by Gucci Mane
The stash was saved but not without consequence. My auntie knew what I was doing, which meant the rest of my aunties knew, which meant my uncles knew, which meant my momma knew. I’d once been the baby of the family. Now I was the black sheep. I started feeling like everyone dreaded my presence when I’d come to Alabama. My aunties blamed me for what their kids were getting into. At the same time I had my cousins—all of whom were older—calling my phone when I’m in Atlanta, telling me it’s dry down there and their pockets were hurting and I needed to come back and give them some work. It was a fucked-up dynamic.
My reputation in the family only got worse after Suge got arrested while he was runnin’ with me. Just the night before Red and I had gotten into town. We caught up with Suge and his homeboy at this little trap house they had going in Jonesboro, on the side of Bessemer opposite from where Suge stayed at. There was a lot of action at this spot, but it was also a risky move because this was not Suge’s neighborhood. The guys who claimed the area weren’t keen on us out-of-towners showing up with better product at better prices. But I didn’t give a fuck what they were or weren’t keen on. So we trapped out of that house all night, making plays and smoking blunts until business dwindled down and we called it a night.
Hours later I awoke to the smell of smoke. The roof of the small shotgun house was in flames. Someone had thrown a firebomb. Our presence wasn’t appreciated. I ran outside to find Red holding a hose, trying to extinguish the fire. But the hose couldn’t reach the roof. I ran inside to grab the stash while Suge scrambled together our munition. We ran outside to load up the truck, knowing we had to split. Red kept at it with the hose. For a minute it seemed he was actually going to put it out, but once it spread to the insulation it was over with. We heard sirens and it was time to go. We took off, passing the fire trucks, and headed back to Suge’s side of town, where we got a room at a motel to hide out and debrief.
Red wanted to return to Atlanta immediately and he had the right idea. This was a tiny community. Word traveled fast; people were going to hear about this. But I told him to head back solo because I didn’t want to hang Suge and his buddy out to dry. After all, none of this would’ve happened if it wasn’t for us showing up, and if I’d gotten my cousin into some sort of trouble, I needed to be there to get him out of it.
I stayed in Alabama for a few more days to see how everything played out. In the meantime I worked the remainder of the pack out of the motel. At some point I left to get something to eat. When I got back the stash was gone. I immediately suspected foul play. My instincts told me it was an inside job and that one of the housekeepers had robbed me. I called Suge and he showed up and got into it with the motel staff, demanding to see the security tapes. The motel called the law. Before I knew it the police were on the scene and Suge was in handcuffs. I made a run for it, hopping into Suge’s car, fleeing for safety.
Damn.
I’d gotten my cousin arrested and his buddy’s house burned down. And my family heard all about it. Even my brother was turned off by the trouble I was bringing around. He told my cousins they shouldn’t mess with me anymore.
It hurt to see my family turn their backs on me but not enough to change anything. I was relentless. I had a girl in Birmingham and I started to operate out of her spot. She stayed in the middle of the projects and was popular there, so she set me up with many of my customers. One of them was her best friend, Amy. Amy sold weed, and whenever I’d come into town I’d serve her a QP (quarter pound). Amy had a boyfriend named Bunny. And Bunny was the first person to introduce me to lean.
For the uninitiated, lean is a drink made from mixing prescription cough syrup and soda. It was made popular in the nineties by DJ Screw, the Houston DJ who created Chopped and Screwed music. It’s best known for being made with Sprite, but you can use anything for the soda. Mountain Dew. Kool-Aid. Crush. Some people add Jolly Ranchers or Skittles. Whatever. The part that matters is the pharmaceutical ingredient. Codeine and promethazine. That’s the shit that puts you in another zone.
Bunny was a hustler too, and for a nigga from the sticks he moved a lot of weight. He didn’t sell weed, which was why I would serve Amy, but he had them bricks. The four of us would hang when I was in town, on some double-date shit. Bunny didn’t smoke but he did drink lean. And one night he offered me some.
“Gucci, I got some grit if you want it.”
That’s what they call it in Alabama. Grit. They don’t call it lean. They call it grit because it’s thick like grits and they drink it straight, like a shot. They don’t put it in soda like how they do in Houston.
I didn’t know the first thing about grit or lean or whatever this was, but I took Bunny up on his offer. Up to this point weed was the heaviest drug I’d used. But since I started running with the Zone 6 Clique, I’d been around them snorting powder, popping X pills, and lacing their weed with all types of junk. I figured this grit stuff couldn’t hurt.
Amy poured the red syrup into a spoon and spread it inside the blunt she was rolling. Me and the two girls smoked the blunt while Bunny sipped his grit, and then we passed around the bottle, each of us taking a couple of swigs.
Everything was cool and after a while at Bunny’s we decided to go to the Waffle House to get something to eat. That’s where things get fuzzy. All I remember is that by the time we got up to leave, I was so out of it that I couldn’t stand up out of my chair. I was stuck to it. I couldn’t tell you how I made it out of there.
The lean had messed me up, but it wasn’t until a few days later that I fully felt the effects of the drug. Out of nowhere, it seemed, I was totally out of my mind. It was like I couldn’t control my thoughts. I found myself doing irrational shit I would never do normally, like giving people stupid deals on dope. I was thrown off, but I didn’t yet make the connection to the lean.
Maybe I’ve been smoking too much.
Maybe someone put something in my drink at the Waffle House and tried to poison me.
I was still tripping when I got back to Atlanta a few days later and my symptoms had gotten worse than selling people dope on the cheap. My behavior was fucked up. I wasn’t talking right. My pupils had gone dark. I’d become extremely paranoid and had turned aggressive toward everyone I came across.
Word got around the hood that something was up with me. When I came across my brother in the streets, he knew right away something was seriously wrong. Duke grabbed me by the arm and we took a long walk home to my momma’s.
There was something strange about that walk. It was dreamlike. It brought me back to when my brother and I used to walk to school together. When we were living in East Atlanta but still going to school by Ellenwood, at Cedar Grove. After we got off the bus we would have to walk almost two miles to get to school every day, rain, sleet, or snow.
My momma and Duke took me to the hospital, where I stayed for a couple of days until I started to feel like myself again. It’s hard to describe this episode, or the similar ones that followed in the years to come, but I knew when it was over with. I felt normal again.
None of the doctors had answers. I hadn’t told them I’d been drinking straight cough syrup because that wasn’t something people did in Atlanta, and honestly it hadn’t occurred to me that that’s what could have caused this shit. Nobody else who drank the grit that night had tripped out. I was really convinced someone had slipped something into my drink, because that was actually something that was going on then. Folks getting drugged and then losing their minds out of nowhere.
Years later, when things were completely out of control and it was obvious what I was doing to myself, a doctor told me I had to cut it out with the lean.
“Listen, you cannot drink this stuff anymore. It’s causing a chemical imbalance in your body,” he explained. “This drug is just not for you.”
By that point I was drinking it first thing in the morning and last thing at night to fall asleep. My stomach had ballooned to the size of a watermelon. I looked pregnant. Even then I wasn’t
ready to hear that. I couldn’t accept that this drug had become my kryptonite.
After that first incident I refrained from drinking lean for a while. It wasn’t that I was worried I would trip out again. It just hadn’t been a feeling I particularly enjoyed, being glued to my seat at the Waffle House. Lean wasn’t even something widely available in Atlanta then. It was a Houston thing.
It wasn’t until I met Doo Dirty that I started to get hooked. Doo Dirty was Red’s homeboy from Savannah, and he was the big man down there.
Savannah has a totally different culture from Atlanta. People in Savannah talk different, they dress different. The way folks move there mirrors Florida more than it does Atlanta, being that it’s only two hours away from Jacksonville and not far from Miami. It’s a port city, so a lot of drugs from overseas come through. And drugs were Doo Dirty’s specialty. He kept a lot of ’em around.
Doo Dirty put me onto pouring lean in a soda can, which I found to be a much different experience. It tasted good and I didn’t react like when I drank it straight. I’d drank an ounce straight down the hatch that first night with Bunny, but now I was pouring an ounce or two in a two-liter of soda and sharing it among a crew. It tasted like candy to me and I loved the high. It relaxed me and alongside the weed put me in a zone I really enjoyed. As my body absorbed the codeine a wave of calm would wash over me. Not a care in the world.
I also thought it was cool that this was something people weren’t doing in Atlanta. It was taboo. In Doo Dirty I found a plug with constant access. That gave me status.
He also turned me on to ecstasy. I had never fucked with pills before but Doo Dirty would drive up from Savannah in his old-school dump—a ’73 Chevy with rims—and he’d have milk gallon jugs filled to the top with pills for us to sell. We started selling these pills and soon we were popping them. Long story short, soon enough I was regularly fucking with hard drugs.
But the Zone 6 Clique wasn’t all drugs and stealing. As much as running with my new partners accelerated my hustle game, it made me step up my rap skills even more. These were street niggas but they also had talent and were serious when it came to their music. The Zone 6 Clique studio sessions were competitive. Everyone was coming hard and it brought something out of me I hadn’t yet discovered. I’d felt good about the work I put in when I first started up with Zay, but now I was paying closer attention to my lyrics and delivery, approaching the craft of rapping in a more focused and disciplined way.
For Doo Dirty, the Zone 6 Clique was an opportunity to get involved in the rap game. For a minute he’d been telling us about this dude from Detroit. Big Meech. I had never heard of Meech or his Black Mafia Family crew, but Doo Dirty was saying this nigga was a serious hustler who was trying to make some legal money in the music business. He wanted to follow their lead. I remember thinking it was crazy to hear him singing the praises of this guy I’d never heard of because to me, Doo Dirty was the shit. He was the richest nigga I knew.
And so just like Meech with BMF Records, Doo Dirty became the CEO of the Zone 6 Clique Music Group, pumping big money into promoting the group. We’d all go out and hit the clubs and D had us in there looking like established artists. We now had Z6C chains, Z6C letterman jackets, and with D’s financing we put together thirty thousand dollars to shoot a video for “Misery Loves Company,” my first-ever music video. Look it up.
The footage is grainy but if you look closely you’ll see I had a busted-up lip. Two days before the shoot I got jumped at Jazzy T’s. I was in the bathroom taking a piss at the urinal when some nigga came up from behind and sucker-punched me. Next thing I knew there were four of them, beating on me in the bathroom. Somehow I managed to escape and scramble out of the club. I took cover at a nearby motel until Red came and got me.
I later found out the attack was stemming from an incident that occurred a couple of weeks prior. A guy had bought like a hundred dollars’ worth of smoke off me but overpaid me by more than a thousand dollars. He’d given me a bankroll with a bunch of fives and ones on top but as I kept counting I discovered hundreds underneath. When he tried calling me about the mistake, of course I ignored the calls. I never saw those guys again, nor could I say I would have remembered them.
Doo Dirty also put the money up for my first collaboration with a major artist. We were down in Florida for a celebrity basketball game and Juvenile was one of the featured guests. Juve was superhot at the time and I was a fan, so I walked up on him and introduced myself, asking if he’d be interested in doing a verse for one of my songs.
“Yeah I’ll do a feature for you,” he told me. “Seventy-five hundred.”
I didn’t have seventy-five hundred on me and neither did D, but I was good for it. So I called up Whoa, from my neighborhood crew Str8 Drop, and he told me he’d go half. He’d wire the money via Western Union and after I got back to Atlanta I’d pay him back $3,750. Done. We got the money wired to Juve’s brother Corey and we were good to go. Corey had us meet them at their hotel, where the plan was to knock out the song in the makeshift recording studio on Juvenile’s tour bus.
I was excited about this. I was twenty-three years old and I was about to get a guest verse from the hottest artist on the hottest record label, Cash Money Records. This could be big. But when I got on the bus Juve flipped the script. He said he wanted to make me a beat and he’d do a chorus for it.
“See I told my partner back in Atlanta that I was getting a verse, though,” I told him.
Juve didn’t budge.
“Look, I’m going to make you this beat and then I’ll knock out the hook for it.”
Flipping the script on niggas like this was my game. I wasn’t going to get tricked out of a verse I’d paid for.
“Why would I want a beat from you?” I finally blurted out. “You’re not Mannie Fresh.”
The whole bus went silent after I said it. I could see Juvenile was pissed.
“What I am is a platinum-selling artist,” he told me. “So I’m not doing a guest verse for you.”
“A’ight, well then I don’t want anything.”
With that, Juve pointed me to the door.
“No disrespect, but you need to get off my bus then,” he told me. “I’ll get the money wired back to you.”
Juve had taken a liking to my boys, so I was the only one asked to leave, which I did without any hoopla or words exchanged. While it may have seemed like I’d just gotten punked out I wasn’t embarrassed in the least. I was proud of how I’d handled the situation. I’d told Whoa I was getting Str8 Drop a Juvenile verse and he’d put his money down for that. So I wasn’t coming back to him with a beat and a hook. For me this was a business arrangement and I had to stand firm on what we’d agreed on.
I was waiting outside the bus for my buddies when Wacko and Young Buck, two well-known artists who were running with Juvenile at the time, hopped off the bus to smoke a blunt.
“Man, don’t even worry about that shit back there,” Wacko told me, passing me the blunt. “Juve be on his bullshit sometimes.”
Doo Dirty got off the bus a couple of minutes later and tried to get me to patch things up. I didn’t think there was anything to patch up. I had no problem with Juvenile. I’d just meant what I said. I wasn’t interested in paying that much money for a Juvenile beat. I didn’t even know the nigga made beats.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” D told me. “Let the wire transfer go through, we’ll get the beat and the hook, and when we get home I’ll give you the money for it.”
I knew if anyone was good for seventy-five hundred it was D, so I agreed and let them proceed with the song. After all I didn’t have an issue with a Juvenile beat and hook if I wasn’t the one paying for it. Wacko and Buck respected how I’d handled myself in there and invited me back on the bus, now that we were moving forward with the record. But I just waited outside until they finished.
“I don’t need to get back on the bus,” I told them. “Let’s just do the song.”
That song with Ju
venile never ended up amounting to anything, but it was my first experience interacting with a major artist. Years later I saw Juvenile and we both pretended like it was our first time meeting. We swapped songs over at Patchwerk Studios in Atlanta. Everything went smoothly. I respected Juvenile. But I knew as soon as I saw him that he remembered that day. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t see a reason to bring up a negative experience that was in the past. But I could just tell he remembered.
I burnt the last of my bridges when I tricked Doo Dirty’s nephew out of thirty thousand dollars while I was down in Savannah. That was a dumb move, and a messed-up one too because D had always looked out for me.
Now I had these young boys from Savannah plotting to come to Atlanta and kill me. And they knew where I stayed. Even if I switched up spots, I worried someone would tip them off. I’d become such a menace in my hood there were a lot of people that wanted to see me get shot up.
So I left, retreating to Alabama, where I lay low for a couple of months, waiting for the beef to die down.
Some niggas tried to wet me up
Shot up my truck in East Atlanta
Want to set me up because I tricked this nigga in Savannah
They put some money on my head, I had to move to Alabama
—“Frowny Face” (2008)
After a few months I decided to return to Atlanta. I couldn’t take it. The place was too slow for me. I’d enrolled in the barbering program at Lawson State Community College in Birmingham but I only went to class once. I didn’t want to cut hair. I wanted to get back to trapping and making music.
I tried to fly under the radar after I came back, lying low at Danielle’s spot. Danielle was my on-and-off girlfriend from age twenty to twenty-five. She was a pretty girl who was as hood as I was. Very rough around the edges. She would help me bag up and stash my money for me. It wasn’t love, but she knew me well and was an asset to the things I had going on then.
I was keeping a low profile because I didn’t know if Doo Dirty’s nephew and his boys were still out looking for me. But one day I left the house to grab some Swishers from the gas station. When I drove up, guess who was standing outside: Red. He had a newborn baby in his arms and was talking to a girl I recognized. This was a girl who stayed in Augusta. We used to trap out of her trailer park there.