Gardner Chris - The Pursuit of Happyness

M y mother always stressed to me that the most important words in the English language are please and thank you. With that in mind I would like to thank some of the folks that I have been blessed to have in my life and also helped me with the most challenging task of attempting to write this book.

My first thank you is to the team at Gardner Rich & Company (GRC) who allowed me the time, space, and emotional range of motion required to look back while they looked forward. I especially want to thank Collene Carlson, president of GRC, for covering my back and balls for the last twelve years.

Ive got to give a shout out to my girl Lynn Redmond at ABCs 20/20 . It was Lynns passion for a portion of my lifes journey that has made so many blessings and opportunities become a reality. Ive also got to thank Bob Brown of 20/20 as well. Bob took getting into his subjects head a bit further. Bob and I have the same barber!

Quincy Troupe once paid me a backhand compliment by telling me that I was as crazy as his previous subject, Miles Davis. Ill definitely take that as a compliment! It was Quincy who helped me open up all the doors in my mind that I had tried to keep closed.

Mim Eichler Rivas helped me to open up my soul. Quincy put down what happenedMim put down how what happened felt . If there is any sense of feeling, passion, or dreams here, it is all due to Mim.

Also vital to this book was Dawn Davis of Amistad, my brilliant editor, who knows nothing about my garments and cares even less. I knew from the second that we met that she was the oneno doubt, never a second thought. When we met, the book she had last published was on its way to winning a Pulitzer Prize. Like I said, no doubt! And thanks to the other hardworking folks at Amistad: Rockelle Henderson, Gilda Squire, Morgan Welebir, and the production and design teams.

I am forever grateful to Will Smith. The boy is the REAL DEAL! It was to Will that I expressed any concerns during the filming of The Pursuit of Happyness . I continue to be amazed at his grace, humility, and talent.

The guys from Escape Artists: Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, and Steve Tisch. Again, I knew from the very beginning that these were the guys to go with. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Mark Clayman, your vision continues to astonish me. None of this could have happened without Marks vision.

Thanks to Jennifer Gates, my agent at Zachary Schuster Harmsworth Literary Agency, for believing in me, guiding me, and allowing me to be afraid.

Nothing in this life or the next will ever mean as much to me as my two children. With a whole lot of help, they were raised into absolutely fabulous young people: my son, Christopher, and my daughter, Jacintha. My greatest blessings. Thank you for being who you are, even when I wasnt who I shouldve been.

To H., my love forever. Your support through the process made it all possible. To Madame Baba, my muse, thank you.

Thank you to the family that I was born into, and just as important, thank you to the family that adopted me: my father Bill Lucy; my big brother Reggie Weaver; my badass cousin Charles Ensley; my big sister Anne Davis; my granddaddy Rev. Cecil Williams; the godfather, the Original Big Will; my godmother Charlene Mitchell; and Willie L. Brown.

And a most heartfelt thank you to my mentor, Barbara Scott Preiskel.

T his is a work of nonfiction. I have rendered the events faithfully and truthfully just as I have recalled them. Some names and descriptions of individuals have been changed in order to respect their privacy. To anyone whose name I did not recall or omitted, I offer sincere apologies. While circumstances and conversations depicted herein come from my keen recollection of them, they are not meant to represent precise time lines of events or exact word-for-word reenactments of my life. They are told in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said and my view of what happened to me, in keeping with the true essence of the mood and spirit of those moments that shaped my life.

W henever Im asked what exactly it was that helped guide me through my darkest days not only to survive but to move past those circumstances and to ultimately attain a level of success and fulfillment that once sounded impossible, what comes to mind are two events.

One of them took place in the early 1980s, when I was twenty-seven years old, on an unusually hot, sunny day in the Bay Area. In the terminally overcrowded parking lot outside of San Francisco General Hospital, just as I exited the building, a flash of the suns glare temporarily blocked my vision. As I refocused, what I saw changed the world as I knew it. At any other point in my life it wouldnt have struck me so powerfully, but there was something about that moment in time and the gorgeous, red convertible Ferrari 308 that I saw slowly circling the lotdriven by a guy obviously in search of a parking spotthat compelled me to go and have a life-changing conversation with him.

Some years before, fresh out of the Navy, I had first arrived in San Franciscolured to the West Coast by a prestigious research job and the opportunity to work for one of the top young heart surgeons in the country. For a kid like me whod barely stepped foot outside the six-block square of the hood in Milwaukeenot counting my three-year stint as a Navy medic in North CarolinaSan Francisco was the be-all and end-all. The city was the Land of Milk and Honey and the Emerald City of Oz rolled into one. Rising up out of the bay into golden glowing mists of possibility, she seduced me from the start, showing off her studded hills and plunging valleys as she laid herself out with arms open. At night the town was an aphrodisiacwith city lights like rare jewels sparkling down from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, through the better neighborhoods and along the rougher streets of the Mission and the Tenderloin (my new hood), spilling out of the towers of the Financial District and reflecting into the bay by Fishermans Wharf and the Marina.

In the early days, no matter how many times I drove west over the Bay Bridge from Oakland, or north from Daly City heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge, which stretches right up to the horizon before dropping down into Marin County, those views of San Francisco were like falling in love all over again. Even as time went by and I got hip to the weatherthe periods of gray foggy skies alternating with days of bone-chilling rainId wake up to one of those glorious, perfect San Francisco days and the beauty wiped away all memory of the gloom. San Francisco remains in my mind to this day the Paris of the Pacific.

Of course, back then, it didnt take long to discover that she was also deceptive, not necessarily easy, sometimes coldhearted, and definitely not cheap. Between steep rents and the chronic car repairs caused by the toll the hills took on transmissions and brakesnot to mention that pile of unpaid parking tickets all too familiar to most San Franciscansstaying afloat could be a challenge. But that wasnt going to mar my belief that Id make it. Besides, I knew enough about challenge. I knew how to work hard, and in fact, over the next years, challenges helped me to reshape my dreams, to reach further, and to pursue goals with an increased sense of urgency.