“Music,” Mike says, thumping his chest, “is in your soul. And yet he was saved by his musical gifts. Kelly came from-growing up in poverty on the South Side of Chicago, having watched a friend die, coerced by an uncle to bury a dead dog, forced to watch and film adult members of his household having sex, facing sexual abuse at the age of eight-the fact of the matter is he should have become Homeless Mike. Kelly went out of his way to talk to Homeless Mike, and they experienced a moment of genuine human connection. The truth is nothing more than a packet of objectively correct information that is open for interpretation, employed more often than not in an elaborate rhetorical game of “Gotcha!” What’s true isn’t important. The truth here, however, is inconsequential. Kelly was once homeless, nothing more than a struggling singer sleeping on Venice Beach. He was certainly merging timelines and embellishing, but it is an indisputable fact that R. Mike was clearly drunk, and tended to lose his train of thought. But then I saw him talking to Homeless Mike. I had ten minutes with him, and they were disastrous. He don’t do that shit.” Specifically, I'm talking to Homeless Mike because I have been sent down to Atlanta to interview R. He don’t think he’s high up and better than me. Kelly got to come talk to me, man!” he says. Kelly, exiting the studio perhaps an hour ago, break from his entourage and come up to Mike and enthusiastically talk to him. I jumped.” Mike says that later, Kelly “went down to all the homeless girls and guys. I looked at it in the bathroom of McDonald’s and looked at it. He said, ‘Come here.’ I come to the car, and he gave me a wad of money. He said to me, ‘Hey man, you alright?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ I didn’t know he was R. Kelly came to Atlanta about the middle of 2000.” Pointing to a nearby house, he says, “I was sitting over there, and R. Kelly since he been coming to Atlanta,” he says, the alcohol taking his already-thick southern accent into elocutionary territory that, if one does not hail from the South, is borderline unintelligible. The sickeningly sweet odor of warm malt liquor blasts me in the face. Homeless Mike picks a 32-ounce McDonald’s cup off of the ground, opens it, and takes a sip.
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