References to hit songs and TV shows pop up throughout “Rabbit,” the new memoir from Indiana comedian Ms. Pat.
Salt-N-Pepa tracks and “Young & the Restless” episodes allowed Ms. Pat to think about something other than her harrowing adolescence.
Poverty. Being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend at age 10. Dating a 20-year-old at age 12. Giving birth at ages 14 and 15. Selling crack cocaine at age 15. Being shot at age 16. Going to jail at 18. And being shot once more before exiting her teens.
Songs by Janet Jackson and 2 Live Crew delivered escapism, but Ms. Pat couldn’t believe what she heard in Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” — known for iconic opening line “I believe the children are our future.”
It was love at first listen for 13-year-old Pat, who was taught to pickpocket before she learned to read.
“I remember saying, ‘What children are the future? They believe in children?’ I didn’t understand what the hell that song was talking about,” Ms. Pat said. “I just knew what I was going through. My mama wasn’t doing any of the things in the song.”
Now 45, Ms. Pat is a touring comedian, published author and lead actress in a sitcom being developed for the Fox network.
The show, boasting Lee Daniels (“Empire”) and Brian Grazer (“Apollo 13”) as executive producers, takes inspiration from Ms. Pat’s culture-shock transition from inner-city Atlanta to suburban Plainfield. Or “Plainville” in the script.
Life today in a six-bedroom home has little in common with her earliest memories of the “liquor house,” her grandfather’s makeshift moonshine bar in the front room of an Atlanta home Ms. Pat shared with 10 relatives.
Mayhem ruled the night until intoxicated customers passed out. That was Ms. Pat’s cue to pickpocket drunks, per her mother’s orders.
“TV always took me outside the house,” Ms. Pat said. “Literally, they could be fighting in the background and I could be watching ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and not see anything else. I’d turn around and everybody would be bleeding. ‘What happened?'”
Star time
Becoming the star of her own TV show was an unlikely goal for Ms. Pat, who grew up eating ketchup sandwiches, robbing Goodwill stores and being baptized in at least seven different churches as part of her mother’s hustle for free food.
Ms. Pat is writing the sitcom’s pilot with “Everybody Hates Chris” co-creator Ali LeRoi, but she isn’t ready to claim TV immortality alongside the treasured drama of “Young & the Restless,” wholesomeness of “Leave It to Beaver” and prizes of “The Price is Right.”
“I think I’m still not believing all this stuff is happening,” said Ms. Pat, otherwise known as Patricia Williams and nicknamed “Rabbit” as a youngster for eating carrots. “I come from a world where you don’t believe half the things you see and none of the things you hear.”
Making podcast appearances elevated Ms. Pat’s stature in the comedy world. She has told her one-of-a-kind life story on shows hosted by Marc Maron, Joe Rogan, Eddie Ifft, Bert Kreischer and Ari Shaffir. Her book deal with HarperCollins imprint Dey St. came through one day after Maron released his Ms. Pat episode, and six production companies reached out with sitcom ideas.
Chris Bowers, co-owner of Ms. Pat’s “home” club Morty’s Comedy Joint, 3824 E. 82nd St., said fans respond to Ms. Pat’s perseverance.
“You hear stories of people who went through the trials and tribulations she did when she was 13, 14 and 15 years old,” Bowers said. “But they don’t make it out to then tell the story.”
Bowers met Ms. Pat about decade ago, when he told jokes at Morty’s before becoming a co-owner. After telling her first jokes at an Atlanta open-mic night in 2002, Ms. Pat developed her craft in Indianapolis.
“She’s become more and more honest, which is what people really like about her,” Bowers said of her stand-up act. “She’s lived this crazy life.”
Ms. Pat’s husband, Garrett, or “Michael” in the “Rabbit” autobiography, is the reason the comedian came to Plainfield in 2006. Garrett took a job at Allison Transmission after a General Motors plant closed in Atlanta.
Her book, which arrived in stores Aug. 22, begins at the “liquor house” and ends with Ms. Pat’s present life as a down-to-earth matriarch.
“It’s not a book about pity,” she said. “You’re not going to feel sorry for me. You’re going to get mad at me. All type of emotions are going to come.”
She’s mother to four children, ages 31, 30, 19 and 17. Four additional youngsters, 8, 7, 6 and 3, live in her Plainfield home.
The second four are the children of Ms. Pat’s niece, who abandoned the three girls and one boy after Ms. Pat moved that family from Atlanta to Indiana.
Bowers said Ms. Pat has a “big heart” behind her R-rated stage persona.
“She’ll call me from the store because she found a deal on something we sell at Morty’s,” he said. ” ‘Hey, Bowers, they have buns on sale at Kroger. I know you have hamburgers.’ That’s just how she thinks.”
Breaking the cycle
Morty’s audiences were the first to hear Ms. Pat tell anecdotes about her life, as opposed to crude one-liners she fired off in Atlanta clubs.
“People came up and said, ‘You made it out,'” she said. “I couldn’t comprehend that. Made it out from where? It didn’t dawn on me until a couple of years later, ‘Oh, I did survive the ghetto and I did change my life.’
“It was all about saving my kids. It was never to write a book or to make anybody think I overcame something. It was all about making sure my kids didn’t go through what I went through.”
She writes about sobbing with happiness when her daughter graduated from high school, a landmark achievement in their family. Ms. Pat’s schooling ended at seventh grade, and she lists her mother, grandfather, siblings, aunts and uncles as relatives who didn’t make it through 12th grade.
Pregnancy brought Ms. Pat’s formal schooling to an end. The father, “Derrick,” was 20 and already married when he and Ms. Pat started dating. She lied by saying she was 18 instead of 12, and he didn’t mention his wife.
Four months into her first pregnancy, Ms. Pat met Derrick’s wife. He brought a new girlfriend to the hospital when he visited Ms. Pat and their newborn daughter.
The story of Ms. Pat and Derrick continued through the birth of their son and Derrick’s rise and fall as a drug dealer. His arrest in the late 1980s left Ms. Pat, then a 15-year-old mother of two, little hope of paying $350 a month in rent.
So she started selling crack herself.
Ms. Pat refers to her mother and Derrick as the two people who let her down the most.
But during the process of writing “Rabbit” with journalist Jeannine Amber, Ms. Pat said it was difficult to include negative details about her mother and the father of her two oldest children.
“What I learned from this book: When you’ve been violated in life, a lot of times you try to protect the person who violated you,” Ms. Pat said. “I didn’t know I was doing that.”
Her mother died decades ago, and Derrick works at an oil-change business in Atlanta. Ms. Pat said he’s not a fan of her current life and career.
“One question that kind of nags me: Why didn’t anybody do anything? Was it because I was a poor black girl in the inner city of Atlanta? If it would have happened to a white poor girl, would she have been more protected than me? I don’t know,” Ms. Pat said.
“He could go to the hospital and sign the birth certificate as a 21-year-old father with a 14-year-old giving birth, and nobody says anything? Then you go back as a 22-year-old father with a 15-year-old giving birth, and nobody says anything? I guess I fell through the cracks. People just looked the other way.”
Radio royalty
In Indianapolis, Ms. Pat found an unlikely comedy foil in “Bob & Tom Show” star Tom Griswold.
She chalks up their radio chemistry as Griswold being fascinated by her wigs while she’s in awe of his wealth.
“There’s an authenticity to (her experience) and a reality to it that I was really unfamiliar with,” Griswold said. “There’s so much life and comedy in her approach. She has managed to survive all of these, in many cases, horrific events and still has this great sense of humor about life.”
“Bob & Tom” airs on WFBQ-FM (94.7) and more than 100 stations in syndication. The raw-edged stories Ms. Pat told at Morty’s generated enough buzz to earn a debut appearance on the radio show in 2010.
“They invited me in, put their arms around me and watched my career blossom,” she said. “They got it all started here in Indy for me.”
Griswold said Ms. Pat has a knack for throwaway lines worth keeping.
“She was telling a story about something, then in passing she mentioned that she’d had her nipple shot off,” Griswold said. “You go, ‘Hang on a second. Can you go back a sentence? What happened?’”
In “Rabbit,” she writes that an unpredictable drug customer shot her in the chest after she scolded him for sitting on her Cadillac. In a separate incident, “Derrick” shot her in the head — “accidentally on purpose,” in the book’s phrasing.
Saying Ms. Pat “peddles in the truth,” Griswold praises her straightforward approach.
“It’s sometimes shocking, but never maudlin. Always just funny,” he said.
‘Plainville’ days
Ms. Pat didn’t use drugs. She was still selling crack, however, when she met Garrett as part of a group outing to a lip-sync competition at an Atlanta nightclub.
“He was sitting across from me,” Ms. Pat said. “I thought, ‘Oh, he speaks well. He has his back teeth. His tennis shoes are clean.’ I thought, ‘Well, he doesn’t know I’m hiring for a baby daddy.’ So I started to talk to him.”
She credits Garrett’s influence for ending her criminal activities, but it didn’t happen overnight. She transitioned from dealing drugs to writing “phony checks at the mall.”
In “Rabbit,” she quotes Garrett as saying, “What I don’t understand is why you aren’t even trying to get a real job. You’re a people person. … With your personality, you could sell the heck out of a car.”
With hopes of becoming a medical assistant, Ms. Pat earned a GED in 1997, completed nine months of medical-assistant studies plus one month of “job readiness” training. But on the brink of landing a job at a doctor’s office, she learned her criminal record — 20 pages, headlined by “convicted felon” — dashed that dream.
A welfare caseworker encouraged a try at stand-up comedy, something that allowed Ms. Pat to be her own boss again. “It turns out comedy and selling drugs have a lot in common,” she writes in “Rabbit.” “You need to be quick, work hard and give people what they want.”
Indiana is a reliable source for laughs for Ms. Pat, who once misidentified cornfields as uncut grass.
“I like my little city of Plainfield,” she said. “It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, there’s no traffic.”
Ms. Pat said Garrett once overheard one of her niece’s children say, “Mama, at this house we eat every day.”
The comment is a reminder of her youth, although, “I don’t ever have to look back at that life if I don’t want to,” she said.
She remembers being hungry.
“Bringing these kids into my life, I realized there’s still people out there going through what I went through,” Ms. Pat said. “That was a wake-up call for me, because my kids don’t miss any meals. They don’t know anything about any struggle. It’s, ‘Give me a debit card.’ OK.”
