'm Not High (16 page)

“Why can’t the whole world do what we’re doing, right here?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just hanging out, talking,” he said. “A lot more problems would get solved if people sat down together and got to know one another. Right now, down the block there’s probably a white fireman in a fire-house who is pissed he has to work in Harlem, ’cause he thinks we’re all animals.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” Tracy said. “But he’s not the only one who’s prejudiced. There’s black people around here that see the same guy as the devil. They’re mad that he thinks he can come up here and protect the community. ‘He doesn’t live here, why’s he trying to help us?’ They’re wondering why one of their own can’t have that opportunity.

“Life is different up here,” he said. “What you saw today happens all the time.”

“Why wouldn’t you just move?” I asked.

“Where?” he said, surprised. “You need a job. Who’s gonna hire a black man from the Bronx or Harlem? Somebody in Iowa?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about your neighborhood? You think someone’s gonna sell me a house in your neighborhood? Be real, man. This is the ghetto and it’s going to stay the ghetto. And most of these people are stuck here. You think we get the same education here as they do in your neighborhood? No. But there’s also a lot of love to go around here, only you’re not allowed to see it. You see it now, but that’s ’cause you’ve been around here for a while. All you’ll see on the news tonight is a black guy shot and killed another black guy, and everyone else will breathe a sigh of relief.”

I knew he was right when he said that, and it saddened me. It was so surreal for me to see another man, regardless of what his background was or whether he was involved in drugs or not, struggling for his last ounce of life out on a sidewalk in America in broad daylight. Seeing it play out, and hearing Tracy’s perspective, taught me never to judge anyone based on the picture that’s presented to me in the media.

A couple of other heavy racial moments happened while I did the show, and they told me a lot about where I was going and where I was from. A cast member named Flex and I went to grab a sandwich at the deli near where the man had been shot, right across from the club. Whenever I’d go in there, I’d get a chicken Parmesan and the old guy behind the counter would scold me.

“You gonna get fat eating that sandwich, white boy.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I’d say with a laugh.

“You should be eating that ham if you wanna stay skinny.”

“Ham, huh?”

And he’d just nod. I thought it was crazy that he thought ham was going to keep me fit. But it was his deli, so whatever. I was gonna stick with the chicken Parm. Anyway, one day, I was in line with Flex getting a sandwich and chips, and I felt someone bump into me from behind. It’s New York, that stuff is bound to happen, so I wasn’t too concerned. Still, it felt a little forceful, so I slowly craned my neck to take a look, and I saw a very well-dressed, buff guy in a suit. He didn’t look like trouble, so I went back to minding my own business. Then he spoke up.

“What?” he said indignantly.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said. Then Flex looked back, too, and just rolled his eyes, as if to say, “Oh no.”

“You don’t belong in here, cracker ass,” the guy in the suit said. “Why are you here, anyway?” He continued chastising me. The rest of the people in line took a step away from us but kept their eyes glued on the situation, like they were going to be seeing some free lunch-time theatrics. Then Flex piped up.

“You don’t know him!” Flex yelled angrily to the guy. He later told me the guy was a member of the militant Nation of Islam and probably hated any white person he’d ever see.

“Shut up,” the buff guy said, addressing Flex. “Uncle Tom.”

“You don’t
know
Uncle Tom,” Flex said. “All you know is hate. You’re going against everything your religion is supposed to be about right now, brother. In fact, I’d trust my kids with this guy more than I would with you.”

The guy glowered at Flex and then fixed his gaze on the counter, trying to ignore him. The crowd of people went back to their own business.

As we walked out, Flex kept churning over the incident and mumbling. “They’re bad for our people. I don’t even understand them, to be honest. Bad for our people.”

The other incident happened away from Harlem. About a year into the show, I decided to head out to Valley Stream and meet Phil and some other high school friends at a bar. To be honest, I was looking forward to fluffing my feathers around my old stomping grounds. It was totally vain of me, but I was hoping the locals would recognize me from being on television.

I got to the bar early, ordered a beer, and bumped into a guy I went to high school with. He’d gotten beefy, a little pudgy even, but he’d been a buff athlete. Someone more popular than me. I’d even looked up to him.

“Breuer,” he said, smiling. “Mr. Television.”

Bingo. I was feeling validated almost instantly. We shook hands and I said, “How ya doing?”

“Great,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “Looks like you’re doing great, too. I’ve seen you a couple times and the show is funny, man.” He paused for a second and smiled. “I gotta ask you though, what’s it like working with all those niggers?”

My mind was blown. This was the early nineties, but not the 1890s.

“They’re good people,” I said, smiling and shaking my head.

He considered what I said for a minute and then said smugly, “Oh, I get it. They’re paying you, so I guess you gotta say that.”

“No,” I said emphatically. “I really—” Then I caught myself, realizing that I was never going to change this guy’s mind. I didn’t bother waiting for my friends to show up. I left. My feathers hadn’t been fluffed, but they had been ruffled.

After two years and twenty-five episodes,
Uptown Comedy Club
went off the air. It was by far the hardest I’d worked in comedy, and it was an education unto itself. I consider everyone who was a part of it a really close friend, and I love them all.

It’s a Breuer Family Wedding

As Dee and I were about to get married in Union, New Jersey, in 1993, we pooled all of our money together and it came out to a grand total of $248. I dug
Uptown Comedy Club,
but I definitely wasn’t getting rich doing it.

The night before the wedding, I drove to the hotel where the whole wedding party was staying, with my ’89 Ford Probe packed with all the stuff Dee and I were going to take on our honeymoon: tennis rackets, a boom box, all of our clothes, a huge video camera. That night, Phil and some other friends, Gene and Joe, and my dad and I all went out to a bar, and I had way too much to drink. Phil drove us back to the hotel, pulled up next to the Probe, and said, “Let’s bring everything up to the room.”

I was tired, wasted, and didn’t want to hear it. “I’m not bringing all that stuff up
now,
” I groaned. “Let’s wait until the morning.”

“God forbid anything happens,” Phil said, shrugging.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s two in the morning. Nothing’s gonna happen. If you feel compelled to haul stuff up to the room, knock yourself out, but I’m not bringing anything up.”

Phil, being the great guy that he is, said, “I’ll just grab the tuxedos, then.” So he got them out and hauled them up to the room. In the morning, we went down to get the rest of the stuff out of the car, and it was gone. The parking space was empty.

“Maybe it rolled away?” I said, scanning the parking lot. “Did we put it in park?”

It hadn’t rolled away.

Phil, Gene, and I took a lap around the parking lot like a bunch of jackasses, just to double-check that we even were looking in the right place. Defeated, I went in to the front desk.

“My car,” I said quizzically, nodding toward the parking lot. “Is missing?”

The balding manager at the desk smacked his forehead and grumbled. “You, too? That makes six cars last night.”

Thank God Phil saved the tuxedos at least. And thank God I had car insurance. I did my best to not let the theft ruin the mood of the actual ceremony. I saw it as just another obstacle trying to get in the way of my marriage, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. Besides, it wasn’t easy to think about anything in a church that was 110 degrees. The AC was broken and there were no fans. After the wedding, everyone lined up to throw rice at us on the steps of the church, but a flash monsoon sent them running, so by the time Dee and I got outside, there was no one waiting for us. Later, people had so much fun dancing at the reception that no one ate any food, and the band came back to the hotel to party into the night.

In the end, Dee’s mom was generous enough to loan us her car for the honeymoon. Obviously, at the time we couldn’t afford a really nice getaway, but I got an idea doing stand-up once in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. I played at a dude ranch called the Rocking Horse. I knew Dee liked horses, so I thought that would make her happy. When we got to the dude ranch we were the only honeymooners there. It was all families, decked out in rodeo-style clothes, and we had to eat dinner at these communal picnic tables with them. None of them could believe we were honeymooning there. But it was our trip.

When we got home, the police had found the Probe. They told us our car had been used as the smack-up car. When these crooks were out stealing cars, they always used one as a decoy—if there was to be a chase, the smack-up car would be the one the crooks wanted the cops to go after, while their partners in crime drove the other way with the more valuable cars. The smack-up car tended to, well, get smacked up. Mine was no exception. It was beat to shit.

Dee started sobbing when she saw it. It was a sad reality to see something I’d worked so hard for completely trashed. But it was oddly thrilling to see where they’d been. The backseat was filled with night-club flyers and White Castle wrappers. They’d stolen everything out of the trunk except the tennis rackets. Car thieves don’t play a lot of tennis, apparently.

Babysitting Billy

Now that
Uptown Comedy Club
had ended, one of the perks of not being bound to any one gig was that I could make my own schedule, and the nice thing about that was that there was actually a schedule
to
make. I was well past dreaming about being a comedian. Booking shows in and around New York was way easier, and I was getting more and more college and out-of-town gigs, too.

For convenience and sanity’s sake, Dee and I moved from New Jersey closer to the city and were living in an upstairs duplex in Franklin Square, Long Island, above this elderly couple who were also our landlords. This brought us a little closer to Eddie’s three sons, too, who were just north of the city in Connecticut. I couldn’t get them off my mind, and I felt a great responsibility to be there for them. And they were slipping. Big-time. They were all teenagers now—a tough enough time for any young guy, father or no father.

A couple years earlier, right after Eddie had passed away, one Sunday afternoon Dee and I took a drive up to visit the boys, and the youngest one, Billy, who was about eleven at the time, met us at the door.

“Uncle Jim,” he said proudly, “you’re going to love this. You’ve got to see what I made for Dad.” He led us to his bedroom and showed me this little shrine he’d made out of family pictures, a necktie of Eddie’s, and a LEGO set they’d once built together. “This oughta help me keep Dad’s memory alive, right?”

He said it so earnestly, and the way he’d put it together and showed it off to us was so innocent, that my knees nearly buckled. It gave me a lump in my throat for a week afterward. Well, that shrine was sweet, but it ultimately couldn’t keep Billy from getting into serious trouble shortly thereafter. I couldn’t imagine having to go through the death of a parent like that, so I was in no position to judge the kid.

By age twelve or thirteen, Billy was boozing it up and had his stomach pumped in the ER several times. He was just lost, trying to make sense of it all. The middle brother, Eddie, who was a couple years older, also just totally fell off the cliff. He had a real anger built up inside of him, and he was wild as could be. The oldest son, Christian, was at first glance the most like his father and did not rebel at all. If anything, Eddie’s death made him more responsible, studious, and committed to being a success like his dad was. In a weird way, that made it even harder on his younger brothers. The younger two had been straight-A students, too, but that soon went out the window.

I watched it all unfolding and realized I should step in. So one year, as New Year’s Eve was approaching, when Billy was thirteen, I called Eddie’s wife with a half baked but well-intentioned plan.

“Do you think it would be helpful if Dee and I took Billy in for a few nights over New Year’s?”

“Of course,” she said immediately.

“I’m doing a bunch of sets in the city on New Year’s Eve, and he can tag along and be me and Dee’s special guest.”

“Come and pick him up anytime. I know he’s going to love it.” The plan was for me to do a set around midnight at this club in the Village and for Billy to come along and watch it. Dee was nearby with some of her girlfriends, and we were all going to meet at a diner afterward. And then I’d do even more sets late into the night.

On the way into the club, I asked the bouncer, who seemed like a nice guy, to keep an eye on Billy and to keep him away from the drunks. There was a little foyer behind the bouncer, where Billy would be able to take a seat on a stool, stay out of the cold, and watch me do my set. In my mind, this was a great solution.

So I did my twenty-minute set and grabbed Billy, and we started walking down Bleecker Street.

“Uncle Jim,” he said, “I’m hungry. Can we just grab a slice of pizza quick before we meet Dee?”

“Of course,” I said. It was New Year’s Eve. As far as I was concerned, Billy could have whatever he wanted. So we walked into this little narrow pizza place, and there were a few revelers seated in there, eating slices off paper plates at round tables. We walked up to the register to order, and all along the walls there were mirrors to make the place feel bigger, I suppose.