Purpose Page 10

  And you know what? At that talent show and whenever Rob and I ciphered, I always started with my line about the Bronx. To me, taking a bad line and making it work was a skill. Rob G realized it, too. He said that line was my secret weapon when we battle rapped other crews, even though it was mad corny.

  “That line is the first one you wrote and it’s terrible,” he said. “If you come out with that, the other rapper will underestimate you, and once he do that, you come back and whup him.”

  Rob G was my mentor at school, while at home my music was developing thanks to some very different teachers. By that time, my dad had replaced our Muppet Show instruments with real ones and our little band began to sound really good. Guitar had become my main instrument and I learned everything from two people. The first was Jerry Duplessis’s brother, Renel. He taught me my first four chords and a bunch of Flamenco progressions. I was happy to learn them but I didn’t want to play flamenco; I wanted to play something that sounded cool. I wanted to make my guitar sound like what I was doing with Rob. Slowly I tried to figure that out on my own.

  I couldn’t have done it without a man named Omexis who rented a room from us for a short time. That was his name as far as we knew, but he went by more aliases than Ol’ Dirty Bastard. His name changed with the seasons: some people called him Commissioner. Some called him Max. Some called him by what we thought was his real name, Omexis, and others called him Joseph. He had to be the biggest hustler in town. I don’t know his real name. He played guitar, so for the months he lived with us, I’d go upstairs to his room and listen to him play. His style was Western: it sounded like the soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  “Omexis, that is so cool, man. Will you teach me?”

  He squinted at me like a cowboy in the sun.

  “Go get your guitar.”

  When I’d sit up there and get lessons I’d notice passport photos all over the floor with his face on it, under six different names. He had false Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, everything. Whatever this dude was into, it was serious. He was an outlaw, playing real outlaw music.

  I don’t know what Omexis was doing, but he always came home super late. I have always been an night owl, so I was up, usually listening to forbidden music on my Walkman. To get upstairs, he’d have to pass by my room and usually he’d stick his head in.

  “Hey, what’s an A scale?” And then I’d have to play it.

  “You remember the G minor?” And then I’d have to play it.

  “Okay, good job, I’ll see you later.”

  He was always on the run, that guy.

  Between Omexis and Jerry’s brother, I developed a style all my own and I learned how many zones of sound the guitar was capable of. I had started with the accordion, then the trombone. All I wanted was an instrument that I could play as a lead singer of the church band that would cause the girls to notice me. Neither of those was gonna do it. But the guitar did.

  The only problem with learning all of these scales and becoming capable of playing whatever I heard was that it caused a war to start in my house. My brothers and sister Melky and I would rehearse every evening, and as we got better, I tried to sneak some of the music we liked into rehearsal. The minute we even tried to, my dad would interrupt us.

  It didn’t matter how softly we played or how far away from us he was; the man had superhuman ears. The moment he heard a note of music that didn’t sound right to him, there he was.

  “What is this you are playing?”

  “We’re trying something new just to practice, Dad. We won’t—”

  “You won’t play it at all. There will only be church music played in this house. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  The man wasn’t going to hear any kind of music or talk or anything else that didn’t pertain to Jesus Christ. If he did, he’d pull off his belt and administer a round of whuppings. The one radio station my father played, both in his car and in our house, was called Family Radio, which is a listener-supported twenty-four-hour-a-day Christian radio station.

  In reality, all of us kids listened to pop music on our Walkmans like every other kid—just more secretly. We fell in love with rock and roll, hip-hop, reggae, and eighties music and we’d sneak downstairs to catch music videos on a show called New York Hot Tracks that was on Friday nights on channel 7. The hosts would be in nightclubs and musicians like Boy George or David Bowie or the Beastie Boys would come through and the hosts would show their videos. We loved it, because we saw musicians doing their thing on television every week. It was very hard for us when they’d show Michael Jackson videos, because what kid at that age can sit still when they hear Michael Jackson? We’d have to keep each other from singing and dancing, because if we made any noise, our father would come out of his room and kill us.

  One night we were gathered around the TV with the volume turned down low, sneaking a peak at Hot Tracks when Eddie Van Halen came on. And I just about lost my mind. I had never seen anyone play guitar like that. I had never heard a guitar sound like that and suddenly all that I knew meant nothing.

  “What the hell is this?” I whispered.

  All of us were motionless, just staring at this guy play. “We’ve got to learn how to do that.”

  There was no way we could ever play rock and roll outright as the church band, but once again a visitor to our home showed us the way. My parents always had Nazarene missionaries from all over the country and the world coming through to stay with us, and one of them who saw me practicing my guitar gave me a tape of a band called Petra. Their name is the Greek word for “rock” and they were the originators of Christian rock, starting all the way back in 1972. They made us realize that religious rock could be cool to play. I have to thank them for that, because Petra allowed us to play music in church that wasn’t corny, that we could never have gotten away with otherwise. My dad would accept it as long as it was about the Lord and had Jesus’s name in it. Petra sounded like Bon Jovi, but instead of “shot through the heart,” the lyrics would be “shot to the devil.”

  Petra gave me an even better idea, which I shared with my siblings while we were practicing one day.

  “Listen, we can play whatever we want.”

  “No we can’t, Nel. You know that,” my brother said.

  “Yes we can. So long as we put Jesus’s name in it. Y’all gotta trust me.”

  This plan worked. We’d learn funk songs and rock songs and change the words so they were all about Jesus, the Lord, and heaven. My father, who never listened to pop music, thought we had written all of it. He had no idea we were borrowing from artists like James Brown, the Police, and Pink Floyd, who didn’t speak about Jesus in any way he would have approved of.

  We developed a sound by blending all of the music we liked into our own groove, with lyrics inspired by Bible stories that we knew by heart because we’d heard them all our lives. We became the main attraction on Sundays, especially to all of the kids. Their parents liked it, too, because we were more entertaining and different than the same old hymns done the same old way every week. We were a cover band, just playing in church, but no one realized that because most of the adults in the congregation were Haitian immigrants with no knowledge of American pop music. This new style inspired us creatively, because we were getting our way without displeasing our dad.

  Every form of rock record that came out in the eighties made its way into our set at one time or another. We did Yes, Steve Miller Band, Asia, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Metallica, Black Sabbath, you name it. The one thing we couldn’t do was hip-hop, because my dad knew hip-hop. It was the sound of Walnut Street: all the thugs walking by with their radios, all the drug dealers’ Jeeps bumpin’ so loud it shook the front windows of our house. He knew that rhythm and all it represented to him too well. He called it bum music.

  My mother listened to a lot of country music, so we made sure to include a lot of it. To her, the soulful singing and harmonies sounded like the Christian music the missio
naries brought with them to Haiti. She didn’t always hear some of the more secular stories about tears and beers and all of that in there. To her those voices and guitars sounded like the Nazarene missionaries from churches in Kansas City and Texas. She loved Crystal Gayle and Kenny Rogers and when she really wanted to get down my mom would blast Charlie Daniels’s “Devil Went Down to Georgia” as loud as her record player would go.

  Through my mom I learned to love Johnny Cash. When I was given the honor of playing at the tribute to Johnny Cash in 1999, with him present, I covered “Delia’s Gone,” my very favorite song of his. I don’t think anyone expected me to play a faithful version of it on acoustic guitar with just a bass accompanying me. I’ve always been good at imitations and I did my version of Johnny. I freestyled a verse, too, and I was worried that the Man in Black might not like it, but when I saw him later that night, he told me he loved it and he was happy to see me make the song my own.

  “That’s what real folk music is about,” he said. “Making a song your song.”

  I LISTENED TO EVERYTHING I could get my hands on that was rock and pop at the time—but never any R&B. I didn’t know the Stylistics, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, the Temptations, none of that. My parents had never heard it because in the seventies when that stuff was going on, they were migrating to the States within the church, so they weren’t exposed to it. Put it this way: I didn’t even know that that Michael Jackson came from the Jackson 5; that’s how much all of that music passed me by.

  We were exposed to reggae, which found its way into our church band, thanks to my cousin Jerry Duplessis. He had just come from Haiti and he brought records that had been played on Radio of Light, which was a Christian reggae station in Haiti. In the same way that we were influenced by the pop music we saw on TV and heard on the radio but made it Christian, these Haitian groups took reggae and made it Christian. They put Christian lyrics over music inspired by Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley, who were coming out of Jamaica.

  There, one artist who influenced us more than any other was Riguard Divarnere because Jerry was his bass player. He was just twelve years old at the time and his bass was much too big for him, so he was nicknamed Little Bass. Jerry fell in love with the reggae groove and he brought a lot of his records with him when he moved in with us. This Riguard Divarnere was heavily influenced by Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley and when I first heard him, I knew I wanted to sound like him. I wanted to be that kind of singer in the church.

  Jerry was having a great time playing that music down in Haiti—maybe a little too much. I remember hearing that he had been hospitalized down there because he had overdosed on drugs. The truth was that Jerry’s dad had left the family in Haiti and come to America to live with us and set up shop the way my father and so many others had. Once he was gone, Jerry’s family home basically turned into a marijuana farm, and one day Jerry smoked so much that he ended up in the hospital. Little Bass got that high—so high that he needed medical attention. You’ve got to really try hard to do that.

  Jerry’s father, my uncle, the one who later sponsored our musical careers by providing a space where we could record without my dad knowing about it, sent for Jerry via a visa through the church. He showed up with his big bass, already a rock star to us.

  I was excited because I thought Jerry would start playing in our band. He was five years older so I figured he could really teach us some stuff. That didn’t happen right away, because we were forbidden to hang out with him at first. My mother ordered us to keep an eye on him and tell her if he was doing drugs. He was clearly the black sheep, which I loved. It was nice to no longer be the only one.

  One day Jerry brought me a cassette, and at the time he couldn’t even speak English.

  “Listen to this stuff, man,” he said in Creole.

  He had a tape of a sound system from Jamaica called Stone Love. Sound systems are a vital part of the musical history of all Caribbean cultures. They are collections of DJs, MCs, and engineers who travel around the country in a truck or bus outfitted with a generator and huge speakers to throw street parties. This was how reggae, rocksteady, and other forms of music were spread to the people all over the island. This is where the DJs of the South Bronx drew their inspiration to throw parties in the parks in the summer time, and this is how hip-hop was born.

  Stone Love was started by a guy named Winston “Wee Pow” Powell and has been going strong for almost forty years. I pushed Play on the tape and heard this guy speaking in an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life. He was saying, “Dis tune is a tune straight outta England, a number one tune, dis one.” The first thing I started doing was imitating that accent all day long because I thought it was cool and funny. That tape changed my life and got me hooked on dance hall, reggae, and all of that.

  Jerry introduced me to other great reggae records, like King Yellowman, Gregory Isaacs’s “Night Nurse,” songs that I’ve loved all of my life since the first time I heard them.

  One night, all of us were in bed going to sleep, when I smelled something unusual. It was a smell I knew right away we weren’t supposed to be smelling in our house. I heard my mom wake up and come down the hall. She started banging on the door, which was locked, with Jerry inside of course.

  “Open this door right now,” she said to him in Creole.

  “I’m using the bathroom. I am peeing!”

  “No you’re not. Open up. Now!”

  By then all of us were standing behind my mom. Jerry opened up and a cloud of smoke came out and engulfed all of us. I tried not to crack a smile. It was going to be the first time someone would catch a beating besides me.

  Jerry’s dad had found his own place by then so my mom brought the phone with her before she started interrogating. She told Jerry his dad was on the phone but she didn’t let him say hello. She held the mouthpiece to his mouth and started asking questions.

  “What were you doing in there, Jerry?”

  “Nothing. I was going to the bathroom.”

  “Why is there all this smoke in here, Jerry? Have you been smoking?”

  “No, I haven’t been smoking.”

  She took the phone back and smelled it.

  “You haven’t been smoking? Well why does this phone smell like smoke? No one smokes in this house.”

  “Uh … I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to keep this phone and let your dad smell it, Jerry, because I know you were smoking in there and now he will, too.”

  That did it, and Jerry broke down on the spot.

  “Yeah, I’ve been smoking. But I haven’t been smoking weed. I was only smoking a cigar.”

  The truth was he wanted to smoke weed, but he didn’t know where to get it. His English wasn’t very good either, so he couldn’t even ask anybody. So he smoked a cigar instead, trying to get a bit of a buzz. He had to get a fix. It was a step up from smoking weed, but getting caught smoking a cigar in the minister’s house didn’t go too well for him. It didn’t matter that he was eighteen years old; he was treated like a misbehaving child that day.

  3

  TO THE BEAT OF MY OWN DRUM

  We lived at 107 South Clinton Street in East Orange for four years, from the end of my elementary through junior high school. When we moved out, my grandmother and Uncle Renaud—Jerry and Renel’s father—moved in there, relocating from Brooklyn. In that house my father had forbidden hip-hop, but in the basement just a few years later, we built the recording studio, the Booga Basement, and in that studio The Score was recorded. It makes complete sense when you look at the history of the men in my family: my father did his best work as a preacher, but he only did so after he went against his father’s Vodou beliefs. And in that little home, I did my best work recording music my dad considered immoral poison, one floor below the room where he used to preach. It was a circle of life.

  My father made a church out of every place we lived, but he was always looking for a proper building for his flock, and he had never had that in Am
erica. One day in 1985, he had the entire family in the car and we were driving down South Clinton Street, toward Newark. It’s about fifteen minutes away from where we lived. It was just a regular day. I think it was early winter and kind of rainy, and I don’t remember where we were going, but that day changed everything for our family. We passed 1108 South Orange Avenue, and there it was: the Garden of Eden my father had been looking for in the Garden State. It was an abandoned funeral home that had been condemned and was halfway burnt to the ground. He slammed on the brakes and the LTD station wagon came to a halt slowly and clumsily.

  “This is it!”

  “What is it, Gesner?” my mom asked.

  “This is what we have been looking for!”

  “What is? What do you mean?”

  “This is what I mean: I have found the church. I have found our home.”

  At that point all of us kids began turning our heads around like we were in The Exorcist because there was no way in hell that he could be talking about that burnt-up, ashy building.

  “Dad! Where is it?”

  “There it is. We will rebuild. We will call it home.”

  The building at 1108 South Orange Avenue had been burned almost to the foundation. It was a skeleton with a half-intact roof and walls so charred that you couldn’t tell what color they used to be. This is where my father was convinced that we should be and where he believed he could have the church he’d been searching for.

  The family thought my father had finally gone crazy. This place, even to us, wasn’t a place to call home. The dead didn’t have a choice by the time they got there, but we still did. I saw what was going to happen: we were going to become the Haitian Addams Family living in this place. I wasn’t about to go to a new high school with kids knowing my family lived in a burnt-out funeral home. To the right side of the funeral home were a big parking lot and an Irish pub. Across the street was a run-down supermarket, and on the left side was an Italian social club: one of those joints where they drank coffee and ran numbers and had late-night illegal card games.