“Yeah I’ll do a feature for you,” he told me. “Seventy-five hundred.”
I didn’t have seventy-five hundred on me and neither did D, but I was good for it. So I called up Whoa, from my neighborhood crew Str8 Drop, and he told me he’d go half. He’d wire the money via Western Union and after I got back to Atlanta I’d pay him back $3,750. Done. We got the money wired to Juve’s brother Corey and we were good to go. Corey had us meet them at their hotel, where the plan was to knock out the song in the makeshift recording studio on Juvenile’s tour bus.
I was excited about this. I was twenty-three years old and I was about to get a guest verse from the hottest artist on the hottest record label, Cash Money Records. This could be big. But when I got on the bus Juve flipped the script. He said he wanted to make me a beat and he’d do a chorus for it.
“See I told my partner back in Atlanta that I was getting a verse, though,” I told him.
Juve didn’t budge.
“Look, I’m going to make you this beat and then I’ll knock out the hook for it.”
Flipping the script on niggas like this was my game. I wasn’t going to get tricked out of a verse I’d paid for.
“Why would I want a beat from you?” I finally blurted out. “You’re not Mannie Fresh.”
The whole bus went silent after I said it. I could see Juvenile was pissed.
“What I am is a platinum-selling artist,” he told me. “So I’m not doing a guest verse for you.”
“A’ight, well then I don’t want anything.”
With that, Juve pointed me to the door.
“No disrespect, but you need to get off my bus then,” he told me. “I’ll get the money wired back to you.”
Juve had taken a liking to my boys, so I was the only one asked to leave, which I did without any hoopla or words exchanged. While it may have seemed like I’d just gotten punked out I wasn’t embarrassed in the least. I was proud of how I’d handled the situation. I’d told Whoa I was getting Str8 Drop a Juvenile verse and he’d put his money down for that. So I wasn’t coming back to him with a beat and a hook. For me this was a business arrangement and I had to stand firm on what we’d agreed on.
I was waiting outside the bus for my buddies when Wacko and Young Buck, two well-known artists who were running with Juvenile at the time, hopped off the bus to smoke a blunt.
“Man, don’t even worry about that shit back there,” Wacko told me, passing me the blunt. “Juve be on his bullshit sometimes.”
Doo Dirty got off the bus a couple of minutes later and tried to get me to patch things up. I didn’t think there was anything to patch up. I had no problem with Juvenile. I’d just meant what I said. I wasn’t interested in paying that much money for a Juvenile beat. I didn’t even know the nigga made beats.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” D told me. “Let the wire transfer go through, we’ll get the beat and the hook, and when we get home I’ll give you the money for it.”
I knew if anyone was good for seventy-five hundred it was D, so I agreed and let them proceed with the song. After all I didn’t have an issue with a Juvenile beat and hook if I wasn’t the one paying for it. Wacko and Buck respected how I’d handled myself in there and invited me back on the bus, now that we were moving forward with the record. But I just waited outside until they finished.
“I don’t need to get back on the bus,” I told them. “Let’s just do the song.”
That song with Juvenile never ended up amounting to anything, but it was my first experience interacting with a major artist. Years later I saw Juvenile and we both pretended like it was our first time meeting. We swapped songs over at Patchwerk Studios in Atlanta. Everything went smoothly. I respected Juvenile. But I knew as soon as I saw him that he remembered that day. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t see a reason to bring up a negative experience that was in the past. But I could just tell he remembered.
I burnt the last of my bridges when I tricked Doo Dirty’s nephew out of thirty thousand dollars while I was down in Savannah. That was a dumb move, and a messed-up one too because D had always looked out for me.
Now I had these young boys from Savannah plotting to come to Atlanta and kill me. And they knew where I stayed. Even if I switched up spots, I worried someone would tip them off. I’d become such a menace in my hood there were a lot of people that wanted to see me get shot up.
So I left, retreating to Alabama, where I lay low for a couple of months, waiting for the beef to die down.
Some niggas tried to wet me up
Shot up my truck in East Atlanta
Want to set me up because I tricked this nigga in Savannah
They put some money on my head, I had to move to Alabama
—“Frowny Face” (2008)
After a few months I decided to return to Atlanta. I couldn’t take it. The place was too slow for me. I’d enrolled in the barbering program at Lawson State Community College in Birmingham but I only went to class once. I didn’t want to cut hair. I wanted to get back to trapping and making music.
I tried to fly under the radar after I came back, lying low at Danielle’s spot. Danielle was my on-and-off girlfriend from age twenty to twenty-five. She was a pretty girl who was as hood as I was. Very rough around the edges. She would help me bag up and stash my money for me. It wasn’t love, but she knew me well and was an asset to the things I had going on then.
I was keeping a low profile because I didn’t know if Doo Dirty’s nephew and his boys were still out looking for me. But one day I left the house to grab some Swishers from the gas station. When I drove up, guess who was standing outside: Red. He had a newborn baby in his arms and was talking to a girl I recognized. This was a girl who stayed in Augusta. We used to trap out of her trailer park there.
For a few minutes I sat in my car in the parking lot of a Popeye’s, watching them. Seeing them interact with the baby, I realized Red had had a child with this girl while I was away.
Then I realized what they were up to. He was loading her down and fitting to put her on the road. The gas station was right off the expressway. Any minute now she was going to hop on the exit and start the two-hour drive to Augusta with birds in tow.
I had a laugh to myself, knowing I’d peeped the move. I wanted to get out of the car and go say what up, but I didn’t know where Red and I stood anymore. He and I never had any fallout, but he was so tight with D and I’d put D in this terrible situation by robbing his nephew.
Why would I do that?
As I sat there watching them, thinking back on how everything had played out these last few months, an SUV pulled into the gas station and parked next to Red and his girl. Out stepped the big man of Savannah and CEO of Zone 6 Clique Records himself, Doo Dirty.
On pure instinct I hopped out of the car and headed toward them. I didn’t know what was about to happen but I did know one thing: I was tired of hiding.