This story is a collaboration between GQ and Epic Magazine.
He was nervous. He hadn’t been onstage since the accident. Here he was, 34 years old, a veteran performer, but he felt like an anxious teenager, picking up a microphone for the first time. Would he find the words? He felt somewhat reassured when he summoned the rhythm in his head. He’d approached the mic a thousand times before, first on street corners and in clubs in New York and later on stages around the world. But he surely never anticipated performing in this venue—the rec room and sometimes synagogue of the Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation near Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Above the makeshift stage hung a long sheet of butcher paper, heralding the HAYM SALOMON TALENT SHOW in bubble letters. After a resident named Betty finished reading poems from her grandchildren, it was his turn to take the stage. He cut an odd figure up there: a six-foot-three former rap legend in a tracksuit, sweating from nerves in front of a room full of frail senior citizens. He may have seemed like a strange booking choice for Haym Salomon—but in fact, he felt right at home. Because he was home. “Please welcome,” the announcer said, “our very own musical maestro, the one and only T La Rock!”
The crowd waited. Some were asleep in their wheelchairs. A few no longer knew their own names. But those who were alert and awake were in quite a festive mood. They tapped their feet as the music started, waving at their fellow resident.
T had been living at Haym Salomon for some time, recovering from a traumatic head injury. Two years earlier, on April 1, 1994, he had been attacked on the street near his house in the Bronx. By the time he got to the hospital, he had slipped into a coma.
The doctors later said T had transient global amnesia, and when he was moved to Haym Salomon—it was one of the few facilities in the five boroughs that could accommodate his kind of injury—he thought at first that he had wound up in some kind of purgatory hotel. His rehabilitation, the doctors warned, would be a long road.
The other residents were mostly elderly Jews, Yiddish speakers whose families had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement. T was from the Bronx, and he had been a direct witness to the birth of hip-hop; ten years earlier, his single “It’s Yours” was the very first hip-hop recording released by Def Jam, hashed out with Rick Rubin in his dorm at N.Y.U. That song became a hit, inspired a whole new sound in rap music, and placed T at the lead of a seismic cultural force. Many of T’s fellow patients knew he was a rapper or singer or something (“That nice boy from the third floor? They said he was a superstar.” “Yeah, right”), but this was his first chance to show them.
It was, as they say, a warm room. T looked around and saw that everyone was there: Bernie and Leon, rolling back and forth in their chairs; Norma and Sophie and Betty down in front; and on the sidelines, Marshall and Sheila, clapping for him. He’d had to painstakingly re-memorize his rap, a medley of hits from his glory days. At the edge of the stage, a student volunteer started beatboxing, and when T found his way into the rhythm, his confidence swelled. He felt that familiar feeling, the declarative pose of street corners in the Bronx, the self-assurance of a youthful yearning for a place in the world, and as the beat rolled to the edge of the verse it was by instinct that T La Rock reached for the microphone.
I’d heard about T La Rock and his strange fish-out-of-water story from a friend who’d stumbled across an article about him published in The New York Times in 1996, when the rapper still lived in the nursing home. That brief mention made me want to find out more about what his life was like at Haym Salomon. I tracked T down and talked to him at length, along with his family and the former staff of the nursing home, to understand how he had re-discovered himself. There was some irony in T’s predicament, since so much of his music was about identity: proclamatory, sometimes prideful, singing a song of oneself. And yet, T could barely summon a self to sing about.
The head injury he’d suffered, an acute subdural hematoma, often leads to severe and lasting memory loss. When he was first brought to the hospital, his doctors had been unsure if he would survive, even as they tried to save him. At one point, T’s family was told to call a priest.
The swelling in T’s brain affected his hippocampus, the seat of long-term memory, which was why when he finally did open his eyes one day, shocking the critical-care nurse on duty, he was profoundly disoriented, and his mother, Sylvia, who had stood vigil for weeks, leaned over the bed to gently remind him of his name. “You’re Terrence Keaton,” she said. “You’re 32 years old. And I’m your mother.” Members of his family also stood by his hospital bed, but he wasn’t sure who they were. When he saw one of his brothers, T pointed at him and asked, “Who’s this?”
“It’s me—Tone,” his brother Anthony said. He was the youngest of the six Keaton kids.
“Where’s June?” T asked.
His mother stayed quiet. She exchanged looks with Tone.
“June?” T said again, referring to Daniel Jr., his eldest brother. But June had been dead for years, shot on the street in the Bronx.
At one point, the doctors thought T would be permanently disabled, and they tried to put him in a mental hospital. But Sylvia, a sixth-grade teacher, was a determined woman, and she made sure that T was not warehoused in the bowels of Bellevue but went to a place where he could recover. Haym Salomon was on the opposite end of the city from the Bronx, but every day she took the train there—an hour each way—to sit by T’s side. For a couple of weeks, he didn’t leave his room. When T was eventually taken out to see therapy specialists on other floors, T found a drab building full of pale, creased faces.
“What kind of place is this?” T asked Sylvia.
“You’re in a nursing home,” she said.
“How long will I be here?” T asked. But Sylvia had no answer.
Marshall, one of the orderlies at the nursing home, first saw T a few weeks into his stay and noted how the resident made for a dramatic sight wandering the halls: unusually tall and more than 250 pounds—a patient like he’d never seen at Haym Salomon, a kosher facility with a rabbi on staff. There were five floors full of Ashkenazi twilight in that building, with a few Italians sprinkled here and there. The staff wondered how this young guy from the Bronx ended up with them. “The one thing we knew,” Marshall said, “is that he wasn’t Jewish.”
It was all a confusing blur for T and hard on his family, especially for Tone, who found it troubling that on each visit he had to tell T about their lives together all over again. His family tried to remind him of all the lost moments—walking to the RKO theater to watch Fist of Fury or sneaking Dad’s car out in the middle of the night—but it was a conversation on repeat. The same story, looped. Whenever they saw T, he would take it from the top, back to the distant past, where T’s last memory lived. “T doesn’t know what year it is,” Tone told his mother. “He thinks it’s the 1970s, and we’re all still kids.”
The Bronx of the 1960s and early ’70s was a multi-ethnic patchwork of communities, a mostly functioning borough like all the others. There were flowers in all the beds on the block. T’s parents owned their own two-story home, and all of T’s siblings—Anthony, June, Kevin, Nero, and his sister Ellen—had their own rooms. T had a room that faced the street, and he’d lean out the window when his friends came by with their car systems or boom boxes, all dialed up to full volume.
T had his own massive boom box, and every morning he’d walk over to his best friend Craig’s house, like a ritual, and direct his Panasonic toward Craig’s windows. “Craig, wake up,” his mother would say, pulling her son out of bed. “Clarence is calling.” He was not yet T La Rock then, just T, or sometimes Terry, but his full (and rarely uttered) name was Clarence Ronnie Keaton. T and Craig would sit on the stoop with their boom boxes, 50-watt behemoths that weighed 25 pounds and burned the eight D batteries so hot in the summer that T would have to take them out and run an extension cord through his window.
The boom boxes drove Papa Keaton crazy, but what could he do? The Keatons were a musical family, and all the kids could play instruments or sing. They were also a tight-knit family. Sylvia didn’t think raising six kids was hard, because “every single one of them knew how to act.” Mostly, they wanted to please their mother. Discipline was rarely necessary; one silent treatment from Sylvia was enough corrective. In the morning, she’d stand at the bottom of the stairs and call all those kids’ names in a little singsong recitation, and they’d run down the steps to line up in order, bumping into one another like the Keystone Kops. At the end of the day, she’d open the front door, sing the same song, and wherever they were—riding bikes or playing skelly at the P.S. 104 schoolyard—word got to the Keatons, who all found their way home.
In 1975, when T started ninth grade at Adlai E. Stevenson High School, he was both a good student and the class clown. Kids wanted to sit next to him, and teachers liked to call on him. Music was everywhere then: At Adlai Stevenson, T played drums and saxophone; around the Bronx, T was a quick study in the breakdancing circles that sprang up on so many street corners; at home, T and his siblings took a tape recorder and microphone and set up their own makeshift recording studio.
T’s house was close to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where a young DJ named Kool Herc lived. Kool Herc had become a sensation after a wild party he threw in his building’s rec room, and it was on his dual turntables that a musical miracle had occurred. He had noticed how much everyone loved the instrumental break. So, he thought, why not extend the break? He took two copies of “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, put them each on a platter, and overlapped the instrumentals. The crowd loved it. Soon all the DJs in the Bronx were mixing beats, and since they were so busy flipping vinyl, they couldn’t talk to the audience anymore, leaving the mic open for friends to get up and start calling out names in rhyme. Thus was born the MC.
T was right there, at ground zero, taking it all in at 14 years old. One of the first breakbeats he heard was Kool Herc reworking James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” He’d see Afrika Bambaataa at parties at the Bronx River Houses. He knew Grand Wizard Theodore, the first guy to scratch a record. It was a novel art form—the DJs were mesmerizing to watch, all dexterity and intuition. DJs felt proprietary about their style; Kool Herc used to soak off the labels so no one could see what records they spun. He saw himself as a shepherd, leading the dancers on the floor like an ecstatic flock.
T would borrow choreography from kung fu movies like Five Deadly Venoms. He was the best dancer on the block; he could do it all, even standing on his toes en pointe, like Nijinsky. When he wasn’t dancing, he watched as MCs became local luminaries on the party circuit. At one party, T told Craig: “I want to get up on that mic.”
He started practicing his rhymes in and out of school. He wrote down lyrics or freestyled over his own “pause tapes,” which were handmade beats he and June made on a double cassette player by recording, pausing, rewinding, and recording again. T’s brothers would join in, along with other boys from the block who liked to gather on the second floor of the Keaton house. Every single one of them was scared of Papa Keaton, but they loved and respected Sylvia, who was welcoming, except when she’d have to knock on the kitchen ceiling when things got too loud upstairs.
The first time he got onstage was at Joyce Kilmer Park off the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, where Kool Herc and other early DJs and rappers would play to as many as a thousand people. T had several crews during high school, and they saved up money for decent gear: McIntosh amps, Technics 210 turntables, and the indispensable “echo chamber” (just like Kool Herc’s). There were parties all over the Bronx then, in parks or community centers or right on the street, where DJs would wheel out their speakers, open up a lamppost, and pull power right from the streetlights.
One afternoon, T and his friends threw their own jam in a tiny park they called The Circle. Sometimes they made flyers for their parties, but this one gathered momentum by word of mouth. They put down a makeshift stage and made a roped-off VIP area right on the sidewalk. The fire escapes of surrounding buildings filled up—six, eight floors of people listening to T’s crew. It was a warm summer day, and as afternoon turned to dusk, their amps made the streetlight dim and flicker. T’s DJ worked the crowd with his turntables, kicking up the rhythm while sweaty hands crept up skirts and down pants and the bass hit so hard it made your bell-bottoms flutter.
T had only been on stage a few minutes when he looked out and saw a familiar face. It was Tina, an old friend—and fling—from school. Tina could hardly recognize him. She’d only known him as Terry. The guy on stage was someone else, a charismatic kid pacing the makeshift stage with a firm grip on the microphone. T couldn’t keep his eyes off Tina, and in the middle of a verse, he handed the microphone to someone else, went under the rope, and walked into the parting crowd straight to Tina. “Remember me?” he said, putting his arm around her with everyone watching.
“Terrence?”
“This is me now,” he said, pointing at his sweatshirt, which said DJ MC T LA ROCK. T took Tina back to the stage and lifted the rope for her, and the evening unfolded into a sweet reunion, all blushes and glances and hand-holding as the party kept going into the night. When they found a moment to be alone and Tina looked up at T, he felt a surge of delight at being seen as he was now, a new person. The kiss that followed was the kind only youthful romance can offer. Tina couldn’t believe that this was the same boy she had sat next to in science class.
At home, Sylvia brought T books to help him expand his lyrical repertoire: Twain and Shakespeare; books about history and inventors. This was somewhat unlike the rhyming influences among his brothers, who listened to Gil Scott-Heron or the Original Last Poets. Papa Keaton watched boxing, so T of course liked Muhammad Ali’s playfully combative couplets, but the bigger influence for him, oddly, was the Hollywood-musical star Danny Kaye.
Ever since he was a little kid, T had watched Danny Kaye movies on TV. He liked Kaye’s vaudevillian timing and wordplay and took inspiration from movies like The Court Jester when practicing his own rhymes in the mirror. It was such an obsession that Papa Keaton had to buy T his own television because no one else in the house wanted to see A Song Is Born every time it came on. On Sunday afternoons, while his brothers and everyone else in the neighborhood would be out in the parks, T was the one kid who would look at his watch and say that he had to go home to watch Danny Kaye. Then young T would sit cross-legged in front of his black-and-white Zenith, captivated by the musical stylings of a Jewish song-and-dance man bred in the Catskills.
T’s first roommates in Haym Salomon didn’t talk much. Leon had been paralyzed by a stroke, and Gary was the stoic type, a former soldier. But T didn’t mind; he spoke slowly himself, though he’d worked with a speech therapist. It felt strange to make sounds that didn’t always match what he heard in his head. At least he wasn’t delusional, like Gary, who was shell-shocked and would sometimes yell that “the enemy is firing!” and demand that everyone within earshot “return fire!”
Right after the attack, T couldn’t move without assistance; his mother thought it was like seeing him as a baby again, learning to walk. In physical therapy, T spent hours walking on treadmills, working with a balance beam, and using weights to strengthen his legs. That therapy paid off, and by the time he moved to Haym Salomon, he could get out of his wheelchair and into the halls.
T soon became friends with Sheila, the 26-year-old switchboard operator who sat at the front desk. There wasn’t much reason for T to be at the front desk, but he started spending a lot of time there, leaning over Sheila’s counter with a big smile on his face, pausing every so often to greet visitors.
Some of those visitors thought this young guy was on staff, and some residents did, too, especially when T started assisting them. He became Leon’s daily navigator, pushing his wheelchair through the peach-colored halls. Though occasionally unsure on his own feet, T was soon accompanying semi-ambulatory residents around the home. He called himself the Minister of Transportation. Marshall thought it was funny to see T in his mesh jerseys and black Nikes, towering over lost ladies in their gray gowns—some of whom were truly half his size—as they clutched his arm.
T liked helping the residents, even when they were confused or wanted to circle the halls at a snail’s pace. If he found 87-year-old Feyga shuffling her tiny feet down the halls, which he did a half dozen times a day, he’d take her hand and guide her back to her room, nodding as if he understood when she’d digress in Yiddish or Russian. Spasibo, she’d say, which was the one word T knew. “You’re welcome,” T would answer.
As T’s former life flickered in and out of focus, his thoughts turned to the many residents with Alzheimer's or dementia. He’d think about it at night, lying in the dark, surrounded by the stuffed animals his sister had arranged on his bed. When Gary’s foxhole was under attack, keeping everybody up, T would wonder which was worse: being haunted by the terrors of the past or not knowing the past at all.
Sylvia brought in a boom box so T could listen to records, including his own music. When T first heard those songs again, it felt like a discovery. “You know what?” he thought. “This is pretty good!” But then he had the strange sensation of hearing himself but not knowing the song. It sounded like someone else was using his voice. His mother also brought dozens of photos, which she taped to the wall: There was T in junior high, and Tone, all skinny and baby-faced, and Nero at 18, smiling in his graduation cap. And there was June, who T now knew was dead, although he didn’t yet remember what happened. There were pictures of old girlfriends, many of them, and hip-hop colleagues from the Boogie Down Bronx.
Propped on a towel dispenser was T’s first LP, Lyrical King. The cover showed him at the height of his career, with his hands on his hips, giving a smoldering stare from beneath a red Kangol. T would sit and look at this picture, almost meditating on it, trying to recognize the confident young man whose enormous necklace bore his name in glinting golden serif.
The visual prompts worked, though not all at once. Sometimes T felt like he was staring at blank spaces. Other times, complete moments re-materialized: entire conversations he’d had, friendships he’d made. Often he’d be struck by just a thought or mood or sense of experience—a phantom visitor from his former life.
Even after other bits of his past returned, though, his memories of the attack remained hazy. Mostly he knew what other people had told him. T left his mother’s house to head for the studio. Or to pick up a friend or go to his brother’s house or visit a girl—no one is quite certain, although T thinks he was carrying a mixing board. He was on Featherbed Lane, no more than three blocks from home, when he saw a friend getting into it with somebody on the street. The violent-crime rate in the Bronx was near its all-time high—the 40th Precinct reported 39 murders the previous year—but T never got into fights. That night, he thinks, he was just trying to help. Maybe the argument was about a girl. Then he saw that the other guy had friends coming up behind him. Maybe it was two people, maybe three. But one of them had something big and heavy in his hand.
No one knew how long he’d been out when his brother Kevin found him, covered in blood on a stoop. T’s face was swollen. He was slurring his words, until he lost consciousness. T always called his mother when he got wherever he was going, but when Tone picked up her phone, it was the hospital instead. The police had little information. His mother wasn’t sure they even took a report. T’s brothers asked around themselves. There are no mysteries in the neighborhood, they said. But no one ever came forward.
It all seemed so far away from where he was now, sitting on an adjustable bed with his mother and stacks of faded snapshots. Outside, you could see the tower of the Parachute Jump at Coney Island’s boardwalk rising above the trees. Every so often, Gary would yell at ghosts. “Stop!” he’d say. “Don’t shoot.”
June and T knew they were in trouble. It wasn’t yet midnight, but that was past curfew in the Keaton household. “You just got to climb up there,” June said, pointing at a window. T gave June a cocked glance. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He won’t hear us.” June was only a year and a half older than T, but he knew what was going on beyond their block, and he wanted to expand his little brother’s horizons. So they sneaked out to see dancers and rappers from other neighborhoods. And now the door was locked.
June watched T scale easily from the garage door handle to the bathroom window and arc his legs over the sill. It was an artful maneuver, but as T emerged into the hallway, there was Papa Keaton, standing right there, arms folded. “Oh shit,” T said.
T didn’t know when he would get yelled at, but punishment would come. There was no escaping the wrath of Papa Keaton. The Keatons trusted their children, but they were also naturally worried about the pitfalls of adolescent life in the Bronx of the mid-’70s, which had become a dangerous place. It had been just a decade and a half since Robert Moses completed the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was meant to unite greater New York and instead destroyed so many Bronx neighborhoods. The Bronx became the nation’s defining example of urban decay, with trashcan fires illuminating whole blocks of rubble and gangs like the Black Spades, the Sex Boys, the Mongols, and the Savage Skulls controlling the streets. In October 1977, President Carter stood in the ruins of one housing development and pronounced it a disaster. Reagan later made the same trip and declared that he hadn’t seen “anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz.”
T had a bit of mischief in him, but he was fundamentally a good kid. At a time when only one in four students in the Bronx graduated from high school, T always stuck with his studies. And when he was asked to join gangs, he had an honorable way out with music, which was neutral territory. Hip-hop had become a refuge. The city might be in ruins, but there were kids making music amid the fallen masonry and broken glass. Across the Bronx, DJs competed with each other in both style and wattage: The best records had to be played on the loudest system. T liked to get close enough that he could feel the bass on his cheeks.
By the time he graduated from high school, T had developed a strong reputation as a rapper, but since that was not yet a viable career he also enrolled in computer courses and got hired as a security guard at a pharmacy. T liked the job, but his head was full of music; every Wednesday, he took his paycheck to the nearest record store. T worked on his lyrics all the time, filling notebooks and even carrying around a Dictaphone. He could be seen on the Grand Concourse muttering into the cumbersome machine like a doctor commenting on charts.
T didn’t know it then, but his circle was an artistic vanguard, and many of his friends would become some of the great pioneers of hip-hop. He freestyled with Big Daddy Kane over the phone, hung around with Kurtis Blow, and saw Flavor Flav at block parties. When T met KRS-One, he was living in a homeless shelter at the Franklin Armory on 166th, long before he became a local sensation onstage.
One of the most important venues in the Bronx was Disco Fever, on Jerome Avenue. The Fever started as a disco club, until an MC named Sweet G managed to grab the mic and the place lit up. The owner immediately booked hip-hop acts, starting with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, whose first Tuesday night brought 700 people to the door. Soon everyone was either at the Fever or trying to get into the Fever, which was not easy if they didn’t know the doorman, a huge ex-con who had done time in Attica and often guarded the entrance in a fur vest with no shirt. In the back of the Fever was a VIP room, hidden by a fake brick wall for private bacchanalias and outfitted with a panic button that flashed red lights if the cops showed up.
T was tight with the staff at the Fever, and he regularly got coveted spots on the club’s stage and in the backroom. He had an effortless charm: “T had the freshest clothes and the best beats,” his brother Kevin said, “and the cutest girls, too.” Ever since T was little and would exchange notes with hearts and arrows with Wendy across the street, he’d had a way with girls. Now he’d grown into a full-blown ladies’ man, with women everywhere, sometimes several at once. There was Davina (on 116th Street), Gwen (on Webster Avenue), Terri (the Puerto Rican girl over on University). The only one T’s mother liked was Maddie, whom she thought was a great partner for T. Sylvia called them “Mutt and Jeff” and thought it was cute how they dressed alike, in matching Adidas tracksuits and felt Kangols.
T’s feats at the Fever started generating invitations to bigger and bigger events, where he earned $100, then $250, then $500 a night. His moonlighting was paying off. T’s clothes got fresher, and his braided links got thicker. But that wasn’t all he spent his money on. The first time he got a real wad of cash, he got off the subway at Mount Eden Avenue, stopped at the store, and called his mother. “Go stand on the stoop,” he said, “and wait for me.” So she did, and a few minutes later, there was T, walking up the hill in his leather and chains, his arms weighted with grocery bags full of eggs and milk and whole chickens for his mother.
Like everyone else, T noticed more and more promoters and producers in the audience at the Fever and other clubs. The first real capitalists of hip-hop were early impresarios like Russell Simmons, who would manage acts and put on shows. The money then was only in live performance. But then a new label called Sugar Hill appeared and, after a string of rejections from rappers, decided to assemble its own recording group. The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” a single that hit Top 40 charts and sold millions of copies.
It was ironic that the first hip-hop hit was an orchestrated product, like releasing a single by the Monkees before you’ve heard the Beatles. But that tune rang out across New York like a clarion call, and in that instant, hip-hop transformed into a gold rush. For the first time, it was clear that there was commercial appeal in this new music. And money to be made.
Once hip-hop was being recorded, rappers and DJs were desperate to get their acetates or test presses played, especially at the Fever, where a spot on the rotation would get you noticed. Eventually, an aspiring disc jockey calling himself Mr. Magic bought some late-night time on WHBI, a New York public-access station, and broadcast one of the first hip-hop shows. Mr. Magic soon had plenty of records to play. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released a single, “Superrappin’,” that ignited their recording career. Then Kurtis Blow became the first rapper on a major label when he signed with Mercury and soon had the first hip-hop gold record. The sun was setting on the days of a local music floating through Bronx parks. The chains went from fake to plated to solid gold.
In Manhattan, hip-hop started appearing at clubs like Negril, Smalls Paradise, and the Roxy, a former roller rink at Tenth Avenue and 18th Street in Manhattan. The Roxy was a living laboratory for the enormous musical innovation of the moment, when uptown and downtown cultures met and New Wave and hardcore and hip-hop were all emerging simultaneously. Above the door was a sign: COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC. On Saturday nights, the wait to get in could take four hours, and you might find Keith Haring sharing the floor with Mick Jagger. It was after T became a regular at the Roxy that, in 1983, he and Kevin were introduced to an N.Y.U. student and aspiring producer named Rick Rubin.
T began carrying a pen and a notebook around Haym Salomon to record details about his life there that he might otherwise forget: names, descriptions, things he liked about people. His notebook became a codex of observations and anecdotes about the gallery of characters around the nursing home. Along with Leon and Gary, there was Bernie, a former professor who was sharp as could be. Norma, who called T “bubeleh” while demanding pecks on the cheek. Sophie, who had three children and loved Humphrey Bogart. And Betty Ford, who delighted in saying she was not the former First Lady.
Norma, Sophie, and Betty became T's core social group, his own kaffeeklatsch, convening at lunch to watch The Honeymooners or soap operas. T became Haym Salomon’s new favorite resident, the guy everyone wanted on their bingo team. He shouted out Jeopardy! answers and joined the Seder table for Passover. He kept helping out the Haym Salomon staff as well, clearing trays in the cafeteria or delivering food to the rooms of infirm residents. Soon T was fielding requests of all kinds. Extra pillows, missing chess pieces—he’d take care of it. When T first arrived, some of the staff wondered whether he’d be able to recover at all; now he helped run the place like a beloved local politician or, as T put it, like the inside boss of a rather pleasant, slow-motion prison.
At one point, T realized that his fellow residents were the dead center of the Danny Kaye demographic. His mother brought in a VHS copy of The Court Jester, which he screened one night after putting word out around the home. He served snacks and juice and introduced the film to a full house. By the end, half the crowd was asleep, but the rest loved it.
But some of the best entertainment was the home itself. T noticed how senior citizens, left with nothing but free time and a knack for grievance, could easily revert back to the politics of middle school. Haym Salomon had its own social hierarchy, with cliques and catty chatter. T and his kaffeeklatsch became a clearinghouse for gossip. Bernie might be an interesting guy, for example, but Betty said he was also a horndog.
“Professor Bernie?” T said.
“Yup,” Betty said. “The guy’s a flasher.” Bernie would approach the nurses’ station in a state of excitement.
“We call him Fresh Bernie,” Sophie added.
T had caught the attention of the female staff himself. “One look at you and I can tell that you are a stallion,” said Della at reception one day when T walked by. One of the other nurses used to make unannounced “patient checks” on T when he was in the communal shower—enough times that he started asking Marshall to guard the door.
Other than that, T loved the attention. He was a nearly indiscriminate flirt, playfully flattering every woman in the place, young or old. “How’s my favorite spring chicken?” T would say to Norma, poking her in the paunch. “Como esta, mi amor?” The ladies loved it. “Come here you!” they’d say, demanding hugs in the rec room.
But around Haym Salomon, T’s favorite gal was clearly Sheila at the switchboard. She started staying later, after her shift was over, to hang out with him. Sheila was struck by T’s smile—it was the first thing she noticed about him—and one day she invited him to lunch. T got a day pass and drove with Sheila to get pasta. They had just one hour, but it was a revelation. He hadn’t thought about life outside Haym Salomon in quite some time. And he certainly hadn’t sat across a table from a beautiful woman.
Sheila had been a fan of T’s music growing up, although she was too shy to admit it at first. Others around Haym Salomon learned about T’s past, too. Some staff and residents didn’t believe it—until strangers started showing up at the front desk of Haym Salomon looking for the one and only T La Rock. Two women came in looking for autographs, and a guy came by to deliver a demo tape on cassette to “Mr. Incredible,” just like in the old days.
Sometimes T would sit alone on the patio with his notebook, searching for that lost time and documenting his attempts to re-assemble his self. It was a fragmentary catalog of stories about the person everyone said he once was. T started sharing those stories with Marshall and Sheila. This seemed like great progress, even if T often forgot what he’d said already and told the same stories over and over, like he was reciting lyrics.
“You know, when you came in, your chart was bad,” Marshall told T one night. “I never thought we’d be sitting here like this.” It wasn’t that long ago that Marshall had to help T bathe, and now they shared a nightly routine as friends. Marshall often worked the swing shift, a quiet time in the home after most of the staff left and residents had fallen asleep, and he and T would wander the halls and joke around, or jimmy open the door to the kitchen to get extra treats. They’d sit out on the patio, enjoying the spoils of their kitchen raids and staying up late into the night, talking about life and love.
“I can’t figure out how to be with just one woman,” Marshall said. He was married, but he had a wandering eye back then.
“You need to be careful running around like a jackrabbit,” T said. “You gonna get busted.”
Marshall liked hearing about T’s heyday; he especially liked to hear stories about the women from T’s time as a star. They spent long hours talking about their mutual love of hip-hop. Marshall knew T’s music, even if T still didn’t quite know it himself.
After his mother brought him CDs of recent releases, T wandered the halls of the home with his headphones on, feeling the new rhythms of hip-hop. When T heard those records, he could tell things were changing fast. Production was different. Lyrics were layered, narrative, full of subtext. Public Enemy and N.W.A. had already upended the genre, and the past few years had seen the appearance of a series of revolutionary albums: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Nas’s Illmatic, Biggie’s Ready to Die. Over on Marcy Avenue, Jay-Z was selling his mixtapes on the street.
One of the hottest new records was Tupac’s Me Against the World, which had a track that celebrated all the rappers who came before him: What more could I say? / I wouldn’t be here today if the old school didn’t pave the way. Tupac remembered Mr. Magic, Flaaaash, and Grandmaster Caz. He remembered poppin’ and lockin’ to Kurtis Blow. He remembered all them parties on the block. And he remembered T La Rock.
When T took the train down to Rick Rubin’s dorm room in Weinstein Hall at N.Y.U., he didn’t know what to make of this odd white college kid with long hair and heavy-metal posters taped to his cinderblock walls. But the two of them got along well, and when they talked about the records stacked in crates next to Rick’s couch, T could sense the musical fire Rick carried. Then he heard the beat Rick had made. Oh, my God, T thought, stunned. This dude got something new.
Rick had been thinking about this beat for some time. He figured out how to take a Roland 808—the heaviest-sounding bass machine yet made—and fiddle with the electronics to get an even deeper sound. His sonic goal was to re-create the kick of being in a club, the way hip-hop was first heard, with that heavy thump booming through massive speakers. This was how Rick’s beat sounded. And T loved it.
T and Kevin started spending more time in Rick’s room, building a song around that beat. The three of them would sit on the couch (Rick had moved his dorm bed into the hallway and pushed the desks together to arrange his DJ equipment) while his roommate tried to do homework. Some of Rick’s friends—fellow hardcore-turned-hip-hop enthusiasts calling themselves the Beastie Boys—stopped by to listen. Rick brought in a guy named Jazzy Jay to scratch on the record, and when the song was ready, they booked Power Play Studios in Queens for $45 an hour to record what they had given the title “It’s Yours.”
It was hot in the studio, and the booth was cramped—Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys had tagged along, as did some girls—but when the on-air light turned red and the acetate wheels turned, T knocked out his verses in one take: Commentating, illustrating / Description giving, adjective expert / Analyzing, surmising, musical / Myth-seeking people of the universe, this is yours!
Ad-Rock and the accompanying girls can be heard shouting out during the chorus. Rick mixed the song right then. During playback, T could sense there was something different and new in how the sound came together. “It’s Yours” was stripped down to its rawest elements, a disco-less rhythm composed of pure beat, scratching, and rhyme. “Yes, yes, yes!” T yelled with a smile, holding a monitor headphone to his ear. “More bass!” He’d never heard anything like it. He wanted more. “Aw, man, kick up that bass!”
The next day, T was back on the job at the pharmacy. He nearly forgot about his recording. There was no distribution for a homemade rap album then, other than out of the trunk of Jazzy Jay’s car. Someone must have bought copies, though, because “It’s Yours” slowly started circulating, eventually winding up in the hands of New York’s first hip-hop DJs. One day, T was in the stockroom of the pharmacy when the radio announced “the number one requested hip-hop record of the day,” and T was surprised to hear his name. “You’re a star now!” his boss said. When T got home after work, the news had hit his neighborhood, and everyone on the street ran up to him. Yo, I heard you on the radio! You got the hottest track out right now!
Six months after it was recorded, the song had avalanched into a genre-defining phenomenon. When LL Cool J heard it in his room in Hollis, Queens, he decided to send his own demo to Rick Rubin. “It’s Yours” was a smash hit at the Fever, where everyone in hip-hop heard it. Russell Simmons was floored by that pioneering beat, tracked down Rubin, and combined his talent relationships with Rick’s producing genius to form Def Jam, which would become the most influential hip-hop label in history. And it was the sound of “It’s Yours” that formed the backbone of albums by LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run-D.M.C. The line drawing of a Technics turntable on the sleeve of the “It’s Yours” single became part of Def Jam’s iconic logo.
“Mr. Keaton to the front desk!”
Sheila’s voice on the loudspeaker meant it was time for one of their lunchtime excursions. They’d been going out more often, and both looked forward to their frequent outings. They had an easy way with each other and had made a deep connection. Sometimes at lunch, they lost track of time, got back late, and T would have to sneak back in undetected.
Sylvia thought that her son’s friendship with Sheila was probably helping T recover. She still came every day on the train, checked with doctors, and brought baked goods for the diligent therapeutic staff on the fourth floor. She’d report back to Papa Keaton, who couldn’t make the trip that often because of his own health problems, and the rest of the Keaton family. Their visits, too, had become rarer. T had been at the home a long time.
In a way, T was closer with some of the people in Haym Salomon than he had been with anyone else in ages. After all, he was spending every day with them, talking about their families, the many wonders of their brilliant grandchildren, and, of course, the past.
There was a lot of loss in all those years. Families broken. Friends long gone. People in Haym Salomon tended to steer clear of those difficult personal matters, but sometimes the conversation would stray, like when Sophie talked about her divorce. Her husband, she said, had left her for her sister. “Well, that doesn’t make sense!” said one resident who had nosed her way into the conversation. Sophie agreed. No, it didn’t make sense, but that’s what happened. T could see that Sophie was upset and rescued her by changing the subject. She looked grateful, if still on the verge of tears.
T had even grown close with Leon, his first roommate, who’d had a stroke and couldn’t talk. T would sit with Leon, listen to him mumble. “I can understand him,” T told Marshall. “I know what he’s saying.”
It was true. T would pass by Leon’s room every day and ask how he was doing. Leon was often depressed and would try to push away, but that only drew T in more. “What’s wrong?” he’d ask. Leon would try to answer, but his words were garbled.
T studied Leon’s movements and facial expressions. They were able to develop their own sort of sign language. And since the staff struggled to understand Leon, T began translating for him. When Leon needed something, the nurses would get T, who would lean in to hear Leon’s mumbles and then explain that he needed more pillows or pain relief or whatever. Eventually Leon’s weird noises started verging on words. T knew Leon was making progress when Leon tilted his head to watch one of the female orderlies walk by, turned to T, and said: mashehathaniceath. “Yes,” T said. “She sure does have a nice ass.”
This became Leon’s main interest, the curve of the orderlies’ asses, which was one gesture he could clearly make. This pastime was one of his few reprieves from an otherwise dreary existence. T noticed that Leon was lonely and had only rare visits from his sister, who seemed to not want to be there. Nor did Leon seem to want her to come. At times, Leon could get violent, as displays of force were the simplest form of public communication. T was called in to calm those situations down. “Come on, Leon,” T would say. “It can’t be that bad.”
He had never really seen depression before Haym Salomon, but there was a lot of it around the home. It was hard to say who was the worst, but Leon was a tough case. One night, Leon and T were talking, such as they could, and Leon managed to communicate that he was feeling suicidal. He couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything for himself.
T was struck by Leon’s agony. He didn’t want anyone to feel that way. He told Leon that he understood being in pain, but that it was just a momentary feeling. Leon was unmoved, so T just kept talking. It might be hard to believe, T said, but there’s value to living, even like this. You are better alive than dead. Eventually, T saw Leon’s mood changing. And his own. He felt a happiness rising just by saying these words. “You have a purpose,” T said, at which point he was crying himself. “Even if you don’t always know what it is.”
This was one of the things that Sheila liked about T, that he was such a good listener—both with the residents and with her. As they spent more time together, they both felt they could open up more. “I had your 12-inch,” Sheila told him one day, revealing her days as a teenager who loved his music. “The one with the red-and-black turntable.” Yeah, he said, that was a limited edition: “You had to really look for that one.”
Once when they were out, someone recognized T and asked for an autograph. When he held his pen to the paper, T had a sudden shiver—he was transported back to a hundred moments like that from a decade earlier, to a time when T was a star and he had fans out in the world, fans like Sheila, who was just 14 when she put together enough money to be first in line at the record store to get her hands on the song that was rocking the whole city.
On July 4, 1984, Def Jam had a release party for its first hip-hop record. The venue was carefully chosen. “It’s Yours” had become a kind of crossover hit, especially in New York, where the song was in heavy rotation, and Danceteria was a multi-format club, a place where you might find Grandmaster Flash and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the audience together and Madonna on the stage.
Run-D.M.C. were at the party that night, and the Beastie Boys played a set, though they hadn’t recorded a full album yet. When it was T’s turn to perform, he ran to the stage, white Kangol on his head, white gloves on the mic. He heard his track, all bass and hi-hat, and was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the crowd, already screaming, “T La Rock!” Before he even started his lyrics, he thought: I can’t believe they all know my name.
A few weeks later, T finally quit his job at the pharmacy to focus on his hip-hop career. His plan was to start writing more tracks with Rick Rubin. In the meantime, though, Rick had also signed LL Cool J to Def Jam, and T felt that sort of stole his thunder. LL’s sound was drawn directly from “It’s Yours,” but the new rapper was younger and hungrier, and Rick believed he could make him a star. Which he did.
T felt like he was being replaced. So when he got an offer to become one of the first rap acts with Sleeping Bag Records, a disco label that was embracing hip-hop full force, he took it. (The co-founder of the label would later help distribute Jay-Z’s first record.)
T put out an EP for Sleeping Bag called He’s Incredible, only half of which he wrote down before freestyling the rest in the studio. For Lyrical King, his first full-length LP, T teamed up with a visionary producer named Kurtis Mantronik for a few of the songs, including the single “Back to Burn.” The label couldn’t press records fast enough.
T started touring overseas, playing sold-out shows in places he’d only read about in school: Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm. It was there that T met Cristina, a blond and blue-eyed beauty whom he called his “little Swedish meatball.” As usual, T had an effortless way with women and was easily smitten himself. T and Cristina fell so hard for each other, she followed him to the airport and they both cried at the gate, right in front of his whole crew, who were all yelling at T because the plane door was closing as he ran back for one more hug.
Back home, he told his mother he was in love, but she didn’t want to hear it. “Ma, this is important,” he said. “If you're not talking about Maddie,” Sylvia said, “I don’t want to hear about it.” When Cristina came to New York, she and T had to hide out from Maddie. “You've been running around with the ladies all your life,” Sylvia said. She thought T would get his wits about him and slow down.
But T had become a bona fide star. He was accustomed to walking on stage with Run-D.M.C. in front of 15,000 people. When he would show up on the old block, all styled up in his jacket and gloves even though it wasn’t cold, people sometimes thought he was strutting. Oh, here comes Mister Top of the World, they’d say.
It was strange for T to think about how far he had come. And his old friend Craig thought the same thing the first time he saw T on stage, when he came back to New York for college break one summer. Not more than a few minutes after Craig started driving back to the city from the airport, he heard T’s voice coming through on WBLS: Do you like it? Do you want it? Well, if you had it, would you flaunt it? At first Craig couldn’t believe it. Then he heard the song again and stopped the car. Oh shit, that is my man T on the radio! Next came an announcement about where T was performing, so Craig went, and sure enough there was T, a young star commanding the stage with his tight pants and matching jacket and his name flashing across his belt.
After the show, Craig found T at the side of the stage with the other hip-hop honchos. Craig could see T acting the part of the big-timer, but when he saw Craig, T broke the façade and smiled like a kid again. He brought his old friend into the VIP room, where there were drinks and girls and record execs and a monitor displaying the sold-out show. Craig was stunned by the whole scene. So was T. Of all his friends and the musical Keaton brothers, T never thought he’d be the one to get famous. “This is all just so crazy,” T told Craig. “It’s like I’m dreaming.”
“Where are we going?”
T was trailing behind June, like he often had. But he felt confused.
“Just follow me,” June said.
They were in a strange place. A different part of the city. T had been there for weeks, walking the streets. It wasn’t foreign, but it wasn’t home. He’d been going to sleep, waking up, looking for something to eat. It wasn’t no fog or nothing scary. It was just regular days. Then June appeared.
“Come with me,” he said. “There’s a shortcut.” June started walking, and T followed.
“But where are we going?”
“Don’t worry,” June said. “I know the way.”
They walked several blocks, winding this way and that. They passed beneath trees, they stood in the shade of brick towers. T wanted to go another way, but June insisted. He told T that he was in pain. He wanted to check it out. T realized they were at a hospital. Elsewhere, T was in a hospital, breathing with a ventilator, comatose. As the doctors told T’s mother that her son might not survive, he was with June, her other son, the one who was murdered, navigating a realm of the lost. June said he was hurt. It was like a page turning, one scene into another. A doctor came, and June had to leave. But he reassured his little brother.
“Stay here,” June said. “It will be all right.”
“Okay,” T said. And when June left, he sat down on the bed, laid himself down to fall asleep, but instead, he woke up.
He was in a hospital bed, still in the ICU. There at his side was his mother. She’d been there since his injury, since Kevin found T, covered in blood, since Tone got the call from the hospital. And now here he was, suddenly awake. T couldn’t move yet. There were tubes. And machines. His mother called the doctors. They looked at him with surprise. Sylvia cried. He asked where June was, but his brother had been dead a long time. “I just saw him,” T said. “He told me to come here.”
Nearly two years after T woke up in that ICU, his recovery felt like a near miracle. He still sometimes repeated himself, or had lapses in short-term memory, and a few times he had gotten confused on outside trips, like his first venture onto the subway, when he walked to the station near Haym Salomon and climbed the stairs to the elevated platform like he had his whole life, but got spooked by the sound and the steel. It felt foreign, he told Sheila later, almost futuristic, like he was on a spaceship.
But soon T began to wonder when he would be able to live on his own again. “Why am I still here?” he asked Sheila one day. “That’s a good question,” she said. T had become content at Haym Salomon. His life had settled into a routine: watching soaps, marking the Jewish holidays, presiding over a social circle in which members occasionally died. At times, he nearly forgot he was waiting for something else.
In truth, T worried that he was not ready to leave. Out there, he had been T La Rock, and he simply wasn’t sure how to face the world as someone else. And as who? Both his identities—Terrence and T La Rock—had been erased, and he was reconstituting them piece by piece, like a puzzle. That’s how he described it to people: Imagine you’re putting together a puzzle, a giant jigsaw puzzle of yourself, but the pieces don’t always fit. With great effort, he had pieced quite a bit together. But the picture taking shape on the puzzle was no longer the same as the one on the box.
Because as his memories came back, something strange started happening. After being so desperate to remember his life, T was stumbling across things he’d rather not recall. He realized he’d been not just a ladies’ man but a Lothario, with so many overlapping women that he’d developed a system of codes with friends as an early-warning system so he wouldn’t get caught cheating. As these memories returned, T sometimes didn’t want to believe them.
“Did that really happen?” he asked his mother. “Yes,” she said. “That’s all true.”
It all came back to him: the frantic cloak-and-dagger of infidelity, the accompanying anxiety and guilt. Loving all the ladies is different in real life than it is in song.
“But I would never do those things,” he protested to his mother.
“But you did.”
One memory deceives another. Those pictures on T’s wall were not just a glorious history to relive. They were also a record of life’s complexities and T’s mistakes, big and small. By the time of T’s injury, Maddie and Cristina and all the rest of the women from T’s youth had moved on, and he was, in fact, alone.
“In a way, you’re lucky,” Marshall told him. “A terrible thing happened, but you get to do things new.” If you think about it, Marshall said, how many people get a chance to wipe the slate clean and live a better life?
T took Marshall’s words to heart. He thought about how some people would be happy to exchange, revise, or erase their lives altogether. At first he’d been troubled to find that his memory was complicated and contradictory, but then he accepted that this ambiguity contained a choice. He didn’t have to be entirely defined by the deeds of the past. Ever since the injury, he’d been trying to figure out who he was—until he realized he could decide who he would be.
Since it was the Fourth of July, T decided on a patriotic tune to close out the show. He had become the de facto musical director for the latest Haym Salomon extravaganza. After the triumph of T’s performance at the synagogue in the spring talent show, the staff had enlisted his help for their Independence Day tribute to Irving Berlin.
T worked on it for weeks, researching the life of Berlin and his contribution to the American songbook. He developed the set list, picked out the big musical numbers, and rehearsed some skits. When the big day arrived, there was a good turnout in the rec room. T had made flyers and distributed them around Haym Salomon: SPECIAL EVENT. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.
There had been only a boom box for the talent show, but this would be a proper pageant, with a live band—guitar and piano and even a brass section—to accompany the cast of singers, assembled from the residents and employees, all in matching red, white, and blue. As the show started, they all looked to T for guidance. “Don’t be nervous,” he prepped them. “The crowd is on your side.”
T opened with a few jokes and then ran the band through the program—“A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Anything You Can Do”—and landed on the grand finale, “God Bless America.” The crowd couldn’t quite manage a standing ovation with all the wheelchairs, but in the scheme of Haym Salomon entertainment, the show was a roaring success. Afterward, there was a cast party of sorts, with virgin drinks in Dixie cups. “That was so good!” said the activities director. “We might have to take our show on the road!”
Not long afterward, T finally approached the social workers to take a serious look at “transition.” They brought in a housing agency to help him start looking for apartments. Not the Bronx, he said. It wasn’t that he was worried about safety there. “I just feel like that time is over,” he said. Maybe he could make a fresh start in Manhattan?
T was never one for good-byes, and he wasn’t looking forward to the ones that were coming. When he told Marshall he was leaving, there was a moment of confusion.
“Like, leaving to visit someone?”
“No, leaving Haym Salomon. I’m going home.”
Marshall found himself a little choked up before he could say: “Yo, man, congratulations!” They talked about how it was a strange thing to have become friends under these circumstances. And yes, they would of course stay in touch. With Sheila, the conversation was more difficult. He knew they wouldn’t really see each other after he left. Whatever they had together would stay in the halls of this place.
T wanted to avoid a big public farewell, but on his last morning at Haym Salomon, the walls were hung with colorful crepe paper and everyone came out to see him off. T’s kaffeeklatsch was in full effect. Leon and Bernie, naturally. Even Gary managed not to dive for a foxhole.
“Why are we celebrating?” a patient asked.
“Because T is leaving.”
“Then I’m not celebrating!”
T’s mother helped him gather the records and other mementos from his room. The photographic history he’d created on his walls fit into a few boxes, which they carried out the door.
T moved to an apartment in Washington Heights and set up a studio in his bedroom. At first he was anxious about being out in the world again. He stayed close to his new home, seeing almost no one other than his family.
Then, not long after he left Haym Salomon, he was invited to an old friend’s birthday party, a big hip-hop bash. T worried he might not recognize people. Or even worse, they might not recognize him. But within a few minutes in the club, he was getting plenty of love. When the host saw T, he said, “This is such a great birthday present just to see you.” As word spread that T La Rock was in the house, the shout-outs from the stage started. LL Cool J, Chuck D—they all paid their respects from the mic.
When I met T, he still lived in Washington Heights. He’d become a fixture in the neighborhood, known by all. Everywhere T went, he was stopped constantly by friends or neighbors or the guy at the bodega or just some adoring children. At times it seemed as if cartoon bluebirds were about to alight on the brim of his hat.
That hat, of course, said T LA ROCK. As did much of his clothing. The walls in his house are full of mementos of T in his hip-hop prime. T loved telling stories about that time. It had been nearly three decades since T’s last commercially successful album, and yet there remained an enormous emotional gravity in T’s mind toward his life as a star.
On the one hand, it makes sense: Hip-hop is a vast self-mythologizing narrative, and T had been there at the beginning, bright and hopeful at the dawn of a new art form. He lived through something incredible. But perhaps legacy can get in the way of life. At times, it seemed as if T inhabited an interpretive center devoted to his former self. I wondered if holding on so hard to this historical idea of T La Rock came at the expense of the new T La Rock, or Terrence, or in any event the delightful guy of the present who can’t walk down Fort Washington Avenue without being overwhelmed with smiles and waves and hellos.
Then one day I realized I was misjudging T’s perspective on the past. I was sitting with him at a restaurant near his house (where, unsurprisingly, the owner came out to give T a hug), talking with him about his time at Haym Salomon, filling in details. We were covering familiar territory, but small details of the story were changing. On the one hand, that wasn’t entirely unusual; learning about T’s life was less like picking up a lost book than embarking on an archaeological excavation, where discoveries were made in layers. But something else struck me. “The thing is,” T said, “when I tell you all this about back in the day, I’m not the same exact person, so you’re getting it through my eyes now.”
I saw that the T I’d been spending time with was not the same T who danced on Featherbed Lane, or asked Rick Rubin for more bass, or stood onstage with Run-D.M.C. “A lot changed at Haym Salomon,” T told me.
Imagine starting over, not just with a new job or a new home but with a neuroplastically new you, a mind reborn. Once T discovered there is no single self, preserved in mnemonic amber, but a collection of conflicting selves, he could choose which selves he wanted to live with. He told me he liked to think he’d re-balanced the composition of Terrence and T La Rock. “It’s a balance,” he said, “that I will always be looking to improve.”
Today T performs pretty often, sometimes to big crowds. There is a strong following for old-school hip-hop, and a circuit for performances. Last summer, T was invited to a show called The Golden Era at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. On the bill were many old friends and veterans of Disco Fever: Kurtis Blow, Soulsonic Force, Slick Rick—and T La Rock. It was a summertime concert that played to a cheering throng of deep fandom, like a fetish ball for New York circa 1983.
Before T’s injury, he was already past his prime—the title of that Tupac song from 1995, the one that pays homage to T, is “Old School”—but he wouldn’t have wanted to admit it. Here, that identity could be embraced. Being old-school allowed T to celebrate the past. No one can be a young star forever, even if you’re the biggest star in the world, and part of life is managing the ongoing reconciliation of past deeds and present wisdom. Or maybe that reconciliation is wisdom itself.
When T arrived onstage in Newark, he looked like a natural. Hat on, flat brim, mic in hand. It was early evening. The crowd had heard from a bunch of acts already but put up a huge cheer when T appeared. He hadn’t stood in front of this many people in a long time.
It was, as they say, a warm room. When the song rolled to the edge of the verse, T didn’t miss a beat. He knew all the words, and the crowd did, too. T looked out at his fans and grinned. Among the many things he had forgotten was that he was, in fact, remembered.
Joshuah Bearman is a writer and a contributor to This American Life.