I really don’t know how else else to say this to why even bother getting fancy with words: GQ’s profile of Rick Ross in its new issue is the most stunningly WTF! thing I’ve read in a long time. The set-up is simple: the magazine’s Devin Friedman spent 24 hours with Ross and his crew. Insanity and hilarity ensued.
Since I was literally driving myself batty trying to figure out what parts of this I should excerpt for a post, I decided to just select the ten best quotes/parts to highlight in sequential order as I read the piece. But trust me, even that was hard. This whole thing is just ridiculous. A celebrity profile for the ages.
#10
In 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.
“Where’s Ross?” I ask.
A 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.
#9
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.
#8
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.
“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”—which, he said, is what I’d walked in on. “I keep myself in shit like this.”
I asked if he had a girlfriend. “I’m single,” he said. “I’m enjoying life. Being a boss. Like all true bosses, one day you gotta give it up.”
#7
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.”
#6
“How the fuck that shit get out?” he wanted to know. He was told that Weiner tweeted a picture of his dick to someone.
“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.”
#5
I wondered what would happen if I smoked what he smoked. He’d smoked ten blunts since I’d been there.
“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.”
Really? It seems hard to lead a stress-free life even without being a famous person.
“Man, you need to stay in touch with your marijuana more often. You know what I’m saying?”
#4
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?”
#3
That’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.”
Someone 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.
“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.”
#2
Spiff 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.
“You ate canine before?” Ross asks. Johnny Dang nods. “What kind? German shepherd? Teacup poodle?”
Johnny Dang says, “Just a regular dog!”
#1
After 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.
“Gotta get a rain check,” he says. Then he makes the “banging someone” gesture with his fist.
How you like him now, Kreayshawn?
