When I woke up in the hospital room in Nevada, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I was trapped inside my own body. My throat hurt like hell. I looked down and I had all these tubes coming out of my mouth.
So I panicked.
I started trying to pull them out, but I couldn’t because my hands were so weak. The nurses came running in to stop me. You ever had a really bad dream, where you’re trying to run away from a monster or some shyt, and you just can’t run? Your legs don’t work like they should, and the monster is coming right behind you, and it’s like you’re in slow motion. That’s what it felt like.
I was laying there, looking up at the ceiling, and the doctors kept coming in and standing over me and saying some stuff. Then they’d leave. Then they’d come back. Leave, come back. Leave again, come back again. Or maybe I was just going in and out of sleep.
My ex-wife was there in the room with me. After all the shyt I had done, I was surprised to see her. Honestly, that’s when I knew that I was probably in bad shape.
At some point, the main doctor came in and told me what had happened. He said, “Mr. Odom, you’ve been in a coma for the last four days. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t talk. So I just nodded.
He said, “It’s a miracle that you’re here. We didn’t think you were going to make it.”
I was in total shock. Couldn’t say any clever shyt back. Couldn’t ask questions. It was the first time in my life that I felt helpless. I felt like I was two inches tall. It was just … it was real.
At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day. Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it.
I didn’t want to control it.
I remember sitting there in bed, and for the first time in my life I couldn’t talk my way out of the situation. I was trapped all day in my own thoughts. And I kept thinking about something that my grandmother used to say to me when I was a kid.
I could see her face, like she was right there in the room.
“What’s done in the dark,” she would say, “will come out in the light.”
I think of all the sneaky shyt I tried to get away with. All the times I did wrong. All the stuff I tried to hide. If it’s not in the public light, it’s in God’s light.
I was laying there in that bed, hooked up to all these machines, people all around me crying, and there was no running from it anymore. It was like God was telling me, “Whatever the fukk you think you’re doing, you need to slow down. Or it’s gonna be worse than this.”
Only one thing worse than this.
Rick James said it best.
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug.”
It’s a hell of a drug.
It will make you do things you never thought you’d do. It will turn you into a different person. It will put you in situations where you say to yourself, “How the fukk did I get here?”
When I was in that hospital bed, I kept asking myself that question. And I kept thinking about all the people in my life who aren’t here anymore. Mostly, I thought about my mother. My dad wasn’t really around when I was a kid. He had his own problems with addiction. But my mother was my best friend in the world. She was just so caring. My first memory in life is hearing the sound of her voice. She had these really wide eyes and a real soft voice.
If we were at a family party everybody would ask me, “Lamar, where’s your mother? Where’s Cathy? Where’s Cathy?”
She was like the center of the universe in Jamaica, Queens.
I remember when I started playing peewee football, I was already big as hell. I could take care of myself. But I got hit on this one play, and I was just dinged up a little bit. I’m on the ground for six seconds or seven seconds max, and just as I’m about to get up, I hear my mom’s voice. She’s running from the sideline out onto the field. Sprinting, yelling, “Mookah! Mookah! Talk to me, baby!”
That was her nickname for me.
She gets to me and I’m like, “Mom, what are you doing? Are you crazy?”
I mean, this is New York City. Everybody’s looking at me like, Yo. Come on, man.
She says, “Mookah, Mookah, are you O.K.? What hurts?”
I said, “Mom, I’m fine. Get the hell off the field!”
She’s like, “O.K.! O.K.! I’m going! I just gotta make sure you’re alright.”
Then she went back to the sidelines like it was nothing. That was my mother. She always had my back.
When I was 12 years old, she got sick. I knew she had colon cancer, but I didn’t really know how bad it was. She kind of kept it from me to protect me. I just remember that she went into the hospital for a while, and when I went to visit her, it seemed like she was getting … smaller. Like she was disappearing, you know what I mean?
One day, when my grandmother was driving me home from the hospital, she said, “You know, your mother is probably going to pass away soon. I just want you to be ready.”
The day that she passed away, I remember going to see her, and I remember how the cancer had just ravaged her body. Like if I could go back to that time, and you could put me in that room, I probably wouldn’t even recognize who she was. Her face was so small and she was bleeding out of her mouth. And she kept saying “Mookah, Mookah….”
I just sat right next to her bed, and one of the last things she said to me … I still think about it every day.
She said, “Be nice to everybody, Mook.”
I don’t think anything can prepare you for losing your mother at 12 years old. It leaves a mark on you. I don’t care how strong you think you are.
