by Gucci Mane
My phone was blowing up with calls from Coach, Todd, and others concerned for my well-being. But I couldn’t be reasoned with. I’d answer, cuss ’em out, hang up, and get back to whatever vice I happened to be indulging in at that moment.
After a week of this an intervention was planned to put an end to the madness. Dame explained that I’d been booked for a last-minute show in Vegas and that they’d chartered a jet to fly me there. Even in the midst of my tailspin, I was still down to make some money, especially if it meant going to Vegas, where I knew I could keep the party going.
Dame got me all the way back to Atlanta believing that. I was in such rough shape that even when we landed it didn’t occur to me we’d only been in the air for two hours, less than half the time it takes to get to Vegas from Miami. It wasn’t until we left the airport that I looked around and realized where I was. This was not Vegas. This was home, the last place I wanted to be.
I flipped out, attacking Dame in the van as we made the fifteen-minute drive to Riverwoods Behavioral Health System in Riverdale. Coach, my lawyer, and other members of my inner circle were waiting for me, begging me to check myself in to rehab.
The only one I paid the slightest attention to was my lawyer, who was telling me I’d failed another drug test and if I didn’t check myself in, I’d almost certainly be sent to jail. After more than an hour of arguing outside Riverwoods, I relented, agreeing to a monthlong stay.
But that shit didn’t last. I wasn’t at the facility a week when I changed my mind and got a buddy to come sign me out. I’d realized I’d already fallen for my lawyer’s line before. I wasn’t doing rehab just so I could get out and get sent right to jail again. The couple of days at the Riverwoods center did little to slow me down. If anything, they were a brief pit stop on my road to total self-destruction. Two weeks after the failed intervention I reached the end of that road at an auto-body shop on Northside Drive.
I’d gotten it into my head that this guy who worked on my cars had played me out of some money. This wasn’t just some mechanic. This was a friend of mine, someone who had joined me on the road before. But in my paranoid state, I convinced myself otherwise. I hopped into my Hummer and hit the gas, flying down Northside Drive to confront him at the shop.
I must have blazed past a cop on the way, because within minutes of my arrival the law was on the scene. Their presence didn’t affect me. I was irate and growing angrier by the minute, barking at this dude for stealing from me, an accusation that in reality held little water. Except I wasn’t living in reality. I was in a world all my own, one in which everyone in my orbit was plotting against me.
The officers demanded I calm down, but that was background noise. I threw a punch. And then another, and another, beating my friend until a blast of pepper spray hit my eyes. I stumbled backward, the two officers wrestling me to the ground and putting me in handcuffs. I was placed in the back seat of the cruiser but I wasn’t done just yet. With my eyes burning, I stomped on the door of the car, so hard that the trim of the vehicle began to break off. An ambulance arrived and I was transported to Grady Hospital Detention Center. After being treated for the pepper spray, I was brought to Fulton County, where I read the list of charges against me.
• Damage to government property
• Obstruction
• Driving without a license
• Reckless driving
• Running a red light or stop sign
• Failure to maintain a lane
• Driving on the wrong side of the road
Damn. I did all that?
I’d get out of lockup the next day, though. Prosecutors dropped every one of those charges citing “for want of prosecution,” meaning I was fucked regardless of the incident at the car shop. I was scheduled to go in front of the judge the next month and he now had a laundry list to choose from as to why I belonged in jail. I’d failed another drug test. I’d skipped out on the rehab. I’d gotten rearrested.
When that court date came, my attorneys filed a special plea of mental incompetency, writing that their client was unable “to go forward and/or intelligently participate in the probation revocation hearing.” In the past—like when I checked in to the rehab—my lawyers had pulled certain moves with the idea that they would keep me out of jail, but this time it was just the flat-out truth. A plea of mental incompetency was warranted. I’d lost my damn mind.
Fulton County Superior Court judge John J. Goger wasn’t sold on that argument. Goger was familiar with my case. Five years earlier he’d sentenced me on my aggravated assault charge after the incident at Big Cat’s studio with the pool stick.
“You have a great future in music, but you seem to get in trouble,” he’d told me at the time.
Three years later he sentenced me to a year in jail for failing to comply with the terms of my probation. Goger could see I had a problem with drugs, but for him that wasn’t an excuse for me to continually break the law. He wanted to put this “mental competency” to the test. I was committed to Anchor Hospital, an Atlanta psychiatric and chemical dependency facility, where I was to undergo a series of evaluations.
Three days later I was discharged. The staff at Anchor Hospital weren’t buying my lawyers’ claims that I had a serious psychiatric condition. They thought I was using that as an excuse.
The folks at Anchor Hospital may not have believed I was crazy, but the rest of the world was about to be sure of it. Days after being discharged I strolled into Tenth Street Tattoo, a shop around the corner from Patchwerk.
I’d spent the previous night at Patchwerk. Atlanta had gotten hit with one of its biggest snowstorms in years and I got snowed in there.
When I walked into the shop that day I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to get. I did know where I wanted it done, though. I walked up to the counter, introduced myself to the owner, pointed to my right cheek, and asked him what we could put there.
My whole body was covered in tattoos. I’d gotten my first when I was nineteen, around the time I’d first started robbing folks and breaking into houses. It was an eyeball on the back of my neck, a reminder to always watch my back. Since then I’d periodically added more.
I already had a bunch of smaller ones on my face but with my skin being so dark, the tattoos under my eyes were hard to make out. I thought it looked like I had two black eyes. I wanted something big, something bold, something unmistakable.
With all I’d been through of late I’d never felt more alienated. I was an outcast, a rebel, a weirdo. More than anything I was tired. Tired of running away from my reputation, tired of trying to convince people I wasn’t a bad person. I wanted to embrace being the villain. I wanted to broadcast that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone said or thought about me. I’d just gotten a gold grill put in my mouth and I wanted to alter my appearance even more.
“Well, that’s cool, man,” the shop owner told me. His name was Shane. “But, uh, yeah, I can’t really tell you what to put there. Honestly I just have no idea where to start.”
I unzipped the orange hoodie I had on to show him my ice cream cone chain.
“What about this?” I asked him. “This is my thing.”
Shane drew up my soon-to-be-infamous ice cream cone tattoo. It was perfect. Almost perfect. It needed something else.
“Just make that shit real rock-and-roll,” I told him.
With that he added the lightning bolts and the letters “BRRR,” and got to work. An hour later, I was out of there and on my way to Patchwerk. I was feeling good about the tattoo. It was what I’d been going for.
That afternoon, the piercer at the shop tweeted out a photo from my visit. The Internet exploded.
“Rapper Gucci Mane has had a large tattoo of a triple-scoop ice cream cone inked onto his face just days after he was released from a mental health facility.”
—Daily Mail
“Gucci Mane’s latest tattoo—an ice cream cone with three scoops and the word ‘brrr’ across the right side of his face—has app
eared all over the internet today. For the most part, people seem shocked and confused by the rapper’s unusual decision, and some have questioned whether his recent stay in a mental health facility was a bit too brief.”
—Rolling Stone
“Whatever they’re drinking over at 1017 Brick Squad headquarters, we’ll take two and call it a week, thank you.”
—Los Angeles Times
I knew the tattoo would get a reaction, but I couldn’t believe the magnitude of it. When I left the shop I’d been thinking about what the people back at Patchwerk would say when they saw me, not the New York Daily News.
People were talking a lot of shit, but the crazy thing is that the response had a positive effect on me. It kind of woke me up. I’d gotten so down on myself that I’d completely lost sight of how many people still cared about what I was up to. I was still a big deal in this industry.
I got back to work, locking in with Drumma Boy for The Return of Mr. Zone 6. The title meant something. I knew my stock had fallen and I knew what people were saying about me.
I didn’t give a fuck about people saying I’d lost my marbles, but I didn’t like that folks were calling The Appeal a sellout album, like I’d gone Hollywood working with Pharrell or Swizz or Wyclef. That was wrong. The Appeal was a great album with a piss-poor rollout. But how I felt didn’t matter much. I needed to remind everyone exactly who I was and where I came from.
Except The Return of Mr. Zone 6 wasn’t a return to my earlier work. The mixtape would mark the beginning of a shift in my sound. I’d always been the one who made trap music fun and colorful, but that Gucci, the one with the memorable ad-libs and different characters, that guy was gone. I couldn’t get back to that because it wasn’t who I was anymore.
I became so determined to get back into the winner’s circle that I lost sight of how making music was supposed to be fun. I was spending more time in the studio than ever before and I was definitely rapping my ass off, but the songs coming out were just different. I was angry. I was resentful. I felt like I’d been dealt a bad hand. I missed Keyshia. As much as I tried to bury those emotions with lean, weed, and reckless spending, they always ended up surfacing, especially in the music.
Damn I think I love her but I don’t really know her good
Know I wanna fuck her but really thinkin’ if I should
How can I believe her? I don’t even believe myself
Tell me how to trust her, I can’t even trust myself
But I can’t live alone, at the end of the day can’t fuck myself
I told her I’m confused and she told me to go fuck myself
Now I’m alone in this world, nothing left for me
But I was born all alone so I guess that’s how it’s meant to be
But she was sent to me and I didn’t recognize
And I blame it on my pride on the fact I’m sittin’ in silence
Eyes redder than a rose, heart bluer than a violet
My heart broke and I’m heartless and ain’t no need to hide it
—“Better Baby” (2010)
“Something darker,” I was telling all my producers. “Give me something darker.”
Darker was different, but it was still good music. The Return of Mr. Zone 6 was a tough album and sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week with no promotion and a fraction of the budget of The Appeal. This was a step in the right direction, but so often in my life, one step forward was followed by two steps back.
•
Two weeks after the release of The Return of Mr. Zone 6, I was in Memphis for a show at a club called Level II. Coach came to my hotel and told me I wasn’t going to be able to perform. We had to go back to Atlanta, now.
“You’ve got a warrant out?” he asked. “Something about a girl putting out a battery complaint against you?”
It took a minute, but I realized what Coach was talking about. Back in January I’d pulled up on this chick outside of the South DeKalb Mall. She was leaving the Chick-fil-A and got all excited when she recognized me in my Hummer. She hopped in and we started driving around, talking, but I wasn’t much in the mood for talking. I asked her if she wanted to get a hotel room. She declined. Fine by me. It wasn’t going to be hard to find another girl to lay up with.
I told her I’d drop her back off at the mall, but this chick started demanding that I take her up to her job in Buckhead. She had some nerve. I wasn’t in the mood for that shit that day.
“Look, I’m not a taxi,” I told her. “I’ll either take you back to the mall or I can drop you off at the bus stop up here.”
This girl started cussing and screaming at me to drive her to her job. I’d had enough. I reached across the passenger seat and opened the door.
“You need to get out of my car.”
The arguing continued until I put that bitch out of my car, but let me be clear on this. I don’t think I put this girl in no danger. But she went out and got herself a lawyer and demanded fifteen thousand dollars, claiming that my car was in motion and she was tumbling down the street or something.
My lawyer said I should just pony up the money and be done with it, but I was already feeling like she played me. Fifteen thousand was petty cash but I didn’t want to give her a dime on principle. I should have swallowed my pride, though. Between lawyer fees, a sixty-thousand-dollar settlement that came later down the line, and my time, the incident would cost me a whole lot more than that.
I’d forgotten about the whole thing until Coach told me I couldn’t perform in Memphis. After three months, she’d filed a complaint.
I posted the five-thousand-dollar bail but was held for violating my probation in Fulton County. Then, for some reason, I was sent to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, a facility fifty miles south of Atlanta. I’d only spend three weeks there but these were three of the worst weeks I ever spent locked up.
Jackson State is a diagnostic prison, a waiting room. It’s a place where teams of prison officials, counselors, and medical professionals determine which of Georgia’s thirty-one state prisons an inmate gets sent to. Unless you’re on death row. Then Jackson State’s your last stop.
As soon as I got there I had my head shaved. Then I was made to strip naked alongside the rest of the incoming inmates in the intake room, with the COs watching us. After I bent over for a cavity search they sent me to the showers. I was given a small bottle of shampoo and told to apply it not only to my now bald head but to my pubic hair as well. It was lice-killing shampoo.
After the shower I was given a white prison jumpsuit, photographed for my prison ID, and brought to “H House,” solitary confinement, where I spent the remainder of my time at Jackson State.
Being in the hole again was horrible. It was sweltering in there. No air circulation at all. And the rats . . . I hadn’t been in my cell five minutes when I saw one scurry by with a tail that was longer than me. I swear the rats were the size of cats in that place. I never thought I’d be so happy to be back at Fulton County when I was transferred back three weeks later.
I’d spend another month in county jail before I was freed. Again, I felt like I’d missed a lot. Even though I was only gone for three months—my shortest stretch since my sixty days in DeKalb County a decade earlier—a lot had happened. On the music front, there were two new guys in the city making a lot of noise: 2 Chainz and Future.
I’d known 2 Chainz for fifteen years. He’s actually BP’s cousin. I knew 2 Chainz from when he was Tity Boi and he was rolling with Ludacris in the nineties. He’d had a taste of fame in 2007 with a song called “Duffle Bag Boy,” but he and Dolla Boy, the other nigga in the group Playaz Circle, weren’t able to follow it up. But Tity Boi was on his own now and he was going by 2 Chainz. And shit finally seemed to be working out well for him.
Future, on the other hand, was someone I’d met only recently. He was from East Atlanta by Kirkwood, an area they call Lil’ Mexico. It’s nearby, but in Atlanta you can be two streets over and you’
re in a totally different neighborhood. He was a few years younger too, so we’d never crossed paths coming up.
Future was the cousin of Rico Wade, from the legendary production team Organized Noize. He’d come up in Atlanta’s fabled Dungeon Family, around OutKast and Goodie Mob and Bubba Sparxxx. Back then he was rapping under the name Meathead but now he was Future, and he was rolling with my partner Rocko.
Rocko had introduced us earlier that year at Patchwerk. He had just signed Future to his label A1 Recordings and was adamant about this guy’s talent. He told me I needed to fuck with Future’s new mixtape Dirty Sprite, which he’d just put out. I never got around to doing that. I met Future in the aftermath of everything that happened at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, so I had a lot of other stuff going on.
Future had picked up a lot of steam by the time I came home in July. The DJs at Magic City and other Atlanta strip clubs were pumping his music heavy. Drake had just gotten on the remix of his song “Tony Montana.” Another song Future was featured on, “Racks,” was killing the radio and that was a song Future had written. Rocko was right about the dude.
Behind 2 Chainz and Future’s big songs was an up-and-coming beatmaker by the name of Mike WiLL Made It. I knew Mike Will very well. I met him in 2006 when he was a sixteen-year-old Marietta High School junior, trying to shop his beats outside of Patchwerk.
Years ago I’d paid him a stack for a batch of ’em and for a while after that Mike Will was hanging around regularly, cutting his teeth at the studio, honing his craft. You can see a young Mike Will in that 2007 Hood Affairs documentary I did when we were working on “No Pad No Pencil.”
At some point Mike Will had a falling-out with Deb. I think she tried to sign him to Mizay and for some reason it didn’t work out. But after that Deb had made it a point to keep us from working together, and truthfully she filled my head with all sorts of junk about him too. So I’d kind of been on the “Fuck Mike Will” tip myself. That’s why there’s a four-year gap when we didn’t work together.