June 19, 2025 • 35 mins
In the summer of 1993, Rick Jervis and Jeff Pearlman—two college journalists at the time—arrived in Nashville for a summer internship at the daily newspaper, The Tennessean. It was a dream come true, and to their surprise and delight, they were accompanied by an aspiring Oakland rapper/Grambling student named Reggie Payne. His hip-hop moniker: Sexy Sweat. Over the next eight weeks, the young men developed a bond that, Rick and Jeff believed, would last for decades. Instead, Reggie vanished from their lives—and left behind a gaping mystery. Where did he go? What did he do? In short, what became of Sexy Sweat. Thirty years later, Rick and Jeff decided to find him—and were shocked and devastated by what they uncovered.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This podcast episode contains discussions of police brutality and features
audio of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised. In the
spring of twenty twenty, with a world reeling from the
spreading coronavirus pandemic, a forty six year old black man
named George Floyd allegedly tried to pass off a counterfeit
(00:21):
twenty dollars bill at the Cup Foods convenience store in Minneapolis.
Outside the store, he was confronted by police and forced
face down on the street. Almost all of us know
what happened next. Police forcibly kept him in that position,
and one of them leaned a knee on his neck.
Nine and a half minutes later, Floyd was dead. News
(00:46):
of Floyd's death and the incriminating cell phoned video reverberated
into newscasts and social media feeds around the world, sparking
global demonstrations and outrage. Everyone by now is familiar with
the story of George Floyd, whose deaf galvanized a movement
(01:10):
against police brutality and led to the arrest and conviction
of all four of his arresting officers.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Just three months earlier, another black man suffering from diabetes
missed a dinner and lapsed into a turbulent diabetic episode
in his parents' home in Sacramento.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
His mother, concerned for her son, called paramedics, who in
turn called in Sacramento police to help them with this
erratically behaving man. Nine one one, What.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Is the location of them? I'm calling to my son
who hating hilirious.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I think his blood sugars are wet.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Let me get let me get medical up on the phone.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
But what's your addressed?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Much like George Floyd, forty eight year old Reggie Payne
was forced onto the floor in the prone position and
hank off by a cadre of police.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Reggie slipped into a coma minutes after crying out in
this police bodycam footage. Seven days later, he was taken
off life support and died.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Unlike George Floyd, there was no cell phone video to
blast across newscasts and social media sites. There were no
massive street protests, no outrage. No one was ever arrested
in connection with his death.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
There was only the pain and grief of a family
who for years tried to ease Reggie's physical and mental
health struggles, and who thought they were calling for help
when they picked up the phone that night.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
For us, Reggie was more than just a vague concept,
more than just another man struggling through life than dying
at the hands of police.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
That's because we knew Reggie in the summer of nineteen
ninety three. We all interned together the Nashville, Tennessee and
Reggie was unique here was from Oakland. He spoke with
this deep, raspy voice and wore a bright orange construction
workers vest and Timberland boots.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
He was a sports editor at the student newspaper at
Grambling State University in Louisiana. He was the only intern
with an infant son, and he was an aspiring rapper.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
His stage name was Sexy Sweat. The news of his
death really staggered us. It got us thinking of how Reggie,
whom I shared a dorm room with in the summer
of ninety three, could lapse into a coma on the
floor of his parents' home. But it also made us
think of how his death came and went so quietly,
(03:45):
when George Floyd's murder was such a touchstone of protest
reform and justice.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It also got us thinking back to that summer in
Nashville and how and why Reggie's life took such a
spiraling turn while Jeff and I went on to live
comparatively stable lives. It got us thinking of the barricades
that may have appeared in his life that maybe didn't
show up in ours.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
This is Jeff Pearlman. I'm a longtime journalist and the
author of ten books.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And I'm Rick Jervis, author and correspondent for USA Today.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is
Finding Sexy Sweat, a search for answers to a thirty
year old mystery that began when three young journalists from
different worlds collided for a summer newspaper internship. But it
ended in a maze of mental health, civil rights, law enforcement,
(04:40):
and ultimately tragedy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Jeff and I have made careers of telling stories. This
one is different. It's a story of Reggie Payne, an
ambitious young journalist who grew up in modest surroundings, broke
out of a cycle of poverty and crime, and seemed
destined for success.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And how he devolved into a morass of mental illness
and ultimately and untimely death at the hands of police.
Along the way, we hooked unpack a few truths about ourselves,
including why we fell out of touch with Reggie after
that magical summer, and why we never stopped talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Him, and what exactly happened that night in his parents'
home in Sacramento.
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Reggie knew everybody. He was like everybody's best friend.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
For Reggie got old, stage, he did his thing, and
people were loving him.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
Somewhere close to Dallas, Texas, the sat in the rear
of the greyhound.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I filled my head, snapped like he was never the same.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
If you don't your head still, and I'm thinking, you're
doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
You're there to help my son.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
But then I'd see my son's not moving.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
It should have been a routine call.
Speaker 5 (05:56):
It should have been about saving Reggie's life.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
And obviously it went quter than.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So it's been thirty two years since that summer. Rick,
when we first met Reggie, I don't know, what do
you remember about your first impression of him?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, he was unlike anybody that I ever met. I
basically grew up back in Miami, Cuban family, Spanish speaking household,
and I just didn't have a lot of black friends,
a lot of black acquaintances. And so when I meet Reggie. Honestly,
he was the first black person that I ever really
became friends with.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I would say of anything for me, I am from
this tiny, backwards town. I graduated from high school three
hundred and thirty people, and all of a sudden, there's
this kid, and he's a rapper from Oakland who calls
himself Sexy Sweat. I feel like the odds are very high,
very very high, that Reggie was probably the first guy
(06:54):
to ever dap me up. Like I don't think I
knew what it was to be to, you know, to
get dapped up. I just straight ahead handshake. And he's
wearing baggy jeans when it wasn't really the period of
baggy jeans yet. And he's wearing Timberland boots and I'd
never seen a pair of Timberland boots. He has a
construction workers vest, and it was like, is everything you're picturing?
It's like a neon orange vest. And it's like, Reggie,
(07:16):
what are you wearing? And he's like, you don't like
my vest?
Speaker 5 (07:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It's like he's totally different than any kind of person
I've ever met before.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
So the first time that I met Reggie was at
the Chips Quinn Scholarship Program. This was a journalism program
for students of color from around the country. They basically
brought us in for this orientation weekend in Washington, d C.
I got their headquarters there, headquarters of the Freedom Forum.
The Freedom Forum is this huge, like sort of journalism foundation.
(07:50):
It was a junior at the time at the University
of Florida. And I get to Washington, d C. And
meet these twelve other scholars and they just blow my mind.
And they're some of the sharpest, smartest journalism students out there.
I kind of remember we're all gathered at the Freedom
Forum offices right outside of Washington, d C. And you know,
(08:13):
these are kind of like the best and the brightest
of journalism students across the country. And here's Reggie. And
Reggie was just I kind of remember this fairly clearly,
Like I remember him sitting down in this lounge chair
and walking up to him and saying and sort of
like introducing myself. And he had this kind of raspy
baritone voice, Yo, what's up, rig And I remember talking
(08:37):
to him. He had he had this really subtle confidence.
And I remember, after talking to him for about five minutes.
I kind of remember thinking, I definitely want to hang
out with this guy, like I want to get to
know this dude. One of the people that I remember
meeting was Katrina Campbell.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, we all in that Yeah, we were in Nashville
because you were at the Tennessee in or something.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yep, exactly, Yep.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
We called her up to ask her about that summer.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I actually pulled out my photo album and we did.
We got to Memphis for.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
The weekend one time, or like, oh.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
My job, I'm going to go the snatch out of
a picture.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Katrina and Reggie were two of the nine Black Chips
Quinn Scholars that year.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, I'm a first generation college graduate, and certainly at
that point, by junior year of college, had made it
further than anybody in my family had. And the fact
that it was not only a summer job but a
real internship, and for my first year in internships at a.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Newspaper doing real journalism.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
I thought I had hit the jackpipes. Frankly, it was amazing.
And the fact that we got paid. I got paid
more than money than I'd ever been paid in my
life to work there. But just the experience of being
treated like someone who was valuable and worthy of investing in.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
I think was the thing that most impressed me.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
So, Rick, you and Reggie meet at the orientation in DC,
and then you both get these internship placements that put
you in Nashville. And that's also where I just happened
to be an intern. Reggie and I become roommates just
because we're assigned to be roommates. Your room with Jared Lazarus,
who you attend to school with at Florida and he's
a photo intern. And we all live inside Watson Hall
at Tennessee State University at HBCU on the east side
(10:35):
of the city. We're on the second floor of the
same hallway as members of the Tennessee State men's basketball team.
I think we're the only ones in this dorm. They're
there for summer workouts, we're there for this internship. It's
hot as hell, and we still talk to Jared every
now and then. So we reached out to him to
see you. He remembered about that crazy summer.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
Who is back together?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Hey man, good to see you, Jared Man, it's been
a while.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Yeah, I was just like reading one of your articles
about these like eighteen thousand cows that died in a
barn fire.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That was like one of the biggest, like my highest
read article in like five years. Like there are more
people who actually read about these like exploding cows than
anything else I've ever written. Jared is now a senior
media producer at Duke University. His life has been similar
to ours, steady job, wife, two beautiful, healthy, successful daughters, and.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Like us, that summer in Nashville stuck with him.
Speaker 5 (11:35):
I was like one of the best summers in my life.
I remember those days like really fondly.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
What about that summer? What about that experience makes you
feel like gives you the warmphizies about it?
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yeah, I mean I just have so many, so many
great memories. It was a time where I was just
exploring like more documentary type work and long term projects,
and I was by this like really amazing staff, Like
I had no other responsibilities. I could just really just
come and go and do whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You remember our shithole living quarters at the Tennessee State or.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
The Tennessee State University. Absolutely, Yeah. It wasn't like a
place you were like dying to get back to in
the evening. So it was making even more of a
reason to be out like working.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
You know. Jared of course remembered Reggie.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
I had no money there, you know, so I was
making like pasta and the dorm room to save money
on the and I would pick up like a forty
ounce bottle of like Motwicker. I'd bring it back and
I remember watching like the NBA playoffs with Reggie, you know.
So those were good times. Man.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Reggie had two loves, rap music and journalism. Grambling he'd
hit the road with the school's football team as a
beat writer for the student newspaper. Here's Travis and covering
the legendary Eddie Robinson, who, if you don't know, is
right there with Nick Saban and Bear Bryan in the
discussions of the all time great college coaches. That's a
(13:10):
life altering opportunity for an aspiring sports showlist.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Every young journalist needs a break, a foot in the door,
and that was his. He was going to parlay that
access and that opportunity into something really worthwhile. He wanted
to be the next Brian Gumble or Frank to Ford
or pick your big time sports journalist.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Reggie. I'd see him walk by, and he always wore tie.
I remember he would wear tie in the newsroom and
a dress shirt and my jeans. I don't remember that,
but I do.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I also remember showing up every day with a certain
tie and seeing Reggie there, and I remember seeing him around.
But Jeff, we were pretty competitive on different stories, and
I remember like trying to get on the front page
as much as possible because I wanted to show them
up to you.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
This is going to sound dumb and kind of trite, nights,
but I feel like in college of Delaware, I was
always considered one of the better writers. I'm not saying
I was good, but at that age, I was, you know,
kind of on this track. And I remember showing up
and here's Rick Jervis and he has all these articles
and he's very ambitious. You had the same ambition I did,
and you had your clips with you in a binder.
(14:23):
I don't know why, but you brought your articles with
you because we were both those guys. We were both
like journalism nerds who wanted to be like nake it big.
We were very close, but I was also kind of
jealous of you and like really wanted it, and that
drove me and Reggie. I think he wanted it, but
I don't think he showed it in the exact same way.
Like he wasn't throwing elbows with us to get articles.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
He was ambitious, it was a good worker, and he
was always there. But I feel like I don't know
if distracted is the right word. He just had other
interests too.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I mean I was a twenty ninety three. I was
a twenty one year old kid who had narry a
problem in the world. I mean, I wasn't getting laid
like that was a problem in my little universe. And
I wasn't like, you know, like I had my little problems.
We were just all we had was journalistic ambition, you
know what I mean. Like in my house, I knew
(15:19):
I was going to college. I knew I'd be okay.
My parents gave me a card to use for the summer.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Like I had.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I didn't have a care in the world really except
making it as a journalist so I could throw all
my energy, everything I had into getting as many articles
as possible, because that is the only reason I was there.
And Reggie as a kid, you know, like Reggie has
all this drama in his life in his background, all
this shit. I'd never thought of it before we worked
on this podcast. Actually, Like the reason you and I
(15:43):
were able to be so competitive is because that's what
we had. Like, we were just too competitive young journalists,
fighting and scratching and client to make it. Meanwhile, there's
a million things hanging over him that I never gave
one second a thought to.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, that's a good point, and he actually never really
brought them up, right. You never heard him complaining about stuff.
You never heard him talk about what a hard scrabble
life he had, like he had his own life outside
of the newsroom, where our lives were completely consumed by
the actual newsroom.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah. Also, if you think about it, and this has
been well documented, like black men in America basically is
like you're not supposed to express how hard everything is,
how difficult everything is. You're supposed to suck it up.
And if you're like a white guy growing up in
America like me back then, I probably whined about everything,
like every little thing, every little slight at the newsroom.
Why is this guy getting that clip, Why is he
(16:33):
getting that Why aren't I getting this opportunity? Meanwhile, you're
Reggie with these real world things hanging over your head,
and you won't say shit about it, like it's just
kind of where we were and probably still are. I
don't think he wasn't burdened. I just think he didn't
talk about his burdens.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Along with his dreams of becoming a sports reporter, Reggie
had another big love hip hop. Reggie lived for hip hop.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
I was a pretty big rap fan, but that summer
he introduced me to his favorite rapper, Oakland's own Ant Banks.
It's funny looking back because coming from the East Coast,
I'd never heard of the guy, but Reggie swore by him.
Banks his first album had just come out. It was
called Sitting on Something Fat Fat p H to a T.
(17:20):
And it is very very Oakland and Ooze's Bay Area
hip hop from that time period. Just hear how the
song live in the Life starts Life in Oakland, California,
ain't no joke, boy, and Reggie played that album NonStop,
literally on an endless loop. In the morning, I'd wake
up to the song you just a punk Shook. At night,
(17:44):
You'll be thumping the title track like that because I'm
sitting out twenty four to seven Ant Banks talking about
money and big butts and sweet cars. When I were
turned to Delaware. That fall, I was reciting aunt Banks
lines to bewildered friends and classmates raised on bon Jovi
(18:06):
and Aerosmith. Rick, what's the one thing you remember most
about Reggie?
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (18:16):
The catchphrase exactly exactly. We've been saying that for years.
We've actually been saying that for years, every time, almost
every time we talk in any reference to Reggie, if
he agreed with you on anything at all, he wouldn't
just say you're right, well, that's true. He would say exactly. Yeah.
I would actually say through the years, when I've heard
(18:38):
someone reference exactly, it could be about like your ups
shipment is in. It could be about your kids would
be picked up at three today, and someone says, exactly,
I actually think of Reggie, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Here's a question for you. So the summer in Nashville,
we had a great time, correct, Like we had a
great time in the actual newsroom, and we also hung
out outside of the news like I remember going to
the movies with you, We went on drives, we went
to breakfast.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Wait, don't leave out the most vivid memory of that summer.
What's that we went up to the club at as
of clubs in downtown Nashville, and I still remember dancing
with a young woman who is a student at the
University of Michigan. I'm drinking more than I'm ever used
to drinking, really drunk, dancing with her using my mediocre moves.
(19:25):
I honed at the University of Delaware. And the next
thing I know, I think I'm in maybe a car
you're driving because I pass out in the bar.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
And then you were on the floor and somebody from
from the DJ booth is like calling my name over
the actual outspeakers. I have to go kind of collect
you and put you in the car and drive you off.
But like we basically have all of these great memories
out of Nashville. The thing that I don't remember is
hanging out with Reggie outside of the newsroom, right. Why
(19:55):
do you think that is?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I was thinking that because he wasn't at ace of
clubs that night. He wasn't At different times we go
to bars and stuff, like, he actually wasn't there, and
I never reconsidered it at the time. I remember he
would he would go out late at night and I didn't, like,
I didn't know where the hell he was going. But
we were living at Tennessee State, which is a black HBCU,
(20:18):
and there were all these clubs around that were mainly
quote unquote black clubs. And he would come back at
two three in the morning, and he would come back
and he would never really wake me up because these
dorm rooms are very small. I mean, if you think
about it, at the time, all those clubs were going to,
like Nashville was still pretty not segregated, but those were
quote unquote probably more white clubs. Like he was going
(20:40):
out to the black clubs by Tennessee State and we
were not going out to the black clubs by Tennessee State.
So I think maybe there was like a little bit
of a social line that we were not aware of,
and maybe we were outsolds. Maybe we should have invited him.
I'm more I have no idea, like maybe we didn't
invite him it. I mean, I can't imagine we wouldn't have,
but like maybe we weren't aware of him we should
have been. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
There was actually one time that I do remember going
out with him, and that's when all of us, you me,
Jared Lazarus and Reggie we all went to Opera Land.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Remember that the late theme park, country music themed theme park.
You remember what we did there? Of course?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, I think so what happened?
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Then? We recorded? All right, so this was our one
chance to really hear Reggie be Sexy Sweat. We went
They had a Meek your Own CD booth and we
went in and Reggie was like, yeah, let's do blah
blah blah, let's do a rap and Reggie just reestyled,
and I remember being like, holy shit, this guy's really good.
(21:39):
I know. I told my friends later on about this
guy Sexy Sweat who was like this great rapper, and
I think I was trying to beat box in a
very failed, you know, like stupid way, but I remember
how good he was, and that was the one taste
I had for him, and I actually thought he was
like a serious rapper. Like I really thought like we
were going to be hearing of Sexy Sweat in the
(22:00):
way you would hear of Digital Underground, Like I thought
he was going to be a guy from Oakland who
would hear it. But I didn't know that much.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
He wasn't just good Jeff in that upper Land booth.
He was phenomenal, like super really really really good sort
of remember him freestyling like he didn't have anything written up.
He was just spitting out wraps like as he went,
and he was incorporating stuff that we had done over
the summer. He was incorporating the newsroom, the newspaper and
(22:28):
all this stuff. And he just belt it out this
like three minute, awesome rap, and I was blown away.
I was like, I can't believe I just heard this
guy do this.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
And would you admit that the great failing of your
life is that you walked away with the one CD
and you don't know where it is.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I'm actually physically sick about that, like the fact that
I misplaced at somehow over the years. We're talking about
thirty two years. Also, you know I moved a lot
in that time, but I having one hundred percent giving
up on it, Like I'm still searching through random closets
and stuff, thinking, well, maybe this could be somewhere, But
the fact I don't have that city really really makes
(23:06):
me physically ill.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I think both of us are haunted by the loss
of that CD, which is probably somewhere in the bottom
of a box. And when we were talking to Jared,
since he was a photo intern, we asked to see
if he had any pictures from that day.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
I mean, man, like if we had phones at the time,
like we I would have had like pictures of all
this stuff, but like no phones, So like yeah, I
mean maybe I shot pictures of it, but like where
would that film be?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Bottom line is that the Tennessee And was a springboard
for a lot of journalists who later went on to
work for The New York Times and other venerable publications.
Katrina ended up leaving journalism, but that internship was life
altering for her.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Also, it just has never occurred to me since that
program that I couldn't do something right, Like now, I
know I can. You know, if I want to try
this out, I can.
Speaker 5 (23:58):
Try it out. If I want to try the world,
I can travel the world. If I want to do
this work, I can do this work.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And so certainly when I look around now, they're absolutely
more journalists of color, so many more women. So I
think it was absolutely contributing to that result.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
But I also think it just allowed.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
For all of us to think godly and do the
stuff we want to do.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Rick, you and I kept in close contact over the years,
and each time we spoke, we always always brought up Reggie,
wondering what became of him, where he was, what he
was doing, whether he was okay, but Sexy Sweat, Reggie
pain he kind of vanished.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, he just fell off our radar, never heard from him.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
So a few years ago I reached out to Rick
and proposed doing a podcast focused entirely on reconnecting with Reggie.
This person who played a takey Ron or formative Summer
of ninety three, who decades later we were still quoting.
We both thought it impossible that a dude who wore
construction vest and called himself Sexy Sweat could just poof
(25:10):
fall off the face of the earth.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So we decided to search every social media.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Site, every journalism group, every.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Reddor rap form from Sacramento to Sarasota until we found Reggie.
We'd look at our friend we met in Nashville and
rekindled that friendship we neglected all these years. We'd call
the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat, and it would be great, except.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
When officers arrived.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
They handcuffed the patient and forced him face down into
the prone position. His family said he needed help, but
he ended up dying.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
We weren't going to find Reggie because Reggie Paine was dead.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Wait, you're saying you wanted to do a podcast before
you found out he had passed.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
That's correct.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
Yeah, like while trying to find him, you found out
you had died.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
Yeah, my gosh, what happened? Like what how did you
find that out?
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I mean, it didn't take long. We were just researching
different things about him, and we found like one article
I think that talked about it, and I'm kind of
excited about about launching on this other very different podcasts
and it would like just would have been this really
funny with a great ending. And then Jeff I think
Jeff found an incentive to me, and I like I
(26:37):
literally had to sit down, like I was, like, I
could not believe that that had happened.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
After finding out Ready had died, we soon discovered our
own lives had taken very different paths. On the one hand,
like us, Reggie considered his college years at Grambling to
be some of the best of his life, filled with
good friends and parties. He wrote for the Gramblin Nite newspaper,
where he became a respected sports columnist, and he met
his girlfriend Tia and became a father. His trajectory was
(27:09):
straight up, and his future seemed limitless. But then one
day in May of nineteen ninety six, a few years
after he met him, Reggie was riding a Greyhound bus
from Grambling back home to Oakland when he felt his
brain gave a distinct jolt.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
This was a start of Reggie's year's long struggle with
mental illness. When he arrived in Oakland, his mother took
him to the John George Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Alameda County.
He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed medication for
tremors and schizophrenia.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Reggie still managed to graduate Grambling the following year, but
his life never recovered.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Desperate to get a grip on his disorder, Reggie did
what he was trained to do.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
He wrote.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Whether it was therapeutic to get his thoughts on paper
or just him trying to fulfill some long lost ambition,
we don't know. But he published The Harassment of Reginald D.
Pain on Amazon in September twenty eighteen, pouring all his pain, anxieties,
and delusions into the pages of the thin book. It's
a rambling, heartbreaking manifesto on his mental health demons that
(28:20):
opens with a grim self assessment. I never considered in
my life this would occur, but it's real.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
They are like labor pains to all the mothers. Maybe
every fifteen minutes, I imagine. Please, I'll be a chump
all day for a full eight hour sleep night.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I am so frustrated right now.
Speaker 6 (28:47):
What the fuck did I do to deserve this harassment?
I want to know who it is, why they do it,
where are they from? Needless to say, I must reiterate
to you that this has been going on for ten
years now.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Then in February twenty twenty, as his mental condition spiraled,
Reggy's life took a sharp turn for the worse.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
It wasn't just that Reggie died, it was how he died.
It happened a week after being handcuffed and restrained face
down by police on the linoleum floor of his parents'
home in Sacramento.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
And this is not normal behavior, career, that's it.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Do you think he's going to be because combative with
the fire department?
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
You know right now he's hugging in the.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
She's like that, never violent, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Okay, that's here.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
Thank you for nounce medications of the Herman.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
When we talked to Katrina and Jared, they hadn't heard
what had happened to Reggie. It was hard to wrap
our heads around this happened to one of our fellow interns,
a scholarship winner with the Chips Quinn program.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
That tears me up because like, this isn't supposed to happen, right,
The opportunities we got were supposed to be be the
kinds of things that allowed us to escape whatever risk
of those sort that we faced. You know, part of
what these opportunities gave me is the chance to get
out of you know, those kinds of circumstances that I
(30:24):
might have been subjected to, not the same kinds of things,
but you know I have I have more opportunities in life,
and so it's a it's a terrible thing to hear
that somebody who had those same opportunities I did, and
who took advantage of them, right, I mean, did really
well with them, would end up dying in that way.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
No, that bothers me. It's interesting because we've been talking
about this, discussing Reggie for years, doing the exactly thing
for years, talking about Sexy Sweat for years, wondering where
the CD was wondering what Reggie was doing, and is
not exaggerations say, it never entered my mind that he
might have died, like, did not cross my mind at all.
Speaker 5 (31:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Now, for a second, I thought this was going to
be a very different podcast. Actually, I thought we were
going to have like a really fun time tracking him down.
And then I was really looking forward to actually finding
him and catching up with him and figuring out what
he's up to these days and listening to that voice
of his again. And when I saw this media report
(31:28):
that he had died, and he had died like in
the living room of his parents' home, it was just crushing.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
After he found out about the circumstances of Reggie's death,
we sort of did what we've been trained to do
that we started learning back at the Tennessee and thirty
years ago. We began to investigate and dig and probe
and look into it.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
And we found a couple of interesting things, like Captain
Jeffrey Clined, he was the highest ranking fire officier on
the scene that night at Reggie's house when the police
were called in to assist.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Kline claimed that after Reggie's death, he wrote to his
supervisors to point out that the prone position the police
had used to restrain him may have contributed to his death,
but Sacramento officials shut him down. Several months later, Klein
was fired. Another weird thing was his cause of death.
An initial review by the Sacramento County Coroner's office determined
(32:22):
that Reggie had just died of cardiac arrest, but a
follow up investigation by a forensic pathologist found something very different,
and the paramedics, fire department, and police department all seemed
to have slightly different versions of this event. The more
we dug, the more the contours of a picture began
to emerge that showed city officials trying at all costs
(32:45):
to protect its law enforcement ranks during a very combustible
time in America when rallies protesting police brutality royaled across
the country and across the world. You know, it's like
we've been saying, Edgie's death was absolutely devastating to us,
and it came out of nowhere, and I think hit
us both just like a gut punch.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
It also left us intensely curious and wrestling with a
swirl of questions. What was Reggie's path after his internship
at the Nashville, Tennessee And why did we not stay
in touch the way we did with Jared and each other?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
When did his mental health begin to slide and how
did it impact his life decisions?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
What help, if any, did he receive as a mentally
ill man, as a black man.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
How did our life journeys so closely intertwined in the
summer of ninety three take such wildly divergent paths. How
did Reggie's identities shape the life he led and how
did they doom him?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
And what exactly happened in the living room of his parents'
home that night in February twenty twenty that led to
Reggie's death.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
These are the questions we plan to explore and untangle
as we dig into the story behind the life and
sudden depth of our friend son father journalist Rapper Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Exactly next time on finding Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
They were almost like the Huxtables, somebody like me.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
It was very different from where I came from.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's always been a happy place.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Reggie would have these big speakers. You can hear those
speakers through the whole neighborhood. The rest My baby, do
you know what's crazy is with the police. How we
see like them beating on black men now like they
used to do that when we were teenagers.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
And we're gonna walk on this nation. We're gonna walk
on this rage's power structure.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Oakland police marge into a home and arrest young people
in the throes of the illegal drug business. Finding Sexy
Sweat is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
This episode was reported, written and hosted by Jeff Perlman
and Rick Jervis. It was produced by Gabby Watts with
production support from Eedily's Perez Zaron Burnett Is. Our story
(35:08):
editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed this episode. George Washington
I read the excerpts from the Harassment of Reginald d.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Pain.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr.
Please leave the show a review and you can follow
along with the show on Instagram at School of Unions.
This podcast episode contains discussions of police brutality and features
audio of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised. In the
spring of twenty twenty, with a world reeling from the
spreading coronavirus pandemic, a forty six year old black man
named George Floyd allegedly tried to pass off a counterfeit
(00:21):
twenty dollars bill at the Cup Foods convenience store in Minneapolis.
Outside the store, he was confronted by police and forced
face down on the street. Almost all of us know
what happened next. Police forcibly kept him in that position,
and one of them leaned a knee on his neck.
Nine and a half minutes later, Floyd was dead. News
(00:46):
of Floyd's death and the incriminating cell phoned video reverberated
into newscasts and social media feeds around the world, sparking
global demonstrations and outrage. Everyone by now is familiar with
the story of George Floyd, whose deaf galvanized a movement
(01:10):
against police brutality and led to the arrest and conviction
of all four of his arresting officers.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Just three months earlier, another black man suffering from diabetes
missed a dinner and lapsed into a turbulent diabetic episode
in his parents' home in Sacramento.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
His mother, concerned for her son, called paramedics, who in
turn called in Sacramento police to help them with this
erratically behaving man. Nine one one, What.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Is the location of them? I'm calling to my son
who hating hilirious.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I think his blood sugars are wet.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Let me get let me get medical up on the phone.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
But what's your addressed?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Much like George Floyd, forty eight year old Reggie Payne
was forced onto the floor in the prone position and
hank off by a cadre of police.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Reggie slipped into a coma minutes after crying out in
this police bodycam footage. Seven days later, he was taken
off life support and died.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Unlike George Floyd, there was no cell phone video to
blast across newscasts and social media sites. There were no
massive street protests, no outrage. No one was ever arrested
in connection with his death.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
There was only the pain and grief of a family
who for years tried to ease Reggie's physical and mental
health struggles, and who thought they were calling for help
when they picked up the phone that night.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
For us, Reggie was more than just a vague concept,
more than just another man struggling through life than dying
at the hands of police.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
That's because we knew Reggie in the summer of nineteen
ninety three. We all interned together the Nashville, Tennessee and
Reggie was unique here was from Oakland. He spoke with
this deep, raspy voice and wore a bright orange construction
workers vest and Timberland boots.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
He was a sports editor at the student newspaper at
Grambling State University in Louisiana. He was the only intern
with an infant son, and he was an aspiring rapper.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
His stage name was Sexy Sweat. The news of his
death really staggered us. It got us thinking of how Reggie,
whom I shared a dorm room with in the summer
of ninety three, could lapse into a coma on the
floor of his parents' home. But it also made us
think of how his death came and went so quietly,
(03:45):
when George Floyd's murder was such a touchstone of protest
reform and justice.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It also got us thinking back to that summer in
Nashville and how and why Reggie's life took such a
spiraling turn while Jeff and I went on to live
comparatively stable lives. It got us thinking of the barricades
that may have appeared in his life that maybe didn't
show up in ours.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
This is Jeff Pearlman. I'm a longtime journalist and the
author of ten books.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And I'm Rick Jervis, author and correspondent for USA Today.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This is
Finding Sexy Sweat, a search for answers to a thirty
year old mystery that began when three young journalists from
different worlds collided for a summer newspaper internship. But it
ended in a maze of mental health, civil rights, law enforcement,
(04:40):
and ultimately tragedy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Jeff and I have made careers of telling stories. This
one is different. It's a story of Reggie Payne, an
ambitious young journalist who grew up in modest surroundings, broke
out of a cycle of poverty and crime, and seemed
destined for success.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And how he devolved into a morass of mental illness
and ultimately and untimely death at the hands of police.
Along the way, we hooked unpack a few truths about ourselves,
including why we fell out of touch with Reggie after
that magical summer, and why we never stopped talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Him, and what exactly happened that night in his parents'
home in Sacramento.
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Reggie knew everybody. He was like everybody's best friend.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
For Reggie got old, stage, he did his thing, and
people were loving him.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
Somewhere close to Dallas, Texas, the sat in the rear
of the greyhound.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I filled my head, snapped like he was never the same.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
If you don't your head still, and I'm thinking, you're
doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
You're there to help my son.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
But then I'd see my son's not moving.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
It should have been a routine call.
Speaker 5 (05:56):
It should have been about saving Reggie's life.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
And obviously it went quter than.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So it's been thirty two years since that summer. Rick,
when we first met Reggie, I don't know, what do
you remember about your first impression of him?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, he was unlike anybody that I ever met. I
basically grew up back in Miami, Cuban family, Spanish speaking household,
and I just didn't have a lot of black friends,
a lot of black acquaintances. And so when I meet Reggie. Honestly,
he was the first black person that I ever really
became friends with.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I would say of anything for me, I am from
this tiny, backwards town. I graduated from high school three
hundred and thirty people, and all of a sudden, there's
this kid, and he's a rapper from Oakland who calls
himself Sexy Sweat. I feel like the odds are very high,
very very high, that Reggie was probably the first guy
(06:54):
to ever dap me up. Like I don't think I
knew what it was to be to, you know, to
get dapped up. I just straight ahead handshake. And he's
wearing baggy jeans when it wasn't really the period of
baggy jeans yet. And he's wearing Timberland boots and I'd
never seen a pair of Timberland boots. He has a
construction workers vest, and it was like, is everything you're picturing?
It's like a neon orange vest. And it's like, Reggie,
(07:16):
what are you wearing? And he's like, you don't like
my vest?
Speaker 5 (07:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It's like he's totally different than any kind of person
I've ever met before.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
So the first time that I met Reggie was at
the Chips Quinn Scholarship Program. This was a journalism program
for students of color from around the country. They basically
brought us in for this orientation weekend in Washington, d C.
I got their headquarters there, headquarters of the Freedom Forum.
The Freedom Forum is this huge, like sort of journalism foundation.
(07:50):
It was a junior at the time at the University
of Florida. And I get to Washington, d C. And
meet these twelve other scholars and they just blow my mind.
And they're some of the sharpest, smartest journalism students out there.
I kind of remember we're all gathered at the Freedom
Forum offices right outside of Washington, d C. And you know,
(08:13):
these are kind of like the best and the brightest
of journalism students across the country. And here's Reggie. And
Reggie was just I kind of remember this fairly clearly,
Like I remember him sitting down in this lounge chair
and walking up to him and saying and sort of
like introducing myself. And he had this kind of raspy
baritone voice, Yo, what's up, rig And I remember talking
(08:37):
to him. He had he had this really subtle confidence.
And I remember, after talking to him for about five minutes.
I kind of remember thinking, I definitely want to hang
out with this guy, like I want to get to
know this dude. One of the people that I remember
meeting was Katrina Campbell.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, we all in that Yeah, we were in Nashville
because you were at the Tennessee in or something.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yep, exactly, Yep.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
We called her up to ask her about that summer.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I actually pulled out my photo album and we did.
We got to Memphis for.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
The weekend one time, or like, oh.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
My job, I'm going to go the snatch out of
a picture.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Katrina and Reggie were two of the nine Black Chips
Quinn Scholars that year.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, I'm a first generation college graduate, and certainly at
that point, by junior year of college, had made it
further than anybody in my family had. And the fact
that it was not only a summer job but a
real internship, and for my first year in internships at a.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Newspaper doing real journalism.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
I thought I had hit the jackpipes. Frankly, it was amazing.
And the fact that we got paid. I got paid
more than money than I'd ever been paid in my
life to work there. But just the experience of being
treated like someone who was valuable and worthy of investing in.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
I think was the thing that most impressed me.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
So, Rick, you and Reggie meet at the orientation in DC,
and then you both get these internship placements that put
you in Nashville. And that's also where I just happened
to be an intern. Reggie and I become roommates just
because we're assigned to be roommates. Your room with Jared Lazarus,
who you attend to school with at Florida and he's
a photo intern. And we all live inside Watson Hall
at Tennessee State University at HBCU on the east side
(10:35):
of the city. We're on the second floor of the
same hallway as members of the Tennessee State men's basketball team.
I think we're the only ones in this dorm. They're
there for summer workouts, we're there for this internship. It's
hot as hell, and we still talk to Jared every
now and then. So we reached out to him to
see you. He remembered about that crazy summer.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
Who is back together?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Hey man, good to see you, Jared Man, it's been
a while.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Yeah, I was just like reading one of your articles
about these like eighteen thousand cows that died in a
barn fire.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That was like one of the biggest, like my highest
read article in like five years. Like there are more
people who actually read about these like exploding cows than
anything else I've ever written. Jared is now a senior
media producer at Duke University. His life has been similar
to ours, steady job, wife, two beautiful, healthy, successful daughters, and.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Like us, that summer in Nashville stuck with him.
Speaker 5 (11:35):
I was like one of the best summers in my life.
I remember those days like really fondly.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
What about that summer? What about that experience makes you
feel like gives you the warmphizies about it?
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yeah, I mean I just have so many, so many
great memories. It was a time where I was just
exploring like more documentary type work and long term projects,
and I was by this like really amazing staff, Like
I had no other responsibilities. I could just really just
come and go and do whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You remember our shithole living quarters at the Tennessee State or.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
The Tennessee State University. Absolutely, Yeah. It wasn't like a
place you were like dying to get back to in
the evening. So it was making even more of a
reason to be out like working.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
You know. Jared of course remembered Reggie.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
I had no money there, you know, so I was
making like pasta and the dorm room to save money
on the and I would pick up like a forty
ounce bottle of like Motwicker. I'd bring it back and
I remember watching like the NBA playoffs with Reggie, you know.
So those were good times. Man.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Reggie had two loves, rap music and journalism. Grambling he'd
hit the road with the school's football team as a
beat writer for the student newspaper. Here's Travis and covering
the legendary Eddie Robinson, who, if you don't know, is
right there with Nick Saban and Bear Bryan in the
discussions of the all time great college coaches. That's a
(13:10):
life altering opportunity for an aspiring sports showlist.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Every young journalist needs a break, a foot in the door,
and that was his. He was going to parlay that
access and that opportunity into something really worthwhile. He wanted
to be the next Brian Gumble or Frank to Ford
or pick your big time sports journalist.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Reggie. I'd see him walk by, and he always wore tie.
I remember he would wear tie in the newsroom and
a dress shirt and my jeans. I don't remember that,
but I do.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I also remember showing up every day with a certain
tie and seeing Reggie there, and I remember seeing him around.
But Jeff, we were pretty competitive on different stories, and
I remember like trying to get on the front page
as much as possible because I wanted to show them
up to you.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
This is going to sound dumb and kind of trite, nights,
but I feel like in college of Delaware, I was
always considered one of the better writers. I'm not saying
I was good, but at that age, I was, you know,
kind of on this track. And I remember showing up
and here's Rick Jervis and he has all these articles
and he's very ambitious. You had the same ambition I did,
and you had your clips with you in a binder.
(14:23):
I don't know why, but you brought your articles with
you because we were both those guys. We were both
like journalism nerds who wanted to be like nake it big.
We were very close, but I was also kind of
jealous of you and like really wanted it, and that
drove me and Reggie. I think he wanted it, but
I don't think he showed it in the exact same way.
Like he wasn't throwing elbows with us to get articles.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
He was ambitious, it was a good worker, and he
was always there. But I feel like I don't know
if distracted is the right word. He just had other
interests too.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I mean I was a twenty ninety three. I was
a twenty one year old kid who had narry a
problem in the world. I mean, I wasn't getting laid
like that was a problem in my little universe. And
I wasn't like, you know, like I had my little problems.
We were just all we had was journalistic ambition, you
know what I mean. Like in my house, I knew
(15:19):
I was going to college. I knew I'd be okay.
My parents gave me a card to use for the summer.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Like I had.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I didn't have a care in the world really except
making it as a journalist so I could throw all
my energy, everything I had into getting as many articles
as possible, because that is the only reason I was there.
And Reggie as a kid, you know, like Reggie has
all this drama in his life in his background, all
this shit. I'd never thought of it before we worked
on this podcast. Actually, Like the reason you and I
(15:43):
were able to be so competitive is because that's what
we had. Like, we were just too competitive young journalists,
fighting and scratching and client to make it. Meanwhile, there's
a million things hanging over him that I never gave
one second a thought to.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, that's a good point, and he actually never really
brought them up, right. You never heard him complaining about stuff.
You never heard him talk about what a hard scrabble
life he had, like he had his own life outside
of the newsroom, where our lives were completely consumed by
the actual newsroom.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah. Also, if you think about it, and this has
been well documented, like black men in America basically is
like you're not supposed to express how hard everything is,
how difficult everything is. You're supposed to suck it up.
And if you're like a white guy growing up in
America like me back then, I probably whined about everything,
like every little thing, every little slight at the newsroom.
Why is this guy getting that clip, Why is he
(16:33):
getting that Why aren't I getting this opportunity? Meanwhile, you're
Reggie with these real world things hanging over your head,
and you won't say shit about it, like it's just
kind of where we were and probably still are. I
don't think he wasn't burdened. I just think he didn't
talk about his burdens.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Along with his dreams of becoming a sports reporter, Reggie
had another big love hip hop. Reggie lived for hip hop.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
I was a pretty big rap fan, but that summer
he introduced me to his favorite rapper, Oakland's own Ant Banks.
It's funny looking back because coming from the East Coast,
I'd never heard of the guy, but Reggie swore by him.
Banks his first album had just come out. It was
called Sitting on Something Fat Fat p H to a T.
(17:20):
And it is very very Oakland and Ooze's Bay Area
hip hop from that time period. Just hear how the
song live in the Life starts Life in Oakland, California,
ain't no joke, boy, and Reggie played that album NonStop,
literally on an endless loop. In the morning, I'd wake
up to the song you just a punk Shook. At night,
(17:44):
You'll be thumping the title track like that because I'm
sitting out twenty four to seven Ant Banks talking about
money and big butts and sweet cars. When I were
turned to Delaware. That fall, I was reciting aunt Banks
lines to bewildered friends and classmates raised on bon Jovi
(18:06):
and Aerosmith. Rick, what's the one thing you remember most
about Reggie?
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (18:16):
The catchphrase exactly exactly. We've been saying that for years.
We've actually been saying that for years, every time, almost
every time we talk in any reference to Reggie, if
he agreed with you on anything at all, he wouldn't
just say you're right, well, that's true. He would say exactly. Yeah.
I would actually say through the years, when I've heard
(18:38):
someone reference exactly, it could be about like your ups
shipment is in. It could be about your kids would
be picked up at three today, and someone says, exactly,
I actually think of Reggie, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Here's a question for you. So the summer in Nashville,
we had a great time, correct, Like we had a
great time in the actual newsroom, and we also hung
out outside of the news like I remember going to
the movies with you, We went on drives, we went
to breakfast.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Wait, don't leave out the most vivid memory of that summer.
What's that we went up to the club at as
of clubs in downtown Nashville, and I still remember dancing
with a young woman who is a student at the
University of Michigan. I'm drinking more than I'm ever used
to drinking, really drunk, dancing with her using my mediocre moves.
(19:25):
I honed at the University of Delaware. And the next
thing I know, I think I'm in maybe a car
you're driving because I pass out in the bar.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
And then you were on the floor and somebody from
from the DJ booth is like calling my name over
the actual outspeakers. I have to go kind of collect
you and put you in the car and drive you off.
But like we basically have all of these great memories
out of Nashville. The thing that I don't remember is
hanging out with Reggie outside of the newsroom, right. Why
(19:55):
do you think that is?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I was thinking that because he wasn't at ace of
clubs that night. He wasn't At different times we go
to bars and stuff, like, he actually wasn't there, and
I never reconsidered it at the time. I remember he
would he would go out late at night and I didn't, like,
I didn't know where the hell he was going. But
we were living at Tennessee State, which is a black HBCU,
(20:18):
and there were all these clubs around that were mainly
quote unquote black clubs. And he would come back at
two three in the morning, and he would come back
and he would never really wake me up because these
dorm rooms are very small. I mean, if you think
about it, at the time, all those clubs were going to,
like Nashville was still pretty not segregated, but those were
quote unquote probably more white clubs. Like he was going
(20:40):
out to the black clubs by Tennessee State and we
were not going out to the black clubs by Tennessee State.
So I think maybe there was like a little bit
of a social line that we were not aware of,
and maybe we were outsolds. Maybe we should have invited him.
I'm more I have no idea, like maybe we didn't
invite him it. I mean, I can't imagine we wouldn't have,
but like maybe we weren't aware of him we should
have been. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
There was actually one time that I do remember going
out with him, and that's when all of us, you me,
Jared Lazarus and Reggie we all went to Opera Land.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Remember that the late theme park, country music themed theme park.
You remember what we did there? Of course?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, I think so what happened?
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Then? We recorded? All right, so this was our one
chance to really hear Reggie be Sexy Sweat. We went
They had a Meek your Own CD booth and we
went in and Reggie was like, yeah, let's do blah
blah blah, let's do a rap and Reggie just reestyled,
and I remember being like, holy shit, this guy's really good.
(21:39):
I know. I told my friends later on about this
guy Sexy Sweat who was like this great rapper, and
I think I was trying to beat box in a
very failed, you know, like stupid way, but I remember
how good he was, and that was the one taste
I had for him, and I actually thought he was
like a serious rapper. Like I really thought like we
were going to be hearing of Sexy Sweat in the
(22:00):
way you would hear of Digital Underground, Like I thought
he was going to be a guy from Oakland who
would hear it. But I didn't know that much.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
He wasn't just good Jeff in that upper Land booth.
He was phenomenal, like super really really really good sort
of remember him freestyling like he didn't have anything written up.
He was just spitting out wraps like as he went,
and he was incorporating stuff that we had done over
the summer. He was incorporating the newsroom, the newspaper and
(22:28):
all this stuff. And he just belt it out this
like three minute, awesome rap, and I was blown away.
I was like, I can't believe I just heard this
guy do this.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
And would you admit that the great failing of your
life is that you walked away with the one CD
and you don't know where it is.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I'm actually physically sick about that, like the fact that
I misplaced at somehow over the years. We're talking about
thirty two years. Also, you know I moved a lot
in that time, but I having one hundred percent giving
up on it, Like I'm still searching through random closets
and stuff, thinking, well, maybe this could be somewhere, But
the fact I don't have that city really really makes
(23:06):
me physically ill.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I think both of us are haunted by the loss
of that CD, which is probably somewhere in the bottom
of a box. And when we were talking to Jared,
since he was a photo intern, we asked to see
if he had any pictures from that day.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
I mean, man, like if we had phones at the time,
like we I would have had like pictures of all
this stuff, but like no phones, So like yeah, I
mean maybe I shot pictures of it, but like where
would that film be?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Bottom line is that the Tennessee And was a springboard
for a lot of journalists who later went on to
work for The New York Times and other venerable publications.
Katrina ended up leaving journalism, but that internship was life
altering for her.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Also, it just has never occurred to me since that
program that I couldn't do something right, Like now, I
know I can. You know, if I want to try
this out, I can.
Speaker 5 (23:58):
Try it out. If I want to try the world,
I can travel the world. If I want to do
this work, I can do this work.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And so certainly when I look around now, they're absolutely
more journalists of color, so many more women. So I
think it was absolutely contributing to that result.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
But I also think it just allowed.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
For all of us to think godly and do the
stuff we want to do.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Rick, you and I kept in close contact over the years,
and each time we spoke, we always always brought up Reggie,
wondering what became of him, where he was, what he
was doing, whether he was okay, but Sexy Sweat, Reggie
pain he kind of vanished.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, he just fell off our radar, never heard from him.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
So a few years ago I reached out to Rick
and proposed doing a podcast focused entirely on reconnecting with Reggie.
This person who played a takey Ron or formative Summer
of ninety three, who decades later we were still quoting.
We both thought it impossible that a dude who wore
construction vest and called himself Sexy Sweat could just poof
(25:10):
fall off the face of the earth.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So we decided to search every social media.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Site, every journalism group, every.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Reddor rap form from Sacramento to Sarasota until we found Reggie.
We'd look at our friend we met in Nashville and
rekindled that friendship we neglected all these years. We'd call
the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat, and it would be great, except.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
When officers arrived.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
They handcuffed the patient and forced him face down into
the prone position. His family said he needed help, but
he ended up dying.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
We weren't going to find Reggie because Reggie Paine was dead.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Wait, you're saying you wanted to do a podcast before
you found out he had passed.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
That's correct.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
Yeah, like while trying to find him, you found out
you had died.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
Yeah, my gosh, what happened? Like what how did you
find that out?
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I mean, it didn't take long. We were just researching
different things about him, and we found like one article
I think that talked about it, and I'm kind of
excited about about launching on this other very different podcasts
and it would like just would have been this really
funny with a great ending. And then Jeff I think
Jeff found an incentive to me, and I like I
(26:37):
literally had to sit down, like I was, like, I
could not believe that that had happened.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
After finding out Ready had died, we soon discovered our
own lives had taken very different paths. On the one hand,
like us, Reggie considered his college years at Grambling to
be some of the best of his life, filled with
good friends and parties. He wrote for the Gramblin Nite newspaper,
where he became a respected sports columnist, and he met
his girlfriend Tia and became a father. His trajectory was
(27:09):
straight up, and his future seemed limitless. But then one
day in May of nineteen ninety six, a few years
after he met him, Reggie was riding a Greyhound bus
from Grambling back home to Oakland when he felt his
brain gave a distinct jolt.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
This was a start of Reggie's year's long struggle with
mental illness. When he arrived in Oakland, his mother took
him to the John George Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Alameda County.
He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed medication for
tremors and schizophrenia.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Reggie still managed to graduate Grambling the following year, but
his life never recovered.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Desperate to get a grip on his disorder, Reggie did
what he was trained to do.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
He wrote.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Whether it was therapeutic to get his thoughts on paper
or just him trying to fulfill some long lost ambition,
we don't know. But he published The Harassment of Reginald D.
Pain on Amazon in September twenty eighteen, pouring all his pain, anxieties,
and delusions into the pages of the thin book. It's
a rambling, heartbreaking manifesto on his mental health demons that
(28:20):
opens with a grim self assessment. I never considered in
my life this would occur, but it's real.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
They are like labor pains to all the mothers. Maybe
every fifteen minutes, I imagine. Please, I'll be a chump
all day for a full eight hour sleep night.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I am so frustrated right now.
Speaker 6 (28:47):
What the fuck did I do to deserve this harassment?
I want to know who it is, why they do it,
where are they from? Needless to say, I must reiterate
to you that this has been going on for ten
years now.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Then in February twenty twenty, as his mental condition spiraled,
Reggy's life took a sharp turn for the worse.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
It wasn't just that Reggie died, it was how he died.
It happened a week after being handcuffed and restrained face
down by police on the linoleum floor of his parents'
home in Sacramento.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
And this is not normal behavior, career, that's it.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Do you think he's going to be because combative with
the fire department?
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
You know right now he's hugging in the.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
She's like that, never violent, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Okay, that's here.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
Thank you for nounce medications of the Herman.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
When we talked to Katrina and Jared, they hadn't heard
what had happened to Reggie. It was hard to wrap
our heads around this happened to one of our fellow interns,
a scholarship winner with the Chips Quinn program.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
That tears me up because like, this isn't supposed to happen, right,
The opportunities we got were supposed to be be the
kinds of things that allowed us to escape whatever risk
of those sort that we faced. You know, part of
what these opportunities gave me is the chance to get
out of you know, those kinds of circumstances that I
(30:24):
might have been subjected to, not the same kinds of things,
but you know I have I have more opportunities in life,
and so it's a it's a terrible thing to hear
that somebody who had those same opportunities I did, and
who took advantage of them, right, I mean, did really
well with them, would end up dying in that way.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
No, that bothers me. It's interesting because we've been talking
about this, discussing Reggie for years, doing the exactly thing
for years, talking about Sexy Sweat for years, wondering where
the CD was wondering what Reggie was doing, and is
not exaggerations say, it never entered my mind that he
might have died, like, did not cross my mind at all.
Speaker 5 (31:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Now, for a second, I thought this was going to
be a very different podcast. Actually, I thought we were
going to have like a really fun time tracking him down.
And then I was really looking forward to actually finding
him and catching up with him and figuring out what
he's up to these days and listening to that voice
of his again. And when I saw this media report
(31:28):
that he had died, and he had died like in
the living room of his parents' home, it was just crushing.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
After he found out about the circumstances of Reggie's death,
we sort of did what we've been trained to do
that we started learning back at the Tennessee and thirty
years ago. We began to investigate and dig and probe
and look into it.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
And we found a couple of interesting things, like Captain
Jeffrey Clined, he was the highest ranking fire officier on
the scene that night at Reggie's house when the police
were called in to assist.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Kline claimed that after Reggie's death, he wrote to his
supervisors to point out that the prone position the police
had used to restrain him may have contributed to his death,
but Sacramento officials shut him down. Several months later, Klein
was fired. Another weird thing was his cause of death.
An initial review by the Sacramento County Coroner's office determined
(32:22):
that Reggie had just died of cardiac arrest, but a
follow up investigation by a forensic pathologist found something very different,
and the paramedics, fire department, and police department all seemed
to have slightly different versions of this event. The more
we dug, the more the contours of a picture began
to emerge that showed city officials trying at all costs
(32:45):
to protect its law enforcement ranks during a very combustible
time in America when rallies protesting police brutality royaled across
the country and across the world. You know, it's like
we've been saying, Edgie's death was absolutely devastating to us,
and it came out of nowhere, and I think hit
us both just like a gut punch.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
It also left us intensely curious and wrestling with a
swirl of questions. What was Reggie's path after his internship
at the Nashville, Tennessee And why did we not stay
in touch the way we did with Jared and each other?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
When did his mental health begin to slide and how
did it impact his life decisions?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
What help, if any, did he receive as a mentally
ill man, as a black man.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
How did our life journeys so closely intertwined in the
summer of ninety three take such wildly divergent paths. How
did Reggie's identities shape the life he led and how
did they doom him?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
And what exactly happened in the living room of his parents'
home that night in February twenty twenty that led to
Reggie's death.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
These are the questions we plan to explore and untangle
as we dig into the story behind the life and
sudden depth of our friend son father journalist Rapper Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Exactly next time on finding Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
They were almost like the Huxtables, somebody like me.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
It was very different from where I came from.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's always been a happy place.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Reggie would have these big speakers. You can hear those
speakers through the whole neighborhood. The rest My baby, do
you know what's crazy is with the police. How we
see like them beating on black men now like they
used to do that when we were teenagers.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
And we're gonna walk on this nation. We're gonna walk
on this rage's power structure.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Oakland police marge into a home and arrest young people
in the throes of the illegal drug business. Finding Sexy
Sweat is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
This episode was reported, written and hosted by Jeff Perlman
and Rick Jervis. It was produced by Gabby Watts with
production support from Eedily's Perez Zaron Burnett Is. Our story
(35:08):
editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed this episode. George Washington
I read the excerpts from the Harassment of Reginald d.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Pain.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr.
Please leave the show a review and you can follow
along with the show on Instagram at School of Unions.
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