I'm Down: A Memoir

I’m Down

A Memoir

MISHNA WOLFF

St. Martin’s Press
New York

I’M DOWN
. Copyright © 2009 by Mishna Wolff.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolff, Mishna.

I’m down / Mishna Wolff.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4299-8290-0

1. Wolff, Mishna—Childhood and youth. 2. Wolff, Mishna—Family. 3. African American neighborhoods—Washington (State) 4. Comedians—United States—Biography. 5. Models (Persons)—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.W55A3 2009

792.702'8092—dc22

[B]                  2008046317

First Edition: June 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my mom and dad, who gave me the best childhood I would never have been smart enough to ask for.

O
KAY, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE
. I have received so much time, guidance, effort, and encouragement on this book. Let me start by thanking all the amazing people at St. Martin’s: Lisa Senz, Sarah Goldstein, Sally Richardson, John Murphy, Dori Wein-traub, Stephen Lee, and everyone else who did the hell out of their jobs. And most important, Rose Hilliard, my fantastic editor, who brought so much to this book and just
gets
it.

Thank you, Erin Hosier, the best agent a girl could have, seriously. Sarah Thyre, for doing me a favor for no good reason and expecting nothing in return. My sister and best friend Anora, whom I am so proud of. The writers who pulled out a chair for me at the table: Jill Soloway, Maggie Rowe, Darcy Cosper, Josh Olson, and Claudia Lonow—thank you. The Fox family, especially Lauren Fox, my friend through
all
seasons. Virgina Scott, for your help with this story. Frank Hannah, a mentor who deserves a whole page. Hillary Malloy and the Malloy family, for filling a lot of seats and feeding me so often. Ira Sacheroff, my very funny and even-tempered stepfather. My stepbrother Sam, he-he. UCB Theater, Caliber Media, Eric King, Pat Healy, Jaclyn Lafer, Richard Potter, and the Doners; Linda, my stepmother, who makes life better. Lauren
Francis—I couldn’t make it without you. Mrs. Romano, my seventh-and eighth-grade English teacher, who taught me about irony right when I needed it. Marc Maron, thank you for the risks you took and everything you shared with me. Lorca Cohen, you are truly a great friend who gave me a sanctuary to write in when my world got too chaotic. And thank you, thank you, thank you, Jeremy Doner, the most amazing man in the whole wide world. I promise I will make you so happy.

E
VENTS IN THIS BOOK
may be out of sequence, a few minor characters are composites of more than one person, many conversations were re-created and names have been changed.

This book is from my perspective as I was growing up. I honored what I thought was true at that age, rather than what I might know to be true now. My memory is limited to what it is, and I didn’t always have all the information as a child. Others might tell it differently.

I claim none of this as gospel. That being said, most of this stuff is totally true.

I’m Down

I
AM WHITE
. My parents, both white. My sister had the same mother and father as me—all of us completely white. White Americans of European ancestry. White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white. I think it’s important to make this clear, because when I describe my childhood to people: the years of moving from one black Baptist church to the next, the all-black basketball teams, the hours having my hair painfully braided into cornrows, often their response is, “So . . . who in your family was black?” No one. All white.

However, my dad, John Wolff, or as the guys in the neighborhood called him, “Wolfy,” truly believed he was a black man. He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Foxx, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. He walked like a black man, he talked like a black man, and he played sports like a black man. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried. It wasn’t an identity crisis; it’s who he was. He was from “the neighborhood”—our neighborhood.

We lived in an area of south Seattle called the Rainier Valley that your average white person, at the time, wouldn’t have gone to without a good reason. Not that there weren’t plenty
of reasons to visit the Rainier Valley—there were. Right off M. L. King Jr. Way, I lived near the Langston Hughes Auditorium, not far from the Medgar Evers pool, close to the Douglass-Truth Library, down the street from the Quincy Jones Auditorium, which incidentally, was in the high school Jimi Hendrix went to. On the literary tip, Iceberg Slim had run a gang of hoes not far from where we lived.

But there were virtually no whites. There were the occasional middle-class white hippies who moved onto our street to escape bougie-ness, but they usually moved away when they had kids. And my dad always wound up hating them. Sooner or later they’d “be showing off” by throwing around their bachelor’s degrees or fixing their roofs, and we’d be banned from any interaction with them. Even before it was hip, Dad was “keepin’ it real.”

He’d moved to our neighborhood as a child in the early sixties, back when it was a white and Asian neighborhood. That was before school busing programs, when middle-class white people started moving out of the cities and into the suburbs, because, “you know.” My grandparents were too cheap to be racist. You don’t sell when the market is down. And as the neighborhood got blacker—so did my dad. He was in high school when he started to help the Black Panthers with the breakfast program. He played sports and he made his friends. They were the brothers and he was cool.

But after a quarter of college football failed to make him a star, my dad reinvented himself as a hippie and ventured east to Putney, Vermont. He grew his hair long, wore leather pants, and roamed the halls of higher education selling weed. It was here that he met my mom. She was smart, pretty, socially conscious, and super needy. And when my dad talked about civil rights, she assumed he was a feminist. She immediately quit school and moved to Maine with him to live in the woods with no electricity and no running water. He had that effect on women.

They did the “back to nature” thing for a while, but once my mom had me, my dad convinced her to move into the house that he grew up in. My grandparents were finally moving to a better neighborhood. And eventually my mom agreed: women like free houses. But once my dad was back on his block, he began to change—or rather change back.

He cut off his long hair and got a short perm, he became obsessed with his shoes, and he bought us an African drum coffee table, and one of those high-backed wicker chairs—you know, the ones you always see Huey Newton in. And he was invited by all his friends from high school to join the Esquire Club, an all-black men’s club. Within a year the man my mom had married had shed his crunchy granola skin, exposing a
bona fide soul brother—and they teetered on the brink of divorce.

Meanwhile my little sister, who was born in the Rainier Valley, took after my dad. She seemed to pop right out of the womb and into a dance troupe. She found so much love and approval in the black community, you’d think she’d invented beatboxing (see Doug E. Fresh).

So while my mom was busy planning her escape, my sister and father were cohorts—completely integrated into the community we lived in. And then there was me—the honky. I’m not saying that to be provocative or put myself down.

I
was
a honky. I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t double Dutch—the dueling jump ropes scared me. I didn’t have great stories that started with “We was at . . .” and ended with “. . . I told her not to make me take my earrings off!”

Honestly, being a honky was A-OK with me. I wished my whole family were honkies. Big honkies! I wished we were the cover family for
Honky Weekly
. If I could have picked my family, they would have been honky professors that sat around in honky-assed tweed jackets reading the paper, stopping occasionally to say honky things about what was going on in China and how brilliant I was. They would talk in gentle honky voices and when they made a chicken they would THROW OUT THE GIZZARDS.

Instead I got my dad, sitting around playing dominoes with four large black men, who were all apparently my uncle, and who agreed that the only way to discuss affirmative action was—at the top of your lungs. They also thought kids were beer-fetchers crossed with remote controls and that there was something seriously wrong with my rhythm. I had a rhythm problem. This was not acceptable to my father, and so he began his crusade to make me “down.”