The Killing of Tupac Shakur (15 page)

“The real tragedy is that there are some ignorant brothers
out here,” Tupac told Kevin Powell. “That’s why I’m not on this all-white or all-black shit. I’m on this all-real or all-fake shit with people, whatever color you are. Because niggas will do you. I mean, there’s some foul niggas out there. The same niggas that did Malcolm X. The same niggas that did Jesus Christ. Every brother ain’t a brother. They will do you. So just because it’s black don’t mean it’s cool. And just because it’s white don’t mean it’s evil.”

Upon his release from prison, Tupac renounced the thug life (an acronym for The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody), but his ambition for his career and passion for music were untamed. He was trying to keep the two elements of his career—movies and music—on track. He also was appealing his sexual-abuse conviction.

Tupac and Suge became inseparable in the months after Tupac’s release from prison. In between recording sessions, Suge took Tupac to Mexico and Hawaii. In return, Tupac brought a fresh star image, a charisma, to Death Row that the other rappers didn’t have.

Tupac claimed that work had rehabilitated him. He used his performance in the movie
Gridlock’d
to prove it. “If nothing else,” he said of his work on the film, “it’ll just prove that I can show up to the set on time and still have an album that sells five million while I’m doing my shit. It’ll just show that I work hard. Also, it’ll show that I should not be in jail, ‘cause in the little bit of time I’ve been out, I’ve showed that I can be rehabilitated out here with everybody else. It’s the money that rehabilitates me, not the jail.” Tupac wanted people to know that he worked hard, that he wasn’t a slouch.

But as the world would later learn, Tupac was far from rehabilitated. He got out of prison swearing he was a changed man, but he quickly succumbed to the same gangsta lifestyle. Maybe worse. Tupac became Death Row’s artistic centerpiece, its biggest star. Along with him, Death Row became the hottest and biggest rap label ever.

In 1995, following the multimillion-dollar success of his CD
Me Against The World
(with Interscope) and his co-starring
role, with Mickey Rourke, in
Bullet
, Tupac founded a company, Euphanasia, to manage his film and music careers. Euphanasia (phonetic for euthanasia) was listed as his employer on the Clark County Coroner’s report of his death. Months after his murder, the business was still operating. Seven months later, however, the telephone number had been disconnected and the office at 8489 West Third Street, Suite 1038, in Beverly Hills was closed.

A few months before his death, Tupac got engaged to Kidada Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones. They had known each other for just a few months. Once, Tupac had publicly criticized Quincy Jones for marrying Kidada’s mother, Peggy Lipton, a white woman and former “Mod Squad” star. Kidada, who had met Tupac at a nightclub, reportedly took awhile to warm up to him because of that. After dating a short time, they moved together into a pricey Calabasas estate leased by Death Row. Tupac installed banks of video games and slot machines in an entertainment room for his friends and relatives who often stayed with the couple at their new digs.

Tupac’s feelings about women were complex and contradictory. In a 1995 interview on MTV, he said his songs attacked loose women, but not all women. He told journalist Tony Patrick, “There ain’t nothin’ like a black woman.” (He also rapped about his allegiance to his other “girlfriend,” his favorite pistol.)

His feelings about children were, however, simple. In an
Esquire
article, Tupac talked about why he didn’t want to have any.

“Procreation is so much about ego,” he said. “Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell, ‘I got fucked by America and you’re about to get fucked too.’ Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can’t have a child. ‘Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I’m not having no white babies.

“There’s no way around it unless I want to turn white, turn my back on what’s really going on in America. I either will be in jail or dead or be so fuckin’ stressed out from not
going to jail or dying or being on crack that I’d just pop a vessel. I’ll just die from a heart attack. All the deaths are not going to be from the police killing you.”

• • •

During the last year of his life, Tupac’s acting career was skyrocketing. Vondie Curtis Hall, star of TV’s “Chicago Hope,” directed Tupac in the film
Gridlock’d—
which opened nationwide on January 29, 1997—a dark comedy about survival adapted from Hall’s semi-autobiographical screenplay. He told
Parade
magazine that Tupac had not been difficult to direct, despite his reputation to the contrary.

“When we cast Tupac, he’d just gotten out of jail, and a lot of people were leery of working with him. But he never caused problems,” Hall insisted, “always coming to work prepared and on time. We never sensed that his luck was running out.”

At the 1997 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, four months after Tupac was killed, actor Tim Roth talked about starring opposite the rapper in
Gridlock’d.

“
It was great [working with him],” Roth told a reporter for the
Park Record
.
“
I know him only from the set, so I didn’t know his music and I hadn’t seen his films, and he preferred that. When he came to meet me for the first time, he said, ‘Please don’t see any [films] if you haven’t. Don’t listen to the music. Don’t see the videos. People are going to tell you things, and some of them are going to be true and some of them aren’t, but try to come in with a clean slate.’

“He was very charming, very witty. He’s a good actor, I think. My experience with him [was] we spent a lot of time laughing. I mean, we would get pissed off at each other and that’s the normal way of things day to day, but we had a good time. A lot of stuff came out in the press, almost as though he deserved it when he died, but I look at him and think, ‘Wow, that’s a great actor.’ If I saw the film and wasn’t in it, just saw it, I would think, ‘I would love to work with that guy.’ So it
is
tragic. He was constantly writing. He would film during
the day, then go off and direct videos, or produce videos, or be in the studio recording music or go off and write music. He was prolific.”

Tupac played the straight man to Roth’s crazy-junkie character.

“Comedy only works when you have somebody good and solid to fire your stuff off of,” Roth told the
Park Record.
“Although Tupac was really funny in the film, he makes a really good straight man.”

In an interview with
Mr. Showbiz
magazine, Roth said Tupac had a work ethic that surpassed others he had worked with: “He worked harder than any of us. He would be off directing videos at night and then go into the studio until four or five in the morning. Then he would be very tired and he would sleep as often as he could when there was down time. But he was very professional. ...”

“He talked about dying a lot,” Roth said, “because he knew it would happen. He knew he wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. It just was not going to be what happened to him. . . . He really wanted to get away from what was expected from him, from how people had pigeonholed him, and move on and do different things. That’s why he was doing
Gridlock’d
. It was part of that change—which is a very adult emotion, so he was somebody who was really growing. He had all the talent to do that, and he had the power and the money to do that.

But on the other hand, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. We’d talk about that, how exhausting it is to be that testosterone guy they want you to be on the street, then I would see an interview with him and he would talk about his life in a very mature way, and then I would see another interview with him and he would be getting in somebody’s face. Like everybody, he had a very childish aspect and a very mature aspect. And they were in conflict. He knew there was no clear-cut way out of where he was at that time. ...”

Roth’s assessment was insightful. The conflict within seemed to stem from Tupac’s prison-time perspective and the temptations and demands of the outside world. When
he was in jail, he told reporters he was a changed man. But after his release, he reverted to his old ways, talking tough and throwing gang hand signs. In many ways he appeared harder than ever before.

While in prison, Tupac said he wanted to team up with his friend Mike Tyson after he got out and start a youth organization called Us First to keep kids out of trouble. The new Tupac preached anti-violence, but he often didn’t practice what he preached.

The sequence of events on the night he was shot was a reflection of the almost schizophrenic contradictions in his life. On his way to perform at a Las Vegas charity event to keep kids out of trouble and off drugs, Tupac was seen beating Orlando Anderson and kicking him while he was down. Tupac played the role of the thug up until the end. Violence had become a way of life—and death—for him.

• • •

Former
Vibe
magazine senior writer Kevin Powell began interviewing Tupac during the early stages of his career and got to know him well. Powell described his relationship with Tupac as “very intense.”

“I was his biographer for a while,” he said. “Pac used to say to me all the time he wanted me to be his Alex Haley. [Haley] did the biography of Malcolm X.

“Sometimes I feel like a big brother to him, [like] I’m related to him. I miss him in a weird kind of way. You don’t want to see anyone die. I think it was internal and external questions on Tupac that ultimately led to his demise. Internally, he could never seem to turn that corner.”

The first time Powell interviewed Tupac was in 1993.

“Even then, he felt misunderstood,” Powell said. “I had been following his career since 1990 when he was with Digital Underground. It was a social commentary. I liked what he was saying. He stood out in my mind. I started collecting notes way before I got the go-ahead [to write a story] from
Vibe
. I
thought,
This is a kid who’s very much the nineties. He’s one person who represents the hip hop more than anybody else.

“He was very much the period, the way James Dean was in the 1950s. He talked about dying. Always. The first piece I did with him in
Vibe,
he mentioned himself dying, and didn’t want people to think he was a ‘hate whitey’ [person]. This kid off the bat was talking about things like that.”

Powell said he doesn’t know what would have become of Tupac had he lived.

“We’ll never know,” he said. “Tupac never really had the space to grow up, find out who he was. He was always in the public eye. The son of a famous Black Panther. He was selling drugs and trying to survive when he was young. The poverty dictated what he did. Once he had money, he was a workaholic. He never had time to take a step back. Everybody put pressure on Pac. Family, friends. He would have really had to take some time. He needed to step back and look at the source of that anger. He never, never got to do that. I was watching this documentary of Jimi Hendrix and it reminded me of Tupac. Everybody said [Hendrix] was dying out of frustration.

“I know from talking to people, Tupac didn’t even want to go to the Tyson fight that night. He wanted to chill in California. But he was a loyalist. He told them he would go, so he went. One thing Tupac said to me—I remember saying to him, ‘Why don’t you just be careful?’ and he said, ‘There’s no place like careful. If it’s time to go, it’s time to go.’ I think that’s sad. In black America some people are just waiting for death. A lot of us are like that. I’m amazed at how much people just don’t care.

“The first week in December 1995 was the last time I talked to him. I really believed, based on my conversations with him in prison, that he was going to change. He talked differently about women and racial issues. But then when I interviewed him on the set of a video, weed smoke came out of the trailer and he was flashing money. I took it personally. Sometimes as a journalist you get caught up. I thought, ‘God,
this guy, he’s not going to change.’ It depressed me. I knew it was the last time I would interview him. I didn’t know he would die; I just knew it was the last time.

“I think, if there’s anything we can learn from Tupac it’s like, man, you cannot live your life that fast and that hard and that recklessly without thinking through every decision you make. I remember thinking the last time I interviewed him, I was wishing he had still been in jail. He would have been safe from the people who not only wanted to kill him physically, but who also wanted to kill him spiritually.”

Sway, the San Francisco deejay, asked Tupac where he thought he might be in five years.

“I’ll have my own production company, which I’m close to right now. I’m doing my own movies,” Tupac told him. “I have my own restaurant, which I got right now with Suge and Snoop. I just wanna expand. I’m starting to put out some calendars for charity. I’m gonna start a little youth league in California so we can start playing some East Coast teams, some Southern teams. I wanna have like a Pop Warner League, except the rappers fund it and they’re the head coaches. Have a league where you can get a big trophy with diamonds in it for a nigga to stay drug free and stay in school.

“That’s the only way you can be on the team. We’ll have fun and eat pizza and have the finest girls there and throw concerts at the end of the year. That’s what I mean by giving back.

“I see myself having a job with Death Row,” Tupac continued, “being the A&R person and an artist that drop an album like Paul McCartney every five years. Not that I’m like Paul McCartney, but there’s no rapper who ever did it, so that’s why I use him as an example. But I wanna do it at leisure. My music will mean something and I’ll drop deeper shit.”

Four months after he was gunned down, Tupac Shakur was named favorite rap hip-hop artist at the American Music Awards.

• • •

Even after death, Tupac had more than an avid following. Fans lined up for hours at record stores across the country, including in Las Vegas, awaiting the November 5, 1996, midnight release of his last album,
Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory
, released posthumously under his rap alias Makaveli. The day before, Mike Tyson, accompanied by several men, had tried to buy the CD a day early from the Tower Records WOW! store on West Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, about 10 miles from Tyson’s Las Vegas mansion.