Alaska Confidential: Don't Mess with Treach

The rapper nearly assaults a teenager.

The hip-hop group Naughty by Nature came to Fairbanks, Alaska, one winter night toward the end of my tenure there, when I was seventeen, to perform in the university’s gymnasium.

I wasn’t particularly a fan, nor was anyone I knew. They were a bit before our time, a little dated.

The name Naughty by Nature is actually pretty corny if you just say it out loud, objectively, as is their logo featuring a cartoon baseball bat with graffiti font.

Fairbanks tended to attract such acts, typically those on the downswing of their careers. I remember it being thirty below zero the night of the show. Time to fire your agent.

But they had name recognition, and for some reason, well, for reasons that make sense actually, the music industry appeared to have not gotten the memo that teenagers in the interior of Alaska were obsessed with hip-hop, so this was the only chance we’d had to see any live act from the genre.

I knew the same two Naughty by Nature songs then that I know now: OPP and Hip Hop Hurray, both of which feature repetitive call-and-response, nursery rhyme level melodies.

The gym was about half full of kids, all of us standing on the basketball court as the bleachers had been pushed all the way in, presumably in response to the ticket sales, to give the impression that the show was not sparsely attended.

We were all standing around in the dark near the stage holding our giant coats, nothing else to do with them. It was really dark. Me, Marty, Frank, a bunch of people we knew.

For some reason a lot of girls came out to this event, unlike the usual promotion involving two guys squashing their beef in a fisticuff at a site called Free Manure (it was called that because it was a place where someone dumped manure and you could have it, for free.)

Frankly I was pretty bored and finding the whole thing stiflingly pedestrian until Treach, the lead rapper of the group, about thirty years of age at the time, in his physical prime really, almost beat the shit out of a sixteen-year-old kid.

Treach appeared to be an avid bodybuilder, likely on steroids or growth hormones. He wore a wifebeater with his guns popping out and his schtick was that he was a really tough dude from the streets of Jersey.

I have since come to believe this was not an act.

There was this kid in my high school, I can't remember his name now, and I didn't know his name then, but I’ll call him Ice Dog, because it seems fitting given his appearance and flare for accessorizing.

Ice Dog was very much on the periphery, seemingly in school one day and then never to be seen again.

He was very tall, about six-foot-seven, and thin. A whiteboy with cornrow braids and a pencil thin goatee, he wore baggy jeans which sagged past his ass, giving the impression that his legs did not bend when he walked, like he was in and old 16-millimeter film.

He strutted rapidly from place to place while scowling and with his fists clenched, usually wearing a FUBU jersey and chain of cubic-z or fool’s gold.

While it seemed likely that he was a poser who was not at all tough, there was also a fair chance that he was definitely hard, as they say, so nobody messed with him, he engaged with nobody, and it worked out well enough and nobody baselessly assumed he was going to shoot up the school even though he was very aggressive and strange.

The only detail anyone knew about him to my knowledge was that he was the son of our school’s janitor.

In Fairbanks there was no stigma involved in being the son of a janitor.

The janitor’s name was Bill, an ex-hippie who was unfailingly affable. He wore shorts all the time, even in the winter. Occasionally he would talk your ear off about Steely Dan or some other terrible band, and he would often brag that he dressed himself out of the school's Lost and Found box to save money so he could catch a Dead show this summer in Oregon.

That explained his All Eyez on Me black-and-white Tupac T-shirt, but looking back this guy and his son didn’t match. It seemed unlikely that he’d raised the next Suge Knight.

So, anyway, Ice Dog was at the Naughty by Nature show, standing in the back by himself, bobbing his head.

For some perspective, and this is an important detail, this was the late 1990s, and the rappers Notorious BIG and Tupac had both recently been murdered in what would be considered highly publicized incidents.

At some point in the set, because of the prescience, because it added to the flow of the show, or because Treach was simply bent out of shape about it, Naughty by Nature’s DJ did that record-scratch effect to cut the music, and Treach began a soliloquy on the scourge of violence in hip-hop while launching into a dedication of the next song to the recently fallen friend, Tupac.

That’s when someone from the back of the gym mumbled, “Fuck Tupac.”

"The fuck did you say motherfucker!?! Are you fucking serious! Yo, turn the lights on!” Treach screamed at the top of his lungs, as he eyed the general direction of the whispered heckle, his face now contorted and his biceps flexing.

The lights flickered on as Treach stared out at the crowd, toward the back of the gym, near a doorway which was giving off a little bit of light, and at a slim, white figure framed by it.

Those who’d been near Ice Dog and presumably heard what he’d said began to slowly inch away from him, and now he was standing alone in and empty circle.

“Shine the spotlight on that motherfucker!” Treach demanded, and the beam rotated away from the stage and onto the sad lonely figure, outmatched in both status and stature, and, as it appeared, certified gangster credentials.

"The fuck did you say bitch!" Treach demanded.

Ice Dog had been found out. He mumbled something inaudible.

"What, bitch?!"

Ice Dog was choked up, but he finally got a word out.

"Biggie," he said.

"What, motherfucker!"

"I like Biggie," he said limply.

"You said ‘fuck Tupac,’ didn't you!" Treach said, his muscles swollen like ripe fruit, his veins about to shred his wifebeater to bits, “get the fuck out of here right now, or I'm going to come down there and beat your ass!"

Ice Dog didn't move, apparently unsure of what to do, until Treach took a step off the stage with great determination.

It was at this point I was very confident Treach was going to kick this guy’s ass, and that this was not a very well-produced audience plant routine.

Then Ice Dog turned around and paced quickly out the door, and Treach shook his head and composed himself, and the show resumed.

The next day in school everyone was talking about how cool Treach was and how Ice Dog had wimped out.

"I want to find him and ask him about it," I said, sitting at a foldout table in the cafeteria eating stale fries.

"Why?" said Marty.

"'Dude, let's see what he has to say about it. He totally got his ass handed to him,” I said.

"Just leave him alone," said Marty, "he's having a tough time already."

"Yeah , what the hell would you have done?" Inugiak chimed in.

We learned a few things that night. Ice Dog was not a real gangster. None of us were, really.

We were all pretty scared of what Treach was going to do. He was the real deal.

Ice Dog was never to be seen again.