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"FacebookPinterest\n\nReal Niggas Don't Send Dick Flicks\n\n It only occurs to me after midnight that it might be past 8 P.M. Normally, due to domestic circumstances, I'm asleep by ten. But it doesn't feel late. Rick Ross lives in his own personal time zone, and when you're around him, you're subject to it. Though I do notice a strange lull in the house, a subtle shift in metabolic state. Ross's bodyguard, a gentle-looking man with sleepy eyes who is nearly seven feet tall, lopes through the kitchen still wearing this strange headset that makes him look like he's getting translation at the U.N. General Assembly. Darren, a kid from Milwaukee, is still in the basement, editing what must be just server-melting amounts of Rick Ross video. I confuse two of the other guys who work for Ross\u2014one's name is Red and the other's is Black, and I think Red wears a black hat. One of them is stripping the tobacco out of several packs of grape Swisher Sweets and then reassembling them into precise blunts. It's mesmerizing, like watching someone who's really good at knitting. But despite all this activity, it feels like the house\u2014the sense of industry that's been ratcheted up for the nine hours I've been here\u2014has slipped into standby mode. It occurs to me that it might be the weed, the same way it feels like you're driving ninety miles an hour when you're crawling along at five. Then it occurs to me that a better explanation is that Rick Ross has disappeared.\n\nIn the den, Gucci Pucci, Ross's manager, is lying on one of the black leather sofas. There's a television channel whose programming seems to consist entirely of people getting into car crashes, and Mr. Pucci is watching it.\n\n\"Where's Ross?\" I ask.\n\nA conversion van plows through the front of a 7-Eleven and surprises a woman buying milk. \"Asleep,\" Pucci says without turning his head. \"Or...\" Then he makes the \"banging someone\" gesture with his fist.\n\nIt's not hard to figure out who that someone might be. Since I arrived in Atlanta nine hours ago, I have met at least a dozen men at Rick Ross's house/recording studio, all of whom kind of work for him and are also hoping to get their big break from him. But I have met exactly one woman. When I arrived this afternoon, Ross was reclining in a cushioned dining chair wearing camouflage cargo shorts, a blindingly white T-shirt, and giant Louis Vuitton sunglasses. The room was fragrant with cocoa butter, and a slender blonde woman in black leggings had both hands up the legs of his shorts. She had skin that looked like it smelled good and a face like Whitney Houston in 1987. Ross dismissed her wordlessly, with a nod, put one warm paw on my shoulder, and let me know that should there be anything I need, anything, all I had to do was ask. He said the word \"anything\" like someone who embraced the scope of what that might mean. He spoke in that deep creamy voice that seems to come from six miles down in his chest. A voice you instantly recognize from his music.\n\nYou can't listen to any station that plays hip-hop for an hour and not hear a Rick Ross song. He's become one of the very few people who pretty much anyone would list if you said, \"Name some famous rappers\" (and they didn't say, like, MC Hammer). And one of fewer still who can make millions of dollars a year rapping. Elliott Wilson, the editor of Rap Radar, classifies Ross this way: Right now he's still technically a street rapper, though just barely. \"Street\" means his bread-and-butter demographic is black people, and mostly males. But he is at the very pinnacle of street. He has started to exhibit the signs of mainstream iconic status\u2014appealing to the full spectrum of teenage boys, culturally curious white people, ironic college kids. Basically anyone who listens to rap on the radio sometimes. \"There's Jay-Z, Kanye, and Wayne\u2014and Eminem is the king of his own domain,\" Wilson says. \"And then there's Rick Ross, right on that cusp.\" Three of his last four albums have debuted at no. 1 on the hip-hop charts (the other one at no. 2). If his new record, God Forgives, I Don't, doesn't follow suit, it will shock everyone in the music industry who knows anything.\n\nBut the question, which is actually not immediately answerable, is why that's happened. Because (a) while the man does have a way with words (see \"The Rossary,\" below), it's probably not his lyrics. I'm into distribution, I'm like Atlantic, he raps on the song \"Hustlin',\" I got them mothafuckas flyin' across the Atlantic. Or this, from \"9 Piece\" (which is a great song regardless): I'm smoking dope, I'm on my cell phone / I'm selling dope, straight off the iPhone. I mean, the man not only rhymes \"Atlantic\" with \"Atlantic,\" he rhymes \"phone\" with \"phone.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAnd (b) it's not because he's rapping about something new, or at all different from what anyone is rapping about or has rapped about for the last twenty years. His songs are mostly about selling drugs, having guns, buying watches, driving cars. He's on a song called \"600 Benz,\" which is about having a conscience\u2014and a 600 Benz. When Ross says, Bitch I got eight balls in the song \"9 Piece,\" he is, of course, not talking about his own anatomy (though the first time I saw him in person, I thought, \"You're huge, you might actually have eight balls\"); he is talking about selling cocaine. He actually named his record label Maybach Music, after the ultraluxury Mercedes-Benz car line. Nearly every one of his music videos features, in slow motion, either smoke snaking menacingly out of his mouth or Ross stepping menacingly from a luxury sedan. Or both. They also often feature Ferraris and Lamborghinis being driven through gorgeously empty streets, defying international traffic laws. And what did he do when he went to the Cannes Film Festival this year?\n\n\"Cannes,\" he says, like the word transports him back. \"That was my first time going there. Took the team over, ended up fucking around, getting some Ferraris, Lamborghinis, going to the Eden Roc, kicking it with a few homeys. Shout-out to Leonardo DiCaprio.\"\n\nIt's basically a vision of the good life as prescribed by the '80s TV show Miami Vice\u2014which, while Ross was growing up in the shitsville Miami-metro ghetto of Carol City, he says, was the show that taught him what to want.\n\nIn Miami, he says, it's gotten so he can hardly get anything done. He bought the Atlanta house to get away and record music. It's a relatively modest house (for a man who drives a cream-colored Rolls-Royce) in a development of miniature Tudor mansions cut into the low scrub near the airport. Beige brickwork, beige trim, beige tiles on the series of pitched roofs that make the house look like a neatly held poker hand. If it were a manor, it might be called Orthodontist Hall.\n\n\"I may come down here to record ten records over two or three days,\" he told me after he dismissed the blond-haired woman. \"I just have my homeys or whatever bringing me the best food. I smoke the best weed. I get the best massages\"\u2014which, he said, is what I'd walked in on. \"I keep myself in shit like this.\"\n\nI asked if he had a girlfriend.\n\n\"I'm single,\" he said. \"I'm enjoying life. Being a boss. Like all true bosses, one day you gotta give it up.\"\n\nOne day. But not today. Today he's still the Boss. Or, as he says it, the Bawse. He also calls himself Rozay and often refers to himself as a don. Like this evening at Houston's, one of his favorite restaurants. After he finished eating a dinner of fried cheese bread, artichoke dip, roasted chicken with sides, and three pieces of Key lime pie (two of them were to go; come on, son), he pushed his plates away and said, \"That's how you gotta eat. You gotta eat like a don.\" He has a habit of handing down proclamations like that about the way bosses should live. He likes to visit the Louis Vuitton store at the Lenox mall when he is in town and has some downtime, and this afternoon, as we drove there, the topic of former congressman Anthony Weiner came up. Ross had never heard of him. He became curious as he learned the story. Some passages from a leaked Facebook chat were quoted.\n\n\"How the fuck that shit get out?\" he wanted to know. He was told that Weiner tweeted a picture of his dick to someone.\n\n\"Chicks send me pictures,\" Ross said. \"And I appreciate it! I love all of them. But I don't do that shit. I'm the Boss.\" He shook his head, his expression hidden behind his candy-apple-red-framed aviator sunglasses. \"Real niggas don't send dick flicks.\"\n\nAnd in a way Rick Ross was right. Anthony Weiner wanted to live like a boss, though he couldn't admit it to anyone. And that shame was part of the reason he wasn't acting like a boss. Anthony Weiner is not a real nigga, and I think he understands his mistake now.\n\nAfter dinner at Houston's, before we swung back here to the house, Ross offered to put me through a short boss-apprenticeship program. In order to learn how to live like a boss, I would live like the Boss. I would eat what he ate, go where he went, smoke what he smoked.\n\nI wondered what would happen if I smoked what he smoked. He'd smoked ten blunts since I'd been there.\n\n\"You'd just be so in touch, man, with yourself,\" Ross said. \"For me to be in the position I am? And I live a pretty stress-free life, man.\"\n\nReally? It seems hard to lead a stress-free life even without being a famous person.\n\n\"Man, you need to stay in touch with your marijuana more often. You know what I'm saying?\"\n\nBut after about half of one blunt, I realized that being any more in touch with my marijuana would mean not remembering how to speak. And even now, by the time Rick Ross disappears for his nap, I'm still not entirely not stoned.\n\nRoss's kitchen cabinets are filled with rations that could last six months. One is entirely stocked with Ortega taco fixings, another with cans of Manwich, another with six-packs of Yoo-hoo, another with bags of Halloween-size candy bars. I try not to go back to the supersize bag of Butterfingers, but it's inevitable. I think: \"No wonder Rick Ross is fat if he smokes this shit all the time and has cupboards full of Butterfingers.\" But Ross is not eating the Butterfingers. He is secreted away in his chambers with his non-girlfriend/masseuse.\n\nOn the television in the den, a semi plows through a tollbooth.\n\n\"So now what happens?\" I say to Gucci Pucci. \"Is the night over?\"\n\nHe shoots a look over his shoulder. No, the night isn't over, you dipshit. \"Gonna hit the strip club later.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nYou See Anything You Want to Fuck With, Compliments of Rick Ross?\n\n I'm still watching car-crash television on the sofa when Johnny Dang shows up. Five feet tall, in acid-washed jeans and a T-shirt with the graphical theme of MONEY IS GREAT, Johnny Dang is a Vietnamese jeweler from Houston whose business cards boast stores in both the Galleria mall and the Sharpstown mall. And he is here to hand-deliver a Rolex for Rick Ross, plus a lesser iced-out Cartier and some baubles and curiosities. He's bleary and coated in a light stink, having come from the airport. It's nearly 1 A.M. (which, I'm telling you, feels early; it's like being at a Las Vegas casino). Dang bros out with the people he knows\u2014Black, Red, Spiff TV, who directs all of the videos for Maybach Music.\n\n\"It's a lucky coincidence you're here,\" Ross told me. \"I have a $100,000 watch coming today.\" It was also a lucky day because Spiff had his Bentley delivered. There must be a lot of lucky days here.\n\nThe commotion seems to have roused Ross. He appears at his bedroom door. He has pillow face and pillow chest. For once he doesn't have on sunglasses, and you can see that he has the longest, most lustrous eyelashes a 300-pound man could possibly have. His butt crack travels from his Polo bor briefs almost to the middle of his back. He's shirtless, of course. If you know anything about Rick Ross, it's what he looks like with his shirt off. At first that seems kind of courageous, something a women's magazine might call \"body positive.\" But then you realize he's like the fat black McConaughey.\n\nRoss hugs Johnny Dang, who would look appropriate perched on Rick Ross's shoulder. Dang produces the watch, which he has been carrying in his jeans pocket. Ross loves it. He asks Spiff to get his camera, and Spiff films the scene in the kitchen. Ross flashes the watch at Spiff and says, \"Forty carats! Let all the kids know: Maybach Music!\"\n\nRoss's nap partner is up now, too, hovering in the periphery in leggings and a white tee. In the time I spend here, I never see her in shoes, never even see her in anything that couldn't be called pajamas. She's like a genie in a beautifully upholstered bottle. She's like a small, exotic caged bird. Ross calls for his entire watch collection, which Red brings down in a Louis Vuitton traveling watch case. There are so many, I immediately get confused about which ones are new.\n\n\"That's disgusting!\" the rapper (and Maybach artist) Pill says, looking at them.\n\n\"The rose gold one look like pink champagne!\" Ross says. \"Ros\u00E9! You want to drink that dial.\"\n\nEveryone is trying them on now. Ross loves to lend out his jewelry. Just as he loves to buy things for people. Earlier today, at Louis Vuitton, he insisted on buying belts for Spiff and Beat Billionaire, a young producer who hangs out with Ross. He wanted to buy me something as well: \"You see anything you want to fuck with, compliments of Rick Ross?\"\n\nRoss bought himself an iPhone case and a pair of shoes at Louis Vuitton, and then he directed the driver, Black (Red?), to Walter's, the famous old-school sneaker store. By the time we got there, almost the entire extended Ross entourage had arrived and was trying on shoes.\n\n\"What's cool is when Rick Ross go shopping, everybody go shopping,\" Spiff said. \"He make sure everybody grabbing a pair of sneakers. Whatever they want. If people know Ross is shopping? We show up.\"\n\nThat's part of the joy Rick Ross feels in his station: to watch others partake of his abundance, and for everyone to know that the abundance comes from a single source. Now Ross announces: \"We gonna go to the strip club. You feel me? Leave in about thirty minutes. Not gonna stay too long.\"\n\nThe van is outfitted for group travel\u2014it's fully custom with tinted windows, a flat-screen TV, iPod docks, swivel chairs, like Rick Ross's tiny USS Enterprise. There are seven of us in it\u2014Ross and me, Red (Black?), Spiff and Johnny Dang, Beat Billionaire, the silent security man in the front seat. He is such a gentle soul, so quiet (I will spend eighteen hours with him and never once hear him speak), behaves so much like a man who believes he is an emissary from a land of vegetarian giants sent to a strange world he doesn't understand, that I can't imagine him ever hurting anyone. The others get in Gucci Pucci's pearl Lexus truck. The front gate bears an ironwork MMG crest (Maybach Music Group). It opens remotely and we caravan out, past the other dentists' manors nesting in culs-de-sac around us.\n\nRoss's seat is the backmost bench in the van, where he can look out on the members of his apparatus arrayed before him in their captain's chairs. The air is still hot, but the syrupy Atlanta traffic has thinned, and we move easily through the quiltwork of interconnected, beautifully landscaped parking lots that makes up endless stretches of the city.\n\nSomeone has already tweeted out that Ross is going to be at the strip club. So that pump has been primed. Another of Ross's people has called ahead so that his song \"Pac Man\" will be playing when Ross walks in.\n\n\"I sent one of my homeys ahead to get some bottles and some singles,\" he tells me. How many singles? \"On a cool night like this? Probably start out with $10,000 in singles.\"\n\nSure, okay. I mean, it's a cool night, right? The car stereo is tuned to station 44 on satellite radio, Hip-Hop Nation. The Lil Wayne song \"John\" comes on, which features Rick Ross. The driver turns it up.\n\n\"They rocking that hard on the streets,\" Beat Billionaire says.\n\n\"They better be,\" Ross says. He listens to his verse, and when it's over he says: \"I'm a hustler. I'm the Boss.\"\n\nRick Ross's part on \"John\" kind of makes that song. But again, it's hard to say why\u2014he basically says I got a chopper in the car a few times, and says Big black nigga, in an icy watch / shoes on the coupe, bitch I got a Nike shop, etc. Which is not exactly new territory. Rapping about the same shit everyone else has been rapping about for twenty years is of course a problem that's not Ross-specific. A lot of rap music has been, for all intents and purposes, contentless for a long time. The subject matter\u2014selling drugs, fucking bitches, what it's like to grow up poor in housing projects, how much money you have now, watches, cars, etc.\u2014has been repeated incessantly for so many years the form has become way more important than the message. And that may be the key to understanding the Ross phenomenon. You're happy to hear his voice. The man may not be able to play a musical instrument, but he has an ear for beats. Warner Music trusts his instincts for building songs so fully that it signed an extremely rich deal with Maybach Music. He chants at you in that buttercream voice, slow enough that you can actually sing along. Rick Ross is likable because he knows he's a character. Figuratively, but also in the theatrical sense. He's an actor playing a fictional role.\n\nRick Ross was born William Leonard Roberts II in 1976, and he borrowed his stage name (and the associated big-time cocaine-selling hustler persona) from the legendary L.A. drug lord Freeway Ricky Ross. But the website MediaTakeout uncovered a photograph of William Leonard Roberts II when he was a Florida corrections officer. Most people thought that'd be the end of his career. Freeway Ricky Ross then sued him for stealing his name. None of it mattered. Rick Ross the rapper just sold more records.\n\nIt's one theory that Ross's idea was to be this generation's Notorious B.I.G.: the fat dude who was a drug dealer and now has sex with beautiful women and runs the rap game. And he's basically succeeded. But where Rick Ross really separates himself is that he inhabits the clich\u00E9 completely while also seeming to know it's a clich\u00E9. You can like him if you think you're hard, and you can like him if you think being hard is ridiculous. Because Rick Ross is always both inside and outside a joke he's making about hip-hop music. I mean, look at him in the Lil Wayne \"John\" video. The man is sitting in a wheelchair that has big silver spinner rims on it. But at the same time he looks so freakin' boss in that burgundy velour suit.\n\nThat's why the only moment he loses me as a willing audience the entire time we're together\u2014the only time I'm not basically eating out of his hand\u2014is when he makes arguments like the one he makes right now, on the way to the strip club, when I ask him about the uncanny resemblance between the fantasies he creates and the ones on Miami Vice.\n\n\"Of course. Of course! That was the mosh pit I was raised in, and when you listen to my music, you hear me boasting of the most lavish shit,\" he says. And here's where he goes off track. \"But I saw the underworld of Miami Vice. A dude we grew up with was on America's Most Wanted. An $80 million drug ring came from my neighborhood. The reason street motherfuckers cool with me is if you don't come from that life, you can't get away with portraying that life. That's the story I tell. That's the story I saw. You saw a plaque at the house for a good friend of mine who was murdered in front of his wife and three kids. A good friend. P-Nut. Rest in peace.\"\n\nHere's the thing. He may actually be telling the truth. He may be the streetest dude out there, he may have gotten shot more times than 50 Cent, sold more drugs than Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls combined. But talking about it just ruins the vibe Ross has created. Trying to get me to take you seriously as a former drug dealer (which he does, at several points in our time together) is, at this point, boring. Whether it's true or not doesn't matter.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIt Feels Good to Be Somebody\n\n Kamal's 21, a tiny strip club in the type of building that almost always houses either strip clubs or rug stores, is deposited in a vast expanse of Atlanta that is dead asleep, dark and silent. It's two in the morning, but Kamal's is teeming with cars, and there's a line out front where a man in a flak jacket and a SWAT-team cap is frisking people. Pucci got here first, and he comes out the front door of the club and sticks his head in the window.\n\n\"It's crowded,\" he says. \"It's gonna be hood. But let's go.\"\n\nSeveral dudes from Kamal's whisk us past a line of people. On the way inside, Johnny Dang puts his platinum-and-diamond fronts in.\n\n\"This is how you go to a strip club!\" Ross yells.\n\nAnd Pill yells back: \"Damn, it feel good to be somebody!\"\n\nRoss loves that. He says, \"That's one of my boss rules. It feels good to be somebody!\"\n\nOur time at the club doesn't last more than an hour. Kamal's is tiny and windowless, and almost every surface is carpeted. The visit doesn't involve much more than Rick Ross (and the rest of us) standing up on a banquette throwing money on the floor. I have no idea where the bricks of money come from, but every so often another appears, and Ross throws hundreds and hundreds of never-before-touched $1 bills on the floor. Not with any kind of flourish or fetishistic savor or anything, but like a man feeding pigeons. A man who doesn't even really like pigeons. Eventually, with considerably less enthusiasm than pigeons being fed, some of the strippers migrate over to the Maybach Music area. The money is three or four inches thick on the floor and on the benches where we stand. Now, I have heard songs about \"making it rain,\" but I didn't exactly know what it meant. And now I can't understand why no one, not even the strippers, is picking up the money. It requires a shameful amount of impulse control not to stuff my pockets. The DJ plays sixty straight minutes of Rick Ross songs. The music's too loud to talk. There doesn't appear to be any private room where you can get a blow job\u2014and no interest on the part of Maybach in finding one. This seems simply to be a promotional appearance.\n\nBy four o'clock in the morning, we're sailing along the empty twelve-lane highways of Atlanta again, back to Ross's house.\n\n\"I like that Egypt bitch,\" Ross says. He's talking about a stripper who had paid special attention to him\u2014a light-skinned woman with a nose ring. \"She have soft edges.\" He explains to me what that means: \"She have natural hair.\"\n\nSpiff starts telling a story: \"Hey, hey, y'all know Johnny Dang from the hood, right? The Vietnam hood! He was walking in the jungle one time, and two dudes on a moped stole his dog. So they could eat it!\" Dang says it's true.\n\n\"You ate canine before?\" Ross asks. Johnny Dang nods. \"What kind? German shepherd? Teacup poodle?\"\n\nJohnny Dang says, \"Just a regular dog!\"\n\nThis is a kind of rote form now, the rapper with the entourage. The gaggle of young, talented rappers and producers nesting under wing who owe everything to you. But I don't know of anyone who loves the job quite as much as Rick Ross. A few years ago, I spent some time with Lil Wayne and his right-hand-man-from-childhood (Cortez), his Rolls-Royce Phantom, his non-girlfriend-girlfriends. Wayne was moody, demanding, unsatisfied, relentlessly creative, chronically restless and unsatisfied when it came to his music and his surroundings, restless and unsatisfied when it came to everything. Typical indulged-artist behavior. Ross couldn't be more different. He very much appreciates having a pool table with his crest on it and girls who want to have sex with him without asking to be his girlfriend. Frankly, it's nice to finally see someone enjoy the disgusting excesses of fame and money instead of pretending to despise them, which is what rock stars and CEOs apparently feel they're supposed to do. Maybe it's because he wasn't really successful until late in his twenties and so doesn't take it for granted. But it's got to be something constitutional as well. He loves being the Boss. When he signed his deal with Warner Music, he hung out the whole day and met basically everyone who works at the company. No one does that. It kind of violates the snobbery of being the talent. Heavy is the head that wears the crown? Not this motherfucking head.\n\nThe Gentlest Bodyguard's specialty (besides appearing to be gentle while not minding if he has to rip people's tracheae out, I bet) is breakfast, and when we're back at the house, he goes to the stove. Into a large frying pan he cracks twenty-four eggs and waits for them to cook, then meticulously flips each one without breaking a yolk. In a pot the grits bubble. And in a large skillet, several cans of bubble-gum-pink Hormel corned-beef hash sizzle on high heat, never changing color. The non-girlfriend girlfriend is happy to have company again. Darren from Milwaukee\u2014who apparently keeps the hours of an ER doctor\u2014comes up from his basement editing suite to hang out.\n\nAfter everyone eats, people start disappearing. Home, to sleep. It's impossible to get a taxi at this hour, all the way out in the super-suburbs of Atlanta. It takes an hour for one of Ross's young rappers to be assigned the job of driving me back to my hotel. I'll just say good-bye to Ross, I say, and be on my way. Pucci goes to look for him.\n\n\"Gotta get a rain check,\" he says. Then he makes the \"banging someone\" gesture with his fist.\n\nIt takes ten minutes of driving for it to start to feel like the 5 A.M. I'm familiar with. Before long, I'm asleep in the car.\n\nDevin Friedman is GQ's director of editorial projects."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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