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I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.

The thing was, at a young age, my mom and my grandma always tried to keep me out of the streets as much as they could, so they put me in a private school when I was super young.

When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.

I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

When my mother had four girls, and she could tell her marriage was falling apart, she went back to college and got her degree in music and education.

My mum died of leukemia when I was in high school - she lost her life at 40. It was very hard, and I didn't do that much in Chicago after that. I actually sat around and didn't do anything for three years. I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore because my everything was gone. I was a mama's boy, and I had to turn into a man real quick.

Growing up, I stayed in a child's place. My father was murdered when I was 20. I was a model and never had a real job and my parents took care of me.

I'd been kind of a hiccup in my parents' lives. They lost track of me and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. And then fate reached in and took me in its hands. I was discovered right out of high school and started getting work.

In fact I was slightly badly behaved at school and got in trouble. I would get a bee in my bonnet about something I thought wasn't right, and I would ape about too, to make everybody laugh. That was my way through my girls' school, because I wasn't very academic.