歌词
As I got older, people always asked,
“Are you tired? What’s wrong with you?
You look angry.Why are you so quiet? Are you upset?”
I always hated that. No, I’m not tired!
No, I’m not angry! (Well, maybe a little angry.)
I’m just not a happygo-lucky m********.
I’m a serious dude because I grew up with a lot of pain, death, and madness.
It’s rare for me to be smiling, in a good mood.
At age four, I got into a fight with a white kid in the schoolyard
for calling me a name I can’t remember.
I hopped off the swings and threw a toy teapot at him and missed.
He threw it back and I tried ducking by bending over to the front,
but I ended up using the top of my forehead
as a bat for his wild pitch. Bing!
A big cartoon lump rose on my forehead.
Head bleeding, I saw the scared look on the white boy’s face.
He didn’t mean to hit me in the head.
The teacher called my father.
After I told Pops the story in the car,
he told me to stop crying.
“Don’t ever duck down if somebody throws something at you,” he said.
Pops was also a karate sensei, a natural-born fighter,
and had his own karate school for a few years before I was born.
“Just move to the side.”
After my forehead lump went down,
Pops started teaching me karate moves.
He enrolled me in a karate class on Jamaica Avenue and 169th Street.
My mother didn’t like it because of the fullbody contact,
though contact didn’t come until second- and third-degree white belt.
My sensei had me cleaning the wood floor with a wet rag
while barefoot in my uniform.
This was for balance and stamina like in the movie Karate Kid—strength training.
After two months,
I got frustrated because I wasn’t learning to fight yet.
I caught a sickle-cell crisis from that cold wet floor,
and Moms said my karate lessons were over.
Pops was pissed.
“You’re turning him into a punk!” he barked.
Chest pain overwhelmed me and I was admitted to Jamaica Hospital,
definitely not the best hospital in Queens.
My mother’s friend Dr. Francis worked there,
a black female sickle-cell specialist.
After Dr. Francis got us in,
the doctors informed my mother that I had acute chest syndrome,
the sickle-cell form of pneumonia.
On that visit,
I learned to make my presence felt in the emergency room.
The squeaky wheel got the oil.
My parents had been trying to coach me on how to conduct myself,
but I didn’t catch on.
Make noise!
Hospital ERs didn’t give a good goddamn about people with sickle-cell.
By the time I hit my teens,
going to the ER was like going to war.
A sickle-cell crisis gets gradually worse as time passes.
Normal red blood cells are small round circles
that resemble a round piece of candy
like a Certs mint or a Lifesaver without the hole in the middle.
When going into a sickle-cell crisis,
normal round red blood cells change to a crescent or sickle shape.
Those sickle-shaped blood cells create a domino effect,
interlocking throughout the body,
creating clotting and blocking oxygen from flowing through the bloodstream.
Loss of oxygen combined with loss of blood flow creates tremendous pain,
risk of stroke, bone damage, and other life-threatening consequences.
It also causes the immune system to weaken and makes it easy to get infections.
Acute chest syndrome was no joke for a fouryear-old,
and they put me in a big plastic bubble in the intensive-care unit.
My mother worked during the day,
so my grandmother stayed all day and Moms came at night.
One afternoon when Grandmoms came to see me,
I was sleeping hard for a few hours,
and when she tried waking me I wouldn’t open my eyes.
She called the doctors to check on me and they said I was just sleeping.
She called their superiors, and they said the same.
But my grandmother, a Southern,
strong-willed female from the old school, knew better.
She told them that the next person she’d call was her lawyer
if they didn’t wake me up immediately.
They went into a frenzy,
finding that all my vital signs were deadly low
and I was slipping in and out of a coma.
Grandmoms saved my life.
Moms and Grandmoms had a meeting with Dr. Francis to get me out of Jamaica Hospital.
Dr. Francis had her own sickle-cell clinic in a house on Farmers Boulevard in Jamaica
where I hated going because it meant I was getting a penicillin shot in my butt,
one of her remedies for sickle-cell.
She told Moms and Grandmoms that Long Island Jewish Hospital
was more prestigious than Jamaica Hospital,
so I was transferred there for at least a month.
The pediatrics unit at Long Island Jewish Hospital
had air hockey, foosball, toys, and movies.
Jamaica Hospital didn’t have a single game or activity.
As soon as I felt well enough,
I’d drag my IV pole down the hallway to the playroom.
I was in sick-kid heaven. The food was like home cooking.
They had name-brand cereals—Corn Pops, Sugar Smacks,and Frosted Flakes.
But no matter how much good stuff they had,
it was still just a nasty hospital with
people dying and infectious disease all around.
When I got out the following month, it was back to the cold mornings,
walking slowly to the school bus.
I started getting used to this routine,
landing in the hospital at least six times between ages four and five.
My parents realized I had another serious problem around that age.
Pissing in the bed.
Most men, let alone rappers, wouldn’t dare admit this,
but a side effect from drinking tons of water to keep my blood hydrated
was waking up with a flood in my bed.
“Why didn’t you just get up and use the bathroom?”
my pops used to yell.
I tried to explain that I was sleeping when it happened,
so how could I get up? Pops wasn’t trying to hear it.
He’d whip my ass with the belt,
thinking I was just scared of the dark
and didn’t want to walk to the bathroom at night.
Grandmoms bought this crazy gadget
that’s supposed to put an end to bedwetting
—a pair of padded underpants with a sensor in the crotch
attached to a wire that attached to my pointer finger,
powered by a nine-volt battery.
As soon as you started pissing,
the sensor made the finger attachment vibrate to wake you up:
basically a pair of high-tech diapers.
I felt like an idiot, but it was worth a try.
The first night I slept through the vibrating
and woke up with the usual flood in my bed,
my finger still vibrating when I woke up.
We tried a few more nights to no avail.
The gadget went into the garbage.
In 1980, when I was six,
my grandmoms paid for me to go to Woodmere Academy,
a private elementary school five minutes from West Hempstead
in a town called Malverne.
The school was 99 percent white.
The only other black kids were my friend Darren and his sister Michele.
Darren smelled like he stepped in shit all the time.
It had to be his breath.
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