Hanif Collins restarts life devoted to rap and responsibility
By Michelle Cole, The Oregonian
November 24, 2009, 8:10PM
Five-year-old Felipe Gonzalez strolls out of the neighborhood grocery waving a purple Popsicle and juggling a bottle of iced tea.
“Stop,” says the young man with the little boy. “Your shoe is untied again.”
Hanif Collins, a friend of Felipe’s father, drops to one knee in the wet, rainy parking lot and ties the lace. The boy leans in and rests the icy Popsicle on Collins’ neck. They smile and stand.
“You da bad guy,” Felipe says, giggling as the two continue down the street.
“No,” Collins answers with a playful poke. “You da bad guy.”
Hanif Collins thinks a lot these days about what it means to be a bad guy and a good man. He was a boy who let impulse and anger unravel his life. Now he wants to be the man who can tie his life back together.
When he was 17, Collins pointed a gun at some drug dealers and stole their pot. In Oregon, there’s no leniency for armed robbery. Not even if you’re young. Collins was tried as an adult and spent nearly six years in prison.
Released at 23, Collins faced the chance to start again. He needed to find work despite a felony record and the worst recession in decades. He wanted to chase his dream of becoming a rapper. And he decided the only way to mourn a good friend was to be there for that friend’s little boy.
View full sizeRoss William Hamilton/The OregonianHanif Collins and Felipe Gonzalez Jr. leave the library on Northeast Killingsworth Street where Collins and Felipe, 5, read books in English and Spanish. Collins hopes that spending time with his friend’s son will help the boy on his journey to manhood.Collins doesn’t fit the cliche of the young black man who finds trouble. He did not grow up an underprivileged child from a broken home.
He had two loving parents, played the alto sax in Metropolitan Youth Symphony ensembles from fifth through 11th grade. His devout Muslim family encouraged their youngest son to read books and think for himself.
So when his parents, Aqiylah and Omar Collins, first saw their son after his arrest, inside that tiny waiting room at the juvenile detention center, even before the hug, Aqiylah Collins couldn’t help but ask:
“Why are you here?”
Collins put his head down and said, “Bad choices.”
“I just wanted to be sure,” his mother continued, “because we did everything society tells you you’re supposed to do. We put you in after-school programs. You had mentors. You were in the youth symphony. We did everything we could to give you the resources to be successful. … So, I just want to be sure about why you are here.”
At 17, Collins was working and going to school full time. He and his friend, Felipe Gonzalez, were part of a rap group called the 7th Science Collective. They were born 17 days apart, loved to spar with words and were about to release their first album.
But Collins confesses that he also had a lot of anger. Maybe it came from reading books like the “Autobiography of Malcolm X” when he was 11.
“I read a lot of things that were good for me to read, but I don’t think I was really ready for them,” he says. “It kind of caused me, I think, to take a stance like anti-everything. Anti-society.”
The summer of 2002, he remembers, was “the summer of chaos.”
“I was around a lot of people doing negative things, and I was one of them. I wasn’t innocent.”
In fact, he bluntly confesses, “I was a stick-up kid.”
The more he robbed people, the more invincible he felt. So when a friend talked about robbing a guy living in an affluent Portland suburb who had a lot of weed, Collins was in.
Only this time, Collins said, he had a bad feeling.
“We were driving out there and I was thinking, ‘Man, this might be my last one.’”
June 26, 2002: The robbery went pretty much as planned. But when Collins and his partner got back to the car, they found the driver had shut off the motor, was smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. That gave the angry drug dealers time to catch up.
Afraid of being shot, Collins drew his .22 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He and his partner handed the marijuana over and ran. They were about two blocks away when they realized their driver wasn’t behind them.
They went back only to discover he’d run in a different direction. And, they found a swarm of police cars and motorcycles.
On Dec. 13, 2002, Collins began a 70-month prison sentence. He was young. Outspoken. Defiant. He spent eight months in the custody of the Oregon Youth Authority, then was transferred to adult prison. He arrived at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution near Pendleton wearing a white jumpsuit and rubber sandals.
He felt like the kid he was.
“You’re chained to about 20 dudes by your wrists and your ankles. And you’re shuffling in with those tiny little steps,” he says. “I’m 18. Just imagine that. These dudes are convicts, killers, tattoos on their face.”
Unlike the movie portrayals of solitary confinement, Collins found the hole wasn’t such a bad thing. He fasted. Prayed. Exercised. He played solo chess, taught himself to speak Spanish and read voraciously.
He was days from finishing a 120-day stint for a fight when the letter arrived.
Out of all his “homies” on the outside, his friend Felipe was one of the few who never wrote him after he went to jail. Collins had started a letter to his friend many times in his head: “Ey dog, what’s up man? How you living?”
The letter from Sonny, Collins’ cousin, was pretty typical until Sonny mentioned that he’d gone to Felipe’s wake.
Collins stopped reading.
Excuse me?
Felipe was killed in a car accident, Sonny wrote. He died on impact.
Collins must have read that letter 50 times. “I never had anybody close to me just die.”
A year and three days from getting out of prison, Collins had counted the long days but suddenly he understood how short life can be.
He promised himself he’d make up for lost time. He’d make sure his life stood for something. Later, he remembered Felipe in a song he wrote: “Yo, I knew a young man shining lost his life in a crash, 22 but living life in a flash, the cycles impasse/was taken from the righteous with his likable mass and all I’m think is that coulda been me/ ”
Two months after Sonny’s letter, Collins wrote to Felipe’s parents: “Hearing about my boy’s untimely demise, I felt a lot of regret.”
In neat cursive on two pages of lined notebook paper, he closed with a promise: “I heard that since my imprisonment Felipe had a son. I would very much like it if, when I get out and Lord willing get my life together, I could play a part in helping him along in his journey to manhood.”
View full sizeRoss William Hamilton/The OregonianHanif Collins performs at an Old Town club. His counselor says lots of young men get out of prison wanting to be rappers. Collins is the only one he knows who is actually doing it.It’s a hot July night and almost a year to the day since Collins got out of prison. He greets a mostly white audience at the Southeast Portland club Rotture like an old pro.
“Hey, yo! What’s up Portland? How ya doing out there?”
Wearing baggy jeans, an oversized orange T-shirt and a necklace of wood beads that had belonged to Felipe, Collins introduces himself to the crowd as “Luck-One Conscious” — his emcee name.
Then he dives into a rap: “Back in 1984, a child came glow on the low, lo and behold I was fresh…”
Young women in tight jeans push their way to the front to dance and flirt.
After the set, the crowd lines up to buy the CDs Collins sells from a cracked brown vinyl bag slung over his shoulder.
The CD, “Beautiful Music,” contains seven tracks ranging from synthesized ’80s beat to jazzy blues to bang-it-out rap. The lyrics speak to prison and prejudice but also to peace and a 17-year-old girl who “abolished the misconception of her race” by graduating with a scholarship. The songs recognize reality but also urge listeners to dream.
Surrounded by the crowd, Collins wipes his sweat with a towel someone offers. In a voice hoarse from performing, he jokes that he feels like a rock star.
Life is good.
But not like a rock star.
“Home” now is a small room on the fifth floor of an old downtown Portland hotel. Collins cooks with a hotplate, convection oven and toaster.
His bookshelf overflows with titles for a young man intent on improvement: Barack Obama’s “Audacity of Hope,” “Gandhi: An Autobiography,” “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. DuBois. There’s also: “The Idiots Guide to Real Estate Investing,” “Spanish the Easy Way” and “Limited Liability Companies for Dummies.”
In the weeks before he got out of prison, Collins’ parents worried about their son. He’d become an adult while locked up. His father wondered: Had his boy matured psychologically?
Shortly after his release, Collins went to his parents’ Vancouver home seeking advice. That, Omar Collins notes with a smile, was something his son had not done before.
Collins had been warned about the sour economy and scarcity of jobs. But he was determined.
“I always felt like there’s nothing that can stop an individual as long as they put their mind to it,” he says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing but I know what I’m doing and getting a job is mandatory.’”
It didn’t take long for him to talk his way into an office, answering phones, filing and doing simple accounting. He had a hunch it wouldn’t last. His skills were rusty, and he admits he spent too much time on the Internet.
His back-up plan involved a trade apprentice program to become a roofer.
By the time he was laid off from the office job, Collins had lined up roofing work. But in August, with construction slow, he was laid off again.
These days Collins is working two jobs and says he may have to line up a third. He’s marketing gourmet cookware, and this week, he landed a second job canvassing customers for a home siding company.
Music remains his priority, and Collins invests money from performances back into his business, “Architect Entertainment LLC.”
Proceeds from his CD — $420 so far — go to FreeTheKids.org, a nonprofit that helps impoverished children in Haiti. Collins says he wants to use his music to create some good.
“I could take this money and buy T-shirts and stuff,” he says. “But to them it means so much more.”
Justin Heilenbach, the counselor who helped Collins make the transition from prison to the outside, says at least one in 10 of the young inmates he works with wants to be a rapper. Collins “is the only one who is doing it.”
Still on parole supervision, Collins has received permission to travel to other states for performances. This fall he flew to Miami and then on to Atlanta.
He sends reviews, show posters and pictures to his friends who are still locked up.
Nicholas McCarty, an inmate at a medium security prison near Salem, says he’s heard Collins on a local station, KXJM 107.5, on Saturday nights.
“For people that know him, it’s inspiring to hear his music,” says McCarty, 29. “He symbolizes to me the ability to use will to overcome obstacles.”
Collins says rap is all he ever wanted to do, all he and Felipe ever talked about. He knows it sounds strange, but he guesses he’d become a teacher if the music thing doesn’t work out.
But for now, rap is his world. And he feels as though Felipe is guiding him.
“I come across scenarios and opportunities, and I feel like he’s playing a role presenting them to me. Opening doors for me. You know what I mean? Like, ‘I can’t do it but you can do it for me. We can do it together.’”
Martin Gonzalez, Felipe’s father and a member of the Portland School Board, says he cried when he read the letter Collins wrote two years ago promising to be part of his grandson’s life.
“I have to tell you,” Gonzalez says, “that young man delivered on what he wrote.”
Among the other promises Collins has kept since his release is the one he made to himself.
He logged 23 misconduct violations during his time in prison. He has not had one parole violation since his release.
“As far as getting in trouble,” Collins says, “I let that go a long time ago.”
Portland Hip Hop Rapper Luck One in the Oregonian
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