Unruly (13 page)

 

EVERYBODY WANTED TO INTERVIEW ME
about this beef shit. I agreed that I would only do one interview and the media could pull from that. We were thinking about who we could get like Barbara Walters or Oprah but in reality, this ghetto shit doesn't touch their world. We decided that we would go with Minister Louis Farrakhan. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Unbeknownst to us, the minister invited 50 Cent. Once again 50 was a no-show. I didn't care because I didn't want him there, anyway. I felt like the minister and I were having a conversation rather than an interview. He discussed a peace thing and a truce between young Black men. He explained that I had to think more broadly about the impact of two successful Black men publicly arguing. We talked about the power of bringing the community together, restoring the strength of Black men, maintaining our families and protecting the community. I have nothing but love and respect for him.

My nonsense felt weak in the face of his clarity. He had a vision for a whole race of people and I didn't even have a vision for my life. I mostly listened to him speak about Allah and the importance of not resorting to violence.

I was young. I wanted him to see my side of the whole thing. The minister said to me, “I love Ja Rule and I love 50 Cent.”

I see now that he was there to tell me that I had to love myself. In doing so, I would be able to love 50 Cent. It would also allow me to appreciate what me and 50 have done collectively for hip-hop. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

 

OFF-CAMERA, THE MINISTER
and I had some real talk. And although he is who he is, he reminded me that even he has history with “beefs.” He explained that he is no stranger to beefs. In fact, he said something that I still think about to this day. He said, “At one point in my life, even I had to choose between my mentor and my leader. I chose my leader. So I know what you're saying, my brother.”

 

*

September 22, 2011

Today is Britt's Birthday. She's 16 today. I can't even begin to explain how fucked up I feel not being there for her on such an important B.Day. I feel empty, hollow as I write this. My thoughts are like echoes hitting the paper, they mean nothing. But as they bounce back they start to have meaning. She's still, and will always be, Daddy's lil BABY. Knowing that I've givin her everything a father could up until this point makes me feel proud. But yet so lost that I'm missing this milestone in her life. There'll be many more . . . graduation, college, marriage. I just never thought jail would be the reason I missed any of them. I spoke wit her today and she sounded happy. But I don't know if that made me feel better or worse. I was happy that she was in good spirits but sad I wasn't there to share that joy. I guess I can't be all things all the time even if all I wanted was just to be there. The funny thing is I probably won't be all that missed. I mean, shit, she is a teenager. LOL.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRITTNEY ASJA ATKINS 143

I LOVE YOU !

 

*

TEN

A Rock Star

THERE WAS JUST NO TIME FOR HATERS. I WAS IN LOS ANGELES
recording my second album,
Rule: 3:36
. I thought it was one of the best times of my life. I rented a house and lived there for three months while I completed the album. I barely slept, as I was too busy enjoying the trappings of success. This was the first time that I had ever had anything extravagant like this. It was a beautiful home worth 10 to 15 million dollars. At first, we were staying at the hotel waiting for the house to be prepared for us. I was anxious. I didn't want to wait for the furniture and all of that stuff. I convinced my boys to get some blow-up mattresses. We went to Rent-a-Center and got some furniture and TVs. At the time, I didn't know that you couldn't have Rent-a-Center furniture in a place like that. There were beds and a couple couches and TVs everywhere. I had so many people staying there. It was like a revolving door. There was one room we called the dorm room. It had about eight blow-up beds in there. If people didn't have a bedroom of their own, they had to stay in the dorm room.

I called the house my “ghetto mansion.” It was located in Nichols Canyon, in the foothills of Los Angeles. I knew that I had arrived being where Julia Roberts, Ellen DeGeneres and Bruce Willis lived. I really wanted to be there. The house rented for $30,000 a month. I didn't have the slightest clue of what to do in a house like that. The house had eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a tennis court, a basketball court and a pool. Needless to say, I never played tennis, but we played hoops and hosted pool parties almost every day.

We had lots of fun in that house. At two or three in the morning we were playing basketball. You know how niggas play basketball, all loud. The police came up there nightly. Every time they came, I had a smart-ass remark for them.

“What you mean I can't have a party up here. I'm paying like everybody else.” Don't be fucking with me. What you mean I can't have company.” I am sure my neighbors hated us.

Sometimes in the mornings before anyone else was up, I would wander through the halls of the huge house, and as the blasts of sunlight touched my skin, I realized that I was experiencing my own version of the euphoria. I was light and carefree. I was free from the everyday shit. I was rich. Anything and everything I wanted was at my fingertips.

As I wandered through those hallways, I would remember Moms, who struggled to pay $700 a month for rent. I remember her negotiating with herself which bill to pay that month and which would be skipped. I looked at where I'd come from. I had sacrificed a lot for everything that was happening to me. This was happiness.

I didn't quite understand the magnitude of what my life had turned into. My life had become a playground with all of my friends, old and new, being a part of my dream. This was my moment. I was tangled up in the web of being “Ja Rule.” Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of Aisha and Brittney, but I kept telling myself that everything I was doing was for them.

As much as
Venni Vetti Vecci
was very personal,
Rule 3:36
was equally personal because it chronicled what was going on in my new life, real-time. “Between Me and You” was a sexy song about indiscretions between consenting adults. The record was a sign of what young men and women were going through—trying to cover up scandalous behavior. Irv and his wife, Deb, were going through it. Me and Ish were going through it. A few of my homies had gotten chicks pregnant on the West Coast. The song embraced a moment in time that we could never get back. We couldn't make up for it either. It was life. I like to make truthful records about what I see going on around me.

Los Angeles is a tough city to adjust to if you're not already rich and famous. There were lots of women around us at all times and I knew my boys wanted to meet some of them. Because I was the “star,” it was very easy for me to meet women and pawn them off to my crew, who was always hungry for some female attention. There was this one particular girl who followed us from club to club. She was always watching and staring at me. She introduced herself and an innocent acquaintance started.

Some of the dudes in my circle got closer to her. From the brief conversation we had, I knew she was trouble. Every time I saw her she would name drop: “I am getting married to Fred Durst.” “Tonight I'm going to visit Maxwell.” “I am seeing Lenny Kravitz.” Why did she need to tell us any of this? I knew she was lying or was a troublemaker. She had moved to Los Angeles looking for roles in music videos to get some exposure for her acting career.

I was shooting the video for “Between Me and You.” When we arrived, Ezette was lying in the grass topless with a bikini bottom on. Everyone came to party, eat, hang out and do drugs that I was supplying. I wanted everyone to be able to say that if you are at Ja's house, you can have anything your heart desires.

This Ezette chick reminded me of the hoes from back in the day. Her sexual appetite was robust and she had no problem with having sex with as many men as she could in one night. All of the crew had their chance with Ezette. I called her a “throw around.”

Our rental house was above the city and often had no signal for my cell phone. I never bothered to put in a home phone. Days went by without me calling home.

Aisha didn't know how to reach me.
What if something happened to Brittney?
I never thought of that shit, in those days. I was doing a combination of drugs. It was weed, alcohol and ecstacy. You never knew what you were getting with the X. It depends on what the X was cut with. It would give me a different high. I pride myself on never doing the hard drugs—coke, heroin—but the truth of the matter is that the X would be cut with all of that.

It seemed not a day went by that there wasn't another team of paparazzi following me around and taking photos of me and everyone around me.

All I could do was to endure the bullets of rage that Aisha was shooting every time she heard the sound of my voice. Aisha and I were fighting a lot. She'd scream at me. I'd hang up. She'd call back. I'd listen to her and then I'd hold on to all I had as an excuse:
work.
I gripped tightly to the rationalization that what I was doing was for our family. She threatened to leave me. I really didn't want her to go. She called me an asshole. I thought she was acting crazy. She told me that she hated me. I didn't say anything. I understood.

I was living a rock star life. I'll never forget the time I went to apply for life insurance. I called myself answering the questions truthfully. He asked me if I smoked or drank. I told it straight up. “Yeah, I smoke weed all the time and drink Henny every day. I don't think I'll live to be twenty-five.” He thought I was crazy. I was.

The thing about life insurance is that one should be as healthy as possible to get the lowest rates possible. But I was thinking that it was like seeing a doctor, where you should be as truthful as possible to get an accurate diagnosis. In actuality, I should have lied to him and saved some money.

I was recording
Rule: 3:36
in the available hours between partying and losing my grip on reality. My boys were renting fast, expensive cars such as BMWs and Ferraris. Often under the influence, we would have accidents. But it was not always our fault. I remember one night me Gutta and H.O. were driving back to the house when a Jeep came out of nowhere. The tires were blown out. There were sparks flying from the rims scratching the concrete. He was on the wrong side of the road coming straight at us. I yelled for Gutta to get out the way. On the right side there were parked cars. On the left was on-coming traffic. Gutta tried to swerve, but we ended up crashing into the Jeep because we couldn't get out of the way. The crazy shit is that we would get into another car that was part of the convoy and we'd leave those cars right where we crashed them. The next day, I would just call my business manager and have her handle it—throwing money after bad decisions.

She always said the same thing, “Jeff you have to stop doing this!”

I must be an adrenaline junkie. That's what scares me about me. I've always been curious to see the other side. Maybe that's what keeps me strong. Fear goes out the window when you're drawn to the things that can get you killed. When those Jamaicans held a gun to my head, I wasn't scared. I just accepted the fact that that could have been my last day breathing. Since I was a kid, it's always been the same way. I seemed to be pulled by death, running towards it, gripping life's ragged edge, peering into the abyss, fantasizing about the other side.

 

I MADE TWO PHONE CALLS
one night. I called my LA tattoo artist, Marc, and I called Moms.

“Jeff, what are you up to now?” Moms said laughing, finally hearing from me. It had been three weeks.

“Ma, how do you spell Kristen's name?”

“Kristen? Why?” she asked.

“How do you spell it?” I insisted.

“K-R-I-S-T-E-N,” Moms spelled it out, carefully.

“Thanks, Moms. I'll hit you back when it's done.” I hung up before she could ask anything else.

We used to go to the club and bring the club back to the house, since shit closed at two a.m. Gutta and BJ only had to mention it to two or three people in the club and the house would be crowded within an hour. It meant a lot to me to be able to host Los Angeles. I'm open to all kinds of people and loved having an eclectic group of celebrities, gangbangers, groupies, athletes, aspiring artists and hip-hop enthusiasts who were in the know.

I had a lot of love for LA because when my first album came out, LA is the city that gave “Holla Holla” a lot of love. I felt I owed the people in LA a good time. Our parties were always the place to be in Los Angeles.

The parties were round-the-clock affairs. At the house, we would swim, shoot hoops and drink freshly chilled champagne. Sometimes I would have Marc there, pay him a day rate of $5,000 and let him tattoo anyone who asked. Additionally, I would make sure that my drug guy was always there and fully equipped with his gray box, filled with every drug in existence.

 

THE CREW WENT OUT
that night and was surprised when I said I wanted to stay home, alone. But that particular night, I couldn't face another crowd of scantily clad women and the scent of liquor on everyone's breath. I couldn't stand to see one more woman bring her child to the party, because she didn't have a babysitter.

I was really missing Kristen and who I imagined that she would have been to Moms and me. I wondered if Kristen could have kept our father from walking out on us. There were so many thoughts around that precious little girl. She should have lived. I was thinking hard about Kristen.

Nothing would take away the memory of Kristen; the sister I never knew. The little sister that I never got to walk to school, help with her homework or protect from l'il dudes who would have been scared of me.

Marc arrived just as the sun was setting. I led him into the huge white gourmet kitchen. The kitchen cabinets held an impressive inventory of Rémy Martin. The Sub-Zero refrigerator kept all of the vodka and Veuve Clicquot champagne perfectly chilled.

I had just gotten some work touched up by Marc a few days before and since then nothing had changed in the kitchen, except there were more fast food bags, plastic utensils and soiled Styrofoam containers spilling out of the garbage can. Marc headed towards the huge dining room table and started to prep. He went to the bathroom and took out several clean white towels. He disinfected the long table with a spray bottle and then covered the table with the towels. He had clamps to keep them in place. Next out of Marc's little doctor's bag came a small pillow for my head and chin to rest on. Without even looking, he placed a small blue box of alcohol pads on the table and last he carefully removed the colorful inks and laid them out one by one.

“No party tonight?” he asked.

“Nah, I took a break.” I was slightly embarrassed.

“How did those touch-ups heal?” he asked.

“They're cool. I want to put the name ‘Kristen' on my back with a halo on top and wings on either side. Here's a sketch that I did. I'm no artist, by the way.”

“That's cool. I can see what you want,” said Marc.

“Just give me something in a feminine script. I just want it large and real . . . beautiful, ya know. She would have liked that shit.”

“Do you mind me asking who's Kristen? Is it your wife?”

“Nah. My baby sister.”

Marc must have seen it in my eyes, there was nothing more to ask. He hesitated then pulled out his sketchpad and went to perfecting the sketch that I presented to him. After about twenty minutes, he handed the enlarged drawing to me for my final approval.

“That's it. That's it! It's dope, man.” The tattoo was going to be a worthy memorial for Kristen. I had smoked a little weed before he got there. I didn't drink anything that day because when you are getting tattooed, drinking causes you to bleed more.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz
sang the buzz of the needle as Marc powered it up. I drifted off to a psychedelic ink-filled dream while Marc raised the dead, tattooing all that was left of Kristen, so I could hold on to her, forever.

 

IT WAS AT THE L'ERMITAGE HOTEL
in Los Angeles, a place that I used to go when the mansion got to be too much. I would sneak out, leaving the house in full-throttle party mode. The night I almost overdosed on fucking drugs, my boys' crew wanted to take me to the hospital. I told them, “No.” I wasn't going to no hospital.

Even in that state, I was conscious enough to fear the media spotlight running away with how far down I'd fallen. I didn't want any more shit documented about me for my wife and daughter to ponder for the rest of their lives. I didn't want them to have to pump my stomach and put my autopsy results all over the Internet. I didn't want the world to be able to say that it was hip-hop's fault.