Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (5 page)

I could not wait to leave that job. Thankfully, on the fourth try, almost two years after my first attempt, I passed the first-class radio operator license test. Doors opened up. White radio stations were under public pressure to hire blacks, but they did not want a black disc jockey. An engineer, however, would fit the bill, and there were very few blacks with that valuable first-class license.

I was hired almost immediately at WRVR, the radio station of Riverside Church. In those days radio stations went off the air during the night, and an engineer had to open the doors and turn the transmitter back on every morning. I landed the gig to arrive at 5 a.m. It didn’t matter if there was a snowstorm; I had to be there or else there would be no broadcast. I finally had a good excuse to quit the post office—and I did.

After a year at WRVR a job opened up at WQXR, the radio station of the
New York Times
. When I showed up, so young and so black, the man at the station skeptically asked if I had a first-class license. I showed it to him. I wasn’t even finished filling out the application when he said, “You’re hired.” I became one of the first blacks to work in downtown radio outside of janitorial departments. Almost all of the on-air blacks, including Frankie “The Loveman” Crocker, were uptown.

During my second day at WQXR it was raining, so I bought an iridescent raincoat on the spot. I was so proud of having a great new job. I was so happy about my good-looking slick raincoat. Everything was looking as good as that rainbow-colored raincoat.

When I got home that day, I bumped into a friend.

“Did you hear about Jimmy?”

“No,” I said, remembering only that he was having money problems and I had loaned him $20 the week before. “What’s happening with the Big Do?”

“He jumped off the subway platform and threw himself in front of a train.”

We call each other brothers all the time. But Jimmy and I—we were
brothers
.

3

Stand-up for the Panthers

REVOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR. BUT WHEN I STOOD UP IN FRONT OF my freshman Oral Interpretation class at SEEK, I had no idea I would soon be in front of crowds who were shouting “Black Power!”

I had to speak for three minutes on the spot without any notes. All I knew were a few Dick Gregory jokes, such as:

People would stop smoking if the warning on the side said, “Caution: Cigarette smoking will make you Black.”

The way I figured it, if no one liked my speech, I could blame him for the material. But the class dug what I did. They laughed, so I kept rapping. That really “turned me on,” as we used to say in the ’60s. I started to think that maybe standing up and telling jokes was something I was good at.

One teacher, Alice Trillin, disagreed. She saw an original story I wrote and called me into her office.

“Not funny,” she said. “Your ideas are weak and your grammar is the worst I have ever seen. You think you’re good and you’re not. You need to reconsider what you’re doing.” She gave me a copy of a
New Yorker
article. “
This
is funny.”

I quickly looked over the magazine piece. “This is different from what I’m doing,” I said. “I’m doing stuff about the street, from the street.”

“This is how you should write,” she said, handing me another dozen or so
New Yorker
articles. “My husband wrote all these. He’s a great writer and someone you should follow.” Her husband was rising journalist Calvin Trillin.

She sensed that I was rejecting her criticism, which only made her more vehement about stopping me from what she saw as embarrassing myself. “You’re not going to try to submit this anywhere, are you?”

“If I can, I will.”

“This will never sell. You’re just not good at this.”

I was still working as a radio engineer, now at WMCA, one of the major AM stations, and I wasn’t able to be part of the SEEK talent shows at night. But I continued performing my jokes and bits in class. I was even invited to perform in front of other speech and drama classes. Students would see me in the hall and say, “Hey man, you were funny.” Their encouragement kept me going. After all, nobody in my family had ever been in show business. The only thing I knew about being a comedian was what I had learned from Gregory’s book.

In the projects word would spread like wildfire when a black act was going to be on
Ed Sullivan
or some other big television show. We made sure we were home to watch the Jackson Five, Supremes, Four Tops, or comedians like Godfrey Cambridge or Flip Wilson—each of them were one of us. So, too, were the first blacks on local TV news. Bob Teague on WNBC and Gil Noble on WABC were probably the first black anchormen in the city in the late ’60s. But to become one of those blacks, a black man on television, was not on the radar for any of us in the projects. I never even fantasized about that possibility.

Then, one day in 1968 someone at SEEK suggested I go to a gathering place in Harlem called the East Wind where a group called the Last Poets might let me on stage. I said to myself, what do I have to do with poetry? Don’t comedians like Gregory play nightclubs?

When you’re young, you don’t know any better. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but sometimes that can send you in the wrong direction. Instead of going to the East Wind, I went to the Club Baron, a down ’n’ dirty black club at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue.

A haze of smoke and the smell of reefer overwhelmed me. People were drinking. There were hookers. There were transvestites. And this was during the day! I had never been in a place like that in my entire twenty years of life.

“Frank Schiffman at the Apollo told me to come over and see you about a gig,” I lied confidently to the manager, dropping the name of the owner of the famous Harlem theater.

He looked skeptically at me. “You know Frank Schiffman?”

“Yeah! I work the Apollo all the time.” I plowed ahead—with energy! “My schedule is really busy, but I have next week open and he told me you could squeeze me in.” Of course, I had every week open.

“Frank Schiffman told you to come here?”

“Yeah! He wants me to do some time when Joe Williams is here. I work with the Count Basie band all the time. Joe knows me.” Joe Williams, who I had never met, had been the singer for Basie for ages and was truly one of the greats.

“Okay, okay,” said the manager. “Come by next Friday and you can do those sets. We don’t need you for the whole week.”

“No problem,” I said nonchalantly. “What kind of money we talkin’ about?” I never lacked for chutzpah, a word my Jewish friends taught me.

“We’ll see.”

“But I need to know the money.”

“We’ll see.” He would not budge.

“Alright, I’ll be here.”

When I arrived for my first out-of-the-classroom performance, I saw Williams at the bar doing shots. He wore a tam and an ascot, and he smoked a cigarette in a holder. Other than Jim Gilliam, he was the most famous person I had ever met. But that did not stop me from interrupting the conversation he was having with someone.

“Mr. Williams, I’m Jimmie Walker. I’m your opening act.”

“What?” he asked in his unmistakable baritone voice.

“Yeah, I’ll do my fifteen or twenty before you.”

He looked perplexed at this goofy-looking, skinny kid standing in front of him.

“Have you ever performed before?” he asked suspiciously.

“I work the Apollo all the time,” I boasted.

He knew I was lying, shook his head, and returned to his conversation.

“I see you talked to Joe,” the manager said.

“Yeah, we’re buds. We go way back. What time do I go on? Eight o’clock?”

He looked at me with a smirk. “No.”

“Well, when does the show start?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

“That’s almost midnight!”

“That’s right, three shows—eleven-thirty, one-forty-five, and three.” He looked me over. “Can you drink?”

“I don’t really drink.”

“Let me put this another way: Are you old enough to drink?”

“No.”

He told me I could sit in the supply room in back. I waited there alone for hours. Finally, the emcee came to me and asked for my intro. Naturally, I told him to say I work at the Apollo all the time.

“You work at the Apollo?”

“Yeah! All the time!”

I nervously walked onto the stage, which was elevated above the seventy-five-foot long bar. I had heard that if the crowd didn’t like you, they would throw shot glasses up at you—if you were lucky. Because looking down from the stage, I could also see guns and knives in the belts and jackets of men at the bar.

My “act” was what I had done in class. But here, after the first minute everyone in the club went back to their conversations or whatever else they were doing. It was like I wasn’t even there. I did another minute or two before thinking that maybe I should just leave. Not that anyone would notice. So I walked off the stage.

The manager came to me. “You’re a comedian, huh?”

“Yeah! I do a show at . . . ”

“Show? You didn’t do five minutes. From what I heard, I’m glad you didn’t do your show.”

“I’ll be better at the one-forty-five.”

“Let me tell you something. The one-forty-five show is going to be great—because you won’t be on it.”

I was disappointed, but I plugged onward.

“I’m going to get paid for this show, right?”

He stared at me without saying another word. At midnight I walked to the desolate 125th Street subway station and contemplated my failure all the way home.

I needed a new plan.

I had yet to even get a shot at being a disc jockey in the city. I spent months auditing a speech class at the New School that SEEK paid for to help me get rid of my regional accent. But I was still behind the board. So when a friend said there was a DJ job available at an R&B station in Norfolk, Virginia, I left WMCA and headed south. Jim Walker was on the air!

I had the early afternoon shift, a couple hours every day, on WRAP, 850 on your AM dial. That’s right, people, I was rappin’ on WRAP. This being my first job behind the microphone, I guess I wasn’t very good—at least that was what the ratings said. Personally, I was a city boy alone in the country and had a hard time adjusting to the lifestyle, just like those summer days in Birmingham. After only a few months I headed back to New York. This time I would check out the Last Poets at the East Wind.

The Last Poets had formed on May 19, 1968, when David Nelson, Abiodun Oyewole, and Gylan Kain teamed up to perform in Mount Morris Park at a celebration for Malcolm X’s birthday. They were politically charged and radical. At that first appearance they walked on chanting, “Are you ready, nigger? You got to be ready!” Soon after, Felipe Luciano, Nilija Obabi, Umar Bin Hassan and Jalal Nurridin joined, creating an ensemble that many today credit as the foundation of rap and hip hop.

Revolution, creativity, and something called “ritual drama” oozed out of the East Wind and onto the streets of Harlem. I went to their third-floor loft at 23 East 125th Street, down the street from the Apollo and adjacent to the Celebrity Soul on Wax record store and Olatunji’s African Drum and Dance Center, to offer my services as a comedian.

Nelson and Kain were not interested at all, saying, “This cat’s full of shit. We don’t have time for this. We deal in heavy revolutionary action. Who is this dude anyway?”

But Abiodun and Felipe disagreed, saying, “Come on, it can’t hurt. Let him get up there. If he bombs, he bombs. Go ahead, man, you can do it.”

There was no admission charge the night I first performed there, but a donation was highly recommended—at least a dollar bill—“nothing jingling,” as they would say. The show kicked off with someone announcing the latest news about the evils of whitey, including which black brothers had been incarcerated and why they had to be freed. The audience of a couple hundred punctuated the news with a few “Wake up, niggers!”

“Now give it up for the comedy of Jim Walker!” Uh, thanks.

My first joke was about how bad the weather was that night: “It’s raining so hard, I saw Superman in a cab!”

The crowd loved it as well as the rest of my eight minutes, much of it borrowed (okay, stolen) from Godfrey Cambridge. The Superman joke might have come from Clay Tyson, a then-known black stand-up comic who worked with James Brown and had a few records out. I couldn’t “borrow” from Gregory or Bill Cosby because they had a smooth storytelling persona about them. Cambridge did more traditional jokes that were easier to put in my own style. One that I did based on a Cambridge bit was:

What’s been happening uptown lately is there’s been a lot of robberies, man, and what’s been happening even worse is black people have been robbing black people. We robbing us. This leads me to the area of nonviolent crime. Now in violent crime we doing damned good. But in nonviolent crime—I mean when was the last time you seen a black embezzler? Or a black man getting busted for juggling the bank books? I’d like to be walking down 125th Street one time and have a black brother lay a counterfeit one dollar bill on me, with a picture of Washington—Booker T. Washington!

After the Last Poets did their chanting-rapping-drumming-political thing, someone passed a hat for additional donations for the comedian. I was paid $25, making it my first professional gig.

I went on to perform with the Last Poets for the next few years—at clubs, rallies, and black colleges up and down the East Coast, including Howard, North Carolina A&T, St. Augustine’s, Delaware State, and Virginia Union. They never said, “Hey, we’re going to Howard University. We’ll give you a hundred dollars to come along.” It was more like, “We’re going to Howard University. Do you want to go? It’s a benefit.” A benefit meant there was no money, at least for me. But the experience was invaluable.

Hanging around the Last Poets and the East Wind taught me a great deal—and not just about show business. Often a popular activist writer such as Nikki Giovanni or Sonia Sanchez would take the stage to read their poetry. I also absorbed a lot of black history that our schools forgot to teach us. I knew who Martin Luther King Jr. was, of course, but the Last Poets enlightened me about others, such as Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey.