I was with my friend Frank the night his brother murdered a guy.
It was Mount Vernon, New York, where I grew up. We were maybe eleven, twelve. My parents were getting divorced, and me and Frank were out late, just walking around, and we’d stay wherever we ended up for the night. (I’m changing the names; this was a long time ago.)
We ran into his brother Robert. Now, everybody knew Robert was a guy who—bless him—everybody said was crazy after he came back from Vietnam. They said he’s crazy and he’s a killer and be careful. I think he was Green Beret, those guys that would cut throats behind enemy lines. But he didn’t bother me none. We’d smoke weed together and he’d say, “You know, D, everybody’s scared of me, man. But you’re not scared of me.”
And I said, “Well, man, you’re just Frank’s big brother.”
I met Frank because when I was eleven I started working in a barbershop up on Fourth Avenue. To get there, you had to cut—or I would cut—through the projects where the basketball courts were, so I started meeting a whole new group of friends in there.
Everybody was gone for Frank and Robert—mother, father, nobody around for them. Frank lived with our other friend Mitch. Miss Mitchell took him in. We had a little band, four of us. Mitch was our lead guitar player, Frank played bass, our friend Jake played the drums, and I played keyboards. My mother owned her own business, a beauty salon, so we had a little bit more money and she could buy me an organ, a Farfisa. We used to rehearse over Jake’s mother’s house, maybe ten minutes away from my house, down by Memorial Field, because they had an attic three or four floors up where nobody could hear us.
None of us read music. We’d sit up there and listen to records and just try to peck out your little part of whatever James Brown song we were trying to play, get your little solo. I wasn’t as good with the solos because I didn’t know how to play, but Frank could play good solos. And Jake, man, he could go for twenty minutes.
We entered a talent show in those same projects one time, and we plugged all our equipment into the outdoor lights. The lights shut off at midnight, so we were the last act—but we won. I was performing back in middle school, too, or trying to. Me and my friend Wayne Bridges—he’s Ludacris’s dad—who I met at the Boys Club, we did a Beatles song in the talent show back then. There were older guys in the neighborhood who we wanted to be like—one guy in particular named Donald Fletcher, and me and Wayne would practice his walk. Elements of that walk are still with me today in the movies. I used to practice moving my shoulders while I walked, trying to look like him, because he was cool, and I wanted to be cool. You didn’t know why, exactly, at the time. All you knew was that you’re six and he’s ten and you want to be like him when you grow up.
So anyway me and Frank coming down the street and we see Robert with this guy Joe, and he tells Joe to go down to the grocery store to get him some Colt 45 malt liquor. Gives him some money. And as Joe takes off down the street, Robert says real quiet to me and Frank, “I’m gonna kill him tonight.”
Just then, Joe turned around from down the street and hollered, Could he get two bottles?
Robert shouted back at him, all nice, “What? Yeah, yeah, get a bottle for yourself, too. And bring me back
