It was a tough ride for Ruff Ryder.
DMX, the screaming hip-hop legend who fights for his life at White Plains Hospital after suffering a drug-induced heart attack, has had a hard time digging up.
“[My mother] he was beating two f – – king teeth in my mouth with a broom, “he told GQ in 2019 about the abuse he allegedly endured at the hands of his mother when DMX was just 6 years old.
And as a teenager, his then-mentor allegedly tricked him into smoking crack cocaine marijuana.
Before his booming baritone and wizard pun on songs like “Ruff Ryder’s Hymn” and “Party Up (Lose My Mind)” earned him multi-platinum selling status, he was just a troubled kid from Yonkers is named Earl Simmons.
“Earl is a person who still holds many things that he suffered in his childhood,” his former manager, Nakia Walker, told Houston Press in 2011.
“It’s about things, instead of talking about things and releasing. He expresses himself through his music. ”
But now, 50-year-old Dark Man X is in life support and in a “vegetative state” as his family and fans watch over the medical unit. He will undergo a series of critical brain function tests on Wednesday.
Born on December 18, 1970, in Mount Vernon, New York, to Joe Barker and Arnett Simmons, the future Grammy-nominated master felt unloved from the start.
“[My father] he never called me for my birthday or helped me grow up at all, ”Simmons said in his 2002 autobiography, EARL. In his memoirs, the rapper said that Barker, an artist, came only when he had to sell paintings in New York City.
DMX believed that his mother, who was only 19 when she became pregnant with him, did not know how to love him.
“Kids don’t come with an af-king instruction manual,” the verse told GQ. “Four sisters; I’m the only boy. Maybe he didn’t know what to do with me. ”
Their relationship, full of physical and emotional torment, was even more tense when a judge ruled that his mother was “unable” to take care of him.
By the age of 10, Simmons had been expelled from school for fighting and throwing chairs at teachers and was arrested twice for arson and assault. The hard time behind bars would become a recurring trend in his life.
He was eventually sentenced to rehabilitative custody of the Julia Dyckman Andrus Memorial Children’s Home in Yonkers – about a 20-minute drive from the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his mother and sisters – for an 18-month stay. .
But he was allegedly kicked out of the building for setting fire to his roommate, according to the 2011 music and faith fusion volume “Hip-Hop Redemption: Finding God in the Rhythm and the Rhyme.”
Once back at his mother’s house, he often fled to escape her abuse and the revolving door of unsympathetic friends. He slept in the Salvation Army’s baskets and befriended stray dogs. (Despite their troubled past, Simmons and his mother have been repairing ever since.)
And at 14, a man she trusted – who was twice his age – gave him his first taste of drugs.
“It simply came to our notice then [marijuana] blunt around and … I hit bluntly “, tearful fellow musician Talib Kweli revealed on the podcast” People’s Party “in November 2020.
“I have never felt this way before. He understood me. I found out later that he dressed the blunt with crack … Why would you do that to a child? Simmons asked during the emotional interview.
“He was 30 years old and he knew I looked up at him. Why would you do that to someone who looks at you? ”
Simmons went on to complain about the life-changing deception in the play “Pain,” in which he says, “I smoked crack at the age of 14 for the first time / I was given a – – – whom I idolized / Love mine is real, but after that, what I saw in his eyes / It was a snake and I loved it was just a disguise. ”
The horrific incident would sound like the starting gun of Simmons’ lifelong struggle with substance abuse.
But shedding light on his dark traumas in public helped the growled, growled megastar cope with the anxieties of his childhood.
“It simply came to our notice then [has helped]He told Kweli. “I really didn’t have anyone to talk to because [growing up] In the hood, no one wants to hear that. ”
“No one even wants to help with the speech,” he added, noting that the expression of your feelings was seen as a sign of weakness in his community.
“But talking is actually one of the bravest things you can do. One of the bravest things you can do is … let him out. “