Why You Crying?: My Long, Hard Look at Life, Love, and Laughter

Why You

Crying?

Imust confess…I’m a crying mess.

A newly crowned Miss America, a Barbara Walters interviewee, your average second grader, they havenada on me.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not…NOT a blubbering fool or the kind of guy who cries at weddings. The tears I shed are often private. I cry sometimes thinking about the father I never knew, the mother I never really had. I break up thinking about how long I lived on the defensive—never smiling, never comfortable with myself or my body. I cry over the loss of the comic genius Freddie Prinze Sr. and the physical suffering of Richard Pryor. I still tear up at the thought of seeing my grandfather—the only real man in my life—laid out in the funeral home. I cry, believe me,I cry, over my deeply dysfunctional family.

My grandmother, Benita Gutierrez, inspired the title of this book.

Come over here. Why you crying? Why you crying? No, tell me for real. Why you crying?

Because you hit me.

Liar, I barely touched you. You want me to hit you for real, cabrón? You want me to HIT YOU FOR REAL? Mira, you can’t even touch him because right away, he starts crying, hombre. Mr. Sensitive.

Actually, she’s done more than inspire the title. My grandmother is the essence of my entire stand-up act and television show. She was hilarious and she didn’t even know it;it was her attitude. I didn’t know comedy could come so cold and often so cruel. She was—no other word does it justice—justmean. Her sarcasm ran deep. Like when I was I don’t remember how old, and I asked, Where do babies come from? and she said, Whores. Now go play.

You know the saddest fucking thing? One day I found a picture at the house of me and my high school girlfriend with her arms around me. I weighed about 175 pounds at the time, damn near what I do now, having dropped 50 large over the last year. But all I can remember from those days is howfat I felt, and how every fucking ounce of that godawful feeling was fed day in and day out by my grandmother. How could I be like that? Be that tall and that thin and still feel like I weighed 300 pounds?

I became a comedian as a way to cope with this kind of wretched psychological abuse, a life so sad it had to be funny. These days, I’m using all the tears and heartbreak to make folks laugh. Over the past two years I’ve sent tens of thousands into gales of laughter, ripping up places one hundred times the size of the clubs I bombed in during the early nineties, otherwise known as the I Hate Me years when I was the Angriest Most Depressed Man Alive. Didn’t have a manager, an agent, or much of a life, a stray cat on the loose, drowning my sorrows in alcohol, undone by the fact I had become what I swore to myself I never would: a nobody.

You see, I’m as tragic as anyone out there. Maybe a little more so. As a little boy, I grew up angry, alone, teased, and tormented. I grew up around Nobodies as a Nobody wanting to be something else. And that’s as true a statement as I’ve ever said.

And now, after twenty-four years of struggle on the stand-up circuit, I’m swimming in the mainstream. I have a family sitcom on ABC television, which has turned out to be the first Latino-based prime-time hit since the early 1970s when Freddie Prinze Sr. starred onChico and the Man. My show,George Lopez, is powering into its fourth season on ABC, a lifetime for Latinos on network TV. In it I play what could have been—the manager at an airplane parts factory married to a sassy wife with two challenging kids and a mother only my grandmother would love. Hailed by critics as a cross-cultural success (our audience, on average, is nearly 90 percent non-Hispanic), we regularly dominate the twelve-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic coveted by advertisers.

So, yeah, I’m a crier. There are tears of sadness and tears of joy, tears of pain and tears of heartache. And these days? Tears of gratitude and tears of triumph. Yeah, I’ve cried every last one of those babies, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

To me, tears are tiny drops of remembrance, portals to the past. They bleach the dirty laundry of my life. They’re my release. A sign I’m alive. That’s why people have tears in their eyes when they laugh, because the humor hits them deep in a place that’s harsh but real. When I’m onstage doing my thing, the audience and I are connecting to our individual embarrassments and pain. But this time, the tears let us know that we’ve moved on. That we’re strong enough to meet on the most intimate of terms, allowing someone into your heart.

Well, welcome tomy heart.

Why you crying? No, tell me for real.

On to You

No matter what the Secret Service says, I swear I didn’t steal it, man. Why is it when something’s missing, the first face people look for is…brown?

Okay, so I did have it in my possession. In my jacket. After the president of the United States of America had already left the stage…Oh, all right, I took it.

What can I tell you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment: March 2003. I’m up on stage performing for the pleasure of George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. It was probably the most important gig a stand-up comic could ever have, and I was a little unsure. Trouble was, I didn’t think that much of my act would work in Washington. Now, at The Ice House in Pasadena or the Improv, say, in Brea, no problem. I’d come out, like always, decked out in a suit, no intro, just my signature song, WAR’s Low Rider pumping through the speakers, and start right in.

"The Chicano? Man, Chicanos are their own breed. Even though we’re born in the United States, we still have accents. I know, huh. I know, eh. You think we’re from Canada. I knew, eh. Tell ’em, eh.

We add words that aren’t there. We make up words. Other people say, ‘Are you going?’ Chicanos say, ‘Hey, are you going, or not?’Or not? And how many times have you been in the store and your mom’s yelling, ‘Mijo, is this what you wanted—or what?’Or what?

"Or, ‘How long you guys been here?’ ‘We berly got here.’ ‘I just arrived, eh.’ ‘I’m berly here ten minutes, eh?’ Berly?

They never let you get too confident—that’s the mentality of the Mexican family. You know, you use a big word and right away, ‘Hey, cómo está?’ ‘Ah, I got a new job and I have to go to Orientation.’ ‘Oh, you’re the big man now. Toilet paper on your shoe, cabrón. Caca hand. Orien-tay-shun.’

But at the historic Ford Theatre in Washington, DC, I was dealing with an entirely different group of people. I guess you could call it diverse. Out of the six-hundred-person crowd, there were about two hundred white people, three hundred really white people, and about a hundred people so white they were pink. The only Latinos within ten miles were either carrying trays or parking cars.

But you know what, I just went for it. I was wearing a tux and a shit-eating grin and charming the pants right off all thoseRepublicanos.

You know, I said, in the latest census, Latinos are the largest minority. Complete silence from the audience. "Thank you—I’ll take your silence as confirmation. I’m kinda surprised, though. We’re so hard to count.We never open our doors. Why would someone be knocking—what have we done? Now, if you honk, we come out. The Chicano doorbell—two blasts from the horn.

"And then, of course, we lie during the census. ‘How many live in this house?’ ‘Oh, just two.’ Two? We’re known for converting the garage and renting it out. It’s a selling point—how many people have a remote-control front door?

So many of us are starting to vote now that someday soon there’s going to be a Latino in the White House, I continued, heading toward my best punch line of the night.

Of course, we plan on leaving it white…with just a little blue trim.

That Ford crowd was rolling in the aisles. And there were the president and Mrs. Bush, dead center, laughing. They’re into it.

By the end of the evening I’m feeling good, realgoood, as the Navy Choir comes out to join me and the evening’s other performers—singers Brian McKnight, Michele Lee, LeAnn Rimes—onstage. Counting their sixty, we’ve got about seventy people up standing around when a worker appears and sets a piece of masking tape on the floor. Next thing you know here comes the podium and the velvet blue presidential seal, followed by this announcement:

Ladies and gentlemen, President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush.

Now the Man is no more than a foot and a half away, eighteen inches in front of me. Probably the closest any Chicano I know has ever got to this kind of power without saying, More coffee, Mr. President? And I can see he has got a little speech typed out and I can actuallysee my name on the sheet. The name I hated growing up as a kid.

I’m thinking,Well, that’s a nice little keepsake, an artistic artifact. So when the president finishes thanking us, and God blessing America, and the choir reaches a crescendo, I make a spontaneous move. I swipe the speech and slyly Bond it into my jacket.

Later, in the car on our way to the post party, I show my wife, Ann, my memento of the evening. Well, let me tell you, she screamed, Oh, my God! like I was GeorgeClooney or something…

My personal pleasure lasted as long as it took for bandleader Tom Scott to find me.

The White House is on to you, man.

Get the fuck out of here, I said.

I wish I were kidding, said Scott, but I’m not.

What is this? I laughed. "AMiami Vice episode? Who uses the termon to you ?"

Evidently Tom did, going on to say, There’s been a theft at the Ford Theatre, and you can expect a visit from the Secret Service.

How would they know I have it? I said. There were a lot of people up there onstage. Why do I have it? Because I’m Mexican?

I’m just telling you what they said to me, said Scott.

Well, I said, I’m just going to tell them I don’t have it.

Ten seconds later an agent from the Secret Service shows up over my right shoulder. He was all the way to Mr. Lopez, I’m from the Secret Service and we’d like to speak with you before I cracked like an egg and yelled, It’s in the car! I’ll show you!

I took the guy by the arm, apologizing all the way outside, barely hearing his offer of regrets, blah, blah, insisting it was standard operating procedure for all presidential papers to be passed on to the archives. (How could I have been sostupid ? Of course, the presidentialarchives !)

There was only one problem: There were about fifty identical black Town Cars in the parking lot, each and every one populated with a sleeping driver. I shook a few of them awake without luck before Secret Service Guy considered the odds and told me he would see me after the party.

How will I find you? I asked.

Don’t worry, he answered, I’ll find you.

And, of course, he did.

Excuse me, I said, after I’d handed him the speech and he was leaving. How did you find out it was me?

"We actually went to the TV production truck and reviewed the last forty-five minutes of the show scene by scene, and we had the shot of the podium enlarged.

You know, he added as he smiled and walked off into the night, my money was on Michele Lee.

Funny. For most of my sad, tormented life I never had any stories like this to tell. I was always talking about other people. Now I’ve got a big one.

I guess you could say people are on to me.

When I was a kid, I had a horrible self-image. That’s what happens in my world when you’ve got a huge head and lips to match, and your skin is so dark your friends’ parents won’t let their kids play with you. Those friends—and I use that word lightly—used to call me nigger.

Anglo kids, man, they get great nicknames like Skip or Chauncey or Muffy or Honey or Cutie. Our nicknames are Gordo or Feo, if you’re lucky enough to be both fat and ugly. Chino was for the slanty eyed, Flaco for the skinny, Beaver for the buckteeth. Whatever was wrong with you, that became your nickname. That can’t be good. Take it from me, when you’re known as Rockhead or Spuds, it has a tendency to destroy your self-esteem, as do the beatings that often accompany the taunts.

Finally, one day when I was about ten, I’d had enough. I was up in Yolo, a small town near Sacramento, and this big fat kid named Rango was fucking with me. I’d never really fought back before, always swallowing the shit. But on the front steps of the local library, something hit me and I hit Rango. Swinging as hard and fast as I could, I knocked Rango down and kept on punching and punching. I kicked hisass. After that, he was nice.

Today I have what you might call adisarming look—but people relate to my realness. Face it, I’m never going to be confused with Tom Cruise—or even Tom Arnold—but I think I have a look that endears people to me. Fans or people who meet me for the first time say I seem like a real person. Guess what? I am. But I didn’t appreciate my unique looks back then.

I remember this one time, we went to Disneyland. Now, of course we never visited the Magic Kingdom like normal people. Never went with friends or family members on normal days or nights. No, we’d go on Gas Night or RCA Night.

So this one night we go, and I really want the Mickey Mouse hat with the ears where they embroider your name.

I told my grandmother, I want the hat with ears.

You know what she told me?

One, you’re lucky we brought you. Two, you want a souvenir—save your ticket. And three, your ears stick out more than the fuckin’hat. Here, I’ll just write your name across your forehead.

The first time I remember getting a compliment I was thirteen years old, and it didn’t come from anyone in my family but from an African-American saleslady behind a jewelry counter at the Montgomery Ward in Panorama City.

My God, she said. You have the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen in my life.

WHAAT?

And your skin is such a beautiful color.

Okay, now I’m thinking, is this some kind of sick Monkey Ward joke they play on Mexican kids? You know, pick out the sorriest-ass-lookingcabrón in the whole store, make him smile, and win a weekend in Vegas. Thing is, the lady was straight up.

The next time I got a compliment, of sorts, was from Cindy Coronado right out of high school. How’s that for a name? Man, she was beautiful. Her parents actually owned their own business, an upholstery store, which to a Mexican is like owning a national bank. Cindy got dropped off at school in a Cadillac, the whole deal, and she was so fine that my friend Arnold and I used to