It was December the fourth, early in the evening, when I got a call from my girlfriend. I was sitting at the computer under the faded yellow light in my mama’s office, surfing on a sea of words, when the phone rang beside me.

“Hey, boo,” I said.

I knew it wasn’t normal because she didn’t laugh or give me a response off top. She sounded like a shock had happened to her.

“Pimp C’s dead,” my girlfriend said.

“Why you say somethin’ like that?” I said, feeling a creeping frost on my heart. “Quit lyin’, man.”

“Pimp C’s dead.”

Whoa.

I found out about the Dirty South movement with Master P, but to me he wasn’t a lyricist like that. He flowed, but he’d be saying some silly things sometimes. I loved Mystikal. But when Bun B and Pimp C came along with Pocket Full of Stones, I was blown away. It was sick. It’s still sick like an alcoholic, and I didn’t even know their names in ninety-two. A menace to society, indeed! They gave me at the age of SEVEN, still a Kermit frog who looked at the drug ridden neighborhood around me with ignorant eyes, the thought that maybe I could tell these types of stories. Experiences that mattered to people, and I wanted to be seen so badly, to tell what was inside of my head.

I didn’t sleep on Front and Back, but I was so young still that I didn’t know my big cousin was playing music from a movement that would prove to be unstoppable.

Then Big Pimpin’ came along, and I was blown away!

Jay-Z, as almost always, made a lyrical landscape, a verbal movie out of his words. Then…

I read the encyclopedia, though not the whole thing like my folks thought. I knew what an impresario was. I had been teased for knowing what words meant, and slowly I learned how to be proud of the words that I knew. It wasn’t just that. But the smooth flow and twang of the Pimp was memorable. He made you pay attention. I saw how smoothly they worked as a team, gears in one clock, and I thought maybe I could write something fun like that. Perhaps even have fun.

Then I went back and found “Three Sixteen’s”. Another story on wax, another portrait of where they had came from, I was awed at the age of nineteen, finally realizing what it meant to be a lyricist. I had begun to write songs at the age of eight, in crayon no less, but who thought that to be anything but a childish fantasy? Pimp C was sincere about the insincere brothas around him. I had often felt that way myself everywhere I went, and I didn’t have a red nickel. He was a star down south for being honest, TRILL, made me wake up and realize everyone has a story to tell. It takes someone with the courage to live life to truly make music like that.

“What killed him?” I asked. What I meant was, why? But not in so many words, she was telling me. She didn’t know.

We still don’t. There’s going to be a missing chapter in our personal history, at least for fans

of the Pimp, until we find out. Period. So if a boot is required to bring about these answers, I just have one thing to say.

Whose behind I gotta kick?