I was still tripping when I got back to Atlanta a few days later and my symptoms had gotten worse than selling people dope on the cheap. My behavior was fucked up. I wasn’t talking right. My pupils had gone dark. I’d become extremely paranoid and had turned aggressive toward everyone I came across.
Word got around the hood that something was up with me. When I came across my brother in the streets, he knew right away something was seriously wrong. Duke grabbed me by the arm and we took a long walk home to my momma’s.
There was something strange about that walk. It was dreamlike. It brought me back to when my brother and I used to walk to school together. When we were living in East Atlanta but still going to school by Ellenwood, at Cedar Grove. After we got off the bus we would have to walk almost two miles to get to school every day, rain, sleet, or snow.
My momma and Duke took me to the hospital, where I stayed for a couple of days until I started to feel like myself again. It’s hard to describe this episode, or the similar ones that followed in the years to come, but I knew when it was over with. I felt normal again.
None of the doctors had answers. I hadn’t told them I’d been drinking straight cough syrup because that wasn’t something people did in Atlanta, and honestly it hadn’t occurred to me that that’s what could have caused this shit. Nobody else who drank the grit that night had tripped out. I was really convinced someone had slipped something into my drink, because that was actually something that was going on then. Folks getting drugged and then losing their minds out of nowhere.
Years later, when things were completely out of control and it was obvious what I was doing to myself, a doctor told me I had to cut it out with the lean.
“Listen, you cannot drink this stuff anymore. It’s causing a chemical imbalance in your body,” he explained. “This drug is just not for you.”
By that point I was drinking it first thing in the morning and last thing at night to fall asleep. My stomach had ballooned to the size of a watermelon. I looked pregnant. Even then I wasn’t ready to hear that. I couldn’t accept that this drug had become my kryptonite.
After that first incident I refrained from drinking lean for a while. It wasn’t that I was worried I would trip out again. It just hadn’t been a feeling I particularly enjoyed, being glued to my seat at the Waffle House. Lean wasn’t even something widely available in Atlanta then. It was a Houston thing.
It wasn’t until I met Doo Dirty that I started to get hooked. Doo Dirty was Red’s homeboy from Savannah, and he was the big man down there.
Savannah has a totally different culture from Atlanta. People in Savannah talk different, they dress different. The way folks move there mirrors Florida more than it does Atlanta, being that it’s only two hours away from Jacksonville and not far from Miami. It’s a port city, so a lot of drugs from overseas come through. And drugs were Doo Dirty’s specialty. He kept a lot of ’em around.
Doo Dirty put me onto pouring lean in a soda can, which I found to be a much different experience. It tasted good and I didn’t react like when I drank it straight. I’d drank an ounce straight down the hatch that first night with Bunny, but now I was pouring an ounce or two in a two-liter of soda and sharing it among a crew. It tasted like candy to me and I loved the high. It relaxed me and alongside the weed put me in a zone I really enjoyed. As my body absorbed the codeine a wave of calm would wash over me. Not a care in the world.
I also thought it was cool that this was something people weren’t doing in Atlanta. It was taboo. In Doo Dirty I found a plug with constant access. That gave me status.
He also turned me on to ecstasy. I had never fucked with pills before but Doo Dirty would drive up from Savannah in his old-school dump—a ’73 Chevy with rims—and he’d have milk gallon jugs filled to the top with pills for us to sell. We started selling these pills and soon we were popping them. Long story short, soon enough I was regularly fucking with hard drugs.
But the Zone 6 Clique wasn’t all drugs and stealing. As much as running with my new partners accelerated my hustle game, it made me step up my rap skills even more. These were street niggas but they also had talent and were serious when it came to their music. The Zone 6 Clique studio sessions were competitive. Everyone was coming hard and it brought something out of me I hadn’t yet discovered. I’d felt good about the work I put in when I first started up with Zay, but now I was paying closer attention to my lyrics and delivery, approaching the craft of rapping in a more focused and disciplined way.
For Doo Dirty, the Zone 6 Clique was an opportunity to get involved in the rap game. For a minute he’d been telling us about this dude from Detroit. Big Meech. I had never heard of Meech or his Black Mafia Family crew, but Doo Dirty was saying this nigga was a serious hustler who was trying to make some legal money in the music business. He wanted to follow their lead. I remember thinking it was crazy to hear him singing the praises of this guy I’d never heard of because to me, Doo Dirty was the shit. He was the richest nigga I knew.
And so just like Meech with BMF Records, Doo Dirty became the CEO of the Zone 6 Clique Music Group, pumping big money into promoting the group. We’d all go out and hit the clubs and D had us in there looking like established artists. We now had Z6C chains, Z6C letterman jackets, and with D’s financing we put together thirty thousand dollars to shoot a video for “Misery Loves Company,” my first-ever music video. Look it up.
The footage is grainy but if you look closely you’ll see I had a busted-up lip. Two days before the shoot I got jumped at Jazzy T’s. I was in the bathroom taking a piss at the urinal when some nigga came up from behind and sucker-punched me. Next thing I knew there were four of them, beating on me in the bathroom. Somehow I managed to escape and scramble out of the club. I took cover at a nearby motel until Red came and got me.
I later found out the attack was stemming from an incident that occurred a couple of weeks prior. A guy had bought like a hundred dollars’ worth of smoke off me but overpaid me by more than a thousand dollars. He’d given me a bankroll with a bunch of fives and ones on top but as I kept counting I discovered hundreds underneath. When he tried calling me about the mistake, of course I ignored the calls. I never saw those guys again, nor could I say I would have remembered them.
Doo Dirty also put the money up for my first collaboration with a major artist. We were down in Florida for a celebrity basketball game and Juvenile was one of the featured guests. Juve was superhot at the time and I was a fan, so I walked up on him and introduced myself, asking if he’d be interested in doing a verse for one of my songs.