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ae | ed come the biggest star, he would become a “superpower” within the Death Row- dominated world of gangsta rap. Just nine months earlier, he had said, “Thug life to me is dead.” Now he embraced it. “Pac was like a chameleon,” Syke says, echoing a common view among Tupac’s friends. “Whatever he was around, that's what he turned into. And when he got around Death Row, he tried to be that.” While Tupac had transgressed many social limits, he had also drawn to him people who tried, with varying degrees of success, to moderate his behavior. But when he set out for the province of Death Row, he left behind virtually all of these putative guardians—among them, Watani Tyehimba, Karen Lee, Man Man, even his wife, Keisha. (Their marriage was later annulled.) Yaasmyn Fula, who was one of the few old friends who remained close to Tupac, says that he was “out of his element. It was a com- pletely different soldier mentality. He was fascinated by it because of the ab- sence of a male figure who could say, ‘Leave it alone.” “He was always looking for a father,” Warani Tyehimba says, “in me some, in Murulu some. But what he missed was ane father with the good and the bad, not a composite.” By the time Tupac met the man who said he was his father (a former Black Panther named Billy Garland, who materialized at Tupac’s hospital bedside in New York after Tu- pac was shot in the Times Square lobby), the encounter failed to satisfy him. It was in Suge Knight, many thought, es- pecially when they saw the two to- gether—the slender, lithe youth shad- owed by the other’s massive bulk, the one all animation, the other exuding au- thority—that he found that connection. Tupac and Knight seemed almost in- separable in the months after Tupac’s re- lease from prison; they worked together long hours in the studio, and socialized when they were through. One of Tu- pac’s friends remembers watching them sing a song from the soundtrack of “Gridlock’d”: “You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like Me.” The combination of Tupac and Knight seems to have been combustible, with each activating the most explosive elements in the other. Someone who has known Knight well for years points out that it was after Tupac arrived at Death Row that its signature excess became even more pronounced—fancy clothes, gold and diamond jewelry (especially heavy medallions, laden with diamonds and rubies, bearing the Death Row sym- bol of a heeded figure in an electric chair), Rolls~Royces (four were pur- chased to celebrate Snoop Doggy Dogg's acquittal on murder charges), and lots of women. Before Tupac, a knowledgeable insider pointed out, “Death Row had not “Stil, be might be remembered as the ‘no cloning’ President.” THE NEW YORKER, JULY 7, 1997 had a real star. They had Snoop and Dre—they’re entertainers. Snoop could be sitting quietly over there in a cor- ner”—he gestured to one end of the res~ taurant we were sitting in—“but if Tu- pac were here he would create such a ruckus. People would be saying, ‘That's Tupac!’ He had star aura. Suge saw that, and he liked that. All of a sudden, there were all these pictures of Suge, together with Tupac, feeding off each other.” Ov: Tupac came out of prison and joined Death Row, he probably did more to stoke the flames of a much publicized feud berween East and West Coast rappers than anyone, For all the posturing and the displays of bravado and the aspersions cast on everyone’s in- tegrity, this was primarily a feud about money. Rap had originated in the East, but, starting in the late eighties, the gangsta rappers from Los Angeles were more successful. Then Puffy Combs’s Bad Boy Records, which was based in New York, began putting our its own version of gangsta rap—which the West insisted was merely derivative. Watani Tyehimba told me that much of Tupac's anger at Biggie Smalls, Puffy's most suc- cessful rapper, was based on professional jealousy: Tupac was in jail, and Biggie’s single “One More Chance” was No. 1 on the charts. In an interview in The Source in March, 1996, Tupac claimed he'd been sleeping with Biggie’s wife, the singer Faith Evans, and he went so far as to taunt Biggie about it in a song: “I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker.” Some of those close to Tupac were appalled at the Faith Evans imbroglio. (She denies that such an encoun- ter with Tupac ever took place.) “The trouble with what Pac was doing, with this East Coast-West Coast thing, was it was just some- thing that got out of hand, a publicity thing, but broth- ers in the street think some- thing is really going on, and they're gonna die for it,” Syke contended. “Pose like a person starting 27 and it got out of control” When the East Coast- West Coast war was sienply aagt