Suge & Me: The Doing & Undoing of My Career as a Gangsta Rapper

    My world was turned upside down.
    As I stared out at the cabana area of the Palm Beach Four Seasons, the blood rushing to my head, the concrete below looking up at me menacingly, I wished I had never run a foul of my business associate and, I thought until he decided to hang me by my ankles over a sixth floor hotel balcony, friend, Suge Knight.
    “I thought we were friends,” I told Suge, but he just muttered something over his cigar about his grip giving out.
    “You hear me honky?”
    “Yes,” I lied.
    The entire hubbub could be traced back to my debut album with Death Row Records, “Rich Gangster Junction,” which had flopped monumentally and lost the label a large sum of money. The album was panned critically, with music writers and fans contending that I was not, as I said several times on the album, from Compton, but in fact from a suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Farmers Branch.
    One enterprising investigative journalist dug up my high school year book and discovered that I had been a member of the glee club and the chess team, and was named by my classmates the “friendliest” guy with the “best smile” in all of the class of 2004 at Lakeside Preparatory School.
    Then came the TMZ video.
    In June of 2009, around a month before the release of “Rich Gangster Juntion,” an amateur video surfaced on TMZ.com depicting me falling to the ground and shrieking at the sound of what I thought was a gunshot, but turned out to be a car backfiring. “Still,” I told XXL magazine, “It was pretty loud.”
    The resulting article was titled “Scared Honky Junction: The New, Lilly Face of Death Row.”
    Indeed, my precarious position was greatly the result of this article, which Suge told me hurt our street cred like a motherfucker. Some fans down at the cabana were chanting “Drop him! Drop him!” and so forth, and that was when I faced the dismaying fact that my career as a gangster rapper, and maybe my life, too, was over.
    Suge opted against obliging the bloodthirsty, pool-goin’ masses, though, and let me go--under the stipulation that I never rap for any label ever again--with a light beating from his cronies.
    “I hope this doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” I told Suge as he threw me, literally, out of his hotel room. But Suge just slammed the door and went back to entertaining the bitches in his room. I walked home sullenly that day, groping the area where my “Death Row” chain had sat so menacingly just an hour before.