At the ER, nurses later said he walked in on his own, spitting blood onto the linoleum, refusing to lie down. “I’m not dying today,” he slurred through a shattered jaw. The doctors counted nine entry and exit wounds. They told his family he had a six percent chance of survival. A bullet had missed his carotid artery by a millimeter. Another had passed through his tongue without severing it. He was a medical oddity—a man turned into Swiss cheese who refused to leak out his last breath.
In the early spring of 2000, long before the world knew him as the billionaire mogul 50 Cent, he was just Curtis Jackson—a hungry, relentless rapper from South Jamaica, Queens. On a humid evening in late May, he was sitting in the passenger seat of his friend’s car outside his grandmother’s house. The streetlights buzzed, casting a sickly yellow glow on the cracked asphalt. He had just finished a studio session, his mind still buzzing with bars about survival, when a white Toyota Camry crept around the corner. 50 cent gunshot wound
Blood filled his throat like warm, salty wine. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t scream. He thought, This is it. This is where I die, in a borrowed car on 134th Street. At the ER, nurses later said he walked
He didn’t hide the scars. He rapped about the bullets as if they were old friends. Because they were. They had taught him the only lesson that mattered: when you’ve already died and come back, there’s nothing left to fear. They told his family he had a six percent chance of survival
When he finally stood up, he was a different man. The boy who dodged bullets was gone. In his place was 50 Cent—a scarred, unstoppable revenant with a lisp from a disfigured tongue and a legendary hole in his cheek. He went straight to the studio and recorded “How to Rob.” Then “Ghetto Qu’ran.” Then every track that would become Get Rich or Die Tryin’ .