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So…this was sometime around maybe ’98-‘99. Martin had been in the news for running around L.A. in the heat wearing his drawls & a loose wife beater brandishing a weapon in 100 degree heat or sumshit. His show was cancelled. Tisha was suing him. Emmett Smith took his wife from him. Dude really had a lot of strikes against him.

Me and my girls took the long drive from OC to L.A. to go to The Century Club. We were young. We did this like 3 nights a week. It was crazy but SO much fun. Like, I met a high Chaka Khan in a bathroom. Mike Tyson snatched me up. We had a blast! We knew all the promoters, never had to wait in line, VIP everything, drink tickets, wrist bands, blah blah blah.  The Century Club was EPIC. This was the club that I met Mike T at. (I’ll have to tell that story another day.) It was this HUGE 2 story club with an upstairs balcony that looked down into the club over the main dance floor. The entire upstairs was the VIP area. There were 2 bars up there, and a separate set of stairs that celebs would take to get into the club. There was another room upstairs that could be closed off & used as a super VIP area. They had a big outside area downstairs that had an Italian villa sort of feel to it. It was super dope and anybody who was anybody was there on Sunday nights.

So, we’re upstairs. There were a few booths in the upstairs area tucked along the walls. The booths were pretty dark, to give folks privacy to sit and talk or whatever. If you weren’t focusing on the booths you wouldn’t even really know they were there so it gave celebs the best of both worlds (party & privacy.) One of the girls that was with us was this quirky Asian chick named Stacey. Cool people, but a little ditzy and she had ZERO filter, especially after a few drinks were in her. She had no problem getting out of pocket with “celebs”. (She managed to offend Dennis Rodman at another club & asked the comedian Shang if he was from Africa because he had an ankh tattoo. “Uh, no but my ancestors were” he said before walking away.) So, we all kinda had this understanding that we needed to keep Stacey away from celebs.

We’d been at the club for maybe 20 minutes. It was pretty early so the upstairs area wasn’t crowded yet. We came in, said our hellos to our peoples and then made our way over to the bar to grab our first round of drinks. We took our drinks over to the area that overlooks the main dance floor. Stacey says “Hey. Isn’t that Martin?” We all look over. Martin Lawrence is sitting in a booth in the corner talking to a woman. It’s a huge booth and he was a pretty small guy at the time so it looked like you could fit 8 more people in that booth with them. There was a big black dude about the size of a refrigerator (not the apartment sized refrigerators. The big ones with the double doors) standing guard next to the booth with his hands folded. “I’m gonna go talk to him!” Stacey says. We all yelled “NO!” and she pouted. I told her to leave that man alone. He was clearly talking to someone. We couldn’t tell if they were on a date or if they’d just met but he was leaning into her and they seemed to be having an intimate conversation so it would’ve been really rude to go over there and interrupt the man just to say “Hi. I watch you on TV” or whatever. Plus we all knew that dude had been going through a lot lately and clearly he wasn’t wrapped too tight. And almost as soon as we finished having this discussion, the woman quickly scooted out of the booth and bolted towards the stairs, leaving Martin sitting by himself. So now we’re all speculating on what happened. After about 1 minute, Martin scoots out of the booth and starts talking to his security guy. Stacey sees this as her opportunity to go talk to him. She makes a bee line towards him and we all quickly rush after her. “Hi Martin!” she says to him in her squeaky little voice while extending her hand. He kinda half ass shakes hands with her. She’s chatting with him and I swear to God I’ve never in my entire life witnessed someone so disinterested in talking to another person. She keeps talking and he’s being a complete asshole. He all but looked up at the ceiling to count ceiling tiles or checked his watch for the time. And that’s when it happened. “MARTIN?” she says in her squeaky little high pitched voice. “Why are you being so EVIL?” We all gasped. Well, that got his attention. He stopped ignoring her. He stepped closer to her. She was too naïve to know that she was in harm’s way. We all knew it but were too startled to say anything. His lip & nose both curled up on one side. He looked her up and down AND WHAAAPAP!!! He swatted her drink out of her hand! And before her glass even hit the ground, big ass refrigerator nigga scooped Martin up from underneath his arm pits and whisked him away through the side room and down the VIP celeb steps and carried Martin out of the club with his legs kicking the entire way.