The 50th Law - 50 Cent [81]
To make this a reality, he told his closest friends to convene a meeting in his grandparents’ house in Southside Queens. They were to invite his most fervent fans in the neighborhood—the young men whom they knew to be loyal and dependable. And they should all bring guns to help secure the street before Fifty showed up.
When Fifty finally entered the living room of his grandparents’ house the day of the meeting, he could feel the energy and excitement. The space was filled with over twenty young men, all ready to do his bidding. He began by painting for them his precise vision of the future. His music now was hot, but it was going to get a lot hotter. Within two more years, he was certain to land a major record deal. In his head, he already could hear the songs for his first record, visualize the cover and the overall concept—it was to be the story of his life. This record, he assured them, would be an astronomical success, because he had figured out a kind of formula for how to make and market hit songs. He was not the usual rap star, he explained. He was not in this for the bling or the attention, but for the power. He would take the money from the record sales to establish his own businesses. This was destiny—everything in his life was meant to happen as it did, including the assassination attempt, including this very meeting that afternoon.
He was going to forge a business empire and he wanted to take all of them with him. Whatever any of them wanted, he would provide, as long as they proved themselves dependable and shared his sense of purpose. They could be rappers on the record label he would establish or road managers for his tours; or they could go to college and get a degree—he would pay for it all. You are like my pack of wolves, he explained, but none of this will happen if the alpha wolf is killed. What he asked for was their help—in providing security, in keeping him in touch with what was happening on the streets, and in doing some of the legwork for the promotion and distribution of his mix-tapes. He needed followers and he had chosen them.
Almost all of them agreed to the proposal, and over the years to come many of them stayed on to gain important positions within his expanding empire. And if they ever stopped to think about it, it was uncanny how close the future had come to resemble the picture he had painted so many years before.
By 2007, after the tremendous success of his first two records, Fifty began to sense a problem looming on the horizon. He had created an image for the public, a Fifty myth that centered on his tough and menacing presence and his indestructibility. This was projected in his videos and interviews, and the photos of him with his glare and tattoos. Most of it was real, but it was all heightened for dramatic effect. This image had brought him a great deal of attention, but it was turning into an elaborate trap. To prove to his fans that he was still the same Fifty, he would have to keep upping the ante, engaging in more and more outrageous antics. He could not afford to seem like he was going soft. But it was not real to him anymore. He had moved on to a different life, and to stay rooted in this past image would prove to be the ultimate limit to his freedom. He would be trapped in the past and the prisoner of the very image he had created. It would all grow stale and his popularity would wane.
In each phase of his life he had found himself challenged by some seemingly insurmountable obstacle—surviving on the streets without parents to guide him, keeping away from the violence and time in prison, eluding the assassins on his heels, etc. If at any moment he had doubted himself or accepted the normal limits to his mobility, he would be dead or powerless, which was as good as dead in his mind. What had saved him in each case was the intensity