by Ice-T
Now, at the time I’m maybe 130 pounds soaking wet. Gary is a wall of muscle, easily twice my weight. I’m scared to hit him, ’cause I think he’s just using it as an excuse to kill me.
“Yo, just hit me, nigga!”
Finally, I hit him in the chest as hard as I could. It was like punching a truck. He didn’t even flinch.
Then—bam—he dipped down and threw a short right hook into my leg.
Then he smiled. Then turned. And he bounced.
Talk about a fucking charley horse. I was doubled over. I could hardly walk.
Okay, Gary was too big to be fucking with me, but he had to teach me a lesson. If he’d hit me in the face, or broke my arm, he wouldn’t have been respected for that. I was too small, and I wasn’t gangbanging. It was just like, “The little homey did something stupid,” and he checked me.
You saw a lot of that shit back in the day. Homeys getting checked by the older niggas.
About five minutes after, I was sitting in the locker room, nursing the charley horse. A bunch of my homeys crowded around me, breathless, shouting:
“Yo, fool! You know who you was fuckin’ with?”
That shit left a bruise for a month.
YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER, I had never seen nothing back East. I didn’t know anything about banging. I was green to all kinds of violence. It wasn’t like I was from Brooklyn or the Bronx. It wasn’t like I was from Newark—though I was technically born there. I was from Summit, and that’s not a place where a kid would see gunplay or nothing. That’s why I always claim the West Coast. I didn’t kick up any dust back East. I was a late-bloomer in this criminal game.
Gangs have transformed radically since my day. Once crack hit, it changed the whole gang system from being territorial and about neighborhood pride into sheer free enterprise, straight crime-for-hire. There’s not any real-true pecking order anymore. Today it’s strictly about money. Back then, I don’t even think the gangs made money. It was about reppin’ your block, reppin’ your hood, reppin’ your set.
In the eighties and nineties, the crack game broke all the gangs and splintered them off into little money-making sets. It made everything more violent, more about gunplay, more about constant retaliation. That’s when most people across the country started hearing about the Crips and Bloods, when there was already a bloodbath in L.A.
Honestly, I don’t think gangbanging could have taken off the way it had if it had started off so violent. That life had to get a foothold, almost based on teams. Based on neighborhood camaraderie. Dudes were still scary, but they still had some codes of chivalry, still had more innocent shit like Gary checking me without really doing serious damage.
The irony is, the more violent the life got, the more inescapable it got. Once people started to die all the time, that’s when cats could no longer get out. Because when murder is added into the mix, banging transforms into a whole other thing. It’s not like you can quit your set now.
I was lucky in the sense that I never got formally inducted into the gangbanging. I was never jumped into a set. And the only reason is because I didn’t live in the ’hood with the gang. I was still walking to school from my block in View Park. My friends, Burnett and Franzell, and I were coming down from the hills, and we actually created a gang, more or less as a joke, called the EPA—Eliminators Pimpin’ Association. It started as a laugh, but it escalated, until we basically had Crenshaw niggas believing that there was a hundred muthafuckas in the hills. We set up our own thing, but it was like a shell company. It was just the three of us in the whole fucking gang.
Still, my boy Burnett was a big, tough guy, and Franzell was a guy who’d moved from the Avenues into the hills. He had that street swagger, being an Avenues kid. His mother was actually a Crip Mama—that’s a mother that deals day-to-day with the gangs. So having a couple of tough friends, that’s all it took. We never got punked.
Outsiders don’t always know this, but you can’t join a set if you’re not from that neighborhood. It was only toward the end of my time at Crenshaw that I really got closer to the gang life. When I got into the twelfth grade my girlfriend, Adrienne, was in the tenth grade. She was a light-skinned girl, athletic build, with a crazy body, big booty—just my type. Somehow or other I found the right words to talk to her. We hooked up and it was a while before I realized that she lived in the heart of Hoover hood—73rd and Hoover. I ended up getting affiliated with their set, because I started to go over there and hang out with the Hoover Crips.*
See, that’s how it works in the street. My girl’s a Criplette, so I’m brought in and I’m affiliated. The act of actually banging is different: It’s retaliating, doing drive-bys, and all that shit is like being a frontline soldier. Now, if you live in the neighborhood, you’re going to wear the colors—you damn sure can’t wear the other colors—and you become an affiliate. And if you’re dating a girl from the neighborhood, you get that same affiliation. Oh, we know Trey. Trey’s good with us. Come shoot craps, come party, come hang out. You’re part of the set, but it would be disrespectful and dishonest to claim you’re an actual banger.
They liked my style, I was a little flyer, I had that West Side look. I got a cool personality. I’ve always had a sucker-proof personality. If people get past the surface and get to know me, within thirty minutes I can flip pretty much anybody. I’m not trying to sound boastful. I’m just a cool dude—or try to be.
I met Adrienne’s brother and younger sister; I met everybody on her block. The gangbangers on the block took to me.
I was a lightweight, but starting to become a hustler. I could gamble. I could talk the talk. I was slick. I didn’t let anyone call me “Tracy” anymore—that sounded like a girl’s name to me. I was known in the streets as “Trey.”
One of the shot callers from the ’hood was a guy everyone called Puppet, he was the real Hoover O.G. For some reason, he took me under his wing. I used to sit up in Puppet’s house, he’d be saying, “Yo Trey, maybe we should roll on these Swans.”
He was setting up drive-bys with me sitting right next to him. “Yo, Trey. We should blast these niggas.”
I was thinking, Hold up, Cuz. That ain’t what I do! You niggas wanna do war talk, I’m over here chilling with my girlfriend, while you bangers are plotting out shit.
Still, I was deep enough in the life to understand one crucial thing about the gang life: The flip side of the violence and negativity is the love. And that’s some extreme love. Extreme love.
I only realized this recently: When I got to Crenshaw High, that’s the first time I’d ever heard someone say love to me.
My aunt never said she loved me. My mother and father were never big on that word.
You get to Crenshaw, and you got a male friend saying, “Cuz, ain’t nothin’ never fin’ to happen to you, homey. You safe, cuz. I love you.”
That’s some heavy shit. Like a lot of the homeys, I was getting something I wished I’d gotten from my father. When I was a little kid and something happened to me, I didn’t want my dad to call the police. Fuck that. I wanted to say, “Go get ’em, Dad!” Of course, hardly anybody has it like that in real life, but every little kid wants to believe that his pops is Superman.
And that protection you get from the gang is something most people in the ’hood don’t get from their families. To me, it’s interesting that some of the kids who came from big families, families with four or five brothers, didn’t need to join the gangs. Because they had that unconditional protection. “Yo, don’t fuck with me—I got a couple of brothers that will come see you, nigga.” I didn’t have that big family structure. And like everybody else, I wanted that feeling that someone had my back.
Yes, the first I really heard love expressed was with the Crips. Not only heard the word “love,” but saw it firsthand. Saw it manifested. Saw that if you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. That’s very enticing. That’s very attractive to a young brother.
It’s human nature. We’ve always had armies and
tribes, teams and squads. That sense of loyalty, brotherhood, love—it’s very primal, it’s at the core of what it means to be a human. And it’s authentic love—as real and as deeply felt as any love out there—but it’s just misdirected in gangs.
* These days the Hoovers have broken away from the Crips and call themselves ABK—Any Body Killers. They’re now known for combining the color orange with the blue, wearing orange bandannas in their back pockets and Houston Astros baseball caps with a prominent orange H.
3.
I COULDN’T STAND LIVING with my aunt. Maybe it was the fact that I was dressing the part of a Crip—flying my blue flag in her house—but we were beefing constantly. I’ve held my tongue for years, but my aunt’s deceased now, so I can tell it like it was. She was the worst kind of hypocrite. She was a social worker and an alcoholic. So add that up. She was the person who, during the day, would check whether foster kids should be allowed to live in certain houses; but then, at night, she’d come home to her own house and drink half a gallon of liquor.
It wasn’t a good place for me. Wasn’t like I was in a family. I was in a boarding house. I was in a foster home, even though they were my real flesh-and-blood relatives. They didn’t show any love at all.
Since I was an orphan—and still a minor—I was getting a Social Security check for $225 every month. My aunt and I had this one major blow-up when I was seventeen, and I said, “Look, just gimme my goddamn check and I’m out!” I’d been signing them over to her, but now I took that little Social Security money and bounced, found my own crib on Kansas Avenue. For the rest of my twelfth grade at Crenshaw, I was one of the coolest kids in school, because I had my own apartment for ninety bucks a month in the ’hood. People hung with me so much, motherfuckers used to run away from home to stay at my house for three or four days. My crib became a de facto drop-in center for the whole crew.
I didn’t have any big ambitions. I guess I planned on being a workingman like my father. When I graduated from Crenshaw, I went to Trade-Tech College for half a year because I wanted to get a job doing auto body and fender repairs.
I was living on that $225 a month Social Security. My friends were hitting petty crimes, shooting dice, stealing car stereos, little bullshit, going in the direction of one day becoming big-time criminals. The writing was already on the wall.
I never got those gang tats everyone else was getting. The only thing I did was pierce my left ear. That was because of the kids I was hanging around with—and since the crowd was 99.9 percent Crips that was the only ear I could pierce. I didn’t go to some shop in the mall. I got my ear pierced the old-school way, with a needle and a potato and some thread. Hurt like shit.
The one thing that separated me from most of my friends is that I never drank, smoked, or did drugs. It wasn’t a moral decision. Like I said, my survival instincts kicked in real early. I was still half a child and I was sleeping alone in my own house. I was sitting around—a lot—alone. My friends weren’t around all the time. So they’d come over and party, then leave, and I’d be sitting there just looking at the walls.
My mind went into this zone. In my mind, I called myself a “spot.” Meaning if you looked at a crowd from the roof of a football stadium each person would be a spot—one tiny speck—and nobody gives a fuck about a spot. A spot is just one solitary life. If one of those spots, one of those people, comes up missing—who gives a shit? The stadium is still full. An anonymous speck. You don’t mean shit. Even now—I’ve achieved some things, and got my share of money and fame—but if I died today, I’m not kidding myself, New York keeps moving.
I realized really young that my survival was all about me maintaining composure. At the end of the day, my survival was really only important to me.
I would look at people getting tore up, I’d seen my aunt hitting the booze hard, and I never thought it was attractive. I never thought being drunk was cool. And it didn’t hurt that I couldn’t stand the taste of liquor. Now, if there was a way to get drunk off some Kool-Aid, I’d probably have been an alcoholic!
I didn’t have a problem with my boys being weed smokers. When I was selling it, you know, one of the first rules of the game is: Never get high on your own supply. My homeys would smoke around me; I had no problem with that. I’m not like my wife, Coco, who is literally allergic to weed, you can’t even puff a toke within forty feet of her. But no, my boys smoked so much that I definitely caught contact highs. It didn’t bother me. Just like I hated the taste of booze, I never smoked cigarettes, so taking something to my mouth and sucking the smoke in never made sense. It just seemed nasty.
But the main reason I never felt the need to make myself high was that I never felt the need to lose control. If I was drunk, I was vulnerable. If I was high, somebody could beat me out of something. I didn’t have bodyguards, I didn’t have brothers, didn’t have family. I didn’t have anybody. If I hit the floor, I would stay there—forever.
And in South Central, that shit wasn’t theoretical. Plenty of times I’d seen cats get taken advantage of when they were drunk and high.
Sure there was that peer-pressure bullshit.
When I was young, like in the tenth grade, dudes would try to push it on me.
“Yo, Trey! Hit the weed.”
“Naw, I don’t want to hit the weed.”
“Well, if you don’t hit the weed, then you’s a bitch.”
“Well if I’m a bitch, why don’t you make me hit the weed?”
The thing about peer pressure is once you say “No” enough times, even the motherfucker who’s most adamantly trying to get you to smoke can become your biggest supporter. See, long before the term “designated driver” came into use, motherfuckers in the hood realized how valuable it was to have a sober homey. If the cops pulled us over, I could do the talking. If we went to party, there was at least one sober head in the house that knows to check that everybody is okay.
You take over the command position by default. Because you ain’t high. You might have another guy in the clique that’s more prominent, got more of that alpha male streak to him, but you’re the one grabbing his ass to protect him when shit’s going down. So often in the hood, the sober man has the most power. I liked that. I liked being in control, liked having that command spot. I took pride in not being high. I took pride in that leadership role it gave me.
I WAS KEEPING ON A straight path as far as the drinking and drugging went, but then that first semester of Trade-Tech, in 1976, I got my girlfriend Adrienne pregnant. I was so inexperienced with sex, I was literally ignorant. I didn’t understand birth control. To be honest, this wasn’t my thousandth nut—I was still green, and hadn’t had a lot of sex. Nobody I knew had condoms; we thought you had to go to a doctor’s office to get condoms.
I was afraid of being a teenage father, but in a stupid way, I wanted to have the kid because at that point I was zeroed out, I didn’t have any family. I thought it would be a good thing to have a child. At the same time, Adrienne’s parents weren’t crazy about her having a kid in the tenth grade. I convinced her to have the baby. Kind of ironic, because usually guys in that situation are saying, “No, don’t. I can’t handle the responsibility.” That wasn’t my thing. I was saying, “Let’s do it! Let’s have this baby!” while her parents were trying to get her to have it “taken care of.” And we were both so naïve, we didn’t even understand what abortions were at that point.
Adrienne went along with me and had the baby girl, who we named LeTesha. We struggled. Adrienne was still going to high school and I took care of the baby. I had no job but still had to come up with the money for food, clothes, and diapers. I started doing anything I could to bring in some bucks. Little petty crimes. Boosting car stereos. Even selling bags of weed like my homey Sean E. Sean. But the petty crime wasn’t cutting it.
This was a moment in life when I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I had to do something. When my daughter came home from the hospital, my girl and I were all crowded into a l
ittle apartment, getting up with the baby all night—I didn’t feel like I had a future.
One morning, as I was running on no sleep due to a colicky baby, something came over me. I started thinking about this enlistment office on Crenshaw Boulevard. It was right nearby. I used to walk past it nearly every day.
I walked over there, full of swagger and testosterone. Came in the door and made straight for the recruiter. “Yo, I want to be in the army,” I said.
When I sat down to take the test, I scored pretty high. I could have had my pick of branches—Army, Navy, or Air Force. At the time, I was kind of a jock. I’d been on the gymnastics team at Crenshaw. I hardly ever tell people I was on the Crenshaw gymnastics team—because we sucked. Still, I learned to do the pommel horse, parallel bars, and rings. That shit takes a lot of stamina, upper body and core strength. So at eighteen years old, I was in top physical shape, and I figured I’d go infantry.
My plan was to become Ranger-certified, and then get assigned to the 25th Infantry Division out in Hawaii, Schofield Barracks—I’d heard some of the old-time cats in South Central talking about the famous Tropic Lightning outfit, which had some history and glory. I signed up to be a paratrooper—you got an extra $2,500 bonus pay for being Airborne—which sounded exciting as hell to me. At the recruiting office, they told me I could be Airborne stationed at Schofield Barracks.
But first, I had to do six weeks of basic training at Fort Leonardwood, Missouri. We called it Fort Lost-in-the-Woods in the State of Misery. That’s some of the wildest shit you’ll ever do—once you get off that cattle truck, and the sergeants start screaming, you begin to have doubts, you really question yourself. What the fuck did I just get myself into? But you tough it out. You get through basic by telling yourself it’s survival of the fittest.
After basic, you get shipped out to Advanced Infantry Training in Fort Benning, Georgia. It was while I was doing my A.I.T. at Fort Benning that I got a lesson in how the military really works—not the recruiting poster bullshit about BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE. It’s funny to think about it now, but all through Advanced Infantry Training, me and a couple of other guys spent half our time stealing for our company. It was mostly supplies and gear, one big-ass flagpole—all this shit that the officers wanted and couldn’t get for some reason through requisitioning. One of the commanding officers singled out a bunch of us guys who seemed to have some street smarts about us. I was basically the leader, and at night we would go out onto the post and boost the shit he wanted.