“Yo, check it out, check it out, check it out!”
Bodies bounced in rhythm, and dozens of white, yellow, brown, and black hands pumped in the air. They loved us.
“Aw, man, y’all are dope. When’s your CD coming out?” one person after another asked afterward.
For the moment, we were hot and loving it.
I gave one of our packets to Faith Evans, my friend from elementary school. Through her, Rameck, Sam, and I met some of the guys who would become rap megastars. One of them was Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G., whom Faith had married in 1994, just days after they’d met at a photo shoot for Bad Boy Records. For a while she lived in East Orange and sometimes invited me to her house with them for Sunday dinner. Biggie was a huge dude who must have weighed more than 300 pounds. I’ll never forget the image of him seated at the kitchen table with a mound of chicken bones piled high on his plate. He had devoured the fried chicken at record speed.
Faith was the first female artist signed by Bad Boy Records in 1994, and I went to the recording studio with her every chance I got while she was working on her first album. I’d sit on the floor while Faith recorded in the booth. Puffy, Biggie, and other stars would be in and out all the time. Everybody was down-to-earth, just regular people back then.
Once, Faith invited Sam, Rameck, and me to a photo shoot at Bad Boy Records. The three of us were rolling dice in a small bathroom when Biggie walked in and put up $100. He lost it to Sam in a game called Celo. Biggie put up another $100 and lost that, too. He kept betting until he owed Sam more than $3,000. Few guys could roll better than Sam. They kept playing until he won all but $400 of it back. But $400 was a big deal to a broke college student.
Biggie and Puffy raised the profile of rap on the East Coast, especially in New York City. Biggie had been a crack dealer in Brooklyn, and he crafted complex rhymes with lurid lyrics that painted vivid images of the realities of inner-city life—the harshness of it, but also the glitzy style that came to be known as ghetto-fabulous. Some of his lyrics were disrespectful to women, but mostly Biggie just wanted to make you feel good and tell you how he was loving life. When you listened to him, you were living the glamorous life through him.
At the same time, Biggie’s West Coast rival, Tupac Shakur, was also selling millions of records with more introspective and poetic lyrics that delved into the life and soul of the gangsta. Even if you weren’t from the inner city, if you listened to Tupac, you got the feeling that the thugs have more heart than you thought. He reached into himself and tried to interpret where a lot of the negative behavior came from, and he crafted his lyrics in a way that you could really understand.
I knew the world they rapped about, and I was a fan of both rappers. But their rivalry ultimately escalated into an East Coast–West Coast feud that, some say, took the lives of rap’s top two stars. Tupac was shot to death on September 7, 1996, in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Six months later, Biggie was gunned down as he left an after-party for the Soul Train Music Awards. The attackers were never identified in either shooting.
I was hoping tensions would cool after Tupac’s death, so when Biggie died less than a year later in almost the same way, I was shocked. My phone rang off the hook with friends calling to mourn, as if a blood brother had just been murdered. Big, tough dudes in my old neighborhood were walking around dazed. I was sure the anti-rap forces would find a way to put more pressure on the rap industry and just shut it down. Critics were already blaming rap for glorifying and perpetuating the violence in communities like the ones where Sam, Rameck, and I grew up.
By the time Biggie was killed, Rameck and I had already made a major decision about our career as rappers.
When we gave the tape to Faith in 1994, our junior year in college, she passed it on to her lawyer, who sent it to Dennis Scott, an NBA player who was with the Orlando Magic. He owned a company called 3D Entertainment, which managed a couple of rap groups. Apparently he liked one of our songs, and he sent us a letter saying he wanted to hear more. The problem was, we were flat broke. We didn’t have the resources to go back into the studio and record.
Rameck was so excited about our chances of succeeding as rappers that he wanted to put everything into making this dream happen. He was even willing to skip medical school. He figured the three of us would still be together, just pursuing a different dream. But the life of a rapper was his dream, not ours. He loved the stage, the spotlight, and the cheers from the crowd. It was part of his fantasy of becoming an actor. To him, being a rapper was the next-best thing. We had good connections, and he figured we could count on them for help, and if things didn’t work out, we could always return to school.
I wasn’t feeling the same way. Graduation from college was less than a year away, and we had to start applying to dental and medical schools. We had to make a crucial decision. One night, the subject came up during conversation.
“Yo, man, we can really do this,” Rameck began. “Let’s just do it. Let’s go and be rappers.”
It was time for me to be honest. My enthusiasm was waning. I knew that if I gave my books enough time, I was guaranteed to become a dentist. But I could go into the studio a million times, and no matter how good the songs were, I wasn’t guaranteed to sell those records. With rap, it really came down to luck. Maybe we would be some of the lucky ones. But I wasn’t willing to take that risk.
“Look, how many broke rappers are out there, man?” I said to Rameck. “One day they’re big and hot with the biggest studio, and the next day, they’re not. Man, you’re on your way to medical school. You want to drop medical school for this? I’m on my way to dental school. I’m not dropping dental school for this. You’re crazy.”
“Come on, man. You’re stupid, man. Let’s just try. Let’s just see what happens,” Rameck shot back.
I didn’t budge.
“Naw, man, I’m not even gonna see,” I said. “At some point, we’d still have to make a decision, and I’ve already made mine.”
Rameck got quiet. I had just spewed acid on his fantasy, and it was shriveling up before his eyes. He didn’t want to try it alone, and P.S., our other partner, had already drifted away. P.S. was a brilliant student, as talented in math as he was in rap, but he didn’t try hard at either one and ended up dropping out of Seton Hall.
After a few minutes of silence, Rameck looked at me. I wasn’t sure what he would say.
“You know what, man?” he said softly. “You’re right.”
That was it. Our career as rappers came to an abrupt halt. Our pact was still solid. Once again, we were on our way to becoming doctors.
12
LOVESICK
Rameck
I ALWAYS THOUGHT I was too cool to let a girl break my heart.
Then I met the woman I’ll call Kay. She was standing next to a friend of mine from high school after a party at Rutgers University in New Brunswick when I spotted her. She was so fine—on the tall side, with golden-brown skin, shoulder-length dark brown hair, innocent eyes, and a tempting smile.
“Who’s your friend?” I asked my high-school friend.
She introduced me to Kay and told her flattering things about me. Kay was a freshman at Rutgers and was two years younger, but the chemistry between us was instant and powerful. She gave me her telephone number. When I called her the next day, we talked for nearly five hours straight.
From South Orange to New Brunswick was a long-distance call, so I rang up a huge telephone bill those first few weeks as Kay and I got to know each other. She and I started hanging out together regularly. Sometimes, we double-dated or triple-dated with Sam, George, and their dates. All of us would go out to dinner, to a party, or bowling. Once, the six of us even went ice skating in New York City’s Rockefeller Center.
When Sam, George, or I had a girlfriend, she automatically became part of our group, like a little sister to the other two of us, and she was off-limits as a potential date. That’s why we never had a conflict over a girl.<
br />
In the first few years of college, Sam and I played the field more than George, who more often than not had a steady girlfriend. Even though I played around, I always knew I wanted to get married and have children after college. I wanted to have the perfect family I had always hoped for as a kid. I didn’t ever want to inflict the insecurity of a broken home—like the childhood I’d had—on a child. I tried to be careful. I couldn’t have any baby-mama drama disrupting my dreams.
Things got serious pretty quickly between Kay and me, and we often talked about getting married and having kids together someday. I thought she was the one. But one night while I was visiting her in her dorm room at Rutgers, her telephone kept ringing. She seemed uneasy when she answered it, and she gave one-word answers, “Yes,” or “No,” and then “I’ll have to talk to you later.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
She wasn’t in the mood for my questions. We argued about it, and I left. Later that night over the telephone, she told me the truth: she had another boyfriend. He was a football jock who attended college in Boston. He had been her high-school sweetheart, and though she didn’t want to be with him anymore, she hadn’t quite broken things off.
I was crushed. How could I ever trust her? How could she do this to me? How could she do this to us? I broke up with her.
I was miserable for a few weeks until we got back together. She promised me the guy was out of her life for good, but the trust issue kept coming up. If she wasn’t in her room when I called, I questioned her extensively. If she ignored her telephone while I was there, I got suspicious. And I felt justified.
She knew she had to earn my trust again, and for a while she did all she could. She’d stay in her room all day instead of hanging out with her friends, just to prove to me that there was no other man in her life. She wanted me to trust her. But the questions and suspicions lingered.
We broke up and got back together a million times. When we split just before my senior year, it seemed like all the other times. I figured we would take some time to cool off and then in a week or two we would be a couple again. But I didn’t realize that she had taken all she would take of my lack of trust. We were done, she kept telling me. At first, I didn’t believe her. Then, I started hearing rumors that she was dating someone else. I confronted her. It was true.
My girl had moved on without me.
The guy she was dating was a legendary player. Everybody knew it. He had dated practically all of the pretty girls on Rutgers’s campus, and all the others wanted him. Maybe it gave Kay’s ego a boost to be with him. But that’s when it hit me that I could lose her for good.
I had heard the term “lovesick,” and I figured it was something that happened to girls, certainly not to a tough guy like me. But all of a sudden, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I lost weight. I started calling Kay a dozen times a day trying to change her mind. I knew her new boyfriend didn’t care for her the way I did.
I loved this girl. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to have kids with her. I had to get her back.
During one of those sleepless nights, a plan crystallized in my mind. Kay was the kind of woman who needed to be with her man all the time. I knew that once I began medical school, the workload would be so demanding that I wouldn’t have time for her. Then, after medical school, I’d have to do a residency, which would keep me even busier. I would be nearly thirty years old before I had time for a wife and kids. At twenty-one, that seemed ancient. I decided I would just forget about medical school, marry Kay, and start our perfect family.
I knew I could get a job teaching.
Sam and I had arranged our schedules that semester to have a day off, on which we’d work as substitute teachers. I worked at a high school and elementary school in a community called Hillside. The principal of the elementary school had approached me one day and asked me my major.
“Biology,” I told him.
“We need teachers,” he said. “You’re a young black man about to get a degree in biology. I have a job waiting for you when you finish.”
I wondered how I would tell Sam and George that I was about to break the pact. We had promised to stick together to the end, but I figured they would be all right without me. I figured they would understand.
I had to live my own life.
I called Kay and asked to see her. She refused. I told her I loved her and needed her in my life. Then she told me what I had been dreading to hear: she was falling for the other guy, she wanted to try to make it work with him, and nothing I said could change her mind.
I never even got to tell her about my plan.
I was lovesick for months. I’m sure Sam and George noticed. But guys are proud. We don’t even let our closest boys know if our heart is hurting.
“Naw, dog, I’m straight,” I said when they asked about the weight loss.
I never told Sam or George about my plan, either. With my heart in pieces, I began preparing again for medical school.
13
ACCESS MED
Sam
THE SUMMER BEFORE our senior year, Rameck and I got great news: we were the first Seton Hall students accepted into a new program designed to help minority students do better in medical school.
The program, Access Med, had begun a year earlier as a joint venture between the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers University. It was expanding to Seton Hall as we finished our junior year. As new participants, Rameck and I would be allowed to take half of our first-year medical-school courses while finishing our last year of college. That would leave us with a much lighter load, just half of the required courses, when we entered our first official year of medical school.
The first year is so daunting that large percentages of students drop out. Access Med was designed to make it easier for minority students, who are grossly underrepresented in medical schools, to survive that first year.
Rameck and I transferred to Rutgers for our senior year to be closer to the medical school. We spent the mornings at Robert Wood Johnson and the afternoons at Rutgers, taking the courses we needed to finish our senior year. The best part of taking the medical-school courses early was that if we passed, we would be accepted into Robert Wood Johnson without having to take the MCAT, the standardized test that medical schools use to decide who gets in. I was not looking forward to the MCAT. I didn’t like the idea that my future could rest on a standardized test that I didn’t believe could adequately gauge my intelligence or ability.
To qualify for Access Med, you had to have a minimum composite grade-point average of 3.2 on a 4.0 system over three years. I had a 3.6, and I would graduate from Seton Hall cum laude. I had received an A+ in organic chemistry, the make-or-break-you course in our field. That was practically unheard of for most of our students.
Rameck had a 3.4. Access Med participants also had to have completed all of the core courses in their majors by their senior year. The two of us needed only twelve hours, all electives, to graduate.
Dr. Linda Hsu, who had taught us biology, became our administrative link to Seton Hall, Rutgers, and Robert Wood Johnson. We had barely known her before then. But like Carla Dickson, she would adopt us and go far beyond her official duties to make sure we had everything we needed to succeed.
The only drawback of participating in Access Med was that we had to leave George behind. With a grade-point average of 3.0, George had signed a letter of intent to enter dental school at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark after graduation. I realized that Access Med was a great opportunity for Rameck and me, but I couldn’t help feeling that we were abandoning George. So much of our success had been tied to our being together and supporting one another. But for the next few years, George would be on his own. And for the first time since the seventh grade, he and I would be separated for school.
Carla Dickson assured us that he would be fine.
“You’ve got to trust me,” she said. “I’ve got George.”
She began to call him e
very day.
Rameck and I packed up and headed to Rutgers in the fall of 1994. After moving several times, we landed in a small room on the second floor of a high-rise dormitory called the South Towers on the Livingston campus. The medical school operated on a different schedule, often remaining open when Rutgers was closed for long breaks. Each time Rutgers closed, we had to pack all of our belongings and move to another dorm.
Rameck and I were surprised to discover that Rutgers’s Livingston campus—one of five campuses operated by the university—is predominantly black. When the two of us walked onto the yard for the first time, students were chilling in the lobby, listening to rap music, and playing cards. The scene felt instantly familiar and put us at ease. Rameck and I were always together, and when we went to the dining hall to eat, we could feel eyes on us. Other students were trying to figure us out. A guy everybody knew as Bam was one of the first students to approach us. We were headed down the steps of the dining hall one Friday night when he stopped us.
“What’s up? Where y’all from?” he asked.
“Newark.”
“Word? I’m from Irvington.”
Irvington is on the border of Newark, so we instantly connected. Bam told us about a party that night, and the three of us hooked up and went together. Rutgers was a big party school, much larger and looser than Seton Hall. It reminded Rameck and me of New York, a stew of all kinds of people. The two of us and the guys who started hanging with us became one of the most popular cliques at school. Because we partied so much and were down-to-earth, other students couldn’t believe it when we told them we were in medical school. I guess we didn’t fit the traditional image of the medical student.
We established some lasting friendships on the Livingston campus. One day, Rameck and I were preparing to drive to Philadelphia for the “Greek,” an annual weekend gathering of college students, most of them members of black fraternities and sororities. We stopped at a store and ran into another of the popular cliques, known for throwing some of the hottest parties at Rutgers. One of the cats walked up to me and introduced himself.
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