I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (28 page)

I always had my gun on me from that point on. Gradually, it went from being thought of as a tool of defense to a tool of offense—or even vengeance. When I was nineteen, I was at the Redondo Beach pier with a bunch of people late one night. My neighbor, a big, strong dude, started fucking around and picked me up by my shirt. Then he hung me over the pier, still joking, until he lost his grip and accidentally dropped me in the water.

Being dropped into that water felt like I was being smothered. Those waves were very rough, it was pitch black, and underwater my clothes seemed like they weighed thirty or forty pounds. It felt like somebody was trying to pull me down. It was horrifically frightening. I don’t know
how
I lived. I struggled to get out of the water, and I still don’t know how long it took. The concept of time was completely out the window. Finally I made it to the shore. I walked straight from the beach past everybody. I went to my car, opened my glove compartment, and got my gun. I went back to where everyone was, but my neighbor wasn’t there.

Now, let me explain the difference between a prank and an assault: A prank is when both parties are in on it. I wasn’t laughing. I had almost died, and my Jheri curl was ruined. My neighbor knew that it was a wrap. He knew what I was going to do. If he would have still been there, I would have shot him. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I drove home, soaking wet and freezing. I pulled into a parking
lot where I could see my neighbor’s door, and I waited for that motherfucker. It was a couple of days that I did that. Fortunately for him—and for me—I didn’t see him. I was literally going to kill him, after he literally almost killed me. By the time I saw him later, I had calmed down and he apologized.

It wasn’t like my neighbor would have been
surprised
if I shot him. Everyone in my neighborhood knew the drill. Even after I became a comedian and those days were long behind me, my mentality really never changed.

When I was a grown man and a dad, my brother came over to my house. We had never been close growing up. A large part of that, I think, was because of how much better our mother treated him. It wasn’t his fault, but he always reminded me of those times and I didn’t like it. Now that we were adults, we decided to make a concerted effort to try to become closer.

I was hanging out with him downstairs, just catching up, while the rest of my family was upstairs doing their own thing. It quickly came out that my brother had just gotten fired from his latest menial job. He had gotten into an argument with his boss, and I have yet to find any boss on any job who enjoys being argued with. My brother was complaining and complaining and complaining about how it was unfair, expecting me to give him sympathy instead of simply telling him the truth.

Well, I did tell him the truth. “It’s your fault, man.”

If my brother’s going to argue with the man who signs his paycheck,
of course
he’s going to argue with his sibling. The argument got louder and louder, and it kept escalating and escalating. It got to the point where my brother stood up and delivered a low blow. “Does your wife know,” he yelled, “that you been out there fucking these bitches at Birdland West?” There was no question that it was
loud enough for LaDonna to hear, and there was no question that it was
meant
to be loud enough for LaDonna to hear.

I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Now let me digress for a second. I know I’m breaking form, I get it, but I really need to make one thing clear. What I have to say is so important that it might save someone’s life. It’s so important that I’m going to put it in a special fancy box so that whoever sees this will always remember it. I’m such a humanitarian, I’m also putting it in this special fancy box so that even the cheap assholes flipping through this book at the store, wondering what that fool D. L. Hughley has to say, will catch their eye on this page and pause for a second to read it. Here it is:

This is a universal truth. Don’t sit around, don’t wait, don’t get your girl, don’t get your coat.
Just get the fuck out
. I don’t know
how
many parties I went to that were broken up with one of those phrases. People hear that, and people
leave
. That’s it!

So I went upstairs to get my gun, and my wife forced herself in my way. LaDonna pleaded with me to stop, because she too knew what it says up in that special fancy box. “Please, don’t!” she yelled. “Come on, it’s not worth it! You would shoot your own brother?”

My wife and I often have a difference of opinion about the value of certain things. In this case, it most assuredly
would
have been worth it. There was no negotiating with me because I was seeing
red. There was nothing she could do to stop me. My brother knew even more than my wife did what it says in that special fancy box. There was not a trace of him by the time I got back downstairs. He had driven off and was long gone.

There’s obviously a profound difference between how I grew up around guns and how most rural Americans grow up with them. Their primary introduction to guns is through hunting, and their dads teach them how to use them responsibly. For me, it was for when you’re going to pop a cap in a motherfucker or rob someone. It’s just the same thing as how a lot of parents don’t want their kids to learn on the street about sex. That’s
precisely
how I learned about guns. As a consequence, my relationship with them wasn’t as
healthy
as, say, some kid in Omaha’s might have been. It was only in 2008 when I
stopped
having a gun with me. That’s when I got an apartment in New York, and it would have been illegal to have a gun there. For me, it was a weird and unprecedented experience to be in a big city where I couldn’t have a gun.

I’m not some gun nut, of course. I don’t like people who
love
guns—that’s kind of past the point where I am. I don’t get those who go to NRA meetings and feel like the only thing standing between us and a totalitarian government is our firearms. I have a healthy kind of respect and fear for guns and what they can do. There are seven guns for every single human being that lives in America, and I am right on the button with that statistic. I personally have seven guns, three of which are semiautomatic. But let me be real clear: I’m not a hunter. There’s personally no sporting element in gun ownership for me whatsoever. I just think guns are necessary, even if I might wish that they weren’t.

I wanted to recount all my history with firearms for several reasons. A lot of people see me on TV espousing a strong progressive viewpoint, and they assume that I get my talking points from the DNC or whomever.
Nothing could be further from the truth
. Despite the racial stereotype, I have
not
drunk the progressive Kool-Aid. I consider myself a political progressive for the simple reason that the progressive perspective hews much, much closer to how I see the world. But the gun issue is really one where I don’t agree with many people on the left.

I don’t understand the position that guns are inherently “bad.” They obviously can be a very bad thing sometimes, and I think that there could probably be more restrictions, but I don’t think they should be ever taken away. Sometimes you need a
bad
thing to counter a
worse
thing. Our entering World War II was a horrible thing with a gigantic cost, financial and otherwise—but it sure as fuck was superior to the alternative. For me, a gun feels like a strong friend that you need to trust and one that you have to have.

This idea that if only guns were outlawed then everything’s going to be fine is not a very realistic one. It parallels the dumb Republican idea that somehow we’re going to get rid of all the illegal immigrants. If guns were banned
tomorrow
, and if illegal immigration ceased
tomorrow
, how would we deal with the millions that were already here in this country? It doesn’t make sense even theoretically. Any perspective predicated on eradicating one or the other is doomed to fail. It’s just like Prohibition. It might be a nice idea as a vague concept, but implementation is literally impossible—and any attempt would bring exorbitant costs, financial and otherwise.

As someone who is on the road every week, I’ve seen how diverse America really is. The relationship of Americans to guns is no different. In big cities like New York, the more reasonable and the
more urbane people are, the less that they like guns. But in other places it’s simply as much a part of life as shopping at Walmart, hating blacks, and loving Jesus. Guns are a symbol of American independence. I did a gig in Boise and learned that they passed a law in 2001 that says you could carry your rifle in your truck at school, in case you were coming home and you wanted to go hunting. In Arizona, you’re allowed to have concealed weapons at a
bar
. I went to a strip club in Florida, and they had one of those signs listing all the things you couldn’t do. At the end of the long list, it specifically said,
NO GUNS IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT
. If some people have to think twice about whether they’re going to bring a gun to see a stripper, can their mentality reasonably be changed? They equate safety with guns, just like I do. A cop might not get there in time. But a gun can be relied upon. It doesn’t think or make choices for itself. It does as it’s told, every time. That’s the definition of reliable.

The other perspective, the idea that the police department is that thing that makes you safe, I don’t find very reasonable—to say the least. When I see a cop, I see
trouble
, not salvation. In order for gun control to work,
everything
would have to work. The police would have to get there immediately, they’d have to be courteous, and they’d have to be effective. And while we’re at it, I’d like a palace on the moon.

The same way that many “Christians”
applaud
the idea of a poor, retarded man being given the death penalty, Americans are really talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to guns. There is no greater arbiter of American values than Walmart. It is the center of the middle American community and represents our hopes, dreams, and aspirations, God help us. You can buy guns at Walmart, but you can’t buy a rap album that mentions guns in the lyrics. I like Jay-Z’s hooks, but I’ve never seen him stretch out
a room. I’ve never witnessed one of his songs slaughter six people at a political rally. It’s not like Biggie’s rhymes took out Tupac; they didn’t turn up the volume to take the dude out. Battling on wax doesn’t kill anybody.

Gun violence is another example of American hypocrisy. Growing up, people used to do drive-by shootings
all the time
. I probably saw more drive-bys than I saw ice cream trucks. If I heard jingling, I didn’t know if Mister Softee was rolling down the block or if someone got a cap popped into him at the laundry and dropped all his quarters. Yet the first time this country got nationally aware of it was when this little Asian girl got killed in Westwood.
Then
the media was in an uproar about how drive-bys were a problem. Well, gun violence was always a problem for
us
—and that’s why it’s always had to be a
solution
for us as well.

The question that no one dares broach is this: If guns are as prevalent among young people in our inner cities as they are in our rural areas, why is so much of the gun violence found in the
former
—and so little in the
latter
? I’m sick of hearing that bullshit line, “Guns don’t kill people; people do.” Those people wouldn’t be
trying
to kill anybody if they didn’t have a gun. They certainly wouldn’t be successful if they were throwing rocks. It’s a vapid cliché that doesn’t get to the root of the issue. The real question is, “
Why
do people kill other people with guns?” The answer is what I’ve been talking about all this time: Black life, especially young black male life, is valued less in this country. It’s especially valued less by
other
young black males.