Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  Aside from music, the only other thing I would love to have been was a boxer. A champion boxer. The only autograph I ever got off anyone was that of another boxer called Johnny Tapia – another of the best boxers that ever lived. His mum got killed – stabbed eleven times. He had such a hard life – he went into boxing because he had anger issues, and then he became world champion in the mid-90s. You would really have to know about boxing to know him. He ain’t like Anthony Joshua, getting OBEs from the Queen – he was a boxing fan’s boxer. I’ve only watched one Joshua fight, but I still watch Johnny Tapia’s fights now. He was the only person I’ve ever asked to sign an autograph.

  As I said before, around the time of making Blowback, I was in this hotel. Then 9/11 happened and I ended up staying and moving into this little ghetto place, with a girl. I said to her, ‘I’ve got no money, I need to come and live with you.’ She went, ‘Okay,’ and I went and moved all my stuff into her tiny ghetto apartment.

  I can move from right up at the top, and go right down to the bottom. I’ve got no problem with that. My life didn’t change. I was still going to all the clubs, but if I have to go and live rough, I would still be doing the same stuff. I would live out of my suitcase, as I always do anyway.

  This girl lived in a really ghetto area – a Hispanic gangbanging area, apparently, and I was the only black person there. One time, I saw a car going by, then it stopped, reversed, the window wound down, and the black driver, shouted, ‘Yo, homie, you live here? What’s that like?’ For me, ignorance was bliss: I was just living there. I had no idea that black people wouldn’t be living there. I didn’t think, ‘There ain’t no one who looks like me.’ My head doesn’t think like that. I don’t have that concept.

  From there, I eventually moved into my own place in Venice Beach – a very expensive apartment that cost $5,000 a month rent, but in a ghetto area. Dennis Hopper lived not far away, because it’s right there by the ocean, but it was kind of a black neighbourhood, and I guess it was a long way from gentrified at that point. It was five minutes good, five minutes ghetto, but the apartment was amazing, with this huge window you could open and have the sun coming in. I’d have people round there, and we would hang out in the sun, smoking weed. Good times!

  On the street outside, they used to call me Crazy Boy because I had a massive mohican, and after a while when they tried to start a conversation with me, it would be, ‘Yo! Give me work, man, give me work!’ They’d seen nice cars pulling up outside my place, and they obviously thought I was a drug dealer. I’d actually bought one of those brand-new BMWs myself – even though I didn’t have a licence – and that was always parked out front. I would try and tell these kids, ‘No, I’m a musician!’ but these young black kids didn’t have a clue who the fuck I was. Maybe I was being too paranoid, but I started thinking, ‘They don’t believe me, and I can’t give them work like they’re thinking – dodgy work – so it’s only a matter of time before they come in to get the work.’ The thing was, the apartment was a loft and there was only one entrance, so if someone broke in, there was no way out. Like, ‘If they come in here one day, what the fuck am I gonna do?’

  That’s how I got into buying guns. Over in LA, once you’ve been there for a while, you get so used to people you know packing, guns stop feeling like such a big deal to you. Even my manager at the time, a wonderful lady called Caresse Henry, had guns, as did her husband. She managed Madonna up to about 2004, and also took care of Ricky Martin, Joss Stone and Paula Abdul. She was a very successful lady, and she’d got into that whole gun culture, not to be badass, but because everybody had one. In 2010, I’m afraid she used one of them to shoot herself in the head – but back when I was around her, seeing my rich and respectable manager with two 9mms in her house, it was kind of inevitable that I’d start to think, ‘Well, I better get one as well.’

  I ended up with three guns – an Uzi, a pump-action, and a 9mm just under the bed. I wasn’t actually carrying anything outside of the house all the time, but sometimes I felt I had to take one with me, to be sure. I don’t want people reading this thinking I’m a gangster or a gunman or a bad man – I’m not. I used to carry a weapon just in case anyone had a problem with me.

  One time, I was out in this Chinese supermarket, where you could get Jamaican food – plantain, yam, stuff like that. I had an Uzi in my trousers, and the clip tucked in the other side of my trousers, but while I was walking around the supermarket, somehow the clip slipped down and came out of the bottom of the trouser leg, just as I got to the checkout. The Chinese woman behind the counter looked at the clip and carried on. Instead of just picking up the clip and tucking it back in, for some reason I decided to feed it back up through the inside of the trouser leg, which took ages, then I paid and left. The Chinese lady almost pretended she hadn’t seen, minding her own business and counting out my change.

  What’s funny is: with all the trouble in America with black people getting stopped and searched, in sixteen-odd years over there I only got stopped twice. I was driving for about eight months illegally, with no insurance, not registered, so it’s lucky I didn’t get stopped then. You would think it would have happened more, right?

  I’ve had some lucky breaks with cops in America. I had one of the guys from London Posse on one of my albums, this guy Bionic, so I flew him to New York. We were in this place called The Bank and a fight broke out. I’m fighting with this guy, and he’s fucked – he’s fighting the doorman, and me! We go through the exit fighting, and the guy is hitting both of us, and we’re hitting him, then he fell and smashed his head – blood everywhere. Suddenly loads of cops came in, and they pulled me to the side, and this guy is covered in blood, and I thought, ‘Oh dear, I’m arrested here!’

  This black officer comes over and looks at me.

  ‘Yo – Tricky, right?’

  This cop had a tongue ring, which was kind of weird for a New York cop.

  ‘Yeah?’ I reply.

  ‘Just go away,’ he says. ‘Go away!’

  Back in LA, I don’t know why, but I bought this BMW, and I’ve never had a licence. You’ve got to want to have a car to get a licence, and I never wanted one. People get scared when I drive, because I’ve got no sense of speed. One time, I crashed into a palm tree in LA, and broke my hand. I was doing about sixty miles an hour, and people thought I must be dead. Actually, that one wasn’t even my car, and we hadn’t got the insurance, so we had to get out of the car and run. We got into my apartment, and I had to put a bag of peas on my hand, because the knuckle was up here. I waited until the morning, then I called Cesar and said, ‘I broke my hand, take me to the hospital!’ Which he did.

  You really do need a car in LA, but in that period where I was driving, I was taking corners at ninety miles an hour – stupid, I have no sense. Cesar is a good guy, but he drives mad as well. He used to have this little black car – a Trans Am, I think. It was close to the ground and he used to drive like a fucking maniac. So really, he shouldn’t ever be complaining about my driving. I’ve had some very hairy times with him at the wheel.

  If I had problems over there, though, Cesar would come and handle it for me. He’s got some amazing stories, about his background, and some situations that happened to me that he remembers better than I do.

  CESAR ACEITUNO: When my friend Chani comes down from Atlanta to LA, we’ll usually party together. One Saturday in ’01 she gives me a call, and she wants me to meet somebody. I’m like, ‘Okay.’ I went over to this hotel, went up to the pool and saw Chani and her friend swimming topless, and all the other guests from the hotel were stripping down. I’m like, ‘Hmm, this is interesting!’

  That’s how I met Tricky, and we immediately connected, talking about boxing. I told him that two of my friends where I grew up in Sun Valley were the world boxing champions, Rafael and Gabriel Ruelas – Rafael eventually lost his title to Oscar de la Hoya, while Gabriel actually killed a Colombian fighter in the ring, in Vegas, which really screwed with his head. That night,
me, Tricky and the girls went out to the Standard Hotel, and after that me and him became kind of inseparable.

  I’m of Mexican and Guatemalan ethnicity, and when I was a teenager in the ’80s in Sun Valley, out in San Fernando Valley, there was a crack epidemic. LA was infested with gangs and violence, like in those movies, Colors and Scarface. Where I grew up there were a lot of football players that would meet in parks, but a lot of those turned into gangs because it was getting rough, and I was involved in one of those, the Vineland Boys. By the ’90s, organised crime was trying to tax all the gangs. Big gangs like 17th Street, which had 7,000 guys in it, said ‘no’ at first, but ended up paying. Vineland Boys was one of the two gangs that did not pay taxes for six years. That meant there was a green light, where if you went to jail, or they caught you on the street, all the other gangs would come after you.

  When one of our guys shot and killed a cop during a break-in, we were tagged by the police. In 2002, another cop got shot, and another paralysed, and the officer that died’s father was a big guy in the LAPD, so the Feds got involved, and came after our people. A lot of them had connections in Mexico, and were running in drugs, so there was a two-year investigation. In 2005, they launched Operation Silent Night, using 200 police officers, four helicopters, and a bunch of armoured trucks, and they took about 200 people. There were forty-seven guys charged: in a normal case, some would’ve got ten or twelve years, but they got life; others got double life; eighteen to twenty years was the standard for what they were giving out.

  In late 2018, they cracked down on the new-generation Vineland Boys that’s come up, and took in thirty-seven guys, but luckily I’m now pretty much a born-again good citizen! In the beginning when I met Tricky, I was in it, but he did get me on a different bat: when all that was going down in ’02 to ’05, me and Tricky were just partying our asses off, so I wasn’t hanging around with my guys as much. I lost a lot of them being killed or imprisoned, so it was a godsend meeting Tricky. Otherwise, I’d either be in prison, or I’d be dead. When my dad was saying thanks to him, though, Tricky was like, ‘What the fuck? Me taking care of him?’

  I was like Tricky’s protector over here. LA is very devious, deceptive. It’s nice and sunny with all the palm trees, very beautiful, but it’s a very dangerous place. Now it’s not as much as it was back then, but the element of danger has always been in the shadows, and it would come out a lot.

  After Le Parc Suite, Tricky lived in that Hispanic neighbourhood, then Venice Beach, but that was still quite a gang-infested area with the Venice Crips, and some Mexican gangs floating around too. When he moved there, it was just starting to get where people were building these beautiful apartments, but across the street they were still selling drugs. After his run-ins there, he moved to a place on Doheney and Sunset, right by the Strip, and that’s where he spent the majority of his time in LA. Towards the end, he moved into a beautiful building in mid-Wilshire – it was about eight or nine years that he was here.

  Tricky had a really hard upbringing, and I think his music career had been a bit of a mind-fuck, so we definitely had some fun out here! He did tell me that he thinks he kind of self-sabotaged his career – subconsciously did a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be beneficial – because he didn’t know if he could take the fame. He was stuck in a very surreal area – he had his family background, and then all that was going on with Martina and having a baby – it was pretty challenging I’m sure. Then he was living in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey with Mazy, so once he got out here to LA it was like he was ready to party.

  Most of the time we were in LA – Santa Monica and West Hollywood. We’d go to this upscale sushi bar on Sunset called Katana’s quite a lot, right across from the Mondrian Hotel, but we went to San Diego a couple of times, and San Francisco. We went there when we first met, to this party called The Wet Party at this arty hotel, the Phoenix hotel, which has a back courtyard with a pool – the best party you’ve ever been to, a great vibe, beautiful girls. People would fly from all over the world to be there. We’d go to Vegas too, but one time we got kicked out. We got banned from the Venetian Hotel – for life – for having two guns, a load of weed and a bag of sniff.

  In LA, we would be going out three or four times a week, to the best parties, with the most beautiful girls. It was a really good time. We were going to Oscar parties, and Grammy parties. The only thing I can recall from the Grammys is that I was really hammered, and I was driving Linda Perry, the songwriter. There was one time where we were dressed up in suits, and we were like, ‘Man, we look pretty good! We gotta keep these clean so we can use them again, right?’ We were drinking, we got to this club, and all of a sudden I’m on the floor fighting this guy – starting some shit with him on the floor, and before you know it both our suits are all torn up.

  There was a point where, just because we were going out drinking so much, we ended up in fights. We had problems with this Mexican gang, and it ended up on the tabloid news website, TMZ. This gang were with a pretty famous rapper, but something turned with him and they hit him up at this club called Joseph’s where all the celebrities would go on Monday night. There were about ten of them, and somehow it turned into a stand-off with us. I went to go get my gun in the car – I didn’t want to say, ‘We ain’t fucking going, fuck these motherfuckers!’ So we’re outside by a hotdog stand eating hotdogs, and these guys are just tripping out why we didn’t leave.

  A bit later, we were at this club in Hollywood with a French name, maybe Les Deux, with my friend Isaac. This big Mexican dude comes in and starts talking to Tricky, and all of a sudden, the guy socks Tricky – and I mean, hard. Tricky has a chin, because he didn’t go down. This guy was three times his size, probably 200 pounds. I ran over there – ‘Hey, motherfucker!’ – and I started fighting him, and suddenly we got jumped by maybe ten guys, against the three of us. Tricky hit this one guy with this big skull diamond ring he had, which cut the big dude’s face open. What we didn’t know was that they were filming it, and it ended up on TMZ. I was getting phone calls from friends in New York, saying, ‘Hey, we saw you fighting on fuckin’ TMZ!’

  Tricky loves talking about gang shit. We call him the Inspector Clouseau of crime. One time we were walking down the street, and he had his hand in his pocket, as he was carrying a taser, and he accidentally tasered himself! Total Clouseau!

  When he had that problem in Venice Beach, I gave him an Uzi and had him load it up with some gloves on – like, ‘Just keep this at your house, and if you go somewhere, it’s up to you if you take it or not.’ A week or two after that, we went to eat lunch in this really beautiful area called Sunset Plaza, and then his neighbour called, saying that a round went through the wall connecting his apartment with Tricky’s. We thought he might be joking, but we started heading back, then we saw all these cop cars blocking off the road. We just snuck through, and we were still joking, ‘Hey, that’s for us!’

  Literally, it was for us! We parked at his apartment, and we go up there. What happened was: the maid was there, and she’d brought her kid; he went through Tricky’s drawers, found the Uzi and shot a round through the wall. We actually became best friends with his neighbour afterwards, but the neighbour’s brother was there, and the round went really close to his head.

  We told the maid to leave, because we didn’t want her to get in trouble. We were waiting there, and the door was kind of open, so I said, ‘Hey, Tricks, go close the door!’ As soon as he closed the door, he said, ‘Hey, I see shadows when I look through the peephole.’ He opened the door a little bit, and all of a sudden, all these lasers were on him. The door was in an L-shaped hallway, so there were cops on the left, and cops on the right, and they told him to come out. He came out, and one on the right told him to go right, and another guy was telling him to turn round, so he started doing a dance, but then they were screaming at him, so he got on his knees.

  They grabbed me, handcuffed me, and took me outside, and they kept him inside. He called his lawyer, but
all these white cops who looked like total rednecks ended up being the nicest guys. They questioned us and we were like, ‘Hey, we weren’t even here!’ Then this black cop comes in, a motorcycle cop with a shotgun. They sent investigators to the restaurant to see if they could prove that we were there.

  Everything was cool in the end, and this white guy went, ‘Yeah, you know what, things happen – I almost shot my wife!’

  Like, ‘Shit happens!’

  ‘Yeah, doesn’t it!’

  That black cop was a nightmare, though. At one point, he came in, put his leg on the chair, put the shotgun across his knee, and went, ‘You guys are fucked!’ After that, the guy would just harass us, putting his hand like a pistol, acting like he was shooting us. Tricky said, ‘Man, this motherfucker is a psycho!’

  A few weeks afterwards, we bumped into this cop at a restaurant. He was all built, so Tricky was like, ‘Man, how come you are in such good shape?’ After that, the guy was Tricky’s best buddy, gives him his car: ‘If you need anything, I mean anything – like you need somebody to get beat up, arrested, whatever – you call me!’

  I took Tricky to shooting practice, because I’m a qualified instructor. The first time I took him, I had him shooting with a sniper rifle at 880 yards, which is half a mile, and he was hitting man-sized targets at that range on the first time out. He definitely does have a knack for it.

  For shooting, yes, but not for driving! I’ve never been so scared until I saw him drive, or try to drive. Because he has never driven, I don’t think he knows what the cars are capable, or not capable, of doing. He’ll try and do a turn at fifty miles an hour. If he ever says, ‘Oh, I’ll drive,’ be afraid. In LA, he always got around okay, because girls would drive him around. He’s gone out with some real beautiful girls, famous girls, and somehow they’d always be his chauffeurs, too. So he never really needed a car, which is pretty crazy in LA – especially back then, before Uber and Lyft.