Mike Epps mines his life of poverty, crime
COMEDIAN MIKE EPPS is the rare author who doesn’t want to end his book with a sentence — even if it’s just probation.
And so Epps addresses the Indianapolis Police Department in the opening chapter of “Unsuccessful Thug,” offering a quick summaryofhiswritingtechnique.
“This whole book is a product of my imagination,” offers Epps. “Any similarity to any crimes solved or unsolved would be purely coincidental. Cool? Cool.
“Also, to friends from the neighborhood pissed that you’re not in here by your right name: Sorry. Giving you fake names was easier than testing statutes of limitations.” This is not your usual celebrity biography, for sure.
But Epps has no intention of going back behind bars — a semiregular address when he was dealing drugs in the Hoosier State. Once he gets his legal defense out of the way, though, the comedian is ready to be honest. Sometimes, brutally so. He remembers the sweet details of childhood — the Garanimals shirts and Toughskins jeans, the way the family would crowd around the TV to watch “Diff’rent Strokes.” But he also remembers the ugliness — the empty refrigerator, the eviction notices, the violence.
And the way, right from the start, he turned it all into comedy. Like his grade-school routine about “Sesame Street.”
“Did you hear?” he would ask his brother Chaney. “Bert went to jail last night. They pulled Bert and Ernie over. They let Ernie go, but I think they found some weed in Bert’s pocket. Mr. Snuffleupagus might go down and make his bond.”
If Epps’ comedy skills were precocious, he had less success in school. “I even got left back in kindergarten,” he writes. “Do you know how bad you have to be in school to fail kindergarten?”
It didn’t help that the family was always on the move. Epps’ mother worked hard, but the men in her life came and went, leaving new kids behind. The family of six bounced around different houses, and the kids went to different schools.
Finally, Epps dropped out and started dealing, buying his first eighth of an ounce of cocaine for $150 and selling it for $300.
“And then you take the $300 and you buy a quarter ounce,” he explains. “A quarter ounce, you could flip that and make a half ounce. A half ounce, you could flip that and make an ounce. An ounce could turn into two. Two could turnitintofour . . . ”
Epps quickly shows how a teenager can transform $150 into a full kilo of coke.
“Huh, I guess I could do math after all,” he writes. “I’d never been able to even really add well before, but now all those equations started to make sense. Because the solution to every math problem now was that I had more money in my pocket.”
A rookie cop finally busted him, and Epps went to Indiana’s Westville Correctional Facility.
“It used to be an insane asylum, and I believed people when they said it was haunted,” Epps says. “I remember one time laying in my cell and seeing something weird zip past. It gave me the creeps.”
Epps leaves his actual arrest record vague. But, he admits, he repeatedly returned to a cell.
“As much as I wanted to do something else, I couldn’t stay away from drugs for long,” he writes. “As a result, for a few years there, I was regularly in and out of both jail and prison.”
During one hiatus from the jailhouse, Epps held court at the barbershop, talking crazy and making people laugh. When someone in the crowd dared him to enter a local comedy contest, Epps said sure, had a few belts of booze, and went to the club. He won. The next day, Epps got some loose-leaf paper and wrote letters to the heads of all the Hollywood talent agencies. He told them he was 22, just out of prison, and ready to be a star. Strangely, no one wrote back. Knowing he needed to try a bigger city, Epps (who by now had a baby daughter to support) moved to Atlanta, where he worked in the sewers during the day and hit the clubs on weekends. He eventually found an agent, Dave Klingman, who told him he needed to come to New York to make a name.
Epps ran out and bought a bus ticket.
“The city was still pretty grimy,” he remembers. “Dave took me to a hotel down on the West Side Highway. This was the 1990s, and the