My Voice: A Memoir (9 page)

ANGIE:
But aren’t you from New York?

TUPAC:
That’s where I was born, but that’s not where I learned how to make money . . . When I came out to the West Coast, this is where I got laced. This is where I learned. This is where I became a man . . .

Right from the start I could see that he was far more articulate and calculated than I was. And at this point, way more seasoned than me. I could have asked him anything. He already knew what he wanted to say. He answered my questions, but he also was very clear about what he wanted to get out of this. He had some shit to say, and he was using me as the vehicle to do that.

ANGIE:
So are you saying that you do not have a beef with New York?

TUPAC:
Nah . . . I have a beef with anybody in my way, anybody that’ll come against me that feel like they could criticize me because they bought my album. That feel like just because they read an interview that they know who I am—I have a beef with them interfering with me getting my money. I got a beef with Wendy Williams saying I got raped in jail because that disrespected me, my family, and what I represent. I got a beef with New York rappers just saying whatever they wanna say about where I’m from . . .

He went off, continuing his laundry list, which finally came around to the main beef. And because I still didn’t fully understand, I asked exactly how his relationship with Biggie had gotten so bad and what exactly Biggie had done.

TUPAC:
He acted like he didn’t know what happened when I got shot. He didn’t know what happened. I was tripping out. I was buggin’. I must’ve been fuckin’ on drugs when I got operated on. This nigga only got shot once. He was acting like a movie when he came upstairs. That type of shit? It’s going down . . . Puffy’s the one that really . . . snapped me back to my senses. When this punk muthafucka said “Thug Life you gon’ be a thug, you gotta be a thug forever you can’t go in and out of it.” Okay, now when a cream puff nigga like that
tell me that, it’s time to ride. ’Cause I had legitimately just walked away from the shit. I was gonna take my shots and move on. I already knew what happened. Only thing that pissed me off is when niggas tried to make me seem like I was buggin’ or bullshitting like I just shot myself. Nobody knew what happened. That’s what really made just me trip the fuck out. And then Mobb Deep doing shows and they introducing people onstage like this the nigga that shot ’Pac.

ANGIE:
Where was that?

TUPAC:
In Queens! It get real deep and everybody involved know it get deep. This is basically what it is—fear is stronger than love.

His point was that New York was an innocent bystander. And there was no question where the battle lines had been drawn for him.

TUPAC:
Niggas that represent New York, some of these rappers—there’s a lot of cool niggas out there . . . But as far as Bad Boy, Puffy is the head of Bad Boy. He’s a cream puff. He’s being extorted. So the niggas that’s extorting him don’t pump no fear in my heart. They pump fear in his heart. I rode against the niggas extorting him. They tried to kill me. Biggie and them watched it and acted like they didn’t know what happened. So now I’m gonna end his business. I’m gonna end it so the extorting niggas don’t get no money. Biggie don’t get no money. Puffy don’t get no money. I get all the money, and they be out the rap game. That’s what poppin’.

ANGIE:
And how do you intend to do that?

TUPAC:
I’m doing it. Them niggas ain’t doin’ no tours. They ain’t livin’ good. They sleepin’ with extra security. They got guns out. They was out here panicky like a muthafucka . . .

ANGIE:
This whole thing that’s going on—

TUPAC:
Is a military move.

ANGIE:
This whole thing is your beef with Biggie and Puffy.

TUPAC:
No doubt.

ANGIE:
So it has nothing to do with you disrespecting New York—

Every time Pac came close to giving me something concrete that I could use to defuse the East Coast–West Coast beef, he’d back off and say something even more inflammatory instead.

ANGIE:
But what I think needs to be clarified is this beef, this whole thing—

TUPAC:
There is no beef! When Biggie get attacked, he run to New York and say, “They after us! They after us!” We ain’t after y’all. We after Biggie! Y’all just need to mind y’all business! Every time somebody say something in rap, New York is not the only muthafucker that can answer. In hip-hop there’s so many battles that nobody trip off but mines everybody’s involved in. Why you can’t respect a soldier for being a soldier for the uniform that he’s wearing! Don’t get mad at me ’cause y’all niggas is not—they punks! If Biggie was fighting, you would never have thought I was attacking New York. Only reason it look like I’m attacking New York is ’cause I’m stompin’ this nigga. I’m smackin’ him up against the wall and he’s not answering. So I’m bangin’ him up against New York walls and it’s like he ain’t doing nothing.

ANGIE:
So what’s gonna come outta this?

TUPAC:
I want my respect. It’s not gonna be over till I drop my Nagasaki. They did they shit. They bombed Pearl Harbor. They shot me five times, okay. But until I get my Nagasaki, we can’t have peace.

I could tell by his aggression that I wasn’t going to get what I was looking for in this moment. I would have to come back to it. My job was
not to judge but to still ask hard questions and not be intimidated. At one point I tried another way to subtly challenge Pac, this time about Faith Evans and his claim that there had been a relationship between him and her, something that she denied. I asked why he would drag her into this.

TUPAC:
Why? ’Cause that was her husband. And I’m his enemy. And she gave me some pussy. I was supposed to dis her. Any real bitch would be on my side like damn, that’s a player for real. But you acting like suckas like, Why’d you dis her? She was married to this nigga and she slid me some pussy ’cause she was caught up in my image. For real though. Let’s be real though. So what did I do? I did what—I didn’t wanna fuck her ’cause I wanted to be with Faith! Fuck Faith!

ANGIE:
Did you make her believe that?

TUPAC:
She knew exactly what was goin’—c’mon. C’mon, Angie! You wouldn’t even come to my video! She was married to the nigga and she was fuckin’ me! C’mon, you smart!

I just looked back at him, not saying a word. He kept going.

TUPAC:
 . . . I don’t lie on my dick. It brings me nothing. This right here made me look bad to females to fuck Faith and tell everybody. It made me look bad.

ANGIE:
It did.

TUPAC:
I would not get more pussy like that. Everybody know that. But I’m not doing it for the bitches. I’m not doing it for the girls. I could care less. I’m destroying a nigga right here. And believe me, every time he touch her, every time he thinks about getting back together with her, every time he think of his wedding anniversary, he’s
thinking of me fucking his wife. And that’s as gangster as you can get. Yup. And if you don’t understand, don’t matter to me. Niggas understand.

Pac was very animated and dramatic about everything. It was overwhelming. I was in no way on his level, to be able to challenge him the way I wish I could have. He was a performer—the way he delivered, the way he spoke, he was poetic. He’d be tearing somebody apart and screaming, like he was out of control. But he was very much in control. And even at some points charming and attentive. There were a couple of moments when he’d be yelling and be really aggressive, and then he would stop and ask, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You know, none of this is towards you. If I raise my voice, if I’m screaming, it’s just how I feel. I want to make sure you’re okay and you’re comfortable. I just get hype. Matter of fact, I’ma get you a gun. You can sit it by you if you get nervous.”

I laughed. “We all right.” Is it weird that I thought it was a charming gesture? Probably.

But in getting more comfortable, I still knew Pac was talking circles around me. I was trying with everything I had for Tupac to say some things that would make the East Coast–West Coast situation simmer down. Ultimately, that’s what I was there for, and so when he mentioned how crazy the idea of having beef with a whole city was, I encouraged him to speak to that.

ANGIE:
This is what I’m trying to get at . . . No one in New York has heard you say that.

TUPAC:
Well, why don’t you tell them how I flew you out here? This wasn’t no publicity stunt. Why don’t you tell them how I called you
personally and I wanted to get this shit settled and I flew you out here to show you that there was no problem? And tell ’em how you not in a hotel room. You in my home. So what beef?

ANGIE:
And I have and I’ve let them know that this was you that wanted to speak to New York. So I’m giving you that opportunity to let people understand what’s really happening . . .

The whole time all the Outlawz were sitting there. I could tell that they all looked up to him. Everybody in the room was somewhat as in awe of him as I was. Fatal from the Outlawz was especially nice to me that day, as I recall. He recently passed away in a car accident and I was really sad to hear that. Every time I’d run into him, even years later, it would always bring us to that moment of sitting in that room.

Looking back, I feel that the weight of history wasn’t just felt by me, but that something inside Tupac had given him a sense of urgency. It’s true that he had been vocal in the media at the time. But he clearly seemed to think it was important to go on the record and cover not just what I’d come for but other thoughts he had, including his hope to inspire other artists coming up, other voices. At moments I even felt that Pac was just talking to me directly about why it was important to be authentic and not feel like you had to overexplain yourself. He said he was tired of talking down to people and that if you respected your audience and put them on your level, they’d get it.

I couldn’t have agreed more, and I carried that with me over the years.

After more than two hours, I reluctantly began to wrap up the interview. I honestly felt like I could have talked to this guy forever. Pac echoed my feelings right about then, saying, “All right, we just talking shit at this point,” and so I stopped the tape.

We took a bunch of pictures. Pac sincerely thanked me for coming and told me that if I ever needed anything to let him know.

An hour later, after Mindy dropped me off at the hotel, I still couldn’t get “California Love” out of my head. My mental track was punctuated by two hours of Pac saying crazy shit about Puff, crazy shit about Big. I had gotten word from a couple people that Biggie wasn’t so happy that I went to do that interview in the first place. His reaction bothered me to an extent but not enough to feel like I did the wrong thing. I understood if he felt like that, but there was nothing I could do. I still had to do it. It was the other side of the story.

Many times in the future, I would have to wrestle with instances when I chose not to take sides and with feeling the weight of knowing you have friends and important relationships on both sides. But ultimately, you also have a job to do. There would be many times when I’d have to talk to people who’d say crazy things about people I cared about. No matter what the situation, I could only do what I believed in and that was to try to give everybody a fair platform.

At the hotel, I was getting calls from people at the station: “How did it go? How did it go? How did it go?” I couldn’t even talk to anybody yet. I had to just be in my own zone for a little bit. Again, I desperately wanted to help the situation. People were too invested in this East Coast–West Coast beef. How much further could it go, what with people getting shot? And I just did not want to go home without Pac’s statement that, “This is not an East Coast–West Coast thing.” Which he did say a few times. But then he went on to say other crazy shit. So the big challenge, as I tried to get to sleep, was how I would help the situation as opposed to inflaming it.

What am I supposed to do with all this?
The responsibility was weighing on me.

•   •   •

P
eople were literally waiting for me at the station when I showed up the next day after taking a flight from LA early in the morning. No answers had come to me yet about how to edit the interview. And I didn’t know who to ask. Why? Because I didn’t really trust anybody. Everybody was so opinionated about it and so biased; this had to be one of those times when I decided for myself.

Being open to input can be a good thing. But sometimes too many opinions are not a good thing. Sometimes if I start asking people for their opinions, it confuses me. I’m a person who likes to get quiet. And then, once I’ve kind of figured it out, I may pick people’s brains about how to do it. Nobody else is going to have to deal with the repercussions but me. I think I’ve always been like that.

That was the space I was in when I ran into Ed Lover and a couple of other deejays who were all there at a time when they normally wouldn’t be there, all waiting to hear something. It was intense. I shrugged them all off and went to sit in the editing room by myself and started listening to the interview. I transferred the cassette to a reel-to-reel tape so that I could begin editing. I had a little razor blade and was cutting the tape and piecing it together with the unused strips falling on the floor. That was the technology of the day. I used to get little slices on my fingers whenever I needed to hurry up and edit, often causing me to go home with Band-Aids on my fingertips.

The sections that were the most direct were the ones that I focused on.

TUPAC:
I really do feel like fuck it, then. What more can I do? I’m not sucking y’all dick
.
I’m not mad at you. I don’t got no beef with you. I’m beefin’ with the nigga you proclaim to be the king of your set. I’m attacking him. I’m tearin’ him down. As long as y’all stay on one side of the
block, I promise you, I will only destroy this side of the block . . . All I wanna do is get my paper and all I wanna see if niggas out there get their paper . . . Biggie is a fake player. See, I wanna deal with some real niggas. That’s all I’m saying. My beef is just with them. Soon as they gone? We gonna try to make New York—man, everything we got you can have. Like we cousins. Y’all wanna borrow some sugar? What y’all want? Man, everything. How do you expect me to sit down at the table with niggas that tried to kill me?