School offered little refuge. He was intelligent and outspoken, but also restless and confrontational. Classmates bullied him, sometimes cruelly, taping his mouth shut or shoving him into lockers because of his nonstop talk about becoming famous one day. When others laughed, he doubled down, insisting he would make it out and prove them wrong. By his late teens, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, his defiance interpreted as something darker by professionals trying to make sense of his behavior.
Music, however, had always been there. He sang in church choirs, performed with siblings in a small family group, studied piano, and joined school choruses. Teachers remembered him as magnetic and sharp, the kind of student who could take over a room without meaning to. But when he learned the truth about his biological father at 17, something shifted. Instead of quietly rebelling, he rejected everything he had been taught outright.
What followed was a period marked by arrests, jail time, and escalating trouble. He was arrested more than 20 times, sometimes serving months behind bars. Facing the possibility of habitual offender charges, he made a decisive break. In December 1982, with little more than ambition and anger, he left Indiana for Los Angeles.
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