I flipped out, attacking Dame in the van as we made the fifteen-minute drive to Riverwoods Behavioral Health System in Riverdale. Coach, my lawyer, and other members of my inner circle were waiting for me, begging me to check myself in to rehab.
The only one I paid the slightest attention to was my lawyer, who was telling me I’d failed another drug test and if I didn’t check myself in, I’d almost certainly be sent to jail. After more than an hour of arguing outside Riverwoods, I relented, agreeing to a monthlong stay.
But that shit didn’t last. I wasn’t at the facility a week when I changed my mind and got a buddy to come sign me out. I’d realized I’d already fallen for my lawyer’s line before. I wasn’t doing rehab just so I could get out and get sent right to jail again. The couple of days at the Riverwoods center did little to slow me down. If anything, they were a brief pit stop on my road to total self-destruction. Two weeks after the failed intervention I reached the end of that road at an auto-body shop on Northside Drive.
I’d gotten it into my head that this guy who worked on my cars had played me out of some money. This wasn’t just some mechanic. This was a friend of mine, someone who had joined me on the road before. But in my paranoid state, I convinced myself otherwise. I hopped into my Hummer and hit the gas, flying down Northside Drive to confront him at the shop.
I must have blazed past a cop on the way, because within minutes of my arrival the law was on the scene. Their presence didn’t affect me. I was irate and growing angrier by the minute, barking at this dude for stealing from me, an accusation that in reality held little water. Except I wasn’t living in reality. I was in a world all my own, one in which everyone in my orbit was plotting against me.
The officers demanded I calm down, but that was background noise. I threw a punch. And then another, and another, beating my friend until a blast of pepper spray hit my eyes. I stumbled backward, the two officers wrestling me to the ground and putting me in handcuffs. I was placed in the back seat of the cruiser but I wasn’t done just yet. With my eyes burning, I stomped on the door of the car, so hard that the trim of the vehicle began to break off. An ambulance arrived and I was transported to Grady Hospital Detention Center. After being treated for the pepper spray, I was brought to Fulton County, where I read the list of charges against me.
? Damage to government property
? Obstruction
? Driving without a license
? Reckless driving
? Running a red light or stop sign
? Failure to maintain a lane
? Driving on the wrong side of the road
Damn. I did all that?
I’d get out of lockup the next day, though. Prosecutors dropped every one of those charges citing “for want of prosecution,” meaning I was fucked regardless of the incident at the car shop. I was scheduled to go in front of the judge the next month and he now had a laundry list to choose from as to why I belonged in jail. I’d failed another drug test. I’d skipped out on the rehab. I’d gotten rearrested.
When that court date came, my attorneys filed a special plea of mental incompetency, writing that their client was unable “to go forward and/or intelligently participate in the probation revocation hearing.” In the past—like when I checked in to the rehab—my lawyers had pulled certain moves with the idea that they would keep me out of jail, but this time it was just the flat-out truth. A plea of mental incompetency was warranted. I’d lost my damn mind.
Fulton County Superior Court judge John J. Goger wasn’t sold on that argument. Goger was familiar with my case. Five years earlier he’d sentenced me on my aggravated assault charge after the incident at Big Cat’s studio with the pool stick.
“You have a great future in music, but you seem to get in trouble,” he’d told me at the time.
Three years later he sentenced me to a year in jail for failing to comply with the terms of my probation. Goger could see I had a problem with drugs, but for him that wasn’t an excuse for me to continually break the law. He wanted to put this “mental competency” to the test. I was committed to Anchor Hospital, an Atlanta psychiatric and chemical dependency facility, where I was to undergo a series of evaluations.
Three days later I was discharged. The staff at Anchor Hospital weren’t buying my lawyers’ claims that I had a serious psychiatric condition. They thought I was using that as an excuse.
The folks at Anchor Hospital may not have believed I was crazy, but the rest of the world was about to be sure of it. Days after being discharged I strolled into Tenth Street Tattoo, a shop around the corner from Patchwerk.
I’d spent the previous night at Patchwerk. Atlanta had gotten hit with one of its biggest snowstorms in years and I got snowed in there.
When I walked into the shop that day I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to get. I did know where I wanted it done, though. I walked up to the counter, introduced myself to the owner, pointed to my right cheek, and asked him what we could put there.
My whole body was covered in tattoos. I’d gotten my first when I was nineteen, around the time I’d first started robbing folks and breaking into houses. It was an eyeball on the back of my neck, a reminder to always watch my back. Since then I’d periodically added more.
I already had a bunch of smaller ones on my face but with my skin being so dark, the tattoos under my eyes were hard to make out. I thought it looked like I had two black eyes. I wanted something big, something bold, something unmistakable.
With all I’d been through of late I’d never felt more alienated. I was an outcast, a rebel, a weirdo. More than anything I was tired. Tired of running away from my reputation, tired of trying to convince people I wasn’t a bad person. I wanted to embrace being the villain. I wanted to broadcast that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone said or thought about me. I’d just gotten a gold grill put in my mouth and I wanted to alter my appearance even more.
“Well, that’s cool, man,” the shop owner told me. His name was Shane. “But, uh, yeah, I can’t really tell you what to put there. Honestly I just have no idea where to start.”
I unzipped the orange hoodie I had on to show him my ice cream cone chain.
“What about this?” I asked him. “This is my thing.”
Shane drew up my soon-to-be-infamous ice cream cone tattoo. It was perfect. Almost perfect. It needed something else.
“Just make that shit real rock-and-roll,” I told him.
With that he added the lightning bolts and the letters “BRRR,” and got to work. An hour later, I was out of there and on my way to Patchwerk. I was feeling good about the tattoo. It was what I’d been going for.
That afternoon, the piercer at the shop tweeted out a photo from my visit. The Internet exploded.
“Rapper Gucci Mane has had a large tattoo of a triple-scoop ice cream cone inked onto his face just days after he was released from a mental health facility.”