Ice

by Ice-T

  One night I was there by myself, hanging out, talking to girls. By the time I left, it was morning. I was at the intersection of West Boulevard and Slauson, stopped at a red light in my Porsche 914. I was wiped. I started half-dozing at the light—feeling like if I could just close my eyes for a second, I’d be okay to drive home, I’d get my second-wind …

  I have no memory of this, but apparently my foot slipped off the brake and my Porsche rolled into the intersection. Boom, I got fucking broadsided. The car flipped and rolled. I didn’t have my seatbelt on, and I got knocked into my passenger seat. The impact broke the steering wheel clean off, demolished the driver’s side—my little Matchbox 914 had folded right in half.

  I should have died that morning. To all the bystanders, I looked like a dead man. One of the L.A. papers actually reported it as a fatality. The reporter on the scene figured no one could have survived a wreck like that. The car was crushed; I was slumped there in the passenger seat, bleeding profusely and looking lifeless.

  I wasn’t dead, though I was completely unconscious for over a day. I had no ID on me at the time of the wreck. When you’re hustling, you never carry any kind of identification so you can always give the cops an alias, and I had a fat knot of cash in my pocket. The paramedics and the police had no clue who I was.

  They took me to L.A. County Hospital and I was John Doe’d up in there for a long time.

  County is not a good place to be laid up. I was stuck in a room with ten people. When I came to—well, really I was drifting in and out of consciousness—I heard people moaning and screaming; a dude across from me had a colostomy bag; at one point, someone died right there in the room with me.

  When you’re in County, you don’t talk to doctors much, you just get moved around on gurneys. But some doctor in a white coat finally came around and I overheard him telling a nurse how lucky I was to have pulled through. I had a broken pelvis, broken ribs, and a fractured femur. Everything on my left side was smashed and broken.

  I was lucky, the doctor said to the nurse, because I was so healthy. I’d just come out of the military; I was in top physical shape. The fact that I was a healthy, young specimen meant that the trauma couldn’t take me out. Even when I was unconscious, my body was fighting back with all its strength. If I was weaker, or if I’d abused my body with drugs and booze, I might not have pulled through.

  At this stage of my life, I was basically a transient hustler. After my Jersey years and then living with my aunt in View Park—essentially, I didn’t have a home life. I didn’t have a house with real family. And for most of the time since I’d gotten out of the Army, I’d kept small apartments, so I would be in one neighborhood from day to day. Living the life of a full-time criminal, you’re never too stationary. You have to move around. Sean E. Sean lived in the same neighborhood in the hills where my aunt lived. But he’d already been locked up. And anyway, if I didn’t see homeys like Sean E. Sean or Sean E. Mac for a week or two, it was no big deal. This was long before the era when dudes were checking in with each other every few hours on their cells or text messaging. You could have close homeys and not see them or hear from them for weeks, and it was no cause for alarm.

  Therefore when I came up missing, it took a long time for folks to realize I was even gone. My daughter and my baby’s mother didn’t miss me. Nobody noticed I wasn’t around. The people I saw regularly were the crew from the nightclubs: the white dudes I rapped for down at The Radio; the hustlers and ballers I used to hang with at Carolina West. Nightclub friends act like they’re your family when you’re out in the spot; but it’s not like they gave a fuck when I didn’t show up for a couple weeks.

  I was in really bad shape. I needed constant cycles of pain medication for my injuries. I remember lying there, hooked on the pain pills. One afternoon the nurse didn’t give me my pain pills—she made a mistake and skipped me during her rounds—and I had to wait four hours for the next dose. I tried to tell the nurse I needed my medication and she said, “No, you got them already.” She thought I was lying. You know, like I was a junkie trying to con her for an extra dose.

  I was arguing with her, but then it was like a switch went off. I could no longer even speak. The pain suddenly kicked in. I could feel all my broken bones. I was screaming, but the nurse still wouldn’t give me the meds, and I knocked over the drinks on my table, my legs were kicking. I was just wilding out. All the nurses did was wheel me out into the middle of the floor so I couldn’t kick over anything else.

  I never saw combat during my military service, but I now realize how you could be seriously banged up and not realize how severe your injuries are until you come off those drugs. When the painkillers wear off, you feel every broken bone, every bruise, every cut, every single piece of pain.…

  It was a hellish four hours. Excruciating. I actually thought I was dying. Then at the end of the four hours, the nurse came to find me still screaming and thrashing. Finally she gave me my pills. I gulped them down, and the meds hit me so hard, it felt like I dissolved through the mattress. I was melting into this euphoric, pain-free state. That’s when I realized how many drugs I was on, because I couldn’t feel the broken bones anymore.

  So I ended up lying there as a John Doe in L.A. County for several weeks, until my buddy Sean E. Mac’s mother realized I was missing. Somehow or other—I still don’t know exactly—Sean E. Mac and his moms tracked me down. His moms told everyone at County that I’d been in the military, that I’d done four years of service with an honorable discharge, and just like that, they put me in an ambulance and transferred me to the Veterans Administration Hospital over in Westwood. Life got a lot better in the V.A. Hospital. I ended up getting my own private room.

  Due to the nature of my injuries, they couldn’t put casts on me, so I was in a light form of traction for ten straight weeks. Completely immobile. You sit there ten weeks, even if you got a few folks coming to see you, it’s not like you’ve got a gang of family waiting there with balloons and bouquets for you to get discharged. I was pretty much isolated lying there in traction, in my quiet private room at the V.A. Hospital. Lying in the hospital, all plastered up like a mummy, hooked up to IVs and beeping monitors, I had nothing but time to reflect on that transient hustling life I was leading. Being banged up in the hospital—it’s almost like being in jail—I realized who was really on my team. I realized what I actually had in my life—and what I was missing.

  It felt like no one came to visit me, but the truth is I was so doped up on pain meds I didn’t know what was going on around me. I remember one time that Sean E. Mac’s sister came up to visit me, and I had a catheter up my dick and I just lay there talking to her, mumbling away, with my whole shit exposed. Later on, Sean E. Mac came up to my room. He said, “Ice, what’s up? You were so fucked up you showed my sister your fucking balls!”

  One day I had a preacher coming through asking me to pray with him. Wanting to know if I’d share the “Good Word” with him. It was the only time in my life when I even contemplated testing out religion to see if it fit me. Finally I told the preacher, “Naw, I’m not gonna pray, I just wanna make myself get better.”

  These religious cats were going around praying over people, and I told them I didn’t want anyone praying over me. I remember shouting, “I ain’t dying!” ’Cause to me that shit felt too much like giving the last rites when everything is hopeless.

  Being immobile gave me a long time to lay there and think, to reflect on my situation. To finally see life on balancing scales. Not in the religious sense of those preachers talking about Judgment Day—though maybe that put the idea in my head. I started to weigh out all the things I wanted to accomplish and all the things I hadn’t yet done. And then this crashing feeling hit me, this sense of, Okay, motherfucker. That was your life. And really, be honest with yourself: You didn’t do shit.

  I wasn’t depressed. I truly felt I’d done nothing, absolutely nothing. And so I flashed back to that moment at Schofield Barracks when Sergeant
Donovan screamed that I couldn’t make it in the civilian world. And here I was nearly dead, and if I’d died in that Porsche, I’d have lived my whole life without accomplishing anything.

  WHEN I CAME OUT of the hospital, I couldn’t walk well. I was limping along, sometimes with a cane. I had a lot of trauma in my hip area, but old habits die hard, and for some insane reason I still thought I could pull licks. There was no way I could run, let alone climb or fight. And most of the licks we were doing were very physical. At some point you needed to do something athletic or acrobatic, whether it was sprinting away from the store, or jumping headfirst into a slow-rolling car. It was action-packed and you had to be in top physical condition.

  I didn’t want to use my cane, so I was hobbling around, real slow. It took me at least a month out of the hospital to be able to walk without a limp. I definitely wasn’t able to run or fight anybody.

  The thing about hustling, you have to weigh the odds: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sean was under. Tony was under. Vic was under. A lot of these cats that I looked up to were locked up. And I found myself hanging with second- and third-string players. Real scrubs. Dudes like Jimmy in the stupid-ass Gucci loafers.

  I tried to get back in the game, working with these slapstick motherfuckers. And then it dawned on me, Ice, do you think you’re that much smarter than all the guys that are stuck? They’re under, they’re behind the wall, telling you don’t come to the pen.…

  You just have to change your hustle at some point. You have to tell yourself, “Yo, I can’t do that wild shit no more.”

  Finally, a few weeks after being released from the V.A. Hospital, it clicked in my head. I said: Let me stop running around with these hustlers—risking prison every single day. Let me give this rap game a shot.

  PART THREE

  SIX IN THE MORNIN’

  “IT AIN’T ABOUT THE COME-UP.

  IT’S ABOUT THE COMEBACK.”

  —ICE-T’S DAILY GAME

  8.

  ONE SATURDAY NIGHT, about two weeks after being released from the V.A. Hospital, I went straight back to the Carolina West Club. There was an open mic competition and Kurtis Blow was the judge. But I didn’t know that when I limped in there. I grabbed the mic and I won first prize.

  Just some kind of bullshit rhyming. I think I made up some raps at that point.

  At that time, nobody had made any money rapping. It was just something to do for the hell of it.

  When the crowd exploded and I won first place, I felt like that was a vote of confidence. Especially if a real rapper like Kurtis Blow from New York thought I could rap.

  West Coast rap was kind of virgin territory. Besides the ones at The Radio, there were a few hip-hop parties popping up in L.A. like Uncle Jamm’s Army. They had a DJ named Egyptian Lover and would throw big dances at the L.A. Sports Arena. For a long time, I was the only person they’d let rap at Uncle Jamm’s Army. They had a drum machine and Egyptian Lover or the other DJ, Bobcat, would shout, “We ’bout to go live” and then he’d play live beats and I’d rap over them.

  After I made “The Coldest Rap,” I recorded a couple tracks with this guy, David Storrs, who used to be a regular at The Radio. David Storrs was a white dude from Hollywood. He produced this track called “Reckless”—technically, the main performer was Chris “The Glove” Taylor, who was a DJ at The Radio. I was just a featured rapper on the track. But Dave Storrs could see I was the rising star. Then I made a couple of records with this cat named Unknown DJ.

  Unknown had his own little label. He also had cats like King T and Compton’s Most Wanted, and I was trying to get him to make a record with my DJ’s brother, but he said, “Naw, Ice, why don’t you do a record for me?” So I laid down “You Don’t Quit,” then I did “Dog’n the Wax,” both of which had Unknown DJ’s “electro-hop” production sound.

  “Dog’n the Wax” needed a B-Side. So I wrote this rap called “6 in the Mornin’.”

  And that record just changed the whole game.

  PEOPLE OFTEN SAY I created the gangsta rap genre with that record, but let me give proper credit. It was Schoolly D who inspired me to write the rhyme. I’d been in this club in Santa Monica, and I heard Schoolly D’s “PSK” booming through the speakers. My jaw dropped. I turned to my homey and said, “Yo, this shit is so dusted!” It sounded different than regular hip-hop. It sounded like you were high, the way the beats were echoing, and his whole delivery was so crazy.

  Schoolly D was writing about Park Side Killers, which is a Philly gang. But it was a very vague record. “PSK, we makin’ that green, people always say what the hell does that mean?” Schoolly D says, “S for the way you scream and shout / One by one I’m knocking you out.” That was the most violent thing he said in the whole record.

  He was reppin’ a set. He was repping PSK. But it wasn’t too specific. He was just alluding to the gang life.

  Now I took that inspiration and ran with it. I said, “Let’s use that same dusted vibe, but let’s tell an L.A. story with it.”

  I adopted a delivery similar to Schoolly D’s but rapped about the shit I knew firsthand. I wrote the lyrics in my apartment in Hollywood with an 808 drum machine. The beat was kind of like a Beastie Boys record, very minimal and raw; it was just meant to be something different—it was a B-Side, so I was feeling loose and experimental. Nobody had ever done a record with a scratch break: bam-bam-bam. It was so simple and stripped down.

  Six in the mornin’ police at my door

  Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor

  Out the back window I make my escape

  Didn’t even get a chance to grab my old school tape

  Mad with no music but happy ’cause I’m free

  And the streets to a player is the place to be

  Got a knot in my pocket weighin’ at least a grand

  Gold on my neck my pistol’s close at hand

  I’m a self-made monster of the city streets

  Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats

  But just livin’ in the city is a serious task

  Didn’t know what the cops wanted

  Didn’t have the time to ask Word.

  I’m telling a story about a guy on the run from the cops, waking up one day in Los Angeles, going to the County, hitting the streets, and then getting into a shootout.

  I didn’t labor over the lyrics. I didn’t think this was going to be some kind of long-lasting or influential record. I was just trying to knock out a cool B-Side. Nowadays people say that record is the origin of a whole genre; they trace everything from Tupac to Biggie to Eminem to “6 in the Mornin’.” I didn’t call it “gangsta” or “hardcore.” To me it was just the life I was living. If anyone asked me at the time, I called it “reality rap.” Later, when N.W.A. came out, they said explicitly that we’re a gang called “Niggaz With Attitude.” And once they dropped the word “gang,” the journalists and the music industry gave the whole, harder-edged West Coast style the name “gangsta” rap. To me the labels hardly matter: Anytime you say you’re solving your problems with a pistol, sure, that’s gangsta.

  Up to that point—from a national perspective, at least—hip-hop had been all about New York. In the beginning, of course, the influential rappers had all come out of the Bronx, then Harlem, then Queens—they had their New York style. They’d made the blueprint, showed the rest of us how it was done. Mostly, if you listen to the earliest hip-hop, cats were talking about parties, girls. If they were dropping science in a harder way, it was nothing really violent—or it was more subtle. Like in “The Message,” when Melle Mel says, “Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge.” He doesn’t say, “Yo, I’m about to pick up a 9mm and body some niggas.” Nobody had dared make anything that violent yet.

  I don’t know if there was a sense that it wasn’t allowed but, at the very least, it hadn’t been tried. Almost as soon as the label dropped “Dog’n the Wax,” we got word that the clubs were heavily spinning the B-Side “6 in the Mor
nin’.” Unknown DJ and I knew pretty quickly that the record was going to be a hit, that people in the street were feeling it. But I figured it would definitely remain underground.

  The label sent me up to the Bay Area to play at the Fillmore, and on the strength of that one song, I had the whole Fillmore sold out to see me.

  It blew my mind. Everyone liked the crime shit. If you listen to “You Don’t Quit” and “Dog’n the Wax,” those aren’t crime rhymes. They sound much more like something L.L. would do. But at the Fillmore, people were bugging out to that sound. A lightbulb went off: I realized that a lot of people were feeling that crime-story rap, and they probably would be for a long, long time.

  THERE WAS SO MUCH hip-hop talent bubbling underneath the surface in Los Angeles. L.A. definitely wanted to be on the map. There was already a rapper named Toddy Tee making some noise in L.A. Not too many people give him props today, but for me, he was a trailblazer. Toddy Tee was more of a comedic rapper who would take other people’s records and do parodies. He’d take Whodini’s “The Freaks Come Out at Night” and turn it into a record about crackheads. He had a record called “Batter Ram,” about the police tank that was running and destroying dope houses in the hood. Toddy Tee had a lot to do with making records totally street, just singing to the ’hood about that whole underground crime thing that was already bubbling up in L.A.

  So I took that gangster inspiration of Schoolly D, some of the L.A. flavor of Toddy Tee, and I guess I took it to another level. I said, “I can tell these street stories, tell these crime adventures and do it my way—do it as Ice-T.”