gq.com/story/r-kelly-confessions

When Robert Kelly was 3 years old, growing up poor with a single mother on Chicago's South Side, construction started on a building a few miles away in the center of town. It was to be called the Sears Tower, and for nearly 25 years it would be the tallest building in the world. The tower—which was actually renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, though many Chicagoans, including Kelly, still refer to it by its original name—would also come to play a complicated role in the psychic geography of the 48-year-old man sitting up here now, looking down upon the city and to Lake Michigan beyond. When Kelly was about 9, he and two friends rode their bicycles in from their neighborhood, and when they arrived, they challenged one another to stand next to this tower. “A lot of kids were scared to do it because it actually felt like it was moving and falling over,” he remembers. Also, Kelly's elder brother had told them that if they got too close, it really would fall on them. The way he remembers it, his friends chickened out, but not him. “I actually did it,” he says. “I put my hands up to the Sears Tower and I stood up and looked dead at it. I stood there for a long time. That's why I wanted to do this interview here.” And what did you think when you looked up at it? “I said, ‘I'm coming for you.’ ” What did you mean? “The top of it. The height, the massiveness. You know, the strength that it carries. I remember wanting that, somehow.” In what way? “In my life, I wanted to feel tall. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels. When my mom would be on the highway, I would always look at the Sears Tower as: That's where I want to go, that's where I want to be.”