BY WILLIAM STANFORD DAVIS
ESSAY
ON MY SECOND DAY IN L.A., BACK IN 1984, MY car caught on fire and I lost everything. I could have turned around and bought a bus ticket home to St. Louis. Instead, I chose to stay and press on. Forty years later, I’m not only still in Los Angeles, but I’ve found myself at the Emmys as part of the cast of a nominated TV show.
Reaching the Emmys was a feat: there was a maze of security, metal detectors, bomb- and COVID-19-sniffing dogs. But the bigger feat was the four decades of work it took to get there. As my shoes touched the red carpet, the cameras flashed, and people I had admired for years congratulated me, I was left looking back on how the hell I ended up there. At 72, while a lot of people my age are retiring, I feel like I’m just getting started.
Four decades earlier, when I was new to L.A. and truly just getting started, the Emmys were geographically close but in every other way a distant dream. Though I wanted to act, I had to take a lot of square jobs to get me through: working in a brickyard, as a short-order cook in a truck stop, a telemarketer, a limo driver, and even a country-and-western DJ, often from 10 in the morning until 10 at night. It was a nightmare not to be able to pursue my dream.
THEN I REMEMBEREDthe reason why I came to Los Angeles. I willed myself to pursue the craft of acting. I began booking small jobs on shows like The Bold and the Beautiful and The Practice. Eventually, I got a chance to audition for the sitcom Friends. I thought I knocked it out of the park. But when I called my agent for feedback, the phone went dead silent. He told me that the casting department thought my audition was so terrible, I should go back to being a telemarketer. My face dropped. My heart sank.
But I did not allow it to break me. It lit a fire instead. I was determined that no one would ever say that about my work again. I enrolled in classes and workshops, performed theater. When I was invited to become a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, I felt not only like a working actor, but also that I belonged. In hindsight, that rejection was one of the best things to happen in my career—until I met Quinta Brunson and she asked me to be a part of Abbott Elementary.
Long before I landed the role of a lifetime as Mr. Johnson, the custodian at Abbott Elementary School, my life was shaped by the real underpaid teachers at inner-city schools in St. Louis—schools that, then as now, lacked equipment, supplies, and f
