Monday morning, six a.m. to be exact. I was tooling up Highway 101 in my brand new sports car. A 1999 Mazda Miata. British racing green. Five speed. It was the most amazing car I’d ever driven. (Yeah, sheltered automotive life. Indulge me.) Driving it was surreal. It was like being in a video game. I just knew that if I smashed up, the words start over would magically appear.
It was a gorgeous morning. The sun was just breaking over the mountains. I was on my way into Mill Valley to do a live-television remote. I was one of the hosts of the morning show for the local Fox TV affiliate. It was kind of a Bay Area Today show and I did daily remotes, like celebrity interviews and goofy man-on-the-street shtick.
When I say “shtick,” that’s exactly what I mean. I created a segment called “I Want to See It,” a throwback to the early days of television and You Asked for It. Viewers wrote in with outrageous stunts that they’d like to see me attempt on live television and I obliged. It was crazy things like jumping into the San Francisco Bay, bungee jumping, and having my legs waxed. I’m a fan of television’s golden age, so I relished the spontaneity. It was fun, but at the same time somewhat disheartening.
While the viewers loved the segments, I didn’t feel listened to or respected by management or by my producers. I had little to no say in what I did. When I didn’t have a viewer dare or a celebrity interview, my morning consisted of accosting strangers on the street as they headed to work, trying to get them to sing songs or eat bizarre things. An inordinate amount of my time was spent (not by my choice) standing in front of San Francisco coffee shops, talking to white yuppies eating bagels. God forbid I did anything that showcased or interacted with people of color.
It was really a love/hate relationship. I loved the people I worked with, but I was dissatisfied with the job. I’m a comic and a writer and I had no outlet for these gifts. On the other hand, I’d spent years working the road as a comic and now I had children who needed their daddy at home. I had a mortgage and parochial school tuitions. All of the white man’s burdens. The pay was decent and the perks were terrific, but I was incredibly dissatisfied. I’d become the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I used to be a rebel. Now I went into work wearing a tie and I was accountable to people who couldn’t give a rat’s ass what I thought or had to say. I was in a cage. It was a gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless.
I actually fell into the job accidentally. I started out by doing funny commentaries on the news once a week and then, upon noticing that the program had no weatherman, I jokingly said, “This show would be a hit if only you had a funny black weatherman.” Two weeks later, I got a call from the executive producer that the station manager wanted to see me about my idea.
“What idea?” I said.
“Your idea about doing the weather,” she replied.
“I was just kidding.”
“Well, it’s too late now. The boss wants to see you. You have a lunch date on Friday at noon.”
The next thing you know, I’m a fucking weatherman. I knew absolutely nothing about the weather. This is not necessarily a bad thing in the San Francisco area. Either it’s going to rain or it’s not. I could handle that. What I couldn’t handle was my entire identity now revolving around temperature highs and lows. Here I had spent my adult life writing and establishing myself as a comic who did what no other black comics working clubs were doing—topical and political humor—and suddenly, all anybody wants to talk to me about is whether or not it’s going to rain when they have their family picnic on Saturday.
I developed a following and I loved the production staff, crew, and my on-air coworkers, but I despised every minute of the job. Especially once black viewers began to write in with the same old challenges to my ethnic legitimacy. When you turn on your television in the mornings, with rare exceptions, you see black men only as the jolly, nonthreatening forecaster—Spencer Christian, Al Roker, Mark McEwan, etc. It has almost become a racist stereotype. Apparently, that’s all America can accept from a black man in the morning, advice on whether or not to send your kids to school in a sweater. I was accused of being every kind of Uncle Tom, simply because I had a job on television, a medium I’ve adored my entire life.
As I wrote earlier, I’m a radio-talk-show host and had been for a few years prior to getting the morning-show job. I had interviewed everybody from politicians to celebrities to criminal defendants in high-profile cases to any and every imaginable newsmaker. Talk radio was great. I wanted more from television. It was only when I threatened to quit and actually walked out of my TV general manager’s office that I was promoted to the cohost job that I now held. Still, the meaty stuff for TV was off-limits. On the radio I could talk to the governor about budget cuts. On TV, I was expected to dress like an Elvis impersonator as I spent a morning watching them prepare for their annual convention.
The best thing I got from this television experience was that for the first time in my life, I felt accepted. Having strangers walk up to me in the store and say hello made me feel “normal.” Like a real person. It was funny to run into some of my childhood tormentors, now grown men, who would puff up their chests as they introduced me to their wives and kids while they bragged about how we grew up together. No mention was ever made of the beatings or the epithets. I was just one of the guys when we were kids. The boob tube had finally given me what I’d longed for since childhood. I was accepted and I belonged.
As much as I hated the job, the day I drove the Miata to work was a good day. I was going to do a few segments interviewing one of my childhood heroes, James Doohan—Scotty from Star Trek. I’ve been a Star Trek fanatic since I was ten years old.
Is that black? Well, they do have black Vulcans now. How does that work?
Do they make the Vulcan peace sign while stoically intoning, “That is illogical, motherfucker”?
I met James Doohan once. I was twelve and at my first Star Trek convention. After waiting in the autograph line for hours, I finally got up to the table and thrust my hand out for him to shake. He grasped it firmly, and I noticed something didn’t feel quite right. It wasn’t all there. He was missing the middle finger of his right hand!!
I didn’t remember that episode:
CAPTAIN KIRK: Mr. Scott, I’ve got to have five fingers.
SCQTTY: Sorry, Captain, but four’s all there be!
It’s kind of a disquieting thing to shake hands with a digit amputee when you’re not expecting it. It’s like talking to somebody with a lazy eye. You never know which eye you’re supposed to be looking at during the conversation. Guess that’s why I never made it a point to meet Marty Feldman and Jack Elam.
With the aid of the wonder that is the Internet, I later learned that Doohan had landed on Juno Beach on D-Day as a member of the Royal Canadian Artillery (yes, the world’s most famous Scotsman was actually Canadian). While walking across a minefield, his unit came under machine gun attack from the Germans. Doohan took four bullets to his leg and had his finger blown off.
Note to self: Don’t freak out when you shake his hand.
The air was crisp that morning. There was an orange hue to the sky. Life was good. No, life was great. I was in my new sportscar. It was a gorgeous morning and I got to spend a few hours with one of my childhood heroes. I didn’t think I could have planned things any better than this.
As I was savoring my good fortune, I started to feel like my breath wasn’t quite filling my lungs. The following breath extracted a little less air, as did the next. My chest was tightening. It felt like somebody had violently grabbed me by the front of my shirt, balled it up, and twisted it in their burly fist, only instead of my shirt, they had the muscle and tissue of my chest.
Now my vision was blurry. It was as though I were looking through the lens of a camera that had been smeared with Vaseline to hide the wrinkles an aging model didn’t want captured for posterity. After a minute or so, I realized that my vision wasn’t blurry. The blur was from the tears. They were streaming down my cheeks.
I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and put the car in neutral. I made it just in time before I lost all power over my body. I began to convulse violently. I was sobbing uncontrollably.
“Why? Why?” I screamed as I pounded my new dashboard with my fist. “What the hell’s wrong with me?”