He was nervous. He hadn’t been onstage since the accident. Here he was, 34 years old, a veteran performer, but he felt like an anxious teenager, picking up a microphone for the first time. Would he find the words? He felt somewhat reassured when he summoned the rhythm in his head. He’d approached the mic a thousand times before,
first on street corners and in clubs in New York and later on stages around the world. But he surely never anticipated performing in this venue—the rec room and sometimes synagogue of the Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation near Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Above the makeshift stage hung a long sheet of butcher paper, heralding the HAYM SALOMON TALENT SHOW in bubble letters. After a resident named Betty finished reading poems from her grandchildren, it was his turn to take the
stage. He cut an odd figure up there: a six-foot-three former rap legend in a tracksuit, sweating from nerves in front of a room full of frail senior citizens. He may have seemed like a strange booking choice for Haym Salomon—but in fact, he felt right at home. Because he was home. “Please welcome,” the announcer said, “our very own musical maestro, the one and only T La Rock!”
The crowd waited. Some were asleep in their wheelchairs. A few no longer knew their own names. But those who
were alert and awake were in quite a festive mood. They tapped their feet as the music started, waving at their fellow resident.
T had been living at Haym Salomon for some time, recovering from a traumatic head injury. Two years earlier, on April 1, 1994, he had been attacked on the street near his house in the Bronx. By the time he got to the hospital, he had slipped into a coma...
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