I’d been doing the podcast circuit a few months when I got a message on Twitter that changed everything. It was from Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast is one of the biggest in the game. “My fans have been asking for you,” he said. Marc wanted to know if I’d come out to Highland Park, California, and do his show.
I was nervous as hell when I walked into Marc’s garage, where he records his podcast. I’d heard that Louis C.K. had cried during an interview with Marc, I was worried about what he was going to ask me. Then I looked around. The place was filled with books, coffee cups, weird little knickknacks, and framed photographs and drawings covering every wall. It’s hard to feel intimidated in a place that looks like the home-furnishing section at the Goodwill.
“This is nice,” I said, sitting down.
Marc asked me where I grew up and the next thing I knew I was telling him about Derrick, Mama, and Granddaddy’s bootleg house. I even told him about calling President Jimmy Carter the “N” word and giving him a cheeseburger for free. “I wonder if he remembers me,” I said to Marc.
“I would hope so,” he said. “If anything, for the free cheeseburger.”
When the podcast aired that October, I noticed Marc had recorded an introduction. He said that talking to me, “learning about what it means to grow up poor and black in America,” blew his mind.
I appreciate Marc so much for having me on as a guest. It helped me get a deal to write this book. But I don’t know if I want to be the poster child for growing up in the hood. Not everybody has it as bad as I did. Plenty of poor black girls don’t get knocked up by married-man predators, and not every kid has a mama who looks the other way. There are lots of poor folks who work hard and take care of their babies. There are teenage moms who make it out of the hood without ever selling drugs or dropping out of school. I just had the extra bad luck to be born into a family that had been beat down for so long, all that was left to our name was a bunch of hustlers and addicts. I had no one to show me the way.
I could easily have turned out different, ending up like my sister, or Butterfly, or all the other girls who I saw get lost to the streets. Instead, I feel like I was specially blessed. How else can I explain the angels who seemed to come out of nowhere when I needed them most?
Granddaddy and Curtis were the first angels who showed me love. But I was lucky, I had a whole crew. Miss Troup, my angel in badass leather boots, taught me to dream, Duck told me to act right, and Lamont opened my eyes to quality. Miss Munroe and Miss Campbell gave me good guidance and Hubert Hood watched over my kids. And through it all my children, my angel babies, made sure I never, ever, ever gave up.
Of all the angels I had looking out for me, Michael is the boss. He met me when I was struggling and scheming. But he saw the good in me and believed I could do better. He wrapped his arms around me and didn’t let me go.
People ask me all the time how I turned my life around. I used to think it was too complicated to answer without telling my whole life story. But now that I’ve laid it all out in black and white, I realize the answer is really pretty simple: I wanted to turn my life around, and what got me there was love.
Epilogue
December 26, 2013
The place I was looking for was in a part of Decatur, Georgia, I’d never been to before, in the kind of neighborhood I hadn’t driven through in more than a decade. There were houses with busted-out windows and run-down buildings with beat-up sofas and empty soda cans littering their weed-filled yards.
“We in the hood now,” I said to Nikia, who was riding with me, as we scanned the street.
We were looking for an address I’d put in my car’s GPS, searching for Sweetie’s second daughter, Diamond, who I hadn’t seen in years. Her older sister, LaDontay, had contacted me saying Diamond needed help, and asking could I go check on her. LaDontay didn’t call their mama; she called me.
“I don’t know about this,” I said to Nikia.
“Everybody deserves a chance,” he said.
We found Diamond in an upstairs apartment that smelled like dog piss, dirty feet, and weed. Dressed in faded pink sweatpants and with nappy hair, she was standing in the middle of the living room looking dazed. Peeking out from behind her legs was her six-year-old son, Jamal, dressed in a thin windbreaker and winter boots several sizes too large. His younger sisters, aged two and four, clung to Jamal’s bony frame. Cradled in Diamond’s arms, wrapped in a hospital blanket, was her two-week-old baby girl.
Diamond told me she had been waiting on her child’s father to come get her. “But he got locked up,” she said. Now the people she was staying with—her boyfriend’s cousin’s family—wanted her out.
A woman shuffled into the living room and pulled me aside: “Real talk, that nigga she waiting on ain’t never gettin’ out. She needs to get up outta here and go.”
I hadn’t seen Diamond since before Michael and I moved to Indiana, before her son was born. I didn’t know what hardships she’d faced or what choices she’d made or which road she’d traveled down that led her to this particular corner of hell. All I knew is she’d hit rock bottom, and now the bottom was falling out.
I reached out my hand for her little boy and told Diamond to gather up her things. As we carried her one suitcase and a trash bag of possessions to the car, I started rehearsing in my head how I was gonna tell Michael that I was bringing home five more mouths to feed.
Diamond came to live with us in Indiana. I took her to a dentist, who pulled out sixteen of her teeth because they were rotting in her head. And I arranged for her to get some glasses because she could barely see. I helped her get day care for her girls and enroll Jamal in school. One night before bed, I heard him explain to his little sisters in a serious tone, “At Auntie Pat’s we get to eat every single day.”
Diamond got herself a job working the night shift at a bakery, cleaning the giant machines where they make the bread. Then, two years after I’d picked her up in that shit hole of an apartment out in Decatur, she’d saved up enough money to move herself and her kids into their very own place. I was so proud. I told her every day, “Girl, you work hard you can turn your life around!” Michael and I even cosigned so she could get herself a car.
A few months later, she crashed it.
Then she fell behind in her day-care bill and stopped paying her rent. She didn’t tell me any of this. Instead, she just disappeared.
I don’t know exactly where she is now. I saw a picture of her on Facebook a few weeks ago. She was in the backseat of a car, her head rolled to the side, her eyes barely open, wearing a bright blond wig and the glasses I’d gotten her. I guess whatever demon she’s fighting won this battle. But I’m not giving up on Diamond. I raised that girl for ten years. I know she can find her way back.
In the meantime, her kids are living with me and Michael in the suburbs. Michaela and Junebug watch over them after school and Michael reads to them every night.
“I love you, babies,” I said this morning while getting them dressed for school. “And I want you to know something important. No matter what kind of hard times you face, remember you can do anything and be anything you want in life.”
I pulled them to me and held them close, my mind thinking back to all the angels who’d kept me safe, given me hope, and helped me find my way. “Remember,” I whispered, “All you have to do is dream.”
How This Book Came to Be
I first heard Ms. Pat when she was a guest on Ari Shaffir’s Skeptic Tank podcast in June 2014. I remember walking my dog and listening to Pat’s nonstop laughter as she described becoming a mother, selling crack, and getting shot in the head, all before her seventeenth birthday.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard details like this. For twenty years I’ve worked as a journalist. I’ve interviewed drug dealers, hustlers, and young girls who’ve been beaten, shot at, and impregnated by men almost twice their age. But never have I talked to someone who embodied all these issues at once.
A few nights later
I went to see Pat perform at Union Hall, a little club near where I live in Brooklyn. I brought my friend Sharon along. After the show Sharon ran up to Pat and exclaimed, “Your story’s crazy. You should write a book!”
Pat said, “I’ve always wanted to, but I’m not a writer.”
Sharon pulled me over: “She can help you write your book.”
A few weeks later I called Pat. We ended up talking for hours. Pat’s journey from illegal liquor house to the suburbs of Indianapolis isn’t just incredible. It’s also the type of story too few people get to hear. Popular culture has given us plenty of depictions of boys in the hood. But what about the girls? What do most people know about the challenges of being poor, black, and female? Not much. Instead, young black mothers living in poverty are often described as “irresponsible” and “lazy.” I’ve even heard them called “animals.” It pains me to hear young women so callously dismissed by people who don’t know their lives. I could see in Pat a unique opportunity to help bring one of these stories to light. By the end of our conversation, I’d committed to helping her write this book.
I assumed we’d collaborate the way most subjects and writers do: I’d interview Pat, get all the details, and put the story together in a way that makes sense on the page. But Pat is one of those people blessed with an extraordinary memory. When I asked her to describe her grandfather’s liquor house, she could recall every detail right down to the pattern on the faded bedsheets hanging in the windows. This would have been a great advantage had Pat’s life been less eventful. Instead, often I’d pose a simple question like, “What color did you paint your Cadillac?” Forty-five minutes later I’d find myself stunned by some new revelation Pat had casually tossed into the conversation.
Every moment of Pat’s life is a movie unto itself, and she remembers it all in vivid detail. Deciding which anecdotes not to include became one of the greatest challenges of this book. In the end, I focused on telling the story Pat most wanted to share, about how she made it out of the hood and turned her life around when all the chips were stacked against her. I hope I did her journey justice.
During the more than two years we spent working on this book, I spoke to almost a dozen people from Pat’s life, including “Duck,” “Stephanie,” and her siblings “Dre” and “Sweetie.” I interviewed Pat’s caseworker “Miss Campbell,” and managed to locate the criminal lawyer who defended her more than two decades ago. I tracked down “Hubert” Hood, whom Pat hadn’t spoken to in years, and talked to Pat’s cousin “Tata,” her children, and her husband, Michael.
Sometimes the interviews were scheduled in advance; other times the conversations would happen spontaneously, when I least expected it. Pat would be in the middle of a story, and I’d ask a question about the particulars of selling crack. The next thing I knew she’d tell me to hang on and suddenly some guy she used to buy crack from would be on the line.
“This the lady writing my book,” she’d say by way of introduction. And then to me, “Go ahead, ask your question.”
The conversations didn’t always go smoothly. Occasionally I’d ask for clarification only to be met with an uncomfortable silence. In those instances, Pat would intervene with her magic words, “It’s okay, you can talk to her. She’s black. She just sounds white.”
I studied Pat’s criminal history record, called courthouses and county jails. I researched the progress of crack through inner cities in the late eighties and nineties, and the war on drugs waged by the nation in general and the Atlanta Police Department in particular. I studied the history of the city’s housing projects and the horrific Atlanta Child Murders. I discovered that one of the victims, Curtis Walker, was Pat’s second cousin.
Of course there were stories Pat told me for which I had to rely solely on her telling, but for everything I checked and cross-checked, not once did I find an inconsistency. In fact, when Pat shared her experiences of something that had been reported in the news—for instance, the Miami Boys’ infiltration of Atlanta housing projects in the late 1980s—her recollections aligned, right down to the little details, with decades-old newspaper accounts I was able to dig up.
Everybody loves Pat’s story. I’ve heard her on countless podcasts with hosts who marvel both at the hellish world in which she was raised and her determination to get out. But here’s the thing, as shocking as the details of Pat’s life are, the circumstances that led her to sell crack to survive are not all that unique. A few months into writing this book I took a break to work on another assignment, which involved my interviewing economically disadvantaged teen mothers around the country. I spoke with scores of girls who, neglected or abandoned by their own parents, were impregnated by much older men. I learned of young mothers so poor they were living with their infant children in homes with no heat or running water in the middle of winter. I interviewed girls whose greatest challenge was finding diaper money even as they dreamed of a better life for their kids. If you think Pat’s story couldn’t happen today, you’re wrong. It’s happening still.
There is a myth in this country that the way out of poverty is to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” that by sheer force of will one can change the course of one’s life, no matter how great the obstacles. But in all my years reporting, I’ve never once spoken to someone who came from abject poverty and transcended that path without help. Pat talks about how badly she wanted to change her life, but she couldn’t have made that dream a reality without the compassion and care she received from Miss Troup, “Hubert” Hood, “Lamont,” and, of course, “Michael.” She couldn’t have done it without public assistance and the support provided by her caseworkers “Miss Campbell” and “Miss Munroe.” Pat wanted to share her journey to inspire people to get over their own hardships. But the more we talked, the more clear it became: Pat’s story is greater than a tale of one woman rising above her own harrowing circumstances. It’s a testament to the transformative power of love.
—Jeannine
Acknowledgments
From Ms. Pat
To my fans, thank you for all your support. It means everything to me. For years I wanted to tell my story but I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to relate to the things I’ve gone through in my life. But the more I talked, the more you guys supported me. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and encourage you to tell your stories and laugh when you feel like crying.
Thank you to my husband, Garrett, for being by my side when everyone else left me. I thank God every day for answering my prayers and sending you my way. God blessed me with everything I asked for in a man: you’re good looking, smart, a good provider, and you have all your back teeth.
Thank you to my wonderful kids who gave me the will to survive: Ashley, thank you for never judging me and understanding that we were growing together. Thanks to my second-born child, Nikia: you have one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve ever met. Also thank you for blessing me with three beautiful grandchildren. Thank you, Garrianna, for always making me laugh. And to my last-born, Garrett Jr., thank you for going undetected for six months so my only choice was to have you. You were ten pounds of joy! Kids are supposed to make parents proud. Thank you all for always telling me how proud you guys are of me.
Thank you to my cousin Boo. I’m sorry for the things I exposed you to at such a young age. I wanted to provide a better life for you and ended up keeping you from living a normal childhood. If I could give you back the childhood you deserved, I would. I hope one day you find the strength to forgive me and know I love you.
Thank you Ant, Tony, and Bo for being the best big brothers I could ever ask for (now that we’re grown!). And to my sister, Maypop, I know you won’t be able to read this because it’s in proper English. I’m just kidding! I’m sorry for what we had to go through as kids. You know I love you.
Thank you to Jasper Hood for keeping my kids safe and keeping your business open a little bit longer so they could stay warm. You were like a father figure to me when I needed one the most. Tha
nk you Miss Chambers for laughing so damn hard when you were my welfare caseworker and for being the mother figure I never had. And thank you, Miss Troup: you showed me kindness at a time in my life when no one else cared. Rest in peace.
To my girlfriends Melodie and Lisa: for thirty years you’ve both been there when I needed you, giving me good advice even when I was too stubborn to take it and making me laugh when I thought all I could do was cry. Thank you, Tracy, for accepting me for who I am, even though I’m a girl from the hood and you have five degrees. And Ms. Jeanne, thank you for opening up your life and letting my crazy ass into it. Friendship is the most pure and honest form of love. Thank you all.
To my loving manager, John, who came into my life like a stepdaddy and turned my career around. Thank you for being so damn honest with me, and not leaving me when I didn’t pay you. Thank you for always respecting me, never judging me, keeping me calm, and teaching me to be patient.
Thank you to my podcast family for helping me get my stories out there: Eddie Ifft, Joey Diaz, Bert Kreischer, Ryan Sickler, Jay Larson, Joe Rogan, Tom Segura, Christina Pazsitzky, Moshe Kasher, and Neal Brennan. To Marc Maron, thank you for inviting me onto your podcast and allowing an E-list celebrity to tell her story. And to Ari Shaffir, you seemed like an asshole when I first met you, but as I got to know you I realized you were just a dick, and I like dick.
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