How comedian Jay Ellis learned to love his imaginary friend

As an only child in a military family, Jay Ellis was constantly searching for stability. Because of his father’s deployments in the Air Force, he changed cities and schools with every calendar change. Interpersonal connections were fleeting. But his bond with Mikey was different.

Ellis – the 42-year-old actor best known for his role as Lawrence in the now-defunct HBO dramedy series “Insecure” – describes Mikey as the big brother he always wanted: a cool mix of Will Smith from the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” era and Kadeem Hardison as Dwayne Wayne from “A Different World.” The two youngsters were inseparable.

Mikey was elegant, smart, and always up for a joke; together they built time travel machines, avoided bullies, and speculated about the appropriate ratio of tongue to saliva for a first kiss.

But Mikey wasn’t like other kids.

Despite all the mischief they got up to, big and small, from kindergarten through middle school, Mikey couldn’t see or hear anyone except Ellis herself.

“For a long time I thought I was the boy Haley Joel Osment from ‘The Sixth Sense’ and that maybe, just maybe, there was a possibility that I could see dead people,” Ellis writes in his first memoir, “Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?” (One World/Penguin Random House, out July 30).

Luckily for Ellis, the only “medium” he had growing up was clothing sizes. His fabricated friendship with Mikey is now the focus of Ellis’ new book, a vulnerable, thigh-slapping and sometimes heartbreaking series of vignettes that portray the innocence and resourcefulness of a black boy in an honest, relatable way.

There are numerous episodes for teenagers that tell the story of a child’s search for recognition and adventure.

When Ellis transferred to an elementary school in Texas where most students spoke Spanish, he dyed his hair with Luster’s S-Curl Activator, studied telenovelas, renamed himself Romon (his middle name), and unsuccessfully dressed up as a “Latin Lover” – all on Mikey’s advice.

On another occasion, Ellis wreaked havoc in his father’s office while he and Mikey sat astride a broom, which he imagined was an airplane hovering over Disney World.

“I imagined myself flying jets back in that hangar in Austin, Texas, and now I actually fly jets in movies,” writes Ellis, who starred alongside Tom Cruise in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Ellis’ book takes readers back to simpler, healthier times, punctuated by references to Ice Cube, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “White Boys Don’t Cut It,” and other millennial pop culture totems. For parents, it’s a testament to the importance of nurturing a child’s creativity, even if it occasionally causes collateral damage.

“(My parents) not only tolerated my having an imaginary friend, after a while my mother actually encouraged it,” Ellis writes, adding that his mother, financial executive and television producer Paula Bryant-Ellis, baked a custom cake for Mikey on one birthday. “I’m sure many black parents would have prayed for me and bathed me in anointing oil… or told me to sit down, be quiet and stop it.”

However, the stories are not all so trivial.

Ellis recalls narrowly escaping a shootout between rival gang members at a Sacramento movie theater when he was nine years old. Mikey’s “bubble belly” was a sign of impending danger.

Two years earlier, Ellis had been getting over the death of his cousin, who had been murdered due to mistaken identity, with his imaginary best friend.

As Ellis matured, Mikey’s presence faded, becoming more of a subconscious, guiding voice than a summoned being. But the lessons remained.

Through Mikey, Ellis understood the importance of loyalty after finding out he was being tricked by his high school sweetheart. His confidence was already boosted when he faced intimidating opponents as a high school basketball player. While attending a magnet school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he knew not to tolerate racist slurs from classmates.

Still, Ellis couldn’t have been fully prepared for the trauma of being stopped by police for seemingly no reason nine times in one year—before he turned 18—or the “Scared Straight”-style jail stint he endured after violating the city’s curfew.

“Mikey helped me feel safe in asking questions about why the world was the way it was and imagining what the world and my life could be like,” he writes.

The anecdotes in Ellis’ book are vivid and quirky – stories that feel tailor-made for a television retelling. (Perhaps his girlfriend and “Insecure” co-star/creator Issa Rae could help make that a reality.) He doesn’t go beyond high school, but it’s clear how those formative years, with and without Mikey, shaped Ellis as a man and an entertainer.

Ultimately, Ellis’ chapters about his childhood remind readers how fulfilling it can be to awaken your inner child. And maybe talk to yourself every now and then.

“We all have a voice that guides us and helps us become the person we are today…for better or for worse,” he writes. “Sometimes, if you listen to that voice carefully enough, if you just take a few minutes to tune out all the adult stuff that our very serious and very busy lives throw at us, that voice is our sense of play, our sense of joy, and our sense of imagination saying, ‘Let me back in!'”