Uncle Joey's Joint with Joey Diaz - #187 | T.J. ENGLISH | UNCLE JOEY'S JOINT with JOEY DIAZ

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Welcome to UNCLE JOEY’S JOINT..... It’s Monday, August 8th… Today we talk In-Studio with Author & Journalist, T.J. ENGLISH, about his New Book DANGEROUS RHYTHMS! Follow him on Social Media and his Website at: https://www.instagram.com/tjbabaloo and at https://www.tj-english.com for More Info!   This podcast is ALWAYS presented by ONNIT! https://www.onnit.com This episode is also brought to you by Better Help & True Classic… BETTER HELP Visit https://www.betterhelp.com/Diaz for 10% off your first month.  TRUE CLASSIC Visit https://trueclassictees.com/JOEY and use code JOEY for 25% OFF!  Follow Uncle Joey on Social Media: https://www.Twitter.com/madflavor https://www.Instagram.com/madflavors_world And don’t forget.....   The Mind Of Joey Diaz on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/joeydiaz #JoeyDiaz #Madflavor #UncleJoeysJoint #TheJoint #TJEnglish The JOINT is Produced by: Michael Klein aka @onebyonepodcast on Social Media: https://www.Instagram.com/onebyonepodcast https://www.twitter.com/onebyonepodcast Huge Thanks to BEN TELFORD for the Tremendous intro video..... https://spoti.fi/unclejoeysjoint

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Welcome to Uncle Joey's joint today. I'm my co-host today, and my main man is my brother. I love him with all my heart. This guy inspires me. He's a great author, Mr. TJ English. What's happening, brother? Joey, how you doing? Nice to be out here in Jersey. Yes, nice down here in the farmland. We can go get a pig after this. Breathe out here. Breathe out here. It's wide open, isn't it?

I thought I just came from my place in downtown Manhattan, went through the tunnel, come over here, all of a sudden the sky opens up, and you can breathe. I felt like I'm in the country. It is. I picked this area because my brother lives in Morganville, and I was in shock. He had a fish company, he still does. He would leave his house at four, go to the Fulton fish market, and then we'd deliver fish to one, and we'd be in Morganville by two o'clock. We'd go through his garage, we'd take showers because we stunk like fish, and then we'd jump in a pool and he'd put the fish from the day on the grill while we were swimming. And I'm like, how can you be in the world's best city in one minute and then you're down the fucking mountain? This is different. It's not like going down the shore, it's nothing like that.

This is farmland. I'm next to Coltsnack, and that's Queen Latifa, that's Bruce Springsteen, that's a bunch of people, but when you drive in Coltsnack, those people have horses, they got everything. You know what I found out? I did not know this, and a lot of people are not going to know this. New Jersey is the state with the most fucking horses. I had no fucking idea that there's more horses here than fucking anywhere. And I'm going to tell you the truth. You want me to tell you how I ended up here? Let me tell you a weird story that only, and I've never told anybody this, only the TJ understand. When I was a kid, I was a santeria kid, and I was involved, and I used to go to all the eatings and chicken killings and shit. Do you know where they got their animals from? Marlboro. Because I remember still being a kid and going, you go to Marlboro, isn't that a cigarette? Like it used to be a cigarette, you know? And then, to add more to this, when I was about 13, I used to come down here every weekend to the English Town Raceway, funny cars, and then they have the English Town flea market, where it's everything stolen. You know, from CDs in those days, from A-track players, so I would come down here on the weekends and buy limousines for the feet.

Julia Serving sneakers, they were like five bucks, and I would take them up north and sell them for 21. You know, so it's like I have a connection to this area in the weirdest way, but the santeria connection is just... Oh man, if you get us started on that again, remember when we were on Rogan's show, I still get people come up to me and say, I can't believe you had an abaqua ceremony on the Rogan's show, you know, because we got off on that. But you know, that's what got me into Latin music, Latin jazz, which I love, really, was by way of hearing it through santeria ceremonies, the drum playing, the chanting, all that kind of stuff. And when you hear that, when they take that element of Afro-Cuban music and they feed it into American jazz, that's my sweet spot, man, that's the music I love. Is that like Cachao and those guys? Yeah, yeah. I have an album here that I really love. This is my all time, like people always say, you know, the Bella Vista Country Club, whatever the fuck that is. Yeah, Bella Vista Social Club.

Not for me. I like this shit from the 60s that I have. Oh yeah. With Cachao on bass and a fucking tape in an apartment that sounds like a fucking apartment. That's the best. You ever hear of Chano Poso? Fuck yeah. Chano Poso? Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah.

The percussionist, the conga player, he got murdered at the age of 33 by his marijuana dealer. Wow. He, Dizzy Gillespie went down to Havana, Cuba and heard about him. They told him there's a conga player in Havana that plays in the traditional santeria style. In fact, he was a babalau in a strain of the religion called Lekumie. Lekumie, yeah. Yeah. And so they, so Dizzy Gillespie went down there in the late 40s and got him and brought him to the United States and used him in an orchestra that played at Carnegie Hall with Charlie Parker and a guy named Chico O'Farrell, who was Cuban, Cuban Irish, who was one of the founders of this music, Latin jazz. And they debuted at Carnegie Hall and it changed the course of American music.

And Chano Poso was 32 years old at the time and this guy was perched on the edge of a mega career. And then he got murdered by his marijuana dealer in Harlem one afternoon. Great tragedy for him. Now, Dizzy worked a lot of Cubans. He did, yeah. He really liked Cubans. Machito. Mario Bowser.

Mario Bowser is a very important figure in the history of jazz in general. Mario Bowser came up here in like the 30s and went to work in Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra in the 30s and he hit Dizzy Gillespie to Cuban music. And that's when Latin music started working its way into jazz. All the rhythms of Afro Cuban music started to change the direction of jazz. And that's it. You listen to that today. It's as fresh as if it was just created yesterday. That's how it sounds.

It sounds great. It really does. I didn't know, listen, I love the Afro Cuban thing. Yeah, it's something that you can't talk about it really. It's not like you meet your friends on the corner and go, have you heard the last type of time? It's something that I grew up listening to and I really liked. I love Santeria music and I still play it in the mornings on Mondays to salute the saints and shit. I still play it.

But the Afro Cuban, it's done like the Afro Cuban whole thing is it's such a culture that I can't even explain it. Like I'm stuttering because I cannot. It's done so much in so many ways. Like those slaves going through Cuba built such I'm watching something on Netflix now about the 12 episode Cuban thing. It's tough to watch at times, but it's slow. You know, it's fucking slow, but Cuba just had this Afro rhythm thing. And I'll tell you, my uncle's dark skin. And you know, they didn't like dark skin people.

And he'll tell you now when he was seven, a guy made a dog piss on him because he was darker skin. You know, I talk about racism in America. Racism in Cuba is horrible. He took till now we talked, you know, once a week and he'll laugh and go, I didn't know my luck would change when that dog would piss on me. If I knew what I knew now, I would have had him piss on me even more. But it changed baseball. It changed music. It changed music and athletics.

Yeah, athletics like the way people think. Like, you know, I get a thing every once a year from some jerk off that listened to a podcast. I didn't like the racism. There was no racism. I grew up, you know, having all that around me. When you're Cuban, there's no racism. I mean, I ain't gonna lie to you. The first time I saw my cousins, I fucking ran in the room and locked the door because I swear to God, like my, and my mom was pissed at me for like a week.

She's like, that's your family. I go, they can't be. What am I adopted? I'm the only light-skinned motherfucker in that picture. It looked like a, it looked like the Nets. When we were kids, the Nets, I looked like one of the water boys. Like, I was like a bull boy for my family. Everybody's dark.

Some of them got afro. Some of them got light-skinned. Some of them, it's fucking crazy. We're like cats, you know, and I think like every couple of years they spit out a white one. Then you look at my cousins, they're both dark-skinned. I mean, you look at them and they like, so I sit here sometimes going, I don't know what the fuck happened. I don't want to know, but it made for an interesting- You got some African in you, man.

Oh, like a motherfucker. No question about it. Yeah. No question about it. And you're lucky to have it because- I am. Yeah. You're blessed.

Nothing to be ashamed of. You're blessed to have it. It's given me a lot. It's given me a lot and it's helped me understand a lot. It's helping me understand a lot. When I did that 23 and me, I had a couple things in me. But you could see that there's all the people that went through Cuba. Yeah.

Chinese, Spain, African. Yeah. That's the people that went through Cuba. I've studied the roots of that music a lot and gone down to Cuba numerous times to hear it at the source. And I don't know what it is about that island. I mean, there's a lot of great music came out of the Caribbean from Puerto Rico and Jamaican everywhere. But Cuba, the music from Africa and from Spain came to that little island of Cuba and started a cross-pollination and it got mixed in with the religious ceremonial stuff.

That's some of the greatest music that's ever been created in the world. Some of the most rhythmic music, exciting music, sensual and sexual music, and also sophisticated music as sophisticated as European classical music, particularly when it gets put together with jazz. Cuba's greatest creation, if you ask me, is that music, what it's done to the world, what it's given to the world. I listen to a lot of Celia Cruz. Yeah. Oh, Celia Cruz.

Let me tell you something. She's the Aretha Franklin of Cuba. Oh, you just took it out of my mind. Like, I read the Franklin Celia Cruz walk into that. She's in her own category. And in fact, I drove by the Celia Cruz gas station the other day in New Jersey. They have a stop and I made my wife go in. I think it's Union City where they have a statue of her.

They have a statue of her up there, but they gave celebrities, six gas stations, Gandolfini, Bon Jovi, I don't know, Einstein, and I know Celia Cruz got one down there. So I went in there, not in a couple pictures of it. There's no Spanish music, but she's got a song called Bamba Colada. Okay. She's got it live and in studio. It sounds like something out of a fucking James Bond movie.

Like in the sixties. I don't even, and it's precision. You know what song I'm talking about? Bamba Colada. Oh, of course. Yeah, I know. The start of it. It sounds like...

It seems like it's something you'd watch on TV in the sixties, but I was like, fuck. That music will take over your body. Yes. Yes. It will possess you, you know, like religious music can possess you. That music will possess you. It changed my life, I gotta say.

You know who else he blew his mind, who wrote about it in his autobiography? Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando was blown away by Afro-Cuban music and he learned to be a pretty good amateur percussionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy how much history Marlon Brando, in fact, last night at dinner at the party,

these guys were asking me about the Superman of Cuba. And I said to them, Marlon Brando will go see him at night, and the article says that Marlon Brando will go with three showwomen, showgirls, and leave with him, you know? Yeah. And just fucking crazy shit. Superman, does everyone know what we're talking about when you talk about Superman?

Oh, yeah, I've talked about it a couple of times. I've spoken about the Superman of Cuba's got an 18-inch dick dry, like flat, like it must have been... I heard a story once Robert DeVall went to Cuba to visit... It's in the article. And he says to the cab driver, take me to the Shanghai Theater, take me to see Superman. Superman had been dead for like decades by then,

and he was so disappointed that he couldn't go see Superman. Cuba has so much fucking history, but this new book that you have, I mean, listen, your love for Cuba has... I've learned a lot from your books. I mean, I didn't know all these stories existed, you know, and with your stories and my stories, I'm just blowing the fuck away. Like, Cuba blows me away, like it really does as an island. I can't believe I'm from there.

I can't believe the thought process of those people sometimes. I'm really proud. Like, I love my mother, and I think I'm happy that she died, because my life would have been completely different. She would have made me pay for the United States, like pay them back. My mother had plans already. My mother wanted me to be a Marine. My mother wanted me to fucking fight for this country.

My mother had, you know, it's the patriotism level of those fucking pre-revolutionary Cubans. Oh, man. Did you see the... Did I send you that video of Ricky a couple weeks ago when he got his acceptance speech? No. In New York with Lucio Ball, like, 1956?

No. Yeah. And he goes... When I came to this country, I used to clean cages. And he goes... He goes, here it is. From that night to this night in New York City on this stage, winning this award lets you know that this is the greatest country in the world.

Like, they loved America, you know? They couldn't... They loved everything about it, you know? And that makes me really proud. Cuba had some disgusting things, you know? Like, when you read the Superman of Article Cuba, you know, Americans were getting off the plane just to shoot, to go see this guy fuck a chick, you know?

It was really fucking filthy. Well, it goes way back, you know? The Caribbean was the crossroads of a lot of, you know, the pirates and all that kind of shit. A lot of commerce, illegal commerce, selling of spices and coffee and all that stuff. And so those islands in the Caribbean were kind of established as a kind of place to go and engage in illicit activities

that you couldn't engage in back in your home country. That was part of the tradition and part of the appeal to lure people from all over the world to come to the islands, you know? What happens in Cuba stays in Cuba, that whole mentality. And so that became a legacy of the island that Cubans had to live with for centuries after that, you know? The idea that you come to this island and abduse it and use it for your own personal form of entertainment

and then you go back to where you came from. Some of that was good and some of that was bad, you know? I think Superman is part of that legacy. Well, Superman, it was weird. In 1985, I had a Panamanian neighbor in Clipside Park. In fact, it was my friend's grandmother and we were talking one day and she goes, Cuba is a country that's, it's cursed. God put a curse on it because of all the bad things that were done down there.

And I'm like, I remember watching Armistad and that's one of the first times that I actually saw, like I heard glimpses, like I know, you know, Santeriano slaves went through there, but I didn't know it was a slave port. How many of those fucking slaves put a curse on that fucking country? You know, on the way out, they were African, they had. Yeah, but they blessed it too, man. They blessed it too.

They brought all that great music. They brought all that spiritual vibrations through that island. You know, it's a, it's a mystical place to go and experience the culture there. And what that, what that island has contributed to the arts in the world, arts and athletics, there's nothing else like it that I can think of. You know, all the little Irish, all the little island nations are very proud. I'm Irish. That's an island.

I think there's always a mentality of people who come from an island country because you're an isolated, you're just, you know, you don't have neighbors, you're surrounded by water. And usually they're small in comparison to the land masses where the other countries are based. And so you have a real sense of pride when you come from that kind of a place. And when, when you excel, when you seek to succeed at something, when you come from a place like that, you really do it like over the top, almost like you have something to prove. You have a lot to prove, you know, Cubans are like that. Puerto Ricans are like that.

Irish are like that. Irish are like that. Yeah. It's so weird, the Irish-Cuban connection. Like I never lived through it. So I don't know what happened with the Battle of Woyne and how they ended up in Cuba and party in the Catholic country. That's all great and dandy. But then I look at the culture and how it affected me as a Cuban, right?

I married an Irish chick. When I was dating, white chicks, whatever, they would come and go. Irish chicks stayed. If you listen to my love, you know, 13, 12, McNeil, Colleen Maines. Yeah. I was a moran. I was an Irish lover and I couldn't figure out why Irish girls liked me. I'm like, why do these girls even talk to me?

That's a fucking lady who's a genius. She's beautiful on Twitter. She's a doctor, okay? And no walkie-her and her father come to my shows. I love her to death. She came to LA and go, I'll meet you at the store. I'm like, this girl trusts me. Like Jesus Christ, who trusts me?

Because they're fucking Irish and their fathers are crazy. Irish dads are fucking nuts. So when they see me, they're like, this guy's perfect. Like, you know, this follows the fucking... That's funny. So I don't know. Sometimes a culture, I'm trying to explain, I'm not explaining it right. Like, I had a friend in college.

She was Korean and I knew I was friends with a boyfriend. And then one day I asked him, where's your girlfriend? And he goes, she goes to the hospital every other period. Okay, every other time she had a period, she would have to check into the hospital for five days. So one day we were at dinner after that and I don't like to talk about periods and all this shit. So we were just talking and she was explaining to us

what really happens to her. And she says that she carried the sins of her culture. That the pain that her grandmothers and everybody endured like for years. Dog, it sounds fucking crazy, but that's what it turned into her. Well, that's a big burden to have to carry, man. Her mother had a period like this. I hope she got some good things out of it, too.

I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Look, I faint. I faint, you know. And one day some guy was telling me in college, the reason why you faint is because you came from Spanish ancestry, from Spain, and they were in a war. And when they were getting conquered,

they faint to act like they were dead. And when you can't handle stuff, you faint. That's part of who you are as a culture. Your great grandfather might have been a fucking soldier, but that stayed with you through your genes. That pain, like career went through a war. That's what she was saying. That pain from the war would happen to them.

She carried that for years. I don't know if it's hard to believe, but I see it sometimes in my life. I see what the Cubanism, the doors it opens for me, the things that I attract to naturally. You know, my daughter's Irish and fucking Cuban. She joined the school band. That's a great combination.

Okay, guess what she's playing? The fucking drums. Right. Okay, the teacher's seen her play the drums and goes, shit the fuck down. When we go to Jimmy Florentine's house, and the boys and the girls are playing, she goes in his garage and you hear,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. See, what that is is like, I was married to a Brazilian. This, when you are drawn to cross cultural boundaries in the friends that you choose and the significant others that you choose, I think in a way you're seeking to complete some part of yourself, there's something in that other culture

that you feel that you don't have. And by forming a relationship with that person, you complete yourself, right? And some cultures are particularly well suited together to do that. I think the Irish and the Cubans have enough in common that that's what draws them to each other. And then they have the things that are dissimilar

that help them complete themselves. For instance, Irish being Northern Europeans can be kind of physically uptight. You hang out with a Cuban woman, man, you're going to get loose. You're going to get loose. Physically, you're going to get loose. And I think Cubans benefit from a little more steady, I shouldn't say steady emotional,

but from a little more of an intellectual instinct that the Irish might have that they don't have. So they get that. That's what they get in return. I'm stupid. And my wife runs the fucking operation. So I depend on her for everything. But my wife, you know, about the Irish and the Cubans have,

though, is fucking temper, the temper that goes off, the emotionalism, the heart, wearing your heart on your sleeve, responding emotionally to everything, you know, not all cultures understand that. Irish and Cubans have that, you know, it's something that's understood between them. It's a perfect combination. I don't know, like, whenever I go to the doctor,

my blood pressure's up. But then we take a breather and then my blood pressure drops. And for years, I've had this problem, but I feel great. It doesn't really affect me. And I think that my engine runs out. Yeah. My engine runs a little harder than people. Like, I'm fucking passionate about shit.

And I've gotten, like, I've lightened up. Because I remember being 25 and people saying, Joey, come here. You got to be, you got to be. This is not good. Yeah, you're going to blow a gasket. And I remember now you're saying that to me one day. I was working on a dealership.

There was an issue about money. And when I was saying the word, I went in the back. I got a sledgehammer and I got on one of the cars. And I said, if I don't get my money, I'm going to start breaking windshields. And one guy, you know, came out and he's like, Joey, Joey, stop. Come in.

What's the problem? How much? He gave me the money. He goes, come back Monday. Take the weekend off. And he was an Irish guy. Billy Solem, what's his name? I'll never forget this guy.

Because he was white. He was rich. He was intelligent. He was Irish by name. You know those people? He was Irish by name. But he read me correctly. And when I came back Monday, he goes, come here for a second.

He goes, bro, I got to love you. He goes, I fucking adore you. I've been thinking about you all weekend. He goes, I don't meet people that wear their heart on their sleeve anymore. I haven't since I left the war. He goes, people are just bland. He goes, I love you to death.

He goes, in fact, I'm not even going to call you Joey. I'm going to call you Renegade. He goes, he would call me Renegade every time he saw me. And when I went to prison, he sent me money. And he wrote me a letter. And he goes, you're going to be fine. You're going to come out of your head. I'm standing on your feet the right way.

I mean, he just understood me. But when he said that to me, he goes, come to my office. He goes, you fucking Cuban motherfuckers. And he goes, huh, no disrespect. I don't want you to go off. He goes, but the passion, the heart on the sleeve. He goes, you don't see a lot of people. And I never knew what that meant, but I love the same.

Like if I love you, I love you. If I fucking hate you, I fucking hate you with everything I got. You know, when I want to help you, I'll do anything in the world for you. I'm one of those guys. And that is a nice Cuban tradition. We're very, we're very open. I read an article by a woman who's a Cuban 20 years ago.

She was, she wrote for the Chicago newspaper and she said that she visited Cuba. She had no idea about Cuba. And she goes, these people had nothing, but they'd always offer you a glass of water when you went to the house. She goes, people in the United States don't even think of that shit. She goes from Cuba. They would ask you a glass of water to give you coffee. She said the coffee tasted terrible.

They had to use the filter like 10 fucking times. But it's a really weird fucking culture to be a part of. When I was a kid, I was really ashamed of it. I didn't understand that nobody would come to my house because of my santeria stuff. I wouldn't allow anybody in my house not to mention my mother was a fucking, you know, I shouldn't be in six and are going, if you don't start wiping your ass and you keep shitting your underwear, I'm going to thumbtack them to the fucking door so your friends can see it when you come over here.

And one day she goes, I'll thumbtack it to the, to the, your bedroom door first. They could continue to get out, thumbtack it to the front fucking door. So somebody sees your stinky ass motherfucker. Man, if they'd reported her to the child services agency, right, they would have come and taken you away from her. Not even close in the seventies. That was mild. Yeah.

I knew kids. Well, let me ask you, growing up in Union City, you say being ashamed of it. You were surrounded by Cubans, right? It wasn't. I was ashamed of it when I started going to school at first. Speak the language. And I, you know, but my mother tried very hard to like remove the accent. My mom didn't want me to have an accent.

She wanted me to be an American. So she didn't want me to sound like Ricky Ricardo. So it took a couple of years. Santeria was very embarrassed about it. I didn't know what the fuck we were doing here. It worked for me. I got healthy. I wasn't going to talk about it, but I wasn't going to.

I liked when I was with those people. And then were you raised Catholic? Yes. So you... Very Catholic. You were baptized? Yes. Right.

Catholic, very tight with my God. Yeah. So was I. My mother was the type of person that she'd be driving in the city and she'd see a pretty church. She'd fucking pull over, go inside and tip the fucking guy and give him a bottle of Doors or something like that. Yeah.

I mean, I came from that foundation. So once I got to Union City, I don't know. I started talking to people and I saw all these bodega owners and I heard their stories. And it gave me a sense of who I was, but it wasn't until 1985 when I went to San Francisco after my mother had died that I became friends with a street gang on Marialitos that I realized I was very proud for being Cuban. She was those Marialitos that instilled that pride in me. No, no shit.

I didn't know this. Because they were successful people. They were on the street selling drugs, the stabbing people. But in Cuba, there were engineers, there were dentists, there were lawyers. And when they came here, all that got taken away from them. And I saw their drive to be Americans and I saw their drive to succeed, whatever it was. Yeah, they sold nickel bags, but a lot of them were janitors at schools at night.

They sold nickel bags to me, they couldn't speak English. So I saw, I got a culture explained to me, like my mother didn't explain it to me growing up like you took it for granted. And now I wanted to, I yearned for that knowledge like six years after my mother died and these Marialitos broke it down for me. That's amazing because the Marialitos got stereotyped in bad mouth a lot by other Cubans, by other Cubans. It was outcast because I guess the Cubans who'd been here for a while feared that the

reputation of the Marialitos was going to bring them down. So they separate, they were like, we're not like the Marialitos. They demonized the Marialitos. They demonized them. Yeah. And for a reason. Well. For a reason.

They burglarized their homes. Yeah. Let me take a short break real quick. Now for a word from my motherfucking sponsors. What's happened? You're beautiful people. I'm here to talk to you about better help. You got to take care of your mind.

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So about the Marialitos. Marialitos. Now, do your viewers know what the Marialitos are? Marialito is, you know, the bulk of Cubans came after the revolution in 59, 60, 61. Then Cuba tightened up for a few years. And then from constant pressure, you know, I guess, I don't know, there was some type of something happening in Cuba, some type of revolt. Here's what happened.

It's interesting. Carter was president. Carter was president. Carter said, Cuba's mistreating their people, and he announced that we will take in any Cubans that want to leave Cuba, right? And you will be given special privilege and citizenship when you get here. And so Castro, hearing this, emptied, this is the legend. He emptied the mental hospitals and the prisons and put them all on a boat, boats, a series

of boats. I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands over the course of like a week. And they all left from the town of Mariel, which is why they were called Marialitos. And they came over here in a flood, like hundreds of them on little boats and everything. It was really desperate, like an act of desperation. And they came over here, and it was not easy for them to simulate. There was too many of them too fast. And so they wound up living in camps underneath the expressway in Miami, and that was that.

And they got a really bad reputation, because the reputation was that they were criminals and that they were low-lifes. And that was a whole generation of Cubans who landed here. That's amazing that you were getting to know them. So you were able to go below the stereotype. You were able to actually interrelate with them as human beings and learn, you know. They reminded me of who I was. I was lost.

My mother had died in 79 in November. That influx happened like six months after that. And I'll never forget it bothered me because my mother was waiting for a daughter. My mother's whole fucking life at that time was trying to get my sister out of Cuba. And here she died. So since I was alive, since I came from the States, I would hear on the phones every day with attorneys and Congress people, speaking Spanish, English, trying to get her daughter. And then my sister ended up marrying a soldier who was a commie.

So by that time, my mom died, and then they opened up Marielle. When my mom died, I didn't touch Cuban food for two years. There was no reason to eat Cuban food for two years. I was just eating Italian food, and I became a criminal. And I lost who the fuck I was. I was like lost. And then in 1984, I finally was homeless, and I went and visited my uncle in California. And he started giving me some of my family history.

Telling me my mother murdered a guy that tried to rape her sister, and that I was a murderer. But I was like, fuck. So I almost killed my uncle. I was going to step, we pulled guns on each other, because it was too painful to comprehend the things he was saying to me about my family. Then a year later, I ended up in San Francisco. And one day I'm walking just to see what's going on. I'm living in the Tenderloin, which is not the best fucking part of San Francisco at

the time. And sure enough, on the block next to, there was a coffee shop, there was a topless coffee shop. You know, the ugliest women, ugliest tits you ever seen in your life, coffee couldn't even save those titties. I forgot what it was called. And it was down the corner, it was a pawn shop. And around that corner was all these, you know, I went down, and I, and also I heard

the lingo. What the fuck? What are you guys doing? We're Cuban. Oh shit. I'm fucking Cuban. And we started talking. And then they told me what they did.

They sold nickel bags. You know, they, they dealt with traveler's checks. So I became, I spoke English. So I was like, they're leading now. I had a suit and I spoke English. What year was this? 85. Oh shit.

So they were running that block down there. And it was hilarious. It was, I learned a lot. You know, I remember one day it was the guy that you had to pay a big to his name was El puro. Thing went on in that block unless it went through El puro, El puro, E L P U R O, which means if I want to sell TJ, uh, uh, an ounce of coke, but Mike wants to stab him. We got to go through El puro and he gets a taste of whatever we take from Mike.

It's just like the mafia, but it's on a block. It's in a small thing. I actually liked El puro because he was old. He was black, dark skin Cuban with white hair and a white beard. And the funniest thing he said to me one day was I was talking to him and some Mexican guy comes up to him, speaking in Spanish and English, excuse me, can I borrow a dollar from you? And he goes, what the fuck is wrong with you?

He goes after all the kicks in the ass the Americans did to you. He goes, you want to speak English to me? You dumb motherfucker. He goes, California belong to the Mexicans and the white people kicked you out of there. Now you want to speak English, get the fuck out of here. Speak to me in Spanish. And I was like, wow, this guy is fucking heavy duty. You know, El puro, you know what, you know what, uh, Cubans call, they don't call cigars

cigars. Right. They call them poodles. Poodles. I wonder if that's where that comes from. He had poodle. They call him. And then I became friends with a guy, Bambusi, and he was a fucking engineer.

He had gone to Germany and all these Cubans sent them there to build and, you know, and now he's in fucking San Francisco selling nickel bags next to me trying to, and I would talk to them every day and they would tell me about their struggles, how they got picked to play baseball. You had to go to Castro's events and if you didn't clap eight hours on Sunday and hours, if they missed you, fall in the sleep, forget it. If you didn't go to work, you went to jail for a year. If you, oh my God, they just filled me to fuck in, but it gave me that balls I needed

at the time. I had a little shell, shell shock from my mother's debt. And just getting that education, that little history reminded me of who the fuck I was. You know, I asked because I lived in San Francisco in like 84 into 85. Yeah. Same time. I was, I was a bartender at Haydash Brewery. Oh, okay.

I lived in the Mission District. Okay. Yeah. I lived in the Virginia Hotel on O'Leary, maybe. I was, it was three months. I lived in San Francisco and I apologize to San Francisco every time I fly in there. It was three months of just, you know, going to Japan town and fucking cash and Travis checks.

And my God, one of the funniest stories though, I learned that because when I was a kid, my mother always told me about Boogalroams and she goes, you look like a Boogalroam. And I would go, what the fuck are you talking about? And one day she told me it's a guy who goes to prison. That's what they call a guy who goes to prison, fucks prisoners. But he lets them suck his dick. He don't suck that dick. He's like the man in the relationship and the gay relationship, but he doesn't take

it in the ass. He just pitches. There's no catching involved with these motherfuckers. That's how you tell yourself you're not gay. Yeah. No, no, I know this for a fact because it's like there's a famous Cuban musician, Mongo Santa Maria. Yes.

And when he came to the United States, he lived at the street level and I was told this by a fellow musician who heard it directly from him. And he was like, oh yeah, we used to go to the Meatpacking District in New York City and I would let gay guys suck my cock. And then his friend said, I didn't know you were a fag. He said, I'm no fag. Don't you dare call me a fag. I let somebody suck.

I let him suck my cock. I didn't suck his cock. It's crazy. It's a fine line. When I was a kid, that shit was being talked around me and I'm like, that don't sound good. And I remember I had like a guy that used to go to my mother's barn. He used to go, you should tell one of your five year old, your fifth grade friends to suck your dick.

You could, you could talk them into sucking your dick. It'll be tremendous experience for you. And I'm like, what are you fucking, like, what are you talking about? I don't want to guy suck. I don't even want a girl sucking my dick in the fifth grade. I want a guy sucking my fucking dick in the fifth grade. So, but that was, he had two gay guys selling coke for him on the corner and he would stay in between the both of them.

They both had a day shaving. They would put a wig on, heels, hot pants, the blouse, pillows and the titties. And when they would fuck up, he would backhand them right on the street, like knock them down and stupidly, I need to punch them and they go down and they get back up and fix their wig. It was like nothing happened. That's some pimp shit there. That is white pimp supremacy.

Shit. That's Cuba. But you did time, right? So you know about, you know about Fifi? Uh, some Cuban friends of mine in Miami who did, did some time, told me, did some serious time like 20, 25 years, uh, eventually they created, uh, they created a vagina. They use like the role of a used up role of toilet paper and then they like dressed it up somehow to give it, um, to give it flexibility and they called it Fifi and it was the hottest

fucking thing in jail. Everybody wanted Fifi and some of the prisoners became really good at creating the Fifi and the Fifi was why you closed your eyes and you put your dick in there and you thought you were, you were fucking a female. If you had a good imagination, you use your imagination, I don't have that type of imagination. I really don't. But how many years did you do? One.

Okay. If you'd done 10, your imagination would have got a lot better probably. Well, I had a good imagination. I banged it out in the shower every day. My floor was slippery, you know what I'm saying? But I didn't need to fuck something like the one, what was years ago? What did Rogan have that you fucked the glass? Remember everybody bought a million fucking things sold that you came in it.

You jerked in the cup. Come on, man. Yeah. No. I need a cup in my house for me to come on. When that happens, you got fucking problems, man. I don't need that shit. You know, TJ, it's a, it's really great that I get impressed.

You're my inspiration, but one of the things that makes me proud to be Cuban was the last couple of years by the books that you've written. It's really filled in a lot of gaps that I needed because I lost my mom early on. My dad, they used to tell me all those stories. But when you're 13, you don't give a fuck. And then after they die, you go, now I give a fuck. I want to hear all those beautiful stories, you know? I was telling somebody the cop that I'd lent the book to about battle.

I go, Havana Nocturne was one of the best $10 I ever spent my life. It was like $10, $12 on Amazon. He goes, I think my friend sent me a copy and I bought a copy, $12 or something. Filled in so many, all these books that I read give me pride. You know what happened, Joey, with the Cuban experience, I think, because of the revolution of 1959 and Cubans getting exiled out of Cuba, not immigrants, exiles, getting forced out and winding up in the most traumatic of circumstances in the United States. And then the hostilities continued and in some ways got even worse between the United

States and Cuba after the revolution. So a lot of Cuban history, a lot of Cuban stories got repressed. There's so much about being Cuban that you weren't able to talk about, that your parents kept from you, that your uncle kept hidden, you know, at the dinner table, deep dark stories. Don't talk about that. I don't want to talk about that. So a lot of your generation inherited a kind of repression about their own history and their own culture.

I meet this all the time through Cubans and I get to know that it's repressed. And so since I've been writing these books that go into some hidden history, some untold history about the Cuban experience, I've had a lot of younger Cubans come up to me and say what you're saying. They're like, I didn't know this. This reminds me of my uncle or my aunt or these stories they wouldn't talk about. Let me tell you this. And they want to tell me their, their, their family stories.

I think, I think the entire, there was an entire generation of Cuban Americans that just got cut off from, from their own cultural history and are just now starting to experience it and learn about it. And because I was worried when I did these books, number one, I'm not Cuban and here I am mucking around in, in the, in some very emotional, controversial history, Cuban history. And I, I wasn't sure how that would be received, you know, and it's been very emotional the way it's been received. Cubans are really touched by it.

Like I remember when I did Havana Nocturne, which came out, you know, like 10 years ago, 11 years ago. And I, I remember when I was working on it, I kept thinking, you know, at some point I'm going to finish this book and I'm going to have to go to, in a room full of Cubans to present this book. And if they don't chase me out of that room and they don't come after me, that means I was successful. That was my definition of what would be successful about that book.

And I remember I had a moment, I went down to books and books in Coral Gables in Miami to promote the book, to do a reading, do a presentation. And I was staying at a hotel across the street and I came a little late, the shine on my shoes. I wanted to look good and I was a little late. And I got over there and the owner of the bookstore said, oh, you're a little late. I said, yeah, sorry. He said, but there's a huge crowd you want to see.

And he pulled back a curtain to show me and a room was fucking full, like overflow crowd. And it was all Cubans and I gas, man, I lost my breath for a minute because that was the moment that I had been knowing was going to come. Eventually. That was the truth. I was going to have that was it. That was the reckoning. And I went out there and they were so attentive and welcoming and interested.

It didn't matter that I wasn't Cuban. I think in a way they understood that it had to be a non-Cuban that was going to tell this story. And all they wanted was it be a non-Cuban who was honest and sincere and cared and connected their heart with it, you know, that's what mattered. You know, show us the respect and we want to know. And it was it was incredible. And it was that way with the corporation.

I went back to that same bookstore and the crowd was even bigger, man. You know, authors are not used to go into events where they have to turn people away at the door because it's an overflow crowd. The only time I get that with these books is when I go to Miami. All the Cubans turn out. They want to know. They want to know this history. I'm surprised that you, the battle book is phenomenal, you know, but I'm surprised it

was received so well. I am too. I always surprised when I had my reasons and I'll tell you why. Well, there's some people who attacked me and come after me, you know, there were, I mean, you cannot write about Cuban politics and not piss somebody off. You know, there's two sides and they feel very strongly and they do. They're well past the point of listening to each other on this subject. They just have their beliefs and that's it.

And they would die and kill for those beliefs and they have, and some of those people came after me. There was a lot of vicious stuff online about, about it, about the politics of it. But generally I think, especially among younger Cubans, your age and younger, they don't want to fight that battle anymore. They, they, we've already heard it. I grew up in it. I thought over it.

They want to know the history, you know, they want to give me an honest, truthful version of it. You know, they want to know. You know, there's a couple of different types of Cubans and I had to find out the hard way. There's Cubans like me that a theta this, you know, it's runs in our blood. We would do my God knows what man, my grandfather was sold junk, not heroin, but he picked up junk from the street and fixed it and sold it. And my uncle goes, that's where you got yourselves in the ship.

He goes, you got to see your grand, whenever I had lunch with my uncle, he's like, I can't believe how much it looks like my father, how much you act like him, the way you're your salesmanship, you know, and that makes me happy, all that type of shit. I never forget meeting a Cuban guy at an audition one day and he goes, what do you do? And he was very nice, no santer here, you know, and he came to my show that night and he was great. His wife was great after the show. They ran out of that.

And the next day, two days later, I called him, what'd you think of the show? He goes, I was a little upset and I was a little hurt and insulted by your material. And I'm like, what did I say? He goes, you just shit on Cuban people by your life. And I was like embarrassed. I'm like, what are you talking about? He goes, normal Cubans don't act that way. And then I don't talk that way.

And I was like, the Cubans I grew up with, you know, obviously this was a very uptight Cuban. Then I went to my other Cubans friend's house a year later for Christmas and I brought a potato into Nico, an album of Afro-Cuban guys when I tell you, these people almost jumped out of the window when I put that music on because there are Cubans that don't want to know there was an African in their system. They haven't gotten over that. They haven't gotten over it.

There's Cubans that walk the face of the earth and they'll say to you, that's got nothing to do with me. Afro-Cuban. I'm Cuban. I'm from Spain. They don't want to know it. And you look at them and you can see the black nose or the black hands. They got the Michael Jackson nose, but you're like, okay, you know, and that's another Cuban.

Well, that's the rate. That's racism. That's the racist Cuban. That's the ones that they don't like the Afro-Cuban stuff. They like that plain Cuban music with the guitar, which sucks dick. They think they're Spanish. Yeah. They think they're Spanish.

Right. They think they're Spanish. And so it's, I knew when I didn't, I thought the Vandalop turn was for everybody. But for battle, I thought they would be, and not until later on, I thought about it. Like I read it the third time, I'm like, there might be a little resistance and there was even Union City. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I remember we were going to do an event there and he backed out at the last minute. They backed out. Yeah. And then my brothers. I knew they were going to back out. I remember when you came to me with that and like, oh, they love your book in Union City. We got someone that's going to put on this public event there. And I'm like, really?

They're going to do that in Union City. I remember I said to you, they're really going to do that. You're like, yeah, they're going to do it. I'm thinking, I don't think so. That was a very controversial figure in that politics in Union City. That's a tough line to walk, you know. That's what they didn't like. And they pulled out.

They didn't like. A week before the event. They didn't like the, they didn't care about the battle stuff. They didn't like the bringing up of the old history in Union City. I mean, my brother, who's an ex-cop in Jackson, he lives in Jacksonville, he's an ex-cop in North Bergen. He sent me messages he got from Union City cops that call me a liar. They were like, that kid's lying.

I'm not lying. I know what I find. Just, just so people will know, and you've probably talked about this before, but Union City was one of the centers of the anti-Castro movement in the United States. And this was an underground movement that was, uh, I guess we could call in a way kind of a terrorist movement. I mean, they used terrorist tactics, bombings, assassinations, all kinds of shit. It was a dirty, dirty little war.

Um, and Union City was one of the centers of that Miami and Union City, but Union City was more quiet because they were looking at Miami for it. And Union City, you could run that shit. Well, I was told by people in that movement that Union City was the more militant hardcore. Hardcore. You know, uh, Miami is kind of the intellectual. They formed the organizations. They raised the money, but when you wanted to carry out operations, you got the boys

from Union City. Well, looking in that book I read, I never knew that Hudson County had the most car bombs in the country. Yeah. In 1975. I'm not living in Hudson County. Yeah. What the fuck is that shit?

And most of that was Cuban related, probably. And mafia stuff. Well, I gotta be honest with you. I still remember, you know, I told the story with Rogan with you and I stand by it about the dirty Cuban cop and a lot of people got mad about that story because they made him out to be this fucking hero and he wasn't. And uh, yeah, they gave him a plaque and everything. Yeah.

And I saw like, I don't remember all the names, but my mother was friends with that hard knock Cuban numbers bar game. There was a lot of those, uh, there was a guy named Boyotlite. That means sad pussy. That was what they called him. His face looked like a sad pussy. So they call him Boyotlite. Yeah.

You know, there was a little, and I still remember them in my mind. I know a guy they call Boilest, he stays sad balls. Sad balls. No, no, they got all those names for Cubans. But I still remember that back room when I walked in from school and I was making believe I was making my soda with the cherry in it and load nice and I still remember what those guys were saying and the hatred, I still remember the hatred in their voice, the hatred. My stepfather, you could not mention, this is part of the trauma.

This is part of the trauma. Yeah. You cannot mention Fidel. In fact, that's why my stepfather was a dickhead, but I respected his Cubanism because after Marielle, he paid 30,000 to get his brothers brought here and the third day he was walking in Union City with them. And one brother yelled at that guy in the street, Kamara, do you know what my stepfather did?

He put him right back on a plane and sent him to Cuba. His own fucking brothers. His own. Just for that one word. Just for that one word, which is like a communist word, Kamara, whatever the fuck they say. Right. Right. Done.

Done. Talking about this beautiful fucking book I haven't finished, but what I've read is fucking just, again, I don't know anything about this. So everything I got to read, I got to read like two times. This book is the story of the relationship between jazz and organized crime, starting from the beginning of both those things, basically. It's just a quirk of history that jazz and started in New Orleans in the early part of the 20th century, right around the time the first mafia family formulated in the United

States, in New Orleans, a lot of people think the mafia started in Chicago or New York or something. No, it started in New Orleans. There was a big wave of Sicilian immigration into Louisiana and New Orleans. And that's where it started. And the music had begun. I mean, I don't know. Are you a jazz fan at all?

I must beat with this now. I love that music. And I think you learn a lot about the United States and race relations and all kinds of things from jazz. Jazz is kind of the window into a lot of things about the American experience. And so I always loved the music. And I knew that the Sicilians were the first to start nightclubs. They weren't called nightclubs.

They were called honky-tonks or dance halls or saloons, mostly honky-tonks in a part of a New Orleans called Storyville, which was a famous vice district in New Orleans, where basically where formalized prostitution in the United States got started. The French brought that over. The French brought it, bordellos, the idea of finery and music played in the foyer of the bordello, and prostitution wasn't sleazy and in the gutter that it had an aspect of it that was like high society. And so Storyville was into that, and they had all these fancy bordellos, and there was

always a piano player playing in the foyer of the bordello, and that's kind of where jazz started. That's one of the places that jazz started. It also came from the plantations, field songs, and all that kind of stuff. It also came from Mother Africa. There's a place in New Orleans called Congo Square, where every Sunday all the African musicians would gather and play those African rhythms on the drums. So all of this was like coming together in New Orleans and creating this incredible music

that took the world by storm. The mafia happened to be there working on the waterfronts, doing local extortions, and one of the things they were good at, the Sicilians in particular, was entertainment, clubs, places where you would come to drink and be entertained. And so they were the first to combine these things, and they were smart enough to round up these great African American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and others who were playing on street corners and say, come to the club and play. This started a relationship that would exist for the next 80 years, and all the mafiosi

and the jazz musicians who were a part of this relationship formulated the business side of the music. And so everyone came out of that. Frank Sinatra, who I write about a lot, he's in the second half of the book, Frank was a Sicilian born into this tradition of music and the mob. I mean, everyone talked about Frank and his associations with the mob, yeah, but put it in context. Frank didn't invent it, and he wasn't the only one.

He basically was inherited this, these relationships, and he ran with it. In some ways went farther than anyone else was willing to go. He started using the mob to negotiate things for him and to handle business for him, and even on various occasions would hire thugs to beat somebody up. That was Frank. So what it is is basically a history of organized crime from the point of view of the music business and jazz and all of that. So as we were just saying, in some ways, in fact, this relationship between the gangsters

and the jazz musicians became the model for the music business in general. I mean, rock and roll, certainly rap and hip hop, that all grows out of this, you know. So it's kind of important if you're someone who has an interest in organized crime and the way it plays out in the United States, this is one version of that story. You with me? You're a bad motherfucker. I'm just, you know, I never heard this before. You know what I love?

So you got a book coming out next year, right? So now you have an idea of what it takes to put a book together, get it down on paper to finish it, to get it out. You may have a deeper appreciation now of what that takes. I've always loved reading. Yeah, that's true. And it's a good, it's a good. I always feel sad.

I shouldn't feel sad. That's kind of condescending, but I, I always feel bad for people who don't read. I get so much joy and pleasure out of it. And I always have. And it's how I learn about the world. I mean, I also go to places and have direct experiences, but there's nothing like reading, man, for giving you context and knowledge about things, you know. Otherwise I would think you'd just be a top spinning top all the time, not able to make

sense of things. Reading gives you a way of making sense of things, you know, you know, for like a year I went away from reading books, just had anxiety and I couldn't focus. Yeah. And I was just reading like articles on how to get better, you know, how to get healthy and shit like that. But over the last two months, I've started reading again and helps my stand up helps my focus.

Reading just settles me so much, you know, so nothing better for me than smoking a fucking joint and getting into a good book when the reef is hitting that book is hitting guys. They not much better than that. See, I could tell, I could tell you a reader when we first met, I'm going to tell people how we first met. Joey reached out to me after the corporation came out, or I think I hadn't even come out and you heard that this guy was right in this book and I don't know how you got a hold of me.

Okay. So you emailed me first and then and then we talked and I got to admit I'm embarrassed to say, I didn't know, I didn't know who you were. I grew up in the era of George Carlin and Richard Pryor and that was it to me that was such a high standard that I didn't pay attention to comedy anymore after that. Me neither for a long time. And in the 80s, remember in the 80s, there was like a flood of really mediocre comedy everywhere.

So I had tuned it out more or less. So I didn't know who Joey Diaz was. And I got up to speed a little bit and then you invited me to a show at the club on 23rd Street. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so I came to your show and you did a set and it was long set. It was at least an hour, probably more.

And you know, I knew you were going to be funny because we'd spoken. I thought this guy's just funny being who he is, you know, just and so I thought it was going to be just you being who you are. But the act was very well crafted at that time. Yes. Not now. It was very well crafted. You told the story of your life basically for an hour and 15 minutes or whatever.

There was a lot of very personal stuff in it. I remember thinking this guy is a storyteller. That's what he is. He's a storyteller. And I do think that appreciation of storytelling is part of what comes from reading. It's one of the things that comes from reading. How do you structure something? How do you construct it?

You know, how do you tell a story? Some of that comes from the street corner and it's just natural and you have that instinct or you don't. But if you're going to get up on stage for an hour and 15 minutes, you got to put some thought into how to structure it. You can't wing it. You can't just wing it, you know. So I knew you had those skills and I knew those skills had to have come from somewhere

other than just telling stories on the street corner. I've always loved reading. No, I've loved reading and I love the connection in the chapters. Right now I'm doing stand up and there's a couple funny jokes in there, but it doesn't connect it. I'm not connecting the jokes yet in time. I'll find the connection, you know, you find it. But I remember afterwards I said to you, I said, I was really impressed with the, with

the act and how well put together it was and how well shaped it is. And you said, you know, I've been doing this act for about 15 years now and I've been shaping that same act for like 15 years. How long it takes, you know, to get it to be that good. Right. It takes a while and a lot of trial and error. Not as much trial and error as writing a book. Yeah.

That was fucking real. That was that writing a book for me was something and I had a lot of things going on. So I like to give it another shot with something else, something I know about. I'd like to give it another shot in time when I have more time and I'm more focused. That helped that and that was that book I did was during the pandemic. Yeah, there was nowhere I could go. I had anxiety. My knee had just gotten surgerized.

So I would fucking outline at night, outline it to the littlest dimension. And then we'd speak the next morning and we'd cover a chapter. And, you know, it was, it was rough. Yeah. When I did it by myself, though, it was rougher. I needed that. When you were doing that and it defeated you kind of, right? Oh, yeah, because listen, it's something that anybody could get a book deal.

This is what killed me, guys. I'm going to tell you the truth. Okay. I don't want to be an asshole here. Anybody could get a book deal, but what's the sense of getting that deal? If I'm just going to tell a couple of stories and some guys going to write the book for me, I'm going to pay you 10,000 as a ghost writer or whatever you want. I don't know what they pay.

I don't know what the golden prices, but I'm just saying for me, I wanted to be a part of it. I didn't want any mistakes in there. I didn't want any, I wanted the reader to just, I wanted him to feel what I felt at the time. This has been very important to me with this book because right now I'm going through legal and they want you to take some stories out, blah, blah, blah, and that's fine. But I wanted the reader to really see what a fucking mess I was. I want the guy that's reading this, not to focus on my standup, not to say anything about my standup, whether he's funny.

I want you to focus on the prison, the losing of the child, the losing of the parents, the losing of the father, and not only that, now let's add the kidnappings, the shit I put myself through being homeless. I did all this on my own. Society didn't do shit to me, you know, but I wanted people to see where I was in that point in my life because there's a lot of people walking around today that are at that point in their life and they don't know how to get out of that. And that's all I wanted to tell the reader at home, that you don't have to stay in that point

in your life. I know this is your situation today, but I'll tell you, if you want to get out of this situation, I got the answer for you. In fact, I don't have the answer for you. You have the fucking answer for you. So I wanted them to understand that there was robberies. I wanted them to know how low I got as a human being. To show them how high I really got.

That a lot of people don't want to show you that they just want to tell you, you know, I hung out with Joe Rogan, I'm in a limo. It wasn't that before that there was this and it was fucking real and it hurt. And I figured out a way on how to get out of that. And it was, you know, it wasn't easy. I mean, I, I didn't stop snorting coke to 44, 15 years ago, I'm 59 years old. I'm not proud of that. But that's who I was.

But this is who I am now. And it was a fucking journey and a half. And guess what? I fucking do it again. And I fucking do it my way again. And that's it. My way, my way back to Frank Sinatra, back to Frank Sinatra. You know, if the books are hit, and I think it will be, uh, that's the reason

they'll be hit because of your honesty. You're honest with yourself. You're not hiding anything. Fuck, I'm not a lot of people. I was in a helicopter with Bill Burr. That's great. But let me tell you why it really was dirty fucking years ago. Most people hide shit.

They're not honest about it. And that must be painful when you come time to write a book. If you're someone who's in denial about shit and all of a sudden you got to put it down on the page because the page will expose you in your, your efforts to like put it down on the page will expose you, man. It's like, if you're not being honest, if you're holding back, it ain't going to work. I want people to read this book.

Not even, I don't want people to read that. Like I'm not saying it wrong, but I want what's happened in this country the last seven years that I really do not fucking like. I'm not talking about cancel culture. I'm not talking about, I think that shit. What bothers me the most about today is when some guy says that some woman says that 23 years ago, the Supreme court judge covered her mouth when they were sleeping. Okay.

He was in a fucking fraternity or whatever and he fucked up. Did he rape you? No, they put his dick in your face. No. So why did you release this? What was the point of you saying that the Supreme court, Supreme court justice did this to you? You understand me?

Now let's say he finger banged you. Okay. When you were sleeping, he's, that's not a right for getting canceled. I can't cancel somebody for that. I can't look somebody in the eye because they made a mistake. And this is where they are now. So that mistake is null and void because this fucking cleans all that. I'm telling you, we cannot keep doing this as Americans of discounting people.

The journey that they made because when, you know, I just saw somebody fucking right about Marky Warburg that when he was 13, he hit some guy in the eye and the guy locked his eye and he did his time. He paid the fucking fine and this is who he is today and you're still going there. Now, does that make him a better person? They did 40 movies. No, but he's not taking people's eyes out no more. Right.

In fact, he's inspiring like the judge inspired me, you know, people inspire me. So now you can't go chopping people for who they'd worked 20 years ago. You know, I think this cancel culture thing is a phase and it's going to pass. But I'll tell you something that isn't going to pass. And there's also just a bigger problem in our society. And that is how everyone's in their own ideological camp now. Like people are on the right and people are on the left, don't interact anymore. They have their own, they have their own information sources.

They have their own heroes. They, they demonize, they demonize the other side. And that's it. And I don't know how we're going to get out of this. I mean, we grew up at a time where I grew up in a big family, family 10, right? Nine brother and sisters. A lot of them had different political points of view right there in the house. In fact, my mother was a Democrat and a liberal and my father was a Republican

and a conservative. I'm used to the idea of having different points of view that I might not even agree with in your circle. And that's fine. That's not ultimately how I choose a friend or judge somebody based on their politics. That's not the number one thing with me, but now that's the number one thing with everybody.

Um, and if you're on the other side, they're not even going to listen to you because they feel, I don't have to, I got my, I got Fox news. I got MSNBC. I got a source that's going to pat me on the back and feed me and make me feel good about my point of view. They're not going to, uh, educate me about another point of view or someone else's point of view. I don't know how we get out of this.

This is just getting more and more and more divided. And if someone comes along like Trump, who is like, you know, throwing a smoke bomb in the middle of it all, someone who's that extreme in their positions, well, we see what happened. The whole country almost broke down. Had a, had a collective nervous breakdown during those four years. He was in office, right? I saw a lot of people lose that everyone lost their shit.

People fucking still losing it, man. Yeah. People still lose their shit over it. And I'm like, whoa, okay. So you lose your shit and you, and your only way of dealing with it is to go to all the other people who think the same way you do. And you all sit around in like a circle jerk and, and, and reaffirm each other's, uh, biases and positions and shit.

I don't know how we get out of this. I don't know who breaks that down. You, oh, you got to write a book, another fucking book. I stay out of, I stay out of politics for the most part or two. I don't even, I'm a felon. That's why I don't go to the right and I'm not on the left. I'm right in the middle.

And you look at my balls. They almost hit the fucking floor. And that's my political. I don't want to, I don't want to look at your balls. That's number one. The party. It's a simple request. I don't want to look at your balls.

The party I belong to is the felony party. Okay. We don't want to talk. I have politics. I just, it's not the thing I lead with. It's not, you know what I mean? No, but over the last six or seven years, America, a lot of people that I knew that were just regular people, all of a sudden,

political fucking experts. And you know what, if you don't even know about Hudson County, how are you going to be a fucking political expert? Last night I was watching someone, 12 news, uh, the Jersey city Democrat. She ran the light and fucking Jersey politics are the best. And some guy came on, it's like mud wrestling. Oh my God. She was, she was getting her car towed because she double parked.

So she called like the co-bulking police and said, you can't do this. I'm a committee woman. But the line of the night was when they called some other guy and they asked him, they go, what are you things going on? And he goes, listen, this is all the part of the Hudson County machine. Yeah, they're not going to do nothing. She's a congresswoman. What is she?

A committee woman, but she lives in fucking no man housing. She lives in like a hundred, 800,000, $8,000 a year housing. So that's Jersey, you know, so everybody wants to know about politics. If you don't know about fucking Hudson County and if you don't know about Cook County, don't even, let's start there. And like I tell people, I grew up in Hudson County and that was the micro. I got to see the micro of corruption. I can't picture what the macro of corruption is.

The name Frank Hague, meaning anything to you. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, they built the hospital by his wife, Margaret. He was an Irishman. This country, the urban areas were founded by political machines that mostly were led by Irish politicians. See, the Irish had one advantage amongst the ethnic groups. They, the immigrant groups, they spoke English.

They spoke English, which was a tremendous advantage. And so a lot of the other immigrant groups gave a certain amount of power to the Irish politicians. They're like their immigrants, like us, buddy speaks English and the Irish had a certain talent for that political leadership, you know. And so you had these political machines in places like here in Jersey. Of course, Boston had one fucking Kansas City, Missouri, the Pendergast machine controlled the whole town.

And it was always this Jovial, although Frank Hague wasn't Jovial. He was kind of an uptight guy, but he ran this fucking area. He was the political boss of the local machine. He wasn't the elected official. He was the man behind the man. He was the guy that put all the pieces together. He chose who was going to get elected. He chose who was going to be the police commissioner in a certain area.

He chose who was going to be in the positions of power. That's how powerful he was. He was the man behind the man. Frank Hague, I always wonder about guys like that, because in his day, he was the most famous and powerful person in this area. You said that he said the name Frank Hague at the dinner table and everyone would fucking bow and say a prayer. Now the name means nothing.

I mean, it's on a few buildings somewhere, but nobody remembers. Is that what the guy from Boardwalk Empire also? Probably, yeah. Yeah, they brought him in. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he was in there because I know Margaret Hague and that was his wife, who they named the hospital. No kidding.

And Jersey City, the hospital got torn down real quick. I just want to leave you one thing. I know you know this story. Ricky Ricardo, friends with fucking Al Capone. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, this book got him the job in the club. This book, Dangerous Rhythms, deals with this overlapping. Capone was a huge jazz fan.

Yeah, he loved it. He also loved opera. Opera was his Italian side and jazz was his American side. And he was a patron of the clubs and he owned four or five clubs in and around Chicago. He owned a piece of them. One that's still there called Green Mill, a club in Chicago that's been there since 1908.

If you're ever in Chicago, uptown Chicago, great little club, kind of like Chicago's version of the Village Vanguard here in New York. The cup. These are a couple of the oldest clubs in America. He he loved it. In fact, he loved it so much he once heard. He went to a club and he heard for the first time, Fats Waller. I don't know if this name means anything to anybody, but I urge you

go online and look up some clips of Fats Waller. Fats Waller was a jazz entertainer in the 20s, 30s and 40s. He wrote the song This Join Us Jump in. He wrote Honey Suckle Rose, some songs that are legendary. And he was a fantastic entertainer. He was drunk and high most of the time. And he would do facial expressions, twitching eyebrows. He was just a very entertaining guy to watch.

He would fall in love with this guy when you saw him perform. And he was in some movies. So if you look at clips on YouTube, you will have an opportunity to see him in all his glory. Capone saw him one night that this guy's the greatest fucking guy. He left there like, oh, what a great jazz musician. So a couple of the next night, a couple of Capone's underlings come to the club and at gunpoint, they go to Fats Waller after said,

and he says, you're coming with us. And he's like, what, what, what, you're coming with us? Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take you to a hotel in Cicero suburb of Chicago, which was kind of Capone's based of operations. We're going to put you up at a hotel there and over the weekend, you're going to perform at Al's birthday party. And it's going to be a surprise.

He doesn't know you're coming and he's going to love it. And so they take him at gunpoint. He's fucking scared to death and kid. They kidnap him basically. They kidnap, they take him to this hotel. He's brought in to perform at the birthday party. Capone loves it. He's fucking overjoyed. That's all they're here. This is great.

He performs for like two and a half days. They fucking bury him in cash. They lavish him in cash. That's while it leaves Chicago. He says he had like three thousand dollars on him, which is probably 30,000 or more today. And he had a great story to tell for the rest of his life about how he was kidnapped about Al Capone to play at his birthday party.

I love all those fucking stories, man. And then there's another one in Chicago. This is a lot more violent. I mean, the Fats Waller one is kind of a funny story. This was a guy named Joey Lewis, Joey Lewis, white guy. He was a type of entertainer that came out of the vaudeville days. He would sing songs and tell jokes, and he was hugely popular. And he was playing at Green Mill, which was co-owned by Capone and other mobsters.

And he was a hit. He filled the place every night. In fact, he was so popular that another club in town said, when your contract is up, whatever they're paying you will double it. Come with us. And so Joey Lewis goes to the owners of the club and he says, the contract's up. I'm leaving. I'm going to go play at this other place. And they said, no, you're not.

And he said, yeah, my contract's up, but you know, you can't hold me. I'm going to the other place. They said, no, you're not. Don't do that. You're not going to do that. We'll give you the money, but you're not leaving and going to another club. And he said, yes, I am. And he did. He left. He went to another club. He played there for a few nights and then some goons came to his hotel room about four o'clock in the morning

with knives and blades and fucking slid his throat, stabbed him multiple times, fucking brutal attack. I mean, I think they were trying to kill him, but he but he survived it. No, he never he never sang again because his vocal cords never fully recovered. But he became an entertainer and a pretty famous entertainer. In fact, he wrote a memoir about what happened to him called The Joker is Wild. It was made into a movie. Frank Sinatra played him in the movie, Joey Lewis, Joey Lewis.

But that story became a cautionary tale that scared the shit out of jazz musicians for decades to come. That's what could happen if you said no to the mob guys who own the club. You know, that was the worst case scenario. They could fucking come and kill you, attempt to kill you. And, you know, here's what's even funnier about that. One of the hoodlums that came in slid his throat was a young, was a young 19 year old Chicago gangster named Sam Giancana,

who would go on to be, you know, anyone who knows the history of the mob knows that Giancana was became the boss of Chicago and also became a very close friend and business partner of Frank Sinatra. So I always wondered about that. I mentioned it in the book. It's like, here's Frank Sinatra playing Joey Lewis, who was attacked by Giancana. And now he becomes good friends and partners with Giancana. What the fuck is that?

I mean, how do you become best friends with one guy and best friends with another guy who attacked that guy and tried to kill him? How do you do that? It's fucking crazy. Bro, you're a genius. And I love you. I love you too, man. You came down here.

When does the book get released? The book was released this week. All right. So it's out there. Dangerous motherfucking rhythms. TJ English does it again. Brother, it's so good to see you, man. It's been a while. It's good to be out here.

Let me say something about Joey Diaz and people may or may not know. All right. Joey Diaz, you may know, wears his heart on his sleeve. What you see is what you get. He's a great friend to have is the kind of friend that stays in touch. Even if you're like in different states, you're not able to see each other. He'll call and check in on you, how you're doing, what's going on and all that. And I treasure it, man. I really do.

We've become good friends, really good friends. I learn a lot from you and I think you learn a lot from me. I love you, man. Yeah, it's the Irish-Cuban connection. It's the Irish-Cuban connection. That's another thing I wanted to say before we get on. All this stuff's coming into my head now. We were talking about this before.

I come from Irish roots. I'm very proud of it. I started an organization called Irish American Writers and Artists. I love hanging out with other Irish people. But for me, man, the great thing about the United States of America is crossing and connecting with people from other cultures, man. I love it. It's beautiful. Having Cuban friends, having Mexican friends, having black friends,

crossing over into these different cultures, learning about their culture, sharing your culture with them. This is this is America to me. This is the thing I'm most proud of. We need more Americans like T.J. English cocksuckers. I love you guys. Thank you for visiting. Don't forget to check out Dangerous Rhythms.

And I don't know what to tell you. Have a great fucking week. I want to thank T.J. English. Everybody. And now for a word from our sponsors, Stay Black. All right, you bad motherfuckers, I want to have. I want to thank you for coming on today. T.J. was great. I love it.

Don't forget to look for his book, Dangerous Rhythms. It's out and he's a New York Times bestseller. But hey, I'm coming to you now for a word from our sponsors. And that's better help. Like I told you in the mid row, you got to take care of your mind, guys. It's all you got and it controls you. Your brain affects how you experience life. So investing time and energy and mental health is going to be crucial to your happiness.

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But most importantly, I want to thank you savages on a Monday morning. We'll be back Wednesday the 10th. Tip top motherfucking Magoo ready to stab a cocksucker. Have a great day. Stay black and I'll see you guys then.