When I got back from Florida, I walked into my mom’s apartment and, as I was talking to her, out of nowhere, my brother Jesse, who I hadn’t seen since I was four years old, popped out of the back bedroom where he’d been hiding, yelling, “Surprise! What’s up?!” I couldn’t believe it. I was definitely surprised. For a minute it was all happy and we were all hugging each other, having this fun moment catching up, but then suddenly he got on this weird older-brother trip where he was like, “Yo. I heard how you been treating Mom.”

“What do you mean?”

“You been disrespecting her, not listening to her.”

Which meant, obviously, that while I’d been in Florida my mom had been in his ear with all her lies and bullshit about how nobody loved her and nobody helped her, and now he was defending her to try to get back on her good side after being away for so long. That lasted about two weeks and then he came into my room one day and was like, “This bitch is crazy! I gotta get the fuck out of here.” So that was cool and from then on we were able to bond over how fucked up our mother was. For a while it was me and him together against the world, and then he couldn’t take Terry Lee anymore and he left to live with Geanie and her babies in the apartment across the way and then it was me and my mom again and I realized I wanted out, too. I wanted a change, something different, just like Josh wanted something different in Florida and my mom wanted something different in moving to Grey Eagle Court.

With Jesse.

More than anything, for whatever reason, I felt this urge to have my dad back in my life. I wanted a real relationship with my father. I wanted a dad to go fishing with and to play catch with, as stupid as it sounds. I wanted that because I’d never had it, and I was still too young to understand that I was never going to get it. Because my dad was who he was, would always be who he was, and had always been who he was my whole life, which I was too young to understand.

Maybe I should have figured it out when he left me in the backseat of a car outside a crackhouse. Maybe I should have figured it out the time he stole my cubic zirconia earring off of my naked body to pay for drugs. Or maybe I should have figured it out the time he stole my identity. That was a new one. I like my name and I’m proud of my name, but when it comes to protecting your identity and your credit rating, it isn’t a good idea to be named after a crack addict. My dad’s name is Robert Bryson Hall and mine is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II and because he knew my social security number, he stole my identity and took out five or six credit cards and maxed them all out. The only cards he was able to get all had low limits on them, so it was only a few grand, maybe. But it was a few grand my mom couldn’t pay back. We didn’t even find out about it until a couple of years later when we started getting calls from collection agencies and by then my credit was already fucked.

Everything about my dad was a lie. My dad would play me music and lie about it being his. He’d pull out a CD and pop it on and say, “Yeah, this is me from back in the day.” And he’d play the shit, and it would be obvious even to a sixteen-year-old that the guy singing wasn’t my dad. I’d be like, “Yo, this isn’t you. You’re playing me this and you’re swearing to me that this is you and it’s so evidently not you.”

The thing about my dad was that he did have admirable qualities. He was a talented musician and a smooth, silver-tongued dude. If he wanted something he could get it, and I inherited that from him. The difference is he only used his powers for evil, to hustle and manipulate people so he could skate by without doing shit. Which is the funny thing about lazy people. They’re not lazy. They put so much effort into doing the least amount of work. If you’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, my dad was like the Danny Ocean of laziness. He’d go above and beyond and cook up all these crazy plots and schemes to do nothing. If he’d just had a regular fuckin’ job, he’d have been further along than he was. But I didn’t see it back then. I didn’t see it when I was sleeping in the car outside the crackhouse or when he stole my earring or when he stole my identity. I looked past all that because I still wanted a relationship with him so much. When I got back from Florida, I wasn’t in school and I didn’t have shit going on or any friends living nearby, so one day I announced to my mom, “I don’t want to live with you. I want to live with my dad.”

At the time my dad was living down in Fireside in an apartment that was way worse than any I ever lived in with my mom. You walked in and you were in the living room with the carpet that probably looked good in 1982 but now had so many stains and spills that it was mostly covered up with throw rugs. It always felt dark in the house, too, even if the windows were open and all the lights were on. In the corner was a TV up on a big stand next to the sliding door out to the porch where I would smoke, and in the middle was a coffee table and one of those big ’90s leather couches that was always cold when you sat on it and it was nasty and dirty because it never got cleaned.

My dad’s brother, my uncle Mike, was living with him at the time. Uncle Mike was super-cool and he worked at Nordstrom Rack. Immediately to your right when you walked in was a door to this tiny room that was barely more than a walk-in closet. Uncle Mike slept in there on a mattress on the floor. Then past that was the kitchen and then the tiny bathroom and then my dad’s room. I didn’t have a bedroom. I slept on the nasty leather couch that was always cold, which is probably why to this day I hate leather couches.

So I was living with my dad for a minute, watchin’ TV and cookin’ fried eggs with Old Bay on them to make sandwiches. My dad sort of had his shit together at that point, so it was difficult to know if he was using or not, but I know for sure he was pimping because he took me with him to do it one day. I guess he saw it as like a fun father-son activity.

The girl wasn’t one of his girlfriends. Donna the Cryptkeeper was gone by that point. I don’t know how or where to. And my dad hadn’t yet met his third wife, Debbie, the one who he cheated on while she was in a coma and then divorced as soon as she got out of the coma. So the girlfriend he was seeing when I stayed with him was this woman Bridget. Bridget was attractive for a crack addict. She was like a ditzy, dumb blonde with big breasts and she and my dad were fucking for a while, but then she ended up getting with Uncle Mike, which is so gross if you think about it. She left the master bedroom to head down the hall and sleep on the floor in the little ghetto bedroom with Mike.

The girl my dad was pimping out wasn’t Bridget. It was some other girl. He took me and we picked her up and drove deep in the hood, way out into Takoma Park, and when we got to these apartments behind some random supermarket my dad parked and said to her, “So, he’s up there?” and she said, “Yeah,” and my dad said—and I’ll never forget this—he said, “All right. When you come back, you make sure you give me that money.” She got out of the car and we watched her walk up some alleyway behind the supermarket. Then we drove to McDonald’s for a bit, and while that girl was getting pimped out I got my all-time go-to standard McDonald’s order. (Number 1 Big Mac, medium, with a Coke and a Spicy McChicken on the side in case the Big Mac sucks. Because the Big Mac is always a roll of the dice, but the Spicy McChicken, you can’t fuck that up.) Then we drove back to the apartment behind the supermarket and the girl came down and got back in the car and gave my dad some money and I was like, “Damn, was I just part of a prostitution exchange?”

So that was that and then Bridget moved down the hall and that’s when Debbie first showed up. My dad met Debbie in A.A. She was this blond woman and she wasn’t skinny but she wasn’t fat and she had her teeth. She was from Atlanta and from money but now she and my dad were addicts together. When they were clean and doing well, they were clean and doing well, and when they were using they were using. She had two adult kids, and they were both drug addicts and alcoholics, too.

I didn’t like Debbie at first, but she turned out to be the sweetest woman ever. I wouldn’t call her a mother figure but she was a good person when she was clean and she was clean most of the time I was there. This one time, my dad came into some money he probably stole and we were at the shoe store and he was buying himself all these shoes and I was standing there in my ratty sneakers with holes in them but my dad didn’t care because he was so focused on himself and Debbie was like, “Buy your fuckin’ son a pair of shoes. What’s wrong with you?” I always liked that about her. They got married and then she OD’d and fell into a coma and while she was in the coma he was running around cheating on her, but all that came years later.

Other than pimping that one girl out and shifting gears between Bridget and Debbie, I don’t know what the motherfucker was doing with his life at the time besides bossing me around. There was literally zero parenting going on. He never cooked a single meal for me; I had to fend for myself. The only parentlike thing he did was say that if I was going to live with him I had to go back to school, so six months after I’d been expelled from Seneca Valley, he went down and enrolled me back in Gaithersburg High. The fall semester had already started and I missed the first few weeks and technically I was a junior but really I was still somewhere between flunking and passing ninth and/or tenth grade. I did all right, all things considered. I reconnected with some of my old friends, which was cool. But I didn’t give a fuck about school. More and more, the only thing I was into was music. Lying on my dad’s shitty leather couch late at night with just the light shining in from the bathroom or the window, I would put on CDs and stare into the blackness until all the light disappeared and there was nothing but me and the music. I would listen to Wu-Tang tracks over and over and over, and as I listened, I started to train my mind to strip the words out of the songs, making an album in my mind of Wu-Tang beats without any Wu-Tang raps. Then I’d close my eyes and imagine my own raps set to the beat. I’d do that for hours, just me alone in the dark.

I fell in love with rap for several reasons. Part of it was that I was actually good at it; it was the only thing anybody had ever given me positive feedback on and encouraged me to pursue. Part of it was that I looked up to older guys like Josh and liked what they liked because I wanted to be like them. But I also know a big part of it was wanting something I could share with my dad. We’d never go fishing together or play catch together, but we could record music and go to open mics together, and we did.

Living with my dad was when I first started recording raps. He knew some guys with a legit studio. And by legit studio I mean there was this self-storage unit in Gaithersburg where these hood motherfuckers—and I mean like real killers—had rented a unit and turned it into a recording studio. We’d go there and take an elevator up and find this storage unit and go in and record. Some days I’d go in and rap for fifteen minutes straight because I had three notebooks full of a million raps.

My dad took me with him to open-mic nights and radio-station contests and shit like that. A lot of them were scams, because you’d have to pay to perform and then you’d have forty people performing and each of them gets two minutes and they think they’re going to get up and be discovered or whatever. You’d be there for hours and whoever put the thing on would walk away with all this money and nobody ever got discovered ever. But my dad would do them with his band and I’d go along.

My dad was a good entertainer. He didn’t have the best voice, but he could hold a tune and had a lot of charisma. There was this one open mic we went to that was at this bar. Debbie was there and my dad had his whole band set up and toward the end of their set I got up and rapped with them. It was one of my first times on a real stage. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was exhilarating. I just got up and went crazy with these insane raps, veins popping out of my forehead while I shouted, “I’m gonna murder this rhyme” and “I’m gonna kill this beat.” Everything was hard-core. Everything was about death. But it was dope.

I’ve got pictures of me and my dad performing together, which is special. I’d go with him to these things and before our sets we’d smoke cigarettes in the stairwell outside and then we’d go back in to perform. We shared this deep love for music and it was awesome and I loved it and, in hindsight, I think I mistook that for affection. It wasn’t like going fishing together or playing catch together because it was all about him. It was never about us and it certainly wasn’t about me. If we showed up late to an open-mic night and there was only one slot available, he’d take it. If it was a choice between me getting an opportunity or him getting the opportunity, it would be him every time.

Performing with my dad.

My dad was a fifty-year-old crack addict who’d been hustling in the local D.C. music scene for thirty years getting nowhere, but in his mind he was still going to make it. The big break, the lucrative record deal, they were always right around the corner. A less selfish person might have recognized, “Hey, this music thing hasn’t worked out for me, but my son has an interest in it so let me get behind him and maybe help him grab the spotlight.” Which is what Joe Jackson did with Michael and the Jackson Five. As abusive and exploitative as Joe Jackson was, he at least had the self-awareness to know that the kids were the meal ticket. My dad was too selfish to exploit me as his meal ticket, because that would have meant giving me the spotlight he thought he deserved for himself. He wasn’t particularly abusive or mean, just selfish and indifferent. He didn’t like to share.

My dad is the type of nigga where if there was ice cream in the freezer and he saw me going for the kitchen, he’d be like, “Don’t eat up all my ice cream, now,” and I’d be like, “I can’t have any?” and he’d be like, “Nah, fuck you. That’s my shit.”

And that’s the way it was.