I’ll start at home, where everything begins again and again in the subconscious. Children exist only in the subconscious for the first year of life and if you can master zen or traumatic dissociation, maybe even longer than that. The brain wave patterns are slow and permeable then; all sensory data seeps in and tries to hold its place by burning impressions of itself into the emergent personality. If a happy event occurs, it might imprint joy and optimism on the infant; if a traumatic circumstance arises it might instill traces of dread, panic, and fight of flight on the behavior patterns of this newborn well into her waking life. We often dream with our eyes open. I am staring at you and seeing the other side of the quantum field where you only exist as a memory I’m inventing in your presence, in this moment, while looking through you into the dream I’m simultaneously having and transcribing. This is called a trance and enter it with me: home— the early years.
We know, we know, we know, dad was a half-fallen star; every nigga is a star. He was just perfect at being himself. But what about when he died and left us with his white widow. She was so in love, so hurt, so belligerent at Spago alone with her two kids on her 30th birthday, drunk and screaming out for love or absolution on Sunset Blvd. We were carjacked at gunpoint a few minutes later. Spared because the robbers, black men, saw black babies in the backseat of our white widow Chevy. We were a bit Thelma and Louise, walking to the phone booth in our dresses to call the police, sniffing back sobs and powders. It was familiar to enter a precinct late at night and blame a black star. This addition to the series of incidents didn’t change much in my brain waves; it enhanced our collective discernment and my private love of criminals who carry a little bit of reform inside of their transgressions. It’s as if they can see their future selves, like they’re awake in a bad dream they cannot turn off because they’re sleepwalking backwards. And to witness them, these sentient zombie men I’ve loved! I felt alive in a monument that refused to be still. Mummified.
It’s clear that I’m not at home, though I keep trying to begin there, not for chronology but to ground in the resonance of devastating routines I abscond by objectifying. Eventually we were home with the babysitters, Kenyan women who loved us and taught us another mode of love, the night mom and her beautiful creole friend Bridgett went to the Comedy Store and Eddie Murphy and Arensio invited them back to Murphy’s mansion. My mother ended up with Charlie Murphy, her type, quiet charisma and an underdog who was nonetheless in charge whenever he entered the room. Bridgett chided Eddie for being with a bunch of white groupies instead of her, when he invited her there. She was promptly kicked out of his house in the Hollywood Hills, had to go upstairs to find my mom and drag her away from Charlie, and the two of them hopped in Bridgett’s Fiat and drove down the hill. They were intercepted by a car full of Murphy’s bodyguards. Bridgett was beaten until bloody, her head slammed against the window while the white widow watched, untouched. No one is getting home tonight. She won a settlement, made the cover of the National Enquirer, was never quite the same though materially a little better off, maybe.
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Melvin Combs, father of Sean “Diddy” Combs, was shot to death in 1972 when mistaken for an informant. I had misremembered and thought Melvin was an informant all these years and used that associative riddle to help rationalize Diddy’s pathologies in my own mind. Allegedly Melvin was just selling drugs and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe being a street hustler turned handler and overseer was in the blood, in the home. And they’ve always installed black agents posing as artists or allies to police black musicians. Now it’s easier because self-surveillance is universal. We share our locations and innermost thoughts and go “live” and flaunt our whereabouts. It makes the FEDs’ jobs easier, maybe even dull compared to the 1960s-1980s. Anyhow, Sean Combs is a miracle of evil incentivized by itself. Whether or not he was seeking revenge for his father’s death or deputized for some other reason, to capture video evidence of the most powerful people in the world adjacent sex trafficking, rape, and obscenely violent drug induced orgies that required participants to take IV’s and hide away for weeks to recover, he engaged in these activities for decades. He seemed addicted to debauchery disguised as glamor and glory, under his own glamor spell, getting off the most vulgar and degrading brand of voyeurism money and power could buy. He glorified his opulent parties that lasted days as well as brunch toasts about respectability, mostly for the optics. He rose to fame and power far beyond his merit and may or may not have had to take the lives of people he called friends or lovers to remain there for so long. LeBron James can be heard on Instagram live assuring, goofily, gleefully there’s no party like a Diddy party, while his son Bronny audibly refuses to participate or corroborate or appear on camera. Diddy’s twin daughters lost their mother Kim Porter in 2018. It’s said she was writing a book about their relationship. Video of him beating Cassie Ventura in a hotel hallway was released this summer shortly after his homes in Los Angeles and Miami were raided. I tried starting at home in the Gil Scott Heron sense that “Home is Where the Hatred Is,” but also in the vagrant, ephemeral way he ain’t never going home no more, it’s sad most of his family will also be displaced, and anyone naive enough to remain his fan or associate.
But this one pathetic fallen man was never the life of the party or even the lure into its darkest most damning caverns. What’s at stake now is the infancy of black excellence™, our nostalgia for a pretend good cultural childhood wherein we were all in infinity pool or on yachts or in nouveau riche LA mansions drunk and high and liberated to the ecstasies of the waking dream for so long we forgot to ask ourselves if any of this was fun, felt right, or even sounded right in our songs. We were so long blasphemous and dysfunctional we couldn’t hear ourselves lying over the squeals of false pleasure. Diddy helped turn pleasure into the tackiest most abject image of itself and sell that image back to its maker as a shared notion of luxury and ‘making it.’ Since the ‘90s, black leisure across all economic and social classes has involved Diddy’s liquor and scattered insinuations of his values. We’ve been dared to turn cruelty and lust into basic tenets of engagement and if we can’t we are too poor or too square for this cult.
It would be fine if the entertainment industry announced itself as faith-based, cult-driven, and fortified by the demonic or unseen evil of trauma based mind control that turns adult entertainers into babies in their first year for the duration of their careers and lives. Their souls leave their bodies to cope with what they’ve seen or helped cultivate at some of these ‘parties’, and these people are susceptible to blackmail but also to command, like child soldiers. They are broken in with varying degrees of ritual abuse until so traumatized they could hear the words ‘Diddy party’ and enter a fit of rage or fear that culminated in stroking the wound again, attending the party, being an accomplice to soothe their sense of danger around leaving this convoluted church of fame and infamy.
But society has grown out of empty slut shaming, and Diddy is a world class slut who was pimping out anyone and everyone he could access and bribe and control. Basic sexual blackmail is a bit obsolete because of the availability of pornography and Only Fans and the soft porn all over social media. Where this man became a threat to the homeland, why Homeland Security had to step in, is because it wasn’t enough for him to convince his adult friends to join in his activities, he allegedly used money and power to help groom unsuspecting minors, some aspiring singers like Usher or Bieber, and jump them into this abysmal gang. The cauldron is so vast and smoldering with depravity, it enters the territory of banality. It’s excessive to the point of being easy to dismiss as ridiculous or harmless. And banality is closer to home than a glamor spell so maybe this is incremental progress. It’s as if the world is emerging from a long infancy held in place by coded songs and superimposed desires so that now to get back home is to build a new world and these old rotting, petrified or losing rank archetypes are the unlikely fertilizer of an inevitable harvest. If it’s true that during the transatlantic slave trade, your own hand sold you, it’s logical to imagine that as black men and women are traded for favor by industry, it would be one of our own who broke the home back into cell blocks and slave quarters. He couldn’t handle it the other way. He is a great and grand handler, a dandy, a weak version of Jason in Portrait of Jason, the help. This is why nostalgia is a dangerous product of our misconception that we have a homeland, or can get home or gain traction in another’s home as house negro or overseer. We have borders, informants, homophobic misogynists addicted to homo-erotics—these are just a few of the men we’ve been told it’s safe and even special to take home. We are leaving home as soon as the dream learns to walk.
Diddy has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is being held without bond.
Wow. This essay blew me away and impressed me to the degree that I don’t even know what to say, other than this single edition alone elevates writing on Substack and has more insight than anything I’ve read in more than a month. I’m a huge fan, seriously, I’m so glad I read this.
I enjoyed reading this, especially stylistically. It is quite accessible because of how it is written. Thanks. Today's world of these kinds of "alleged" (I stress alleged because he will have to litigate this for sure) deeds which bleed the line of criminal conduct and immoral degenerate behavior are tough on society and the world itself. On the one hand, you want to give people the benefit of the doubt; on the other hand, social media has altered that equation. He did things and we know it. There is a digital trail. Whether he did what they say he did is loaded on both sides. The system is loading up the case for conviction while others as is always the case, will stand behind celebrity no matter what. I am not sure why that is so but it is. I do think the state has a tough case to prove which is why they denied bail. No way he should be held without bail. That has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. Thanks again for a very nice piece of writing.