RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  RAW

  MY JOURNEY INTO THE

  WU-TANG

  LAMONT ‘U-GOD’ HAWKINS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1. Started Off on the Island

  2. Growing Up on the Crime Side

  3. RUUUUMBLEEE!!

  4. The 5 Percenters

  5. Hip-Hop Was Our Way of Life

  6. Crack Hits the Hill

  7. It’s Yourz

  8. Cash Rules Everything Around Me

  9. Enter the Wu-Tang

  10. Turbulence

  11. On the Inside

  12. Headed Up North

  13. When You Come Home

  14. Saber-tooth Tiger in the Booth

  15. The Night the Earth Cried

  16. Redemption

  17. Tour Life

  18. Cracks in the Foundation

  19. The Legacy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  RAW

  PROLOGUE

  Time is a motherfucker. Time reveals shit. It wears things down. Breaks things. Crushes things. Kills things. Reveals truth. There’s nothing greater than Father Time.

  If you have patience, time will be on your side. And if you recognize how valuable time is, and if you know the right time to make your move, you’ll be a bad motherfucker.

  That’s how I feel right now writing this book. The time is now for me to write all this shit down. It’s time to write down not only my legacy, but the story of nine dirt-bomb street thugs who took our everyday life—scrappin’ and hustlin’ and tryin’ to survive in the urban jungle of New York City—and turned that into something bigger than we could possibly imagine, something that took us out of the projects for good, which was the only thing we all wanted in the first place.

  But first, we had to come from hell all the way up. New York City was a crazy place to grow up, especially in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. There was so much energy on the streets and the clubs back then. That shit got into my system early and stays there to this day. Not just the club scene, but that whole era, the Mayor Koch, punch-you-in-the-face, snatch-your-pocketbook era. The whole Clan is from that era, and we convey it in our music, because that era molded us, it’s still in us. We’re constantly evolving and changing, but that core is where I draw my inspiration from. And not just what we saw, but everything we went through at that time.

  When they built the projects, it was just an urban jungle; dangerous, but if you knew the rules, you could get by all right, maybe even have some fun occasionally. There’d be fights, usually with fists, maybe brass knuckles, maybe a knife. Drugs were around, sure, but not like they were later on.

  But when crack hit my Park Hill neighborhood on Staten Island, that jungle became a goddamn war zone. Fists and knives turned to pistols and submachine guns. Bulletproof vests were hidden under sports jerseys. Bullets and bodies littered the streets, and often you didn’t know who you could trust from day to day. People you thought were your friends, lured in by addiction or easy money, often became sneak thieves or stickup kids.

  That fear, anger, and terror in the streets made the friends you could trust all the more precious. And in the early nineties, nine friends, each a master of his own craft, each with his own part to play, came together to form the legendary group you know as the Wu-Tang Clan.

  RZA, the Mastermind: From creating the very idea of the Wu-Tang to gathering the members who would execute his plan to shaping the hooks, concepts, and themes of our early albums, RZA was the general whose orders we all followed. He had a great mind; he was very, very intelligent for his age. He wasn’t no real hustling-ass dude, but to feed his family, he’d put that great mind of his to it and came up with things to put food on his plate. Wu-Tang was just one of those things that took us all higher.

  GZA, the Genius: Often right beside his cousin RZA, GZA elevated his verses from the grimy, crime-ridden streets to higher planes of thought, consciousness, and expression. When he dropped his debut album, Words from the Genius, on Warner Bros., suddenly we could see the reality of music taking us out of the projects. I still remember me and Method Man listening to that tape and just vibing off it.

  Method Man and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the Performers: We were all performers, but Meth and ODB were the two who always took shows to a higher level. Meth had his infectious enthusiasm and natural charm, and brought it from way back when he was kickin’ New Edition dance moves at the P.S. 49 after-school center. ODB was just unpredictably wild, with insane stage charisma. Out of all of us, he was already a natural entertainer right out of the box—he was just early with it. Sometimes I used to look at him like he was fucking crazy, but he always knew what he was doing, every time.

  Inspectah Deck, the Artist: As a kid, Deck was always looking out his apartment window at 160, down at everything going on in the street below. He absorbed all that shit and turned it into these vivid rhymes. His visual details, plus using words you hear news reporters use, just made it seem like he was reporting street news in his verses.

  Ghostface Killah, the Storyteller: A troublemaker all his life who hit the streets early, Ghost made his stories come alive because when he rapped them, it felt like you were living them right alongside him.

  Masta Killa, the Natural: A disciple of GZA, Masta’s the only one of us whose first performance was with the fully formed Wu, but his ability to hold his own from the start was undeniable. I know everyone’s roots in Wu-Tang—everybody except Masta Killa’s. He’s always just held himself real close to the vest. And that’s just the way it is.

  Raekwon, the Hustler: Creator of the “mafioso rap” subgenre, he was in the streets at an early age, pushing crack out of the gate down the block from Meth and me. One of my very first drug stories is of Rae and me trying to move this shitty weed we’d gotten from his cousin Rico. Drug dealing may not have been the best vocation, but it sure gave him a lot to rhyme about.

  And me, U-God, the Ambassador: I was just a straight hard-core thug with the brain capacity to do a lot of shit, make things happen on my own, and hustle those bombs to get my bread. I was there from the very beginning, beatboxin’ in the hallways of 160 with Rae and ODB, hustlin’ on the streets with Meth, layin’ down the first tracks at RZA’s crib—I was there for all of it. Walking my own path, which had a detour or two, to be sure, but that path led inexorably to the Wu-Tang Clan, as I’d somehow known it would from the very beginning.

  This is my story.

  This is our story.

  1.

  STARTED OFF ON THE ISLAND

  Growing up as hard, as rough, as wild, as crazy as we in Wu-Tang did, death was always a part of my life.

  I remember the first time I saw somebody die. I was only about four or five years old. It was just me and my mother in the apartment. “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton was playing on a radio in the street. It seemed like whenever shit was going down, there was always music playing along with it.

  Something was always happening in the Park Hill projects. I remember a commotion outside my window—I could barely reach the windowsill to look out to the street. A crowd was forming, making the uproar that drew my mother and me outside to see what was going on. By the time we arrived, the gathering had gotten bigger, so she put me up on her shoulders. I looked around the courtyard and up the street. All my neighbors, as well as half of 260 Park Hill Terrace, were outside.

  Soon, the cops, firemen, and an ambulance showed up. A woman was standing on the roof of the project next door—280 Park Hill—threatening to jump. She was pretty young, talking to herself and yelling down at everyone as the cops tried to talk her down off the ledge.

  I remember staring up at her till my neck was stiff. I didn’t understand what
was going on or what was about to happen. At first, it seemed like she was going to be okay. She looked like she didn’t really want to kill herself, but something still kept her from coming down off the ledge. I can still see her face—tormented, twisted in despair, her wide eyes staring down at the crowd seven stories below.

  Then, without a word or warning that she’d had enough of making a spectacle, she jumped—or slipped and fell, I never knew which.

  She flailed her arms for a second, then fell so fast I almost couldn’t see her. She hit the fence first, then landed on the steps at the side entrance. Blood flew, people screamed, and the cops and paramedics ran up to the bleeding soon-to-be corpse. Everybody there, my mother and me included, just stood and stared at the body in shock and disbelief while they got her ready to be carted off.

  I was a toddler, and already I’d seen death up close. The sound of her hitting the concrete steps would resonate with me forever. At the time, I couldn’t understand what could make someone end their own life. As a five-year-old, you don’t always recognize what you see, but I always felt like that was the moment that made me self-aware. It made me think of life and death for the first time. I was young as hell, but it made an impact on me.

  *

  I come from a long line of project babies. It seems like poor people always start from the bottom. Either you make it out of the projects or you stay there, sometimes for generations. I still know people that have been there for their entire lives. Never advanced, never went nowhere else, never explored the rest of the world outside their neighborhood. I guess they’re content with that sort of life, but I knew early on it wasn’t for me.

  Only the pure of heart make it out of the ghetto. What that means to me is that when you really believe in what or who you are, you stay focused on yourself, and you don’t hurt anyone while trying to get out. You don’t connive, you don’t do any ratchetness to get ahead, and you don’t backstab someone else to get out.

  You get out with determination, willpower, and persistence in pursuing what you believe in. If you really believe you can become a doctor, and you study to become a doctor, that’s pure of heart.

  Now, I became a songwriter, even though I had drugs and all that stuff in my world, and people was dyin’, and I might have sold poison and all that, but underneath all that drama, I was still pure of heart. I never sold to a pregnant woman. I helped old ladies down the stairs. I still managed to keep my personal morals in an unrighteous setting. Even though I was doing wrong to get by, there were still lines I would not cross.

  I know people that went through some hard shit, they were thieves or murderers, and then they changed their life around, got a job, had a family, and they got their shit together. Now, just because you killed someone, you might think you’re done, man, you’re gonna be fucked for the rest of your life. Not necessarily. Even if a person accidentally hurts somebody or they did a wrong deed, they can always correct their deeds by choosing to act on their pureness of heart. In other words, you choose a right path. You choose righteousness over negativity.

  That’s what I did.

  *

  My mother’s from Brownsville, Brooklyn. She was raised in the same project building as Raekwon’s mother, at 1543 East New York Avenue, in Howard Houses.

  The Brownsville projects were the wildest, period. Ask anybody from New York City what part of Brooklyn is the roughest, they’re gonna say Brownsville.

  Some projects you could walk through. Some you couldn’t. At its worst, you couldn’t walk through Brownsville. You couldn’t walk through Fort Greene or Pink Houses either. The tension and violence was always in the air in those places. Guaranteed there was gonna be fights topped off with a few people getting cut or stabbed, and even back then there might have been a shooting or two. Someone would probably end up dead by the end of the ruckus. That’s why I don’t like going back to my old projects nowadays; I feel like the spirits of my old comrades are calling to me. They’re still haunting the projects they hustled at and got killed in.

  When I was a kid, there was always someone looking to rob your sneakers, your coat, anything they could get their hands on. They would steal your fucking sneakers right off your feet. Back then, if you wore gold chains and shit, you better know how to shoot or how to fight. And the cops wouldn’t really do shit to prevent a crime or deal with it after the fact. They just didn’t care.

  And when they actually did get involved, a lotta time it turned out worse for us. During the early seventies, law enforcement had no regard for life. My grandmother told me on more than one occasion that the cops in the Seventy-third Precinct in Brownsville were killing people in the neighborhood. She and a lot of her friends and family claimed that people would get escorted in, handcuffed and bleeding, and they would never be seen again. Guess the cops put them under the jail—literally. That’s how treacherous it was in Brownsville.

  Just getting in and out of the neighborhood was an adventure. My mother got her pocketbook snatched four or five times right in front of me. She had to call the police to escort us from the train station to my grandmother’s building on several occasions because a group of kids were waiting on the corner to snatch the few dollars she had.

  Each project or street had at least one gang or crew. You couldn’t walk from one block to the next if you didn’t know the right people. Thugs would come right off the stoop and get in your face. “Who you coming here to see? Why you think it’s okay for you to walk through my block if I don’t know you?”

  The local gang, dressed in Kangols, Pumas, and Adidas tracksuits, hung around the bus stop near the Chinese restaurant on Pitkin Avenue. At the time, Pitkin Avenue was the shopping area in Brownsville. It was full of clothing stores, had OTB (Off-Track Betting), and dudes would be retailing stuff on the corner. There was also a slaughterhouse where they used to slaughter chickens. My grandmother would take me over there, and there would be chickens in a cage, and she’d get fresh chicken cut from the butcher.

  We were always leery of these dudes, just like we were any time we went anywhere in the projects. I remember seeing them chillin’ one time as some guy came riding toward them on a ten-speed. One of the gangsters came out of nowhere and whacked him over the head with a pipe, then took the bike and went and sat down on the bench. We just kept walking like we didn’t see anything. No one else did anything or reacted, even though the dude who got hit was lying there twitching and bleeding.

  My craziest Brownsville memory, though, involves Mike Tyson, who came from Brownsville. This was back in the seventies, before he was the world champion or had even started boxing. I was about eight years old, holding my mother’s hand, walking down Pitkin Avenue by the OTB, when this dude came by and snatched my mother’s earrings right off her earlobes. Left her with bloody ears and everything and just took off.

  I was too young to remember exactly what he looked like at the time, but years later, when Tyson started getting famous, my mother saw him on TV and swore, “That’s the guy who snatched my earrings!” It sounds crazy, and of course I don’t have any proof, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing as a kid that a slew of Brooklynites and even some Manhattanites could say the same thing about the World Champ.

  I don’t know who my father is or where he comes from; I wish I could find out more about him. A big part of why I don’t know much about him is because of how I was conceived.

  My mother probably wouldn’t want me to bring this up, because she hates me talking about it, but I was a product of rape. I was a rape baby. She told me my father had tricked her into believing he was a photographer and wanted her to model for him. He told her she was a natural beauty and all this other fly shit. He lured her to a spot and took advantage of her. She never pressed charges and never even reported it.

  The only person who could have told me more about him was my mother’s friend Carol. Carol used to be pretty good-looking back in her Brooklyn days. She liked to party and used to hang around with my father and the dudes he
ran with. She was on drugs and eventually contracted HIV. She had a brain aneurysm and is currently in a mental ward in Brooklyn. She doesn’t remember a goddamn thing now. Needless to say, she’s not much help to me as far as learning about my dad.

  When I was around ten years old, I remember asking about my father a lot, but Moms wouldn’t tell me anything. She didn’t tell me about him until I was a grown man. I’d been asking off and on for years, though. My dad was the missing piece of my whole life.

  “Who’s my dad though, Ma? Who is my dad?”

  “God is your father!” she would always reply.

  Finally, when I was twenty-one, she got into some of the details. She also explained why she kept me. She told me that one night, God came to her in a dream and told her not to abort this child, that I was gonna be a great man someday, so she kept me. That dream solidified her spirituality, her connection with God. My moms is real spiritual, I mean like super spiritual, so she always points out how it’s funny that my name turned out to be U-God. “And now look at you,” she told me once, as if confirming that the dream had been right.

  She always emphasized that she never regretted having me, even during the tough times we went through. The way I see it, you’ve got to be a compassionate individual to love a child conceived the way I was.

  When she told me, I was shocked. The average person, even if born accidentally, is still often born out of love, and to know I’d been brought into the world like that really rocked me. The whole situation seemed like a fluke accident—after all, my mother wasn’t looking to get pregnant at the time, and certainly not by no fly-by-night photographer/rapist. But I had to accept that that was how I’d been born and that it wasn’t going to stop me from being great.

  Yet make no mistake, I’m the product of both my parents. I have the side that comes from my mother, like her good heart, but I also got my father’s hustle. My father’s side—I know my mother doesn’t have it—must be where I get my internal drive from. Nobody else in my family has it, so it had to come from my father.