I lifted my head. I opened my eyes. I’d made it through another round on the toilet.
I was still in the middle of opiate withdrawal. Still exhausted and somehow wide awake. Still aching. Still sweating. Still angry. Still anxious. Still alone. But I wasn’t hopeless. I was going to get through this.
?
A few days later I’d made it through the worst of withdrawal but the shits weren’t letting up. I’d been here a few days and spent more time sitting on the toilet than I had in years. I needed to see me a doctor. Something was seriously wrong.
“What is going on with me?” I asked a nurse.
“You’ve been using an opiate for a long time, Mr. Davis,” she said bluntly. “As a result of that your metabolism has slowed considerably. You’ve been constipated. Your body has been retaining everything. Now you’re losing that weight.”
The fucking lean. That’s why my stomach had gotten so fat.
?
Tweets from September 22, 2013
11:04 a.m.
Woke up the other day out this hospital bed & I’m so embarrassed & ashamed of my behavior that was brought to my attention. (Cont)
11:05 a.m.
I just wanna man up right now & take this time to apologize to my family, friends, the industry & most of all my fans. I’m SORRY! (Cont)
11:06 a.m.
I’ve been drinking lean for 10 plus years & I must admit it has destroyed me. I wanna be the first rapper to admit (Cont)
11:08 a.m.
I’m addicted to lean & that shit ain’t no joke. I can barely remember all the things I’ve done & said. However there’s no excuse (Cont)
11:10 a.m.
I’m currently incarcerated but I will be going to rehab because I need help. I wanna thank everyone that has stood by me (Cont)
11:11 a.m.
during this difficult time. Please keep me in your prayers. #GUWOP
11:31 a.m.
I wanna personally apologize to birdman ross & drake. Dem my niggas. I 100% regret my words & actions.
11:59 a.m.
Wrote sum new hard shit can’t wait to get out dis hell hole so y’all can hear dis shit
12:04 p.m.
Keyshia Dior Kaoir I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
?
“Why the fuck haven’t you come down here and bonded me out yet?” I screamed at Keyshia through the phone. It had been nearly two weeks since my arrest and I was still in the same DeKalb County isolation cell.
Keyshia had good reason to not want to help me out. I’d gone crazy on her, first privately on the phone when she’d tried to talk me off the ledge and then on Twitter. But that wasn’t why Keyshia hadn’t come to bond me out. She’d taken every one of my phone calls since my arrest. Her phone bill was ridiculous from all my collect calls. Despite everything, she still wanted to help me. But Keyshia couldn’t get me out of jail.
I had holds. One in Fulton County from my pending assault case from March and another one in DeKalb County for a probation violation. But nobody had said anything to me about these holds since my arraignment, so I’d been sitting there waiting, thinking I was about to get out any minute now. The reason I was still so aggressive and agitated was that I hadn’t started the process of mentally adjusting to being locked down again.
That process began on September 27, two weeks after my arrest, when I was sentenced to six months in DeKalb County for violating my probation.
Three days after that I was transferred to Fulton County Jail, where my bond had been revoked from my March arrest. As part of the routine intake procedure they weighed me when I was booked at Fulton County. I couldn’t believe it when I stepped on the scale: 240 pounds. I was 265 when they weighed me at Grady Hospital. I’d lost twenty-five pounds in two and a half weeks.
?
When I was transferred back to DeKalb County later that week I was allowed to return to general population.
I now had a court date set for November, and while I still didn’t know exactly what I was facing, things weren’t looking good. This wasn’t going to be another three-or six-month situation. The six months on the probation violation I’d just received was only the beginning. They hadn’t even gotten to these new charges yet.
? Carrying a concealed weapon
? Possession of a firearm by a convicted felon
? Disorderly conduct for safety
? Possession of 1 oz. or less of marijuana
They were just getting started.
?
That was when I made a decision. As long as I was here I was going to put my energy into getting more of this weight off. It felt good dropping those twenty-five pounds but I had a long way to go. It wasn’t that I wanted to walk out of jail all brolic. That look had never appealed to me. But I did care about my appearance and I’d always fancied myself a dresser. With the way my stomach had gotten, for years I hadn’t been able to fit into a lot of the clothes I wanted to wear.
I started with a run up and down a flight of steps. It was all I could do and I was out of breath. Then I ran up and down twice. Then three times. The next day I did five. A week later I did twenty. Very quickly the routine became like another addiction to me and between that and barely eating the snack food they serve in county jail, the pounds started falling right off. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
You looking good, Gucci.
Your skin looks a lot better, Gucci.
You talking better, bro.
I looked different from the man in my September mug shot. And I felt different. Sharper. Stronger. More at ease. The exercise was helping me deal with stress. I wanted to push myself harder, transform myself further. When I did get out, whenever that was, I wanted to be able to go on tour and have the energy to put on a show for my fans. I wanted to be able to keep up with a hectic schedule without falling apart. I wanted to look good doing it. I wanted Keyshia to lose her mind when she came to pick me up. When that would be was out of my control, but I could control whether I was ready for that moment when it came. So I kept running up and down those steps.
?
On November 19, 2013, I was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm. My case had gotten picked up by the US Attorney’s office. Alongside the ATF and the Atlanta Police Department, they were going to prosecute it on a federal level as part of something they had going on called the Violent Repeat Offender Program.
“The indictment charges that on two separate occasions, this defendant, a convicted felon, threatened individuals, including the police and his attorney, with a gun,” said US Attorney Sally Quillian Yates. “This is how people get hurt, and we are committed to ensuring convicted felons not have guns.”