BOYD INTERVIEWED IN THE MARICOPA MONITOR

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

'The streets don't love you back'

Reformed drug dealer speaks out against drugs, gangs

By ERIC MUNGENAST
Staff Writer

Published: Monday, September 20, 2010 12:04 PM MST

Photo courtesy of Lucinda F. Boyd, Robert and Lucinda Boyd are making there way across the country to promote Robert’s book, “The Streets Don’t Love you Back,” and will speak Sept. 22 at the Maricopa Youth Center.

It was the late 80s in Detroit, and Robert Boyd had two diverging roads to take.

The first road, the one he started on, was one of violence and gangs and drugs, poisoning his community as part of the proverbial life of crime with an ambiguous ending.

The second road, the road less traveled for those growing up in inner city Detroit, was a life away from the guns and heroin, the one that did not offer the same chance for riches and glamour yet provided security and a better chance of survival.

Boyd eventually ended up on the latter path, and it made all the difference in his life. The man with a lifetime worth of stories said he is scheduled to share his own with Maricopa’s youth Sept. 22 between 6 and 7 p.m. at the Maricopa Youth Center, located in the Maricopa Manor Business Center at the intersection of Arizona 347 and Garvey Road.

“I had a choice, you know,” he said. “So I took the choice to live instead of the choice to die.”

Boyd spent nearly a decade of his youth selling heroin, cocaine, pills, crack and other assorted drugs, spending thousands of dollars on shopping sprees and essentially living the high life.

It was a path he fell into after his stepfather, a prominent figure in his life, was stabbed by Boyd’s grandfather at the age of 9.

“Once that positive light wasn’t around any more, that’s when things got out of control,” he said.

Living the kind of life Boyd lived, though, has consequences. Those consequences included the death of many of his friends, imprisonment for others and a near death experience for Boyd himself.

And throughout the experience, he still had the love of his mother, who Boyd said helped lead to his salvation.

So he was 25-years-old, and the world around him was falling into fragments of what it once was. Boyd needed to change his life, and that meant leaving Detroit for Cincinnati, getting a real job and starting over.

Boyd documents the highs and lows of his life, and the lives of the friends and his fellow gang members in the book “The Streets Don’t Love You Back.”

“All the guys in my book are the guys I grew up with, the guys I hustled with,” he said.

Besides being the title of his book, “the streets don’t love you back” is also a prevalent theme for Boyd’s life about how the streets, as he puts it, owe nothing to the drug dealers or the gang members who inhabit them.

“It’s just a dead end life, period,” he said.

For Boyd, it’s no longer about taking the road less traveled, but rather taking the one that leads to the right decisions, to avoid making the one fatal mistake that takes people on the wrong path to an early demise or life-long incarceration.

It’s a message he broadcasts on two television shows he produces in Cincinnati: “‘Change’ TV Reality Show” and the “Keep it Real Show,” a radio show he hosts with his wife, Lucinda, and to the youth as well.

And the response has been positive and productive, with Boyd mentioning a girl at one of his recent speaking engagements who told him she was planning to transport drugs one state to another, but changed her mind after listening to his speech.

“People are like, ‘wow, man, it’s a blessing you’re here to tell your story,” he said.

In addition to his scheduled talk at the Maricopa Youth Center, Boyd said he also has a speaking engagement at Cortez High School that same day, as well as a book signing at Bookman’s in Mesa on Sept. 18.

For more information, or to book a speaking engagement, visit Boyd’s website at www.thestreetsdontloveyouback.ning.com.

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