by Ice-T
“Dig, homey, we need that laptop.”
Boom—the kid hands it right over.
You have to understand—Sean E. Sean’s taking a big risk even running this recovery mission for me. Sean’s got two strikes already—two felony sentences. So if he gets caught even transporting that stolen computer, he can go back to the pen for life. No joke.
Luckily, Sean knows how to move in stealth. He gets me the stupid laptop, we get it to Ice’s moms, and Darlene turns the laptop in to the police.
I had to buy Little Ice a nice new suit. Darlene had to go with him to the hearing. I knew it was probably all going to get squashed. But I’ve already given this attorney the ten-grand retainer, so I told him to make my kid sweat a bit. Let him know what he’s really looking at. Ice ended up getting a one-year probation, but it took a good six months to clear the legal bullshit up.
THE YEAR-LONG PROBATION didn’t matter much to him. I don’t think he really woke up—really felt how he’d fucked up—until the end of his senior year. It wasn’t just the car break-in, he was distracted and slipping.
Little Ice is smart as fuck. He’s smart enough that he only has to show up at class to get a B. If he does the reading and applies himself, he can get the A. He was slacking and got caught out there. Adolescence hit him in the head. At the start of the year, he had a girlfriend and they were both getting great grades; she’d do the homework with him. But they broke up and once he got single, he found out he was fly, found out he was slick, and he starting hanging out with his dudes. Hanging with his bum-ass friends, breaking into fucking cars to snatch up laptops and tennis rackets.
That’s one thing I’ve learned about parenting. Your kids need to feel it. Not hear it. Feel it. By the end of twelfth grade, he had decent grades, but ended up five credits short on graduation. They wouldn’t let him walk. It would’ve been different if he didn’t graduate and nobody said nothing. But because he couldn’t graduate with his friends, couldn’t walk the stage, he hurt. He really felt what I warned him about. Because every friend and uncle and aunt had marked it on their calendar. He had one hundred people—literally—that wanted to come to his graduation. And he had to man-up and tell them he wasn’t walking.
He had to stay and re-do summer school English. He had his diploma by mid-July, but he was still bummed out that he didn’t get to walk the stage in June. And that’s a big moment in any teenager’s life. I’d warned him for a long time. “Yo, I’m not the one that’s going to feel fucked up, homey. You will.”
And he did. I saw it in his eyes. You can do all the parenting in the world, but something like that has to happen to them from time to time, something that knocks the wind out of them. And that graduation shit hit him hard. I know that it sucked way more than me bawling him out or punishing him. “Okay, let him just feel that sadness and disappointment,” I told Darlene. “Don’t say nothin’ more.”
A few weeks after the graduation he came to me, looking more focused than I’ve ever seen him.
“Dad,” he said. “I’m gonna walk the stage in college.”
“All right. Cool. I’ll hold you to that.”
Little Ice is a good kid—way closer to a ten than a five. But he’s got his issues. He’s a teenager. It’s rough for any teenager these days.
In addition to all the usual pressures on today’s kids, he’s stuck having a famous father, and everybody he meets gives him that weight of responsibility, reminding him about the shoes he’s got to fill. They’re testing him all the time, letting him know—Dude, you’re carrying Ice-T’s name.
I don’t care how balanced and together you are, that’s a heavy weight for any kid to bear.
SINCE I NEVER HAD PARENTS for those difficult years—all that crazed adolescent rabble-rousing shit—I have got to make my own blueprint. I can’t follow some parenting manual. Everyone knows I was never an angel, so I’ve got to live by my own values—Iceberg Family Values.
I’ve led an unconventional life, so I guess it makes sense I’ve had to deal with some unconventional parenting problems. Little Ice only recently started giving me headaches, but back in the day, I had way more complicated issues with my daughter, LeTesha. One time, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the LAPD.
“Is this the residence of LeTesha Marrow?”
“No. Who’s asking?”
“We’re looking for the parents of LeTesha Marrow.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
I damn near dropped the phone. This cop starts telling me that my daughter was busted with her boyfriend in a raid on a dope house down in the ’hood. And not only was she busted in the dope house, she was caught in possession of her boyfriend’s gun.
“A fuckin’ dope house?” I said, half losing my mind. I was never that into the drug game, of course, but I had friends who were big-time dealers. We’d be in the dope house and it was insane what you’d see: Niggas would show up with six-foot lamps, lawn furniture, air-conditioners to trade for drugs. One time we were in a dope house and these fiends came with some huge machine they’d ripped off from a hospital—we found out later it was high-tech equipment that a cardiologist would use. We were all saying, “Where the fuck did you get this?” Crackheads can be some devious, creative motherfuckers. You never know what’s going to happen next in a dope spot.
So I considered myself lucky and bailed my daughter out of jail. I knew her boyfriend, some half-assed gangster, was going to advise her how to handle the jam—of course, he’d want her to claim ownership of the pistol—but I had to take charge. The first mission was to get her separated from the boyfriend.
I grabbed her hand tight as soon as I got her bailed out of lockup.
“LeTesha, I don’t give a fuck if this is a guy you love, if you think you’re going to be together forever,” I said. “Fuck all of that. Basically, as far as the cops are concerned, you do not know him. You’re just some bitch he met that very day. You ain’t nothin’ but hood rat to him. You meet, he asks you to hang out. See, if you don’t know him, then you don’t gotta testify against him. Plus, he ain’t gotta corroborate stories with you. You guys just met that day. Can you go along with that? Can y’all stick to that story?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding.
“Now, as for the pistol: You’re just stupid. You wanted to be down. He asked you to hold it, and you didn’t know no better. Got it? You’re copping to being a dumb-ass, and that’s it. He’s taking that gun case.”
We talked to her boyfriend and told him the story. He only met my daughter a few hours before the raid. He doesn’t even know her real name. And he’s copping to ownership of the piece. Dude shrugs at me, acting like a bad-ass. “Yo, that’s no problem, Ice.”
Then I got my daughter alone, in the passenger seat of my Benz. “Look, Tesha. If you’re hanging out with a guy that’s got a gun, then he’s potentially—fuck ‘potentially’—he’s probably got people after him. You’ve got to know that the killers that are after him would just as soon kill you to get their point across. Anytime you meet a guy, and he’s carrying guns, you do not need to be fucking with him. Period. You’re just as much a target as he is. When niggas shoot up the car, they don’t say, ‘Hold up! Miss the passenger!’ They shoot the whole fucking car up.
“That’s one lesson you need to know. Secondly, know this: When you’re in a dope house and the door gets kicked in, you pray to God it’s the cops. Because if it’s them other motherfuckers, then everybody’s dead. All of y’all. So therefore, you don’t need to be in none of these spots with none of these guys.”
I’m lecturing her, driving her back to her mother’s crib, but I’m also hearing another soundtrack in my mind: the B-Side of this record. I know that what she’s doing right now is searching out a guy who’s like her dad. Even as I’m telling her how she fucked up, I’m trying to come to grips with that. My daughter is always going to search for a guy that’s got a hard edge. A guy that’s tough, that’s cool, that’s gangster.
Every other guy she meets, she thinks he’s weak. Because she’s seen how I handle shit. She’s seen her father’s get-down. Almost every other boyfriend she had in the past, she’d complain to me, “Daddy, he soft” or “He act like a punk.”
I don’t really feel like I messed up with Tesha. I lived my life and I don’t have any regrets. But I do recognize my dilemma. I don’t care who you are as a father, your daughter is going to seek you out. In all your negativity. Whatever you think you are as a husband and as a man, to your daughter, you’re her first man. So it’s like we always say in the game, Don’t talk about it—be about it. It doesn’t matter what you tell her to do, how to live her life, what to look for in a man. What you portray, your daughter will always—always—seek out.
So I have to own that, too.
But now that I’ve transformed, Tesha’s starting to look for guys that are more like the new me rather than the old me. When she was growing up, I was hustling. That’s who I was. I was doing dirt every day. She went after those criminal-minded guys. Now that I’m on TV—who the fuck knows? Maybe she’ll go after an actor.
TODAY, LETESHA AND I are on great terms. She lives in Atlanta. She’s real cool—a hip young lady. A mom with three kids of her own. And she’s great with Little Ice. One of her sons is a year younger than Ice, so they hang out, shoot hoops, play videogames together.
I’ve realized that, as children come into their own adulthood, they understand more about parenthood. About your parenthood, your strong suits as well as your shortcomings and mistakes. Of course, the fact that I wasn’t around when Tesha was a child hurt her a lot. But as she’s grown up, been with guys—and things didn’t work out, raising three children by herself—she realized that marriage is a great concept in theory but it doesn’t always work. She’s going through domestic strife and the struggle of being a single mother, so she understands how complicated these things can be.
Funny enough, LeTesha is the first person I talked to about marrying Coco. I’d never married Tesha’s mom, Adrienne; never officially married Darlene, and this was the first time I ever considered formally tying the knot.
I was a bit reluctant to ask her. I thought my daughter might trip, because she’s almost exactly the same age as Coco. “I want to ask your advice about something, Tesha.”
“Okay …”
My kids aren’t used to me calling them up for advice. “I’m thinking about marrying Coco.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “If you don’t, you’re crazy. Coco is fine.” Then after a long pause. “And she’s good for you, too, Daddy.”
ON THE FAMILY FRONT, I know I’ve made my share of mistakes. But now I’m just out here trying to make a few more millions so I can leave them all a trust fund and be that patriarch in the portrait over the mantelpiece.
Honestly, I’m starting my family from scratch. I’ve got my daughter, Tesha, and my son, Little Ice. I’ve got my wife, Coco—our relationship is now ten years strong—but she’s not their mother. That’s a complicated family dynamic, I know. But our relationships are probably more close to the average American family than the advertising image of two parents living with their two perfect kids in the ’burbs.
We make it work. I’m happy with Coco. I’m also happy with Darlene. People on the sidelines still ask me why Darlene and me aren’t together. And I tell ’em, “This is not a storybook.” It starts off like that, but shit happens. Fortunately for us things never got ugly. We didn’t have a public breakup.
When you see these celebrity divorce meltdowns, at least one of the two sides has got to want to take it public. You’ve got to decide to take it public. If my ex wanted to be in the press and say negative shit about me, she could do it. And they’d eat it up. Page Six and TMZ would have a field day. But you’ve got to make a decision: Who ends up having to deal with that bullshit? The kid. In the end it would be Little Ice taking all the damage.
My wife’s been turning me into more of a family man than I’ve ever been. I fought it hard at first. When I first got with Coco, I was amazed by how tight she is with her family. She’s close with her brother and sister. Her parents are divorced, but they’re real cool. They have these regular family meetings to talk out issues. I never had any of that. Like I said, there just wasn’t much talking in my household in New Jersey. I never went to Christmas dinners. I always felt like I was an outsider. Over time, I started to enjoy being a loner and built that up as my protective shell.
But Coco recently got me sitting down at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with her family. I had such internal resistance to it all. Because when you’re a kid and you don’t have a tight family unit, you cancel it out. You tell yourself that you don’t want it or need it.
Fuck Thanksgiving—that shit’s stupid. Fuck Christmas, too. Fuck family. Matter of fact—fuck the world.
That was my attitude for years and years.
And I can’t lie: I still have mixed emotions. I like doing the family thing, but I also still hold on to my reluctance to be a part of one, to give up the image I have of myself as a lone wolf. The downside to families is the pain—you expect a lot out of them, and inevitably they let you down.
WHEN YOU GET NAMED ICE it’s because you seem to lack emotions. You seem cold to the world. But that coldness was never a negative attribute to me. The way I’ve always seen it is: Emotions don’t really get shit done.
The sooner you learn how to contain emotions and move past them, the sooner you can survive serious situations. When you’re in the military you’re not allowed to be emotional. You’ve just got to handle the task. If some shit goes wrong, deal with it. The attitude is not, Don’t cry over spilled milk. It’s, Don’t cry. Period. That’s just a wasted emotion. Same thing in the street; the hustler’s life isn’t any more emotional than a military dude.
When both of your parents die when you’re a kid, when most of your friends die before you’re twenty-one—getting killed in the gang wars, OD’ing on drugs—and the rest end up in prison, there’s a part of your personality that goes numb. It actually atrophies. For most of my adult life, deep emotions were foreign to me. They were nothing but a liability.
But the strange thing is, now that I’m over fifty I’ve been getting a lot more open to my feelings. I guess it just had to hit me at the right time. Like a door inside me had to be ready to open. You lose the self-absorption you felt as a young man. If there’s one thing I don’t believe in, it’s self-pity. These days, I care more about other people than I do about myself. I still have a pretty cold, detached attitude about my own life—my own daily dramas—but if you want to see me get real emotional, talk to me about the people I love.
PART SEVEN
PEACE AND WAR
“MY LIFE’S BEEN A GREAT STORY
IN THE ULTIMATE WAR
SHOULD I ILL OR DO RIGHT?
MAKE PEACE OR GO RAW?”
—“EXODUS”
15.
HIP-HOP SAVED MY LIFE. That’s no bullshit. It was hip-hop that got me out of that negative cycle I was living. If I’d stayed a hustler, I’ve got no doubt, I’d either be dead or in the pen like so many of my partners.
I was passionate about hip-hop when I first heard it. I remain passionate about it. But today’s hip-hop—let me try to be diplomatic—well, we say it “lacks soul.” It lacks content. It lacks lyrical depth. It lacks a lot of the elements that made hip-hop so great to us.
Since I’ve always been a motherfucker who speaks his mind, I’m not shy about telling. This got me into some media static a couple years back with the young rapper Soulja Boy. He was riding his hit “Superman” at the time and someone asked me what I thought of him. I called it like I saw it. To me his music was some kind of bubblegum rap, and during a studio session, I said he was “killing hip-hop.”
Looking back, the whole situation was unfortunate. I never meant my comments to be spread so widely or to be taken so seriously. I was in the studio and somebody was getting at me about Soulja Boy a
nd the newer cats in hip-hop. That’s like taunting a fighter. Talk shit to an old boxer and you’ll most likely hear: “Fuck him, I will bust his ass. I’ll rip his fuckin’ head off.”
There’s that same visceral response you get when you talk to an old-school rapper. When you’re part of the game, you’re intimately connected to it. For me, talking about hip-hop is practically like talking about my kids. The context of my comment was me saying, “Look, we’ve come all the way from Rakim, Public Enemy, and KRS-One and now—come on, man, nowadays y’all are bullshittin’. Man-the-fuck-up. This is wack.”
Then I told the young dude, “Eat a dick.” That’s just an L.A. term meaning “Kiss my ass” or “Shut the fuck up.” Nothing more than that. “Eat a dick, nigga.” It doesn’t mean suck my dick. It ain’t a literal invitation to perform fellatio. In L.A., you hear “eat a dick” every day.
My comments ended up on a mixtape, Soulja Boy heard them and went and made a YouTube video. He got personal. Looked me up on Wikipedia. Talking about how old I was and all this shit.
“Okay, dude,” I said, “you got angry but you decided to get a little bit fly.”
So I replied back with my son there—Little Ice is about the same age as the dude—and I tried to clarify my point. I apologized to him. I also told him, “I’m talking about your music, I don’t know you. But as a hip-hop G, I feel I have to stand on it.”
It touched a raw nerve. Cats throughout the rap world started taking sides. Kanye West jumped to the defense of Soulja Boy, but a gang of rappers like Snoop co-signed with me. The cats that knew me said, “Yeah, that’s what Ice and them niggas do! They don’t give a fuck! Them niggas been cursing motherfuckers out since day one.” But kids that didn’t know me thought I was coming off kind of harsh. Not just stating my opinion but stomping on the young homey.