Everybody's Brother (7 page)

IN MY ROOM

Dig the expression on my face and the posters on the wall.

It all screams teen attitude.

W
hen I came back home to Atlanta from military school at age thirteen, I stopped following orders entirely and started to freely pursue my own passions. And there was no shortage other new passions to pursue. For instance, having left an all-boys school, there were lots of girls to notice.

From an age that would shock many of you, I have loved women. Right from the start, being with a woman rubbed me the right way. Here’s what I learned early—and continue to be reminded of often to this very day—there is nothing like the touch or the scent of a woman.

My first sexual experience was very, very early and with a much older woman. Today, she might be thrown in jail, but trust me, I would never be the one to press charges. See, one thing that you should know about me is that I always have admired older things. Older cars. Older singers. Older music. And yes, I always admired older women too.

I know it’s rude to blow my own horn, but the truth is that I always had game with women because there was one thing that I could always do that woman loved—and that’s talk. In my experience, the gift of gab will help you get a lot of great rides—with both fast cars and fast women
too. That very first experience was with one of my mom’s friends. How old was I at the time? Let me just put it this way—I was just a boy, but in her defense, I was already acting like some strange kind of man-child, wearing suits and carrying around that pipe of my dad’s. So from an early age, I acted and behaved like a much older person, like an older man. To play amateur psychiatrist, I suppose I was dressing for a part that no one else was playing—the man of the house who wasn’t anywhere to be found.

According to the textbooks, there is a clinical term that my mother was once diagnosed me with called pseudomaturity or some shit like that. It’s a very real condition that causes young people to act like they are much older than they are. I was never tested for this condition, but I’m pretty sure I had a serious case of it anyway. It may explain why I grew up trying to charm the pants off my momma’s friends. When I think back to the day, I remind myself of the smart hustling little boy in the movie
Fresh
who was always running the bags. If you’ve never seen that movie, then you must see it because I grew up a lot like that, only my unlikely story came to pass in the Dirty South and not Brooklyn. Actually, I was even more of a mix between that kid in
Fresh
and Damien from
The Omen
. I don’t mean to say that I was demonic—Damien clearly had me beat in the pure evil category. But I always related to Damien in terms of understanding a lot at a very early age—and of course being devilishly charming.

I understood full well that my mother’s friend was much older than me. Yet at the same time I understood
that I could say the same thing twice, but a whole different way once my mother walked away. For example, there are two ways to say “Don’t you look beautiful today.” It all depended on how you savored that magical word “beautiful.” And being as fresh as I was, I was going to let it be known that I was attracted to this woman out loud, but I instinctively knew how to communicate that thought and keep it between me and her in private.

That understanding of being seductive had a lot of impact, and even as a kid I was aware of it and used it to my advantage. Technically and legally, what my mother’s friend did was wrong, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t feel like I was a true victim. I was not a passive participant then—I could never be passive then or now. For better or worse, I always knew what I was doing at all times. And there tends to be something wickedly charming about knowing what you’re doing, because it exempts you from being innocent. In a way, I’m not unlike that other devilishly appealing character Al Pacino played in
The Devil’s Advocate
. It’s like he says in that movie, “I’m the hand up Mona Lisa’s skirt. They never see me comin’!”

Whether it matters or not to any judge, for whatever reasons, I was advanced sexually. And I’m
still
a lady-killer, but for some reason, some people I run across still don’t believe me. They
still
don’t see me comin’! The irony always tickles me because I know that I don’t—and won’t ever—look on the outside like the stud that I am on the inside.

My sister, Shedonna, also reminds me that my love of older women meant that I always had time to flirt with
her friends. As Shedonna remembers, “Because we look a lot alike and I am only two years older, Lo would tell my friends that we were the same age or twins so that he could hit on them and date them if he could. When we were out somewhere, Lo was always explaining—‘That’s not my girlfriend—that’s my sister,’ and he’d be asking for numbers. Lo has always been what you would consider fresh—with a strong love for beautiful women. Lo’s always loved mature women because he’s such an old soul.”

Maybe my attraction to older women had something to do with how different I was and how hard it was to get with girls my own age. I wasn’t exactly the guy to date, I wasn’t the high school football player. I had to get the girls alone. And if I could get the opportunity, they’d say, “Oh, I like him. He’s cool.”

That’s what happens to this day. Maybe I’ve seen too much of life for the average woman. There’s always that intimidation factor because I’m fearless. It’s natural to fear what you don’t know. And I make sure that you don’t know me completely.

At the same time, when I was an adolescent, what the girls—and boys—
did
know about me probably struck real fear into their little hearts. Because Chickenhead was still around and making a comeback, just in a slightly altered state.

Having discovered in military school that taking acid was not my personal trip, right about then I started to smoke
weed—a tremendous and pungent amount of weed. This aromatic if thoroughly illegal and unhealthy passion combined exceptionally well with my other recently acquired interest—hardcore rap of the dirty gangsta variety.

Like almost everyone else of my generation and the generations that followed, rap hit me where it counted. Rap altered my entire worldview. The first record that I ever bought for myself was when I got a job over the summer between eighth and ninth grades and I took some money I had actually earned and bought
Down by Law
by MC Shan. I loved that song and another song MC Shan did with TJ Swan on the same album called “Left Me Lonely.” For reasons that may be obvious, I think I understood the meaning of being lonely from a very early age. Then I bought a 12-inch single for Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” which was altogether mind-blowing in its own revolutionary right, and on the B-side was another masterpiece that spoke to me—“My Uzi Weighs a Ton.” The combination of brilliance and violence was so appealing to a young man and, compared to everything that came before it, so damn trippy. The “Look of Love,” this wasn’t.

For me and for countless others of my generation, Public Enemy’s sound changed the way we experienced the world around us. This was more than political rap with lots of attitude. To my ears, this was like Parliament-Funkadelic for a whole new era—it was fantastically black and psychedelic and something about the group’s mutant weirdness and desire to have their say really spoke to me. Public Enemy were true street poets and troublemakers in
the best sense. This was rap. This was rock. And most of all, this was thoroughly mind-expanding.

The next rap artist to blow my mind was Too $hort—a little guy who had the big balls to put a dollar sign in his name way before Ke$ha tried the same thing. The music was minimal but with fierce beats I can still feel, and the filthy streetwise words left little or nothing to the imagination—a bluntness that helped fire up my own imagination forever more. Too $hort was talking about the street scene happening in Oakland, not Atlanta, but the same dirty things that were on my young mind were apparently on Too $hort’s too. Looking back, some of Too $hort’s lyrics make “Fuck You” look like an entirely sweet little nursery rhyme—in fact, the words “fuck” and “you” were two of the nicest in his songs. But as an immature, horny kid with a few anger issues of my own, I loved every word that Too $hort rapped, and just between us, I still do.

Believe me, songs like “Freaky Tales” by Too $hort were so trippy you could get a decent contact high simply from listening to them. I was too young to drive at the time, but this was music you had to listen to while driving the streets looking at girls. My friend Bert—we used to call him Super Bert P—he had a nice system with Cerwin Vega speakers pounding away in the back of his Hyundai Hatchback—and we loved going anywhere as long as we were listening to Too $hort tell everyone in the world “Fuck You” way before I did.

Other than the occasional crazy joint from 2 Live Crew, we had never heard anyone talk so vile, and we just
loved it. This was music that spoke our language fluently. We were young wild boys out in the street getting drunk drinking Olde English—that’s all we used to drink, 40s of Olde English. Rapping along with Too $hort, we could imagine that we were the ultimate gangstas. People think that music was West Coast shit completely—but it wasn’t. That was some young stupid ghetto shit, and the good thing was that you could be stupid just about anywhere you wanted. Frankly, that might have been a pretty good rap name for me back then—Too $tupid.

The Atlanta public school system gave me another chance—perhaps unwisely—and I enrolled in Benjamin E. Mays High School to finish freshman year with all my homeboys. But I kept skipping class and getting kicked out for bad behavior, so I never moved up. After repeating the ninth grade twice, I ended up in Frank McClaren Technical School—a place of last resort for kids with problems or dropouts who needed to get their GEDs. That only lasted for a few months before I gave up for good. As you can imagine, this did not go down very well in my family full of professionals with advanced degrees. I hadn’t told anybody I was flunking out and then dropping out. Shedonna, who was on her way to college at the time, was so disappointed she could barely speak to me. And, boys and girls out there, it is shameful not to get a formal education when you have the chance. I do not recommend the path I took. But by the time I left high school, I was
putting myself through an intensive self-education in the School of Rap at the venerable University of Hip-Hop.

One of the only useful things about my time at McClaren was reconnecting with André Benjamin, my friend Dré from third grade, who had also turned into a bad boy. Dré was already rapping, and by then, so was I. We started hanging out together, and he introduced me to his friend Antwan Patton, who was going by “Big Boi.” We’d go over to Big Boi’s aunt’s house and work on our rhymes. They were performing as a group called 2 Shades Deep at the time, and sometimes I would step in with them.

Many years later, once OutKast became an international sensation, Dré gave some interview in which he told the whole world that I was a bully in high school—which I wasn’t. I only picked on bigger kids. But I remember that Dré called me something like “the Slap Master,” which frankly I kind of like now that I think about it. As I always say, it’s better to be the master than the slave. I remember hearing that Big Boi told everyone that I was a “high school hothead” who would “smack the shit out of people.” Were they making all that shit up? Hell, no, but did they have to tell everybody? Seriously, I should slap those two again next time I see them. You know, not to hurt them because I love them both. No, if I slapped them it would just be for old time’s sake.

It seems funny to me now, but back then, I was on the brink of something I was lucky to have survived.

I had meant to leave Chickenhead behind when I’d exiled myself to military school, but I have to admit that
I took a little bag of chickenheads to Riverside with me. I thought they might come in handy for something. And as soon as I got back to the neighborhood, I returned to my old, wicked ways—and then took it to another level. Sometimes, when I look back, I can’t believe my infamous former self. Isn’t it hard to believe, with what I’ve become? But the truth is the truth.