WHEN I BEGAN SHOOTING A Man Apart, I was on top of the world, both professionally and financially. Working as an actress in a green-lighted movie meant I no longer had to do things I didn’t want to do to pay bills. I was free from having to strip in clubs or form relationships with wealthy men strictly to make financial ends meet. Every week a check for three thousand dollars would arrive in my mailbox, whether I worked that week or not. Personally, it seemed as if I had what many girls dream of as well. Earlier that month, I had begun dating one of the most recognizable men in the world, and although he would not be the only man of such high visibility in my life, he would be by far the most generous.
We had a mutual friend in John Salley (the former NBA player for the Detroit Pistons and then on Fox Sports Net’s Best Damn Sports Show Period), who had set us up on a blind date. According to John, I was this man’s type, and “he is certainly yours.” John gave this mystery man the directions to my place in Santa Clarita, just thirty minutes north of Beverly Hills, and I waited nervously for him to arrive. I heard a car’s engine outside my window and the sound of a door slamming. My doorbell rang and I answered the door, with butterflies fluttering in my stomach. When I opened my front door, I was floored. It was NBA superstar, world champion, Olympic gold-medalist Shaquille O’Neal.
I had gone out with several high-profile athletes and even a few mega-movie stars. He wasn’t the biggest, name-wise, but he was the biggest in size. Shaq’s presence was more overwhelming than that of any man I had ever met. Shaq stands over seven feet tall, weighs more than three hundred pounds, and wears a size twenty-six shoe. When he greeted me at the door with a hug, I felt like a little girl as my cheeks pressed against his stomach. My face was lost in his huge hands as he held it to kiss my mouth. Shaq immediately began to look around my condo, checking for what I had and what I needed to have. My place was still very new. The walls were stark white with only a small white leather sofa and black wrought-iron coffee and end tables. There was a twenty-five-inch television that I had gotten from a friend and no dining-room set. I had no pots and pans, only disposable plates and utensils. My bedroom had a secondhand, full-size bed and the sheets that came with it. My son’s room was empty. The bathroom shower curtains were purchased at the local dollar store and were made of extremely thin plastic, which failed to protect the floor from spraying water. Although I had been living in my place for a while, it was all but barren. I spent so much time with other people, like Ja Rule and Ray J, I rarely came home, except to pack a new bag of clothes and maybe pay the bills every couple of months.
My apartment was so empty that Shaq reached into his pocket and gave me a couple of hundred dollars in cash. The next day, he arranged for ten thousand dollars to be deposited into my bank account. Shaq was very up-front about the way the relationship would be.
“I won’t be able to come see you a lot, so I’ll just write you checks to keep you happy,” he said. He was charmingly self-effacing about his sexual prowess and wanted to reduce my expectations. He essentially told me not to let his size fool me.
I laughed, thinking it was a joke.
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “You may like it, or you may not. Either way, you’ll be well taken care of.”
I found sex with him satisfying. Although one might have “bigger” expectations, for a man who stands over seven feet tall and who weighs more than three hundred pounds, compared to other men, he was nothing to complain about.
Shaq, or “Big,” as he is affectionately called, is reputed to be extremely arrogant and conceited, yet also extremely honest. But I saw him as a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it and made no bones about saying what it was. By giving me money that first night, he was saying, “I own you now.” We had our first sexual encounter that same night. It was my way of thanking him since I’d always equated money with sex.
Even though Shaq and I had sex that night, it seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind during the remainder of our relationship. Over the next four months or so, Shaq and I would be intimate maybe two or three times. My most prominent memory about our sex life is of the weight of his body and the enormous amounts of sweat that would soak my body, even through my mattress. On one occasion, I had to turn my mattress over to have a dry place to sleep once he left.
Shaq is known to be a very generous man who loves to take care of the people around him, especially the women in his life, as long as they live by his rules. He changed my life at a time when I was so busy living other people’s fantasies that I hadn’t paid much attention to my own. He paid for all the things I had been neglecting, and with the money he gave me throughout our short-lived relationship, I was able to purchase my son’s first bedroom set and furniture for every room in the house. He did, however, have a few specific requests—like a big-screen television and a larger couch for him to sit on. He said that everything in my place had to be big because he was and that he wanted to be comfortable when he came over. He was very protective. He didn’t want me to have to do anything—not cook or clean. At his request, I hired someone to clean my house for me. He said that no woman of his should have to work—all of her attention should be focused on him.
He also demanded that I not go out at all or speak to anyone, especially not about him. Most women would have been more than happy to accept his rules with no problem and no questions asked. Not me. I was so accustomed to the spotlight and living life my way, I refused to do what he asked of me. Naturally, it strained our relationship. After a few months of trying to work it out, things came to a head. There was no shouting or high drama. We went back and forth in short, clipped messages on our two-way pagers as I sat at the first table read for A Man Apart. My mind was barely on the scene we were reading because I was busy keying away in an effort to salvage what was left of this relationship. My attempts were futile because just like that, it was over between Big and me.
I threw myself into my work on A Man Apart, and threw myself at the man in A Man Apart—Vin Diesel. On my last day of shooting, Larenz and Vin sent flowers to my trailer. I had gotten very accustomed to being with the cast and crew. Now it was all over, and I felt empty inside. I held back the tears as I was leaving the set, and gave out smiles and hugs to the remaining cast members and F. Gary Gray, the film’s director. But as soon as I got into my car, I laid my head against the steering wheel and began to cry uncontrollably.
I cried all the way home and lay in bed for the next few days. I hadn’t been around my old friends or the music industry for a while and soon began to make the phone calls that would get me back in. I craved the cars, the jets, and the yachts to which I had become so accustomed before shooting A Man Apart. I longed for the trips to the islands and abroad, even the shores of South Beach in Miami, and with the money I was making, I felt I would be well received. Maybe now I could be one of them. So I went back to hip hop—to its incredible highs, and very soon, to its devastating lows—but first, there was a detour.
This is about the time I resparked my affair with Irv Gotti, head of the label which housed my former lover Ja Rule, as well as singer Ashanti. Gotti would call me every time he was in town and even when he wasn’t. When he called, I went to him. I did whatever he asked of me, and he would take care of me financially for the time that I spent with him and Murder Inc. I was a part of something when I was with them, but I was also a drug addict and an alcoholic.
From sunup to sundown, we were surrounded by XTC and cognac. It was literally there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I continued to be depressed after wrapping the movie and began to indulge even more in the dangerous habits that accompanied hanging out with this crowd. There was more sex, more intoxicants, and more unsavory behavior. I was paid to be the bad girl, but as long as I was wanted, I would have done whatever it took to stay in the mix. The things that went on while Gotti and I were together are almost unimaginable to me now, but in the haze of drugs and liquor, it all seemed all right. I was being used over and over again. There was man after man—all friends and acquaintances of Gotti’s. I was doing what I was told by one of the most prominent men in my life and now was well rewarded for my misbehavior. It’s no secret that Gotti is not the most sensitive person around. In fact, he can be downright brutal. It’s also no secret that Gotti was married with three children and kept lovers all around the globe. But I was his favorite. No matter where he was in the world, he would always find his way back to me. His wife knew of me and our relationship. I wasn’t in love with Gotti by any means, but he was the gatekeeper to the lifestyle to which I’d become accustomed—and addicted. And because of that, Gotti was in charge.
I quickly became Gotti’s showpiece. He would turn other people in the industry on to me. I was his party favor, and I became the new form of “payola” with label and radio heads. Whenever there was someone who Gotti wanted to impress, he would send me to them and I would “take care” of them. One of those people was Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.
It was sometime after Valentine’s Day, 2001, just after Diddy and Jennifer Lopez had announced their split. Gotti and I had been spending the day drinking and popping XTC, as usual. The mixture of alcohol and X often made us extremely sexual, and we would have sex all day and night. As a lover, Gotti was insatiable. The drug drove him to unbelievable heights and soon he began experimenting with Viagra. The sex became more like a boxing match than anything else. We would compete against each other, and on most every occasion, I would win. There were a few times when he actually got up and ran and even locked himself in the bathroom in order to get away from me. Still, at other times, he got the sexual upper hand, and I would lie in bed, curled into a ball, feeling completely spent, which in my inebriated state turned me on even more. Gotti and I were a perfect match as lovers.
On one particular night, we were riding around Beverly Hills in a limousine with Ja and other members of The Inc. and we ended up at Mumba, a club on the west side. We ventured through the club, entourage in tow, and made our way to the outdoor patio and out to the back parking lot. I stood there beside Gotti as Diddy walked up to him. They greeted each other with a slap of the right hand; Diddy held a drink in is left. He seemed to be as intoxicated as we were. I stood there looking at him while they spoke, when all of a sudden he turned and looked right at me.
His conversation with Gotti was abruptly cut short as he took a few steps closer to me, grabbed my hand, and said, “I want you. Can I have you?”
Then Diddy turned to Gotti and said, “My bad, Dog. Is this you?”
Gotti quickly said, “Nah, it’s cool. This is Yizette. She’s cool people.”
“Can she come with me?” Diddy asked.
I wanted to leave with Diddy right then. The XTC had me in a mood where whatever I felt normally was heightened a hundred percent. Even the wind on my face made me orgasmic. Right there in front of me, Gotti and Diddy made arrangements for me to meet Diddy at his house in an hour.
“I’ll send her to you in a little bit,” Gotti said. “Give me the address.”
I didn’t understand why Gotti didn’t let me go with Diddy right then, but we took the address and got back in the limo. We went back to L’Ermitage, and after we took more XTC, Gotti was tearing away at my clothes. Gotti had a strange bedside manner. He would get rough at times, which I could handle when we were high. He also liked to compare himself to other men. He would want to know how they were built and how they had sex. He wanted to know if I liked Diddy and if I was going to sleep with him when I got over there.
“You gonna fuck him good, huh?” Gotti asked.
I just wanted him to hurry and shut up so I could make my way to Canon Drive to meet up with Diddy.
Gotti sent me on my way and gave me a key to his room so I wouldn’t wake him when I returned. It was four in the morning when I pulled up to Diddy’s home in my SUV. There were security guards in the driveway—all of them dressed in dark suits with their hands clasped in front of them. They stood at attention, waiting for me to approach the gate. They had been expecting me and they let me in the gate and into the house, through the garage. I stood in the hallway, waiting for Diddy. My body was hot as the drugs and alcohol continued to feed off of each other.
After just a few minutes, Diddy greeted me and showed me to the nearest bedroom, where Farnsworth Bentley, Diddy’s self-proclaimed manservant had been sleeping. Diddy woke him and gestured for him to leave the room. My guess was that there was someone else upstairs in Diddy’s room and that this was to be my first and final destination within the home.
“So who is Gotti to you?” he asked. “And is he cool with this?”
“Gotti’s my boy,” I said. “When I see something I want, he lets me have it.”
With that slight formality out of the way, Diddy and I spent the next fifteen minutes or so engaging in the usual. After the experience he said, “You’re one of the best.” I said the same to him when, in actuality, he was average. Our sexual encounter was pretty straightforward, nothing out of the ordinary.
Before I left, he asked me to meet him back at the house the next morning around eleven thirty for brunch. I emphatically accepted and traveled back to L’Ermitage and to Gotti, who was asleep. I crawled into bed and fell asleep beside him. The next morning, Gotti wanted details. I really had nothing to say about my experience with Diddy. He was polite and gentle, and I actually preferred him, as a person, over Gotti, who was cocky and nasty at times. Gotti seemed a bit frustrated with my unwillingness to give details and even more irritated by the fact that I had been invited back for brunch. He always wanted to present me as his resident whore but hated it when anyone actually wanted to keep me around, which happened quite often. He almost relished the idea of people using me and then throwing me away, like yesterday’s newspaper. But I was beaming from ear to ear as I got dressed to head back to Diddy’s house. Gotti left in a hurry, with the look of disgust on his face. And that made me even happier.
Back at Diddy’s, I was received with open arms by him and his entire staff. I met him upstairs in his dressing quarters, where his tailor was fitting him for the upcoming MTV Music Awards. I was awestruck by the vast array of suits, ties, shirts, and shoes. They were so obviously rich in fabric and texture, and he was handsome in everything that he tried on. I stood by the French doors, drinking in the sun, as Farnsworth Bentley sat intently on the floor next to me with his legs crossed Indian style. He looked up at Diddy with a gleam of admiration. Everyone in the home was devoted to Diddy and catered to all of his needs—and, for the afternoon, all of mine.
Brunch was served on a long rectangular table in the dining room. Diddy and I sat and talked about who I was and about my relationship with Gotti. He listened but didn’t have much to say. He was extremely kind, and I remember him complimenting me, saying I was very pretty and had beautiful skin. I began to understand all the hype about Diddy, why he is this pop-culture icon. He’s got that star quality, that something which draws people to him and makes them want to be in his space and part of his world. I was no different. By the end of the afternoon, I’d become easily enamored.
There was still so much going on during this time in my life. The drug use and drinking got heavier and more frequent. I also began to experiment with different types of XTC. The three major components of the drug are cocaine, heroin, and speed. I began to take the drug in large doses and in different mixtures—some with more cocaine or more speed. It would keep me up all night and part of the next day. Under its influence, sex became more of an experience for me, and I would fall even more “in love” with my mate than I would have done without it.
Every night was a party for me, and I easily became less of a person and even less of a mother. I wouldn’t see my son for weeks and even months at a time. My nanny and her family had basically adopted my son. She was the one who potty-trained him and got him on solid foods. She and her family were there for him as I ran around the world, chasing acceptance and money. Pretty soon I was burned out.
It became increasingly difficult to keep up with the lifestyle I had adopted. Ja would call us all “rock stars” because that was the type of life we were leading. They had it all—the money, cars, homes, the girls. And if you were with them, you had it all, too, until you realized that none of them could ever sustain it. It was all just a myth. I could see we were all growing weary, becoming, each day, a shadow of the person we’d been before. In fact, we were not “rock stars.” I was an addict of a more dangerous sort. I became addicted to my companions’ lives and to all the material things in them. My body became thin and weary. I wasn’t able to sleep or eat because of the drugs and the liquor.
Sometime during 2001, I began to reach out for help, even though I was not quite sure what I would do if I got it. On the night before the Soul Train Music Awards, Gotti and I had been up to our regular antics—sex, drugs, alcohol, and hip hop. We had popped a new type of XTC. I can’t remember the name of it, but it was about four times the size of a regular pill. Gotti took a half, and I, being the addict I was, took a whole one. We then drove to the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. I don’t remember much of that night because the XTC had taken over before we even entered the club. What I do remember is lying in bed after the night was over. Gotti was asleep and I was lying next to him wide-awake, naked and sweaty from the sex we’d just had. Emotionally unsettled because of the drugs, I called Little X, the director with whom I worked on Mystikal’s “Danger” video. It was three in the morning, and I began to talk to him about everything—my childhood, the rape, and my mother. I talked to him about the things I was involved in, including the self-abuse. I was sobbing at times and angry at others. Little X listened intently for the next three hours and offered what advice he could. He asked the questions that no one had ever really asked, and the answers scared me.
“Why do you do this?” he asked. “Do you think these people actually love you? What’s happened to you to make you want to live this way?”
I saw then how distorted things in my life were, how unsound my judgment had become, and it made my body shake. But I wasn’t ready to face the truth, so I ended the phone call with Little X at around six in the morning, blaming my weakness on the drug.
I have no problems. I’m fine, I told myself before closing my eyes and falling asleep.
By April 2001, just four months after filming A Man Apart, I was penniless. My drug and alcohol addiction was costing me around five hundred dollars a day. My monthly bills at the apartment I barely slept in totaled around five thousand dollars a month, and there were three leased cars in my garage, which cost me upward of about twenty-five hundred dollars each month. I had an SUV, a convertible, and a German sedan. I spent extra money every month on lease payments just to be able to switch cars whenever I decided to go home to pack a new bag. On top of the usual bills, there were also trips and shopping sprees, and even though I was being paid by the men I slept with, I found myself spending all of their money and all of mine, too. I had been around the rich and famous for so long, I actually began to believe that I was one of them.
Needless to say, I was completely delusional and irresponsible. None of my bills were being paid during the first few months of 2001 as I traveled around the world in a dark cloud. I spent a couple of months in Atlanta and in New York and was a frequent flier to Miami’s South Beach. By the time I finally returned to Los Angeles that April, there was a red letter stuck to my door from the sheriff, and my garage stood empty. All of my cars had been repossessed. My partying and irresponsible ways had finally caught up with me, and I hit what appeared to be rock bottom.
After I unlocked my door and walked into my stuffy condo, my first stop was the downstairs bathroom. Sitting on the toilet to urinate, I felt a burning sensation. I screamed from the pain and leaned in to the wall for support. I had not been having unprotected sex, but I also knew that the effectiveness of condoms and vaginal films, or dental dams, were less than a hundred percent. I would find out days later that the alcohol level in my body was so high that it created the burning sensation. I ignored the pain for the moment as my attention turned to the sheriff’s notice. I began to make phone calls to try to salvage what was left of my life. The first person on my list was Shaq. He had been so generous when we were together, and all I needed to keep the condo was two thousand dollars. Stuttering a bit as I explained the situation, via telephone, I then heard Shaq turn me down before I even finished my story.
“But my son and I will be out on the street in a week if I don’t pay them their money!” I pleaded.
He asked me what happened to all the money I’d made on the movie, and I had to lie—something about having a sick family member or something. I even cried as I begged for help, but to no avail. I was too ashamed to admit I had spent all my money by living beyond my means and by supporting my drug habit.
The next call I made was to Irv Gotti, and to my surprise, he, too, refused me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As I went down the list, every man I called said no. After about three or four phone calls, I gave up and brought myself back to the reality of the situation. I had to pack up and move and do so in a hurry.
Within a week, I had put most everything in storage and had just enough money to rent a car. For the next nine months, I would be homeless, and sadly, sometimes my son would be living out of my car with me when he wasn’t at the home of the family who’d in large part taken him in as one of their own. It was as if I were a sixteen-year-old runaway again, except this time I was responsible for a three-year-old son. Bouncing from pillar to post, I became more of a hustler than ever.
From time to time, I would strip at the famous Crazy Girlz Club on Sunset Boulevard. Even worse than that, I resorted to selling my body to men I already knew in the music industry for the money I needed to stay above water. Between keeping a rental car and trying to manage the weekly hotel bill, I needed at least a thousand dollars every week—which didn’t include essentials, such as food and gas. On the weeks I couldn’t come up with the cash, my son and I would stay with friends or just slept in the car.
There were a few people who were there for me. I found a warm bed and a hot meal at the homes of directors John Singleton and F. Gary Gray. Whenever they could, they gave me money to help me get on my feet, but it never seemed to be enough. For the moment I gave up drugs and monitored my alcohol consumption. I was clean and sober, and, ironically, in need of even more money than before just to keep up with the increasing costs of renting cars and hotel rooms. It seemed as if I were spending money even more rapidly than I’d done when I’d actually had money.
On the nights when there was no money, I would park my car behind the W Hotel in the Westwood section of Los Angeles and rest, or on a quiet back road I found in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. There were days when I drove around all day, not having a place to shower or a restroom to use. I would have to pull over to the side of the road or use a disgusting gas-station bathroom. The trunk of the rental car was stacked with the clothes and basic necessities for me and my son. During that winter, we covered ourselves with heavy leather coats in order to keep warm while sleeping in the car. I would wake up to start the car every few hours in order to use the heat, then turn the car off shortly after so as to not waste gas. I would watch my son, sleeping on the reclined passenger seat next to me and cry. I knew that I was the one who’d done this to him, and I was determined to fix it. But the path to salvation was still unclear.
One thing had become clear to me. The people I considered my friends, and even my family, were nothing of the sort. Over the past few years, I had done what was asked of me in order to keep the men in my life happy, in hopes that they would always accept me and want me around. I was the life of the party and the ultimate party favor and showpiece, but now I was a person with issues. When I had a problem and was no longer the carefree addict they had all come to know, they didn’t want me around. They began to change. The same men who gave me thousands of dollars for shopping sprees and fantasy sex-capades were now donating maybe two or three hundred dollars to help me in my plight. I was getting less money in my time of need than I was when I was everyone’s favorite whore.
To get back in the game and back on my feet, I pretended that everything was fine and that all of my problems were temporary. My resources were limited. By the time G left me, I was faced with having to deal with thousands of dollars of debt. And now with the eviction and repossession of my cars, there was no way I could rent an apartment, no matter how much money I had. What made it even more difficult was not having any family or close friends to depend on for emotional support. I had not been allowed to go back to school while I was with G, and without his financial support, I found it hard to catch my footing. I moved to Los Angeles before obtaining my nurse’s-aide license. I had office skills and experience working in retail, but no formal education, and working for minimum wage would not satisfy my insurmountable bills. To stay afloat, I had to hustle once again. I would soon turn back to the very men who had used me before and wouldn’t help me when I needed help the most. I went back to being hip hop’s version of a prostitute—sleeping with men in the industry, both artists and label executives, for which I received money.
The man I affectionately call Papa was unaware of what was going on in my life. I sheltered him from the truth out of shame. But he must have known I was headed for trouble. Throughout our time together, he frequently told me that I would have to change my life completely in order to be happy. He was always there for me financially, but I would never ask for more than he offered. We saw each other whenever he was in Los Angeles, and we met in other places, such as New York and Miami.
In October of 2001, Papa and I ended up spending a few days together in Los Angeles. Now back in the game, I was back to my old party-girl ways. I had been holed up at the luxurious St. Regis Hotel in Century City with Eva, a girlfriend of mine and the longtime girlfriend of Ja. She and I had become extremely close as friends and lovers after a ménage-à-trois with Ja in May 2001. We took baths together, popped XTC, and lounged around in bed enjoying the high. When the phone rang on that day, Eva answered then handed it to me; it was Papa. I’d left him a message earlier, letting him know where I was and that I wanted to see him. I left the St. Regis and drove to the hotel where he was staying that night. Once there, we made love, and the emotions of the moment made me weep with satisfaction.
Papa had always been more than my lover. He was easily my best friend and the one person who I knew loved me. Although he had recently married at the time, I couldn’t stop being in love with him. I should have been angry anddisappointed enough to walk away from him, but he was already in my head and had become very much a part of my life. I spent the next morning with him in the studio as he worked into the early evening. Right before he was to head back to the hotel, I rushed to get there before he arrived. I got a key to his room from the front desk, drew myself a bath, lit candles around it, and sat in it while eating from a bowl of grapes. I was going to surprise him, so I called Papa on his cell to ask where he was. At the very moment he was explaining to me that he was still working, I heard him come through the hotel-room door. Once he realized that I was actually waiting for him in the tub, he became enraged.
He yelled at me about him being married. “What if I had my wife with me?!”
He said I had no right to sneak back into his hotel room and wait for him without notice or permission. He crushed me with every word. I was dying inside and couldn’t take the pain. I got dressed and ran out of the hotel in tears. Unfortunately, I headed back to the people who were always there for me, despite what came with the lifestyle. I headed back to Murder Inc.
The night began rather typically, nothing out of the ordinary. I called Eva and agreed to meet her and a few members of Murder Inc. at Mr. Chow. Depressed and confused, I sat at the table brooding over the fight I’d had with Papa. He was my backbone in my most trying times, and now he, too, seemed to be against me.
“I need something,” I said to one of Ja’s people. “Give me a pill.”
He flipped open the inseam of his jacket and pulled a pill from behind one of the buttons. He handed it to me, and without looking, I placed it on my tongue and chased it down with a shot of sake.
I sat at the table with my head in my hands for what seemed to be about three minutes, when all of a sudden things seemed to go very wrong. I began to feel numb and hot all over. The noise from the restaurant began to overpower me and seemed deafening. I turned to Eva and asked her to follow me to the upstairs bathroom. Once in the restroom, I sat on the toilet with my head on my knees. Slowly, I could see the shaking begin from my feet and travel all the way up my body until I could no longer control it. From that point I blacked out, as my body went into a seizure. My next memory is of waking up on the bathroom floor. Eva was nowhere in sight. I was alone, right back where I had started. I slowly stood up and held on to the sink, looking at myself in the mirror. My pupils were dilated and I could feel my wobbling knees giving out underneath me. I splashed cold water on my face, hoping to snap out of the trouble that I was in.
Soon I was on the floor again, waking up from another bout of convulsions. My tongue was swollen and bloody. I made my way back to the sink and splashed more water on my face. I opened the bathroom door and began to scream my son’s name into the stairwell that led to the restaurant. My heartbeat was racing, accompanied by a dry mouth and blurred vision. No one was there for me. I felt I would die alone. Finally, a woman came in to use the restroom. She took one look at me and asked if I was all right. I told her I was an epileptic and had been having seizures. Within seconds, the manager of the restaurant was at my side, laying me down on the tile floor and propping my feet up. Only then did Eva return with a couple members of The Inc. After just a few minutes, I began to feel a bit more levelheaded. My first thought should have been for my health, but in fact, it was about how this would affect the reputations of the members of Murder Inc. and the unwanted attention it would bring them and the other celebrities in the restaurant, some of whom I knew.
I could hear the ambulance making its way up the street, and before it arrived, Eva and I sneaked out of Mr. Chow and went back to the St. Regis Hotel. I cried all the way there while being held by Remy, a Def Jam employee. I cried for Papa, begging Remy to call him and tell him what had happened to me. He didn’t come.
Once I was in the hotel, everyone decided to go to a club, and I was left to deal with the aftermath of my seizures. My head was pounding, my tongue was swollen, and my speech was slurred. I began to call everyone I could. It was about eleven o’clock at night, and I can’t remember everyone I called, but I remember calling my dad. His words broke my heart and shut me out farther than I had been already. I told him about the drugs and seizures and that I needed help.
He responded, “It’s late. Call me tomorrow or something.”
He had never really been there when I was growing up, and although he was there to save me from my mother, he had always told his children that they could never come home again once they left, no matter what. If anyone could have saved me, he could have. I felt as if he bothered with me only when it appeared I was doing well, while I was living the high life with G. But now that I was down-and-out, he was too tired to even acknowledge my desperate voice. I had known I was alone before, but that night it was made painfully clear just how alone I was. I cried all night until, finally, I fell asleep.