‘So bad in school I got left back in kindergarten’
West Side Highway had no artisanal ice cream stands, only transgender hookers leaning into cars.
“The hotel’s name was HOTEL. Just that: HOTEL. Behind the desk was a little Chinese guy. He charged me $35 a night, for which I got a room, a blanket, a toothbrush and a towel. Damn, I thought. Am I in prison again?”
Epps started working the clubs. He joked about dating white women. About the way his grandmother would call the police on everybody. About “a cousin so country he had a corn bread wedding cake.”
He killed ’em, but only in the clubs that mostly drew a black crowd. White audiences never laughed as loud, and it reopened a lot of old wounds.
“Growing up, I always felt like white people treated my family like they were superior to us,” he confesses. “It’s just something I’ve never gotten over. White people have always made me feel like I was doing something wrong.”
Even if Epps was never going to be swapping tales of Indiana with David Letterman as a “Late Show” regular, he began climbing his own ladder.
He did “Showtime at the Apollo.” He got a slot on “Def Comedy Jam” (although he still gripes about how people dissed the show’s comics for doing too many dirty jokes).
Epps, who never felt comfortable in New York, abandoned the East Coast for Los Angeles. There, his feeling of being judged for what he looked like began to fade. His sense of possibility rose.
Finally, he caught a huge break — a shot at a role in “Next Friday,” the latest in the smash Ice Cube comedy franchise. Except it was a slim chance. “I walked up to the building, I saw every actor in the world who looked like me out there practicing my lines,” he remembers. “Wayans brothers. Wayans cousins. Wayans acquaintances.”
Epps landed the part, and it launched a movie career that’s run from “Friday After Next” to the latest “Death Wish,” with a couple of “Resident Evil” and “Hangover” movies in between — along with a short-lived TV series, “Uncle Buck.”
Now, he’s ready to reach a new level with the starring role in an upcoming biopic of his idol, “Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?”
Along the way, he’s gotten married, divorced, and had four daughters. He’s quietly given back, investing in his friends and relatives and his old hometown, buying up and restoring properties in the city that he calls “Naptown.”
“Back when I was a kid there, me and my friends, we didn’t get a lot of recognition for who we were,” Epps says.
“If we were great, we didn’t know it, because nobody told us. Going back there now, taking care of people, that lets me say those people were great and maybe I was, too.”