A high-school graduation party occupies a strange place in the contours of the mind and memory. Think about it: at the time, you are going about your life, hanging with the same people you’ve seen every day for the last four or so years, with little sense of the moment’s impermanence and the fleeting nature of youth.Yet, life is about to change. Drastically. As college and careers beckon, familiar faces will become strangers. With others, the lines of communication remain, but as paths diverge, the connection is never the same. At the party, though? Everyone is in sync one last time, blissfully ignorant of how far life will move them all in different directions. Now consider how these memories might take on an even more complex hue if one guest will, in a few short years, completely metamorphose themselves, emerging on the other side as one of the most dynamic, controversial, and electrifying entertainers of modern times, an icon who still inspires intrigue, study, and passionate debate nearly thirty years after their death. Consider that this person was widely viewed by those who knew them as the most memorable, dynamic, creative, charismatic light in a school full of memorable, dynamic, creative, charismatic types, and yet, none of those people could have possibly foreseen the trajectory that lay ahead for said person. These were the circumstances of the June 1988 house party GerardYoung held to celebrate his graduation from the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA), where he hosted his friend Tupac Shakur for perhaps the last time. Unlike most at the party, Tupac, a junior, was not in the Class of ’88. (The party would land within days of his seventeenth birthday). In a few weeks, however,Tupac would hastily depart for the West Coast with his mother, Afeni, bringing the family’s tumultuous four-year chapter in Baltimore to a sudden close. They, along with Pac’s sister, Sekyiwa, would land in Marin City, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where, the following year, ’Pac would graduate from Tamalpais High School in nearby Mill Valley, and where, one year after that, he would begin his professional recording career as a member of
the expansive Oakland area rap crew Digital Underground. From there, it would be an explosive, era-defining, impossibly eventful five-year run between his 1991 debut album, 2Pacalypse Now , and his death in 1996 at age twenty-five. Fortunately for Gerard, better known today as the DJ and producer GE-OLOGY, his party, at his parents’ home on WoodbourneAvenue in northeast Baltimore,was well documented, both in photographs and in the near-photographic banks of his memory. At the time, in addition to being a promising outgoing member of BSA’s visual arts program, he was DJ Plain Terror, the musical anchor of an ultimately short-lived group calling themselves Born Busy.The outfit, in addition to Young, consisted of ’Pac, then going by the moniker MC NewYork; Dana Smith, a beatboxer and sometimes rapper known as Mouseman (or Mouse, for short); and Darrin Keith Bastfield, another rapper, who went by MC Ace Rocker. Gerard remembers, with frame-by-frame detail, the exact moment when he first saw Tupac.“My Tupac story starts before he actually came to our school,” he explains.Two years earlier, he had encountered him outside his little brother’s school, Roland Park, where ’Pac was then enrolled in the eighth grade. “I remember seeing a cipher of kids rapping in a circle, laughing and joking, and this one kid had a t-shirt on with some iron-on letters and they say,‘MC NewYork,’” he recalls.“Everyone seemed to be fascinated by him. I don’t know, something about his look was very different and I remember the face. It caught my attention at the time.” Gerard would soon start seeing this kid on the No. 8 bus he took on his daily commute to school, not knowing who he was or his name. One night, during his junior year, following the conclusion of the Beaux Arts Ball, an annual BSA talent show, word spread that a battle was about to go down in the hallway outside the school cafeteria. “There’s low ceilings there, so we always [would] use that area because it had great acoustics, especially for beatboxing,” Gerard recalls. “Anything you did reverberated and bounced off
( opening spread ) Tupac Shakur, then going by MC New York, and Gerard “GE-OLOGY” Young, then known as DJ Plain Terror, at Gerard’s home during a party celebrating the latter’s graduation from Baltimore School for the Arts in June 1988. All photos courtesy of GE-OLOGY.
110 WaxPoetics
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