HOLIDAY

As told to fayemi shakur | Images by Akintola Hanif

Holiday AKA HotShot Holly is a self-described chameleon, an adaptor, a hustler. His business card says “sex appeal specialist.." He says he's like Christmas, he brings excitement, That's why he's called Holiday. Many people are intrigued by Holly and his sense of style, but what they don’t know is, in order for him to survive, poverty was his greatest motivator.

“If you put me in the jungle, I’m gonna come out with a bear wrapped around me.”

I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. My father was a big time cocaine dealer. I have fifteen brothers and sisters. We lived a good life until my father died when I was five. He took care of us. Whatever he did outside that door was his business. We didn’t find out what he was doing until we was in our teenage years. Because of poverty and being on the run, we were spilt up into foster homes a lot.

After my father died, the guy my mother was with started taking me out because he knew I could make money because I was young. I would knock on every door and ask if they wanted to buy incense. I would go on one side of the street and he would watch me from the other side. A lot of times I didn’t want to go but every night there was a lot of green stuff on the floor and I knew that I liked that…making money.

I think poverty is the best motivator. When I was eight years old and tired of being hungry because the welfare check didn’t come, I went out for the first time by myself. I walked a mile to the local supermarket after school to make money helping people with their bags. I used to get kicked out the store. Then I would stand outside with the big kids. All the ghetto kids who was mad at the world hung out there. They used to rob me a lot. Sometimes I’d run, sometimes I’d cry, sometimes I’d fight back.

I didn’t have a favorite hustle. I did everything. I shoveled snow. I shoplifted. I sold a bunch of bullshit but people bought it because I was young and they wanted to support me. I even sold drugs but I wasn’t a drug dealer. I was a hustler. A drug dealer doesn’t have many ways to make money, he really believes that’s going to make him rich. But a hustler can switch it up. If you put me in the jungle I’m gonna come out with a bear wrapped around me. I’m a hustler born and bred. I have many different hats in my closet and underneath each hat is a hustle. I’m like a chameleon. I can adapt, accomplish and achieve. I don’t feel like it’s a different identity. It’s a hustle.

I never wanted to blackball myself with the whole gang shit. I don’t wanna glorify that lifestyle. It was a lifestyle that chose me. I didn’t choose it. My homies look at me like I ain’t G’d up. We lost the struggle man and at the end of the day none of the real G’s ain’t have nothing to show for it but death and incarceration.

But I’m courageously creative. I can make up any kind of style.

For example, I like wearing my kilt. The red one is called the Lady Red Devil. The Scots wore it when they went to war. Now they wear it for sporting events and special occasions like marriages. I never had a desire to be socially accepted. Men do what they want to do, boys do what they’re told.

There’s a lot of things that I don’t let people know about me. I don’t wanna throw an alarm clock in the graveyard and wake up the dead. I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with letting people see your true self, I just don’t do it right off top because of what I’m trying to achieve and accomplish. Because of the energy that I create sometimes I make people think I’m less hood than I really am. A lot of people get that wrong impression all the time but it’s fine with me because it keeps bullshit people away from me.

I had to be very disciplined and have a lot of endurance in order to survive and keep going. A lot of people didn’t make it. Some people wallow in their problems and I don’t. I tell people that if they took all their problems and put them in a magic hat in the sky and mixed them up with everyone else’s problems in the world and randomly picked a problem out of the hat, when they see what they got they would probably want their own problems back.