my parents came to the united states in the seventies
from iran. i was born in the early eighties in staten
island where i grew up most of my life until i started
dorming in the city for college when i was eighteen. a
few years later i moved to new jersey and got an
apartment with my friend. another friend of mine went
to college at a suny school a little upstate in new
york. i started going up to visit him a couple times a
week and bringing back ounces of weed to break down
into twenty sacks. it was working out real good, i was
making lots of new friends.
i got pulled over a couple times. once i remember i
had an ounce in the pocket of my jacket that was in
the backseat. the other time i had two ounces in the
lining of my trunk. it worked out fine though, i just
got speeding tickets. everyone wants to hang out at
your apartment when you're selling weed. it was pretty
good, first time i was really living out on my own.
once we were hanging out outside about to leave and my
roommate had some closed beer containers on him, but
the thing is we were hanging out with some underage
kids who were seventeen. detectives rolled up and put
him in cuffs and asked me if they could look in our
apartment. i said alright so i walked him up there and
he kinda looked around a little, first thing he did
was open up the freezer. on the way out he's asking me
if i got money for bailing him out and i'm telling him
no. they let him go and i stopped selling for a while
after that.
same time i moved out and was selling dope i was
getting real interested in religion. i would have
people hanging out at my place and i would kick them
out like at one in the morning and start reading the
bible and hitting my bong. i would just open it up
randomly and start reading. i was also getting into
the fruitarian diet. i would be going to the
twentyfour hour pathmark down the street from me at
nighttime getting lots of fruit while i was high. i
would eat just fruit for days at a time and feel real
light, my friend was telling me everytime she looked
at me i had a smile on my face. it was a real
confusing time, i was starting to believe that fruit
was the original diet in the garden but everyone
around me's just eating junk food.
so i found me a girl and moved out to a new place with
a new friend of mine. we ended up having eight cats at
that apartment, which was basically all my fault. we
would have lots of parties though, and people were
feeling us. another friend of mine was getting
inspired to start making music. i think it was new
year's when he made up plans to built a studio in his
basement. we were spraypainting foam for sound
proofing, and building walls for a vocal booth. we got
a hard disk recorder, turntables and a mixer, and pro
tools from the music store and started setting it all
up. i would kick my funny little freestyles but i was
real clouded at that time and it wasn't nothing. my
friend who's house it was put together a band and it
was all coming together. he recorded me, his band, and
some other friends of ours and put out a compilation
cd at a record release show in the park.
round that time i moved out and was just living by
myself. time away from people got me serious on my
diet and i stopped eating cooked foods altogether. i
wasn't feeling being around people partying in any way
and i started spending my friday nights reading the
bible. i was detoxing real bad now that i was eating a
straight diet from all those years i was eating junk.
my throat was real infected and i couldn't even
express myself. i was finding it hard talking to
people and had extreme anxiety about holding a
conversation. this extended into two years of spending
time basically by myself and with my family. i started
realizing the importance of islam, which is the
religion i was born into, and started reading qur'an.
i took an arabic class at my college and the whole
term was spent learning the alphabet. how to read it
and write it. after that i got some books on qur'anic
arabic from barnes & nobles and a muslim store in
brooklyn by my mosque. after a while i was able to
read qur'an in just arabic. that's how i do it today.
i started praying three times a day and really
building my identity. two decembers ago i left
with a group from my mosque to go on pilgrimage to
mecca. sometimes i wish i was still there praying on
the marble floor of the sacred mosque.
