Excerpt
Successful Failure
The Show Must Go OnI never saw the rock coming—which makes sense since it was make-believe—but I was ready for it all the same.
I was about seven years old and standing onstage with my older brother, Jason, at our family’s church in El Paso, Texas. Together, in front of our entire congregation, Jay and I were acting out our own updated comedic version of the David and Goliath story. We’d spent weeks writing and revising our little script, loading it up with as much cool hip hop lingo as two Pentecostal boys could get away with in a West Texas house of worship. Jay was playing David. I was giving my best urban Goliath. Both of us were determined to wow the audience.
“Can’t touch this!” I shouted at my brother as we prepared to square off. (Look, MC Hammer was a big deal back then, okay? And that line got a LAUGH.) We bantered a little bit more, then Jay drew back his arm and fired a pretend stone right at my head. I prepared for impact.
When Jason and I first imagined our skit, I’d thought briefly about doing a fake pratfall, just teetering over slowly and then catching myself and easing my way to the floor. But nope. Even before my brother fired that invisible rock, I had decided that my fall had to be 100 percent convincing and, above all, entertaining. You think I cared that this was just some little skit my brother and I had put together for our church family? Oh no. It was my time to shine. I wanted—needed—to get that real audience reaction. So a half second after Jay fired his slingshot, I collapsed with as much drama as I could muster. This wasn’t some lightweight tumble. I dropped fast, crumpling to my knees first before keeling over and outright faceplanting, my head slamming hard onto the thin carpet that covered our church’s concrete floor.
My bottom lip split wide open. Blood gushed from my mouth like an oil geyser. Goliath was down! And if the blood squirting from my mouth was any indication, he might not be getting up. Good thing my eyes were already closed, because I was hurt for real.
Then I heard it. The crowd began to clap. Cheers and peals of laughter floated from the pews. Suddenly, as I lay there, head pounding, eyes closed, lip bloodied, the pain of my awkward fall began to give way to a deep sense of satisfaction. Even at seven, I was willing to commit as fully and go as hard as I could if it meant winning over an audience. Then as now, the applause and the shouts of approval were equal parts salve, motivation, and validation.
In my own way, I knew even then that I was meant to entertain. And I would happily give everything I had to be good at it—no matter how much I’d have to bleed, no matter how many times or how hard I’d have to fall.
To some, my spill may have looked like a blooper, a flop in every sense of the word. For me, it was confirmation that I’d found my passion. I didn’t care who laughed at me. Honestly, I get a kick out of that recollection myself, recalling how crazy I looked with my goofy little smile beaming proudly through blood-smeared teeth as we took our closing bows. So laugh as much as you want. It’s okay. But I can only pray that you find that thing in your life that you love so much—that you desire so deeply to excel at—that you’re willing to bust your face wide open . . . then get up and do it again.
All in the FamilyI came by all of it naturally, of course: the desire to perform, the fearlessness about falling, the determination to keep rising.
I’d entered the world as part of a devoutly Christian family that viewed entertaining church audiences as a calling, a chance to play a small part in the larger worship service. Everybody had their thing. My brother played the drums. My grandma sang in the choir. My mom was a great writer. My granddad—who ended up having another family after he and my grandma divorced—he and everyone on his side of the family were gospel artists who put out their own music. Sure, we were amateurs who never took our performances any further than church sanctuaries—nobody was going to confuse the Fredericks family for the Winanses—but each of us savored our chance to praise God with as much passion, creativity, and flair as possible. Then there was the social cachet that came with getting onstage. In our church, you were cool if you got to be a part of the service, as opposed to just being there.
Before I realized I could stand onstage and make people laugh, my first real aspiration had been to be a drummer like Jay. I loved playing drums in the church services. But Jason was so much better. Later, I discovered that I was more talented at the guitar, so I switched my interest and threw myself wholly into becoming a great bass player. I went so far as to find a mentor to teach me. He was an incredible bass player, one of the best in our community. But whenever I’d ask him to show me how he did certain things, he would just shrug, look at me, and go, “Brother, I don’t know what I be doing. I just be playing. It just comes to me.”
Whatever “it” was, it had clearly decided to skip over me entirely. I was never going to be a great musician. As a drummer, I washed out early. As a guitarist, I was . . . serviceable, at best. Maybe I might’ve gotten to “good” if I’d kept at it—but when real bass players would show up at church? It was like that old Katt Williams joke where he talks about Chrysler 300 drivers who compare their ride to a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
“Yeah, it looks like a Phantom . . . until a Phantom pulls up!” That’s how I was as a guitarist. I was cool for my church, but anytime we went to another church for the 3:30 service, you could automatically tell who the real bass player was. And it was not me.
I kept at it for a while, even into adulthood. But after Melissa and I married and had our first son, Isaiah, I gave up. I’d be trying to practice, but Zay Zay’d make it nearly impossible. He would unplug my bass from the amplifier. He’d pull at the bass strings. I was like,
I’m not going to be the world’s greatest bass player, and he’s not going to let me be even just an okay bass player. Maybe I’m going to be done with this. Eventually, I just stopped.
Honestly, that’s a problem of mine: If I’m not going to be the greatest at something, I lose interest. I don’t just quit at something that I want, but I also don’t want to squander time and energy working to be only mediocre at something. You don’t have to be a huge success at something to appreciate or enjoy it, just like you don’t have to be a miserable failure to know that something is best understood as a hobby or a side hustle, not your day job.
I still love music. I work with a live band as part of my set. But music wasn’t where my real talent lay. I still firmly believed that I belonged on those stages, but I wasn’t sure I knew where.
I was a Black child of a single mother, living in the working-class South, a kid whose dad left before I was born, the product of a family whose poverty stretched back generations. We lived in my grandmother’s three-bedroom, one-bathroom home in a poor West Texas neighborhood with poor schools for poor people. By the time she was twenty-five, my mom had three children to care for alone. She worked so much that I can barely remember her being home. To top it off, she did it while disabled, having lost much of her eyesight in a work accident that happened when I was a small child.
But despite her odds, my mom never gave up. We barely had anything—but we had a roof over our heads, clothes to wear, food to eat, and plenty of laughter and love. Our life wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t terrible either. Matter of fact, one of my first jokes was that I didn’t even realize we were poor until I was a teenager. When everybody is poor around you, nobody seems poor. You eat whatever’s put in front of you. You go to school when it’s time, and the rest of the time you spend in church. You don’t sit around bemoaning your life and pouting about how poor you are—at least you didn’t in my family’s house. In our house, we ate pumpkin pie and watched
Star Search. That was enough.
I came to realize that struggle has the potential to break you, yes, but struggle can also clarify goals and offer a sense of purpose. Struggle can motivate just as intensely as it can depress and infuriate. Struggle isn’t necessarily aimless, even when unsuccessful. Struggle can help light a path, inspire ambition, and outline desire.
Inspiration came from other sources, too. Every time I’d go to the mall in El Paso, there was the reminder that I shared a name with one of the most famous brands in the world—
Frederick’s of Hollywood. So what if they sold lingerie? To me, that name was a symbol, a signpost for my future. Every time I saw that sign for
Frederick’s of Hollywood, my sense of destiny was reinforced. I was going to Tinseltown one day. I was meant to be great. And I believed that, down to my bones, my entire life.
