“Let me see your ID.”
Knowing it would buy me time, I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The moment he took his eyes off me to inspect it, I was out the door.
I bolted through the backyard of a house on Custer into the woods, ending up in Glen Emerald Park. I blew past the tennis courts, leaping from the top basketball court to the bottom one. When I landed my legs gave out, all wobbly; I was like a boxer who took a shot on the chin. My mind was responding but my body was not. I collapsed on the court, knowing the cops were on my tail.
“I’m down! I’m down!” I screamed out.
My surrender didn’t help my cause. Those cops beat the fucking shit out of me. I hadn’t caught my breath from running when I was tossed in the back of the cruiser. I threw up all over the seats.
My face was swollen from the beating, so instead of taking me to the police station, where they’d have to take a mugshot, they took me to Grady Hospital. Afterward I was brought to DeKalb County Jail, where I was booked and told I was allowed one phone call. I called my momma.
“Momma, I’m locked up.”
“For what?”
“They’re saying ‘criminal possession of a controlled substance,’?” I said, doing my best to play dumb. “I was just standing at the bus stop, waiting to go for a job interview.”
But the days of fooling my momma were up. Vicky Davis didn’t play around about no drug shit. After I posted bail, she took my key to the house and told me I was no longer welcome at home.
?
When I went in front of the judge a few months later, I took a plea deal as part of Georgia’s First Offenders Act. If I accepted the plea and completed a probation period, I could have this first felony struck from my record. But if I got caught “in any trouble” again, the deal was off the table, and the judge could resentence me.
“I’m giving you ninety days in county jail, Mr. Davis,” he told me. “But do you understand that if I see you here again, I can sentence you up to thirty years in prison behind this?”
I heard him loud and clear, but I couldn’t drop hustling cold turkey. I’d had nearly forty thousand dollars saved up at the time of my arrest, but I now had lawyer fees and had gotten my own apartment after my momma kicked me out the house. I needed to be making money.
Since I was still technically enrolled at Georgia Perimeter, my lawyer was able to convince the judge to suspend my ninety-day sentence until after the following school year, which was about to start up. So just like that I was out and it wasn’t long before I was back to dibbling and dabbling in Sun Valley and the Texaco.
It might sound like the judge’s warnings went in one ear and out the other, but that wasn’t the case. I’d absorbed what he told me. Those words carried weight. I was back in the streets, yes, but for the first time in my life I was thinking about what I could do to get myself out of this shit. My decision to pursue music was heavily influenced by my arrest at the Texaco.
?
I’d long had a passion for music, ever since Duke and I were in Bessemer listening to his boom box. Even after we moved to Georgia, Duke was the guy who was putting everyone onto the new shit of the nineties, from 2Pac and Kilo Ali to Spice 1 and Poison Clan. He was tuned in, always on the cutting edge when it came to rap. And I absorbed it all. My whole childhood I was running circles around everyone my age. It was like how I learned to read before my peers. Whenever a new artist or song blew up and everyone in school was talking about it, it was old news to me. My brother had been put me onto it.
As much as I was into rap, the idea of becoming a rapper always seemed lame to me. The rappers I knew—classmates who used to perform at the McNair talent shows—were all broke. There was no way I was going to be the nigga with a backpack riding the MARTA bus with a CD player and headphones, trying to get people to listen to my music. To me that was panhandling. I didn’t give a fuck if that’s what it took to make it in the music business. It wasn’t going to be something I did.
What was appealing to me was being the money man behind a rapper. I’d been heavy into Master P throughout high school. P was the consummate rap entrepreneur. No Limit was putting out albums every other day back then and I bought all of them just off the strength of P’s cosign. I would have never bought a Fiend or Mac or Mia X album, but I listened to all of the No Limit albums to hear what P was saying.
Even before Master P, I always gravitated toward the CEO, the person in charge. As a little boy in Alabama, I liked Eazy-E more than Ice Cube. I thought Tony Draper was cooler than 8Ball or MJG. I wanted to be more like J. Prince than Scarface. Later on when Cash Money started blowing up, I knew right away that Baby and Mannie Fresh were my favorites. The Big Tymers fucked me up for real. I liked the shit they were talking about.
I had a friend whose younger brother decided he wanted to rap. He was fourteen and his moniker was Lil’ Buddy. I saw potential in this kid and thought he could become a Kris Kross or Lil’ Bow Wow type. And I could be the money man pulling the strings. I decided to give it a shot.
This same friend told me he knew of a producer whom I could buy some beats from to get my artist off the ground. So one day in 2001 he took me to a house in suburban Decatur, where I met a twenty-three-year-old beatmaker by the name of Zaytoven.
Zaytoven was new to Georgia. He’d grown up in the Bay Area, and following his father’s retirement from the army, his family relocated to the South. Zay stuck around to finish high school in San Francisco but eventually joined his folks when he couldn’t keep up with the cost of living out there.
When he got here he enrolled in barber college, which was where he’d met my friend. Zay was a good barber but a way better musician. He had a natural ear, having grown up playing piano and organ in church. With that foundation he’d become a hell of a producer.
Today Zay’s sound is synonymous with the music coming out of Atlanta, but at the time that wasn’t the case. His beats were superinfluenced by his roots in the Bay. He’d come up studying producers like DJ Quik and making beats for guys like E-40 and Messy Marv while he was still in high school.
He was the oldest in a family of four children and I sensed he was the spoiled favorite. His parents had converted the entire basement of their new home into a recording studio for him to pursue his craft. I didn’t know what made a good studio or a bad one, but I could tell this setup had cost some money. It looked legit.