His words didn’t seem arrogant: They were just true. This was my moment. Hova was in the house. It was all happening.
Suddenly, my dad burst into the dressing room. “Oh, man, that’s Jay Z right there! Got to get a goddamn picture. Motherfucking Jay Z and Chris motherfucking Rock. Y’all motherfuckers got to give me a picture!”
He whipped out an old plastic camera from the seventies, with a flash cube that he had to stick on top and a thumb-wheel that he spun to advance the film. He fiddled with it for a long minute—click, click, click—then started taking photos, each one accompanied by a blinding flash—click click click POP click click click POP.
Whatever magic the moment had was gone. We all slinked away politely.
When I walked on stage that night, the applause thundered through the arena. I stood there and took it all in. It was unbelievable. “I’m happy,” I told the crowd. “I want to explain why I’m happy. First of all, my divorce is final . . .”
* * *
A couple of months before the film came out, I was invited to host Saturday Night Live and promote it. Twelve years after getting rejected by the show, I found myself crammed into Lorne Michaels’s office with some three dozen writers and cast members, working on an episode. The writers pitched their ideas to Lorne, he narrowed them down to about fifty sketches, and a couple of days later, we ran through them all. For my monologue, I didn’t want to give away the material from the movie, so I ended up sharing the story of my failed SNL audition.
Spending that week working on the show reaffirmed my faith in the idea that everything happens for a reason. If I’d been added to the cast when I’d first auditioned and performed my horrible impressions on national television, I’d probably be selling sneakers today.
When Let Me Explain came out in theaters, it was more than four times as successful as Laugh at My Pain, pulling in thirty-two million dollars and reaching number eight at the box office.
What’s harder than achieving success is achieving consistent success. But what’s even harder than achieving consistent success is achieving consistently bigger successes. The reverberations of that second concert film took me to the next level, because now I was respected not just in comedy circles and Hollywood circles but in business circles.
The first thing I found at that next level was script stalkers. Before this, people used to hand me scripts; but now, they were threatening me with scripts. A few guys set up meetings with networks by claiming to work with HartBeat Productions. Another script stalker reached out to everyone in my crew and, when that didn’t work, went after their family members—even hiring Joey’s son to work as a party DJ in order to hand him a script for me.
The creepiest stalker of them all kept popping up backstage at concerts with fake credentials and pretending to be part of the entourage. I once caught him harassing Eniko, trying to get her to convince me to make his movie.
We eventually had to take out a restraining order on a few of these guys. The lesson is that you can hustle all you want, but you’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re hustling with a delusional mind.
“The most disappointing thing about making it as a comedian,” I told Eniko afterward, repeating something Chris Rock once said, “is that you don’t get sex groupies like rappers and athletes. You get business groupies.”
92
* * *
STILL HAVING TROUBLE WITH THIS PARTICULAR LIFE LESSON
This is the point where, in most memoirs, celebrities reveal how they sabotaged their rising fame and success. The flaws in their character become magnified by the spotlight, and they start messing with a drug and develop an addiction that takes them back down to the bottom.
That’s pretty much what happened to me. The drug I got hooked on was a very powerful one. The kids these days call it: the Xbox.
I had already experimented with some Madden, which turned out to be the gateway drug to the hardest stuff of all: NBA 2K.
I’d been touring for so long with the Plastic Cup Boyz that we’d grown tired of clubs and after-parties. Most of us were in serious relationships, and our tolerance for the bullshit had faded to zero.
Instead, after every show, we’d meet backstage and begin the ritual.
“Yo, let’s get to the hotel room!”
“Y’all set up the game?”
“Yeah, let’s play.”
“Hey, who got the records?”
“I got ’em. Did y’all set up the profiles?”
“I bet five hundred I’m gonna beat you with only Dirk Nowitzki.”
With everything I get into, I don’t have a halfway setting. It’s all or nothing. I have to either be the best or give everything I’ve got trying. Soon we were taking our Xbox and TV to the arenas and setting up in the greenroom so we could play before and after each show. People would come backstage to party with us and end up just watching us shout, argue, and cut each other down as we played NBA 2K.
When we were kicked out of the arena, we’d rush to the hotel, the bus, or the plane as quickly as possible so we could get back to playing the game. Often, we’d sit up playing all night. I remember looking up at one point and saying, “Yo, we been playing this game for sixteen hours!”
Addiction is a nasty disease. Your tolerance builds up, and soon you need a bigger, more dangerous high. We eventually found that high: Guts.
Guts is a fast-paced poker game in which players are dealt a hand of two to four cards, and each has the option of either saying “guts” (if they think they have the best hand) or folding (if they don’t). Because of the way the betting works, if five people say “guts,” the pot can quadruple in one round. The game is fast-paced and money changes hands rapidly, so we started keeping a record book and settling our debts with each other at the end of the tour.
I don’t have a better way to explain what goes on in a game of Guts other than to bring you into one that’s going on right now, on a private plane somewhere over Fresno:
Wayne: This fucking game. John’s head is gonna hurt when he sees this five-thousand-dollar tab he got.
Kevin: I’ll just take it out of his pay. Let him run up that tab forever. It don’t matter to me. I’ll eventually get what he owes me.
Spank: I owe him three thousand. He’s the only one that don’t pay, so that’s why I’m not paying him.
Nate: You’re not recording this, are you?
Writer: Of course I am.
Spank: I don’t care, you can put this in the book. Shit, I ain’t gonna read it.
Wayne: Remember that time on the last day of the tour, when you went to the bank and got thirty grand to settle with everybody?
Spank: Yeah, I pulled out five thousand and started playing. Then I got out the rest and lost it all before I got a chance to pay anybody what I owed.
Writer: Your wife must want to kill you for doing this with your salary.
Spank: She don’t know.
Wayne: If you think they tell their girlfriends or wives what them pots be up to—hell no.