by CeeLo Green
Back then, my behavior seemed natural to me, almost involuntary, truly elementary. And it was all about having the power. If you could ask almost anyone if they had a superpower, say the power to be invisible, and what they would do with it, probably the first thing they would tell you would be something criminal. “Oh, I’d rob a bank.” I never got around to robbing banks, but I did a lot of bad things with my power.
Early on in the inner city, you tend to become part of your surroundings. It was a lifestyle. And not everyone wants to be the star of that show. But I wanted to be something, and I wasn’t afraid to take the bumps and the bruises to become it. I can quote Will Smith, who said that his initial attraction toward acting was because “I wanted to be somebody. In matter of fact, I wanted to be somebody else.”
That was me too. But I wasn’t acting.
Based on my own early experiences in the streets and trains of Atlanta, crime can pay and pay pretty well sometimes. But eventually it’s going to end up costing you too. Did I ever get caught stealing? Hell, yes, I got caught sometimes, although I was never locked up for long. A couple of times I got banned from the mall for my antisocial behavior. Once when I was in seventh or eighth grade the police picked me up for stealing some sneakers and delivered me to my mother at her bridal shop. Man, she started whipping me so hard the police had to break it up. I guess they figured it would be more punishment to leave me with her than to haul my ass to jail.
Mom didn’t believe in sparing the rod, and she had a belt at home with my name on it. She knew I was getting into trouble, and from an early age she would chase me around with that belt. Sometimes I’d try to lock myself in Shedonna’s room, but it was no use. She’d always get me. But the beatings didn’t do any good. In the end it was me who decided to roll back my life of crime. Or at least try.
As you get older and move further up the crime food chain, you begin to question yourself, because the rush you feel becomes less even as the stakes get higher. For me, my criminal path was leading to some truly dangerous shit. We’d have these big outside fights—like the Valley Boys and the Pony Boys would meet in a big park, and just fight it out like boys sometimes do—gang crap on a grand scale like in that movie The Warriors. The way that I remember it, guns came in with the drugs and the big eighties crack epidemic. And then typically you had a gun because you assumed someone else there would have a gun too. That’s a recipe for disaster. That’s how it became a kind of arms war right in the streets. Actually, it was like an arms war all mixed up with a black fashion show. Of course, leave it to the urban community to make just about anything about fashion. So for instance, I remember you had to hold your gun sideways, because that was fashionable. I don’t understand why we do that, but we do and with a lot of style.
Word tends to spread quickly in the streets—especially when you’re a really strange-looking kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere and fights every chance he gets. I was hanging with some heavy characters, much older than me, and I was starting to realize that I needed to stop myself from becoming some random crime statistic. And eventually my rep was so bad that I was pulled right out of the Atlanta public school system and told to go somewhere else—anywhere else. So where else does a kid who is trouble end up? That’s right. If it’s not jail, it’s military school. And so I—the Thug Formerly Known as Chickenhead—somehow ended up entering the ninth grade at the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia.
Big Gipp: Atlanta called itself the City Too Busy to Hate, and that’s true enough. But the Dirty South has its dark side. Everything that seemed clean, it was not what it appeared to be. If you knew the right people you could do anything you wanted. There were people who got money on one side of the street, people without money on the other. But we saw that people from both sides dibbled and dabbled in the underworld. From the police to the mayor to everybody. That’s why it’s called the Dirty South.
Along with the magnolia trees in Atlanta there’s a history of thug life and enough prisons and jails to hold our bad guys and take the spillover from other states. Rice Street for the locals. Metro for the bad youth. Jackson for the grown-ups. And the Federal Pen right downtown for all the notorious criminals, political and otherwise. Marcus Garvey served time there, and so did Al Capone and some more recent mobsters from the Lucchese family. Cubans from the boatlift tried to burn the place down in the eighties. The eighties was a decade when Atlanta’s kids grew up fast. And let’s not forget, when we all were busy getting grown, Atlanta was not just our home—it was also home to the Atlanta Child Murders, which scared both whites and blacks who wanted their kids in by dark. The whole city was terrified.
Things calmed down a bit after they locked up Wayne Williams—the man and the myth. But then the whole game changed around 1984 to 1985 when I was going to middle school. That’s when drugs first started really hitting the streets in Atlanta. Suddenly, the ghetto kids were showing up to school with better clothes than we had, and they always had lots of money stuffed in their pockets. We asked ourselves, what are these kids doing? They come from bad homes, but they have designer clothes and they’re presenting better for the girls than we are. All of a sudden kids in eighth grade were showing up to school in cars—kids like Rico Wade, who went on to become the leader of Organized Noize. Rico drove his own car to middle school even though he wasn’t old enough to drive then.
There were so many kids from rich families being drawn into trouble and then into crime. We all mixed it up in the streets. You had kids like Maynard Jackson’s children who were known to fight and get in trouble. Andrew Young—his kid Bo Young, he stayed in trouble. Our friends were always a mix of kids who had and those who didn’t have. The street element was so strong then it drew us all in. The lure of the street was so strong then that it was like playing football—the biggest game in town.
I had already started turning myself around a little bit. During the summer between eighth and ninth grades I took a good job on a construction crew, building some of those houses that were popping up all over Atlanta. I was making $9 and $10 an hour, which was exceptionally good money for someone that young. Now anything I wanted, shoes and starter jackets, I’d do it out of pocket. It felt good. I liked that feeling of independence. Amazingly, it was my idea to go to military school, and even more amazingly, I loved the joint. The Riverside Academy was an hour and some change north of Atlanta. But for me, this new place was a few worlds away from the streets where I had been so successfully wreaking havoc. The campus looked like an old-fashioned fortress with ramparts, high up on a hill. Cadets were marching around the parade ground in blue uniforms and garrison caps—I felt like I had landed in military Oz. They say that young people actually want rules, and I think that’s true—even if some kids like me still take pleasure in then breaking those rules. I loved the attention, and all these new authority figures who seemed to care what I did. I went to the Riverside Academy’s website the other day, and on the front page it reads “Focused Learners, Cultivated Leaders, Dedicated Brothers.” Well, at least I was one very dedicated brother.
Even though military school made a better man of me, the place definitely did not make me an ideal, follow-orders kind of soldier. Now, I didn’t mind wearing the uniforms. As you may have noticed, dressing up is one of my great pleasures, and I like that martial style. But there were other aspects of the experience that I did not adopt so easily. Like inspections. Inspection was when you stood by your bed in the barracks in the morning and evening and checked your shoes and your bed and your medals and stuff to make sure everything was clean and orderly. Then you would march by battalion up to meals in the mess hall. I can reveal this now because I’m out of the school and they can’t discipline me, but I used to grab an extra blanket and sleep on top of it so I could just jump up in the morning and go. I never changed my bed or sheets or anything.
I also confess that my first experience with actual psychedelics was when I dropped acid with some other cadets a few months after I arriv
ed at the academy. I have never been the type to do things in the right order—so somehow I ended up taking my first hit of acid before I even smoked a joint.
For the record, here’s how it happened: I had a great friend at Riverside named Doberman who was one tough-ass white boy from Florida. Still, right from the start, Doberman was down with me. I figured out that Doberman was my friend when this other guy at school was fighting me and trying to hit me with his rifle, and unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a rifle with which to hit him back. That’s when I heard my new buddy Doberman say, “Hold everything right now. Wait one minute.” I figured that Doberman was going to kick his ass for me. But instead of taking this kid’s rifle away from him, Doberman gave me his own rifle and said, “Okay, now you two guys go for it.” That was Doberman—very tough, but very, very fair.
There was another time when one of Doberman’s cousins sent him some acid and he generously wanted to share. And why not, since we were brothers in arms, even though only I was technically a brother? I remember that back then the acid came in those funny little tabs with little images of Snoopy or Charlie Brown on them that made it look kind of cute and harmless. Clearly, I was a kid with extremely shaky judgment, so of course, I made a bad choice and took the acid. Kids, remember, never give in to peer pressure.
I thought I had picked the timing of this trip carefully. I thought wrong. After classes at Riverside, there were athletics—which could mean anything from playing football to doing fucking archery—which was not my thing even though some people might think I look a little bit like Cupid. After I came back from football that day, I got dressed in my uniform and decided to drop the acid right after passing evening inspection. I was thinking that the chemical reaction might make dinner more interesting or possibly even taste a little better.
For whatever reason, the acid didn’t kick in until later, much later. After dinner, if you failed a class that week, you had to go to study hall—otherwise you could just be free to study in your room. Well, I had failed something that week, so I had to go to study hall. I sat there in study hall that night just waiting for the acid to kick in and make that experience more exciting. Still nothing. When I came back to my room after that, it was almost time for taps. Then phooomph! The barracks lights switched out for the night.
I still remember lying in bed in the darkness and telling my friends, “This shit is not working. It just must not work on black people.” By now I began to think my trip had been cancelled, so I decided to say my nightly prayers. Growing up—and even now when I don’t forget—I’m still big on saying my nightly prayers. So I closed my eyes to pray… and that’s when the acid hit me. Hard. I started seeing things—big white dots and crazy colors and shapes. I screamed, “It’s working! It’s working!”
I’m sure everybody was so happy that I was tripping too, but they weren’t saying anything, because we had to be really quiet. Which only freaked me out more. But they were all used to the insanity because, after all, they were a bunch of crazy white boys.
Okay, they weren’t all crazy white boys. I also had a friend named Ayala from some exotic country. That night Ayala got high with us and snuck into our room—which was popular because I had this ghetto blaster boom box with eight-inch woofers all across the bottom and two tape decks in the corner. That boom box was massive and had great blinking lights all around the woofers. (I just know that boom box is in some Korean flea market right now and I want it back. Years later, I think I saw that same model—it might have been in the “Music” video by Madonna. I forgot to ask her about that at the Super Bowl. Maybe next time.)
So we locked the door behind Ayala and were all just sitting and staring at that blinking boom box. Then Ayala started having a bad trip and went back to his room to lie down. A few minutes later he came back and started kicking on the door shouting over and over that a green man was trying to get him. We opened the door, but thankfully, that green man was nowhere to be seen. When it became clear that poor Ayala was tripping even more than I was, that somehow that brought me back to Planet Earth and under control a little. I didn’t want to see a friend being that scared. I also really didn’t want to us all to get kicked out of school or court-martialed or killed—all of which always seemed like distinct possibilities when you’re attending military school.
I looked into Ayala’s eyes and tried to calm him down. I said, “Yo, what are you talking about green men? There’s no green men here.” But there was not any reasoning with Ayala at that point. So then I went the other way, and tried to quiet him down with a little brute military force. I said to Ayala, “If you don’t shut the fuck up about this green man shit, I swear I’m going to hit you.” Ayala took a deep breath and considered my threat for a moment. Then he looked at me and screamed, “Better you than the green man!” In his own trippy way, Ayala made an excellent point.
In every way, military school was a true education for me. Even though I’d known a lot of white kids, I’d never learned to live with them before, and I definitely loved this close brush with cultural diversity. They say it takes all kinds, and I like all kinds. I was going to class and doing pretty good. But this episode in my life had to end prematurely. I didn’t realize until after I got to the school what a big expense it was for my mom to try to keep me there. It didn’t take long before it hit me that she could only afford the one year, and even that was pushing things. But like a lot of those tough decisions that life makes for you, this is one that worked out for the best eventually.
I called my mom toward the end of the school year and told her, “Ma, I’ve got to come home.” It wasn’t just the money. I realized that my problem wasn’t learning to behave at military school. My problem was behaving in my natural environment, in Atlanta, where the good guys weren’t the only ones with guns. So I told my mother, “If I don’t solve my problems back home, then they won’t be solved at all.” In retrospect, I think that was something pretty profound for a thirteen-year-old to say.
Like her son, my mom was a beautiful and strange bundle of contradictions. She was like both a father and an uncle. She could be really liberal, and sometimes a little absentee, but at the same time she was very tough too. My mother gave me enough credit to make up my own mind and enough freedom that I could have ended up getting myself killed. But on some deeper level that neither of us ever totally understood, she always seemed to trust me to make the right decision… eventually.
I think she just prayed that she’d still be around to see me make a man of myself.
CHAPTER THREE
The Very Fresh Prince of the Dirty South
I don’t recall, ever graduatin’ at all
Sometimes I feel I’m just a disappointment to y’all…
… I admit, I’ve done some dumb shit
And I’m probably gon do some mo’
You shouldn’t hold that against me though (Why not?)
Why not? My music’s all that I got
But some time must be ingested for this to be manifested.
—OutKast featuring Goodie Mob,
“Git Up, Git Out”
IN MY ROOM
Dig the expression on my face and the posters on the wall.
It all screams teen attitude.
When I came back home to Atlanta from military school at age thirteen, I stopped following orders entirely and started to freely pursue my own passions. And there was no shortage other new passions to pursue. For instance, having left an all-boys school, there were lots of girls to notice.
From an age that would shock many of you, I have loved women. Right from the start, being with a woman rubbed me the right way. Here’s what I learned early—and continue to be reminded of often to this very day—there is nothing like the touch or the scent of a woman.
My first sexual experience was very, very early and with a much older woman. Today, she might be thrown in jail, but trust me, I would never be the one to press charges. See, one thing that you should know about me is that I always hav
e admired older things. Older cars. Older singers. Older music. And yes, I always admired older women too.
I know it’s rude to blow my own horn, but the truth is that I always had game with women because there was one thing that I could always do that woman loved—and that’s talk. In my experience, the gift of gab will help you get a lot of great rides—with both fast cars and fast women too. That very first experience was with one of my mom’s friends. How old was I at the time? Let me just put it this way—I was just a boy, but in her defense, I was already acting like some strange kind of man-child, wearing suits and carrying around that pipe of my dad’s. So from an early age, I acted and behaved like a much older person, like an older man. To play amateur psychiatrist, I suppose I was dressing for a part that no one else was playing—the man of the house who wasn’t anywhere to be found.
According to the textbooks, there is a clinical term that my mother was once diagnosed me with called pseudomaturity or some shit like that. It’s a very real condition that causes young people to act like they are much older than they are. I was never tested for this condition, but I’m pretty sure I had a serious case of it anyway. It may explain why I grew up trying to charm the pants off my momma’s friends. When I think back to the day, I remind myself of the smart hustling little boy in the movie Fresh who was always running the bags. If you’ve never seen that movie, then you must see it because I grew up a lot like that, only my unlikely story came to pass in the Dirty South and not Brooklyn. Actually, I was even more of a mix between that kid in Fresh and Damien from The Omen. I don’t mean to say that I was demonic—Damien clearly had me beat in the pure evil category. But I always related to Damien in terms of understanding a lot at a very early age—and of course being devilishly charming.