SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
I asked D.L. Hughley to read from his new memoir about the neighborhood where he grew up in South Central LA, a place called the Fives.
D L HUGHLEY: (Reading) Every block had a rhythm - choppers overhead, pit bulls barking, boom boxes battling from open windows, kids double-dutched in driveways and raced on busted big wheels. Their laughter bouncing off garage doors. Talk everywhere. And if you stood still long enough, the block would tell you everything.
SIMON: His new book is called "Charlie's Boy," and a caution to our listeners that our conversation mentions domestic violence and child abuse. D.L. Hughley, one of the original kings of comedy, star of a sitcom called "The Hughleys" and host of his own national radio show. That doesn't take much, does it?
HUGHLEY: (Laughter).
SIMON: Joins us now from our studios in Culver City, California. Thank you so much for being with us.
HUGHLEY: Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
SIMON: "Charlie's Boy," because you are. Could we get you to tell us about your father?
HUGHLEY: Well, I think my father was typical of men that age. He didn't talk a lot. "Charlie's Boy" is the title of that because he would always call me boy. He would never call me my name. I resented that early, but then later on, I came to realize that that was his stamp of ownership that was saying, my boy. There he is, my boy. And so, after a long time, it became a source of pride.
SIMON: And I guess we should add he was your stepfather, wasn't he?
HUGHLEY: Yes. I didn't know that for a very long time. I think I was maybe 10, 11 or 12 when I found out. But I could have lived with that lie my entire life. It was not a truth that I needed to know. But I know from that moment on, when I found out he was my stepfather, something was different and has been to this day.
SIMON: What?
HUGHLEY: One thing - it answered a lot of questions when I found out he was my stepfather 'cause he wasn't a warm man toward me and my brother. Like, he wasn't mean, but he wasn't warm. He's very warm to my sisters, but there seemed to be a perceptible level of distance that I always been able to pick up on. And then when I got that information, it answered that question for me.
SIMON: Fair to say you had a difficult relationship with your mother?
HUGHLEY: Yes, that's fair to say. But I think there's a certain amount of grace that you give people when you find yourself (laughter) kind of walking down their paths. But my mother was a very young woman when she got married. She was 14 or 15. She married my biological father. My father, Hughley, was actually friends with my biological father, and they were in service together. He meets my mother - is taken with her. My father, of course, was a bit of a cad, so he ends up breaking my mother's heart. She ends up running away with Hughley. I ended up being born to him. But she was a young woman who had, you know, four kids by three different men by the time she was 18.
And so I knew that I looked like my biological father, who was the love of her life. So imagine being a constant reminder - and for my father, imagine being the reminder of a place in the woman you love that you'll never have. So I think part of the thing she tried to do was to be harder on me because she never wanted to see how much she loved my father. So I thought that it was a bit of thou protest too much, so she was always meaner to me, a little more distant to me.
SIMON: You slept in the closet?
HUGHLEY: Yes.
SIMON: Why?
HUGHLEY: I knew my mother was troubled. Like, my mother set my father's bed on fire. My mother would do incredibly - she attacked my sister with screwdrivers. Like, she did a lot of things, and I was so sure that she was going to kill me in the middle of the night that I would make my bed up and sleep in the closet from the time I was 14, the time I was 16, something like that. Because I was like, if she goes off, I'm going to be the only one surviving. And that was - you know, that's the way you think when you're a kid, but I was so certain that she was going to do that that I slept in the closet. I would make myself a dummy in the bed, and I would sleep in the closet.
SIMON: But you learned, or you taught yourself something about laughter.
HUGHLEY: Yes. Yes. That was when I started to get that I didn't need as much as other people did. Some people are cactuses and some people are roses, and I think that I was more of a cactus than a rose.
SIMON: You mean, you didn't need - what? - love, attention?
HUGHLEY: I guess I didn't need the physical manifestations of it. I never needed for people to tell me that were proud of me. I never needed for people to tell me that they loved me. I never needed that. If I did need it, I convinced myself that it wasn't vital to me.
SIMON: You're right in the book that you learned a joke could be armor.
HUGHLEY: Yes. I think that all of us, no matter where we are and where we're from, your gifts reveal themselves to you, whether it's academic or athletics, but I learned that it could disarm my mother. It could make girls attracted to me. It could make people take notice of me. It became a secret weapon.
SIMON: How did you become a Blood? This is a pretty notorious street gang.
HUGHLEY: I think that it is nothing that you set out to do. It's just you want to belong to something. I don't have a romantic notion of it, but my connection to it was just wanting to be a part of something. I wanted to feel important, wanted to be seen and wanted to be valued.
SIMON: And then one day there was dead roses on your doorstep.
HUGHLEY: I used to take my mother's car.
SIMON: Yeah.
HUGHLEY: So I would turn it on, put it in park, push it down the street and drive. And we caused a lot of mayhem. And so the car was pretty infamous. And me not thinking that, you know, 'cause she never knew I had the car, but every night I would sneak out of there, or oftentimes I would sneak out. One night my mother, they - my mother's driving home. They see the car. They think it's me in the car, and they shoot up the car.
SIMON: Yeah.
HUGHLEY: And I acted, of course, like I didn't know what was going on. And then, a couple of days later, there were dead roses on my mother's porch, and then they sent me to Ohio.
SIMON: Yeah. Aunt Irene (ph), right?
HUGHLEY: Yes.
SIMON: Did that give you a glimpse of something else?
HUGHLEY: I didn't recognize or realize the impact of what was happening. And my Aunt Irene was the sweetest woman and would listen to me. And I just -where I was angry and filled with angst and not necessarily knowing what would happen, it became a place that I loved and never wanted to leave.
SIMON: I've got to ask you, you're here with us now, speaking so lucidly, perceptively, calmly, about some very sad things.
HUGHLEY: Yeah.
SIMON: What made a difference to you?
HUGHLEY: I think living, like anything else, you remember the good and you get rid of the bad, and then this process of having to write and to draw from this thing to write this book made me have to sit in things that I kind of breeze through and have forgotten about.
SIMON: I want to get back to Charlie, if I can. Your father, right?
HUGHLEY: Yes.
SIMON: We can get rid of the step.
HUGHLEY: Yes.
SIMON: You wind up for reasons I won't go into here, wondering if you came through for him in all ways. And I guess it's none of my business, but I want to tell you I think you gave Charlie a sense of purpose.
HUGHLEY: (Crying) Well, we can - let's hope so.
SIMON: Does he - remembering him help you be the kind of father you want to be now?
HUGHLEY: You know, my daughters said something that was so funny to me. They said, I want a man who's just like you and a man who's nothing like you. Which is interesting to me 'cause in baseball, if I bat 500, I'm a superstar. So...
SIMON: Yeah. Right.
HUGHLEY: ...I guess in fatherhood, it would be the same thing.
SIMON: D.L. Hughley. His new book, a memoir written with Geoffrey Gray, is "Charlie's Boy." Thank you so much for being with us.
HUGHLEY: Thank you, man. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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