Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Yearbook - Chapter 4: Local Celebrity

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

As the Blake basketball team roars through its thrilling season, Chad and his teammates experience local stardom. With his newfound status, Chad gets access to all of the hottest house parties…and ends up in white student’s houses for the first time with their parents out of town. Behold, the high school rager. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So we come in and our same kind of clicks. Just think about it as being in Varsity Blues, like a movie like that. You know the house parties that they're in. And it's just crazy because you walk into the house, you got one long table, beer pump. The next long table, flip cup.

Deliver room, just straight conversation. So it's just different environments, different parties in one party. And you just making it through. You just making it through until 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. Now, let's get it. I was supposed to be in mourning right now.

My friend just died, and that mourning and even the performance of that mourning, it so quickly became secondary to what I knew was my mission, the thing that would make my dad proud of me, the thing that would give me an excuse to quit other stuff that I didn't want to do anymore, like piano lessons and Cub Scouts, the thing that would make girls pay attention to me, the thing that would make guys want to dap me. I knew I had to make this fucking basketball team. I don't know that there's ever been anything in my entire life that felt more urgent than making that basketball team. It was just like,

either you're going to have a jersey and you're going to be somebody and people are going to know you or you're going to be nobody. I want to get your point of view on how big a presence was basketball in our house and in my life? Oh, it was huge. If anybody walks in our house now, they'll see how huge it was. Your dad played basketball in high school and in college. He played for Columbia. He was a star in Detroit on his basketball team in high school. I remember when you actually made the team and you came home and you were very excited that you had made it. And you told me later, you said, mom, the main reason that I wanted to get on that team was I could not imagine coming home and telling dad that I got cut. I mean, you wanted it for yourself too,

but it just was not an option to come home and tell him you didn't make it. Remember that? I don't remember, but it sounds- You don't? him you didn't make it. Remember that? I don't remember, but it sounds... You don't? Basketball was, I think, like a language that my dad established between us. Wow. And you know, the stereotype of the imagination. And it's a tall person's sport. No, I mean, it's okay. But like, it is what it is. It's a tall man sport. And my dad's taller than me. All my friends are taller than me because I played that sport. So that relief you saw when I came home and told you I made the team, that was real relief because I felt like I was in a losing battle at all times

with that sport because I didn't have the most obvious advantage. And so I always felt my whole life I was clawing, scraping and clawing to hold on to that social advantage, the thing that girls liked, the things that kept me close to my friends. I watched as some of my friends didn't make teams. I saw how it changed their social lives. Basketball is huge in the DC, Maryland area. It's a very black area. There are some- You don't say. Right. To say the least, there are tons of NBA players that came out of this area when I was in that age range with me Kevin Durant Ty Lawson Carmelo Anthony Mike Beasley just so many guys so anyway it was a big big thing as important as I thought it was

for me to make that basketball team as much as I suppressed my feelings about Alicia to focus on making the team, the experience of being on the team was so much greater and more consuming than the expectation that I had coming into it. And when I say greater, I just mean volume. I have felt moments of celebrity. I have probably felt 17% of what the full celebrity scale can go up to. I've never felt the celebrity that I felt being on this basketball team. Gyms that are packed full of people. Video cameras at a time when people didn't bring video cameras to basketball games. We had highlights on the news. We had fan sections from other schools. We have our own fans.

They're singing songs. They have chants. They have face paint. Everything you imagine from a movie about college basketball, put that in a gym that only holds about a thousand people so that they're literally sweating over the court that we're all on. That was our basketball experience for that year. The game is only played for an hour and a half to two hours. But the intensity of the ferocious sort of fawning from the community around us, the intensity of the games that continued on into our lives after the games were over. So, you know, we in our travel suit, our new fresh whites. So we put them on just knowing when you step in that building, it's almost like game day.

First period, everybody in their Blake attire, everybody face painted. From the first period, I don't think we was really focused on doing schoolwork. It was very tough on game day. So many distractions. So many people wanting to talk to you. So many people saying, hey, get me in through the back door. It was just very hard to be a student. So I think on game days, we was just an athlete.

Those were the days that, if you want to use that word, celebrity, it started in the hallway. And then it ended at the party or whatever at the end of the night but people calling your name down the hallway like hey y'all gonna get the win tonight kelvin can you dunk three times for me you know but it wasn't it wasn't just the student body that's doing that it was the security it was the teachers it was the principals it was the counselors the whole school was ready to rock for us as soon as we walked in the building it's your girlfriend texting you

from another school it's your girlfriend at school and then it's your other girl also at school texting you all at the same time

saying what's up in the hallway everybody just wants to feel like a part of the vibe yep every time again like our first grade class

we had Ms. Diller and she would just let us sleep, go. Like, you know, take a break. You know what I'm saying? Like on the long block days, and we would just leave. Right. Go to Ms. Lumpkin, get a pass, come back to class. And that's our day. We just literally do whatever we needed to do

to be successful on game day. Here's my older sister Shannon's perspective on the culture around the basketball team that year. I definitely remember that the team was treated in that celebrity way. And I saw some of the girlfriends that the other guys got as a result or whatever. I saw that you started dating people and that some of those relationships kind of stemmed from that, at least the confidence, if not, I don't know that we need to use the word celebrity or whatever, but yeah, definitely the confidence, the belonging, the community of it.

And then I saw that you had all of those guys, they all became your friends and they were all sort of like brothers to you. High school is that weird time where some kids look like adults and some kids look like kids or people's body types start to come out and you can see that somebody's going to be 6'3 and somebody's going to be 5'2. And so I would see you hanging out with these other kids in some cases who are super developed and seemed very adult-like. And I saw just the respect and the inclusion that you were getting from them. And

that kind of made me start to see you differently. How so? Just some of them were very tall and they were very, like I said, developed and muscular muscular and they seemed very confident. They had sort of this swagger. I just saw that they treated you like a peer where I was still partly because of being away at college for some of this time. I was still relating to you as like a younger brother at this point, but I began to see what the level of this currency was. I realized you were cool, you know, and you really always had been. I don't really agree that you were thought of as a nerd or that you were not treated as cool at an earlier point, but definitely at this point, I felt like you were really a leader, like you were really a superstar socially among your friends. My friend Theo didn't make the

basketball team till his senior year. So he got to experience life at Blake before he was an athlete. Okay. So Blake high school was a pretty diverse school in terms of like race. We had probably like 20% African American kids, which is kind of big in our area. The regular breakdowns for everything else. But in terms of sports, sports was kind of like the key. If you played sports, you were kind of treated raceless. Being treated raceless is kind of a thing. It's a beautiful thing. The white people talk to you a certain way. They want to hang out with you. You get invited to all the parties, all the activities. People talk about you in a different way. If there's yearbook quotes, they're going to be about you. Things like that. I remember I had long hair, maybe until about 11th grade. When I wasn't on the basketball team, I remember having my hair out and my biology

teacher saying that my hair was in the way of class. That was a distraction. That was always stood out to me because I still remember, and I love these guys, but I still remember Kenny and Sean Neely and all them. Their hair was always out. And girls would be playing in their hair and, oh yeah, there's a game tonight and everything was cool. Right. This is you on the outside. This is me on the outside. Before you're in the program. Yeah, so it's like, wait a minute. You mean to tell me that if I get a basketball jersey, I can wear my hair out without being a distraction? Interesting.

There was a freedom that we felt because of the success we had on the court and the fandom that we had in that community, which allowed us to walk into these environments that we were not previously invited to, such as white folks' houses, nice houses, big ass houses, beer kegs, bonfires, teenagers going in and out of rooms, messing around with each other, like all this shit I wasn't even privy to.

I didn't know that black kids went to the white kids' houses sometimes because they didn't, but the basketball team did. Maybe a couple kids here and there who knew how to like do the dance, but I wasn't really hip to that. So I wouldn't say we were treated racelessly, but our blackness was very much tied to our athleticism and our maleness. You couldn't dissect the passionate fever of, and this is some real shit, it was the white kids who had this clawing desire to be close to us. I'm not even saying the white girls, the dudes. So there were guys who liked to touch us. I'll start off moderate. Put a nice big hand right here on your back Maybe now sometimes around your neck in a picture all the way over to

little bit of smacking on the butt All the way over to They see you when you show up to a party. They're so into it They give you a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was unwelcome It was this feeling like you didn't even know who the fuck I was two months ago. Now you're my buddy. Now you're my homie. You're using those words to describe our relationship. Occasionally you're using words that you're not supposed to use to describe our relationship. And you're putting your fucking lips on my cheek when I see you. And what I'm talking about, it's not sexual. It's entitlement.

You are a value now. So I wrap myself around you and put my body on you. So when Theo says we were treated racially, I actually completely disagree. If you made the team, you went from being invisible, someone to be avoided, to an extremely high value item, something that people want in their party to show that the party is cool. And those parties were, they were fun. They weren't average high school parties. That's the thing about it. The success we had on the basketball court, it was carrying over and into these houses and making people bring it for the party. Everybody was ready to do the thing. Dax Shepard told me about doing comedy, why so many people end up doing drugs who do performance art like that. It's because

you go up there, you feel this enormous high of connecting with an audience. Then you walk off stage. You don't want to come down from that feeling. You want to stay there. That's what was going on with these kids. The game was a high for all of us. It was like, ah, nobody wanted the feeling to come down. And I have to paint the picture because I haven't let it go. It's still in my head. I went to college. I went to a crazy ass college.

I had that experience, but like white kids party different. It's a different thing altogether. Bro, you came into the party. You're probably met with a chant of your name of some sort like i got a shio henji many times i'm just like dog like i'm just the sixth man of the team and then like a small thing you're probably gonna come in and probably like yo sit right here you're probably gonna get a seat to sit down and chill and then somebody will probably

sit right next to you that's probably a girl and they're gonna talk to you you know i'm saying like see how the game went they might even ask you about one of your teammates. Like, so is Chad, is he coming tonight? Is he available? Like, tell me. All of that is going down and it's getting spicy. It's getting super spicy. So let me keep it a buck real quick.

These are white people's houses. Right. And we are all black. We are black. And the white boys on the team are not coming. Except for maybe Greg Carey. So we are several cars, a caravan's worth of black teenage boys walking into a white person's house, generally greeted by a white mother or father who is happy to see us there, and walking downstairs into a basement where basically anything goes. Right. So we come in and our same kind of clicks. Just think about it as being in Varsity Blues, like a movie like that. You know, the house parties that

they're in. And it's just crazy because you walk into the house, you got one long table, beer pong, the next long table, flip cup, the living room, just straight straight conversation so it's just different environments different parties in one party and you're just making it through you're just making it through until three four o'clock in the morning now let's get it now we're gonna decide who's in this room who's in that room who's in the living room who's downstairs in the closet who's in this room? Who's in that room? Who's in the living room? Who's downstairs in the closet? Who's in the bathroom? We're going to get through until it's that time. But it's just crazy because, like we said before, it's like a movie.

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HelloFresh recipes make it super easy for me to eat something delicious, healthy, to give me what I need so I can get back out there and keep creating. Go to HelloFresh.com slash yearbook free and use code yearbook free for free breakfast for life. One breakfast item per box while subscription is active. That's free breakfast for life at HelloFresh.com slash yearbook free with code yearbook free. America's number one meal kit. Even the adults around us noticed how much fun we were having. Here's our assistant coach, Coach Wiggins. I'm kind of jealous that I wasn't a student during that year because it was almost like a TV show. I think of that football, what is it, All-American? Friday Night Lights, All-American. See, I never really watched Friday Night, but I

watched All-American recently. And I'm like, yeah, when I see that, I think about y'all. Where do you get this diversity of students? Hey, the black basketball team. And there's some white students in the basketball team. And they have VIP passes to everywhere where not necessarily all of their friends could go to the party up in Alney. Uh-huh. I hear about the parties with a lot of the white students and us in the big houses in the community. And you guys were there.

You guys were in it. You had the pass to get in. You had celebrity status. I mean, it's magical. It was magical. You know, you listen to music. You talked about the game. If it was a black party, there was dancing.

Right. If it was a white party, there was not. Right. If it was a white party, there was not. Yeah. Same music, no dancing. Yeah, exact same music, no dancing. More drinking. Probably a little more smoking. Yeah.

Honestly, like probably a little more hooking up at the white parties. At the white parties. Yeah. I feel like the white kids, they had the better parties. And being on the basketball team was for me my ticket into those parties. Yeah. I feel like the white kids, they had the better parties. And being on the basketball team was for me, my ticket into those parties. I did learn about everything from their world. So their world is the one that we're all modeling after when we're in high school, college movies, road trip at that time and your road trip, American Pie when they went off to college and all that stuff.

So they were very much trying to emulate what they saw in those movies. And at the time, that's what I thought was really cool. It was two different types of fun. So let's say like the black parties, one, they're usually at a venue. I don't know why exactly, but my guess would be most of the black families, they don't have jobs where they're traveling all the time. And if they were, they will make some type of arrangement for their kids so that the kid wasn't able to throw parties while they're gone, which was the complete opposite of, say, our white counterparts. So black parties,

it's usually at a venue. It's usually music-centric, dancing, the whole bumping and grinding party kind of thing, which was totally fun. With that, you mix and mingle. You're chopping it up with people from other schools. Sometimes it was all good. And then sometimes your group of friends is eyeballing another group of guys the entire night, waiting for somebody to do something to set things off. But then you go to the white parties, usually somebody's house. There's always beer. It's definitely more of like an alcohol-driven scene for us being Black. And I never felt judged because we were Black at these places. Sometimes I would wonder if the parents were home, would they be

okay with us being there? You could feel it. Yeah. Obviously, I didn't expect for it to be the kind of love I would get if I went to, say, your house or something like that. But sometimes I did wonder if so-and-so's mom was home, would they be okay with us being in their basement, even if it was just something innocent. In their basement, sometimes in their bedroom. Some of these parts we're going to, they're letting in like 50 high school kids into these random houses in the burbs.

Big houses. Yeah, huge houses. Music, people are bringing games. There's beer. Sometimes people are bringing kegs. And now that I think about it, how do some of these people even have the access to these things? Bro, I never touched a keg. I never picked up a keg until I was a senior in college. How are you even getting this stuff? And I mean, of course, we felt cool because we were being

invited to it. But I won't say that I wasn't comfortable in those situations because it felt like people looked up to us. People wanted us around. And I guess in terms of like high school, school hierarchy or whatever, parties, the lights are off. And at the white parties, the lights are on. And I don't even know what is the significance of that. I still can't wrap my brain around it. But there's a couple of things about the white parties that I want to explore a little bit, because I would say being in the band and like wearing glass, there was a lot about me that was very nerdy. And then I was also an athlete. So I had that kind of thing. So in some ways, there were times where I felt like an imposter in both environments, but I definitely felt more comfortable, just literally physically comfortable in the black environments because I knew those kids. My girlfriend was in that world. I felt like I kind of knew my place a little better. Yeah. In the whiter environments,

there was this sexy danger about it a little bit. It was like, I don't know if I'm really even allowed to be here, but their parents, my own parents, and I'm only like just now really getting to know white girls. I'm like 16, 17. It was like a little enchanting for me. So there was another major difference between these parties and I can't pretend like I didn't see it then. In fact, I was very aware of it then.

There will be very few, if any, black girls at the white party. I have one specific memory going to a party in Olney, one of the houses that we always went to, and somebody said a purse disappeared or something. This particular time, we had brought two young black girls who were friends of ours. And somebody said they lost a purse. Someone was accused of stealing that purse, which was one of the two girls that came with us. And I just knew they didn't steal the purse. The way that you kind of know your friends or whatever, as a kid, I still, to this day, I'm like, there's no way this girl stole a purse. And the result of it was, and I don't remember if it was directly communicated or if I just took this on myself, but it was basically like, don't bring any more black girls here.

And that felt like the vibe sometimes was like white girls white guys black athletes nobody else no black girls did you see that i didn't know any black women who wanted to drink like that so you think it was about the way we were kicking it yeah i didn't know any black girls who wanted to play beer pong shotgun beers that kind of stuff which is not to say that they didn't exist right i also wasn't friends with girls you know yeah i was friends with men you're a captain of football team the girls that were there were through no action of mine. So I can't really say if they were welcome or unwelcome. I will say that when things would go wrong in a party setting, Black people were the first to get blamed.

Oh, yeah. But we never really took into consideration how we were viewed in the Black girls' mind. But we experienced it. I know it was a lot of black girls who hated me because like you said, we didn't provide them with our presence after the game because we were funneled to the white parties. You know what I mean? And I was getting a side eyes, but I was confused why I was getting a side eyes. I'm like, damn, I didn't do nothing to you.

And it was girls that I used to have relationship with, not physical relationship, but we used to be cool. We used to come by the hallway, what's up, what's up, what's up? And then it was just one time where they like, yo, what's going on? And I put it into perspective that that's what it was. It was that after the games, we was not giving them the time that they wanted. We were straight to the other's house. We didn't go to the Black parties like that.

You were able to participate in things that were not in my reach at that point because those parties that we talked about where you were allowed to bring one friend who was Black or whatever, that friend was understood to be a guy. Black girls were just not welcome in that space. And there was no equivalent white guys looking for the social validation of black girls. And so what I experienced at that time was probably some envy. It wasn't conscious envy because what I remember of my own experience then was just feeling like I did not belong to the place where I was, which was this community in high school.

I just felt like I was not a relevant person for the people around me. And so I just kind of like didn't participate in anything in that space. I don't even know that regret is the right word. I'm happy where I ended up and all of that. But I did experience being very, in some cases, like violently excluded from the same sphere that pulled you in. And some of those white girls, of course, had reasons to want to capitalize on like your social currency. This is a really progressive community. You get a lot of points if you have a black friend. You get points if a black guy is attracted to you that can really

validate that you're a certain type of person or whatever. My sister Shannon's time in high school was very different from mine. She's really smart. She's a writer. We think similarly. We talk similarly. I knew that we were different socially. And I thought that the reason was just because nature, God zinged me with a social gene. And my sister, he made a little bit more introverted or something like that. But now I'm an adult and I know I'm an introvert. And I now can see that what actually happened was that she was a girl. I was a boy. And even though I was a natural introvert, I could pull off the performance of being charismatic because people were open to it, because I was a guy. People responded to me differently because I was a dude. White people responded to me differently in a

spectrum of ways because I was a dude. I mean, those parties, being able to walk into that world and walk out of it, however dangerous I now as an adult know it was at the time, it was an adventure. I saw things. I learned things. I experienced things that I wouldn't want to give back. My sister was three years older than me. So our social worlds didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to collide. But what I know is basketball is what gave me a hall pass to experience certain sides of life. But what I also remember in this school, in this area, in this part of the county that was such a mashup of races and cultures

and not in a particularly harmonious way. A friend of mine, a song came on. We were listening to country or alt-rock. We were probably listening to Dashboard Confessional or Yellow Card or something. And a rap song came on. And then my friend said, I didn't know we invited niggers to the party. She wasn't calling me a nigger, but I was the only black person there. And I just kind of left. I just

got in my car and left. The one disappointment I had was that everybody was sort of neutral about the moment and preferred for me to handle it with that person as opposed to taking a side. with that person as opposed to taking a side. And they all had my back and agreed that it was messed up, but they weren't really willing to do more than that. Yeah. If the same thing happened today, actually, I do know they would do more. But we were children, you know?

Yeah. Something probably felt wrong for them, but they weren't sure if it was wrong. For literally everybody involved, it was our first time in that experience. Everything we're describing here, this is on the low end of the spectrum in terms of the intensity of race in the country we live in. I live in New York now. When I think about where do I want to raise kids, my heart and my brain, they pull up an image of the suburbs and the fences and the bonfires in the backyard and the football field, the grass and the trees and the fireflies. That is a vision of what I think most Americans have been told is perfection. And while I knew that I wanted to go in and tell an honest story about where we grew up, I felt this guilt about exposing the warts on something that we all told

ourselves was next to perfect. My friend Marcus, who was one of my best friends from our rival high school, he was with me on the night where that parking lot fight broke out and one of the girls got killed. So as soon as the game was over, I guess everybody just knew there was going to be a fight or somebody said there was a fight. And I still remember helping my brother and some of his little friends get into my dad's car

and girls fighting like right by the car and us having to push some of those girls out the way in order for my brother to get into the car's car and girls fighting like right by the car and us having to push some of those girls out the way in order for my brother to get into the car and close the door. And then after finally they're out of the way, then our boy, he had gotten into a fracas that night and I'm sitting there and I'm trying to calm him down. Blake is also right near People's Community Baptist Church. So take him and we start walking towards the church and we walk past a group of dudes. Apparently this group of dudes was some of the people that had gotten into a fracas with. So when we walk past that group of dudes, one of them's like, hey, ain't that that dude right there?

So then I'm like, what the hell? Like I'm trying to walk to the place of the Lord and I'm still dealing with bullshit. So I think this is probably when you start remembering that night. We run up the hill and we're like, yo, these motherfuckers trying to jump us. Y'all need to come down and help us. Blah, blah, blah. The whole game is mayhem. There's police there.

I'm the black kid who's running up and like, yo, they trying to jump us down here. As I'm running up, the police kind of hit me up and they're like, yo, I could have gotten arrested that night. Luckily. Yeah. Luckily. Yeah. At least I could have got jumped and left for dead. There's kids that got jumped and left for dead while we were growing up. Right. And did die. So I ran up and I was about to get hemmed up by the police, but Reverend body, Mr. Body saw me get hemmed up. And I was, since I was about to get hemmed up by the police, but Reverend Boddy, Mr. Boddy saw me get hemmed up. And I was, since I was a student athlete, Mr. Boddy, who was very involved in paintbrush athletics, he saw me and he talked to the police and then the police kind of put me with you, Chad. So that was like the precursor to when a girl actually did pass, could have lost our lives

that night too. Just, I don't know, in this scenario where it's teenage high schoolers, alcohol, violence. So thank God that I'm still here. If Reverend Boddy hadn't been there and vouched for Marcus, at the very least, he would have been arrested. And I think we all know that is not a safe place to be for a teenage black kid. The thing about teenagers is when you see them do something that feels erratic

or feels risky, most of the time, I think you trust where that feeling is coming from. At this stage, they're still pure. They still act in honesty. High schoolers are going through a lot of emotions all the time. They're all tangled up. They are feeling sadness and excitement, confusion, passion, and I think pain. I remember learning from a psychologist years ago that sex is like a go-to method of pain relief for young people. Sex, love, romance, teenage romance in particular, that's one of the greatest highs that you can feel. And throughout history, artists have connected the euphoria of Young Love with tragedy. That's ultimately what killed Alicia. She and the driver were just trying to go on a date.

In the next episode, I'm going to get into my own experience with Young Love and how Alicia's death ended up bringing her best friend and I together. Bye.