I met him through some rough characters I knew. “Where you at? Why you ain’t coming?” I’m, like, “I’m coming, man, hold on.” Come.” I stopped off to get some weed, and he paged me again. Now, this guy I was going to charge, because I could see that they was just using me, so I said, “All right, you give me seven G’s and I’ll do the song.” He said, “I’ve got the money. After I laid the song, I got a page from this guy Booker, telling me he wanted me to rap on Little Shawn’s record. He’s, like, “Pac, I want you to come to my house and lay this rap down for my tapes.” I said, “All right, I’ll come for free.” So I went to his house-me, Stretch, and a couple other homeboys. IF YOU SEE EVERYBODY DYING BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU SAYING, IT DON’T MATTER THAT YOU DIDN’T MAKE THEM DIE, IT JUST MATTERS THAT YOU DIDN’T SAVE THEM.”Ĭan you take us back to that night at Quad Recording Studios in Times Square? “IF WE REALLY ARE SAYING RAP IS AN ART FORM, THEN WE GOT TO BE MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR LYRICS. Even if they give me the maximum sentence, that’s still my job. God let me live for me to do something extremely extraordinary, and that’s what I have to do. The Tupac that would stand by and let dishonorable things happen is dead. The addict knew if I went to jail, then it couldn’t live. You sound like you’re saying the opposite now. When I spoke to you a year ago, you said that if you ended up in jail, your spirit would die. I’d be in my hotel room, smoking too much, drinking, going to clubs, just being numb. I wasn’t having them because my brain was half dead from smoking so much weed. People look to me to do things for them, to have answers. I don’t see myself being special I just see myself having more responsibilities than the next man. I got shot five times, you know what I’m saying? People was trying to kill me. When I got in here, all the prisoners was, like, “Fuck that gangsta rapper.” I’m not a gangsta rapper. They’re going to come 100 percent, so if I don’t be 100 percent pure-hearted, I’m going to lose. But I see now that whether I show up for work or not, the evil forces are going to be at me. I was so scared of this responsibility that I was running away from it. I’m just as guilty for not doing nothing as I am for doing things. Even though I’m innocent of the charge they gave me, I’m not innocent in terms of the way I was acting.Ĭould you tell me specifically what you mean? Then I started seeing my situation and what got me here. I was reading whole books in one day, and writing, and that was putting me in a peace of mind. Then every day I started doing, like, a thousand push-ups for myself. I was sitting in a room, like there was two people in the room, evil and good. Emotionally, it was like I didn’t know myself. Well, the first two days in prison, I had to go through what life is like when you’ve been smoking weed for as long as I have and then you stop. How do you feel after everything you’ve been through these past few weeks? If I get killed, I want people to get every drop. After a brush with death and the barrage of rumor and innuendo that followed, Tupac said he’d summoned me because “this is my last interview. “I’m kinda nervous,” he admitted at one point. He looked me in the eyes as we spoke and smoked one Newport after another. Dressed in a white Adidas sweatshirt and oversized blue jeans, he seemed more alert than he had been in all our interviews and encounters. Tupac strutted into the room without a limp, in spite of having been recently wounded in the leg-among other places.

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