My Voice: A Memoir (13 page)

She put me in a fucking corner, man
.

So I storm out of Tracy’s office and follow her to the studio. I bust in and she’s already in conversation with Wendy. They both turn around and just look at me. They both have a glare in their eye, like—
Oh my God, what’s she gonna do? Why is she here???

Tracy says, “Angie, get out of here right now.”

I pause and look at Wendy, who is visibly shaken, and she lets out an erratic “You’re crazy!!!”

Meeeee???
I’m the crazy one?

I could tell by the seriousness on Tracy’s face that we were done here. So I went back to her office and waited for her to come back. This was another time my career could have been over before I even hit afternoons. I could have been fired. By the way, I should have been fired. Instead I got suspended. And so did she.

•   •   •

T
he
Daily News
ran with the headline:
A
NGIE
M
ARTINEZ
P
OUNCES ON
W
ENDY
W
ILLIAMS
.

To this day, I don’t know what Wendy really felt, if she was mad or embarrassed or just shocked. When she went on the radio the next day,
she stated, “For the record, nobody hit anybody. Nobody punched anybody.”

People had warned me there might be a lawsuit, but once she said that, I was relieved.
Oh, great. I don’t ever have to worry about anything there
.

Then a divide happened. Wendy had always been an outsider at the station. She would bring ratings, but her personality was not that of a team player. And as an outsider, she’d caused resentment in the past, and people started feeling comfortable enough to voice it. Flex got on the radio and read the article, treating it as if it were funny. “‘She pounced.’ Ha!” He was laughing at Wendy on the air. This was a coworker still. He shouldn’t have done that. But Flex was Flex. And he knew that people would eat this story up.

The truth is that if it wasn’t me it was gonna be somebody else. She was disrespectful to so many people all the time. And this may sound crazy, but I actually believed that it was a good thing it was me because I wasn’t someone who really wanted to hurt her. I was just trying to defend myself. I thought maybe I saved her from someone else feeling they needed to run up on her. Someone who actually could have hurt her. Yes! At the time I actually believed that it was for an all-around good cause. I for sure got a few thank-you notes.

My mother, who knew the world of radio as well as anyone, even if she didn’t know the day-to-day dynamics at Hot, asked me the following night, “Well, what really happened?”

“Well, you know, I just kind of pushed her.” I shrugged, trying to downplay what happened.

“Really?” she said. “’Cause the paper says you pounced on her.”

My mother was concerned. I was embarrassed.

A few days later she came to me and said, “You know what one of my colleagues said?”

“What?”

“You know, the thing with Wendy,” my mother began, and then paused, careful and thoughtful with her words as always as she continued. “As much as it’s the wrong thing to do, to ever put a hand on someone, especially at work, it does set a precedent that you are not somebody that can be pushed around.”

And my mother, by the way, is the queen of doing everything by the book. She never wants to offend anybody. She never wants to do anything illegal. You know, if she owes you $4.07, here is your four dollars and five, six, seven cents. She is by-the-book Shirley. So for her to understand and say, “In the big picture, down the road in your life and your career, at least people will know you are not somebody that will allow someone else to push them around.”

That was her way of saying “I trust your judgment and I support you.”

A few weeks passed, and when they brought me back from my suspension, that’s when the conversation happened. I really should have been fired, but everybody there was already tired of Wendy because there were a lot of problems with her. She wasn’t happy there either. And I think they were looking for a reason to get rid of her as it was.

“Listen, we know Wendy’s a pain in the ass,” Steve said. “We’d love to get rid of her. But the problem is, if we did that, you have to do Afternoon Drive.”

I never wanted to do Afternoon Drive. I loved being on air at night. I loved the freedom. I loved the artists. I loved being able to go out after, and I didn’t want to do Afternoon Drive. To me that was corny. I mean, I was on in the nights, when I could be edgy. Plus, I was young and still wanted to be in the streets.

Steve may have understood that I didn’t want to do that. But he put
it to me in no uncertain terms, saying, “Listen, if you don’t do Afternoon Drive, I cannot let Wendy go. I don’t have anyone else strong enough to take that slot. The only way I can let her go is if you take it.”

After talking to Flex and Ed and a few others at the station, I agreed. I would take one for the team.

So now, not only am I moving to a time slot that I don’t want, but the thing about Wendy Williams is that she is super talented and amazing at what she does. I don’t do what she does. And I was scared as shit!

And soon the story was everywhere:

DUELING DEEJAYS

Friday, October 24, 1997

After getting into a shoving match with fellow Hot 97 deejay Wendy Williams, it must taste sweet to Angie Martinez to have taken over Williams’s drive-time slot the last two weeks. Despite her high ratings, the trash-talking Williams has been gone from the station for three weeks, and management ain’t saying whether it’s permanent . . .

The
Daily News
headlines continued throughout October 1997, and Wendy’s listeners were wondering if she was gone for good. And now that I was on afternoons but no official announcement had been made, Wendy’s listeners became most unfriendly. I used to get threatening faxes—it wasn’t texts or e-mails or tweets; it was faxes that said things like, “Bitch, get off the radio. I’ll break your jaw.” It was awful and it made me insecure. Worse, the newspaper reported that Wendy’s fans had other plans, too:

FANS’ RALLYING CRY: WHERE’S WENDY?

Friday, October 31, 1997

Fans of WQHT afternoon deejay Wendy Williams, who has been off the air for almost a month with no official explanation, are planning a protest rally at the station Monday to ask why. The rally is planned at Hot 97 studios at 395 Hudson St., 2–4 p.m. Station officials couldn’t be reached yesterday for comment on Williams’ status. She is aware of Monday’s rally, but it isn’t known if she will attend. Williams was reportedly involved in a heated argument at the station a month ago with sister deejay Angie Martinez.

They were planning a rally? A fucking rally!

How had my charmed radio life been turned upside down? I was somebody who loved what I did and tried to have a voice that mattered to my listeners, and had never had any aspirations or claims on anyone else’s arena. All of a sudden everyone is putting the pressure on—saying, well, you’re filling the shoes of Wendy. Can you get her numbers? Can you fill her spot? Can you deal with this type of heat on you? It was the first time people were nasty to me. Apparently, I had to develop a much thicker skin.

You just keep pushing. You can’t quit. You just keep showing up every day. I sucked for a while because I was off balance. What I had been doing for so long at night didn’t work in the afternoon. Not surprisingly, at first I couldn’t deliver. But I couldn’t let myself believe that would be forever. So I just had to keep going.

Bit by bit I began to get the difference. In the afternoon, you have to be a little quicker with it. Nighttime, I could be like, “Who’s ordering chicken?” We could talk about that for eight minutes and it was
entertaining. In the middle of the day, when people are at work, that’s going to lose the audience. That challenge is that you have to develop a whole different timing. And I had to get beat the fuck up for a while. From what I heard later on, I almost didn’t make it.

Blundering along, I think the part that hurt most was feeling so alone. Management started to wonder if they had made a mistake. And Flex was still telling labels that guests had to come to his show first. He was taking all the exclusives. I was drowning.

Finally, I called Flex and said, “I want to talk to you.” Our relationship had become flimsy. We barely talked anymore—but really, I had no one else to turn to. I couldn’t do this alone, and I needed him. It was a tough call for me to make, and for weeks he blew me off with one excuse or another.

At last he agreed that I’d come to meet him in his office and we’d go somewhere for lunch. We jumped into one of his muscle cars and headed out for something to eat.

On the way, I started in, explaining, “Look, you don’t understand how hard it is for me out here. I’m trying to navigate my way through shit by myself. I don’t know what to do a lot of the times.” I couldn’t believe how upset I allowed myself to be, pouring it all out. “Even this Wendy thing—I don’t want to do afternoons. I’m taking it for the team. She had to go. You all agreed, and now I don’t feel like I’m getting support from anybody. I don’t even know what happened to us . . . Like you’re talking shit—” And in the middle of what I’m saying, I start crying . . . bawling like a little girl, sniffling and trying to catch my breath.

Flex looked so shaken. And confused. You see, Flex is the type that thrives off competition and is motivated by a proverbial “enemy,” so I think once I wasn’t (in his mind) on his team anymore, he just put me
in the “competition” box and treated me as such. But in that moment I think he realized that not only was I not his enemy but that I actually loved him and needed him.

And in that moment something changed.

Flex looked over and smiled his great smile. “It’s all right, Ang. You know, you did the right thing,” he said. “You’re gonna be great. Don’t worry.”

From that day on Flex has probably been the most important person in my radio career. He has defended me when I didn’t ask him to and was a bully for me during a lot of crazy times. I know I wouldn’t be on the air without him. But I also don’t think I would have survived some of those tough periods had we not had the one-two punch of Flex and Ang. We lit those fires when those fires needed to be lit. Once we established trust with each other, then it was like we were unstoppable.

That conversation was a defining moment maybe for the both of us. Flex and I became like the mother and father of the whole station. He could do the dirty work—playing the power politics and pushing his weight when it had to be done—and he left me a lane where I didn’t have to. I didn’t want to do dirty work. I didn’t want to argue with people. I just wanted to be gracious and boost morale and hopefully motivate.

Flex came through time and again. He has been my friend, my confidant, my mentor, my guy. That’s not to say he hasn’t pissed me off over the years. But he pissed me off in the way a family member would piss you off. Like I’m gonna call you and tell you, “What the fuck did you do that for?” We disagreed plenty of times. But even when we did, there was not ever a doubt about his loyalty or our friendship.

That adjustment to the new time slot took some time. And eventually I found a rhythm; eventually I found my voice in the afternoons.

The lesson was a first for me—the fact that shit ain’t always sweet. People are not always gonna like you. When I looked back at the past, I had to say to myself, of course you found your niche and got real comfortable and people liked you and you were grateful for it but you also somewhat took it for granted. That was back in once upon a time when you could just do what you love and it’s all gonna be sweet. And now you’ve moved on and that’s not the case anymore. There was no more Battle of the Beats, which I missed. Now I was doing the Hot Five at Four instead of the Hot Five at Nine. Now my interviews had to be a lot quicker. It was a tough adjustment. But you know, I found my way.

Wendy found hers as well. I watch her TV talk show sometimes and she has really mastered her lane. I find myself watching and laughing out loud. I don’t have any ill feelings toward her. When I think about what happened, I understand that she was doing her and she didn’t care who she offended. And I was fighting for myself. I was very protective of my personal relationships, and I felt violated in a place where I shouldn’t ever have to feel violated. And so what do you do when you’re in a corner? Sometimes you have to fight back.

As dramatic as the episode was, it was only a moment in time. I haven’t seen her since.

THROUGH THE FIRE

H
alf asleep, early on the first Saturday of February 1998, I’m at Tip’s town house in Englewood, New Jersey, and I hear him banging around and making noise like he’s trying to wake me up on purpose.

We had been fighting a lot that week, and the night before I got so pissed off that I grabbed my pillow and went to sleep by myself in the other room. So as I hear him walking around and shaking the house, my blurry thoughts are—
Why is he being so loud??? Is he just trying to be a dick ’cause I slept in the guest room?
I was so sleepy. And so annoyed.

That’s when he bursts into the room—“GET UP!!!!”

“What? Why??!”

“You don’t smell the smoke? There’s a fire in the house!”

I jump up. “What? Where?!”

“I think it’s in the studio. Get dressed! We gotta get outta here.”

While he runs downstairs to see what’s happening and try to find the extinguisher, I bolt into his room to grab some shorts and slippers.
By the time I get back to the staircase, the flames are there, climbing up the sides and quickly building at the bottom.

“Tiiiiiiip!!” I scream. He comes running around to the bottom of the stairs trying to beat the flames with a blanket.

“Come on!!!!!” he calls to me from the bottom, where I can barely see him. “Just run down fast. I got you!”

I was terrified. I looked around and quickly assessed my options.
I can’t do it. I’m just going to jump from the balcony.
I’m not sure why I thought the twenty-foot jump from the balcony was a better option than running through the flames, but that was my plan.

“C’mon!” he yelled.

“I can’t do it, Tip. I’m scared . . . I’m just gonna—”

Before I could finish, Tip threw the blanket over his head and ran up the stairs to grab me. He covered me with the blanket, grabbed my hand, and said, “Keep your head down and don’t stop.” And together we ran down the stairs and out of the house.

Tip’s road manager and friend Lite was with us, and the three of us stood there covered in soot and watched the house burn down. For what felt like hours, we watched it all burn, and I mean everything—clothes, photos, unreleased music, equipment, and probably the most painful to Tip, his entire beloved record collection . . . ruined. If you know anything about Q-Tip, you’d know these albums were not just a typical record collection. This was his life; this was what got him out of the hood. He spent countless days finding exclusives and rare vinyl and then hours each day listening to the nuances of these albums, trying to rework them. I mean, it was devastating; and we were numb.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad, his longtime friend and collaborator from Tribe, came over soon after, and I remember watching the two of them standing over the melted vinyl. It was brutal. We took a photo of the moment and tried to keep perspective. In the spirit of “These are only
material things; let us be grateful to be alive,” we posed and did our best B-boy stance. Years later, when I came across the photos, it was obvious we weren’t fooling anyone. We did do the poses, but in our eyes there was nothing but sadness.

We tried to give ourselves a sense that life would go on and it was good to be alive, so we decided to leave the scene for pancakes. There we were, Lite, Q-Tip, Ali, and me, at the IHOP in Englewood, New Jersey—covered in soot and reeking of smoke and fire. It was such a sad day.

Tip and I made it out of the fire, but our relationship, already strained, had new challenges. He had just converted to Islam, and in finding his path he became exacting in his beliefs. Though I made an effort to read the Koran and get as familiar as I could with the religion, that was not my path. It wasn’t as if the fire caused the breakup. But I think when you go through any kind of life-threatening ordeal, it forces you to take stock of your life and figure out what’s important. We both saw that our lives were in different places, and as much as we loved each other, Tip couldn’t compromise what he saw for his future and I couldn’t compromise mine. Ultimately, it didn’t work, but I adore him and we are still great friends to this day.

•   •   •

T
hat year delivered huge hip-hop albums—including Big Pun’s
Capital Punishment,
making him the first Latin rapper to ever go platinum.
This was such a big deal because not only was he Latino, but this was real hip-hop and he was dope. Latinos were proud. Big Pun was signed to Fat Joe’s newly formed Terror Squad, along with Cuban Link, Prospect, Armageddon, and Triple Seis
.
Some of my favorite memories of this era are of hanging out with Big Pun and Fat Joe up at Jimmy’s in the Bronx. Fat Joe’s then girlfriend (and future wife), Lorena, would
become one of my closest friends. She is the definition of a rider, the type of friend you’d want to go to war with or commit a crime with because you know she’ll have your back till the end.

I’d known Joe for a lot of years at this point and we also developed a friendship. Fat Joe, a big Puerto Rican with an even bigger presence, could tell a story like nobody else, always entertaining and extremely likable. There was a certain innate camaraderie I had with him—being authentically part of the culture, and also Latino and from New York. As Joe’s career grew, he went from being a solo artist to the leader of the Terror Squad. Pun was another Puerto Rican from the Bronx and a notorious prankster with a quirky sense of humor, the kind of humor where you weren’t sure if he was hilarious or if you should be offended.

There was this one time when Big Pun came to my show and brought weed cookies. “Have one,” Pun said with a twinkle in his eye.

Though I smoked weed, I’d never eaten it before, so I didn’t know what the difference was. I tried a cookie and it had no effect. “I don’t feel anything!” I told him.

Ten minutes pass, still nothing. Fifteen minutes later, nothing. “Have more!” Pun said, because he was a fucking asshole. “Eat more!”

Whatever. I didn’t really want to eat more, but he was relentless, so I ate a shitload of cookies. And when those things kicked in, Pun had already left, and I thought I was going to die. Actually die.

“Call 911! Take me to the hospital. I’m poisoned!” I screamed to my producer, Paddy Duke. As I was just learning, the thing about weed cookies is that it’s not the same type of high as when you smoke. When you smoke, you chill. This was crazy aggressive and so nauseating that I started to throw up as my head spun, telling me one thing—
I’m going to die
.

“Paddy, I need you to call 911.”

“I can’t call 911.” Paddy reminded me that I still had an hour left of
my radio show to do. He said, “If we call 911, everyone is going to know that something happened to you. The bosses are going to ask what happened, and we’re going to have to tell them that you were eating weed cookies on the air with Pun. We can’t call an ambulance.”

“Well, I’ll take myself to the hospital then!”

I stormed out. I never made it to the emergency room but instead had to be driven home, where I then slept it off. Never again! No weed cookies, brownies, or gummy bears for me, thanks.

That episode aside, I was so happy for Big Pun when his album went platinum and when he and Fat Joe showed the industry that there was much more to come from Latin hip-hop artists. New voices were coming into their own from other corners, and overall the players in the game were a more diverse cast of characters than ever. In 1998 OutKast’s
Aquemini
put a spotlight on hip-hop coming out of the South. It was a big time for super crews like The Fugees, Murder Inc., Ruff Ryders, and Shady/Aftermath.

As Y2K came into view, it was a done deal just how wrong the people were who had said that hip-hop was only a phase and wouldn’t last. This was not a bad time to be in the middle of it all as I swung into a higher gear on my show in the afternoons, pulling out all the stops. The pace was crazier than ever.

On top of that, I was single and caught up even more in the fast life, hosting parties, hosting mixtapes, hanging out and having fun but always working and always running. After the split with Tip, I’d moved to a new apartment on Prospect Avenue in Hackensack, New Jersey—which was one of those neighborhoods where you would run into rappers at the supermarket. Lots of music-industry new-money folks living in high-rise luxury buildings, that was us. Mike Kyser from Def Jam lived up the block, and either I or someone else would host a night of playing spades or extremely intense Monopoly games with people like Irv Gotti and Ja
Rule joining in. When my girlfriend Liane got engaged, her bachelorette party was at my crib. And since hosting was my thing, I started to have taco nights on the regular. I mean, that apartment brought me so much fun. Well, that is until . . .

Yup! It happened again. Eviction notice on the door. Padlock on the doorknob. Me standing there in horror. Again.

What is wrong with me?! I didn’t think my rent was
that
late?

Now, in addition to the shock and embarrassment that I felt the last time this had happened, I was also so
mad
at myself. At this point I’m twenty-seven years old and this shit is not cute.

Nikki was in between apartments and had been staying with me at the time. So now, not only was I homeless, but I had made my best friend homeless, too! All because my dumb ass wants to live check to check, drive Benzes, and pay my bills whenever I got around to it . . . just dumb irresponsible shit.

That first night Nikki and I stayed at Margarita’s house. Then we went to a hotel. At that point, I thought hard about what it was going to take to get back into the crib and never let anything like this happen ever, ever again.

The immediate goal was to figure out how to pay the six thousand dollars in back rent and get back into the apartment. The problem was I didn’t have it! I was only able to scrape together three of the six.

Nikki shrugged. “Why don’t you call Tip?”

Of course I knew he would say yes and bail me out. But I couldn’t. My pride wouldn’t let me. Instead I called my friend Mary.

Mary J. Blige. God, there are no words for how I love that woman! She is one of the most authentic people I know. Mary is all heart. Not an easy thing to be, by the way. It is the reason she is able to make the music she has made and touch the lives she has touched.

“Come get me now; I’m in the studio,” were the first words out of her mouth when I told her what had happened.

“Are you sure?”

“Girl, bring your ass over here.” She was going to lend me the money.

When we arrived at the studio it was almost midnight. Mary ran downstairs and hopped in the back of Nikki’s ’94 Honda Accord as we drove off to find an open check-cashing spot. I have no idea why Mary happened to have an uncashed check in her purse at that moment, but she did. We tried a few places, but they were all closed.

At that point I’m sitting in the passenger seat as Nikki drives and I look back to see a serious expression on Mary’s face as she says, “Nikki, pull over. We gotta pray on this.”

I don’t remember the exact prayer, but I do remember Mary intensely rebuking the situation and asking God to spare me from these type of problems. Right after that we found a twenty-four-hour check-cashing place in Midtown. With no concern about any of the people who recognized her in there, Mary got the cash, handed me the three thousand dollars, no questions asked.

We got back into the apartment the next day. And I don’t know if it was Mary’s prayer session in the back of the Accord or my vow to never, ever let this happen again, but after that I started to get my shit together. It wasn’t overnight, but I got serious about how I chose to support the lifestyle of being a grown-up in my late twenties. Sometimes you go through the fire of an embarrassing eviction, like I had the first time, and you just don’t get the lesson. Or you do learn it, but you get so caught up in other demands that it loses its staying power. So you have to get through it again. And even though nothing disastrous happened in the end, twice was enough to give me a crash course in keeping a better eye on how I earned, spent, and saved money.

And thank God I did start to do that, because after all that talk about me recording an album of my own, Sylvia Rhone at Elektra Records actually made me an offer. The deal was for more than a hundred thousand dollars to go into the studio and record an album. Yep! A fucking hundred-thousand-dollar-advance check for me as an artist in my own right. And, as icing on the cake, Warner Bros. gave me a publishing deal—for even more than that!

Now, remember, at that point I had done eight bars on the “Ladies Night Remix” and had written a couple of verses for Doo Wop and Tony Touch mixtapes. Nothing more than trying it out, trying to learn, putting my toe in the water. But that was it. I had absolutely
no
clue how to even begin to make an album. But again, here I was with an opportunity that I sure as hell was going to embrace—as I would encourage anybody in my position to do. You show up, and you go for it all the way. And then you sink or swim.