But that wasn’t the end of Tupac’s troubles. Seven months later, he was hit with another wrongful-death suit, this one from the parents of a six-year-old boy who was killed in the crossfire between Tupac’s crew and some old Marin City gang rivals. Tupac’s label, Interscope Records, settled out of court for a little under half a million. Nine months after that, he was arrested for trying to club a fellow MC who had upstaged him at a Michigan State concert. He pleaded down to a misdemeanor and served ten days in jail. Five months after that, he was charged in the nonfatal shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers. He claimed that he and his posse were simply coming to the aid of a black motorist the officers had been harassing. His defense — and his lyrics — were later substantiated by mounting evidence of racism on the part of the two cops, one of whom wrote in his report that the “niggers came by and did a drive-by shooting.” The charges against Tupac were dropped.
And then came his Waterloo, three weeks later, in the form of a nineteen-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson. In November 1993 she cried rape. Everyone listened, so much so that when Tupac’s third album, Me Against the World, premiered at the top of the Billboard charts in 1995, he became the first recording artist in history to enjoy a number one debut from inside a prison cell.
Well, maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word.
I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him, said Hunta.
________________
For my own well-being, I should have caught up on sleep, but I was simply too keyed up. By 9 a.m. on Saturday, I was back in my car, driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, hoping to jump-start my sputtering brain. I needed to understand the woman I was suddenly up against. And to understand Lisa Glassman, I needed to understand what really happened to her the night of Friday, December 15, when she celebrated a very Mean World Christmas.
Doug Modine was no stranger to the fine art of ass-covering. Right after Lisa had tendered her angry resignation, he solicited written statements from nearly two dozen people who had attended the party. These weren’t sworn depositions. Doug just wanted to get the story down while the facts were still fresh. He put it all in the file.
For the gala, Mean World had rented out one of the grand ballrooms at Le Meridien, a posh hotel on the eastern end of Beverly Hills. Between the staff, the talent, and all their friends and families, there were more than two hundred people present for the buffet.
After dinner Byron “Judge” Rampton spoiled all the kids with gifts, mostly of the PlayStation 2 variety. The employees got generous checks. The artists got car keys. Despite the fact that music sales were stagnant for the first time in two decades, 2000 had been damn good to Mean World. Things were festive. So festive, in fact, that by 9:30 all the mothers in the room got the heads-up from Doug. Soon this party would not be suitable for children.
Although the alcohol consumption had started with dinner, nighttime was the right time for all the homeys in the house to break out the bud. You know what I’m talking about. The bammer, the brown, the buddha, the cheeba, the chronic, the dank, the doobage, the hash, the herb, the homegrown, the ill, the indo, the method, the sess, the sake, the shit, the skunk, the stress, the tabacci, the wacky. Marijuana. What can I say? California knows how to party. For the boys at the label, it wasn’t enough to crack another 40 and smoke some kill. They were also determined to put the “ho” in “ho ho ho.”
So in came the ladies. Dashers and dancers, prancers and vixens. What started out as an evening of reindeer games devolved into one big stag party. You won’t hear me casting judgment. After Keoki Atoll, that’d be the pot calling the kettle bitch.
At the same time, I can spare some empathy for Lisa. Born and raised in Oakland. Accepted, full scholarship, into the San Francisco High School for the Performing Arts. Graduated magna cum laude. Accepted, full scholarship, into UC Santa Barbara. Graduated summa cum laude, with a BA in African American studies and a BFA in Music Theory. Card-carrying member of the ACLU, DNC, Black Women’s Caucus, and (for God’s sake) Mensa. Has published poetry in numerous anthologies and has written a bunch of articles for LA Weekly, covering the hip-hop scene. She’ll be twenty-six in July.
This was no bitch.
As a smart and skillful young woman, Lisa must have had a hard time breathing in all that secondhand smut. Lord only knew what rationale she used to fuel her polite smile. Boys will be boys? All’s fair in rap and war? Ain’t nothing but a gangsta party?
I didn’t know. I didn’t pretend to know. All I had was the testimony of others. The witnesses all seemed to agree that Lisa was having a bad time to begin with. All throughout the night she threw loaded glances at Hunta, enough to trigger a loud spat between him and Simba. No one was particularly alarmed by the squabble. It wasn’t a big deal, one source quipped. They only fight when they’re married.
At 9:50, Simba took Latisha and left. Hunta didn’t go after them. Instead he smoked some blunts (pot-filled cigars, for the uninitiated) and got obnoxious. He felt up Felisha, the label’s very own platinum-selling R&B sex kitten, which ignited a heated argument between Hunta and Felisha’s husband, fellow rapper X/S. The fight was broken up by the Judge.
Hunta eventually settled down…with Lisa. They retreated to a remote couch and had, as witnesses describe it, a quiet but serious looking conversation, complete with lots of touching. At 10:30, the pair set off for quieter pastures. Everybody saw them leave together.
An hour later, Lisa came back. Alone.
Everyone agreed in no uncertain terms that she seemed perfectly fine. Her hair. Her clothes. Her demeanor. All was jake. She spent another ten minutes talking to her immediate boss, producer Kevin Haggerty. All work-related stuff, according to him, although he admitted in his statement that he was too stoned to do anything but nod. At a quarter to midnight, she gave Kevin a kiss on the cheek, wished him a great holiday, and left. Ipso facto.
Wrongo. It occurred to me during my aimless drive that these accounts were a little too consistent and time-accurate, especially for a bunch of people baked out of their muffins. I had gone through my own marijuana phase in college. After two joints I became chronologically challenged. Every time I opened my mouth to say something, I got the nervous sense that I’d been droning on forever. “You know, the other day I — JESUS! How long have I been talking? I’m so sorry! I don’t usually ramble like — JESUS! I’m doing it again!”
Maybe the folks at Mean World held their ganja better than I did. Maybe Lisa wore a huge clock on her back. Or maybe Doug had embellished the stories, which meant there were facts worth hiding.
At 10 a.m., I parked the car in front of a mattress store on Santa Monica Boulevard and called Doug. In L.A. the pay phones were merely decorative nostalgia. Nobody actually used them. From the way passing drivers looked at me, I might as well have been wearing a porkpie hat and riding a penny-farthing bicycle. Like everyone else, of course, I owned a cell phone. I just didn’t want to show up on any of Mean World’s phone logs, should the very worst happen.
Doug sounded half asleep. “Hello?”
“Doug, it’s Scott. I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“A little. Are you using a pay phone?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’ve been reading these statements. I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I don’t mean to sound like a TV lawyer, but I can’t help you if you’re going to lie to me.”