NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 23: Rapper Scarface performs onstage at the 2009 VH1 Hip Hop Honors at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on September 23, 2009 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
(Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)
Scarface is releasing a tell-all memoir with assistance from Benjamin Meadows-Ingram. The book, titled Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and the Roots of Southern Rap, is very candid and features personal excerpts on the legend’s troublesome life growing up. The Geto Boy powerfully reflects on his mental heath and numerous suicide attempts as a child. Check out excerpts below and find out more about the book here.
“Looking back, I think I just wanted the attention. I see that now. But back then, I felt like attention was the last thing I wanted. I wouldnt have been able to tell you if it was any one specific thing that had pushed me to that point. I just know that I was mad. Mad and sad. I felt like no one wanted me. My daddy was dead, and my mama didnt want me. I didnt really get along with my stepdad, and my grandma already had nine kids of her own, so there wasnt really a place for me at her house either. I felt like I couldnt do shit right, and the only way I could get any attention was by f—ing up. No one would come watch me play football or check out my baseball games or any shit like that, but as soon as I popped some kid in the face or busted somebodys head open in class, everyone was there, telling me I was f—ed up for what Id done, trying to take away my privileges and shit like that. That was the attention I was getting: for being a f—up.”
“I dont remember too much about that particular day, but I know I was ready for it to be done. I was ready to get up out this b*tch. So I went in my mothers medicine cabinet and took all of her blood-pressure medication. I woke up on the bathroom floor with the ambulance parked outside and the paramedics trying to get me up and out the door. They took me to the hospital and gave me this stuff, ipecac, to clean out my stomach. I spent the whole next day puking my guts out. It was disgusting. I thought that shit was going to kill me! I was like, ‘Damn, you brought me all the way here to do me in like this?’ You could have just left me on the floor and saved everyone a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“It wasnt like that was the first time Id tried to kill myself. Id been trying to take my own life for years. You name it, Id tried it. Slitting my wrists with a box cutter and bleeding out all over the bathroom floor, putting loaded guns to my head, all of that sh*t. If youd asked me then, Id have told you straight up: I was ready to go. But I never did it. I never cut myself deep enough or far enough away from my family to be left alone to die. I never pulled the trigger. I never went all the way. Thats why I say that I think I really just wanted the attention. If you really want to go, dying is the easy part. Its the living thats hard. That shit takes a lifetime. And it will test you every step of the way.”
