Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (25 page)

“Are you up on the house?” he asked.

The question came out of nowhere. I had no idea why he was asking, or how honest I should be. And then, I realized, there was no denying the truth anymore.

“I’ve got to be out of the house in thirty days,” I said. “I’m going to let them take it, man, because right now I can’t handle it. I’m looking for a new place to live.”

“Look, I’m going to pay what you owe,” he said. “We’ll put the house up for sale, correctly, and we’ll go from there, so you guys can get out in the right way.”

“Oh, man,” I said.

I didn’t know what more to say. I hadn’t volunteered any of this information to him. I hadn’t asked for help. And yet here he was, offering to save the day.

“I had a feeling that you needed me,” he said.

“Thank you.”

That was all I could say: Thank you. I was so humbled by his generosity. And I was so grateful that we were going to get a chance to make things right.

Slowly, but noticeably, our circumstances began to turn around. Mark took care of the payments we owed. We put the house up for sale in 2003, and we sold it. We even made a small profit. Mark and I made an agreement that I would pay him $1,000 a month until we were even. This was yet another example of his amazing generosity, because it gave me the chance I needed to get us back on our feet.

At the same time, I knew I had to do something to help Rebecca. I was really worried about her. So I finally called our old pastor Joel Brooks, who had married us back in Kalamazoo. I told him about the miscarriage and the state she’d been in since then.

“I don’t know what to do, man,” I said. “I mean, what’s going on?”

“First of all, take her to a doctor and make sure she’s in good health. You’ve got to get her checked out.”

I took Rebecca to be examined, and they realized she had a hormone imbalance following the miscarriage, which had just taken her out. They gave her medicine to regulate her hormones. It also helped that we no longer had the stress of losing the house to worry about. Rebecca started to recover. She got her bearings back, her mood improved, and she came alive. It was such a relief.

I started getting a few small jobs. Rebecca got pregnant
again. Now we really needed a new place to live, but we couldn’t afford anything. And then we went to look at a place in Altadena that was so beautiful and well done. After everything we’d been through, I wanted to rent that house for my family, but I knew I didn’t have enough money. The owner, Samuel, was from Ghana, and he walked behind Rebecca and me as we looked everything over and then looked at each other.

“So do you want it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I like you. It’s yours.”

“Well, sir, we’ve had some issues. I’ve got some credit stuff.”

“I don’t need to see credit. I don’t need to see anything. I like your spirit. I see you with your wife. I like who you are. You just give me what you can.”

It seemed unbelievable, but it was really happening. Rebecca had kept telling me to go for the best place we could. But I’d been feeling bad about myself and all of the mistakes I’d made, so I didn’t feel I deserved a nice place. Then I realized this is how faith works: You take action based on where you want to be, not based on where you are. And I began to see that we all get some things in life we don’t deserve, and we can all point to times in our lives when things went our way.

Everything was finally good again. But we were still just getting by, and I was hungry to do something to take us to the next level. I had finally landed a part in a movie called
Friday After Next
. I was acting with Katt Williams in most of my scenes, and we became really good friends. He was homeless at the time, and so at the end of the day’s shooting, he only pretended to go home. Then he waited until everyone had left and snuck back into his trailer, so no one would know he was living there, and stayed overnight. A few people found out, of course, but they let him do it.

At the same time, I’d been going through everything at home, selling the house, trying to look for a place to live, and not knowing what we were going to do. So Katt and I really bonded, and we made a vow: This could be the last project for both of us, and so we’ve got to make it memorable. We’ve got to go all out.

What we did on that movie became the catalyst for so many things that happened for me later in my career. My character was a really despicable guy, and I had nothing to lose, so I threw all of my stress at home into my performance. When we were filming, I was able to completely enter this other character and forget all of my own problems, and that felt so amazing that I just went for it.

The film was a comedy, but I played this big guy who’d just come out of jail and taken a liking to this pimp, played by Katt. We had a scene in a bathroom, where I was pretty much trying to take advantage of him. Well, even though it was a comedy, we played this scene as if it was
The Deer Hunter
. Seriously, if you turned the sound off, so there were no cues to tell you to laugh, it would be horrifying. We were sweating and crying, and he was slapping me, and I think it really added a layer to that film that made it deeper than just a straightforward comedy.

When I took Rebecca to the premiere, she couldn’t handle that movie at all, especially when it came time for the bathroom scene.

“Oh, this movie is crazy,” she said. “This is not my thing.”

“I know, honey,” I said. “I know.”

But then, there were so many moments when I was onscreen and the theater just erupted. So maybe comedy was for me. When I’d filmed the movie, I’d been in a place where I was so desperate, and as actors, we often find comedy in sadness. So much comedy happens in this strange dark place. It’s where Richard Pryor and so many of the comedy greats came from,
and I felt all of that when I watched the movie. During one of the worst times in my life, I was able to laugh, and I was able to make other people laugh. And that was a really powerful moment for me.

“Terry, these people are cracking up,” Rebecca said during the premiere.

“I know,” I said.

This is powerful. This is a very powerful place.

And then, at the after-party, Rebecca rushed up to me, so excited.

“Ice Cube came up to me,” she said. “He was like, man, the first two acts, it’s me and Mike Epps, and the whole third act is Terry and Katt. They stole the movie.”

Ice Cube wasn’t the only one who had good things to say. People kept approaching me at the premiere. They were excited. I could feel it coming off them.

NOW THAT THINGS WERE GETTING BACK ON TRACK
, Rebecca and I could concentrate on the excitement and joy of the new baby she was carrying. I thought back to my dream about watching my son play football, and I was sure this baby was the boy I had envisioned. But, again, Rebecca told me this baby was a girl, too. Having just come out of the horror of the miscarriage and the loss of our house, and with four girls already at home, I was sure this was it for me, and our family was now complete. I wanted to concentrate on getting back in sound financial shape with the family we already had. My dream had been so vivid that a part of me was disappointed that I would never have a son. But Rebecca assured me that God had promised to send her someone special, and she was absolutely right.

Our little baby Wynfrey was born in 2003, and after such sadness just one year before, she was an absolute treasure. I turned my attention to the newest addition to our family and began to make peace with the fact that the boy I had dreamed about was probably my grandchild. I figured we would be much older when Rebecca held our grandson on the staircase she had envisioned, but I knew we’d be just as happy with the boy in our family’s next generation.

I did some other smaller parts in 2003, including a role in Jamie Kennedy’s film
Malibu’s Most Wanted
, where I played a gang member alongside Damien Dante Wayans. Because of my performance, Damien recommended me to his nephews for a new project they were writing called
White Chicks
, for which they needed an athletic kind of guy. At the same time, Damon Wayans also had a show,
My Wife and Kids
, which was looking for a new regular.

So it worked out that in the morning, I had an audition for
My Wife and Kids
, and in the afternoon, I had an audition for
White Chicks
. Well, let me tell you, I have never bombed during an audition like I bombed that morning. My hands were shaking while I held the paper with my lines on it. Damon and the other producers were looking at one another like they couldn’t believe I’d been recommended so highly for the job. Afterward, I got in my car, and I called my agent, even though I almost didn’t want to know what they’d said to him.

“How did I do?” I asked.

“Well, we’re not hearing anything yet, but go on over to the other audition with Keenen,” he said.

I did not want to go. All I could think was how, sometimes, when things start off bad, they tend to go worse. But as I drove across town to the west side of LA, I tried to psych myself up:
Man, I’ve got nothing to lose. I already stunk up the first deal so bad. I might as well just go for it
.

It was like the exact opposite of what had happened in the morning. I was reading the lines without even looking at the pages. I was doing the part like I
was
that guy, and it was just coming out of me. Keenen Ivory Wayans was cracking up. It was the best audition I’ve ever done, even to this day. I had that same feeling I’d had trying out for
Battle Dome
. I waited a day and a half, and then my agent called me.

“Good news and bad news,” he said. “Bad news, they’re going in another direction on
My Wife and Kids
.”

“I knew it because I stunk it up so bad,” I said.

“But the good news is you got
White Chicks
.”

Rebecca and I just screamed.

THAT WAS ONE OF THE BEST PERIODS IN MY LIFE. I WAS
actually making money. We were still renting, but the house was great, and we could afford it. I was paying my friend back. The kids were getting older and more acclimated to where they were. Rebecca had totally rebounded, and it felt like we were finally on our way.

But now that I wasn’t just in survival mode, I had the chance to take inventory of the many mistakes I’d made along the way, and how close I’d come to ruining everything, especially with what I’d done in Vancouver. Not only were we still standing, but also, we were actually thriving. I was full of hope for what was to come. I vowed never to mess up again, and never to let Rebecca know what I’d done. Now that I understood how close I’d come to losing everything, I was going to hold on tighter than ever.

All of this was very much on my mind because we filmed
White Chicks
in Vancouver, and so I was on location where the stress of my first acting experience had made me go off the rails. I never did so again, but my secret was very present for me while we were there. I thought about how I should really tell Rebecca, but I just couldn’t. Things were going too well after they had been so bad for so long. Luckily, my experience on
White Chicks
was so positive that it reversed my first Vancouver nightmare. In fact, filming
White Chicks
was the best experience of my professional life, ever. All of the Wayanses—Keenen, Marlon, Shawn—and producer Rick Alvarez and all of those other guys were so great. And I’ve never been in the zone quite like that, before or after. I was firing on all cylinders.

I shot my scenes for the film maybe three times a week, and so I had a day or two off between my days on the set. I wanted to be excellent, so I practiced, practiced, practiced. One morning I was working on my dance moves in my room, and the maid walked in on me. I froze, mid-glide.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.

Her face said:
Okay, what’s going on here?
She laughed and closed the door.

When I had ideas for jokes, I brought them to Keenen.

“Go for it,” he said. “Do it.”

And so I went for it, again and again, and it all worked. We did the scene where I was singing in the car in one take. And then, it seemed like everything I did was one take. I didn’t even have to look at the lines.

“Do you have any notes for me?” I asked.

“Brother,” Keenen said. “Just do what you do. No notes. Let’s go. Don’t stop.”

I was almost on a constant high. Here I was, working with my hero, one of the most accomplished comic actors, writers,
producers, and directors of all time, the guy who gave us
In Living Color
, Jamie Foxx, J. Lo, and Jim Carrey, and he loved everything I did. “You’re killing it,” he said. “Man, just go. Just keep going.”

When he did give me notes, he shared tips with me about how to do comedy and what it’s all about, and where the jokes really hit. I just soaked it all up. And then, Shawn and Marlon were always around, telling me what we were going to do, and it was so smooth, it felt like a family. I felt like a member of the Wayanses.

Everybody kept telling me the same thing: “Terry, this is something special.”

After three months of filming in Vancouver, we wrapped. I felt tremendous sadness. I was beginning to understand the problem with being a performer, always chasing the high of performing, and then struggling with the extreme depression that hits after projects are done. When I got home, it was back to reality in a big way.

“The trash is loaded up over there,” Rebecca said, pointing.

I looked at her and sighed. I’d just come from nailing every take and being extolled for my talents, to taking out the trash, and it was humbling. It hurt. Honestly, I was mean to my family because I felt like my life had been better in Vancouver when I was filming than it was at home with them. Obviously, looking back, I can see that my perspective was clouded by my depression. But at the time, I was just in it, and I was a jerk.

“You’re nicer when you’ve got a job,” my family said.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

Rebecca was not about to let me get full of myself, and so she loved to tease me about how it was when I was on location, versus how it was at home.