How to Get Out of Your Own Way Read online

  As a kid, you just want to belong, and that’s what the gangs prey on. Like a drug, they hook you when you’re young, and never let you go.

  When you’re in the hood and you don’t have family or even if you do have family, you can sometimes feel alone, very vulnerable, and unprotected. But when you’re in a gang, you feel like everybody’s got each other’s backs, that you’re a part of something. The streets are your family. You don’t have to run around by yourself anymore, you’ve got somebody to talk to, somebody to laugh with. I couldn’t talk to my mama and my daddy wasn’t there. I would unload on my boys and we’d swap ghetto stories about our never-ending family dramas. In a gang, you’ve got homeys to run the streets with and get into some trouble with. Everybody protects each other.

  Although most dudes in the hood are making bad choices—shooting, killing, banging, dope slinging—it’s consistent that everybody loves Jesus and has a relationship with God. They may not exercise it and go to church every Sunday, but they pray and ask God for protection while they’re out there doing stupid shit. I realized this, even as a youngsta. In the hood, on every Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s we’d see all the thugs in their best suits, going to church to praise God. Contrary to what you see in the news, every thug loves Jesus.

  I wasn’t too young to join the gang—kids younger than me were already banging. There are accidental gangbangers and guys who are determined to gangbang. I would have become an accidental gangsta had an OG—that’s “original gangsta”—named Dirtbike Fred not kicked me in my ass and told me to get out of there. We’d throw up gang signs and do the Crip walk and try to hang out with them, but Fred wasn’t having it. Every time he caught us trying to hang he would literally kick us in our asses. He’d tell us, This is what we do, y’all need to get the fuck out of here, go play sports, football, basketball. He wanted us to do anything that was different than what he and his homeys were doing.

  Fred was trying to keep us out of the gangs. He didn’t do it out of respect for our parents, he just did it out of respect for us. Fred had to be about forty. Now that I’m older I realize he probably knew that when you’re young and trying to figure out who and what you want to be, you can be easily influenced by the glam, all the nice cars, and other stuff gangstas were buying with the drug money they were making, whether it was by hook or crook. I could have banged whether Dirtbike Fred wanted us to do it or not, and a lot of my friends ended up doing it anyway.

  I never sold drugs but I was that guy hustling all across the board. If you didn’t grow up in the hood, let me explain something to you: When you’re broke and hungry, you’ve got to have hustle in order to survive. A hustle can take many forms, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It’s just about trying to make something out of nothing any way you can. Being broke and hungry can motivate you to do a lot of shit.

  When I was about ten, I started hustling for coins in a supermarket parking lot in Southgate, which was about five miles from our house. The supermarket wanted people to return its shopping carts because so many people would steal them, so they gave their shoppers a quarter to put the carts back. On a good night, shoppers at the local store would allow a starving kid to return their cart and get their twenty-five cents for the task. But on most nights people just looked the other way, thinking that I was some punk out to rip them off, or worse. There is nothing more humiliating in life than being a ten-year-old kid, and having strangers tell you “no” over a quarter. That’s pretty much as humiliating as it gets. On the bad nights, I didn’t take the bus home or eat anything at all. I walked back to Watts and went to sleep hungry.

  I did anything I could to get money. Any odd job you could think of, I probably worked it. I begged at the gas station, waiting to ask people to pump their gas. I cut grass, I did landscaping. I would clean the drug man’s crib and wash his car, anything so he would give me some money. I was just hungry.

  We had a neighbor who always seemed to have change in his car. Every time he pulled up to his house my brother, my boy Porky, and I had a competition to see who could open the small gates of his driveway. This guy would give us whatever change he had—seven or ten or thirty-five cents—and we’d wait for the ice cream truck to spend the money he gave us. With whatever change I had left after I bought food for myself, it all went to candy—I used to love to eat sunflower seeds, Chick-O-Stix, Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans, Strawberry Shortcake ice cream bars, Pink Panther ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, and Red Vines.

  When I was about ten I worked on an ice cream truck for a family-owned business. I rode around with an African woman, helping her sell ice cream; her husband drove one truck and had one or two of their kids with him and she had another couple of kids and me. I figured out what I thought was a creative way to steal money and the balloons they gave out to kids: I just put it all in my pockets. I thought I was being all slick, but one day she saw me through the rearview mirror. She pulled over the truck and in her thick accent she said, “Ty-dese, you steal my money! What is in your pocket?” She made me pull out the insides of my pockets and all the money fell out along with the balloons. There were so many—red, white, blue, yellow, green, and pink balloons—all over the ground so I could barely see my feet. She fired me on the spot and cursed me out while she drove me home. Before I got off the truck, I turned around and asked, “Do you mind if I have those balloons?” She yelled, “No! Get off my truck!” And I walked up to my house empty-handed.

  In my early teens I did a whole lot of stealing. I stole clothing off clothing lines so I could have a fresh T-shirt, underwear, jeans, and socks. Every other night we would go five, six or seven yards over and just hop over the fence. My homeys and I jacked some Mexicans for their bikes. We used to go to Southgate, and we’d see a Mexican on his bike and just beat him up and ride back on his bike. We got caught a few times and ended up on probation.

  My boys and I were just rough—with our bikes or whatever toys we had. We had one bike and would ride around on it for months. We would mess up a bike so bad that both tires would go flat and since we couldn’t afford new ones, we’d just ride around on the rims and our hands would go numb from holding on to the vibrating handlebars. We would push each other in shopping carts from the shopping center, wilding out and having fun. We did anything to have fun in the midst of a crazy situation. That’s why they say, It’s all good in the hood, baby.

  In 1992, the news of the acquittal of the four officers who had beaten Rodney King enraged everybody, and they sparked the LA Riots. I was only thirteen, but I had seen on television that everyone in the hood was out looting so I went out with the rest of them, stealing shit out of swap meets and stores—I was popping. For two days I went around with my boys in a big hatchback truck. Buildings everywhere were on fire, and it was so hot that we could feel the heat off the buildings as we drove by. I was afraid the whole time we were doing it—the scene was nuts. My heart was beating hard but I stayed out because it was a free-for-all. At one point, we went into a grocery store and because of the fires, the sprinkler system had left about three feet of water on the floor, so we had to step through the large puddles as we collected some food. The riots and looting weren’t just about Rodney King. They were about ongoing racism that had been brewing for years and finally reached a tipping point and exploded on the streets of South Central LA. Mexicans were fighting with the blacks, and any white or Asian person was a target. We went to places the Asians owned, like the swap meets. They were spray-painting “Black-owned business” across their storefronts because they thought it would stop people from looting and burning down their stores, but they got looted anyway because anyone who lived in the hood knew exactly which stores had black owners. The news started reporting that the National Guard was shooting at people with dummy bullets and my moms didn’t let us go out after that.

  Years later when I was in high school, O. J. Simpson was acquitted for his wife’s death. That trial was on television all day every day, and as soon
as they announced the verdict my boys and a few of my homegirls went down the streets screaming because a black guy had been let off. We had all thought that if he didn’t get acquitted it would all go down again in the hood, that there would be more riots. Everybody knew that the verdict was coming in so police were everywhere wearing their riot gear. They were prepared to deal with everything just in case people started looting. But we all know nothing happened because white folks weren’t going to start burning down Beverly Hills. At the end of the day, most of the blacks and Latinos who were rooting for O.J. to get off weren’t really paying attention to the facts or what was being reported. We just all felt that this was another black man who was wrongly accused, because we were always being accused. So we wanted to celebrate his acquittal.

  Living in the hood, I still had a lot of fun. We had to make the best of a bad situation and environment and that’s what we did. We had the time of our lives—willying our bikes in the streets, football and basketball games, playing baseball in the park, going to the mall, to the swap meet, running track, having water balloon fights, riding on the backs of ice cream trucks, swimming at Will Rogers Park and in Jacuzzis and swimming pools around the hood, hitting talent shows at the park, flirting, having fun with girls. One of my favorite childhood games with my boys and girls was called Hide Go Get It; when you found the girl you’d get to dry hump on her—fun times! We would take slabs of drywall from a new house they were building and with the white chalk inside it, draw lines in the middle of the street like a real football field and play for hours. We’d also draw out basketball courts in the middle of the street, and use bicycle tires as basketball hoops.

  You name it, we did it, and we had a great time and I don’t want anyone to think any different. And my family still laughed. My siblings, mama, and I cracked jokes and got silly—nobody made us laugh the way we made each other laugh. I was the king of all kings when it came to anything funny in my house. Everything was messed up but every chance we got we’d just try and make the best of a bad reality. We watched Def Comedy Jam when it first came out and completely submerged ourselves in comedy shows as an outlet so that everything wasn’t as heavy all day, every day. I still have a lot of love for the hood. I don’t want to cast a cloud as if there is nothing positive about it because there is. And visually, Watts is a beautiful place, compared to some of the other hoods in the country and places I’ve been since I’ve been able to see the world.

  But in the midst of all the fun my friends and I had, there were a whole lot of killings, a whole lot of drugs and gangbanging happening. My household was like a pot of stew that had every combination of emotion in it. Being hungry, seeing my mama drink and get beat, I felt helpless most of the time because I couldn’t do anything. It was heaven and hell in a pot, and it just kept on stirring. Any day you could go from having the time of your life, to coming out of your front door and seeing one of your homeboys under a sheet right there on your block—and you could have just been laughing and having fun with him the day before. It’s crazy to think that when Daniel and I played our games and used a little piece of something we found on the floor as a gun and said pow pow pow, right down the street my big homeys were using real guns, and the pow that we heard meant a bullet was shot, and that bullet was taking a life. Moments like that reminded me that I needed to get out of there. That was it. It was eat or be eaten. I would have been sucked into the matrix if I hadn’t decided there had to be something else out there better for me.

  When I was a kid I sang pretty much everywhere I went, around the house, in the shower. I didn’t think for a second that I was any good because nobody in my family ever complimented me on my voice or told me I could sing. In fact, all I ever heard was, “Tyrese, why don’t you shut up?” Or, “Tyrese, why are you making so much noise?” So when my neighbor heard me singing one day when I was thirteen, the last thing I expected her to do was ask me to sing for her, which is what she did. She went nuts. She responded in a way I had never heard before. She said, “Tyrese, you can sing! You can sing real good!” Not long after that, she had a big party at her house and invited a bunch of her girlfriends and cousins over, and I sang for them in her front yard. They reacted the same way my neighbor did, but I was still trying to figure out if they were saying such nice things just because I was a kid, or because they really meant it.

  I didn’t think I had any talent that could specifically help get me out of Watts until my neighbor heard me sing. She kind of planted the idea in me that music was something I needed to look into. As soon as she and her friends told me I could sing, I was going to try and go all the way—period. If singing could get me out of Watts, I was going to put all my time and energy into music and singing. The pain of being broke, hungry, stuck without a ride or any transportation, the feeling of being vulnerable and being in an unpredictable environment became my motivation.

  It didn’t take long for me to be singing for my neighbor and her friends on a regular basis. To change things up I decided to do it for some different people, because I had already won those women over, and I needed to see if my singing impressed people who didn’t just live on my street. So I entered the Head Start Talent Show at Will Rogers Park with four of my boys; I sang lead vocals on a New Edition song with them doing harmony. I sang my heart out and we finished in first place.

  If you asked me back then if I was going to go far with music, I’d have told you I had no idea. But I would have also said to you that anything would be better than the shit I was living in. I had decided I wanted better for my life, my surroundings, and everything else. I was always thinking, I need to get out of here. I’m broke, I’m hungry, there is nothing that I’m wearing on my back that was purchased, it was either given to me or a hand-me-down or some stuff Bernard brought home, or something stolen off a clothing line. I don’t really know if that was an epiphany or just literally knowing there had to be something else out here that was better, and so whatever the hell I had to do to get money and hustle to get out of there, I did. I would have tap-danced in front of the Cheesecake Factory.

  After I won first place I was singing and practicing every chance I got. I would sing in the bathroom into a little tape recorder, because the bathroom had better reverb and echo. I was trying to figure out my voice and if I was hitting good notes or bad notes.

  Don Lee would also tell me to come to the gym at Will Rogers Park and I would sing for hours along with a karaoke machine. He would play song instrumentals and record me on the other side, so technically that was my first time ever getting recorded. I was there every other day, singing and learning my first bit of choreography. Don had a little Motown going on up at the park where he had discovered and was working on developing a few other groups that were pretty big in our community at the time, like Y.N.V., J’Son, and the Fellaz. They would perform at talent showcases and the girls would just go nuts.

  One night I was watching Midnight Love on BET, and I decided to write down all the record labels that the artists who appeared were signed to. I wrote down every record label, every music video, and then I wrote down all the different record labels I could think of off the top of my head. After that, I started calling every one and told them the same story. I said, “Hi. My name is Tyrese, I’m fourteen, I’m from Watts, and I want to be a singer, I want to get a record deal.” They all told me the same thing—that they don’t take solicitations over the phone and that I should send them my demo. I borrowed tapes from my neighbors or popped the bottoms off of prerecorded tapes so I could dub over them. I got ahold of some stamps, and started sending out my demo.

  When I called Priority Records, Gayle Atkins picked up the phone. The crazy thing is, it wasn’t even her phone. I had called into the general line. Gayle’s friend—who normally answered the phone—had asked Gayle to answer her line because she was expecting a really important call. If Gayle hadn’t answered the phone I probably would have heard the same speech I had gotten from every other label—that they don’t take so
licitations. It was by design that she was at the front desk sitting in for her friend.

  Gayle didn’t work in A&R, she worked in promotions, and when she answered, I hit her with the same thing: “Hi. My name is Tyrese, I’m from Watts, I’m young, I wanna sing, I wanna be a great singer when I grow up one day, and I want a record deal. I know that Priority Records has got artists and I’m just wondering if…” And Gayle said, “Oh yeah? You’re a singer? Well, sing something.” I was shocked that she asked me to sing—that she wasn’t turning me away. That was my fourteenth phone call. I had been on the phone all day. So I ran to the bathroom and sang for her over the phone, and she said, “Wow, you sound good. You’ve got a really nice voice.” We ended up communicating. I sent her letters, demo tapes of me singing in the bathroom and lyric sheets I had written out, and I think her heart went out to me.

  About two months later she ended up coming to the hood to meet me. Now, when I first talked to Gayle I thought she was a white girl. She is a really attractive woman, a black girl who grew up in the Valley, so she speaks extremely articulately. She was saying, “Oh my God, you’re so cute. You’re really talented. I was just wondering what I could do for you.” Originally she was not interested in managing me on any level. She had just figured that since she knew a few people in the music business, maybe she could help me out.

  Gayle would come to get me almost every weekend. A few times she took me up to the home of Paul Stewart, one of the head guys at Priority Records, who lived in a huge house in the Hollywood Hills, right next to the piano player George Duke. I swam in his pool, messed with his turntables, ran through his house. I knew it was a big deal for me to be in this huge place doing all this stuff, because I’m from the bottom-of-the-barrel Watts. I had never been to anybody’s house that was that big, I had never met or even seen people who owned or lived in houses that big. Looking at this guy—he’s rich, living in the Hollywood Hills—I realized there was so much more to reach for. Unfortunately, when you’re in the hood you tend to want to become the things you see—the same is true for anyone, no matter where you are—but when I was exposed to this new world, I started realizing there was more out there. Gayle created a huge shift in my life. She became an important person in my formative years as a musician and as a man. Gayle introduced me to amazing people, like Greg Parks, who managed me for years and years. Like my bus driver Angie, Gayle was a supportive and caring mother figure in my life.