HICKSON

THANKS VERY MUCH, TROY! STUBBS & MYSELF APPRECIATE THIS GREATLY, & WHEN HE'S ABLE TO THANK YOU PERSONALLY, HE WILL. STUBBS HAS SIGNED A MULTI BOOK DEAL HERE AT GHETTOHEAT, & WE'RE WORKIN' ON SEVERAL PROJECTS OVER THE YEARS. THANKS FOR POSTIN' THE COVER OF LOVE DON'T LOVE NOBODY, WHICH WILL BE HIS FIRST NOVEL. YET BEFORE THAT'S RELEASED, I'M PUBLISHIN' HIS PRISON MEMOIR, BROTHERS BEHIND BARS. BROTHERS BEHIND BARS IS ACTUALLY A PRISON SERIES, STUBBS HAS CREATED VOLUME ONE, WHICH I'M NOW EDITIN' BEHIND THE SOON TO RELEASE NEXT. IT'S A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, POETRY, PROSE & COMMENTARY. IT'S SO RAW...IT'S EXPLORES HIS LIFE ON THE STREETS WHICH LANDED HIM IN PRISON. STUBBS ACTUALLY WROTE & TYPED IT WIT' ONE HAND FROM FEDERAL PRISON, & SENT IT TO ME PAGE BY PAGE (ONE AT A TIME) VIA EMAIL FROM FEDERAL PRISON: A STORY WITHIN THE STORY.... THIS WILL BE NONFICTION, & I'M VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT. STUBBS IS VERY FOCUSED, & STAYIN' ON A POSITIVE PATH, & MAKIN' A DIFFERENCE HERE AT GHETTOHEAT. I'LL KEEP YOU POSTED ON ALL, & SEND YOU THE ARTWORK ONCE IT'S DONE. THANKS AGAIN, TROY!

PEACE & GHETTOHEAT, TROY! IT'S BEEN A JOURNEY...ONE THAT I'VE FULLY DOCUMENTED TO DATE (MR. GHETTOHEAT, MY MEMOIR): & WILL PRESENT TO YOU IN TIME. YES, I REMEMBER WHEN WE FIRST MET, & YOU CAME TO MY VERY FIRST POETRY READIN' IN HARLEM: I WAS SCARED TO DEATH! LOL! I NEVER LIKED PUBLIC SPEAKING. SO MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN: YET I'M STILL THE SAME: BUT BETTER. I'VE GROWN TREMENDOUSLY PERSONALLY, & NOW READY FOR THE NEXT STAGE! THANKS AGAIN FOR THE LOVE ALWAYS! & BLESSINGS TO YOU, ALSO!

PEACE & GHETTOHEAT!

PEACE & GHETTOHEAT!

LADY SPEAKS THE TRUTH by SHA Growing up in Urban America isn’t easy. Throw in the race, gender and age cards. You walk through life with iron-filled crates shackled to your ankles. How can you climb the ladder-of-success with so much holding you back? This isn’t about me outlining how to live your life or what’s right and wrong—I don’t know the answer to that. This is about me asking you to wake up! What’s up, Urban America? Have we’ve become so complacent as to stop our complaining because we’ve been reassured that everything is new and approved, and comes backed with a money back guarantee if we’re not satisfied? I don’t know about you but, I’m not satisfied! I’m not a part of the “walking dead” that rest assured in what they’ve been spoon-fed, that would’ve been the easy way out: I like it hard. I don’t think you understand me. As my third grade teacher put it, I wasn’t “born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” I was born in Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. It happened sometime after the birth of “THE MONSTER” (HIV/AIDS) and just before the Crack epidemic hit hard. Though my father owned a bodega and I attended parochial school, I was far from rich. It wasn’t steak and lobster, ‘34th Street Miracle Christmas’ and such. However, what we lacked in finances, we made up for through love and unity. No money meant a closet filled with out-of-style clothes and ridicule from my peers; it was whatever! I was too focused on school to really give a damn. Then my body decided it wanted to start puberty at nine-years-old. Don’t think that made me special, there were other girls in the fifth grade with bangin’ bodies. While they were using what they had to get what they want, I stayed in my books. Of course I wasn’t popular with the boys, but everybody knew my name. Rhymes were my reason and Hip-Hop saved me from the cruelty of the bullies. Well, at least, some of the time. Being from BK, my ability to write poetry and to get lyrics from any song off the radio, made me tolerable. My strict Haitian father didn’t allow me to hang out after school, go on go-away trips or participate in any of the bullshit that happened in my neighborhood. If it didn’t happen on my stoop, I wasn’t able to go. Soon after, I was in Queens and desperately wanted to go back to Brooklyn. I thought I’d be much more popular back “home”, but the reality was if I wasn’t “doing it”, I was wack. I accepted that. I had no choice but to be wack and watch every single move that everybody made. Then I reached high school. I attended a school that made headlines for acid-throwing, gun-toting, monster-infected students! It was the closest one to my house, so I really didn’t have a choice. It was then when I got the fever for the fast life. I wanted to be that chick with the fly dudes that pushed the baddest cars, dipped in jewelry of every caliber. I started asking around for the flyboys from elementary school. Surely by then, I thought, they had to be on top of the game. Dudes were either in Spofford, just recently released from juvenile detention, dead or strung the fuck out on crack-cocaine. Real talk, a sixteen-year-old junkie is not a joke. Then I started watching the older dudes. This was the era of “The Sleepwalkers”, “The Lost Boys” and others. My young self got a thrill walking through the neighborhood with the older boys checking for me, because of my over-developed body; that made the girls hate me even more. I was already catching hell because of my hair and swagger. Yet, that was dealt with accordingly. I’m not saying I won every battle, but you damn sure won’t be able to call me cara cicatriz (Scar face)! It was all fun and games until someone got his head blown off in Brookville Park one hot summer night…that brought me to the reality of things. I sat back and started making connections. It didn’t take too long to figure out who were the major drug dealers, the minor drug dealers, the wannabe drug dealers, the stick-up kids, the car thieves and the wankstas (suckers). Before long, I had them all figured out and knew most of their modus operandi; it was too easy. For the rest of high school, I met a whole slew of characters. I met guys who were predicate felons at the age of twenty; guys who snapped their fingers and made anything you desired appear like magic. I’ll admit crime life is very enticing! But the end results are not. I played my cards well, at that time, holding them close to my chest. I was very careful about who I was seen with and where. Undercover detectives were all over the place, all the time. Every other day, somebody was getting locked up, and females were getting caught out there on technicalities. That right there was what really made me think twice about all my moves. I lost count of how many females I’ve seen get charged with years and decades, just because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Damn those RICO and Rockefeller laws! They will get innocent people and first-time offenders caught up in the system every time. Besides the jail time aspect of a hustler’s life, I realized that Uncle Sam makes fun and games out of hustlin’. That’s another reason I just observed the business of drugs. Tell me why a Black man getting caught with crack rocks in BK will get at least ten years, but a white man getting caught on the island with cocaine will get a much lesser sentence? Doesn’t crack come from cocaine? Wake up, Urban America! Why is it that Caucasians dominate the welfare system, but yet African-Americans and Hispanics are portrayed as being the dominant races in the system? Isn’t it strange how families stay stuck in the same situation generation after generation? Your momma had you at sixteen, her momma had her at fifteen and her momma had her at fourteen! Yet, all of you still live in the same project apartment? F.Y.I., the projects, no matter how “luxurious” some may seem, are designed to keep the masses psychologically disabled so we can perpetuate the cycle, over-and-over again. Uncle Sam put up the projects. Uncle Sam allows drugs to come into the country. Trust that if America really wanted to be drug free, then we damn sure would be! Then what would the DEA do? Do you realize how many federal, state and city jobs would be lost if there wasn’t any illegal drugs in America? Thousands of people would be out of work and the economy would fall apart. The Great Depression wouldn’t be able to compare to the economic state of America if drug money wasn’t in circulation. Uncle Sam can keep his VESID vouchers and his rehabilitation programs: I know the score. To my young people of Urban America: hustlin’ is what it is. We all do it in one shape or another. For most of us, it’s a part of life. Victims of our socio-economic status, we have to do what we have to do; just do it wisely. Know when to hit HARDER, know when to ease up. I thank God for that ability. Too many times I’ve come close to being state property…I’m free. Wake up and you’ll be, too. HARDER WRITTEN BY SHA HARDER EDITED BY HICKSON HARDER A GHETTOHEAT® PRODUCTION EBOOK & PAPERBACK: SOLD & DISTRIBUTED EXCLUSIVELY AT GHETTOHEAT®! HICKSON: CEO of GHETTOHEAT® & GHETTOHEAT® TV! GHETTOHEAT® PRODUCTIONS: GHETTOHEAT® CONVICT’S CANDY HARDER AND GOD CREATED WOMAN LONDON REIGN SONZ OF DARKNESS TANTRUM HICKSONBELIKE... LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY THICKNESS GHOST TOWN HUSTLERS BANJEE CUNT ULTRAFABNABULOUS BROTHERS BEHIND BARS SO SEXY TOUGH MR. GHETTOHEAT® SKATE ON! GHETTOHEAT® EATS TURF GHETTOHEAT® MAGAZINE! GHETTOHEAT® | P.O. BOX 2746 | NEW YORK, NY 10027 GHETTOHEAT®: THE HOTNESS IN THE STREETS!!!™ #GHETTOHEAT #THEHOTNESSINTHESTREETS #HICKSON #CEOOFGHETTOHEAT #TEAMGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONHOTNESS #PEACEANDGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONBELIKE #GHETTOHEATBOOKS #GHETTOHEATMAGAZINE #GHETTOHEATTV #GHETTOHEATMOVEMENT #INSTAHICKSON #MAMAGHETTOHEAT #HOUSEOFGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATSALUTE #PAZYGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATHOTNESS #IAMGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATPRODUCTION #MOVIMIENTODEGHETTOHEAT #BABYGHETTOHEAT #INSTAGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATWORLDWIDE #SALUDODEGHETTOHEAT #MRGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATGLOBALGROUPHUG #LACASADEGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATEATS #GHETTOHEATCOM

ONCE A SLAVE by DRU NOBLE This is not about my crimes. This is not about my redemption. It is aboutlife, and only that.my In the early summer morning of June 18th, 1979, there was a thunderstorm, and I was born. The falling rains would be a prelude to the struggles I would endure. Mere months later, my biological father would abandon me to an uncertain future, this was the first of many abandons. Like so many others of my generation, I faced the brute of an era of drugs, violence and pure apathy; lost souls and shattered dreams. Cards placed on the table. A gun, placed on my head. My very sanity, daring me to play. Years later, I would have two brothers and a sister who I’d have to watch over andcare, as if I were their father; in a single-parent home, with a mother on welfare. I learned in those early years that I possessed hidden talents while babysitting my siblings, as my mother gambled her nights away. Abilities like drawing, making up fantastic stories, and losing myself in my imagination to worlds that existed only in my head, but at that time, none of this would be harnessed. No, instead, it was buried.take Only for a time. Being a Gemini, there has always been two sides to me, each trying to conquer the other. One half intelligent, forgiving and understanding, the other, violent and self-destructive—this internal war would play out in my soul, going into my teens. I ran the streets doing things most men twice my age had never done; a young man who’d aged before his years. Taught things of wrong, learned in things of pain. Too many crimes, but this is not about that. Whatever I did, I knew that there was something out there better. I ignored that calling. Mental chains shackled my mind, and I allowed it. I’d become a slave to the cycle of ignorance burdened to me. When I was seventeen, I participated in a robbery. Any dreams I had after that were destroyed, and my life as I knew it—would come to a tragic conclusion. Only for a time. Soon after, I was tried and found guilty of murder in the second degree. Sentenced to twenty years to life, more time than both of my co-defendants put together; given three times the length than the actual murderer in my case. Less than two years later, I was abandoned by everyone I once loved, and would be treated with stark realization, as if I were dead. A living ghost, faced with the bitter truth that people who I believed cared for me: family, friends, even my siblings, would turn their backs on me. No letters. No visits. Nothing… My bid was done in the harshest of ways—it was done alone. And this would be for a time. Being in prison can bring out the worse in a person… I aged before my years, living with hatred, consumed with misery and animosity; I let it feed me, teach and mold me. This would be the darkest time in my life. I learned that I wasn’t abandoned completely. GOD sent the one person who would get through to me, my angel, my godmother, a woman with more strength and love in her heart than anyone I’d known. Even when I tried to push her away and show that my madness was stronger, my godmother’s patience and understanding hand, did the impossible—she helped heal my demons, and eventually destroyed them. She told me, “Son, you are not dead, the person you were is. GOD has other plans for you; I know this.” And she stood by me, unmoving—I love her for that; I always will. It was time for a man to be reborn. Eventually, I let my past go, shed the brewing anger. The chains that held my mind since childhood, shattered in a million pieces, and ironically, in the pit of prison. For the first time in life, I was set free. Natural-born talents, along with many I didn’t know I had, returned to me. I began to re-awaken my imagination, and ventured back into worlds that had never left my dreams, which had never ABANDONED me. I found out that some members of my family would stand firm beside me, and a door would be open where I would meet new ones. This would also be for a time. Then came a day where a brother I respected and known for years, would hand me a note that had the name and address of a new writer and publisher—one looking to publish works of other thought-provoking writers. His company name is GHETTOHEAT®; his name is simply, HICKSON. The voice of my godmother played in my head: “God has other plans for you.” I took that paper, and soon after, got a taste of those plans. My name is DRU NOBLE. I am an enigma of many things. But I am a slave no more. Now it’s time… SONZ OF DARKNESS WRITTEN BY DRU NOBLE SONZ OF DARKNESS EDITED BY HICKSON SONZ OF DARKNESS A GHETTOHEAT® PRODUCTION EBOOK & PAPERBACK: SOLD & DISTRIBUTED EXCLUSIVELY AT GHETTOHEAT®! HICKSON: CEO of GHETTOHEAT® & GHETTOHEAT® TV! GHETTOHEAT® PRODUCTIONS: GHETTOHEAT® CONVICT’S CANDY HARDER AND GOD CREATED WOMAN LONDON REIGN SONZ OF DARKNESS TANTRUM HICKSONBELIKE... LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY THICKNESS GHOST TOWN HUSTLERS BANJEE CUNT ULTRAFABNABULOUS BROTHERS BEHIND BARS SO SEXY TOUGH MR. GHETTOHEAT® SKATE ON! GHETTOHEAT® EATS TURF GHETTOHEAT® MAGAZINE! GHETTOHEAT® | P.O. BOX 2746 | NEW YORK, NY 10027 GHETTOHEAT®: THE HOTNESS IN THE STREETS!!!™ #GHETTOHEAT #THEHOTNESSINTHESTREETS #HICKSON #CEOOFGHETTOHEAT #TEAMGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONHOTNESS #PEACEANDGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONBELIKE #GHETTOHEATBOOKS #GHETTOHEATMAGAZINE #GHETTOHEATTV #GHETTOHEATMOVEMENT #INSTAHICKSON #MAMAGHETTOHEAT #HOUSEOFGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATSALUTE #PAZYGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATHOTNESS #IAMGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATPRODUCTION #MOVIMIENTODEGHETTOHEAT #BABYGHETTOHEAT #INSTAGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATWORLDWIDE #SALUDODEGHETTOHEAT #MRGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATGLOBALGROUPHUG #LACASADEGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATEATS #GHETTOHEATCOM

I'M STILL HERE... THANK GOD! HOLLA! HICKSON: CEO of GHETTOHEAT® & GHETTOHEAT® TV! GHETTOHEAT® PRODUCTIONS: GHETTOHEAT® CONVICT’S CANDY HARDER AND GOD CREATED WOMAN LONDON REIGN SONZ OF DARKNESS TANTRUM HICKSONBELIKE... LOVE DON’T LOVE NOBODY THICKNESS GHOST TOWN HUSTLERS BANJEE CUNT ULTRAFABNABULOUS BROTHERS BEHIND BARS SO SEXY TOUGH MR. GHETTOHEAT® SKATE ON! GHETTOHEAT® EATS TURF GHETTOHEAT® MAGAZINE! GHETTOHEAT® | P.O. BOX 2746 | NEW YORK, NY 10027 GHETTOHEAT®: THE HOTNESS IN THE STREETS!!!™ #GHETTOHEAT #THEHOTNESSINTHESTREETS #HICKSON #CEOOFGHETTOHEAT #TEAMGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONHOTNESS #PEACEANDGHETTOHEAT #HICKSONBELIKE #GHETTOHEATBOOKS #GHETTOHEATMAGAZINE #GHETTOHEATTV #GHETTOHEATMOVEMENT #INSTAHICKSON #MAMAGHETTOHEAT #HOUSEOFGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATSALUTE #PAZYGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATHOTNESS #IAMGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATPRODUCTION #MOVIMIENTODEGHETTOHEAT #BABYGHETTOHEAT #INSTAGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATWORLDWIDE #SALUDODEGHETTOHEAT #MRGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATGLOBALGROUPHUG #LACASADEGHETTOHEAT #GHETTOHEATEATS #GHETTOHEATCOM

PEACE & GHETTOHEAT!