After Rikers, they moved me to a minimum-security prison called Camp Gabriels. Minimum security means no fences, and that shit was sweet. Everything was real lax. You could cook in your cell. You could get all kinds of shit from commissary, which was good, because I wasn’t getting much from the outside.
See, people I took care of in the street didn’t reciprocate the love when I was incarcerated. No visits from a lot of people I was holding down. No packages comin’ up north. Not even a letter. Only people who sent letters and accepted my collect calls were Method Man, Jay, and one of the most reliable people I could depend on, a woman who was one of my top workers.
In jail, you need money. I didn’t even need to see their faces if they didn’t want to make the trip. I would’ve been happy if they would have sent twenty dollars. I didn’t get a dime from nobody I took care of in the streets. It was a rough bid for me, and that made me understand the importance of having my own back.
Camp Gabriels was on New York Forest Preserve land, and we spent our days cutting down trees with a chain saw. I must have cut twelve miles of trees during my time there. Afterward I’d go work out for a couple hours, have a late dinner, and go to bed.
I learned a lot about myself in prison. I learned what I’m capable of doing, and what I’m not willing to do. I learned that when shit gets funky, I’m gonna handle mine. Even in fucked-up situations, I’m gonna stand up and handle it. Because your size, rep, or whatever doesn’t matter in jail. It’s different in jail; everything is not about a fight, it’s more about winning at any cost. Dirty, no rules, none of that. They’ll throw boiling oil in your face and disfigure you. They’ll squirt some flammable mixture on your hair and light that shit on fire. It’s not about being the biggest or strongest. That one skinny, crafty dude might be the one to tear your head off. I’ve seen scared dudes doing their first bid beat the shit out of some thug with a jailhouse rep. I’ve seen the smallest guys take down giants.
*
After serving eight months overall, I made parole. In no time, I was right back on the streets, selling and shooting and ducking the cops. But I didn’t stay out there for long.
Violating my parole for the first time turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the Island got wild while I was away. Some new people, outsiders really, got into positions of power. Our hood had been infiltrated.
It started because some dumb-asses from our projects vouched for some outsiders. Then the outsiders turned on the ones who vouched for them as soon as they got in a position of strength. I don’t cosign for you or even claim to know you unless I know your family. Not just the people you run with in the street; I want to know your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your cousins, your grandparents—if I can’t trace your roots back, I don’t know you. Just because I smoke a blunt with you one time doesn’t mean I know you.
That’s how you verify the peoples in your circle and make sure their shit is real. I’m not sayin’ that knowing a dude’s family is an absolute guarantee they’ll have your back—you can know all this shit, and a motherfucker can still flip on you. Either way, you’re rollin’ the dice on someone, and you won’t know how it turns out until the shit gets real.
So they were like, “Yo, help us out. These dudes took my gate and kicked me out the spot.”
“What?! I thought they was your peoples?”
“Nah, fuck them dudes. I thought so, but …”
They used them, shook them, and set up shop. We had to get them up out of Park Hill. It wasn’t gonna be easy, though. They had settled. They had apartments to run to and stash out in. They also had neighborhood girls holding them down, providing shelter.
These outsiders from Queens were trying to take over Park Hill, trying to tell us we couldn’t sell in front of 160, our own fuckin’ building. It was a war every day after that. Every time we stepped outside onto the block, we had to be extra on point. It was home, but because of the UFOs trying to pump their drugs and shoot at us, we may as well been on foreign soil at the time.
It got so bad that peoples were turning against each other, fighting over those damn buildings. One of the dudes we ran up against was named Uncle, which made me kind of upset because he had kind of been a mentor to me on the street, but he’d thrown in with the dudes trying to take over our projects, and he was causing lots of problems. So he had to go.
Me, Varf, Trey-8, and a dude named Chip were gonna hit the UFOs. We were all blacked out, masks on, gloves on, bulletproof vests, ready to tear up the building. I had the MAC-10, ready to go.
Again, I had just come home, and already I was caught up in the situation. We crept through the back of the building, and Uncle was sitting out in front of the building. We got the drop on him. He had no idea we were there. With four hammers among us, we could have blown him the fuck to kingdom come.
I was standing there with the gun in my hand, aimed at Uncle, finger on the trigger about to unload, when I had an epiphany moment. Every now and again, I’d see the light about the direction I was going—about the situation I was in and what I was a second away from doing. It’s moments of clarity like those that I call “brain jumps,” and often they’ve changed my life.
I looked around, saw Varf and the rest of the dudes with me, looked into their eyes, and realized I was the one initiating the kill! The others were following my lead; they weren’t as into it as I was.
That’s when I got this funny feeling in my body to not do it. It was like an angel came down from heaven and said, “Lamont, don’t do this. Don’t do it.”
I eased my finger off the trigger and lowered the gun. The others looked at me and went, “Yo, what’s up, man? What you gonna do?”
And I looked at them and said, “Naw, man, I ain’t gonna do it.”
So we slowly all eased up outta there and got back to the house, and I took off all my gangster shit while the others were all starin’ at me.
I just looked at them, left my burner at Varf’s place, and said, “I’m goin’ home, man.”
And that’s just what I did—I went home, and I sat down and thought about what I’d almost done. I didn’t go anywhere for the next two days, just thinking about it and thanking God that I didn’t squeeze that fuckin’ trigger. Because I know for a fuckin’ fact that the rest of those dudes would have told on me, they would have squealed on me. I felt it. It wasn’t the fact that they would have squealed on me; it was that I had been in that situation already and had a change of heart. It was like God came down and softened my heart, and I didn’t squeeze on this dude. Every part of me wanted to, but the Lord would not let me pull that trigger. I could not shoot that fuckin’ gun.
The ironic thing about it all was that Uncle ended up in jail anyway, doing a sixty-year stretch. He turned informant and was the neighborhood snitch. As for the dudes I was rollin’ with that night, well, besides the federal cases against them, Varf ended up getting killed by the police; they beat his head in with a walkie-talkie. Trey-8 got shot in the face and died. Chip is still runnin’ around here somewhere, I don’t know where the fuck he’s at nowadays. And I became a superstar rapper.
I still think about it a lot—how, if I’d pulled that trigger, I’d have done ten years minimum and would never have gotten on the Wu train. I’d just be another ex-con trying to survive.
It was straight madness at that point. I had just come home and was already in all this drama. The drug game was all fucked up and had been reduced to a bunch of smaller factions trying to knock each other off to come up. There wasn’t enough to go around like during the height of the crack game. The glory days were gone, and everybody was doing bad. We were shooting each other over drug buildings that we didn’t even own. They weren’t ours. We didn’t own the land. And today, you go back there, and there’s nothing there. The building’s still there, but no one’s selling. It used to have a sign out front that said drug zone, now there’s no drug zone there—it’s over.
I look back out on it now and wonder what we were doing it all for besides survival. It sure wasn’t the path to any kind of career. At the time, none of us had the mental skills to take that money we were making and take it out of the drug game, use it for something positive. What was it all for?
Like I said, repetition is a motherfucker, and my parole officer sent me back to prison for another six months for dirty urine. Looking back on that now, not squeezing that trigger was the best thing I ever did. God was putting me in the dugout again to keep me safe from all the shit going down in Park Hill and the rest of Staten Island. Still, it hurt to only have been back on the streets for less than a month.
So I was back inside. Brooklyn House to Rikers Island to Bare Hill. I didn’t really care, though, because I had learned how to bid. I could do six months easy. Or so I thought. What I wasn’t aware of was that when you get caught on a parole violation, you can’t get no commissary, no visits, no phone calls. You can’t send letters or receive packages. Plus, the state only gives you one set of drawers, one pair of socks, and two T-shirts. For two months, that’s all you have.
Plus, I got sent up in the dead of winter, so I was freezing that whole time. And with no commissary, if I missed breakfast (6 A.M.), I starved. If I missed lunch (12–1 P.M.), I starved. If I missed dinner (4–5 P.M.), I starved. So I made sure to eat a big breakfast and big lunch, and then after dinner, I might try to sneak some dinner back to my cell. During those two months, my man Zeiss from West Brighton snuck me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at night. And when I could finally access my commissary account, I hit him back up real good. I always paid back a favor from a brother who was looking out for me.
When I got busted, I had about twenty-five hundred dollars on me, which they put in my commissary account. But I couldn’t touch it. No flip-flops, no lotion, no snacks, no smokes. I had nothing for the first two months but the three squares a day and some PB&J sandwiches. When I took a shower, I had to use the state soap, the bar kind called Corcraft (the marketplace name for the New York State Department of Corrections, Division of Correctional Industries), and I had no lotion. My skin was like sandpaper.
Once I got access to my commissary, however, life got much better. It doesn’t take much to live well in prison; you can do it for about a hundred dollars a month. You could get rice and flour, and I’d use the flour to make bread dough. I could get cookies and cake, all kinds of meats and seafood; I could make hamburger patties. If you knew how to cook, you were all good. I’d hit up my man in the kitchen with a carton of cigarettes, and he’d get me chopped meat, which I’d add to pasta and make lasagna, complete with cheese and sauce, the works, in the oven.
After that six-month bid, as soon as I touched down, I was getting right back into the street life—and getting violated and sent back again.
*
It didn’t help that my fucking parole officer hated me, too. Mr. Ortiz had a real lifeblood vendetta out for me. Especially after I told him about the Wu-Tang album. At first, he probably didn’t believe me. He didn’t know too much about music at that time. Now, when I ran into him after we became a worldwide phenomenon, and he saw me in designer clothes, driving a brand-new Range Rover, and owning a storefront, he got really heated. I kept it light, like, “Yo, Mr. Ortiz, what’s up, man?” I could see it in his face, he was like, Fuck you. That’s one time when living well truly was the best revenge.
But the douchebag kept punishing me for dirty urine. He knew who the fuck I was. He knew what I was doing. I kept catching dirty urines, though. He thought I was selling drugs, which I was. He thought I was using drugs, which I wasn’t.
The dirty urine wasn’t from smoking weed, though. Like I said, I was still selling, and I was chopping and cooking up half bricks of coke on the regular. If you handle cocaine with your bare hands, it goes into your bloodstream without you even knowing it. Your skin absorbs the coke. You breathe it in and it gets into your system. I didn’t know anything about that. So when I took the piss test, I had traces of coke in my system. So I got sent right back.
After the first violation, I couldn’t go back to the minimum security at Gabriels, so they sent me to Franklin, which was a medium-security prison. They still have my picture on a bulletin board up at Franklin for former inmates who made it out and became something. I’m one of those faces. I still get people who come home after a bid who tell me my picture’s still up on that bulletin. They always seem almost surprised. They shouldn’t be, though. I’ve been up there.
I’ve slept on those bunks. I was in that chow line.
I was in the weight room up there. I was in the yard.
I was in Franklin. I got sent there after coming home from and violating my parole yet again. I never did maximum security because I never got bagged for any more serious infractions like murder or armed robbery, or taking a case to trial where I knew I was in the wrong. Also, by then I knew I had a good situation to come home to, so I started to cool out a bit. Everything I was doing was according to a preconceived plan. I knew we were gonna sign the deal with Steve Rifkind and Loud. I was mad because I got caught before that went down. If I hadn’t gotten caught, I’d have been on the first Wu-Tang Clan album more. My plan was to cop out as fast as I could, ’cause I knew I was gonna come home in time to make the record. I was home for two months and was working on Wu-Tang stuff with RZA.
I got back in time to record my verse for “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’.” I also got to make it to the video shoot for “Protect Ya Neck.” That video was major for us. Not only did Uncle Ralph McDaniels help RZA finish directing the project, he also played it on Video Music Box, which was pretty much the only outlet for raw-ass hip-hop and a bunch of young grimy Staten Island project dudes jumping around.
All praises due to Uncle Ralph. He’s the most humble guy, and the gateway for many great things. Steve Rifkind called him up after RZA met with Steve and told him that Uncle Ralph was playing the video. Steve Rifkind wanted to know if he should sign the group. Uncle Ralph cosigned us to the fullest, and RZA and Wu-Tang Productions signed the deal with Loud Records.
Then I violated my parole and got sent back to prison again. I came home in six months and got to shoot the videos for “C.R.E.A.M.” and “Chessboxin’.” Loud Records was smart in shooting our videos all at once so they could just have all of them on deck, fully loaded and ready to go.
Then I got violated again for dirty urine from cooking up that shit and absorbing it into my system again. So I went up for six more months, then came home. Three times I got my parole violated over dirty piss, and each time they sent me back for six months. Eight months plus six months times three is twenty-six months. So I wound up doing twenty-six months out of a fucking one-to-three. Dumb-ass fucking me.
*
Every time I cycled through the system, I got more lost. I was getting more and more comfortable in jail, which is how the penal system gets you. They can hit you with all sorts of time, and you won’t really care, because jail has become your element. You get that institutional mentality.
And when I was back on the streets, I was still carrying guns and wildin’, so I couldn’t focus on the Wu-Tang Clan as much as I wanted to. Even with what I learned about my addiction to drug cash in the joint, slinging was still the fastest way to make money on the outside. My rhymes were already taking a back burner because I had to fucking feed myself. I had a baby on the way. I had things I was taking care of every day. I was all fucked up in the head, so I couldn’t concentrate on rhymes at the time.
When I wasn’t hustlin’, most of my attention was on caring for Meth. The first time I went away, I left him with about five grand, and he could hit up my peoples anytime he wanted. Even when I was incarcerated, my peoples were still hitting him up with money just to keep him from dealing. I told them, “Yo, make sure he doesn’t have to be in the streets.”
When I came back home, he was still struggling to stay afloat with all of that shit, but he was still getting money from my peoples. All he had to do was go to my peoples’ house like, “Yo, I need some bread and nicotine.” They hit him up with the bread, hit him with this, hit him with that. That’s how it was.
I said, “You know what? Fuck it. My man who’s focusing on this, I’m gonna push him further.” Meth was more focused than me, so I made sure his life was comfortable while I was hittin’ it hard on the streets. That was basically my responsibility. You might not think it was, but it was my responsibility to keep him out of trouble and keep him on a good path.
I’m proud of that, even though it meant I didn’t get a chance to really get my feet wet. I said, “I’m up here taking care of my man so he can succeed.” And all that stuff going down was why I couldn’t focus on my own music at that time.
*
During those years that I was bouncing in and out of jail, RZA sat me down and said he wanted to have a talk with me. That talk probably saved my life.
“Uey, what are you doing, man? You keep getting locked up like this, you keep fuckin’ around, and they gonna hit you with some real time.”
“I gotta get my money. I still gotta be in these streets scrambling.”
“Well, we getting ready to really walk this Wu shit. You gotta leave that drug dealing alone. You have to decide, God. Are you going to keep fucking around and getting locked up and doing bids, or are you going to come do this fly shit over here with us? The streets ain’t goin’ nowhere. Just give me nine months of your life, God. In nine months, if it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the street and do whatever the fuck you want. The street’s always gonna be there. This opportunity you have right now, though, if you take it for granted, you’re gonna lose out on it.”
What he said made perfect sense. The block and the fiends in front of 160 weren’t going anywhere. Selling drugs would always be an option if I really needed the money. But this rap shit was so much more promising. Of course, I’d rather be traveling the globe with my brothers, meeting the finest women, copping cars and clothes, smoking and drinking the best of the best, all the while getting paid and living out my dreams.
“You know what? Why not? Why the fuck not?” I had about forty or fifty grand left over in my stash. “I’m gonna live off this right here for a couple of months, and I’m not gonna call the connect no more.” I threw all my burner phones and beepers away.
God pulled me away from certain things and situations to save me, and this was one of them. My time in jail did make me much more appreciative of things, too. In hindsight, going to prison probably saved my life, because the building we were hustling in front of got shot up that first summer while I was locked up. I would’ve been out on the block when that shit happened. Two good dudes got killed right in front of the building. I would’ve been there, too, and who knows if I’d have made it out alive.
That was all my prison time really got me; like I said earlier, if I could have avoided it, I would have in a heartbeat, because it didn’t do shit for me. You don’t need a rap sheet to rap. Prison time has nothing to do with making music—in fact, it wound up hurting my career.
So when the blessing came, I didn’t take it for granted. I was down to work.