RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  And ever since then, Guy, the dude that accidentally shot him—I knew it wasn’t meant for my boy—thought I was gonna come and kill him. So they called the police on me, they thought I was going to set up some retribution, had me under surveillance, do all types of shit to make sure they knew where I was—they were scared for their lives. They’re still scared for their lives. Of the people who had anything to do with that shit—there’s like five motherfuckers associated with it—three of ’em are dead as of today. Now, I had nothing to do with any of that—sometimes the streets serve up the best kind of karma.

  Dontae had a hard recovery, there was a lot of rehabilitation and such. It deprived him of his youth. He spent his whole childhood—from three years old to almost sixteen—in and out of fuckin’ hospitals. He had asthma, and had to go through the ordeal of losing a kidney from the bullet and being forced to use a shit bag for many years. He had to wear diapers for years. My boy’s left leg is still messed up. He walks with a limp to this day. It was fucked up.

  Between his asthma and other things—he got hit by a car, broke his arm, and right after graduation, he broke his leg in three places while playing football—my son went through so much fuckin’ pain, but the pain made his mind jump. He was also strong, and he never let any of it whip him.

  My son just graduated from college. He went and got a bad bitch and he’s living on Staten Island, so he’s good now. Well, mostly. He went to school to get a degree in film. I told him, “You don’t need a degree for film, you can just pick it up and learn it.” But now he gotta pay back those student loans on some shit that he really can’t get any money from. You can’t get no money from being in film unless you know how to do the damn thing. So I told him he needed to go back to school and learn certain things. But he’s kind of resistant—he wants to do film, and nothing but film.

  And as I see him struggle with his career, I realize something that parents, especially black parents, are doing when they raise their kids. It’s not really our fault, because of how we were raised. Looking back, I spoiled my son a lot, and I don’t regret that at all. But I would have been sterner about him picking a career that was more secure and made surer, more consistent paper. That’s how a lot of immigrant groups get ahead in a couple of generations. They’re not letting their kids pick something fun like film—not to say film isn’t a profession, it’s just not secure. Parents should guide their children to make money first. Young people often want to pursue something a little bit impractical rather than securing their future.

  Like my son. He’s got a degree, but he’s still struggling because his field is competitive, and budgets are low even if he does get work. It’s a start, though. At least he’s not in the projects pumping crack and ducking the cops. He’s never done a bid, or even been arrested. He’s got a smart girlfriend, and he’s making his way in the world without resorting to crime. His kids won’t be doing that, either.

  I remember this one time, right after my son got shot, I was walking with him down the street. He was limping along, and I was guiding him by holding his hand. It was frustrating for him—he wanted to walk by himself, but he was hurt and was gonna need some time.

  I will always remember the way my man Tinker rolled up in his whip and hopped out. He’d heard about what happened to my little seed, showed him a lot of love, and even got him to smile. He even gave my little man a hundred dollars before he hopped back in the car and drove off.

  A few weeks later, Tinker got killed. He got shot in the head, but was able to draw his gun and get off one shot. He killed his killer; they canceled one another out. I cried when I heard about it.

  Shit like that killed me a bit; it was like a constant influx of bad news. Whether it was my boy almost getting killed, or a friend like Tinker getting killed, all that made everyday life hard to deal with sometimes. But if I was truly gonna give my son a better life, I had to get back to my music career. It needed to be solidified so we could take care of our peoples and our seeds, and break this constant cycle of violence.

  16.

  REDEMPTION

  While dealing with the aftermath of Dontae getting shot and his recovery and everything that went along with that, I lost myself. I forgot who U-God—Lamont Jody Hawkins—was.

  So I went back to the hood. I went back to Park Hill, which was still just as shitty and drug-and gangster-filled as when I left. But even amid all that, in the midst of the projects, I managed to find myself again.

  I was there with my DJ at the time, his name was Homicide. One day, I’m on the phone while we’re just fooling around, listening to music—I still was into music, of course, would think nothing of dropping two grand on records at a time—and smoking and drinking, when all of a sudden we hear gunshots go off. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. We were like, “What the fuck was that?” but then we went right back to what we were doing, cause that’s how it was, like Vietnam in the hood.

  But two seconds later, I hear that one of my friend’s friends, his name was Dutch, had been shot. We ran downstairs to find two motherfuckers laid out on the fucking street! Dutch was lyin’ there with eight shots in his legs and lower body, and the second dude was sprawled in the corner with a bullet in his chest. Me and Homicide are just looking at this all cockeyed, like what the fuck just happened?

  Dutch was in bad shape, going in and out of consciousness, so Homicide ran over and picked him up, and I could see the life come back into his eyes when he got that support. Before that, his eyes were rolling back in his head. Now, I was gonna help put him in the back of my truck and take him to the hospital, but we didn’t know if moving him would make the bullets shift or whatever, it might leave him paralyzed. So we had to wait out there in the street for the ambulance.

  Now, mind you, I had all this surveillance on me for years. Cops didn’t show up for like twenty or thirty minutes. This dude’s sitting there leaking, everybody’s looking at him like he’s a wounded Bambi in the middle of the street, no one even giving a fuck ’bout the other dude on the sidewalk, he’s just sittin’ there fucked up.

  Finally the paramedics come, and we got Dutch to the hospital. Then, a couple days later, I had another epiphany! I had a brain jump, and I finally realized who I was. It came to me: I’m fuckin’ U-God from Park Hill. I’m that street motherfucker. This is where I’m from, this is where I’m at, this is what I’m gonna rhyme about from this day on.

  *

  Along with that clarity hitting me, I was going through other stuff as well. That was when my daughter’s mother got pregnant and told me she was having the baby, so there was all that drama going on, too. The end result was that I went a little crazy, enough so that I ended up spending fifteen days in an insane asylum.

  To this day, I’m not sure exactly what happened, whether my vitamin D slipped, or maybe one of my girlfriends poisoned me, or what. All I know is one day I found myself in the middle of the street in my bathrobe, drawers, and Timberlands, running around like a goddamn maniac. And then I went crazy on my mother, so I checked myself in, ’cause I was off the charts.

  Before I knew it, I was getting fluids and medicine, all kinds of shit. They gave me some medicine that I had to dissolve under my tongue, and the effect was whenever I tried to think, it would freeze my brain, so all I could see was little black and white dots. It was unreal; this shit stopped the thinking process cold, it shut it down. No daydreams, no imagination, you just—can’t think. A side effect was that it shrank your dick up. Now, I don’t know ’bout you, but I need two things working every day: my mind and my meat.

  While I was in there, I saw some seriously crazy dudes. One guy, he couldn’t say more than five sentences without barking. He’d be having a normal conversation with you, but in the middle of it he’d just start barking.

  Another dude there had tried to kill his parents. He was afraid of the outside world. He appeared to be a cool dude who had it together, but when it came time for him to go home, this motherfucker went crazy. “What am I goin’ home
for? I don’t wanna go home! I don’t need to go home!” They had to give him an injection and put him on a gurney to get him out of there.

  So I did a two-week stint in there, I was detoxed, I came home. I stopped smoking weed after that for two years. I also went to a therapist during that time. I didn’t know shit about therapy, I didn’t know anything about fuckin’ mental barriers or any of that shit.

  So I’m in there tellin’ the therapist about what happened and all that, and he said, “Lamont, you never talked about what happened with Dontae to anyone?”

  And I said, “Naw, I never had anyone to talk to like that.” Again, the black community typically self-medicates when we’re going through some shit; we don’t talk about it, we don’t express our horror, our fears, or our regrets; we just smoke weed or drink and just bottle all that up. There was no outlet for all that pent-up emotion; the only ones I had were fucking, running around, and rhyming, that was it. I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t meditate or any of that kind of shit.

  Then he said, “Lamont, you’ve been running and gunning ever since you were a kid.” And that, combined with everything in my life—the drug game, jail time, stress over the rap game, my boy getting shot, and now I was gonna have a second child to look out for—just made me lose my mind for a bit.

  And throughout all that, I never learned how to just live. I never learned about relaxation, taking a vacation. I never learned about downtime. What I did learn from this episode is that when your body and mind want to rest, when your mind has had enough, it’s gonna lay down without you. You can sit there and act like you’re tough and strong and all that shit, but if enough pressure accumulates, your mind is gonna shut down, and it will go one way, and your body will go another. And you’re gonna split in half, and you’ll wind up on the floor going, “What the fuck just happened?”

  And that’s what happened to me. So I took a break from intoxicants for two years—I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t do shit. I gained about thirty pounds, from about 175 to 210. I was just big ol’ fat Uey. But during that time, I was taking my fish oil, my vitamins, I was just trying to get my mind right, get myself back together. And even though I had that meltdown, I’m blessed in that I heal pretty quick, that once I know what I gotta do for myself, I do it and come through that shit.

  *

  Before we knew it, it was 1996, and the time for a second Wu-Tang Clan album was upon us. We were all over the place, but we hadn’t been back fully together in a good while.

  A lot had changed since the release of 36 Chambers. We were feeding our babies off this rap shit now. We had seen some of what the world had to offer. Wu Wear was popping (although of course that didn’t turn out quite right, which I’ll talk about later). The whole world was watching and waiting on our return. We had raised the art form of rap and changed a lot of its accompanying aesthetics when we busted through the door. Raekwon and Ghostface with their criminology talk. Deck with his concepts and flow. Method Man with the charisma and lyrics to match. ODB with his antics and sheer rawness. Just the whole moving with a mob of disciples, mad deep, became the standard set by our Clan.

  Now the fans and our peers were waiting to see how we were going to come with it this time around. Could lightning strike twice? Could the Clan still give the fans that raw, blunt-in-the-staircase rap? The pressure was on.

  It was also the perfect time for me to show and prove. The more you’re in the booth, the better you get, so I was making it a point to stay writing and rapping.

  Back then, when 36 Chambers was still on the shelves and Wu-Tang Forever was on its way, shit was popping and everyone was down to work because the only alternative to music was the street. Nobody wanted to go back to that shit, so we went hard on the road and in the studio. Plus, we were having so much fun touching and seeing shit we’d never experienced before. It was all new to us, and we were hell-bent on enjoying ourselves back then.

  The budget for Wu-Tang Forever from Loud/BMG was much bigger than what we had for 36 Chambers, so RZA set us up in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills for about six months. The whole place was ill. It had been used as a porn set before we got there, and that crazy vibe continued for the remainder of our stay.

  Now, I’m gonna tell you something: people think that the musician party lifestyle, with the women and the drugs and everything, is a given, but in reality, that’s a choice. Because there’s a lot of faithful guys out there who make music. At a certain point, it’s like, how much pussy are you gonna get? How much Hennessy are you gonna drink? How much weed are you gonna smoke? How much is enough?

  Nowadays, I’ve had enough. I’ve been all around the world. I’ve been to Hawaii five times. I’ve been to Paris fifteen times. I’ve done it all. I’m done with the excess. I’m a grown man, to the point where I’m not trying to fuck ten women. I’ve done it—at one time in my life, I was juggling twelve women at once. Twelve women at the same time. And it drained me—it was fuckin’ hard work. Because they all wanted the same thing. Every night it was another woman; one would leave, another one would arrive. For two weeks straight, it was a different girl every night.

  Then my doorman got jealous. Seems he was mad ’cause I didn’t have to work his hours. I was coming downstairs in my robe at noon, smelling like weed. Well, that and the parade of women coming through my place every day. So he told one of the girls I’d had another one over. Then me and him got into it, and there was some more drama.

  The bottom line is, your lifestyle is always a choice—you can turn it up sometimes or you can just sit back and chill. It’s always your call to make, however.

  But at the time, we couldn’t resist. We were the hottest dudes in the game, and we were living in a mansion on top of a hill next to Kobe and Shaq. That was a fun time, and we lived it up to the fullest. All the celebrities coming through; Aaliyah and all that, Kidada and Rashida Jones (Quincy Jones’s daughters), Ray J, Brandy, Kurupt, Snoop, Bokeem Woodbine, all of them. We had mad motherfuckers come through there. We were always throwing parties in the spot, and it was an amazing time.

  And I ain’t gonna front, I got my share, too. I was on fire in L.A. The first day we touched down, we had to stay in a hotel. I was in my room for maybe twenty minutes, then I went out in front of the hotel and bagged a bad-ass white woman in a drop-top BMW. Meth was in the backseat, goin’, “U-God, you a fuckin’ ill motherfucker.” We out running through the city, homegirl driving us around and all that. We come back, eat, then I go to her crib, she got a house in the Hollywood Hills. Even I couldn’t believe it, I was like, How’d I bag her so fast? It was an amazing night, let me tell you.

  I came back to the hotel and the others were screwfacin’ me—they knew where I’d been and what I was up to. They were just sour that I was able to get with a fine woman like that so quickly.

  Another time, I was at the mansion when Raekwon brought this girl and a couple of her friends through. Now, Rae liked to front, he talked so fuckin’ much it wasn’t funny. Now, I’m not about botherin’ with a girl someone else has designs on; I’m not one of those dudes who moves in on your girl or anything like that. There’s plenty of women out there in the world for everyone, far as I’m concerned.

  So Rae brings her and her friends through. Me and some other peoples are in the living room playing video games and whatever, I wasn’t paying them any attention.

  Eventually I leave and wind up going to another lounge with Kidada and the rest of the Quincy Jones crew. The girl Raekwon brought over, she came to the same fuckin’ club. It’s a small fuckin’ world. I said, “Hey, how you doin’? You with Raekwon, right?”

  She comes right out and says, “I’m not fuckin’ with him. I ain’t giving him none.” Just like that.

  Five minutes later, we’re in the bathroom going at it. She had it going on, by the way. Afterward, she went her way, I went mine. I come outta the bathroom ten minutes later, I’m tired, my shirt’s all mussed up. Kidada and the others are giving me a look like,
“Uey, I know you didn’t just fuck that bitch in the bathroom.” I just sat back down at the table and didn’t say a word.

  I guess Raekwon found out, ’cause I went back to New York for a week, and when I came back, it was like he’d been fuckin’ some girl in my room, there were condoms all over the bed and shit. I said, “Oh … this is supposed to be payback for homegirl.” I went and told him, “Yo, man, she told me you and her weren’t even fuckin’. She just jumped on me. Now why you runnin’ around here lying on your dick, fat boy?”

  And he just got this look on his face like, “Fuck you, U-God!” But it was all good, just some of the fun and games of being a rapper. There’s plenty of girls out there. And in the end, it doesn’t matter, he still can’t fuck with me. I just go and do my thing.

  *

  Of course, there were plenty of other times my Wu brothers and me got our party on. Ghostface and me always had a good time when we’d go out to hit the clubs. Ghost was a bit of a troublemaker, but we had lots of fun together. Sometimes, when we weren’t working in the studio, we’d go hit the town. Hollywood was right on our doorstep, so there was always plenty of A-list parties to rock out in.

  One night, we went to Brett Ratner’s place for a party. Nobody else wanted to go. The only dudes in the house was me and Ghost. We said, “Fuck it. We goin’ to the party.”

  So, we get to the party and shit. Big mansion, Brett Ratner has the Ferraris all in the front. Me and Ghost, we were fuuuuuuucked up. I mean, we were so fucked up. We threw a gallon of rum in us. I was smoking. Ghost didn’t smoke, he just drank. We were pissy fucking drunk.

  We came up in the spot, and there were tons of people there and all that. Leonardo DiCaprio was up in there. Q-Tip, Kidada, Metallica, Keenen Ivory Wayans, all of them was up in there, the list just went on and on. There were mad motherfuckers up in this house. Oh yeah, Heavy D, God bless the dead. Heavy D was outside waiting when we came outside. It was off the fucking chain.