• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Thank you for seeing that. I just want her and my immediate family—my daughter, my niece and my little brother—to have things I didn’t have: love and material things. But I can’t just buy them things. I have to be there. That’s a cop-out if I just popped up once in a while, didn’t have custody of my daughter and my niece.

Do you have full custody?

I have full custody of my niece and joint custody of Hailie. It’s no secret what’s been going on over the past year with my ex-wife [Kim]. I wouldn’t down-talk her, but with her being on the run from the cops I really had no choice but to just step up to the plate. I was always there for Hailie, and my niece has been a part of my life ever since she was born. Me and Kim pretty much had her, she’d live with us wherever we was at.

And your little brother lives with you.

I’ve seen my little brother bounce around a lot from foster home to foster home. My little brother was taken away by the state when he was eight, nine.

You were how old?

I was twenty-three. But when he was taken away I always said if I ever get in a position to take him, I would take him. I tried to apply for full custody when I was twenty, but I didn’t have the means. I couldn’t support him. I watched him when he was in the foster home. He was so confused. I mean, I cried just goin’ to see him at the foster home. The day he was taken away I was the only one allowed to see him. They had come and got him out of school. He didn’t know what the fuck was goin’ on. The same thing that had happened in my life was happening in his. I had a job and a car, and me and Kim, we bounced around from house to house, tryin’ to pay rent and make ends meet. And then Kim’s niece was born, which is my niece now through marriage. Watched her bounce around from house to house—just watchin’ the cycle of dysfunction, it was like, “Man, if I get in position, I’m gonna stop all this shit.” And I got in position and did.

So you have joint custody of Hailie, but she lives with you and spends most of her time with you and not with Kim.

I don’t know if I’m inclined, or allowed, to say more than what is fact. In the last year, Kim has been in and out of jail and on house arrest, cut her tether off, had been on the run from the cops for quite a while. Tryin’ to explain that to my niece and my daughter was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through. You can never let a child feel like it’s her fault for what’s goin’ on. You just gotta let her know: “Mom has a problem, she’s sick, and it’s not because she doesn’t love you. She loves you, but she’s sick right now, and until she gets better, you’ve got Daddy. And I’m here.”

There are two songs about Kim on ‘Encore.’ In “Puke,” you hate her so much she makes you want to vomit. Then in “Crazy in Love,” you’re like, “I hate you, yet I can’t live without you.”

It’s a love-hate relationship, and it will always be that. We’re talking about a woman who’s been a part of my life since I can remember. She was thirteen when I met her. I was fifteen.

What was it like the first time you saw her?

I met her the day she got out of the youth home. I was at a friend’s house, and his sister was friends with her, but she hadn’t seen Kim in a while ’cause she was in the youth home. And I’m standing on the table with my shirt off, on top of their coffee table with a Kangol on, mocking the words to LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad.” And I turn around and she’s at the door. Her friend hands her a cigarette. She’s thirteen, she’s taller than me, and she didn’t look that young. She easily coulda been mistaken for sixteen, seventeen. I said to my friend’s sister, “Yo, who was that? She’s kinda hot.” And the saga began. Now there’s the constant struggle of “will I ever meet somebody else that’s gonna be real with me, as real as I can say she’s been with me?”

You get deep into your feelings about President Bush and Iraq on ‘Mosh.’ Do you think the war in Iraq was a mistake?

He’s been painted to be this hero, and he’s got our troops over there dying