Out of Babylon

By Henry Taksier

A few blocks from Tim and Terry’s, Tygur nervously smokes a cigarette. His eyes are red and watery from the other four he just smoked. Every time he gets invited to freestyle onstage at a bar or club, he walks around town and bums as many cigarettes as he can. As the performance draws nearer, he asks me to buy him a beer. I say it’s a bad idea.

“Nah,” he says, “It’s cool, man. You know I do better when I’m fucked up.”

Tygur One, an underground rapper, has lived on the streets of East Gainesville since 1998. A year later, he started an unofficial record label called Phatt Boy Entertainment, which has provided recording time to nearly a hundred local rap and reggae artists.

Tygur can usually be found downtown at Bo Diddley Plaza, rolling his own cigarettes. On a typical day, he wears a colorful beanie over his dreads. The faded black outline of a tiger is tattooed on his left cheek, barely noticeable against his dark skin. Just above his other cheek is a patch of scarred flesh where his face hit the pavement in a motorcycle accident.

Ever since Tygur arrived in Gainesville, his life has been driven by music.

He wants to give every artist he meets on the streets a chance at recording, even if all he can offer is a few pieces of old equipment.

“I wish I could reach all the youth and start a change in society,” he said. “Those young fellas, they gotta grow up and reach for the sun.”

Tygur said music is what saved him from living the wrong kind of life.

“It was a war between gangs, where I come from,” he said. “We were foot soldiers, fighting for superiority on the streets. Only the strong survived.”

Tygur was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At 3, he moved with his family to Chocolate City, Georgia. In his early childhood, Tygur listened to his dad play reggae and blues with a keyboard, guitar and drums. He started hearing music in his thoughts constantly, which helped him deal with the reality around him. Most of his peers were involved in drug dealing and gang fights.

As he got older, Tygur drifted from his family. His Haitian father envisioned him finding a stable job and conforming to the family tradition of arranged marriage. He began to skip school so he could roam the streets, looking for ways to make an extra buck. Tygur said that’s when his “dark side” developed. At 13, he met a new role model: an older drug dealer.

“A smooth cat,” Tygur said. “A real cool Jamaican. His name was Boxy.”

Boxy asked Tygur to wash his car each week in exchange for some money. In the meantime, Boxy sold marijuana discreetly to passersby.

“It caught my eye,” Tygur said. “The fast money. He started letting me sell weed for him. The more I did it, the more we became friends.”

At this point, Tygur had dropped out of school and rarely went back to his house. He slept in alleys, playgrounds, tunnels and abandoned railroad tracks. At 16, he bought a keyboard and began to practice whenever he could. Still, most of his attention was directed elsewhere.

“By then, I was part of a street fraternity,” he said. “I was selling the most drugs. And this guy I knew, who had a pawnshop, he and my father were best friends. My dad would get all these antique guns and shit and store them in the shop. Getting guns was easy.”

He also found a partner-in-crime: a young man his age named Rodney Jackson, who had his own six-member hip-hop crew called King of Beats. Rodney was the kind of guy who could fracture someone’s skull with one punch. He and Tygur raised hell together.

“Back in those days in Georgia, you had to have a gun,” Tygur said. “I had several. You pull a gun on me, we get into a fight, and I grab your gun. That’s how my collection formed.”

Tygur’s interest in music was still alive. Whenever they could, he and Rodney would show up at clubs and freestyle together. At one of those clubs, Rodney got into a fight. The other guy pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol and shot him in the head. As Rodney was airlifted to the hospital, Tygur realized how alone he felt.

Meanwhile, his talents and resources led to a new lifestyle. By his early 20s, he had a two-bedroom apartment, three cars, and a girlfriend named Alicia Kirkpatrick, who helped him get rich. Together, they recruited eight girls who sold their bodies and brought in tons of clients, including lawyers and police officers.

Spiritually, Tygur felt bankrupt. Alicia fell into a downward spiral, snorting more cocaine than she was selling. Rodney had recently left the hospital in a wheelchair, permanently paralyzed.

“The first time I saw him, all I could do was cry,” Tygur said. “He told me, ‘All this shit you’re doing, man, you can end up like me. The police are watching you. All these boys hanging out with you, they’re not really your friends. They’re all waiting to get you.’”

Tygur said that’s when he started to see the light.

“I realized life is serious, and a gun can really fuck you up,” he said. “I turned to music to escape the drama.”

With Rodney gone, the King of Beats had fallen apart. Tygur sat alone with his keyboard, searching for inner peace. He left Alicia and left the apartment. His travels, which mostly consisted of hopping buses, led him to a small college town in Florida with a thriving independent music and art scene.

“Gainesville was a good place for music,” he said. “A lot of local bands. I made friends with punks and joined the underground movements.”

When Tygur was sitting in a bar one night, depressed, he met a girl named Sparkle. She was a beautiful work of art, with pink, white, blonde and blue-striped hair, fishnets and “at least seventy piercings on her face,” he said.

Sparkle took an interest in Tygur’s music and introduced him to her friends from The Wayward Council, a nonprofit record store on West University Avenue. They invited him out to a place called “the spot,” an old clubhouse on Depot Road, to record some music and party. Thus began his new lifestyle.

Since then, Tygur has rapped at Brophy’s, Tim and Terry’s, The Laboratory, The Kickstand and more parties than he can keep track of. He moves his studio equipment from place to place, such as the backrooms of convenience stores, depending on who will grant him time and space.

“I was living in Babylon,” Tygur said of his life in Georgia. “In Gainesville, I found Zion. Zion is life, art and music. I want to bring Zion to Babylon, you know, and tear Babylon down.”

Tygur is 36 and continues to sleep on the streets. His goal is to find a permanent place to store his equipment and record some music. Until then, he stands and waits for shows, compulsively bumming cigarettes.