When me and Melissa met, it was that whole ridiculous love-at-first-sight thing. It must have been. Because we have been together ever since. Ever since Sunday, March 30, 2003. (I know that is true . . . because I just Googled it. Thank God our wedding website is still up.) And I say “ridiculous” because I’m not really sure that I believe in the idea of “love at first sight.” Or at least I don’t believe that “love at first sight” is the only way to find the love of your life. I’m really more of a believer in the When Harry Met Sally model. (WHMS of course being the greatest romantic comedy of all time period!) You meet somebody. You meet them again. You become friends. You become good friends. They annoy you. But you can’t get enough of them, and finally if the two of you determine that your body parts match up and work well together, then you start dating. Me and Melissa didn’t do all that. We just saw each other and were like, “Oh . . . There you are! . . . WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
Also, because I didn’t grow up with my parents together or with really a ton of married people around me, I always feel like I’m not totally sure what exactly goes on in this whole marriage thing. Melissa comes from a family that’s lousy with marriages and great at marriages. Her parents are the classic high school sweethearts who decided to turn pro once they graduated. Whereas with me, my mom was married twice before my dad, and my dad was married twice after her. To be fair, his marriage to my stepmom is still going strong after more than thirty years. But much like how Deadheads feel about every keyboard player in the Grateful Dead after Pigpen, my stepmom always seems newish to me. But marriage was nowhere in my mind when I first saw Melissa. Because when I first saw Melissa all that was going through my mind was, “DAAAAAAAAAAAAMN!”
—
My dating history has been less than legendary. I went on one date in high school. It was with a super popular girl. I think it only happened because our parents were friends (the way Black parents often bond at private schools), so we were around each other a good bit. I wasn’t super unpopular. I was just not a factor in school at all. At. All. She, who will remain nameless, was a friendly, smart person who glowed from the inside. In my mind I was going to be her Dwayne Wayne to my Whitley Gilbert. And I was so nervous the next day that I literally (yup, literally) didn’t say one word to her. And not in a cool, mysterious way. It was more like in a future-serial-killer way. Years later—after we had both gotten married and had kids—we had a chance to talk about it; she told me that she thought I was mean. I appreciated the feedback. And I tried to explain that I understood why she thought that. I didn’t explain that I wasn’t mean. I was just so afraid of screwing it up that somehow I convinced myself that not talking to her at all and even walking the opposite direction when I saw her in the hall was the best “approach” to a new relationship. And that’s not all. Wait, there’s more! There was another time in high school when I mailed handwritten poems to a girl to declare my “love.” She was way, way, waaaaaay above my high school station. I’m guessing that she was the prom queen, if my high school did that. (I have no idea. I didn’t go to prom. I went to the movies . . . with Jason and Rob.) She handled the creepy package the best way possible . . . by telling me that I should be a writer and by also telling me “No” in clear yet remarkably gentle terms for a teenage girl who had just received a pile of furiously scrawled love notes from a dude who got her address from who knows where. (The school had a book with everybody’s addresses. I’m guessing that has changed in the years since. Maybe thanks to me.) And even though that all happened a long, long time ago in a city far, far away from where I sit now, even knowing that you are reading this right now makes me want to move to the hills and live all by myself, surviving off whatever I can figure out how to grow off the land . . . which would be nothing.
By the time I went to college in Philadelphia. . . . and then dropped out, I was still nearly completely inexperienced with women. So after high school, I knew I needed to make some big changes. I actually decided to make a concerted effort to have some friends who were women. I knew instinctively that I needed to at least be around them and get comfortable, if I was ever going to have chance to maybe, you know . . . date one. Angie was one of my first attempts at making friends with a woman. It sounds so stupid even as I type this, but this was a big deal for me. I was a twenty-one-year-old college dropout (twice by that point). I had met Angie at Ben & Jerry’s, and then she helped me get my next job working with her at a video store, Nationwide Video. (It had three locations, all in Chicago.) Angie was easy for me to be friends with. She was easygoing and darkly hilarious. And because she was a lesbian, I had no nerves about talking to her. There was no fear of sexual tension. We weren’t great friends, but I knew she liked me. She had helped me get a better job after all.
During this time I was starting to do comedy. And even though I was not very good at all, it was helping with my confidence and also making me feel like I was a part of something. Like I had a secret mission. (Mostly because I knew I sucked and I didn’t want anybody to come see me.) That “new me” must have started to make an impact. One day one of my coworkers, Gigi, told me, “There are two people here who have crushes on you.” I thought, “WHAT? . . . TWO PEOPLE? . . . THAT’S TWO MORE THAN I NEED!” This was something I wasn’t used to hearing.
Gigi said, “Do you want me to tell you who they are?”
“Yes, of course I do!”
Gigi replied, “Well, I can tell you one, but the other person isn’t sure she wants you to know yet.”
Me in my head: “WHO GIVES A SHIT, LADY? JUST TELL ME THE ONE WHO WANTS ME TO KNOW. TIME’S A-WASTING! WE’RE BURNING DAYLIGHT!!!!”
Me in real life: “Cool. Whatever . . .”
The one who was fine with me knowing was Catherine. We went on a date as soon as possible, which turned into dating for three years. We moved to California together. I was twenty-one, and she was six years older, which, weirdly, was almost the same age difference between my mom and my dad. She was a white public-school teacher of Irish descent. Catherine was a really good person who loved her job, which was an incredibly hard job. Not her public school job in particular, but teaching is a hard job, being an elementary school teacher is a harder job, being an elementary school teacher in a public school that is underfunded and understaffed is an even harder job, and then getting paid so little that you have to take a part-time job working at a video store so you can pay your rent and keep up with your student loans makes Sisyphus seem like a hipster working on his screenplay in a coffee shop.
We were together from the time we went on that first date. And pretty quickly I moved into her place, which seemed like a better move than sleeping on a pull-out couch in the living room of the apartment I was living in with three other comedians (including Dwayne Kennedy, who later I would hire for Totally Biased). After two years of doing stand-up mostly in coffee shops and bars (there was only one full-time comedy club in Chicago at that point. It was Zanies, and I had done one or two sets there without anything close to success), I told Catherine I had to move to a scene where there was more opportunity and also a place where I could feel freer to grow. I had read a bunch of books about the history of stand-up comedy, and every one of them made the San Francisco scene sound magical. I figured I could move there for a couple of years, and then once I was setting the world on fire, LA would beg me to come down and take its money. That didn’t happen then. And it still hasn’t happened. Catherine said she wanted to come with me. And we moved out to Oakland together. Well, honestly, she moved us out to Oakland. She had all the adult stuff. She knew how to call a moving company. She knew how to both find a new apartment and how to get the lights turned on. Without her I probably would have moved, but it would have been some sort of sleeping at a bus station situation while I got my shit together that I’m guessing would have ended up with me reenacting the real-life version of hard-to-watch heroin scenes from the movie Requiem for a Dream. Hopefully I would at least get to be the Marlon Wayans character. I don’t know if Catherine knows how important she was to that move. She probably does, but I’m guessing that she doesn’t know that I know. Hopefully, you are reading this, Catherine. Thank you.
After about a year, it was clear things weren’t working. I was wanting to be out doing comedy and hanging out with my new comic friends. She was getting closer to wanting to settle down and have a family. After a year, Catherine had a great job but hadn’t really established her life out there, and I was always going off to do comedy . . . or see comedy . . . or hang out with comedians. In my mind, I had to choose between my relationship and comedy. I chose comedy.
So we broke up, and very soon after, I met Lynn. By this point I was twenty-five, and Lynn was younger than me by a few years. Lynn was Vietnamese and Southern Californian. We met at our job at a Berkeley school supplies store. Where Catherine had felt like the first person in my life who had really liked me and pursued me, Lynn was the first person I really liked and pursued . . . successfully. I didn’t know I had it in me before that. She’s attractive. I want to date her. Wait, I got her?
I flirted hard-core with Lynn for a month, and when things were finally officially over with Catherine, I asked Lynn out. And later that day we were making out in front of a church down the street from where we worked. The first few months were the kind of relationship that songs are written about—but like Prince songs. It was amazing and very TV-MA. After that, things pulled apart, as usually happens. It became super on-again, off-again for the next two years. Everyone has to have a relationship where you look back and think, That person is crazy! And for me and Lynn, we are EACH that person. We were two people who were holding tightly to each other because we felt like we didn’t belong on this earth and needed someone, but we were the wrong people to cling to. It was the kind of relationship where we’d break up, and people would say, “Good For you! You’re much better without him/her,” and the next week we’d be back together, and our people would say, “Oh . . . Good. For . . . you both? I guess.” I know I screwed up by moving in with her super quickly. The place I found after Catherine was not livable long-term. I wormed my way into Lynn’s apartment. I was a punk. And I’m sure it totally screwed up our time together. I should have grown up and handled my business differently. Sorry, Lynn.
One thing about Lynn, though, that was markedly different from Catherine was her approach to race and racism. Catherine was goodhearted and had been a schoolteacher working in the Chicago public schools. She was basically living that Dangerous Minds life of a white woman with hope, trying hard to use the minimal resources the school system provided to teach kids who needed the maximum resources. (I’ve known a lot of public school teachers in my life, and I’ve seen how all of them end up using their paycheck to subsidize their kids’ education. It’s gross that the system doesn’t have their backs.) When I was dating Catherine, I was starting to talk about race and racism in my act. I wasn’t that funny yet, which meant that sometimes it either sounded like weak diatribes or petty criticisms of white people. And after we moved to Oakland, I had a bunch of free time before I found a job. I had also read Richard Pryor’s autobiography, Pryor Convictions, so I think I was trying on some level to replicate the mystical mixture of the Bay Area that I read he put together when he moved out there. No, not crack and alcohol and fire. That was his Southern California mixture. When he moved to the Bay Area he had apparently begun reading a lot of books to help him understand his feelings about Black liberation. I started regularly going to a used bookstore on Grand Avenue in Oakland. I bought Roots, a collection of Alex Haley’s interviews from Playboy magazine, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (that I was rereading), Soul on Ice, and others I hadn’t read in any of my schools. Catherine noticed that there were suddenly all these Black books around, and I just remember there was a feeling in the air of Catherine being like, “Oh, are you going to be doing this now?” It wasn’t necessarily said out loud, but I just remember being conscious of where the books were in the house. But I kept going with all the reading; after all, if you’re going to be doing this, Oakland, birthplace of the Black Panthers, is a great place to do this.
But onstage I felt like I couldn’t lean into (yeah, I know) trying new material about race and racism because it made it weird at home. But when I started dating Lynn, things were immediately different. Lynn had the classic story of a person of color who goes to a suburban school with mostly white students, and the mostly white students had given her four years of simultaneously treating her like a white person (racist jokes and never taking into account that as a Vietnamese-American she might have a different experience from theirs that could be helpful in their understanding of the world at large) and also like she was weird because of the food she ate or the second language she spoke. Lynn moved to the Bay Area and was deeply committed to letting the white man have it, while at the same time, due to her upbringing, she was also deeply committed to Radiohead being the greatest band of all time period. I thought the dissonance was hilarious, but I also thought it was awesome.
I loved Lynn. She was very freeing and fun. Her sister was in grad school and also lived in Oakland and was dating another academic. It seemed like everybody I was hanging out with was an activist or ethnic studies major. And mostly they were all people of color. It was glorious. I was fully living my version of Richard Pryor’s experience. They were younger than me but also smarter than me. I started talking about race and racism more directly in my act. Lynn liked it and pushed me to do it more, which made me want to do it even more.
But at the same time, we clearly weren’t meant to be. We had all the benefits of a crazy relationship, and all the shitty things about a crazy relationship. Super fun when it’s fun, SUPER not fun when it’s not fun. Also despite Lynn pushing me to step into my full self as a comedian and more importantly as a Black man, there was a problem. She knew her parents didn’t want her to be with a Black man. So when they came into town I had to skedaddle. One time they stayed for a couple of days and I actually had to get a hotel. This was before the days of pulling up a hotel on your Hotels.com app on your phone, so I didn’t know how to get one, especially since I didn’t really have a lot of money. I knew me and Catherine had stayed in a cheap hotel when we visited San Francisco before we moved. I went there. It was the kind of hotel that is downtown but is super cheap . . . too cheap. It was depressing to be back there. It was as if my life wasn’t moving forward. I stayed there for two days feeling rejected by my girlfriend, but at the same time I knew I was a loser for not having my own place to live. I vowed that if Lynn and I broke up (at that point it was already “if we broke up again”) I wouldn’t ever again date somebody who didn’t want me to meet her parents.
Now it was the early 2000s. Me and Lynn were fully done. The last time we really spoke was after 9/11, which makes it a weird marker for my life. “Where were you on 9/11?” “At my house, promising myself that I would never talk to my ex again! . . . Also watching the towers fall on TV.” This was my first time truly being single and not immediately running into a new relationship. When I met Melissa I was coming off a really bad stretch of dating. I was excited to be single, but it quickly got out of hand. I didn’t know what I was doing. People always think male comedians have a lot of people wanting to hook up with them after shows. And some do, but in my experience most definitely do not. For one reason, comedy clubs are classic date-night venues. Everybody is already with everybody. Two, most comics’ acts are far from sexy. You spend a lot of time onstage talking about either how much you suck or how much the world sucks. This doesn’t turn most people on. Three, in my observation, the guys who do find a disproportionately high number of hookups after the show would find those in their regular life anyway. And/or they have written an act that is basically a walking personal ad, about how they are single and can’t find a date, but also . . . “Here’s some stories about me having sex so that you know I do like all that stuff.” I’m not mad at those guys. I’m just saying that when people say humor is an aphrodisiac, they don’t realize it only really works that way if you are already attracted to the person. I bet Idris Elba is hilarious to everyone he meets: man, woman, child, animal, and mineral.
So since I wasn’t meeting women at the clubs, I had basically gone on an Internet date bender. The early 2000s were the Jurassic period of Internet dating. There were the beginnings of dedicated dating sites like Yahoo! Personals and Match.com, but a lot of the dating sites were charging money to join them. I was a broke comic. I was going to be lucky if I had money to pay for the date let alone money to pay for access to the date, so I went to the back alley of Internet dating . . . Craigslist. Do you need a slightly used, not too stained couch and a relationship? Well, then Craigslist is here for YOU! No disrespect to Craigslist. (Or even to Craig himself. I used to see him in my neighborhood in San Francisco all the time.) Maybe dating on Craiglist is better now. But back then in the still relatively early days of the Internet, it was pretty bleak. Initially all you could do was run an ad with words. It wasn’t a dedicated profile. It was just an ad. That meant that like two days after you posted it, it was buried. And the only way they might, might find you is if they happened to search for your key words. Good luck with that. Everybody was mostly still enjoying the same “hiking, watching movies, and hanging out.” This led to me (and others, I found out) posting multiple ads so you could get more attention. And then it led to me posting multiple ads with multiple perspectives just to try to expand my customer base. Soon it became addictive. It was just sort of a video game where the high score was love . . . Who am I kidding? The high score was usually a drunken make-out in a bar that neither of us had ever been to before just so we were unlikely to run into friends. Cue the romantic violins. Also initially on Craigslist you couldn’t post pictures, so you were counting on someone’s prose to describe their physical appearance, which is a lot like someone trying to describe a bad smell to you; you need to be there, so you can know why you don’t want to be there.
And when there was a picture swap after a few e-mails had been exchanged, the pictures were never good enough to tell you what you needed to know. This was way before camera phones had fully replaced cameras for most people. A lot of the pictures you’d get from people were physical pictures that had been scanned into computers. Pictures where uncles and exes had been cropped out. Scanned on cheap scanners. And this was before we were all so used to getting our picture taken. Now everybody has a way they want their picture.
“Hold the camera at a high angle. Let’s move over there where the light is hitting my face. OK, lemme put my right leg forward. Don’t shoot directly on. Give me a little angle to the right. OK . . . OK . . . I’m ready for my DMV photo now.”
So all these pictures were of people not looking at the camera or caught in the middle of a laugh or with a complete expressionless look on their face. These pictures were the kind that Lennie from Law & Order would carry around so he could say, “We’re looking for this girl.” (And of course the all-time best Law & Order cast, with no regard to year is of course Lennie and Ray as the cops, Sam Waterston and Angie Harmon as the DAs.)
By the time I met Melissa, my Internet dating had stopped being fun, and I found myself in a wilderness of horrible. I’m not blaming the people I dated. It just felt sort of destined to fail. Every Craigslist date had become the same: Two people set a date. They both show up for the date. One person would show up thinking, “I can’t believe it’s you. You are everything your Craigslist ad said and more. How did I get this lucky? . . . Should we spend the holidays with your family or mine?” And at the same time the other person would be thinking, “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S YOU! HOW THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO SEND THAT PICTURE OUT WHEN YOU KNOW IT ONLY VAGUELY LOOKS LIKE YOU NOW? IF THE PERSON IN THAT PICTURE COMMITTED A CRIME THEY WOUDN’T EVEN BRING YOU IN FOR QUESTIONING. THAT’S HOW LITTLE THAT PICTURE LOOKS LIKE YOU. AND WHAT’S THAT SMELL? IS THAT YOU? I’M GOING TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SEE IF THE WINDOWS ARE BIG ENOUGH TO CRAWL OUT OF.” One person would be super sad, and the other person would be super excited. And if you were excited, you knew the other person was super sad. It never matched up. And I was on both ends of that equation. It got to the point where if I realized that I was excited to see the person then I also knew immediately, “Aw man! I’m the loser here. Dammit!”
My last Craigslist date was the worst version of this. It was clear that we both thought the other one sucked. But we were trying to honor the social contract by spending a “date’s worth of time” together. And as we were both sitting at a coffee shop wondering how long that is—two hours? Three hours? How about an hour? That’s fine, right? Forty-five minutes is definitely too short . . . right?—a friend of the woman’s walked up to say hi. We were both happy that new blood was being injected into this experience, and then when the friend left to catch the bus, we both got sad again. That’s when the woman who I was on the date with said, “I live near her! I could give her a ride home.” I was like, “Really?” I immediately jumped up and ran onto the bus. I pushed my way past the other passengers until I got to the friend, who understandably had a confused look on her face when she saw me, the dude who had just been on a date with her friend. Before she could even say anything, I blurted out, “SHE CAN GIVE YOU A RIDE HOME!” The friend responded, “Oh. OK.” We got off the bus. They left. We didn’t even have to say the date was over.
I was done with Craigslist. And just like the movie says you are supposed to do, I met Melissa the next week. It was 2003, two years after I finally broke up with Lynn. My friend Bruce, who had helped me develop the Bell Curve, introduced me to Jill, who was a woman in her fifties developing a one-person show about her crazy life (kinda like most people who write a one-person show . . . It’s either that or cancer). Jill told me about a dance and art history student named Melissa Hudson who was going to do the lights and sound. In my mind, I was picturing an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old coed. Melissa had been hearing about me, assuming I was Jill’s age. I’d been picturing a kid, and she was picturing a fifty-year-old man. So we had this moment of looking at each other and thinking, Oh, you’re not what I expected.
We spent the whole day working together. She was actually twenty-three, but I guessed at the time she was twenty-eight—I was thirty at the time, which was key because I had told myself that I could only date women who were my age. I was immediately attracted to her. She had long, dark brown hair, was a dancer, athletically built, and she was tall—around five foot nine—and carried herself even taller. There was something about her that reminded me of Wonder Woman. She looked like she could both throw and take a punch. And she could; I later found out that she was a black belt in Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art that was popularized by Chuck Norris. We had fun early on, staging mock battles between us, since I had studied Wing Chun kung fu, Bruce Lee’s original martial art. We often “re-created” the scene from Bruce Lee’s third film, Way of the Dragon, where Chuck and Bruce fought. (Do I have to tell you that Bruce won . . . easily? No, I hope not. Take that, Chuck Norris Facts.)
And when I say that Melissa reminded me of Wonder Woman, I’m talking 1970s-era Lynda Carter Wonder Woman, a woman who while, yes, looking completely ridiculous by 2017 standards in her crime-fighting outfit of booty shorts, impossible-to-keep-her-covered-up top, and high-heeled boots, was clearly capable of kicking ass. Lynda Carter was broad shouldered, athletic, and looked like she might be descended from Amazons, like the character. This was the ’70s, when women in Hollywood could be built like that. Lynda Carter, Pam Grier, Jayne Kennedy, Raquel Welch—and Melissa could have hung out with all of them. And she was in grad school with an undergrad degree in contemporary dance. And even though she was twenty-three, she seemed fully grown-up. I just felt like her whole energy was, “I don’t need you . . . but I like you.” It was intoxicating. Shortly after we started dating she had parked her car in a lot and lost her ticket as she went to pay. The lot had one of those policies where if you lost your ticket they charged you the full twenty-four-hour fee. And in San Francisco, if I remember correctly, the fee was like one month’s rent plus everything in your pockets. I remember being amazed as she calmly paid the outrageous fee without complaint and then went to her car, found the ticket, and went back and got her money refunded. I didn’t have experience with my partners being this reasonable in stressful situations. Hell, I didn’t have experience with me being this reasonable in stressful situations. I was in love. Growing up with my mom, I was attracted to women—and people—who can take care of themselves. You can lean on each other. You’re not always being leaned on.
—
The night we first met we all went out to get Chinese food. I got a phone call saying they needed someone to open at Cobb’s Comedy Club that night. Cobb’s was one of my two home clubs in San Francisco, the other being the Punch Line. I knew it would be an easy way to impress this woman I had just met. I invited Jill and Melissa to see me perform.
At this point I was confident in my skills to be funny . . . at least for the twenty minutes I was given that night. I knew that Cobb’s would see me walk in with these people and give them VIP service. I didn’t do this often . . . or hardly ever, so I knew everyone would be on their best behavior to help me impress them. Tom Sawyer, the notoriously hard-ass owner, would give them great seats. Damon and Johnny, the bartenders who had become my friends, bought Melissa and Jill their drinks. During this era, I was one of the local guys. One of the solid local comics the club could depend on to do a good job and help out when needed, from moving chairs for the carpet cleaner to being lightweight security if someone got out of hand. (That just meant standing behind the actual security to create the illusion of more help. Being 6'4'' has its privileges.) People genuinely liked me, and Melissa could see that. Later she would often make fun of me by saying, “Everybody loves Kamau!” But really it was important to her that people did like me. She had come out of a relationship where that had not always been true.
The next day, after we worked on Jill’s show, Melissa asked me if I needed a ride home. I said yes, even though we weren’t going the same direction at all. It was the first time I tried to kiss her, even though she made it clear that she was not going to make her lips available to me on the first day we met. A couple days later, she invited me to see a modern dance show. I of course said yes. Even though I had no interest in seeing a modern dance show. Now I have seen probably several dozen contemporary dance shows. And I can enjoy them. (Some of them don’t actually care if you enjoy them. Like a comedian who revels in walking the room.) I’m all about that Robert Moses, Bill T. Jones, and BreadnButter (Melissa’s dance company). That night we did what couples in San Francisco are supposed to do on a first date. We had burritos in the Mission. While we were eating, an older Black couple walked in and the woman looked over toward us. She started talking to the man, and I could tell she was getting agitated. She kept looking at us and getting visibly angrier. I kept tracking them as the lady kept looking more and more upset between taking looks at us. A few minutes later, when their burritos were ready, they quickly left the taqueria, and her husband held her arm and guided her into the car the way a cop puts a suspect in the backseat. By this point I was smiling and almost laughing. That’s how I do when things get awkward like that sometimes.
Melissa looked slightly confused. “Is that about us?”
Me: “Yup. I’m guessing she’s not happy about us being together.”
Melissa: “Really?”
I wasn’t totally shocked by this. I had experienced moments like that when I had dated Catherine. (With Lynn, we didn’t really have those problems. Something about the fact that we were both people of color made it so that even Black people who didn’t like interracial dating thought it was fine. As long as she wasn’t white.) And these things do happen, even in the so-called liberal bastion of San Francisco, but Melissa was genuinely shocked. She had dated a Black dude before, but it was in college, and they were both in the theater department so everybody was trying everything in that setting. (“I’m going to do my one-person show where I drink my grandma’s blood.” “COOL! I’m going to date a Latina and see what my parents say when they see the pictures on Facebook!”) Melissa told me later that she realized in that moment that a part of our relationship was going to be about other people’s feelings about interracial dating. It opened her eyes. She knew she’d have to decide if she was going to be all-in. She was. Because that is how she do.
After eating and talking about what had happened, we walked to the dance show together. As we were crossing the street, I took a chance and grabbed for her hand. She let me do it. This was already going well. So later, in the middle of the show, when the lights went down between pieces, I leaned over as we were talking and I tried to kiss her. She let me do that too. And we’ve been together ever since.
Two weeks later, I met her parents. Honestly, I didn’t think it was a great idea. But Melissa assured me that this is how it worked in her family. She had an older brother and twin sisters. To me that was so different from my family that it basically sounded like the Duggars (minus the gross stuff). Her family’s house was the place where all the friends hung out after school. It was the family where once one of the kids goes on three good dates, the parents ask, “So . . . when are we going to meet him?” I knew there were red flags (and maybe one big 6'4'' Black flag) with our relationship. But Melissa made it clear that this was happening. So we all went out to the Stinking Rose, the world’s number one garlic restaurant, and had dinner. And I told myself, “This will be fine.”
And it was fine. Totally fine. In a “How was your sandwich that you bought from 7-Eleven?” “It was fine” way. Her parents were nice and friendly and I sensed that they were thoroughly unimpressed. I didn’t blame them at all. At all. And I really didn’t think it had anything to do with me being Black. Well, at least not in the way that makes this story juicy. Think of it from her parents’ side of things. Here is their twenty-three-year-old daughter who is in grad school. And she introduces them to a thirty-year-old college dropout, alleged stand-up comedian (I say “alleged” because no one believes you are a stand-up comic if they don’t know who you are. No matter how famous you happen to be. They always ask for proof. “Really? Where have you performed? When? Are you on TV? Now? Like can I turn on any random TV right now and see you doing stand-up comedy RIGHT NOW?”) I’m sure her parents felt like, “How the hell is this guy going to make a living? He’s got nothing.” And if they weren’t thinking that about me, I was certainly thinking that about myself.
But me and Melissa kept dating, and we very quickly became very essential to each other’s artistic lives. When I did the Bell Curve, she held the projector in her lap. I did lights and sound at her shows and helped stage manage and move chairs and whatever else it took. She used all her dance training to clean up my stage presence. “Stop shuffling your feet so much. Stay rooted while you are talking. It will help the jokes.” It did. She ran the box office at many, many of my shows. We were embedded in the most important part of each other’s lives. And the best part for me was that nothing I was doing onstage about race and racism threatened her at all. She only offered criticism if she felt like I wasn’t making the point effectively, or if she genuinely didn’t understand. I showed her an example of what an artist did out in the world. She told me that my example helped her push forward in her dance career. Shortly after we started dating, she dropped out of her graduate program and eventually went back to school to do what she wanted to do: be a dancer and a dance scholar. And now she has her master’s in experimental dance choreography and her PhD in critical dance studies. I love referring to us as “Doctor and Mr. Bell.” But before all that there were times through the years when I was making money, and times she was. And there were times when we were literally living off her student loans. But she believed I was funny. It was always important to my mom that the person I was with believed in what I was doing, and through Melissa I realized how important it was to me too.
We’ve been together for fourteen years, which is basically a third of my life. It doesn’t feel that long because every day together is like a beautiful new flower blooming. OK. Maybe not that. But seriously, we’ve been through some shit, and we’ve been through some ups and downs. And I know who is responsible for most of those “downs.” In this relationship it is clear who the crazy one is. This career I’ve chosen is designed to make the person crazy. It’s me. One hundred percent.
But having grown up with my mother as a single parent—who I think did a better job by herself than most two-parent families—I know that the idea of being divorced, and being a single parent, is around. It’s in the air. Male comedians talk about how they hate their wives . . . or how they’re happy to be divorced and hate their ex-wives. Wives are targets, even if they really love them. It’s a male-comedian trope.
During Totally Biased, it became clear that the show (and all the tremendous challenges and changes and incomprehensible level of hard work) was destroying me. And in turn it began to destroy my marriage. There was a time when I actually did contemplate divorce. It was in the middle of what should have been the biggest success of my career, but I was allowing it to make me crazy. The pressure and the hours were terrible, and I wasn’t healthy. At some point my eyes turned red. A doctor had given eye drops to me, and it turned out I was allergic to them. You can watch Totally Biased episodes where my eyes are bloodshot, and at the time I had no idea why. I was barely holding it together.
There was a time when I was living alone at my dad’s apartment in New York, and I would just visit Sami every few days. It was a taste of the divorced life. And. I. Hated. It. In one way, there was less pressure. I could just focus on the show. I could come home at night without that pressure to be connected to the family. The pressure to answer questions and check in. I remember thinking, “I can just come home and watch TV! I’m more productive than I’ve been in a while!” But I hated it. And I am forever grateful to my wife that she waited me out. She let me go through my bullshit and I’m even more grateful that she let me come back. At some point I realized that I refused to let me let a TV show be even partially to blame for my family breaking apart. I didn’t care if the show was a hit or not. “Luckily,” it wasn’t a hit. Stay tuned, true believers!