Scarface has always been candid about his troubled childhood. But in his new memoir, Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death and the Roots of Southern Rap, he takes us into a (very) personal recollection of his mental health and behavioral issues as a teen.
Billboard, Scarface and the book’s co-author Benjamin Meadows Ingram released an excerpt from the book, which explains how he searched for attention as a child by getting in trouble and attempting to take his own life multiple times. He also detailed a specific suicide attempt where he recalled his reaction to being brought to the hospital after overdosing on purpose.
“I don’t remember too much about that particular day, but I know I was ready for it to be done. I was ready to get up out this bitch. So I went in my mother’s medicine cabinet and took all of her blood-pressure medication. I woke up on the bathroom floor with the ambulance parked outside and the paramedics trying to get me up and out the door. They took me to the hospital and gave me this stuff, ipecac, to clean out my stomach. I spent the whole next day puking my guts out. It was disgusting. I thought that shit was going to kill me! I was like, ‘Damn, you brought me all the way here to do me in like this?’ You could have just left me on the floor and saved everyone a hell of a lot of trouble.”
He also went onto speak about other life risking attempts regarding slitting his wrists.
“It wasn’t like that was the first time I’d tried to kill myself. I’d been trying to take my own life for years. You name it, I’d tried it. Slitting my wrists with a box cutter and bleeding out all over the bathroom floor, putting loaded guns to my head, all of that shit. If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you straight up: I was ready to go. But I never did it. I never cut myself deep enough or far enough away from my family to be left alone to die. I never pulled the trigger. I never went all the way. That’s why I say that I think I really just wanted the attention. If you really want to go, dying is the easy part. It’s the living that’s hard. That shit takes a lifetime. And it will test you every step of the way.”
Peep the full excerpt on Billboard. And catch Scarface’s Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and Roots of Southern Rap, which is set to hit book store shelves on Apr. 21 and is being released by Harper Collins. – Krissy Lewis