I really, really hope you motherfuckers got foie gras up in this piece.
We meet at a place downtown whose name I cannot pronounce, something with letters in it I do not recognize.
“The food here is banging,” Jeezy assures me as we enter, the maître d’ scuttling over to greet us.
“Mister Jeezy,” he says. “It has been so long since you have come to see us. How have you been?”
“I’m a’ight,” Jeezy says. “Shit’s been good, _____________.” I assume that he is addressing the maître d’ by name and not clearing his throat, but I don’t know. I took Spanish in high school.
He orders for both of us without looking at the menu. “Let’s start off with some of them crudites,” he says. “And that escarole and white bean soup.”
“You ain’t going to believe this shit,” he says, turning to me. “Their escarole and white bean soup will make your momma’s escarole and white bean soup crawl under a bus bench and die of shame.”
I think to comment on this, then decide against it. Jeezy is legendarily touchy about his momma.
“I was reading some shit the other day on the tour bus,” he says after the waiter has left us with a bottle of Bollinger and two glasses. “You ever get up on Joseph Campbell?”
I nod, having not actually read any Campbell, but having heard that one of his books maybe ties together Jesus and Luke Skywalker. Luke Skywalker the character played by Mark Hamill in the Star Wars franchise, not the 2 Live Crew hypeman who assumed his name.
“The Hero With A Thousand Faces. You ever peep that shit?”
I nod less confidently this time, chewing on a radish and washing it down with the Bollingers.
“So, this motherfucker Campbell is saying there’s like a model or some shit,” Jeezy begins, attempting to shape the thing he is trying to say with his hands for emphasis. When he’s thinking hard, really focused, he looks about twelve years old.
You would be willing, I think, to stay with him forever if only you knew he was capable of that look. Even if you seldom saw it. Even if you never saw it again.
“He says there’s this like archetype.”
I nod, wondering when the much-touted escarole and white bean soup might arrive.
“Like, Jesus fits in with this archetype,” Jeezy says. “But like also so does Luke Skywalker.”
I nod again.
“Like, the dude from Star Wars,” Jeezy says. “Not that motherfucker from 2 Live Crew.”
“Right,” I say. “Thanks for clarifying.”
He tilts his forehead back, nostrils flaring slightly, smelling the air to see if he can detect any sarcasm. Which he can’t. He’s so earnest most of the time that he doesn’t even notice. It’s only when he’s vulnerable, like now, that he becomes alert to the potential of being responded to ungenerously. Satisfied that I am not trying to step to him, he continues.
“I think maybe that’s what’s behind this whole cocaine rap thing,” he says. “Like, Biggie Smalls but also Jay Z fits in with this archetype or whatever. And the both of them fit in with the model of Jesus. Projects and mangers. Like coming up from nothing and making it big, having hard times trying to come up. Scarface fits in with that shit, too. Oh, shit!”
The way he says this last, clapping his hands and breaking into a goofy grin, means this is occurring to him in the moment.
“Isn’t that all empirical, though?” I find myself saying before I can think not to, my tone arch, critical.
“I mean,” I continue, though his face is going from childlike wonder to puzzlement and back to the perpetual scowl he wears to protect himself, not knowing why I am doing it, only that I must. “The linkage is pretty airtight, not to mix metaphors. The myth of Jesus was pretty much lifted whole cloth from Mithra, right?”
“That the motherfucker fought Godzilla?” He says, looking not at me but at the plate between us, where he is poking at a baby carrot with his index finger, his diamond bracelet scratching light furrows into the table’s top.
I continue without responding. “And the cocaine rap genre, I mean Scarface is White Heat, at least in regard to the sociopathic criminal with an unhealthy attitude towards his female relatives, and the martyrdom of Christ is essentially what makes the difference between the lionization of the hail-of-bullets deaths of Biggie and ‘Pac and the quiet unease around the AIDS-related death of Eazy. It fits in with the archetype, but the archetype can essentially be boiled down to Christ-like or Mithra-like, actually, like hey Mr. Campbell, it’s just the one hero with the one Judeo-Christian face that other people keep wearing. And maybe it’s the irony, right, that people unconsciously respond to, like while Jesus healed the sick and the insane, brought the dead to life, the purported corner boys who grew to be rap moguls made people sick and crazy in their rise to fame. They killed people, if you’ll believe the lyrics. They’re like the Christ/Anti-Christs, right?”
I take a breath.
“Right?” I say.
He says nothing. Purses his lips as if tasting something distasteful. Sniffs and cocks his head.
“This white bean soup,” I say. “It would make your mother’s want to crawl under an underpass and asphyxiate itself with a trashbag full of freon.”
“The fuck did you say about my momma?” he says, and my mouth goes dry, the taste of pennies blossoming on my tongue.
“Check?” I suggest, but there is no one there to ask.
