Episode 3 - Darius Kennedy

27 years is a long time for anything. In 27 years you are just about paid up on your standard mortgage, and you’ve probably had to replace the roof at least once. Good luck getting a car to last 27 years. 27 years is how long all those dead rock stars lived their entire brilliant lives. A 27 year old person is old enough to know better. 10 year-olds supposedly don’t really know shit though.

27 years ago was 1993. I was already 10 and in the fifth grade and I was new to the school. So was this kid Darius. Darius was maybe a little more new to the school in a sense since the school was in the middle of cornfields (still is) and Darius was from the south side of Chicago. I had at least seen cornfields before. You ever just know immediately when you like a person? It was that. Although we came from very different backgrounds and looked quite different from each other, we hit it off and became best friends. We played football on the playground every day. Joined band together. He played alto sax and I trumpet. Those first few formative years helped define who we would be 27 years later. Darius wanted to be a stand-up comedian even way back then, inspired by his Uncle Dwayne who he never shut up about. I wanted to be a pilot, inspired by……I’m not sure. Darius already was a stand-up comedian way back then. At 10 he was the stand-up of Mrs. Zarumba’s musty mobile trailer classroom, but by 12 he was actually getting stage time in comedy clubs in Chicago. I couldn’t even comprehend what that meant as I played around on my flight simulator. I mean, I had seen Gallagher on HBO….’’Darius, are you doing that?’’ ‘‘Not exactly.’’

27 years later and Darius is still doing stand-up. And he’s good! Nobody as outgoing and naturally funny as Darius Kennedy could possibly fail at stand-up comedy. You’re going to laugh. And you’ll laugh during the podcast. He just has a way of telling a story where you are waiting for the next laugh to come. But he’s also very smart and can tell you all about what it takes to get a large commercial building LEED certified in the notoriously corrupt city of Chicago. He can tell you what it’s like when one the many tenants of his family’s rental properties squats in the apartment after they’ve been evicted, tragically loses a child while still living there, and he is the one who has to respond to the scene on behalf of the property and deal with the tenant and with Chicago police on the south side. He can tell you about the 2008 financial crisis and how it damn near destroyed the real estate empire his family had built, and had damaged the physical health of he and some of his family. This dude has been through some shit, folks. And 27 years later he and I still connect. One of those where you just pick up right where you left off and its like all that time hadn’t even passed. Except for the current presence of bourbon and beer, our conversations still feel like we are in the back of that musty mobile trailer classroom in a boring cornfield somewhere out by…..nothing. Its not by anything! And I’m not a pilot.