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.It’s natural.It’s not a thought-out move on my part.But in my own way, I’m integrating American television.I get my beautiful cousin Alice on the show.She dances with all the white boys.Dance Party gets hate mail.“I don’t want some big nigger dancing with white girls!” Vile stuff.I have to credit Dave Parker and Dick Stewart, though.They never backtrack.They can’t.I’m unstoppable.I am too popular.American Bandstand, on the other side of the country, practices strict racial separation.It fights against integration fiercely and to the end, like a lady wrestler.That’s the whole subject of John Waters’s Hairspray, the hit movie and Broadway musical.I meet lots of celebrities on Dance Party.All the big stars appear on the show.Ann-Margret.James Brown.Annette Funicello.Clint Eastwood.Aretha.The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, just days before the plane crash that becomes the day the music died.“Are you coming back on the show?” I ask Ann-Margret as she sweeps out of the Dance Party studio on a cloud of perfume.“I don’t know,” she says, giving me her flirtiest smile.“Are you going to be here?”The one day in my life I wish I could do over is when Sam Cooke comes to the Dance Party studio.That afternoon I am off in Stockton picking peaches.So I never meet the greatest soul singer in the world, and the man who I will play in a movie.Applause is love, and so is the TV camera.I’m a Dance Party regular, and I feel as though I am the king of California.I get recognized and asked for autographs out on the street.The closing theme of Dance Party, played at the end of every show, is “Dream” by the Pied Pipers—one of Dick Stewart’s schmaltzy big-band throwbacks.“Dream when the day is through/Dream then they might come true.”I am living a dream that I didn’t even know I had.The thing about dreams, though, is that when you realize one, it just whets your appetite for an even bigger dream.At the dawn of a new decade, in a lesbian bar in the beatnik area of North Beach, I discover someone who sets me on a whole new path.CHAPTER 10In my last year of high school, I date a pretty girl named Karen Perry.She looks like a combination of actresses Lori Petty and Audrey Hepburn.Karen and my cousin Alice are best friends.People always think that they’re sisters.Karen is a great actress herself, and plays the female lead in all the school productions at Berkeley High.The school has a double standard for its plays.The drama teachers want only white kids to perform.I audition and get rejected.“Paul, we just don’t have a part for you.” A polite rejection, but I see right through it.I don’t have the complexion for the protection.White people like to think their skin color protects them.I don’t have it, so they can ignore me.I’m dancing on the top-rated teen TV show, and you don’t have a part for me?But I always have to be onstage.I always have to guerrilla my shit.In direct opposition to the drama teachers, I start my own talent show.I do a skit based on Little Red Riding Hood, and I play the wolf, of course.I look out at the school audience, and whoever isn’t laughing their guts out is shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.That’s how I like it.You either laugh, or you get uptight.I have sex with Karen, the drama department’s major star, and she gets pregnant.No more school plays for her.She gives birth to our daughter, Lisa.I am not out of high school yet, and I have three children.As the 1960s dawn, I’m getting more and more restless.Dance Party is great and my first taste of celebrity is sweet, but suddenly Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco—the whole place seems too small to hold me.I look around for options.I attend a local community college, but that seems more small-time than ever.The Dance Party gig ends abruptly when I get drafted into the army and sent to West Germany.I think maybe that will satisfy my thirst for the wider world, but I learn quickly that there’s nothing more claustrophobic than the U.S.Army.I had sergeants constantly on my jock.My main army claim to fame is integrating the base swimming pools.They make me a lifeguard.The little kids who come to the pools look up at me, sitting all regal on my life-guard’s throne, and they give me shit.“That nigger’s the boss?” one kid says.My sergeant is there.“Anybody calls my nigger a nigger,” he barks out, “and they’re going to answer to me!”Thanks, Sarge.But he scares the fuck out of the kids, and they’re respectful after that.It’s the early 1960s.Vietnam is starting to ramp up.Black kids die by the dozens over there.Pretty soon it will be by the hundreds, finally by the thousands.My sergeant attaches me to a new unit.Airbone.“You black motherfucker,” he says, “we’re going to throw you out of an airplane!”In the Army now: Me in civilian clothes when I am in the service in GermanyAirborne means combat.Combat means death.Hambone saves me once again.I win a base talent contest with the same hambone routine I do in the movie theaters of Oakland.Suddenly I’m part of an army entertainment troupe that tours all over Germany.Dancing for my supper is something I get used to.But the U.S.Army is the only force that is evil and fucked-up enough to make me dance for my life.I get through my two-year hitch with enough hard-won experience to know what the acronym FTA means when, years later in 1972, I join an anti-war comedy troupe with the name FTA.Fuck the Army.The military machine vomits me back onto the streets of Oakland.I am right back where I started.I’m going out with a girl who works at a North Beach bar that used to be called Mona’s and now is called Ann’s 440 Club, at 440 on Broadway off the Embarcadero.Later on, Ann’s is a beatnik place.But when I go there, it is catering to tough butch lesbians and their femme girlfriends.Ann Dee, the big, blowsy blond lady who runs it, is really Angela DeSpirito, a singer.She has acts on the club’s small stage, singers mostly—Johnny Mathis gets his start there—but some comics, too.I visit my girlfriend one night while she’s waitressing at Ann’s.I want to make sure none of the butches misunderstand and think that she is available.I get struck by lightning as I sit at the bar.Not literally, of course.It’s just that there’s a stand-up comic that night who’s doing his act.His name is Lenny Bruce, and he is already doing the riff that is going to get him busted.To is a preposition and come is a verb.I’ve heard these two words my whole life.As a kid when my folks thought I was sleeping
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