Like his father and uncle, however, it wasn’t long before Dave was ripped out of his life, too.
The teenager plunged into darkness, what he later refers to as his “Danny Darko” phase, finally submitting to the lure of easy money offered by trapping.Īttending Garfield High School, the lone little Russian boy was the minority in the hood, and Dave Blaze, a thug with as big a reputation as a heart, had taken Av under his wing like a little brother. His uncle, who took on the father figure role, died a year later of cancer. With his mother, the breadwinner of the entire family, traveling for work for weeks at a time, he carried on with little parental guidance, even if relatives were around. Unbeknownst to her at the time, the former hub of jazz and soul, as well as the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, was also the most active, gang-infested hood in the Emerald City.Ī couple years after moving, the 15 year old Av and his mother found his father a couple days dead. Since the family did not move across the world for Av to be locked up, his mother moved them out of the ethnically-diverse Crossroads to Seattle’s historically African-American Central District.
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By the time he was 13, he had learned how to properly seal bags of weed, and was arrested a year later in front of his entire school on a felony robbery charge. In other words, he knew that Danny was destined for something after witnessing him writing poetry and later rapping at the tender age of 9.ĭespite his somewhat stable upbringing, Av had a knack for attracting trouble like a magnet, and didn’t exactly turn his back on it. Though his parents both grew up Russian Orthodox, they practiced Buddhism in the 80s, which is why his father started calling him “Avatar,” a word to describe the descent of God into human and other forms. As an accomplished painter and artist, he taught his son discipline, and how to manifest, express, and release emotions through art, with Av choosing the medium of music. Raised primarily by his father and great grandmother, they instilled morals, values, respect, honor, etiquette, and the importance of knowledge in him, always showering him with love, encouraging him to think for himself and be his own independent person.įrom his father, he inherited a love, appreciation, and respect for art.
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His mother enrolled in the University of Washington, and worked full time. English was not his first language, as he grew up speaking Russian, and he was in ESL classes until third grade. In spite of the hardships early on, Av’s early childhood was a more or less happy one. The thought-to-be-affluent suburb of Bellevue wasn’t exactly flush with opportunity for Avatar’s family at first, as they called home a cardboard box outside of an Ivar’s Fish & Chips by the Crossroads Shopping Center. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, to Ukrainian/Russian parents, Danny "Avatar Darko" Degtjar and his family moved nearly 5,000 miles across the world by the time he was three months old, eventually settling in the suburbs just east of Seattle, Washington.
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