My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy by Albert "Prodigy" Johnson

Author:Albert "Prodigy" Johnson [Johnson, Albert "Prodigy"]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2011-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

“On the rec!” The loud, obnoxious, military-style shout from the CO abruptly woke me from my sleep. He was letting the whole dorm know it was time for recreation. Pulling myself off the steel cot attached to my cell wall, I forced myself to go to the yard. C’mon, boy, let’s go, I said to myself. You owe it to your family and to the people who love your music. Now get your ass outside and work out! It was raining hard so I grabbed my green hoodie and workout gloves and ran to catch up with the other inmates.

Out of thirty inmates in my dorm, only four of us went out to brave the weather. The yard at Mid-State Correctional Facility is the size of a football field and has a large shed with plenty of weight-lifting equipment, pull-up bars, dip bars, and concrete picnic tables. I went out every morning. You’ve been in the game seventeen years. What makes you think people are still going to care about you when you get home? I’d constantly ask myself. My answer was always the same. Because of my ability to create music. My attitude about life and my physical appearance will all be better than it ever was.

With all that in mind, I worked out hard for three hours every day. But I worked on my music and attitude more than anything, especially my attitude. My mother always told me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” I didn’t fully understand that until I was forced to sit in a cell and think about my whole life. Damn, I had a big mouth. I needed to tone it down. A lot. I enjoyed being a fearless badass, doing and saying things others were scared to. As a teenager, I got my kicks out of doing shit like standing on a long department-store line of white people and their children and reciting the lyrics to N.W.A’s “Niggaz 4 Life.” “Why do I call myself a nigga, you ask me? Well, it’s because muthafuckers want to blast me….” Seeing how those lyrics made white people uncomfortable would make my day. My boys laughed hard afterward, saying, “Yo, you crazy, P, what’s wrong with you?” It was fun being bad.

We smoked weed and drank big bottles of alcohol in train cars full of passengers, robbed people in front of numerous witnesses, and wreaked havoc throughout the five boroughs. There weren’t as many cameras, police, or thousands of tourists roaming the streets of Manhattan. If you were a teenager growing up in the five boroughs during that time, you know why I acted, talked, rapped, and carried myself the way I did. The concrete-jungle education that New York City provided me is priceless. I’m sure it was similar in every inner city on the map, but nothing compares to the every-man-for-himself state of mind that New Yorkers have—you won’t find that level of ruthlessness anywhere else in the U.

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