IT WAS MAY 12, 1998, two months after my tenth birthday and a week before DMX’s debut album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, was set to crash-land in stores. In Brooklyn, five dollar bootleg copies of albums lined the display cases of street vendors well before Tower Records could slap a $15 sticker on them. Occasionally, when I wasn’t sure if there was enough food in the fridge for my mom to scrape together dinner, I would swipe a few copies from downtown Brooklyn to sell to my neighbors back in East New York. Typically, I’d end up with six dollars, earning enough to cover the cost of four chicken wings with shrimp fried rice from the local Chinese-food restaurants that outnumbered grocery stores in my neighborhood.
That was my goal that day; hunger was all
