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1C°§ av- ple nat sa pac of ‘cal veir ust 10 ew to the 1€1r ne 4 ed | ; at 9 COROT 4a. Pe Pa rex 2 SHAKESPEARE GANGS 1975, became small Panther celebrities on the radical- chic circuit. “Then every- thing changed, the political tide changed over,” Tupac said in his deposition. “We went on welfare, we lived in the ghettos of the Bronx, Harlem, Manhattan.” He estimated that he'd lived in “like eighteen different places” when he started jun- ior high school. In his deposition, Tupac says that by the time he was twelve or thirteen years old Afeni had developed serious drug and alcohol problems. (Afeni disagrees. She says he was seventeen.) Tupac did not know who his father was, but he was close to Mutulu, who was the father of Sekyiwa and lived with them for a number of years. Then Mutulu, too, left him, going underground when Tu- pac was ten, after the Brink's holdup. While their contact was not altogether broken (“When I would feel he needed me, I’d do what- ever I had to to ger chere, even if it was just so that he could see me—and he'd wave, so happy,” Mutulu recalled), the connections came at some cost to Tupac. “He had to keep secrets,” Mutulu said. F.B.1. agents would approach Tupac at school to ask if he had seen his step- father. (Mutulu was on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list until he was captured, in 1986.) The family moved to Baltimore, and when Tupac was fourteen he was admit- ted to a performing-arts school there. “For a kid from the ghetto, the Baltimore School for the Arts is heaven,” Tupac said in his deposition. “I learned ballet, poetry, jazz, music, everything, Shake- speare, acting, everything as well as aca- demics.” Asked by his attorney whether he’d been in any gangs at that time, Tupac responded, “Shakespeare gangs. ] was the mouse king in the Nutcracker. ... There was no gangs. | was an artist ” He had started writing poetry when he was in grammar school in New York, and it was. only a short step from writing poetry. to-rapping. He wrote his lyrics with great speedyand ease, and was soon performing at befiefits for Geronimo Pratt and other prisoners. oo bee _. ise “Do you have any references besides Batman?” Tupac spent two vears at the Balti- more School for the Arts. When he first came in, Donald Hicken, a former teacher, recalls, “he was a truly gifted ac- tor, with a wonderful mimetic instinct and an ability to transform a charac- .. His work was always original, never imitative, never off the rack. Even in this talented group of kids, he stood out.” One of his schoolmates, Avra War- sofsky, told me that there was no sugges- tion of the belligerent, confrontational side of Tupac that would later come to dominate his public image. “He was a dear, sweet person,” Warsofsky said. “There qwere inner-city kids at the school who were tough, who stole—but he was not that, not one bit.” This idyll ended when Tupac's life at home became intolerable. As he de- scribed it in his deposition, he had no money for food or clothes; for a time he stayed at the home of a wealthy class- mate and wore 4is clothes, That didn’t last, though. “So I had to go back home. . . . But my mother was pregnant, on dope, dope crack. She had a boy- friend that was violent toward her. We weren't staying in our own spot, we were staying in someone else’s spot. We never could pay the rent. She always had to sweet-talk this old white man that was the landlord into letting us (stay] for an- other month. And he was making passes at my mom. So I didn't want to be there anymore. So I sacrificed mv future at the School for the Arts to get on a bus to go cross-country to California with no money.” He was not quite seventeen. Tupac stayed for a time with Linda Pratt, the wife of the incarcerated Ge- ronimo Pratt, in Marin City, a poor community north of San Francisco, and then with his mother, who also moved to California. Bur school in California did not provide a haven for him. “I didn’t fit in. I was che outsider... .1 dressed like a hippie, they teased me all the time. I couldn't play basketball, I didn’t know who basketball players were, ...I was the target for... the street gangs. They used to jump me, things like that....I thought I was weird because I was writing the poetry and I hated myself, I used to keep it a secret. ... l was really a nerd.” UPAC’ S mother was at once a mythic figure to him and fallen, and his identification with his radical heritage was profoundly ambivalent. “At times he resented being the nineties’ voice of the ay