This Thug's Life



It's a brisk Wednesday morning in November-the day before Thanksgiving-and courtroom 120 at 100 Centre Street in downtown Manhattan is filled to capacity with mostly black and Latino men. There is a uniform sense of disillusionment among them: Some slump on the long benches while others reflexively spin their bodies around every so often to see who is coming into court. There would be little excitement on this day were it not for the presence of the media and a celebrity defendant. "That's Tupac!" a gap-toothed black girl whispers with glee to no one in particular. Two broad-chested white boys with thick Queens accents join in the chorus of saying his name as if they, too, had made a great discovery.

Tupac Shakur notices none of this and glances from time to time at today's presiding judge. Charged with sodomy and sexual abuse, Tupac has been at the center of a heavy media barrage for the past week, made more intense by the arrests of two other hip hop icons, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Flavor Flav. The New York City papers have reported that on November 18, Tupac allegedly forced himself on a black 20-year-old woman he had met days before at a local club. The woman claims that she went to visit Tupac at the Parker Meridian, a posh Manhattan hotel, and that they embraced in his bedroom. When, moments later, three of Tupac's friends came in, she tried to leave. But, she charges, the four men held her there, pulled her hair, sexually abused her, and sodomized her numerous times. As the prosecutor put it, Tupac "liked her so much, he decided to share her as a reward for his boys." These charges come only a few weeks after Tupac was arrested in Atlanta for allegedly shooting two off-duty police officers and released on $55,000 bail.

In an effort to rebut the charges and beat back the negative publicity, Tupac's attorney, Michael Warren, has charged law-enforcement officials in New York with erasing sexually eplicit telephone messages to Tupac left by the accuser. Warren claims that on November 14-the night Tupac and his accuser met-eyewitnesses saw the young woman engaging in oral sex with the rapper on the dancefloor of the club. Further, the prosecutor has admitted the woman testified to having had consensual sex with him that night. In a press conference scheduled for later this week, Warren plans to introduce Michelle Fuentes, an 18-year-old fan who visited him at his hotel without incident, in the hopes of portraying Tupac's relationships with women as amiable. The lawyer says his team has interviewed a number of young women who've had encounters-sexual or otherwise-with Tupac and that, "as time goes on, you'll see more young ladies step forward" as character witnesses.

But Tupac's taste for posing with guns and publicly dissin' black women (one young black woman has claimed Tupac berated her in the hotel lobby at last year's Black Radio Exclusive convention) make one wonder how he can survive any of this. That these charges coincide with his biggest hit ever, the Top 10 "Keep Ya Head Up"-which both praises women and criticizes men for disrespecting them-is emblematic of Tupac's contradictory nature.

With a cloud of controversy surrounding him and a movie in progress-he has been in New York City shooting the high school basketball drama Above the Rim, directed by Jeffrey Pollack-Tupac looks nothing like the happy-go-lucky 22-year-old I met at the black-music convention "Jack The Rapper" in Atlanta last August. Back then the surprisingly tall Tupac was fresh off his starring role in Poetic Justice opposite Janet Jackson, and his single "I Get Around" was jacking the rap charts. Unsure what to make of him as he stood in the hotel lobby absorbing the "oohs" and "ahhs" of female and male admirers alike, I introduced myself. The posing stopped-at least momentarily-and Tupac gave me a pound and exclaimed loudly, "Whassup, nigga?! You my man from that MTV show. I had your back, dog..."

Today, Tupac is just a shadow of that B-boy machismo. Surrounded by an entourage of black men of various hues and sizes,he steps before the judge with his codefendants, looking like a lost little boy. The charges are read, he is given a return date, and the reporters ready themselves outside the courthouse. On the night of his arrest, Tupac puffed up his chest and cold-smacked the media: "I'm young, black...I'm making money and they can't stop me. They can't find a way to make me dirty, and I'm clean." But as he and his entourage move out of the courtroom today, that defiance is tucked away, enveloped by the muscular arms of security guards who push him through the throng, into a waiting van that speeds off, leaving news teams on the curb, befuddled.

Before all this trouble, before the New York and Atlanta cases, no one was eager to tell the story of Tupac Shakur, save a few fanzines. As his career evolved and as his brushes with the law piled up, I kept mental notes, preparing for interviews that would eventually provide the basis for a piece not just about a rapper but about the young-black-male identity crisis in America today, about the troubling contradictions inherent in hip hop culture, 1994. Tupac seemed a fitting symbol, a lightning rod, in fact, for many of these issues.

But then the story changed. Yeah, he is an angry young black man. But why is he so angry? Where did he come from? What compels him to say and do the things that he does? Are the cases pending against Tupac Shakur merely coincidences, part of an elaborate "setup," as his lawyers would have us believe, or evidence of a deeper problem? Is he the symbolic young black man shackled by the system, or an individual young black man out of control?

Tupac seemed on the verge of a breakdown as I pursued this interview in November and December,calling his publicist, his manager, his record company, close friends, even his mother. The media had been unfair, they said, and he didn't want to talk anymore. He finally agreed to talk to me, perhaps because I had been working on the story long before these arrests, and perhaps because he saw it as his one good chance to tell his side of the story.

Tupac has always been the person who's made up the game-always," says Afeni Shakur, Tupac's 47-year-old mother, a week after his New York arraignment and a day after a hearing in Atlanta. A tiny, dark-complexioned woman with close-cropped hair and deeply etched dimples, Afeni lives in a modest apartment in Decatur, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, and speaks with an urgency that, she says, comes from her lifelong political activism. "He would have make-believe singing groups," she continues, "and he would be Prince, or Ralph in New Edition. He was always the lead."

But life wasn't quite that simple for Tupac Amaru Shakur. Named after an Inca chief, Tupac Amaru means "shining serpent," referring to wisdom and courage. Shakur is Arabic for "thankful to God." Although he was shaped by many of the problems of inner-city youths growing up in post-civil-rights America poverty, fatherlessness, constant relocation-Tupac's story began even before he was born.

Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams in North Carolina), was "like everyone else in the early '60s and watched the civil rights movement on television." A member of the notorious Disciples gang as a teenager, Afeni points to two primary factors that channeled her frustrations in a political direction: The historic Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, parent-student strike (where her nephew was a student) in 1968, and the formation of the Black Panther Party in New York City.

Founded in 1966 in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers quickly grew into a radical wing of the civil rights movement, with support in the hardcore ghettos as well as white patronage from the likes of Jane Fonda and Leonard Bernstein. Best known for their militant display of guns and insurgent tactics, which earned them FBI surveillance and raids, the Panthers were also a community-based organization that provided free breakfast for children and free health clinics in black neighborhoods across the nation.

Afeni joined in September 1968. In April 1969 she and 20 other members of the New York Panthers were arrested and charged with numerous felonies, including conspiracy to bomb several public areas in New York City. The case dragged on for 25 months.While out on bail, Afeni courted two men-Legs, a straight-up gangster ("He sold drugs, he did whatever he needed to make money"), and Billy, a member of the Party. She had previously been married to Lumumba Shakur, one of her codefendants who remained incarcerated. When he found out she was pregnant, he divorced her.

When Afeni's bail was revoked in early 1971, she found herself at the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, pregnant with Tupac. While defending herself in the Panther 21 case, she says she had to fight to receive "one egg and one glass of milk per day" for herself and her unborn son. Tears fill her eyes at the memory. "I never thought he'd make it here alive."

In May 1971, Afeni and 13 of her colleagues were acquitted of all charges. A month later, on June 16, Tupac was born. Her hands shaking, Afeni leans forward, clasps her fingers around a cigarette, and inhales deeply. She touches her lips and thinks for a moment.

"I was scared they were gonna take my child when he was born," she says, her elbows pushing hard on her knees. "I was nuts and out of it. The doctor took the baby right to my sister, who was standing outside so that she could tell me later;" she begins to cry. "So that she could identify him later and tell me it was really my child."

My mother was hella real with me," Tupac says later the same day, as he takes a long, reflective drag on a cigarette, sitting on a sofa in his new home outside Atlanta. "She just told me, `I don't know who your daddy is.' It wasn't like she was a slut or nothin'. It was just some rough times."

Rough times meant Afeni juggling her political activities with the economic realities of raising two children. Tupac says his family moved between the Bronx and Harlem a lot, sometimes living in homeless shelters. "I remember crying all the time," he says. "My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with.

"Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life and you don't fit in no matter what. If they push you out of the 'hood and the white people's world, that's criminal." He brushes smoke away with his hand. "Hell, I felt like my life could be destroyed at any moment..."

Tupac still wears a lot of gold-"old-school jewels," as he calls them-and his pants, baggy khakis, are still wrapped around the crack of his ass. With his razor-sharp cheekbones, long, feminine eyelashes that curve upward at the edges, and bushy eyebrows framing his distinctive, wide, and piercingly dark brown eyes, he looks like the black prince he says his mother's friends called him as a boy. And this split-level home is his castle. It has a 45-inch color television in the living room tuned to an all-music video channel, a basement where he plans to build a recording studio, and a huge backyard with a pool. Sneakers, packs of Newports, empty fast-food bags, and piles of CDs and audio and video cassettes cover the floors. Members of Thug Life, Tupac's posse, stroll in and out. This ghettocentric enclave is on a block where white folks, he says, are frightened of all the young black men driving Mercedeses and BMWs and playing their music real loud. In Tupac Shakur, I guess they think they have their worst nightmare as a neighbor.

"I was lonely," he says in a hushed tone. He played a lot of games as a kid to escape. "I didn't have no big brothers, no big cousins until later. I could remember writing songs, like real love songs. I remember writing poetry." A look of excitement crosses his face. "I remember I had a book like a diary. And in that book I said I was going to be famous." His mood swings again. "Looking back, I see that as the actor in me. Because I had that fucked-up childhood. The reason why I could get into acting was because it takes nothin' to get out of who I am to get into somebody else."

When Tupac was 12, Afeni enrolled him in the 127th Street Ensemble, a theater group in Harlem. "I wanted Tupac to focus on something since he was becoming of age," she says. In his first performance, Tupac played Travis in A Raisin In the Sun.

Tupac leans back on the sofa and beams at the memory. "Right now I can remember the bug biting me right there. I lay on a couch and played sleep for the first scene. Then I woke up and I was the only person onstage. I can remember thinking..." He lowers his voice to a whisper. "`This is the best shit in the world!' That got me real high. I was gettin' a secret: This is what my cousins don't do."

At the same time, though, he was having trouble squaring his mother's political views with his life. "She was trying to make me live this white-picket-fence lifestyle, but yet we ain't got no money and no food and no lights." Says Tupac: "You want me to go to school? They tellin' me all this stuff about the system but they pushin' us in the system. What type of shit is that?"

Perhaps more significantly, Tupac says he felt "unmanly" because he was fatherless. "All my cousins was like, `You too pretty.' I didn't have hard features. I don't know, I just didn't feel hard," he says with exasperation. "I could cook, I could do clothes, I could sew, clean up the house. I could do all the things my mother could give me but she couldn't give me nothing else."

Tupac admits these are the forces that drove him to the streets of New York. And to the life of Legs, the father he claimed. "I see him in me even now," he says. A classic city hustler once affiliated with legendary drug kingpin Nicky Barnes, Legs came to live with the family in the early 1980s and introduced Afeni to crack. "That was our way of socializing," she acknowledges. "He would come home late at night and stick a pipe in my mouth." Legs eventually wound up in prison-he had been arrested many times-for credit-card fraud. By the time he was out, Afeni, tired of the hard times in New York, had moved her family to Baltimore. By the time Afeni called back to New York to let Legs know of her move, he had died from a crack-induced heart attack at 41.

"That hurt Tupac," she says, her eyes looking at her bare feet. "It fucked him up. It was three months before he cried. After he did, he told me, `I miss my daddy."

"I was real bitter about Legs's death," Tupac says, "because I believe a mother can't give a son ways on how to be a man. Especially not a black man. It made me bitter seeing all these other niggas with fathers gettin' answers to questions that I have. Even now I still don't get 'em."

Baltimore was the first place Tupac began to feel an identity of his own. "I remember writing my first rap there. My name was MC New York. That's when I started fitting in. I was starting to get a name." He auditioned and was accepted by the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he finally felt in touch with himself. And with a different reality.

"The white kids had things we never seen. That was the first time I saw there was white people who you could get along with. Before that, I just believed what everybody else said: They was devils. But I loved it. I loved going to school. It taught me a lot. I was starting to feel like I really wanted to be an artist." He pauses, grins mischievously: "I was fucking white girls."

"I found him to be an extremely talented young actor," says Donald Hickens, head of the school's theater department. "He was confident and willing to take risks. He was very serious in the studio." Then Hickens-who is white-adds this: "For Tupac it was a new situation to be around white people who really cared about him and really wanted to help him. I think that shocked his expectations."

"I could feel him trying to bring me up," says Tupac of Hickens. "He couldn't do it, though. I was a little black kid from the ghetto and it was too much. I could see it in his face, he was trying to help me but it was a problem beyond him."

At the age of 17, after his junior year, Tupac moved with his family to Marin City, California. He never finished high school. He places his hands on top of his head and lets out a big sigh. "Leaving that school affected me so much. Even now, I see that as the point where I got off track."

Marin City is across the bay from Oakland. Nicknamed "The Jungle" because, according to Tupac, "niggas there like to kick up dust," it's essentially a housing complex. "When he got to Marin City," says Afeni, "Tupac was taught the streets." More to the point, she says, he learned those little lessons about manhood that she couldn't teach him.

"I was in the streets before but only as my mother's son," Tupac says. "Marin City is where I started getting my own name." With Legs dead and Baltimore behind him, Tupac tried to make it alone. Shortly after arriving in Marin City, he moved in with a neighbor. Tupac sold dope, befriended everyone, and became the running joke in the area.

"Niggas that wasn't shit and I knew it used to dis me," says Tupac. "But I didn't have no money and that's what used to fuck me up." His lips curl in exaggeration as he spits the words out, full of venom. "It be shitty, dumb niggas who had women, rides, houses, and I ain't have shit.

"All through my time there they used to dis me," says Tupac. "I got love but the kind of love you would give a dog or a neighborhood crack fiend. They liked me because I was at the bottom." Nevertheless, he finally felt like he belonged somewhere. "It was like a 'hood and I wanted to be a part of it. If I could just fit in here, I'm cool. And I thought I did."

The underground hip hop scene in Northern California rekindled Tupac's rap ambitions. He auditioned for Shock-G, the leader of Digital Underground, and was hired as a roadie and a dancer-well, sort of. When D.U.'s "Humpty Dance" blew up, Tupac found himself touring the States and Japan, bumping and grinding with a rubber doll to the latest dance craze.

Just as things were again beginning to look up for Tupac, he learned that his mother was addicted to crack. "I was on the road with D.U. and called my homies in Marin City just to say whassup, and they told me my moms was buying dope from somebody. It fucked me up. I started blocking her out of my mind," he says, fingering his gold watch.

Neither Tupac nor Afeni will talk much about that period. "After she started smoking dope and all that," says Tupac, "I, like, lost respect for her." He draws a circle in the air with his cigarette. "In New York and all those times we was growing up, she was my hero. She was like breaking men down. I'd be like, `Damn, that's my mother.'"

Afeni moved back to New York, eventually kicking her drug addiction, and now works for 2Pacalypse Entertainment, her son's management and production company. Meanwhile, Tupac compensated for her absence by "representing D.U. like a gang." He talks passionately of how he "gained points" on the road, "not taking shit from anyone. Everybody knew me even though my album wasn't out yet. I never went to bed. I was working it like a job. That was my number-one thing when I first got in the business. Everybody's gonna know me."

The first time I encountered Tupac Shakur, he scared a lot of people. It was in his role as Bishop in Juice. Directed by Spike Lee's cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson, Juice was a mediocre attempt at capturing black-boy angst. But Tupac's dark, brooding performance as a juveniledelinquent-turned-psychopath outlasted the film and left us with the prophetic line: "I am crazy. But you know what else, I don't give a fuck!"

"He's what they call a natural," says John Singleton, the writer-director of Boyz N the Hood and Poetic Justice. "You know, he's a real actor. He has all these methods and everything, philosophies about how a role should be played."

The critical acclaim Tupac received for his role (The New York Times called him "the film's most magnetic figure"), and the release of his debut album, 2Pacalypse Now, signaled the beginning of a new phase in Tupac's life. "I loved the fact that I could go to any ghetto and be noticed and be known." It also marked a new reason to exist: Thug Life.

On a balmy September day at the Marcus Garvey School in South Central Los Angeles, Tupac stands before a room full of teachers and administrators, mostly women, and explains Thug Life. "It's a double finger when you see people dressing like this," he says, pointing to his sagging jeans, pushing them down for extra emphasis. I scan the audience and everyone is listening intently. "Thug Life" is what Tupac calls his mission for the black community a support group, a rap act, and a philosophy. Thug Life was given its acronym after the fact: The Hate U Gave Lil Infants Fuck Everybody.

"But why be a thug?" an elderly man asks.

"Because if I don't, I'll lose everything I have. Who else is going to love me but the thugs?"

I think of Tupac's music: It's a cross between Public Enemy and N.W.A, between Black Power ideology and "Fuck tha Police!" realism. When he raps, Tupac is part screaming, part preaching, part talking shit. The music is dense and, at times, so loud it drowns out the lyrics. You cannot dance to it. Perhaps that is intentional.

"Nobody can talk about pain like Tupac. No one knows it like me," he says. "It separates me from other rappers. All that pain I'm talking about in my rap, you can see it." All too clearly sometimes. Apparently, it is not just something he works out in his music or in his acting-it's something he carries into his relationships with women, with his peers, with authority figures. He seems incapable of separating art from life.

First, there was Oakland: In 1991, Tupac was arrested for jaywalking and resisting arrest, and has a $10 million claim against the police for alleged brutality. Then, in 1992, during a confrontation with old acquaintances at a festival celebrating Marin City's 50th anniversary, a six-year-old boy was shot in the head. No criminal charges have been filed against Tupac, but a civil suit is pending. Later that year, a Texas woman filed a multimillion-dollar civil suit against him, claiming that the young black man who killed her husband-a cop-had been influenced by Tupac's music.

Then there is 1992's In Living Color incident. Tupac had just arrived at the Fox lot to tape a segment when he claims his "limo driver disrespected my homeboy, screaming at him like he was less than a man. Then the limo driver went to his trunk. We didn't know if the guy was getting a gun or what." Tupac and his friend jumped out of the car and allegedly attacked the driver. Tupac was arrested but the charges have been dropped.

Finally, a year ago, Tupac got into a fight with directors Albert and Allen Hughes over the loss of his role in Menace II Society. The Hughes brothers will not comment on the case. Tupac, however, has a lot to say.

"They was doin' all my videos," he says. "After I did Juice, they said, `Can we use your name to get this movie deal?' I said, `Hell, yeah.' When I got with John Singleton, he told me he wanted to be `Scorsese to your De Niro. For starring roles I just want you to work with me. So I told the Hughes brothers I only wanted a little role. But I didn't tell them I wanted a sucker role. We was arguing about that in rehearsal. They said to me, `Ever since you got with John Singleton's shit you changed.' They was trippin' 'cuz they got this thing with John Singleton. They feel like they competing with him."

The Hughes brothers dropped Tupac from Menace (Tupac says he found out watching MTV), and then, a few months later, ran into him at the taping of a Spice1 video. Tupac stepped to the twins ("That's a fair fight, am I right? Two niggas against me?"), hit Allen, and Albert ran off. Allen's civil suit against Tupac was still pending as VIBE went to press.

When I spoke with John Singleton in September about Tupac's problems, he said, "Everybody needs to fuckin' chill out and understand that this is a black man that's still tryin' to grow, you know?" By December, Singleton, who Tupac considers his "one friend in Hollywood" and was planning to cast the rapper as the lead in his next film, Higher Learning, was forced by Columbia Pictures to drop his star because of Tupac's recent arrests in Atlanta and New York. "Basically, since all this stuff is happening, the media is trying to play `good nigga vs. bad nigga' and say I don't want him in the movie," Singleton says. "That ain't true. In their minds, it doesn't matter if he's guilty or not. They don't want nothin' to do with him. I talked to Tupac and said, `I still got your back.'"

Continued...