Everybody's Brother (5 page)

The first singles I ever acquired came into my hot little hands because my sister, Shedonna, bought them for me. I will always be grateful to her for buying me the ABC single “Look of Love,” which came out in 1981. I really loved ABC—those were some funky British white boys making true “Lady Killer” music. Shedonna bought me “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc, and later “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s
Over” by Lenny Kravitz. I loved that song then and I still do now.

In the end, music helped save me, and Lord knows I was already needing some saving from an early age. Shedonna remembers how my lifelong passion for music led me to shoplift early on. “As a kid growing up, Lo would always head to the magazine section at the grocery store and take all the
Right On!
magazines, or the
Jet
magazines or whatever publication that had some about music inside it,” she remembers. “Anything that had to do with music, Lo wanted it, and he was going to get that magazine the best way he knew how, whether Mom was going to pay for it or not.”

If the magazine had anything to do with secular music, Mom was definitely not going to buy it for me. When I was around four years old, our mother started getting serious about her religion. Our grandmother is a Methodist, and we went to church with her when we were staying there. But Mom liked a more fiery style of preaching and a more Pentecostal relationship with the Spirit. First we started going to Grace Covenant Baptist Church, where Mom—never one to do anything halfway—got herself ordained as a minister. She sang in the choir and made announcements. Sometimes she’d call for the offering when we needed money to pay the bills. She became friends with the pastor and his family, who used to babysit us. Every Friday night they’d come over for a supper of salmon croquettes and biscuits.

I used to love watching Mom preach, which she did
part time. But when she really got into the Spirit, it sometimes scared the mess out of me and Shedonna. We used to go to tent revivals, and Shedonna and I would huddle together when our mother got in the line for a special prayer. We were afraid she would catch the Holy Ghost and pass out. And then what would we do? She caught the Holy Ghost a lot at that Baptist Church. It scared me to see her flailing around like that, but it also gave me an opportunity for some mischief. Shedonna remembers at least two times when I’d fake the Holy Ghost and fall on the floor. My mother would not be amused.

A few years later we switched to a full gospel church called the Fellowship of Faith. They used to speak in tongues, which also scared the mess out of us. The first time we saw them gargling and jabbering and carrying on, Shedonna looked at me and said, “I mean, are these people crazy? What is this, voodoo?!” Whatever it was, we wanted no part of it, and we’d sneak out when we knew that part of the service was coming up. We’d sit in the car for a while then get back in place before church was over and Mom found us.

There were a lot of good things about church too. Most of it musical. Every Friday night we had to go to what’s called “family enrichment” and then go to church very early every Sunday morning. To make it more fun, I started singing in the choir and doing Bible raps for the congregation. We learned all the books of the Bible from something called “Bible Break,” which I quickly memorized. “Lo’s gospel raps became a phenomenon at our
church,” Shedonna remembers. “So Lo could save souls even when his was in danger.”

It turns out that Shedonna understood me pretty well—maybe better than I understood myself at the time. She knew that while I was singing like an angel at church, bad things were starting to happen out on the street. The devil was sitting on my shoulder, and there was a battle going on inside me for my very soul.

SCHOOL DAYS

Here I am apparently doing some higher learning while a student at Riverside Academy, a place that had a big impact on my life in a short time.

P
eople called me “Chickenhead.” Then they ran the other way.

Today, the world knows me as that sweet, soulful black guy on some hit TV show. But I haven’t come this far in my life to have to bullshit anybody. I come to speak the truth—my truth. I may look as if I’ve always been a pussycat, like Purrfect, that pretty white creature you may have seen me stroking so lovingly and gently on
The Voice
. Please trust me, I haven’t always been that way. Not even close. However you want to spell the word, I am rather far from perfect—and somewhere deep in the Atlanta police files, I no doubt have the juvenile record to prove it.

So here is a little taste of reality for you. Just like all the most interesting heroes in your finer comic books, the truth is that right from the beginning, I’ve always had a little villain deep inside me too. I’m kind of like Two-Face in reverse. Which is interesting, because I’m a Gemini, and two faces come naturally to me. Then and now, I try to embrace all sides of my own character, especially now that I seem to be living such a happy ending. They say that before you can get high, you’ve got to get low, and as a kid growing up in Atlanta, I got pretty low—and as you’ll see, eventually I got pretty damn high too.

So let us then get real. Back in the day, before I became the lovable, ready-for-prime-time character who I am today, I was a damned effective little criminal—with the emphasis on damned. If you wanted to give me the benefit of a few doubts, the best that you could say for me was that growing up, I was sort of half angel and half devil. I may have been doing Bible raps and singing in the choir, but as soon as I got out on the streets, my more devilish half was definitely getting his due. For better or worse—mostly worse, I’m sure—doing bad things felt like second nature to me.

So at an age when other kids might be out selling lemonade, I stole my ass off. Looking back at it now, I’m trying to think what was going through my head. I’m not trying to make excuses for my bad behavior here, but maybe I felt as if life had already ripped me off by stealing my father away from me before I even got a chance to know him. Whatever it was that had been stolen from me early on, I couldn’t wait to try to get myself a little payback.

I started out shoplifting, trying to be sophisticated, then regressed to just snatch and grab. I remember one time cutting school with friends—which we loved to do whenever possible—and taking the train to an Atlanta Braves game downtown. The mischief began with us just fooling around on the train and grabbing people’s hats. Mind you, I was a criminal with some conscience, so I didn’t bother old people, for instance. No, I liked to pick on people closer to my own age or a little older. Soon I moved on from grabbing hats to stealing starter jackets and shoes. It was a slightly more innocent time
when all the rage was kids stealing Air Jordans. Truth be told, I’m not proud of this, but I made lots of people take off the shoes on their feet and hand them over. What I was accused of—and frankly, mostly guilty of—was what is sometimes called strong-arm robbery. I intimidated people into giving me whatever I wanted at that specific moment. These weren’t crimes of passion—more like crimes of convenience. I wanted things, so I took things. From sneakers, I moved on to jewelry and anything else shiny that caught my eye. Thinking back, I was sort of like a shorter, younger version of that character Deebo from the movie
Friday
that starred Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. Yet I wasn’t the star of any movie other than the one constantly running in my head. Instead, I was just some little neighborhood thug always making trouble in the streets.

In some strange way, I think a hero is really just a villain who’s had a change of heart. I’m trying to be honest here, and not too cavalier, because in the end, most of my crimes may have been petty, legally speaking, but not to the innocent people who got robbed. Those poor people were probably truly scared and paid an emotional price for being threatened and taken advantage of by a street thug like me. For what it’s worth—which is probably not nearly enough—I am sorry.

In my own weak defense, I hardly ever stole at gunpoint. The thing is that I didn’t usually need a gun because people sensed somehow that I was not to be messed with. I guess I always came across like a bad kid who looked like he didn’t have a lot to lose. In a way, I felt like I didn’t.

Growing up the son of two preachers, I heard a lot about sin and salvation—and right away I was interested in the whole combo platter. The way I saw life, it was never as simple as good and bad—it was always good and evil in my world. I associate both good and evil with the Spirit, they seemed somehow Supreme to me. Growing up without a father figure, moving from place to place, being a highly impressionable child, I felt like I was an ideal dwelling for good and evil, so that both instincts kicked in powerfully at different times. I leaned more toward the evil back then. I’ve become measurably sweeter since then. But make no mistake, I still see the darkness and the light, and I understand both. It’s like Walt Whitman wrote in a great poem called “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I’ve often said I was a kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, and just plain maniac. One time I almost burned our house down. Mom had moved us into a house in College Park but the heat wasn’t turned on yet, so I made a fire in the fireplace to keep warm. For some reason I decided it was a good idea to splash the fire with gasoline to keep it going, but then the flames jumped back into the gas can. I freaked out and threw the can into the fireplace, and the whole wall started going up. We got the fire put out, but the crazy thing was: I liked it. I liked watching that burst of flames, knowing I was the one who caused it.

Back then, my behavior seemed natural to me, almost involuntary, truly elementary. And it was all about having the power. If you could ask almost anyone if they had a superpower, say the power to be invisible, and what they
would do with it, probably the first thing they would tell you would be something criminal. “Oh, I’d rob a bank.” I never got around to robbing banks, but I did a lot of bad things with my power.

Early on in the inner city, you tend to become part of your surroundings. It was a lifestyle. And not everyone wants to be the star of that show. But I wanted to be something, and I wasn’t afraid to take the bumps and the bruises to become it. I can quote Will Smith, who said that his initial attraction toward acting was because “I wanted to be somebody. In matter of fact, I wanted to be somebody else.”

That was me too. But I wasn’t acting.

Based on my own early experiences in the streets and trains of Atlanta, crime can pay and pay pretty well sometimes. But eventually it’s going to end up costing you too. Did I ever get caught stealing? Hell, yes, I got caught sometimes, although I was never locked up for long. A couple of times I got banned from the mall for my antisocial behavior. Once when I was in seventh or eighth grade the police picked me up for stealing some sneakers and delivered me to my mother at her bridal shop. Man, she started whipping me so hard the police had to break it up. I guess they figured it would be more punishment to leave me with her than to haul my ass to jail.

Mom didn’t believe in sparing the rod, and she had a belt at home with my name on it. She knew I was getting into trouble, and from an early age she would chase me around with that belt. Sometimes I’d try to lock myself in
Shedonna’s room, but it was no use. She’d always get me. But the beatings didn’t do any good. In the end it was me who decided to roll back my life of crime. Or at least try.

As you get older and move further up the crime food chain, you begin to question yourself, because the rush you feel becomes less even as the stakes get higher. For me, my criminal path was leading to some truly dangerous shit. We’d have these big outside fights—like the Valley Boys and the Pony Boys would meet in a big park, and just fight it out like boys sometimes do—gang crap on a grand scale like in that movie
The Warriors
. The way that I remember it, guns came in with the drugs and the big eighties crack epidemic. And then typically you had a gun because you assumed someone else there would have a gun too. That’s a recipe for disaster. That’s how it became a kind of arms war right in the streets. Actually, it was like an arms war all mixed up with a black fashion show. Of course, leave it to the urban community to make just about anything about fashion. So for instance, I remember you had to hold your gun sideways, because that was fashionable. I don’t understand why we do that, but we do and with a lot of style.

Word tends to spread quickly in the streets—especially when you’re a really strange-looking kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere and fights every chance he gets. I was hanging with some heavy characters, much older than me, and I was starting to realize that I needed to stop myself from becoming some random crime statistic. And eventually my rep was so bad that I was pulled right out of the Atlanta
public school system and told to go somewhere else—anywhere else. So where else does a kid who is trouble end up? That’s right. If it’s not jail, it’s military school. And so I—the Thug Formerly Known as Chickenhead—somehow ended up entering the ninth grade at the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia.