The good news was I was free. The bad news was I’d spent a hell of a lot of money to get free. Fighting my two cases had drained my resources. Hiring and firing lawyers and the whole legal process had cost me over two hundred thousand dollars. I was damn near starting over.
Despite my absence, Trap House had been a huge success. My debut album had sold more than 150,000 copies independently. But somehow I wasn’t seeing any of that money. Big Cat and Jacob told me of all these expenses they covered while I was away, but those expenses sounded more like excuses. Lame ones. The numbers weren’t adding up.
As I was coming home Cat was readying to go in for a year. He’d had a strap on him the night we all got picked up in Miami and caught a charge being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He was going to have to do fourteen months in the feds.
Because he would be locked down for over a year, Cat wanted to get the ball rolling on my next album, which was ready to go. I’d recorded it prior to getting locked up and Jacob had come up with the title Hard to Kill. As soon as I got home there were interviews and phoners lined up to promote the album. But before I could do that, Cat and I needed to settle up.
I’d learned a lot in my time working with Cat. About what it took to put out a successful independent album. About publishing sheets. About accounting. Cat is someone I credit for making me a better businessman, but all the shit he taught me was about to bite him in the ass. I wanted to see the QuickBooks spreadsheets. I wanted to see the receipts. I needed a detailed explanation of the financials.
In addition to the album royalties I was owed, I’d also given him some money to hold on to before I went in. Now I needed that money back. I was broke.
Cat didn’t have my money. He told me he needed a few days to get the money out of the bank and he offered me his credit card to use in the meantime. That was not what I wanted to hear.
“What the fuck do I want your credit card for?” I barked. “Where is my money?!”
I stormed out of the office and hit up one of my homeboys for a grand to hold me over. Later that night I had a performance lined up that would pay me seventy-five hundred, so I knew I wouldn’t be broke for long. I was just pissed that Cat had set up all this shit but couldn’t have my money for me. I’d asked him about it repeatedly. But like every other time I brought up money, it seemed, Cat had an excuse.
I came back to the Big Cat office a few days after the argument to meet with Jacob about my probation. Part of my plea deal was I had all these community service hours I needed to fulfill. Even before I’d taken the plea I’d been thinking about how I wanted to give back after I got out. This was something I’d made a promise to myself to do if I beat my murder case. So I was all for it when Jacob told me he’d brought someone on board to help me get this nonprofit idea off the ground. This was the day I got introduced to Deborah Antney. Like Cat and Jacob, Deb was a transplant from New York. She’d been living in Georgia for the last decade but still had a thick Queens accent. Her background was in social services but she’d recently worked with a few well-known recording artists on setting up their foundations and different charity ventures.
Deb and I discussed what I was looking to do. I explained I wanted to organize a back-to-school giveaway of sorts, where we’d hand out new book bags full of school supplies to kids in Zone 6. The conversation went well, but before we parted ways she pulled me aside.
“Listen, these people don’t have your best interests at heart,” she told me. “That’s what they brought me in for. I don’t want any part of it but I just thought I should let you know.”
What Deb was telling me was what I was already suspicious of. And while I still wasn’t quite sure of what to make of this lady, I did know I was about finished dealing with Big Cat and Jacob.
Later that week I was on the set of a video shoot for “Go Head,” one of the songs off Trap House that had blown up while I was locked up. Deb was there and so was Jacob. But I wasn’t interested in speaking with either of them. The only thing on my mind was the money I was owed and the things Deb had told me the other day. I left the set and decided that I was done doing business with these people. “Go Head” never did get a music video.
?
My departure from Big Cat would trigger my return to the streets. It wasn’t long before I was knee-deep in it again, running with my old partners. Time had healed old wounds and everyone was still doing what they’d been doing. It was back to trappin’ like we had been.
My homeboys had a new spot they were operating out of and it soon became mine as well. There were a couple of niggas who actually lived there but mostly this was a trap house to juug out of. The type of place where the lights would go out and we’d have no power but we still wouldn’t leave the house. Or the refrigerator would stop working and we’d send one of the young boys to the store to get us drinks. Or the stove went out and we’d get someone to turn the gas back on illegally. It was a hangout too. Smoking, gambling, and girls. But when the pack came in it was down to business.
Given the success I’d had in the music game, it was crazy how quick I was back to the same shit. It was like I never stopped. But my attitude had become “Fuck Music.” Big Cat had put out this song “My Chain” as the first single to Hard to Kill and the response to it was lukewarm. People weren’t really feeling it. “My Chain” is a cool song but looking back on it now, Zay and I may have been trying too hard to re-create the magic of “So Icy” with another song about jewelry.
Paired with the fact that I was at odds with my label, I was feeling like the rap game had brought me more problems than the streets ever had. People were telling me that I needed to get back to the music but I wasn’t into it. Hard to Kill was finished. Let Big Cat put it out and we’d go from there.
This would become a trend throughout the course of my career. Whenever the music wasn’t going right I would fall back into the streets. Maybe it was a coping mechanism. Going back to something I knew I’d find success in when I wasn’t experiencing it elsewhere. Whatever it was, it was a habit that went on for much longer than you’d think.
?
The trap house was boomin’ one day when my buddy ran inside and grabbed me. His urgency caught me off guard.
“Man, you ain’t gonna believe who’s outside,” he told me.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your momma.”
He was right. This was unbelievable.
For one, Mother Dearest and I had not been on good terms for a while. We’d had a rocky relationship ever since she kicked me out of the house in ’01. But that’s not even what was fucking me up. I just couldn’t believe she was actually here, at my trap. My momma didn’t do shit like that. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that. This house had been shot up days earlier. Junkies were coming in and out as the hours passed.