A Walk in Santa Monica

When we were young and starting out fresh in life, my husband Ron and I worked in the theater in the San Francisco Bay Area. We built and painted stage scenery and Ron did some acting. During that time, we met and befriended an actor named Shabaka when he directed my husband in a community theater production. We later had many opportunities to watch Shabaka onstage at various little theaters in the Bay Area. He was a gifted actor and we encouraged him when the going got tough and celebrated with him when he met with success. He had a key to our apartment so he could come by and play Ron’s bass guitar when the mood struck him. That ended when he moved to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood.

Although we didn’t see Shabaka much after he moved, we stayed in touch and he sometimes visited us when he returned to the Bay Area to see his mother. Occasionally he’d call to let us know he was going to appear in a TV show or a movie and we’d watch. While Shabaka was busy hitting the pavement in Hollywood, Ron completed his bachelor’s degree and we got busy making a family. When I became pregnant with our third (and last) child, we asked Shabaka to be the godfather for the baby and he agreed. While we raised our children and worked our ordinary jobs, Shabaka got bigger and bigger acting roles. Once he visited us and told stories about celebrities he worked with or met in Hollywood, like Debra Winger, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, and Delroy Lindo. He talked about them like you would regular folks. “I went to a Christmas Party once with Meryl Streep and that woman knows the words to just about every Christmas carol ever written,” he said. It seemed surreal to us that he had hung out with these famous people.

Pretty soon we started to see Shabaka all the time in movies and TV shows. He played the detective or the psychiatrist or the judge. He landed highly visible minor roles in major movies and sometimes he played a significant supporting character. Our children were constantly calling to us from the TV room with “come quick, Shabaka’s on TV again” or “there’s a preview on for a new Eddie Murphy movie and Shabaka’s in it.” He played Herbert Muhammad in Ali with Will Smith; he was on NYPD Blue, Grey’s Anatomy, Barbershop, and Heroes; he played the security guard Thurman in The Terminal with Tom Hanks and Stanley Tucci; he played the jazz musician Daniel who gets shot in Collateral Damage with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx; and in 2006 he was Lt. Castillo in the movie Miami Vice.

In the summer of 2006, Ron and I and our son (Shabaka’s godson) visited Shabaka in Santa Monica. We arrived a couple of weeks after Miami Vice had opened in the movie theaters and Lt. Castillo was a huge role for Shabaka. One evening we went for a walk on Santa Monica Blvd. As we passed a movie theater where Miami Vice was playing, people pointed and stared at Shabaka, recognizing him from the film they had just seen. A few people he didn’t know came up to him and complimented him on his performance. We were so proud of him and loved to see this friend who had worked so hard for so many years recognized. As Ron said later, “Shabaka was walking tall.”

During our walk in Santa Monica that night, a man approached Shabaka and shook his hand. The man, Omar, was an old friend of Shabaka’s who had seen him in Miami Vice and stopped to congratulate him. They got to talking as our family stood politely by. Then Shabaka introduced us and said, “Omar just moved back to Santa Monica from Chicago. Hey,” he informed Omar, “Ron here grew up in Chicago.”

“Oh yeah?” Omar asked, interested. “What part of Chicago?”

“South Side,” Ron answered.

Shabaka interjected, “Ron grew up in the Robert Taylor Projects.”

Omar’s eyes grew wide. He put the palms of his hands together as if in prayer and bowed deeply to my husband. “I give all due respect to you, Man,” he said, with ten times the admiration he had just shown to Shabaka for his big movie role. “You made it out alive. This is your wife? And is this your son?” He pointed to our son while my husband proudly nodded affirmative. Omar pumped our son’s hand and told him, “Your father is a real man. He’s strong. He made it against all odds. You better appreciate him, Man. Respect him.” My husband blushed with embarrassment at the compliments.

Later that night, my son asked me, “Why did Omar make such a big deal about Robert Taylor?” I explained to him briefly that Robert Taylor was an African American ghetto in Chicago identified by Newsweek magazine as “one of the most dangerous housing projects in the country.” Very few African American men made it out of Robert Taylor alive and led productive lives. In 1988, Newsweek journalist Sylvester Monroe published his book Brothers about the men he grew up with in Robert Taylor, I told my son. In his book, Monroe shows how most of the young men from that ghetto wound up dead, in prison, on drugs, or crazy. “Omar,” I concluded, “was just showing your Dad how much he admired him for overcoming overwhelmingly bad circumstances and making it out. He admired him for having a beautiful son like you and being here for you while you are growing up.”

My son learned an important lesson about fame and celebrity that day. When we returned home, he took Brothers off the shelf to read about his father’s roots. Godfather Shabaka is a famous Hollywood movie actor, but Dad is his hero.