there has got to be a 1-800 number for tupac shakur sightings. just to make things easier for everyone, you know.
for everyone like myself, perhaps. because this morning, in the lull before the midday crush, i swear to god, i saw tupac on the number 6 train.
he wasn’'t wearing his defiant bandanna. no low slung sagging jeans. nothing in him reminiscent or imitative of the prison culture he used to rhapsodize.
he was, of all things, sweltering in a rather confining suit. salaryman’'s navy blue, of all hues. and of all days, a waspish tweedy kind of suit. this on a tepid spring day.
as i was straphanging across him, i could very well see the books he was cradling in his lap.
james baldwin, george orwell, two slim volumes of poetry by nikki giovanni. the winnie mandela autobiography. there was something about method acting and another one about tai chi. tai-chi?
and on top of this voluminous pile, he was scratching like a mad man on a yellow legal pad. i leaned over and gasped to realize he was working on a draft of some sort of thug dictionary.
thug. n. one who has nothing but is willing to hustle for anything.
hustler. n. someone putting to good use what his mama gave him to make a go at life.
playa. n. a promiscuous person who has a harem of women. he is never exclusively available to any of them.
mac. n. a superplaya. one who lives off the largesse of his bitches.
and i got giddy just trying to keep up with his scribbling that i decided i find an empty seat to steady myself.
as soon as i found one, union square stop came and out he went. i scampered after him but he was gone.
for my generation, the still unsolved murder of rap giant tupac amaru shakur is our version, hip hop’'s version, of elvis lives looneyism.
sure he was seductive like a hip hop marvin gaye. but what baits me deeper and deeper into his mythology was his addiction to death, his arrogance and bravura, his lyrical eloquence, his narrative complexity, his religious sensibilities. a riveting complexity and a resolute refusal to be described, to be categorized, to be catalogued just to be any one of these constructs.
as much as i refuse, even until now, that it is already over for him after mere twenty five years of vicious life.
so much so that it is easier for me to wallow in the gunky pop culture realm of amateur criminology and overamped conspiracy theories.
my favorite, by far, is that tupac is still alive, chilling out from the vicissitudes of thug life in capitalist free cuba with his adopted godmother assata shakur.
and sometimes, when the weather finally clears here in east coast where he was born, he would just fly in.
and he would continue to edit, rewrite, and polish the draft of the forever evolving mythology about him being a misogynist thug, a failed black revolutionary, a conflicted son, a lyrical street poet and a beautiful, hard to let go urban legend.