Hello Sluggo:

I received a text from my wife yesterday that signaled the passing of a great man.

“Have you read the news that Dolemite died?”

I hadn’t. Jumping over to Dolemite.com, I read the mounting news reports of his death and remembered the couple of times I met him. Onstage, he was Dolemite, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw the Devil’s Son-in-Law and more, all rolled up in one big nasty package, but offstage, he was kind, thoughful, even going-out-of-his-way courteous to a crowd of people he didn’t know as they lined up for autographs and souvenir photos.

The first time I saw him perform in 1993 at the See You Later Lounge over on Montopolis Drive, he seemed to just be starting his “revival” after languishing in obscurity during most of the previous decade. A small crowd of Emo’s regulars (all white, of course) had come to the show, and RRM took enormous pleasure including a bit of friendly harrassment in his act that night, at one point asking if anyone would “eat a chitlin cleaned by this white bitch over here” (my future sister-in-law, Mary Ann) and even getting me up before the crowd to exclaim, “This big motherfucker look just like Pee Wee Herman, just fatter.You jack off alot don’t you, man?” And what could I say but, “Yes, Mr. Dolemite, yes I do!” For my good sportsmanship, I was rewarded with a copy of a porn movie entitled “Willy Jackoff’s Chocolate and Cream Factory: Black Thunder.” The crowd loved it. As I left the stage with my prize, he sent me off with “Here, take this… It’s horrible.”

In order to pay his way back to LA, he was selling posters and other Dolemite merch, plus some dubious non-RRM junk such as framed prints of huge stacks of cash and cheap VHS porn tapes and other junk, most of which he had nothing to do with. Upon asking him to sign the movie I had proudly won, he replied, “Man, I ain’t in that movie, I can’t sign my name to it.” He did, however, finally signing the box, “To John, You Pee Wee Herman Motherfucker.”

The second time I saw him was in 1997 at Catfish Station on Sixth Street. By then he was enjoying a rebounding career that brought high praise from the movers and shakers of the comedy and hip hop worlds. His act, as well as his gracious personality, was basically the same though, but this time I noticed his advanced age was surely catching up with him. I picked up a “Dolemite for President” t-shirt and some other memorabilia, and as he was signing the merch and chatting with me, he seemed to be looking right through me—he was probably already suffering vision problems from the diabetes that had plagued him for so long. He remembered the Pee Wee Herman comparison from years earlier, and thanked me “for being such a good sport up there.”

The lasting impression left on me by RRM, besides the fact that he was a funny motherfucker, was that he was the antithesis of the “take the money and run” stereotype of his contemporaries. If anyone deserved attention and respect for all that he pioneered in the entertainment world, it was him.