I was a pretty delinquent little kid. My folks and I didn't get along, so I basically moved out... put myself through high school and then college by working. I'm only a half-year short of a degree in history.
My second grade teacher told me I would never graduate high school. That I was going to be a juvenile delinquent.
When we first met, I was trying to put a band together. I asked around at school for other guys who wanted to play in a band. Someone told me about a juvenile delinquent they knew who played bongos.
Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.
When I had a baby, I didn't leave the second floor for six months. I nursed my babies. I was a full-time homemaker. I taught them all how to read before I let them go to school. So I gave them that care in the early life that somehow feminists have been led to believe is demeaning and is not worth the time of an educated woman.
I created the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation back in 1997 for the purpose of going in and improving the living conditions of my people on the African continent, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I came from. Out first mission was to go and build a new hospital. Our next mission was to build a school.
Someone had an eye on me as I was leaving high school. I had a chance to record demos, but they were kind of wanting to make a pop singer out of me, of the 'X Factor' variety. I didn't feel comfortable with it. I wanted to be a songwriter.
I'm the guy that once graduated Ranger School - a place that starves you and denies you sleep for over two months - and took a fight six days later in the IFL and won.
Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.
I always wanted to be a dentist from the time I was in high school, and I was accepted to dental school in the spring of 1972. I was planning to go, but after the Olympics there were other opportunities.
Even when I was doing well in acting, my dad would say, 'You can still go back to dental school.' But since I've been on '90210,' I haven't heard that.
My dad worked for a generator company and then UC Berkeley, and my mom was as a dental hygienist and then eventually a history teacher. My uncles and aunts, all of them are elementary school teachers or scientists.
When I was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I saw the potential of some of our best and brightest students cut short, punished for the actions of others - kids who had grown up and done well in our school system, and kids who know no other home but America. This is unacceptable.
And I spent that time working as an insurance adjuster and going to law school in the evening, and then when I left law school, I joined the Department of Justice in Washington.
When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.
I came from a small town and at school in one class there was me, a member from Depeche Mode and someone who went on to join The Cure. That was all in one class of 30 kids.
I had a professor in graduate school who told us, 'Know what you're good at, and do that thing.' And I thought, 'Hands down, I'm an ensemble girl. I'm a fierce ensemble girl. I am dependable.' I was never seen for the ingenue or the leading lady.
Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
Clay Hunt was the kind of individual that has made America a great country. In 2005, when his country needed him, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Shot in Iraq, he earned a Purple Heart, and after he recuperated, he graduated from Marine Corps Scout Sniper School and was deployed to Afghanistan.
I didn't even walk for graduation - I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn't have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn't write one of them. She literally got me my diploma.
