It all exploded in 1981. After another eviction for bad behavior, his mother took her 10-year-old son on a surprise visit to see the Children’s Village home. Led to believe that he was only inspecting the property, she entered him into the institution. He didn’t even have a chance to take his clothes from home. In the Ruff Ryder’s ChroniclesDMX broke down in tears, describing the betrayal as a defining moment in his life: “It was then that I learned to pull away, hide and bury everything that bothered me. The other side of me was born there … the side that allowed me to protect myself. “
Several months later, he and another child were to be arrested for arson. In defense, he claimed he didn’t want to set the school on fire, just see if the flames would turn blue. Soon after, he nearly killed his co-conspirator, leading the group home to isolate him in the infirmary. This was a preparation for the periods of solitary confinement that put him under pressure for the next four decades.
After 18 months, DMX returned home. He despised his family life and began to spend the night on the street, sleeping in the Salvation Army garments, and trying to befriend stray dogs. By then he had fallen in love with hip hop, had episodes of Mr. Magic, claiming that Whodini verses were actually his own creation. He had become a budding master of the beatbox, taking his rap name from the Oberheim DMX digital drum machine that defined old school percussion sounds. A regionally respected rapper named Ready Ron offered mentorship early on and encouraged him to take the art seriously. He also allegedly introduced him to cocaine in the form of a ‘woolie’, a cocaine-laced blunt that the 14-year-old DMX mistakenly believed was strictly weed.
There isn’t much about education in the Yonkers section of COUNT All upper class men carried weapons. As a freshman, X became the second fastest on the varsity track team, despite his poor grades and sparse attendance record. But he was broke, hungry, and ragged in hand-me-downs. Neither his mother nor his grandmother had the money to help him. The way of the gun became his favorite route. His first victim was a lady who walked out of a supermarket on Yonkers’ Getty Square. He jumped out of the bushes, grabbed the bag from her shoulder, and ran. The score earned him $ 1000, which bought his dog Blacky a new leather collar and harness, and he himself a pair of Timbalands. From the start, DMX was always DMX.
By the end of his freshman year, classes were an afterthought. School was just a way of robbing the other kids. He developed a strict regime of three robberies a day: before school, after school and late at night. Three different flavors of people to choose from. He claimed the morning shift was the “robbery under pressure,” following kids on their way to school or running into teenagers with money at the corner store. In a revealing confession, he wrote that he was more comfortable robbing people in the flesh. Home invasions were anathema. Even at his cruelest lows, there was something naturally human to him that craved the personal interaction, to see the whites of their eyes.
None of the DMX stories seem real, but they had to. In 1986, the police shot and killed his dog Blacky. The following week, he came to Yonkers High with a sawn-off shotgun taped to his leg. The following year he acquired a new hobby: stealing cars. On a pleasure ride in the Hamptons, police pulled him and a friend over, which led to a bid for the Suffolk County Jail. It wasn’t his first jail term, but it was his first meeting with the hole. For a week he was trapped in a dingy 6×9 box guarded by sadistic prison guards and forced to drink water from the sink. As always, X found meaning from the hardship. Solitair led to his first artistic breakthrough.