Cheech Marin: A California all-American

Cheech Marin: A California all-American

This week, California should give thanks for Cheech.

Richard Anthony Marin deserves our gratitude not just because his new autobiography, “Cheech Is Not My Real Name … But Don’t Call Me Chong,” is the best California book of the year. Or because he provides hope that short, bald men still can be stars.

The biggest reason to thank Cheech now is that his life embodies Thanksgiving itself: a big, robust meal that includes many different flavors but is ultimately for everyone. This California entertainer reminds us, happily, that our state’s cultural mainstream is so much more interesting and inclusive than we acknowledge.
Indeed, Cheech is evidence of a California paradox: To stay in the mainstream here, it helps to start as an outsider. And Cheech is most often identified as a “cult” figure — one-half of the stoner comedy team, Cheech and Chong, that made the 1978 film “Up in Smoke.” But his career has been much bigger and more mainstream than that.

Indeed, the dirty secret of Cheech’s life, as he tells it, is just how much of a square he’s been. Marin was a middle-class kid who spent his early years in African-American South Central Los Angeles. His father was an LAPD officer; his mother was president of the PTA. But by his teens, the family had relocated to a white neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Racially and ethnically, he was an outsider in both places, so he fit in as much as he could. The future stoner actor-musician-writer-comedian was a Cub scout, a Boy Scout, an altar boy and “a little wiseass who got straight A’s,” first at Catholic schools and later at San Fernando Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge). He even worked in the signature L.A. industry — aerospace—during college, manufacturing airplane galleys at Nordskog.

The book’s signature moment — recounted by Cheech as the Apostle Paul might have recalled his trip to Damascus — is when he smoked marijuana for the first time and found that the allegedly mind-rotting substance expanded his perspective. He thought: “What else have they been lying about?”

And with that, he discovered art, awakened politically, dodged the draft, met Tommy Chong and began playing shows all over the world. The rest is California history. He bought a house in Malibu and even practiced Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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