About eight months before
Tupac Shakur was shot down during a drive by in an intersection east of the Las
Vegas Strip, videographer Gobi M. Rahimi got into a water gun fight with the
rapper in an L.A. backyard.
"'That's what I'm talking about. This motherfucker won't
give up. All you motherfuckers are attacking him. That's a Crazy
Iranian,'" Rahimi recalls Tupac saying. "That's the first time he
called me the Crazy Iranian. And at that time I was like, 'I love this
guy.'"
In the months leading up to his death, then 30-year-old Rahimi worked on or directed most of Tupac's videos, including "2
of Amerikaz Most Wanted," "How Do U Want It," and the rapper's
final video "Made Niggaz." Today, he's working on a film called 7 Dayzabout
the final week of Tupac's life.
Amid a growing tension with Death Row Records, Suge convinced
Tupac to go see Mike Tyson's fight against Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand on
Sept. 7. That night, after a scrap in the MGM following the fight, Tupac and
Suge made their way to a party at Knight's Club 662 in a black BMW 750. At
11:15 p.m. on the corner of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, an unidentified white
Cadillac pulled up to the right of the BMW and opened fire. Tupac was hit four
times, and rushed to University Medical Center. This is what happened between the shooting and
Tupac's death in a hospital bed at 4:03 p.m. on September 13, 1996.
September 7 was Tracy, my partner's, birthday.
So I kind of convinced her and a few other production people to go to Vegas to
celebrate. She was very against the idea because she didn't want to be around
Death Row people and didn't enjoy the idea of Vegas. I kind of knew we had to
be there for some reason.
We
made it out there. I tried to get us tickets to the fight, and I couldn't get
into the fight, so we went to 662 because we planned on meeting Tupac there. We
were hanging out in the club, and the atmosphere was just off. There was a
bunch of gangbangers and policemen. The place was filled with cops and unsavory
characters. I remember Nate Dogg was walking through the crowd up to every
group of people he recognized, and he finally walked up to us and said, "Pac
and Suge have been shot."
We found out that he had been taken to University Medical
Center. We went there and I remember one of the first things I saw was Kidada
Jones and his cousin Jamala crying on the pay phones. Everyone else that was in
the ER waiting room was Suge's people. It was his mom and dad, it was his
lawyer, it was Reggie Wright—and there was no one there for Tupac. It was just
us. Within an hour, the nurse came out and walked up to Suge's mom. Suge's mom
said, "How's my baby, how's my baby?" And the nurse said, 'Ma'am,
your son's fine. He got hit with a piece of shrapnel. Probably a piece of
glass. We're going to give him a couple of stitches and he's going to be taken
to a private room within an hour." Then she turned to us and said, "Unfortunately,
for Tupac, it's not the same situation. His right lung was shot, so we had to
remove it. There will be a series of reparative operations and it will probably
take 12 hours."
Basically, that was the first night of me sitting watch from
12 to eight in the morning for the next six nights. The scariest thing about
that night is that it was really just me and Tracy. We were the only ones from
Pac's camp. His fiancée and his cousin were just bawling in the corner. They
tried to get some Death Row security but couldn't find anyone who were normally
his two security guards. We were just scared shitless. For me, it was like Enzo
the baker in The Godfather. We had no clue what to do, but we knew we had to be there.
The next day we tried to get him moved from the first floor where you could see
into his room, but we got no help from the hospital administration.
It was the scariest six nights of my life. There were
undercover FBI agents, the police weren't helping, I got one of the death
threats. The marketing director came up to me on the third day and said,
"They called the Row, they're going to come finish him off." Then he
walked away. So I called Vegas PD, and said, "Send the troops—they're
going to come finish Tupac off." The lady came back on the phone and said,
"Sir, we're a little understaffed right now, so if anything should happen,
go get the foot patrol in the hospital." Immediately, I was like, Something's
a little off here. I remembered that earlier that day we had a press
conference, so I called all the local news stations and said, "Every hour
there will be a news conference." And I thought, "At least there will
be people here with cameras if shit should go down."
It was just chaos and no
support. We didn't trust Death Row—we didn't trust anyone. After all of that
happened, there was a southern old security guard in the corner, and he started
chuckling and was like, "Son, I've got to tell you, last year there was a
white rodeo star who broke his leg, and the Vegas Police Department gave him
four policemen, and six wagons for his family and friends to be
comfortable."
I
thought, "Isn't that a bitch that the number one rapper in the world can
be laid up in the hospital and can't get any sort of security." Part of
that is indicative to all the racial divide in this country that's still going
on today. Pac talked about all that, and I think he suffered from that, as
well.
Pac was in an induced coma the entire time because every time
he came to he'd try to pull the plug and get out of bed. I stayed every day,
and I went to get his mom or whoever flew in from the airport. We had a hotel
nearby, where I shared a room with his biological father. I would stay there a
few hours during the day and keep watch at the hospital at night. I was
imagining that a bunch of gangbangers would run through there with Uzis and
shoot the place up. I didn't grow up with guns or any of that shit, but I was a
scrapper, and I felt that if there were any questionable people, I could attack
them.
There was a fat old white nurse that would come out and give
me a progress report. One night she came out and said, "That Tupac, he's a
fighter. I almost lost him and got him right back." I'm not 100 percent
sure why—I had plenty of opportunities to go see him—but I didn't because I was
afraid to see him. Then on the fifth night, that same nurse was like,
"Baby, you've been here this whole time, why don't you go in and see your
friend.
I went in there, and it was
just me and him. It was a dark room, and he had the tube down his throat. He
was basically naked except for the couple of sheets they had him covered with.
His head was swollen twice the size, and everywhere there was a bullet wound—there
was gauze on each and blood was seeping through. He was missing a finger, so
that was bandaged up. I walked up to him, and I put my hand on his arm. He was
ice cold, I'd imagine because of all the fluids going through him. I said a
little prayer, and I walked out. And that was the last time I ever saw him.
He
was like my little brother. He was someone who I felt the responsibility to do
whatever I could for him to survive. And I don't mean the shooting—I mean all
the drama that he was surrounded with before with Death Row and all the people
he was surrounded with.
On
the sixth night was when The Fruit of Islam showed up, and suddenly everyone
showed up. It seemed kind of crazy that it took that long and everyone was
like, "Let's go take care of Tupac." I sort of felt I couldn't do
anything more there. Tracy had left a few days earlier to go back to L.A. On
the sixth night, the nurse finally said that he was 13 percent better. That's
when I decided to go back, because that's the first time I thought, "This
motherfucker has nine lives. Maybe he is going to pull through."
I went in there, and it was just me and him. It was a
dark
I went back to LA, and the
next day, I remember hearing Theo on The Beat say that Pac had passed. We were
on our way to set, and everyone in the van started crying.
I've
heard all the rumors from it could be Suge, it could be P. Diddy who paid for
it, it could be the fight with Orlando Anderson. You know, at the end of the
day, Tupac had a voice. The one thing he didn't have was subtlety. If he had
continued on the same path he had been on, someone would have taken him out. He
was disruptive, and he was a threat. He was a threat to the establishment. I
don't know who took him out. But whoever took him out took out someone very important
who could have done a lot for African Americans and humanity as a whole. At 25,
he had accomplished more than some people do in a lifetime. One of the last
meetings I had with him, he said, "People aren't going to recognize me in
six months. I'm going to act like such an adult." He was ready for a
transformation, he wanted to be more than a stereotype.
No comments:
Post a Comment