by Wyclef Jean
“Only if he finds out.” I turned around and stared him down.
We got on the highway, heading toward Burger King. My plan was to drop them off, and then go buy some food for the really poor kids and homeless people who were always hanging around in the parking lot begging for scraps. I was going to give the rest of the money to the kids we worked with, because we worked hard and deserved more than minimum wage. To me it was as simple as this: those kids needed money and the church, which was doing fine, had money. In my mind, this was following my dad’s lessons. If there was money in the church and God said to give, I was going to give the congregation’s money to my hardworking brothers and sisters at Burger King that day.
We were on the highway in the left lane and it was so hot we had all the windows open. All of a sudden this Porsche cut me off and I slammed the brakes, which started us skidding until we slammed into the median and, Dukes of Hazzard–style, went up on two wheels for a hot minute. Then we slammed down on the median and skidded sideways to a stop. We’re lucky the car behind us didn’t smash right into the side of us because that hooptie Datsun’s doors were paper-thin.
No one got hurt from the accident, but something was lost, alright. While the car was up on two wheels, the bag of money opened up and got sucked out the window by the wind. As I got my wits about me, I looked out the cracked windshield and saw all this green paper flying behind us, most of it now on the other side of the highway, getting slapped all over the oncoming traffic. It was all gone.
The accident distracted my father from realizing that the money was missing for a while, maybe a week. He and my mother were too happy that we were okay to notice, but eventually he figured out it was missing so I had to admit to it. I had no story to cover it up and deep down I felt like I didn’t deserve to get away with it, even if I could have. So I got a beating worthy of St. Peter for that. Christ was crucified facing forward but St. Peter was crucified backward. A St. Peter’s beating is when they hang your ass in the air backward and beat you to death. That’s what I got, and I could barely sit down for a week.
There was no getting around that one, but it’s a good thing my dad didn’t know about half the shit I was getting into. If he had known, I probably wouldn’t be here today. My whole life then was like Porky’s. How I spent my school days and school afternoons would have ruffled his feathers like nothing else in his world. I don’t think he would have understood why and how I’d managed to get into the local strip club at least once a week.
That started during my sophomore year when my friends and I discovered that we could sneak out of Vailsburg High School pretty easily after checking in first period, and not be noticed as missing if we got back by lunch. A three minutes’ walk away from school was a place called Go-Go that we passed a million times on our way to the deli next door to buy some candy and lunch. That little neon sign with the blacked-out windows had always made me wonder.
“What that mean, ‘Go-Go’?” I asked my American friend.
“There’s naked women dancing in there.”
“What? In there?”
“Yeah.”
“We gotta find a way to go up in there.”
The next time we cut out, I led the charge and we just walked in. And for the five seconds I was inside, oh my God, I thought I’d found heaven: there were women everywhere in just bras and G-strings. It even smelled like heaven to me. Then a big dude blocked our path and pushed us outside.
“What y’all want?” He was a mean-lookin’ dude.
“We wanna see the women.”
The guy started laughing. “Shouldn’t you be in school right now, little man?”
“Yeah, we’re going back there … But we want to see the women.”
This guy was smirking at us now. “Little man, you know you ain’t old enough. I can’t let you in there, but here’s what I can do for you: You give me ten dollars. I give you ten minutes.”
“Okay, thank you, man!”
That guy was cool, because he wasn’t worried about the cops showing up or if it was morally wrong for high school kids to be in a go-go bar; he was just being human. He knew what it was like to be a young man and to want to see naked women. So every Friday we’d visit him and get our ten minutes in Go-Go.
I loved watching the girls dance and once they got used to seeing me there, they’d talk to me and I’d ask them all about their lives. I was a kid. I didn’t even know enough to ask for a lap dance.
I’d ask questions like: “What makes you do this stuff?” “You’re dancing naked, why?” “Does your man know you’re doing this?” I was coming from a curious, sensitive spot, but I just didn’t understand that I was probably offending them.
They were cool women. They’d be honest with me. They’d say, “You know, I’ve got three kids at home and I have to do this to make money. You’ve got a mom at home and if she didn’t have your dad, she’d have to do this to support your family.” I thought that was incredible.
There was one question that was always answered the same way: “No.” And that question was: “Can I get a dance?”
Once I understood what that meant, I asked it all the time. They would put their hands on my cheek and tell me I was cute, but that was as far as I got. I didn’t care. Sneaking out of school for forty minutes to go to a strip club was the most forbidden, coolest experience ever for me.
In high school, besides Burger King, I also had a job in Manhattan, so I’d take the train in a couple of afternoons a week and do my internship at CBS/RCA records with Jan Berger. To make some extra money I got a job as an assistant security guard two nights a week for Donna Karan in downtown Newark. I liked having that uniform, and I’d tell my little sisters I was a police officer.
That job didn’t end up so well, though. I was doing so much stuff between work and all my bands that getting enough sleep became a problem for me. Donna Karan’s showroom front desk had a real nice office chair for me to sit in, too, so a lot of nights I fell asleep. On one of those nights, some dudes broke in the back door and stole a whole rack of clothes that were bound for Manhattan to be in her fashion show. I lost my job over that incident, and I should have, too. I felt worse, though, because there was some one-of-a-kind shit in there and Donna probably had to get something made real quick to fill that hole and get her show up on time.
Years later, after I’d become famous, I met Donna at fashion week in New York and she was telling me how much she liked the Fugees.
“Donna, I have to tell you something. You might not know this but I owe you a check.”
She looked at me like I was crazy.
“You see, a long time ago I was your night security guard in Newark,” I said. “And I fell asleep on the job and a whole rack of clothes for your show was stolen. I still feel bad about that. And now that I’ve met you I feel even worse!”
“Wait, that was you?” she said, smiling. “You do owe me a check then!”
I REALLY DID START to become a problem once I became a teenager. Like I said, my dad didn’t like me staying out, so I became skilled at sneaking in. I even hid a butter knife in the bushes so those nights he locked my window, knowing that’s how I got inside, I could still get in. Then he started listening for me, so it would be this race to see if he got to my room faster than I could get under the covers. The only time I got caught was when I wasn’t fast enough to get my shoes off. Sneakers on, under the covers? That’s being caught red-handed.
He knew I was doing music outside of what I did in church and he knew that some of it had to be hip-hop. I never admitted it and he never heard it, but we both knew what was going on, and that threw gas on the fire. He wanted me in church Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and when I couldn’t oblige that, he started coming down on me. Keeping to his schedule was just the first step in a larger plan that he had in mind for me, which included Eastern Nazarene State College, the same as he planned for my brother Sam. My brother followed that path, but when I didn’t respond, my dad pushed
me away, and it all came to head in the middle of winter my senior year in high school. He threw me out of the house and left me no other choice than going to live with Shoe Man.
Shoe Man was one of those characters who only exist in poor neighborhoods: he had no real job; he just made money by hustling to fulfill whatever need his community had. People like Shoe Man are like Muppets in a way, just cartoon characters that you never know much about, but they serve the one function that everybody knows about in your neighborhood. Shoe Man was the guy who got sneakers off of some truck and sold them at a huge discount. He was the guy you asked to get you the new Jordans, so among the kids, this guy had power. Sneakers are like cars to teenagers in the ’hood: they determine how flush you’re rolling. Shoe Man didn’t even have a shoe store, but he didn’t have to; people just came by his apartment to buy their shoes.
He had other hustles going, too, the biggest one being getting kids to stand on line at the DMV to register cars or get government ID cards for illegal immigrants. Shoe Man would walk the neighborhood recruiting kids he met on corners. He had a number of aliases and passports and a stack of Social Security cards. He had a whole system going for getting Haitian immigrants registered in the US government system with green cards, visas, all that. I knew I could go there and live with Shoe Man because he was always looking for kids like me to do his work for him. All the parents in the church told their kids to stay away from Shoe Man because he was shady. They’d say that the kind of work he did got a lot of kids arrested. But nothing could stop Shoe Man; he was always able to recruit teenagers when their parents’ backs were turned. He’d tried to recruit me many times, so I knew he’d let me in.
I knocked on the door and a few moments later Shoe Man opened it a crack.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I want to work for you, Shoe Man,” I said. “My dad kicked me out and I have nowhere to stay. Can I stay here and work for you?”
He turned around and looked back into the room. “Who’s at the door?” I heard his woman say.
“Nobody,” he said over his shoulder. “Listen, you can’t stay in here tonight. She’s crazy. You got to stay in my car.”
“Alright, then.”
It was winter in New Jersey at the time, and global warming wasn’t really helping me out any. I spent four freezing nights sleeping in Shoe Man’s Toyota during a blizzard. Independence from my father’s house rules was not all it was cracked up to be.
The fifth night, after the snow had stopped, Shoe Man told me it was cool to come into the house and sleep on the couch. He and his girl had been fighting but they’d figured it all out, he said. Until about 2:00 am when I woke to the sound of her screaming.
“Fuck you, motherfucker!” she yelled. “Fuck you! I’m going to kill you, you piece of shit!”
I looked toward the bedroom and saw Shoe Man running, barefoot, toward the front door. She was right behind him and she wasn’t kidding: she had a knife in her hand. Before I could even sit up, she sunk it into Shoe Man’s back. He started yelling as blood started squirting everywhere. She didn’t let up, either; she cut him two more times before he fell to the ground. The living room was a blood bath, and I ran for my life through the kitchen and out the back door.
It was snowing hard that night and the cold blinded me when it hit my face. I had nowhere else to go but home, and I knew I’d have to make amends. I crept into the church through the back door and went to sleep in one of the storage rooms. I slept there soundly until the morning, and didn’t wake up until Sunday service was already under way. My father was in the middle of his sermon when I opened the door and walked right into the room. He didn’t stop speaking, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. There was only one thing for me to do: repent in a very big way.
I went down the aisle and dropped to my knees in front of him.
“Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned. I repent!”
My father kept his eye on me but otherwise ignored me kneeling there and continued with his sermon. I held my hands up to the heavens.
“I repent!”
He still didn’t acknowledge me. Then I felt a hand tap my shoulder. It was my mother.
“My son, do you need prayer? Do you want to pray for forgiveness?”
“Yes, Ma, I need prayer. I want the Lord’s forgiveness. Please pray with me!”
“Bow your head, my son,” she said. My father looked at us skeptically, and then slowly came down the aisle and joined us.
“He is a sinner, Gesner. He needs our prayer,” my mother said, as the whole congregation looked on.
“Please, pray for my soul,” I said, looking up as pitifully as I could. I kept thinking about how cold it was outside and what sleeping in Shoe Man’s car would be like that night.
My mom turned to the congregation. “What shall we do? Will all of you pray for our son and his sins?”
“Yes,” they replied together.
“Well, then,” my father said, “let us pray for his soul.”
My dad beckoned me to the front of the church, made me kneel, and then put his hand on my head.
“Son, do you repent of your sins?” he said in a booming, dramatic voice.
I earned an Oscar that day, because I didn’t feel that I had sinned, but I convinced everyone. “Yes, Father!” I yelled. “I repent! I am a sinner! I praise God and I repent!”
All I cared about was that I was inside, somewhere warm. And for the first time in a week I’d gotten a decent night’s sleep. I was happy to go and take a seat in the back of the church. I had earned it. It was so warm that I fell asleep in a matter of minutes.
After services were over, I took my mom aside for a minute.
“You know, Mama, I’m sorry I ran away for a while, but I have to tell you something,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I love music, and I am going to continue doing it. It is what I want to do with my life. I know that Dad doesn’t like to hear what I’m doing, but my music doesn’t come from the devil.”
My mother looked at me long and hard. “Well, Nelust, I am fine with that because you are going to do as you see fit. But I have to ask you to do something for me and for yourself.”
“What is it, Ma?”
“You cannot tell your father about what you are doing outside of the house with your music. You must play in the church and that is all he should know. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.”
It was as if my mother understood that music was like religion in Haiti: whether a Haitian practiced Vodou or Christianity didn’t matter, it was all a relationship with a higher power. The details don’t make as much of a difference as people make them out to do. If you make music and communicate a message, you are speaking a universal language that goes beyond God’s or the devil’s music. But not everyone sees things that way, and my father was among them.
I honored my mother’s request and I kept hip-hop out of our house—or at least away from anywhere my dad could hear it. We didn’t practice it in the house and I didn’t work on rhymes out loud there, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped writing ciphers. The irony was that as much as my father hated hip-hop in every form, his brother did not. My uncle Renauld loved rap, R&B, and all the music my father thought was evil, so he let me, his nephew, set up a studio in his basement. It wasn’t even his basement; it was my grandmother’s. But it was his workroom—a room no one else could go into. It became the Booga Basement once I devoted myself to making a life of this. Once we founded the Fugees, that place was our refuge. But that couldn’t happen until I ran away from home.
I was in my last year of high school, and my brother Sam had already gone off to Eastern Nazarene College, just like my father wanted. In Gesner’s eyes, I was next. Of course I’d have to graduate first, and there was one little problem with that: algebra. I think the biggest issue I had with algebra was that it was first period in the school day. I was already spending my nights in recording studios laying down
music and rhymes all night, so I was tired. But besides that, I’ve just never liked to get up in the morning. I still don’t. If all of the music stuff I was doing outside of school was happening between six and nine in the morning, I don’t think I would be a musician today. That is how much I hate getting up. Becoming a father has changed all that for me, because once you’re a father, your mornings are no longer your own. I wouldn’t change it for the world, but back when I was a teenager, I wasn’t having the early morning bell. I never made my first period class, so by the end of the year, I was failing algebra. And if I didn’t pass it, I wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate or walk in my robe to get my diploma.
There wasn’t time enough left in the year to turn that grade around. I think we only had one or two more tests and even perfect grades weren’t going to push my average above the failure line. There was only one thing to do: beg and charm my teacher into letting me slide. Her name was Miss Serato, and she was a pretty nice lady, so I figured I had a chance. I had to do something special, though, so I got my guitar out and wrote a song for her. Then I waited in school until she walked out and sang it to her. All I needed was a D-, so a serenade had to count for some kind of extra credit, right? If I didn’t graduate, my father was going to kill me, and put me in one of those old burnt-out coffins down in our basement.
“Oh, Miss Serato,” I sang to her in the hallway outside her class, “you gotta let me go. It’s not my fault that I be waking up late. I be in the studio the night before, I can envision myself in Madison Square Garden, I beg your pardon, Miss Serato. Oh, Miss Serato, please let me go.” The song was a nice, humble ballad. And it didn’t do a damn thing to melt her. That woman was tougher than nails.
“So you’re asking me to pass you, Mr. Jean?”
“Yes, Miss Serato. I know I’m not close to a pass, but maybe you could just this once?”
“And why do you deserve this?”
“I just want to graduate, Miss Serato. My father will kill me if I don’t.”
I started playing the song again, and finally she smiled.
