PART # 2 THE RISE AND FALL OF SOUTH PARK MEXICAN

PART 2 OF 3

Armed with a GED, Coy attempted to further his education at San Jacinto Junior College. He spent most of his only college semester playing golf, skipped all his classes and flunked out.

Next, he worked with his brother Arthur in a chemical plant. That fizzled as well. Coy's last straight job was much better-suited to his talents, if not his desire for wealth and fame. He sold perfume door-to-door and in mall parking lots. Coy discovered a gift for gab. He could cold call with the best of them. Still, he soon gave in to frustration. His bosses in this racket were getting rich while they doled out peanuts to their best salesman.

Earnings were better in the crack game, which was Coy's next addition to a not-too-impressive resume. Exactly how long Coy was a crack dealer is debatable. His sister said it was three months, Coy said on the stand it was less than a year. Others estimate it was longer.

Coy insists he was as much prey as predator in the crack world. He testified that he had been on the ground on the wrong end of a gun numerous times, eyes closed, waiting for an oblivion that never came. For whatever reason, the gangsters who marked him for death never pulled the trigger. Coy later attributed it to a sign---surely he was destined for great things.

But first, things go worse. Thieves stole a consignment of crack he was fronted, and Coy was left with a debt he had to pay either by coming up with the silver or taking in some lead. To cover the debt, Coy sold all the flashy cars and bling he had bought with his crack proceeds. He was back at square one, no better off than he had been when he was peddling knock-off perfume. To hear him tell it, his conscience was also gnawing at him. "I was tired of selling crack to your homeboy's mom," he told a Houston Press reporter years later.

Coy spent about a month hunkered down. His mother owned a trailer park, so Coy was loaned a mobile home in which to plot his next move. He subsisted on cold pork and beans and small loans from his brother. He didn't want a real job--he says he was too proud to work for the white man for peanuts. He wanted greatness, and he wanted it now.

But what was he great at? Not much. What he was best at was selling crack. He saw no alternative, he said. He was going back to the dope game. As he was dialing up a crack wholesaler, he abruptly lost his will. The phone slipped from his fingers. He fell to his knees and begged Jesus for a sign.

Jesus delivered. According to Coy's dramatic story, he picked up the remote and zapped on the TV. The first thing he saw were three huge letters. R-A-P. Hip-Hop was to be his destiny. Years later at his trail, prosecutor Andrews asked him about his life in the dope game. Coy boasted that it was much like the music career that followed. He was always known as the man with the "best uncut dope."
"What do you mean by 'uncut'," the prosecutor asked.
"I've never believed in adding any harmful additives," he said, his trademark swagger then still intact. The jurors were not impressed and the media sniggered later in the halls.

That was always one of the things that his fans loved about him. He "kept it on the real," as they put it, and did so with wit and humor. But these kind words were to come later. Coy's road to hip-hip glory was long and hard.

The first detour along this road, he said from the stand, was an ill-fated foray into Christian rap. After losing a live rap battle to a rookie rapper who didn't know half as much about the ghetto as he did, Coy swore off Christen rap for good. He started rapping about his life as a crack dealer and soon made a cassette he named Hillwood in honor of the South Park 'hood where he plied his trade.

Coy was a natural-born hustler, and he loved to sell himself. He sold Hillwood by the backpack-full to anyone and everyone who came in his orbit. When he wore his own 'hood out, he would load up another backpack-full and hop on a bus and ride it to the end of the line and do the same there. His brother eventually helped him by loaning him a car, and then Coy took his debut tape and his marketing genius to Dallas, San Antonio, Abilene and Corpus Christi. He was everywhere----at low-rider shows, swap meets, flea markets, or just hanging out in front of liquor stores. He wouldn't let demographics get in the way of a sale---little abuelitas got the pitch as readily as his contemporaries. If he couldn't afford a booth at a flea market, he would hang out in the men's room and peddle his tapes there.

Veteran Houston-scenester Dennis Marshman is no rap fan. The owner/operator of the Boat Yard's two incarnations is a rocker and honky-tonker to the bone, but even Marshman appreciated Coy's genius. "Musicians my son's age are always bitching about why they aren't stars," he said. "They blame radio, the media, whatever. I always tell them, 'Look at South Park Mexican. If you want to make it, that's what you gotta do.'"

Coy's persistence paid off. By 1997, he had Southwest Wholesale distributing his stuff for him. But he had slipped up early. About the time he was beating the streets with his backpack full of Hillwood dubes, he met Jill Odom. Odom fell head-over-heals for the aspiring rapper and ghetto legend. She later testified that Coy was her first lover, and that the two of them never discussed birth control. She wound up pregnant and gave birth to a son that the basketball-mad couple named Jordan Dominique, though Coy didn't give the boy his last name.

There was another complication factor: Carlos was 23 at the time and Odom was 13. He later testified that he had thought she was much older, although he admitted that he often picked her up and dropped her off at her Pasadena middle school. He was "always big on education," he testified. He hadn't known it was a junior high, he said, since her school was in Pasadena. He didn't know all the names of the schools there. According to Coy, when he met her she looked like a "party type" and she was known to have a weakness for wine coolers.

He informally acknowledged his son and sent Odom a few checks every now and then. He even offered to marry Odom, though the girl's parents quickly put the kibosh on the plan. Six years later Harris County constables served Coy with papers in July 2000 to formalize paternity and arrange for consistent child support. It seemed like an isolated incident a long time ago, and the local media ignored the matter. By then, Coy had two other children with girlfriend Gina Acosta: son Carlos jr., and daughter Carley.

That year on the Houston scene---Destiny's Child aside--Coy was the biggest thing going. He swept the first of two straight Houston Press Music Awards. He scooped a half-million dollar advance from Universal and released two new albums--Time is Money and The Purity Album. He garnered favorable write-ups from Texas Monthly and Newsweek, both of which heralded him as not just a rapper, but also as a de facto civil rights leader, a voice of the voiceless.

"A lot of Mexican-American kids have low self-esteem," he told Newsweek's Lorraine Ali. "I let them know that they can do more than just work like an animal for peanuts."

But 2000 was also the year his fame crested. He never broke through to the California Hispanic market like Universal hoped. After releasing Never Change in November 2001, Coy's affiliation with the major was over.

From a public relations standpoint, Universal could only have wished the deal terminated a couple of months sooner. Over a long Labor Day weekend, two months prior to the release of Never Change, Coy committed an outrage that, barring a miracle of appellate lawyering, will keep him in prison until 2022.

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