by Jason Lee
We sat down together and came up with a 30-day plan for us to transition out of the relationship. It was enough time for him to find somewhere else to live. I didn’t know who I had become while in the relationship with Josh, but I won’t say that it was only because of him. I’m grateful for the time I spent with Josh because I learned a few things: I deserve someone who was straight up with me, and I did not want to be in a dysfunctional relationship. I took him, his luggage, and our dog and dropped them off at the bus and got him a one-way ticket back to northern California. I haven't talked to him or seen him since. I don't even know where he is, but I wish him all the best in his endeavors.
***
At some point during the tenure of my relationship with Josh, I rekindled my friendship with Calvin. We both had other relationships since we’d been together, but there was no bad blood. He was dating a guy named T, and we all got along pretty well. Whatever crazy, cool experience I was having, I wanted him to partake, and the night I got invited to Prince’s after-party in 2011 was one of those times.
I was in New York, and a friend of mine took me over to Melyssa Ford's house. He introduced me to Melyssa and she casually mentioned that she had tickets to the Prince concert and that she was going that night. I grinned. I loved Prince. I’ve dressed up like him for Halloween and had Purple Rain on repeat. Ever since those mini-concerts I would have as a six-year-old in my living room, I had always appreciated his artistry. Melyssa asked us if we wanted to go, and we were all over it.
We went to Madison Square Garden, and while we were sitting in our seats, Steven Hill, who was the president of BET at the time, walked toward us. Melyssa had been on BET, so when he saw her, he said, “Why aren't you guys down by the stage?”
She said, “We don't have any passes to get down there.” Steven gave us some purple bands, and then we headed down to the stage. We were sharing space with Jimmy Fallon, Mos Def, Questlove, and a bunch of other celebrities. It was really intimate yet overwhelming.
I saw Miguel, who I knew, sitting in the audience across the stage, and then the stage manager came over and said, “You guys want to get up on stage?”
We gave him a unanimous, “Hell yeah!” We got up on stage and danced with Prince. The stage was built like his infamous symbol, and his dancers were dancing on skates while he was going around the stage playing the guitar. Questlove got on the drums, Jimmy Fallon got a guitar while Mos Def, A. J. Calloway and I were just standing there watching all this shit go down. It was crazy.
I didn’t care what I was doing or what anybody else thought of me; I had the opportunity to share a stage with an icon. It was electric. I was a grown man, but that little boy was leaping to come out and take center-stage. I thought he had died, but that night showed me that he was still alive. I cherished that night because even though that experience was brief, it gave me back that careless light-hearted spirit that life had tried its best to snuff out.
After the performance, Miguel walked over to me while we were on stage and said, “Hey, Prince just invited us to his private after-party. You can come." The party was at a little club—it was a very intimate space. There was someone performing on stage, and I became star-struck by all the celebrities I saw there: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z, Madonna … I had to share this moment with someone else, and since Calvin lived in New York, I called him immediately.
“Yo, you need to come down to this club!” I pretended to panic. “I'm about to get jumped; these guys are trying to get me.” I knew if I had told him the real reason why I wanted him to come he would have chickened out.
“I'm on my way, and I'm bringing T!”
Calvin and T pulled up like the getaway drivers of a bank robbery because they thought I was about to get jumped. Calvin called me and asked, “Are we at the right place? There are a lot of police out here, and there are barricades. We can't even get in the club.”
“No, you at the right spot. I was lying, let me come outside.” I went out there and I got them. I brought Calvin in, and Calvin looked at me like he wanted to punch me.
“Yo, you got us thinking some shit was going down!"
I said, “Nah, it's cool.” I was trying to act nonchalant because I knew that he was getting ready to lose his mind.
When we walked in, Calvin was checking the place out, and then he looked at the table where Miguel and Melyssa Ford were sitting.
He paused and said, “Is that Miguel?”
I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
He looked at me and said, "What the fuck is this?"
“Come with me to the bathroom. I'm about to tell you where we at.” Calvin and I walked toward the bathroom, and Leonardo DiCaprio walked by. Calvin gasped and said, “Yo, son, is that Leonard DiCaprio? Oh, shit!” I was trying to get him to calm the fuck down, but because Calvin didn’t live his life working with celebrities, he was psyched.
Calvin lived in Brooklyn and is a huge Jay-Z fan. We were getting closer to the bathroom and we passed by Jay-Z's table. He yelled, “You got to be fucking kidding me.”
I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Jay-Z.” We finally made it to the bathroom, and I started explaining. “Okay, listen. This is Prince's private party, nigga. I don't know how we got in here, but we in here. I just didn't want to experience this shit by myself, but—"
“Prince is here?” he shrieked.
“Oh, yeah,” I responded nonchalantly like I wasn’t just about to have a whole fit while I was on stage with him. We walked out, and as soon as we turn the corner, Prince was sitting there with Madonna. When Calvin first got to the club, he ordered some bottles, but after he saw Prince and Madonna, he was so overwhelmed by it all, he just left. He couldn't even stand to be in the building.
I called him, like, "Nigga, you got to come back and pay for these bottles." Nobody just orders bottles and leaves. I was like, What the fuck? He regained his composure and came back. We paid for the bottles, we got drunk, and we had a good time. There was no arguing or no conversations about unrequited love. I’m glad that the foundation of our relationship was strong enough for us to still remain friends.
12 Trayvon Martin & Activism
To keep the bills paid, I had immersed myself in work. Though I was around celebrities, I wasn’t one—I still needed to make a constant income. I was still trying to determine who I was and what I had to offer the world, and navigating in that space was always eventful. The death of Whitney Houston and all the issues that had arisen from caused me to take a break from events and I decided to get back to my grassroots in youth advocacy. I had lost a great role model, Ed Fleming, but I didn’t lose the love that I had for youth which he allowed me to discover when I worked as a youth counselor. Shortly after, I worked in the probation department because I really wanted to help at-risk kids. After a few months on the job, I discovered that the system wasn’t really interested in helping those kids succeed; it was a business. I ended up encountering a lot of racism and a lot of politics, so I became an advocate for the kids. Despite my primary responsibility of being a probation officer, I felt like my first job was to do whatever I could to help them make it. I was once a kid in the system, and I had to do most of my own advocating.
I ended up filing a complaint with the juvenile justice commissioner about how some of the staff were abusing the kids. On Halloween, they gathered the kids from the low-security section and dressed them up like Jason from Friday the 13th. The staff forced them to put on orange jumpsuits and ski masks, and then they handcuffed and shackled them and walked them around from unit to unit. They would just make a big joke of it all and take pictures and laugh hysterically. The kids were forced to participate against their will, and that pissed me off that they weren’t treated with dignity. To add to an already fucked up situation, the staff would frequently refer to some of the kids as “niggers.” Here I was, a Black man, and they didn’t even respect me enough to at least not use that word in my presence! On top of that, I knew that the administration had purposely passed me up
for a promotion even though I had the highest scores on my tests and had the best experience for the position. Guess they just didn’t want a Black man as an authority figure in the criminal justice system.
They found out about my complaint and fired me. I ended up suing them and then became an advocate in the community. The union was already aware of my advocacy and what I was going through because they were representing me. The day after I got fired, I was hired with the union and became one of the realest, most respected union leaders within the industry of labor, the labor movement. I did that for 10 years and became a staff director over Kaiser Permanente in California. Then I became a regional director, so I had statewide responsibilities.
Eventually, the union was taken over by our parent union because we were using the members’ dues to fight some disparities within the union. Somehow that was a violation of the rules, so we all ended up losing our jobs. The president and all the executives ended up getting removed, and all of us secondary leaders were all corralled into rooms at a hotel. We had to go through an interview process with the parent-union to be rehired. We had to explain our loyalty to them, and we had to agree to lie to the members.
I had a decision to make: was I going to lie and lose all my integrity with these people and keep a really good job, or was I going to quit and figure out life? It was an easy decision: I quit and joined the opposing union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). While I was there, we organized the members to leave; we got 91,000 out of over 100,000 members to sign a petition to leave the union within 10 days.
I worked at NUHW for about a year, and then I joined the California Nursing Association. I lost my passion for the labor movement because it became all about politics and less about the people. I left that career path behind, and I really started hustling. I started to make friends with different people in the entertainment industry and started to offer consulting services or party promotion, but I still had a heart for my community. I had acquired all of these skills within the labor union and I wanted to use them to make a difference.
One day while I was back home in Stockton visiting family, I was watching the news and saw that five kids were shot in their backyard during a graduation celebration. I was just so shocked that that was still happening. The city had literally become as dangerous as it was in '97 when my brother was murdered. I got in the car. I drove down to city hall, and I asked to speak to the mayor. When she came out, I asked her, “What is going on in this city?” I needed to know what her plan was to protect the people. My niece was entering kindergarten, and I was really concerned about how unsafe the city was. I didn’t want her or any other kid to have his or her life cut short because of the violence that dominated Stockton. Then I started looking at what was happening in the community at large, and I immersed myself into the city’s restoration. I actually moved home for three months to put together a plan. I organized the community to talk about safety and accountability, and I started this whole initiative called “I Am Ready,” which was about youth empowerment and leadership and safety.
In taking that meeting and then going on to do that initiative, I started meeting with community leaders, union leaders, drug dealers, fucking gangbangers—I was meeting with everybody. City council, the mayor, Congressmen, the Senator. At that time, there was a national conversation going on about gun violence as it related to the Trayvon Martin case. I was compelled to meet with Trayvon’s older brother, Jahavaris, because I knew what he was going through. I lived with the pain of losing Rodney, so I just wanted to support Jahavaris and the rest of the family the best way I could. My attorney reached out to Trayvon Martin's attorney, Ben Crump, and I flew to New York and met with Trayvon's mother. I got her permission to team up, and we created a campaign to bring awareness to the Trayvon Martin case.
We created the official Trayvon Martin T-shirt and officially launched the campaign. I had worked for the union, so my experience there was helpful in thoroughly and properly creating a campaign. We also created a website and arranged for a bunch of celebrities to take photos in this shirt and post it on their social to raise awareness. We get everybody from Chris Brown to Matt Barnes, and Tank. We asked our personal connections to participate and even had Omarosa lend her support. I flew to Miami and I shot Trayvon’s entire family in the shirt. That was a special moment for me because they trusted me with handling Trayvon’s memory. They trusted my vision and supported me even though they were heart-broken and grief-stricken. They let me in, as a result, we raised a lot of awareness and participated in the conversation about gun-violence and police brutality within the African American community. We wanted to there to be a world-wide concentration on gun laws and the lack of protections for people of color, and more specifically, the effect that Trayvon's murder and other murders like them have on communities.
***
I wanted to make a bigger impact in the lives of people around me, and that opportunity came to me in the form of a 17-year-old boy named Jaelyn Bague. Jaelyn reached out to me on Facebook and told me that he was a fan of mine. He said that he had a rap group and that he really wanted to meet me. I didn’t know that I had “fans” and I was flattered that he thought I was someone he could look up to. I remembered when I got that phone call from Michael Jackson when I was around his age, and although I wasn’t on Michael’s level, if I could have given another kid a fraction of the excitement I felt that day, I was willing. When I went to his page, I scrolled through his pictures and was taken aback by how much he looked just like me. It was crazy. I got an eerie feeling because I thought about how much I had looked like Ed back when he mentored me. When I did more digging, I found out that I had gone to school with his dad, and I knew his mom.
I responded to his message and said, “Okay, when I come home to Stockton, I'll reach out to you and your co-rapper. I'll get with both of you, and then we’ll meet up.”
I made good on my word, and the next time I was in Stockton, we linked up. He introduced me to the newest city council member, Michael Tubbs, who happened to be the youngest Black man elected to the city council. He was a big deal and was even endorsed by Oprah.
Jaelyn and I became great friends. When I did the tribute to Whitney Houston on the anniversary of her death, I invited Jaelyn to come along. I knew that Dana would be there and he had mentioned before how much he loved Queen Latifah, so I wanted to introduce them.
Sometime during the evening, I had Jaelyn follow me to where Dana was and I said, “Hey, Dana, this is Jaelyn. He's from Stockton, and he's a rapper. Don't he look just like me?"
She laughed and said, “Yeah, he does. Nice to meet you Jaelyn.” He gave her a hug and then she turned to me and said, “I hope you're doing for him what I did for you.” That stuck with me. It was my responsibility to pay it forward. As much as I reached forward, I needed to reach back.
***
Though I was doing everything I could to bring comfort and support to the Martin/Fulton family and trying my best to pour into Jaelyn, the relationships with my own family members were still damaged. I could have literally killed my father. Talking about Trayvon no doubt stirred up a lot of emotions about Rodney, and I was angry with my father because of our interactions after Rodney was killed. He was very insensitive. My brother was a drug dealer at the time, and after he died, my father stole two kilos of Rodney’s stash, sold it, and didn’t give any money to Rodney’s daughter. Then he took all Rodney’s property and distributed it out to his brothers and other people.
Rodney also had an old school car that he had worked on; he was so proud of it. He painted it red (because he was a Blood) and customized the interior with red and white seats. He put a lot of money and work into it. My dad gave it to his brother, my uncle Ricky, who my brother was never even close to. They had no relationship. He may have even sold it to him. If he did, he definitely kept all the money.
He didn't even give anything to us as a keepsake. He was very selfish; he was divisive. He wasn't a person who bro
ught the family together. He’s an elderly man now, and I’m not sure that he is any different than he was when we were just dealing with Rodney’s death.
We've only had one conversation about Rodney, and it was terrible. About fifteen years had passed since Rodney died, and I thought that we’d be able to talk about it as sensible, mature adults, but the conversation ended up being a heated, bitter discussion. Rodney’s murder came up when I was back home working on the Trayvon Martin campaign with Trayvon’s family. I was also continuing to do work in the community as a mentor, and I took Jaelyn to my dad’s house with me because I had a meeting with Ralph White, a well-known community leader, who happened to be a friend of my dad’s.
During our meeting at Ralph’s house, a local pastor told me that some community leaders were up in arms because I was doing so much to organize the city. I don’t know why anyone would have been upset because things definitely needed to change in Stockton. I continued to meet with a lot of different groups within the city, I was learning and strategizing how to bring change. I had been meeting with Ralph White[57]; he was like the one Black guy in Stockton who everybody listened to because he had been very successful. He had been on the city council, but it was also rumored that he was corrupt.
As our meeting continued, the pastor went on to say, “You over here talking about this and that. You ain't even from Stockton. You from LA. You don't know nothing about violence in Stockton.”
