Unruly
Page 13
IT WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE 2003 and Aisha was pregnant with Jordan, my second son. The crew went to Las Vegas. I invited her along. Irv had gotten us a deal with Fox to do a hip-hop version of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. We were trying to do a New Year’s countdown that had some flavor.
We were all in a club a little away from the Strip, trying to chill and have a good time. The club had set up a roped-off VIP area for the crew and Aisha. I never liked VIP areas in clubs. I wanted to be near the people and let them meet me and speak with me. Aisha never liked that. “Jeffrey, you know people are crazy.”
I convinced her to let us sit in another semi-VIP area that was closer to the dance floor and easier to be a part of the party. Once we got situated in the new booth, a random dude came up to me, pretending to be a fan. He small-talked me for a minute and then he just snatched the bottle that I was drinking out of my hand. “What the fuck are you doing, homie?” I asked.
Black saw the altercation and snuffed him. I clocked the dude with the bottle and then we all beat the shit out of him. I was enraged at the audacity of someone starting some shit with my pregnant wife sitting right there. I wanted to show him that he had disrespected me and my wife.
Arms and hands were flailing, girls were screaming, thugs were gathering around. Someone swept Aisha away from the scene and into the back of the club which had a private room for the owners. We left the club quickly. My clothes were covered in blood. I couldn’t wait to get them off of me. We went back to the hotel. Aisha went right to the room to get the clothing away from us. I called one of my boys to come to my room and dispose of the clothes.
“Burn them,” I said.
My security team took them in the plastic bag that hotels give you for your laundry.
Once the clothes had been burned, and we had all showered, it looked as though it never happened. I left Aisha to talk to my boys about what had just happened.
“Rule, we left that nigga for dead. That shit could come back to haunt us . . .”
“Who was that nigga? What the fuck just happened, man? Why would a muthafucka come up and do some shit like that to me?” I asked to no one in particular.
“Whatever it was, we took care of that shit.”
I was disappointed that this had happened. A lot of these things that were happening I didn’t want them to happen. I know I have a bad temper and the friends around me have bad tempers. This combination was volatile. It was creating situations that were becoming potentially dangerous. I wanted to get away from it. I just didn’t know how. At some point, I was starting to understand what Jay-Z said, “Everybody that comes with you can’t go with you.”
When we got back home, my man Cici already knew the whole story. It had traveled fast to Los Angeles.
“Rule, the homies are in an uproar about what happened in Vegas. The nigga was in the hospital. You should do something for him, Ja. You guys beat him up pretty badly,” Cici called to tell me.
“What the fuck do I have to do for him?” I screamed on Cici. “That nigga’s the one who violated me! He grabbed my bottle out of my hand. Get the fuck outta here, Cici.” I hung up on him.
MEANWHILE, A DETECTIVE came to Moms’ front door. From outside the door, he said, “Mrs. Atkins, my name is Detective Smith and I have something important to talk to you about.”
Moms didn’t trust the police. She knew that they were always saying one thing in order to get to another. From inside the door, she said, “What’s it about, officer?”
“There’s a hit out on your son’s life. Jeffrey Atkins, a.k.a., Ja Rule.”
Moms slowly opened the door a little wider. She listened to what the detective was saying about California, Las Vegas and some gang activity. Moms had heard of the gang violence in California but didn’t understand how I got involved in all of that being from New York. She listened a little longer then slammed the door. She was concerned but didn’t tell me the police had came by until later, after another visit.
The detectives came back to see her two more times, trying to get inside the house, trying to see if I lived there. I had been in the Feds’ files for a while now in relation to Murder Inc. and the drug money that supposedly funded the label. They were looking for anything that they could get on me, to take me down with Irv.
THE GUARD AT MOMS’ GATED COMMUNITY told her later that the detective had said the guard didn’t need to alert Moms anymore, that the guard should just open the gate. My Moms didn’t like that. It was some more sneaky shit.
Moms hadn’t trusted cops since the days of them harassing me on the corners and in the building. The cops had always been in our lives as far as I could remember. I have been ditching and dodging them my whole life, it seems. Moms always complained, “Police have a racial thing against rappers and ball players. They think y’all think that y’all are above the law.”
“MAY WE COME IN?” the detective asked when he surprised my Moms by being at her front door for the second time.
“No, officer. There’s no need for you to come in. We can just talk here. What do you need to know, now?”
“Is your son home?”
“No.”
“When will he be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No, officer, I don’t know. He is an adult.”
“Thanks for your time,” one detective said as the other one was peering over Moms’ shoulders trying to catch a look at anything possibly suspicious that they could link to me.
Moms didn’t want to upset me. She tried to keep these visits from me. When the detectives came for the third time, Moms had to tell me.
“Jeffrey, we need to talk.”
“What’s up, Ma?”
“The police came to see me today. There’s a hit out on your life.” As she spoke her voice started to tremble. My Moms is a crier.
“Why didn’t you tell me? When did they come? What did they say?” I was starting to get angry at the thought that the police were involving my Moms with all this bullshit. She didn’t do anything wrong.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said softly.
“How many times did they come?” I asked.
“Just once. . . . Twice. Well, three times,” she stuttered.
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry. They won’t be back,” I said as I hung up the phone.
I called my lawyer immediately and the visits stopped.
But the fear and concern were still there. My daughter was almost four years old and there was a hit out for my life over a bullshit fight. I’m not even from the West Coast. I don’t know anything about that shit. I didn’t have the time or energy to fight anymore. The guy sued me and I ended up paying him $150,000 to squash it.
IRV SOUNDED WORSE than I’d ever heard him sound. “Nigga, you won’t believe this shit.” I was on the road at the time, still doing shows, despite the shit that was going on at home.
Irv continued, “The Feds came up to the office took our shit, computers, files and everything. Those muthafuckas are even freezing our accounts. They’re shutting our shit down.”
The Feds had put an indictment on Gotti and they were trying to investigate me as well, but there wasn’t any evidence on me.
All of the hype of Murder Inc. was dead. And, it was all over lies.
DESPITE ALL OF THIS DRAMA, the show must go on: So I released my third album, Pain Is Love. And my fourth album, The Last Temptation, included the joint “Murder Reigns,” which is all about the shit with the Feds.
It was a tough time for me. I think the hardest part of the whole mess was that I felt betrayed by my fans. All those years of being in the spotlight and having crowds approach me for autographs and photos, I never once said no. It really fucked me up that my fans turned on me like that. What people didn’t understand was that the things that 50 Cent was saying about me, teasing me about singing and shit on my joints, he actually was singing, too . . . and making bigger records than before.
EVERYBODY WANTED TO INTERVIEW ME about this beef shit. I agreed that I would only do one interview and the media could pull from that. We were thinking about who we could get like Barbara Walters or Oprah but in reality, this ghetto shit doesn’t touch their world. We decided that we would go with Minister Louis Farrakhan. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Unbeknownst to us, the minister invited 50 Cent. Once again 50 was a no-show. I didn’t care because I didn’t want him there, anyway. I felt like the minister and I were having a conversation rather than an interview. He discussed a peace thing and a truce between young Black men. He explained that I had to think more broadly about the impact of two successful Black men publicly arguing. We talked about the power of bringing the community together, restoring the strength of Black men, maintaining our families and protecting the community. I have nothing but love and respect for him.
My nonsense felt weak in the face of his clarity. He had a vision for a whole race of people and I didn’t even have a vision for my life. I mostly listened to him speak about Allah and the importance of not resorting to violence.
I was young. I wanted him to see my side of the whole thing. The minister said to me, “I love Ja Rule and I love 50 Cent.”
I see now that he was there to tell me that I had to love myself. In doing so, I would be able to love 50 Cent. It would also allow me to appreciate what me and 50 have done collectively for hip-hop. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
OFF-CAMERA, THE MINISTER and I had some real talk. And although he is who he is, he reminded me that even he has history with “beefs.” He explained that he is no stranger to beefs. In fact, he said something that I still think about to this day. He said, “At one point in my life, even I had to choose between my mentor and my leader. I chose my leader. So I know what you’re saying, my brother.”
*
September 22, 2011
Today is Britt’s Birthday. She’s 16 today. I can’t even begin to explain how fucked up I feel not being there for her on such an important B.Day. I feel empty, hollow as I write this. My thoughts are like echoes hitting the paper, they mean nothing. But as they bounce back they start to have meaning. She’s still, and will always be, Daddy’s lil BABY. Knowing that I’ve givin her everything a father could up until this point makes me feel proud. But yet so lost that I’m missing this milestone in her life. There’ll be many more . . . graduation, college, marriage. I just never thought jail would be the reason I missed any of them. I spoke wit her today and she sounded happy. But I don’t know if that made me feel better or worse. I was happy that she was in good spirits but sad I wasn’t there to share that joy. I guess I can’t be all things all the time even if all I wanted was just to be there. The funny thing is I probably won’t be all that missed. I mean, shit, she is a teenager. LOL.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRITTNEY ASJA ATKINS 143
I LOVE YOU !
*
TEN
A Rock Star
THERE WAS JUST NO TIME FOR HATERS. I WAS IN LOS ANGELES recording my second album, Rule: 3:36. I thought it was one of the best times of my life. I rented a house and lived there for three months while I completed the album. I barely slept, as I was too busy enjoying the trappings of success. This was the first time that I had ever had anything extravagant like this. It was a beautiful home worth 10 to 15 million dollars. At first, we were staying at the hotel waiting for the house to be prepared for us. I was anxious. I didn’t want to wait for the furniture and all of that stuff. I convinced my boys to get some blow-up mattresses. We went to Rent-a-Center and got some furniture and TVs. At the time, I didn’t know that you couldn’t have Rent-a-Center furniture in a place like that. There were beds and a couple couches and TVs everywhere. I had so many people staying there. It was like a revolving door. There was one room we called the dorm room. It had about eight blow-up beds in there. If people didn’t have a bedroom of their own, they had to stay in the dorm room.
I called the house my “ghetto mansion.” It was located in Nichols Canyon, in the foothills of Los Angeles. I knew that I had arrived being where Julia Roberts, Ellen DeGeneres and Bruce Willis lived. I really wanted to be there. The house rented for $30,000 a month. I didn’t have the slightest clue of what to do in a house like that. The house had eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a tennis court, a basketball court and a pool. Needless to say, I never played tennis, but we played hoops and hosted pool parties almost every day.
We had lots of fun in that house. At two or three in the morning we were playing basketball. You know how niggas play basketball, all loud. The police came up there nightly. Every time they came, I had a smart-ass remark for them.
“What you mean I can’t have a party up here. I’m paying like everybody else.” Don’t be fucking with me. What you mean I can’t have company.” I am sure my neighbors hated us.
Sometimes in the mornings before anyone else was up, I would wander through the halls of the huge house, and as the blasts of sunlight touched my skin, I realized that I was experiencing my own version of the euphoria. I was light and carefree. I was free from the everyday shit. I was rich. Anything and everything I wanted was at my fingertips.
As I wandered through those hallways, I would remember Moms, who struggled to pay $700 a month for rent. I remember her negotiating with herself which bill to pay that month and which would be skipped. I looked at where I’d come from. I had sacrificed a lot for everything that was happening to me. This was happiness.
I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of what my life had turned into. My life had become a playground with all of my friends, old and new, being a part of my dream. This was my moment. I was tangled up in the web of being “Ja Rule.” Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of Aisha and Brittney, but I kept telling myself that everything I was doing was for them.
As much as Venni Vetti Vecci was very personal, Rule 3:36 was equally personal because it chronicled what was going on in my new life, real-time. “Between Me and You” was a sexy song about indiscretions between consenting adults. The record was a sign of what young men and women were going through—trying to cover up scandalous behavior. Irv and his wife, Deb, were going through it. Me and Ish were going through it. A few of my homies had gotten chicks pregnant on the West Coast. The song embraced a moment in time that we could never get back. We couldn’t make up for it either. It was life. I like to make truthful records about what I see going on around me.
Los Angeles is a tough city to adjust to if you’re not already rich and famous. There were lots of women around us at all times and I knew my boys wanted to meet some of them. Because I was the “star,” it was very easy for me to meet women and pawn them off to my crew, who was always hungry for some female attention. There was this one particular girl who followed us from club to club. She was always watching and staring at me. She introduced herself and an innocent acquaintance started.
Some of the dudes in my circle got closer to her. From the brief conversation we had, I knew she was trouble. Every time I saw her she would name drop: “I am getting married to Fred Durst.” “Tonight I’m going to visit Maxwell.” “I am seeing Lenny Kravitz.” Why did she need to tell us any of this? I knew she was lying or was a troublemaker. She had moved to Los Angeles looking for roles in music videos to get some exposure for her acting career.
I was sho
oting the video for “Between Me and You.” When we arrived, Ezette was lying in the grass topless with a bikini bottom on. Everyone came to party, eat, hang out and do drugs that I was supplying. I wanted everyone to be able to say that if you are at Ja’s house, you can have anything your heart desires.
This Ezette chick reminded me of the hoes from back in the day. Her sexual appetite was robust and she had no problem with having sex with as many men as she could in one night. All of the crew had their chance with Ezette. I called her a “throw around.”
Our rental house was above the city and often had no signal for my cell phone. I never bothered to put in a home phone. Days went by without me calling home.
Aisha didn’t know how to reach me. What if something happened to Brittney? I never thought of that shit, in those days. I was doing a combination of drugs. It was weed, alcohol and ecstacy. You never knew what you were getting with the X. It depends on what the X was cut with. It would give me a different high. I pride myself on never doing the hard drugs—coke, heroin—but the truth of the matter is that the X would be cut with all of that.
It seemed not a day went by that there wasn’t another team of paparazzi following me around and taking photos of me and everyone around me.
All I could do was to endure the bullets of rage that Aisha was shooting every time she heard the sound of my voice. Aisha and I were fighting a lot. She’d scream at me. I’d hang up. She’d call back. I’d listen to her and then I’d hold on to all I had as an excuse: work. I gripped tightly to the rationalization that what I was doing was for our family. She threatened to leave me. I really didn’t want her to go. She called me an asshole. I thought she was acting crazy. She told me that she hated me. I didn’t say anything. I understood.