I Can't Make This Up
Kevin Hart & Neil Strauss
To my mom, my rock, my angel.
I am who I am because of you. My commitment to my craft and to becoming the best version of myself is all because of you. The lessons that you’ve given me are beyond priceless.
For that, I thank you.
Let him who would move the world first move himself.
—Socrates
A sliding board can’t be slid on if you ain’t got on the right pants.
—Chocolate Droppa
MANDATORY INTRODUCTION
This introduction is mandatory.
That means you have to read it.
You can’t just skip ahead to the sex scenes.
Because in order to get the most out of this book, there are three important words you’re going to need to know and understand.
The first word is: “Huh?”
It’s pronounced short and sharp, as if someone just hit you in the stomach. Typically, it’s spoken while pulling your neck back, raising your eyebrows, and quickly scanning the room to make sure everything looks normal and you’re not in some weird-ass dream.
The dictionary definition of the word is: “Did you just say what I think you said? Because it literally makes no sense and my mind can’t process it right now, so I’m going to have to ask you to repeat it.” It’s the kind of thing you might say when your dad comes home bleeding and tells you that someone hacked him up with an axe.
(This really happened, people. I can’t make this up.)
The second word is: “What?”
This is pronounced with a silent “t,” and it generally follows a few seconds after a Huh. It’s spoken with your mouth contorted into a look of disgust and your forehead creased, while looking at someone like they’re batshit crazy.
It is short for: “What the hell did you just say? Because I only asked you to repeat the crazy shit you just said, and now you’re adding some even crazier shit on top of it. My ears can’t believe what they’re hearing right now.”
It’s the kind of thing you might say when your dad, whose head is busted open and wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, assures you that he’s fine and doesn’t need to go to the hospital and just wants to lie down for a little bit.
The third word is: “Okay.”
It’s spoken with a shoulder shrug, a side-to-side shake of the head, and a roll of the eyes. It means: “I can’t even begin to fathom your reality, but I’ve decided to just accept it and move on.”
It’s what you say when a Huh and a What have gotten you nowhere, and you’re starting to think that maybe you actually are stuck in a dream and shouldn’t eat pizza before bedtime anymore. Like when your dad tells you that the reason someone hacked him up with an axe was because he was jealous of his skills as a refrigerator repairman.
This all may seem unbelievable to anyone who hasn’t met my father, but this is the honest-to-God truth. In life, you can choose to cry about the bullshit that happens to you or you can choose to laugh about it.
I chose laughter.
These are the stories behind the jokes, and a few lessons I’ve figured out about life, success, family, and relationships along the way.
Actually, I’m still working on the relationships part, but the rest I got down.
Life Lessons
FROM DAD
* * *
Don’t do what I do, do what I would tell you to do if I wasn’t doing the stupid stuff I did.
Visiting Dad in prison with my older brother
1
* * *
BIRTH OF A SEX SYMBOL
My life began with one of the biggest lies men tell women: “I’ll pull out, I promise.”
Those were the words that turned into me.
Of course, my dad had no intention of pulling out. He wasn’t planning on knocking up my mom either. He just never learns from his mistakes.
The first mistake happened eight years earlier. His name was Robert Kenneth, my older brother. Our parents had just met back then, so Dad was able to get away with bigger lies: “My nuts done got squashed in a bike accident. I can’t do nothing with them.”
That’s really what he told her. I can’t make this up.
When my mother found out she was pregnant, she beat the hell out of my dad.
His other lines were: “I’m just gonna put it in a little and leave it there. I just wanna be close to you.” And then there was the classic, “I’m just gonna rub you with it. I promise I won’t put it in.”
I’m surprised there are just two of us.
Though if you count all the other women he did this with, there are something like eleven of us with six different women. At least one of them is my age too.
He definitely didn’t learn from his mistakes.
* * *
My mom and dad met when he was working for Bell Telephone and she was a cashier at a Shop N Bag grocery store next door. From the moment he laid eyes on her—“a fine, petite country girl with big hips,” as he put it—my dad started begging her to go on a date. This went on every day for a year.
My dad wasn’t persistent because he was in love with her. He was a player. He probably had thirty women all over town he was using the same lines on. My mom just held out longer. As my dad always tells me, even though I definitely don’t need to hear it, he had to “con her out of her drawers” because she’d never had sex before.
They never married, though they stuck it out together, probably because Kenneth was born a year after they started seeing each other. But they were like oil and water: My mom was bossy; my dad hated being told what to do. My mom didn’t party; my dad did. My mom didn’t believe in fighting; my dad believed fighting made you a man. My mom couldn’t stand the smell of cigarettes, weed, or alcohol; my dad stank of all three. My mom believed that sex was a sacred thing; my dad didn’t believe anything was sacred, especially sex.
When Mom found out she was pregnant with me, my father was picking up Kenneth from school.
“Spoon,” my mom’s sister Patsy yelled from inside the house when my father and Kenneth came home. My dad’s full name is Henry Witherspoon, but everyone called him Spoon, and my brother was nicknamed Little Spoon.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come here.”
My father walked up the steps.
Aunt Patsy didn’t budge. “Get in here!”
That’s when my father knew he was in trouble.
“What did you do?” she asked as soon as he walked inside.
“What you talkin—”
“Nancy is pregnant, and she crying.”
“Naw, Nance ain’t pregnant!”
“Go tell her that. She waiting on you.”