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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Listen as Devin Friedman sits down for an exclusive interview with the most prolific man in music, Lil Wayne.\n\nThere's an assistant who works for the recording studio and an assistant who works for Wayne. The first one's name is Miguel. He gives you cold Fiji water and makes sure you know where the bathroom is. The other one's name is Eddie. His attention is only on Wayne. For Eddie, your presence penetrates only as it is reflected in Wayne. There's a sofa in the anteroom of the studio, and a television, and food in disposable Glad containers for later in case anyone gets hungry, congealing angel-hair pasta steaming the thin plastic. Eddie comes out of the studio where Wayne is. He smiles. He's Hispanic, with a razored chin-strap beard, an underbite that makes him seem harmless, a big belly. All of his clothes appear to be in danger of falling off at once.\n\n Excuse me, he says. One of his hands is cinching up some red shorts. Would you mind waiting outside? I'm really sorry.\n\n First they said to wait outside the studio, and now they're saying to wait outside the building, in the parking lot, where there's a white wicker chair for people to sit and smoke. It's past midnight. Wayne's Maybach is parked under the portico, and his driver, a man with no hair and no eyebrows who wears a black Nehru suit and a driving cap and goes by Mr. Q, is asleep inside it. There's white noise in the night from traffic along a main artery buried somewhere in the flat Miami distance. The bungalows across the street sit flimsy and dark, waiting to be blown away by a hurricane.\n\n It's past 1 A.M. when Kia, one of Wayne's two publicists, comes outside. She smiles weakly.\n\n Wayne doesn't feel he needs to be interviewed, she says.\n\n What do you mean?\n\n He thinks you've already asked him everything, she says. She's talking about the first interview, on his tour bus, more than a month ago, after which another meeting was arranged. That second meeting would be in Miami a few weeks later. Cortez, Wayne's manager, called that night to say it would probably happen late. Then Cortez's assistant called to say that Wayne had gone to sleep. Then Cortez called and said we'd do it in the morning, but in the morning Cortez disappeared. Then, a few days later, the publicist calls to say that Wayne had mouth surgery and wouldn't be able to speak for nine days. Then Wayne's other publicist said it was going to happen in Atlanta when Wayne was there for the BET Awards, but a woman in Cincinnati who was carrying Wayne's child was induced into labor, and Wayne got on a private plane to be there for the delivery. If you come to Miami in mid-November, she said, you can interview him at the studio. But now he doesn't think an interview is necessary.\n\n Wayne released Tha Carter III in June. It sold a million copies in a week. No one's done that in three years. It's now sold almost 3 million copies. It may be that Wayne is different since this has happened, or it may be that Wayne is the same despite those new circumstances. But he has been acting erratic. He's been picked up on a gun charge and a drug charge. He wouldn't go through security at a concert at Radio City Music Hall and got scratched from the lineup; then he didn't show up for a performance with Jay-Z and canceled another show in Boston. Even when he can't be made to appear at an event, it's not that no one knows where he is. He can always be found. He is hardly anywhere besides his bus, a recording studio, his condo in Bal Harbour. Even when he's close, though, he can be unreachable. This summer, a reporter was with Wayne in his home for four hours but never spoke to him.\n\n You can sit with him in the studio, Kia says in the parking lot in Miami. But don't, like, ask him questions. Nothing personal. With Wayne you just have to see what it is minute to minute.\n\n She leads the way back into the studio. Wayne doesn't talk to people when they walk into the room, unless it's one of a dozen or so people he knows. People are constantly cycled in and out, people coming to look at him and act like they're not, people whom he renders basically invisible. He stands at the soundboard, listening to a beat that plays loudly enough to rattle teeth, testicles. From the back, he could still be 14 years old. But he's just turned 26. He has a narrow waist and a small, perfectly articulated, fatless body. He's in one of his white tees, still creased from the box, and the long, thin black dreads are cinched by a rubber band. His mouth is partly open, his metal teeth glinting. He has on a pair of black sunglasses like a visor over his face, and through them you can almost see that he has eyes.\n\n I like that there, he says, listening to a beat that he's making. He's been into hard rock lately. This track could almost be punk, or a harder Hendrixy psychedelic thing, if it weren't for the synth and the drums. That guitar right there. Play that back again.\n\n KY loops it back. Right now KY is the engineer he works with all the time. He travels with Wayne wherever he goes. Wayne has a studio on the bus and a studio at his condo, and he keeps studios reserved here at the Hit Factory in Miami and at Hot Beats in Atlanta. He goes through engineers. The white boy Josh isn't working with him much anymore, partly because he got burned out. They'd record from midnight until noon the next day, and then Josh would come into the studio again after getting some sleep and Wayne would be there with some new stuff he'd recorded at home. They'd record all night on the bus on the way to L.A. and then go into another studio when they got there. Josh couldn't think straight anymore, and he was having trouble discerning one day from another. When Wayne exhausts one producer, he moves on to another.\n\n Wayne hasn't been making his own beats for long. He's always gotten his beats, the music he alters and raps over and turns into songs, from the enormous free-form market of beats available to any MC who can pay one of a thousand producers who make them. But now he wants to take over the whole enterprise. He's writing the treatments for his music videos. He's learning the drum machine. He's playing electric guitar. He's been inventing some new kind of rap-rock, using these gothic, noisy beats and chanting over them. He runs his voice through a computer so that it's rendered only part human, and the songs come out like some kind of demented RB. He's made a dozen songs like this in the past month or two. He's still making rap songs, too. He's recorded maybe twenty of those since the album came out. He just released a mixtape, part of the Dedication series, for free on the Internet. He's thinking about songs for his other mixtape series, and an RB record he wants to make with someone named Juelz Santana, and forming a supergroup with the rapper T-Pain called T-Wayne, and doing Tha Carter IV, and\u2026\n\n The monitor glows white, the second straight showing of SportsCenter unspools on the TV over the soundboard, but otherwise the room is dark. There's a champagne bucket filled with ice next to him on the console. His small Louis Vuitton attach\u00E9 case is next to that, and inside you can see crisp hundred-dollar bills and a prescription-pill bottle. The blunts have been rolled ahead of time and placed in paper bos. Wayne removes one. He takes it and wraps it in a piece of standard white rolling paper so that the cigar tobacco doesn't stain his lips. Then he looks for his lighter. The triple-stacked white Styrofoam cups are in his left hand and the joint in his right, like a woman with a cigarette and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc at a cocktail party.\n\n He has KY play that last section again.\n\n Listen, he says. Make those two guitars get along.\n\n Yeah, KY says. They're fighting.\n\n He's in that jangly phase of the night. He's nocturnal, so he hasn't been awake for long. He fiddles with his two cell phones. He checks the blunts in the packet. He checks the tall Voss water bottle that he uses to refill his Styrofoam cups; it's three-quarters full with a faint pink liquid, four parts to one, water and promethazine cough syrup. He's not liking what he's hearing right now. He stands over KY's shoulder and says he wants one of those snares taken out.\n\n You're not getting me, he says. You're not getting my drift. I'm gonna say it for you simple as I can. You see this, where it goes ehh-ehh-ehh um-um?\n\n Yes, KY says. He does what he thinks Wayne wants.\n\n You are so stupid, Wayne says.\n\n KY licks his lips while he calmly clicks through the beat. He keeps quiet. The system is not set up for discourse. He says to Wayne, Do you mean this?\n\n You gotta do that shit instead of telling me what I mean, Wayne says. He's scolding him. I don't know how to do that on the computer! Niggas would die to be in that chair, B. Niggas that I wouldn't have to do this with. I'm bearing with you. GQ is here watching this. And GQ, I hope you put this in there.\n\n Eddie, the assistant, shuffles in to check on things, but he knows not to talk to Wayne right now. You have to be able to read him. He's the funniest, most generous, craziest dude you ever met. Or he's like this. This is when he fires people. This is when he might kick everyone off his bus and it'll just be him and his driver, who has a knack for staying out of Wayne's way. This is why his security people advise that you don't approach Wayne, you let him approach you. Eddie leaves the room again. Ron Jaworski's disembodied head jabbers on soundlessly.\n\n In a few minutes, ESPN rebroadcasts the Boston College-Notre Dame football game. Wayne watches it on mute, though he's already seen it. Today he also watched LSU-Alabama, Penn State-Iowa, USC-Cal. He watches sporting events; then he watches them broken down into highlights again and again; and then he watches them reconstituted as games. He has ESPN on a constant feedback loop.\n\n Meanwhile he's got both phones going, talking on one and texting on the other. By 3 A.M. he's done with that beat he was working on earlier tonight, and now he's listening to new beats that he's been e-mailed today. The producer Swizz Beatz sent him two songs, and Fat Joe sent one. He listens to the first Swizz Beatz song, and then the second, and then the first again. He might rap over one of them tonight and make a song if he's feeling it. He listens to that swift beat again and again. It's something you could march to. And then this stirring music comes up that sounds like plastic violins. It's weird, Wayne says, but every time I hear that music come up, I see\u2014what's that band? Black Parade?\n\n KY finds it on Google. Welcome to the Black Parade is the song, and My Chemical Romance is the band.\n\n This beat will be like their biggest song, he says. And I'll be like, why did I skip that beat! That's why I'm not going to skip it. I can see everyone out there at a show doing a chant with me on this. See, that's how I do it. I visualize everything first. Before I even write a song, I see the video, I see how it sound.\n\n Something has shifted, melted away. The jitteriness is gone. He's in the second stage of his day. He's relad, sitting at the console, waiting for the Swizz Beatz song to be cued up again. Eddie reappears at the door, smiling and watching. It seems like it's okay for you to ask him something now.\n\n Did you hear about that emo band that did a remake of Lollipop?\n\n What's emo? Wayne says.\n\n He's more interactive now, engaged. He wants to show you this picture of his kid when it was still in utero. He finds it on his Sidekick. It looks like a computer-animated face covered by a membrane, like Han Solo in his deep-freeze block. That shit even looked like me when it was in the womb!\n\n He was there in the room with the mother of his child. No one had heard of her until a few days before the baby was born and he talked about it at the BET Awards. He was fascinated by the birth process. He stayed in the room and held the baby's left hand as it came out. He's always been fascinated by blood and genitalia. Both equally. He raps about menstruation.\n\n Man, I could never do that shit! Wayne says. Wouldn't no babies be born. I'd be like, wear ten condoms. He lights his seventh or eighth joint of the night and blows smoke at the soundboard. Really crazy, man. Crazy. The last time I was in there, it was ten years ago, he says. He'd been in the delivery room for the birth of his daughter, Reginae. I was 15. It's crazy being there ten years later.\n\n He wants to play some of the songs he's recorded lately. Have you heard Get a Life? he asks. It's one of his new punk-rock/hip-hop anthems, with a heavy guitar in it and a refrain that goes, Fuck You! Get a life!\n\n That sounds like an angry-teen anthem, he's told.\n\n Teen spirit, he says, tongue in cheek. I don't know, that's just what it smell like.\n\n He's doing everything these days, musicwise. Punk, RB ballads, the twisted rap that made him successful. He will try almost anything. Last year he rapped on more than seventy other artists' songs. He may have tattoos and watches and Maybachs, he may have a bullet hole in his chest where he accidentally shot himself as a kid, and he may do shows with Jay-Z, but he doesn't want to be a gangsta or a record ecutive, the two identities currently available to male hip-hop stars. He has almost no impulse to pretend to be something, almost no tolerance for posing, though he does have a taste for costume and gruesome self-transformation. What he mostly wants is to stay here in the studio and experiment with music.\n\n Wayne says you've got to hear the song Monica and Rachel.\n\n These two girls told me to write a song about them, he says. So I did. He's ranging along the soundboard as it plays, singing along to it. The song says, I kissed them other lips. It's suggested that that's part of the difference between Wayne and other rappers: They rap about getting head, and he raps about giving it. He has a song dedicated to it called Pussy Monster and another about a kind of never-ending 69 of getting and giving head, getting and giving head. He would never deny being a womanizer, but he's known to be emotional; he likes to profess his love, to text women messages all night and then just as easily disappear on them.\n\n He's asked, How did you meet Monica and Rachel?\n\n He winks and points to the new gold-and-diamond ring he's wearing on his wedding finger for the mother of his child and says he just had a baby, so he really shouldn't say exactly what the nature of his relationship with Monica and Rachel was. They both got my name tattooed in they mouth, he says. I don't want to brag, but they also got it tattooed on their hip. The tattoo artist who's next door in the other studio, working on Birdman [the owner of Cash Money Records]? He just touched up their mouth!\n\n He says he saw them the other day. He was trying to have a quiet night at his condo on the beach. He put on a DVD about a famous drug dealer and got in his Jacuzzi to watch. He wanted to let Monica and Rachel know that he meant to watch this DVD alone in the hot tub, so he put on his swim trunks. But they got in there with him.\n\n They raped me! he says.\n\n Then he tells KY to play the next song. He's feeling it now. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, reperforming the songs. This is what must feel like midday to Wayne. He gets up at seven or eight at night and eats dinner, gets to the studio at eleven or twelve, records all night, eats breakfast at noon, and goes to sleep. But that suggests more of a schedule than exists. He'll just as easily sleep for two hours and then record for five hours and then sleep for fifteen minutes and then record again, dragging the whole apparatus\u2014Eddie and KY and Mr. Q and whoever else of the dozens who work for him or somehow depend on him and happen to be with him\u2014into his reprogrammed sense of time. The producer of his music videos says it like this: It's Wayne's universe, and we are just little stars constellated around him.\n\n At close to 4 A.M., Birdman rolls in, wearing a velour Gucci warm-up jacket. Wayne calls Birdman his father. He signed Wayne to a record deal in New Orleans when Wayne was 11. Where Shorty at? Birdman says. He's with another man Wayne knows, also in luxury sweats, with a Louis Vuitton man purse. Wayne hugs each of them. Their greetings are minimally verbal, low in register, a familiar grunt and nuzzle. Birdman's on his way out for the night, and he takes his 10-year-old daughter with him, yawning.\n\n When Birdman's gone, KY plays the Swizz Beatz track again and again while Wayne thinks of how the song should go. Eddie appears at the door and watches Wayne for several minutes. First, Eddie replaces the empty blunt packs with fresh ones. Then, biding his time, he swaps in a new champagne bucket filled with fresh ice and delivers a new Voss water bottle. While Wayne bounces and heaves and swings his head as if his muscles and bones were producing the music like a human accordion, Wayne absently counts the bos of blunts and inspects them, arranges them neatly, places his lighter over them, removes the lighter, peers into the bos again, restacks them. Lastly, Eddie stands at the door with a small yellow cloth bag, made of felt, bearing an insignia that might be Herm&amp;amp;#xE8;s. He peels it back and reveals the top of a glass medicine bottle, the promethazine syrup. He watches Wayne attentively, and when Wayne isn't in the way, he deftly swaps the bottles out, like Indiana Jones switching the golden idol for a bag of sand. The whole mise en place has been replaced now, new weed and new syrup, providing what might be a measure of assurance. The substances will never run out, they will be always at his elbow in their proper places in their proper measures, and he will never have to glide back down to earth. Time can be stopped. A million songs can be made. The night can be made to last forever. Wayne measures out the Voss-and-syrup mixture himself and then caps the bottle again, now filled with the pale pink liquid.\n\n Play My Little Red Cup for GQ, Wayne says. It's a song about the mixture he's drinking. It's part of his compendium of songs about his substances, the most accomplished of which is I Feel Like Dying: Swimming laps around a bottle of Louis the Thirteenth / Jumping off of a mountain into a sea of codeine\u2026 / Wish I can give you this feeling that I feel like buying / And if my dealer don't have no more, then I feel like dying\u2026\n\n Afterward, Wayne keeps up a patter. You can't have the little red cup, he says. No. It's a white cup. I'm gonna write little red cup on it. In black marker. But it'll be my little red cup. Stop it! This nigga's so abstract!\n\n His attention is getting blurry now. This is a phase of the evening when it can seem like he's buried deep inside his own head. Anything from the outside world that rouses him is greeted with unfocused eyes, as if he were trying to make things out through a smeared window. This is what he was like that first interview, a few months ago now, in Miami, at two in the morning on his bus.\n\n He had been aboard the bus for nearly twelve hours by then, the machine turning out hot exhaust and traces of weed smoke through the brightest part of the day, past twilight and into the darkest part of the night. He was shooting the video for Mrs. Officer, the song on Tha Carter III about getting pulled over by a hot policewoman, and as the song says, all she wants me to do is fuck tha police. For hours at a time, the apparatus of the shoot had been halted as they waited for Wayne. Everyone's attention was on the bus as it sat quietly and revealed nothing behind its tinted windows. All we need now is one platinum-selling artist, one of the crew would say over the radio, and another would answer, We're working on that.\n\n Before you were let onto the bus, Kory from security knocked at the door. Then he yelled Coming up when the door levered open, so you didn't surprise anyone. There was an ESPN football show on TV. There's a living room/kitchen area in the front, and a master bedroom in the back, lit like a dance floor by little blue lights. Wayne came in from the bedroom, his silver teeth glinting, his face behind dark glasses. It seemed as if a wholesale transformation was nearly complete: the metal teeth, the tattoos like scales on his skin, the long dark snake hair, the visored face, the weed-bleached voice.\n\n You're in my seat, he said, and pointed to a bench across from the kitchen table where guests were to sit. His voice was nearly dead, an octave lower, and very thick. He seated himself at the table and asked for a lighter. In front of him was the triple-Styrofoam cup assembly filled with pale pink liquid and half-melted ice. Four people watched the interview\u2014his boy Mac, a rapper from his neighborhood in New Orleans; E.I., the road manager; and two other people who weren't regulars with Wayne and were trying to seem relad. Hundreds of people had been let through the security cordon for one reason or another\u2014friends of friends, artists from Cash Money Records, the 12- and 15-year-old rappers he'd signed to his label Young Money and keeps around to watch him and learn how to live the life of a rapper, a cadre of men with fleur-de-lis tattoos on their faces and prominent red bandannas, headstrong teenage girls who said, I think I'm going to cry if I see him, but I don't want to freak him out. They were all pressing farther and farther in toward him as the day progressed, and these two other people had even made it onto the bus. The video producer said earlier that he won't do rap videos anymore\u2014he only works with Wayne because they're old friends. I call them urban bar mitzvahs, he said. Just look around.\n\n There was a LeBron James teaser for ESPN's basketball coverage on TV.\n\n He ain't from Cleveland, Wayne said. He from Jupiter. Playing like that.\n\n You say yourself that you're a Martian.\n\n Just out of here, you know, he said. He seemed to be trying to break through the clouds, but couldn't quite. He wasn't fully pronouncing words. Don't like to think like everybody else, don't like to try to think like everybody else, don't like to do nothing everybody else think I'm gone do, don't like to say nothing everybody else think I'm gone say. I'm a Martian. I like to be different. And what's more different than a Martian?\n\n Wayne opened a package of LifeSavers Gummies and ate them one by one. He eats candy like he's still a kid without parents. The bus and his home are stocked with candy and Biscoff cookies, which are his favorite. He gets toothaches and keeps a tube of Orajel on the bus, and later he'll have that oral surgery. The bus was delivered to the shoot cleaned, with fresh linens, but now it's like a teenager's bedroom. Piles of clean and dirty clothes on the furniture, magazines, candy wrappers discarded next to watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. His condo often looks the same way. He is rich, but the money hasn't been marshaled to construct the kind of deep, flawless narrative of an entirely comfortable world where nothing is out of place, as many people use money to do. The world he's created with his money is inside this bus, where he spends more time than anywhere else. He has bunks for his friends, a little recording studio, a steady supply of weed and pills and syrup, and isolation from the rest of the world. Since he was 11 years old, this is where he's lived, and he's hardly ever known anything else. He hasn't driven a car in four years.\n\n I live it, Wayne said. The bus is like my home. I grew up on this motherfucker. There are people who get on their bus for a tour, and then their bus stay parked for six months out the year. I don't. I am this.\n\n There was a knock on the door, and Kory yelled, Coming up. Someone escorted a woman up the bus stairs. She wasn't more than 23 years old, with very curly long blond hair and a tiny crocheted dress. You could smell her. Wayne kissed her on the cheek and said, Hey, baby. He got up and offered his seat to her, but he didn't speak to her again for the next forty-five minutes. One of his security staff likes to say that Wayne has a girl-delivery service.\n\n The bus is his world, a little independent territory that lives by his rules. What would the rest of the world look like if it were run according to his rules?\n\n First of all, I already know, men would be able to marry however many women they want. School would not be optional. It would be mandatory. Because I do not like unintelligent people\u2014it's a pet peeve. If you dumb, you not around me. Other than that, did I mention the men would be able to marry women? Ain't no limit on that.\n\n The girl sat quietly with her hands in her lap, looking as if she was on a job interview and didn't speak English.\n\n Violence, instead of going to jail, you just evaporate from my world, just like that. I don't know where you go, but you gone. You know where you go? Back to Earth! Picture that. Back to Earth! That's what it's like being with me. Especially ladies! You knoooow. After me, it's back to Earth.\n\n Then he turned up the TV. ESPN was doing a piece on Plaxico Burress's suspension, which he felt especially offended by.\n\n How many songs do you think you've recorded at this point?\n\n More than a million, he said.\n\n More than a million?\n\n I been recording since I was 11, Wayne said. Not writing but recording. Birdman had me in the studio. My first album came out when I was 12. Over a million, yeah.\n\n When he took his sunglasses off, his eyes seemed tired. You can study the tattoos on his face when you're up close. The teardrops on his cheeks (which commemorate some kind of death or murder, though Wayne's never said exactly how). The C for Carter (his last name) between his eyebrows, over which is a floating cross. The words FEAR and GOD on either eyelid. The spiderwebbing crack that he's had inscribed at his hairline. His first tattoo was a tribute to Rabbit, his stepfather, who was shot and killed when Wayne was 14. He has one for Holly Grove, the New Orleans neighborhood where he grew up. He has one that says ESPN. For Wayne, a tattoo doesn't require a period of deep reflection. It's a marker of the passage of time. To think that all this stuff you are living through, mundane or not, doesn't mark you indelibly anyway is ridiculous. Over his body, he must have more than a hundred tattoos, some of them covered over by new ones. He doesn't cease to inscribe himself with the names of people and places both absurd and meaningful. Like he's been unable to cease, over the past ten years, composing an endless real-time rap, a minute-to-minute transliteration, the rap without end.\n\n You can't be near him without wondering how long this all can last and what will happen to him afterward. He talks about it, but only rarely. He once said you can't go through life beating yourself up the way he does. But it's not easy to ask whether he thinks he'll end up crazy, sober, or dead. It's easier to ask where he sees himself in ten years.\n\n Nowhere, he said. He didn't want to be tricked into considering all that right now. I don't\u2014that's stupid. If anyone sees themselves in ten years, they're lying to themselves first, so you know they're lying to you.\n\n Now, back in the studio, Wayne says he's going to start recording the Swizz Beatz song. His head has somehow cleared again. Too much weed and he's cloudy, more weed and he somehow struggles to the surface again, regains control of the aircraft. He goes into the little room with the microphone and has KY play the beginning of the song over and over again. This is how he makes his songs. He doesn't write his raps down. He writes as he records, and he says it is very different than freestyling, which he looks down upon as a trick more than a craft. It's not that different from sitting down at a keyboard and writing: You compose something, delete, think, move forward, edit, move forward. He has KY start recording a new track and starts to rap: This the shit that your mama told you / Not to fuck with, like a condom with holes through / A fruit basket / A banana slit / You can't predict / What I'm a say, what I'm a do\u2014\n\n He says hold it. He's doesn't like that last line. He has KY bring it back and picks it up again: When I run this foot on your face, / lick on my shoe.\n\n He says hold it again. The beat switches here, and he has KY play the next part over in a repeating loop for three or four minutes. Then he starts recording: All my measures are treasures / I open up your chest / Swing on your lungs / Step on your neck. He holds again. The next thirty seconds are again played on a loop. He's a barely lit figure behind the Plexiglas, stalking the egg-crate walls, thinking of words without saying anything. He goes to the mike and says okay: This is for the real motherfuckas / Who in the bullet storm with a steel umbrella. He stops. That seems to be trying too hard to be gangsta, which isn't what Wayne does. Wayne wants to impress you and verbally fuck you up. When he says, I'm an urban legend / Like a black Acura, it's not about status but wordplay. KY brings it back again: Now whatcha gonna do, Consuela? / I'm in the bullet storm with a steel umbrella.\n\n It's nearly seven in the morning, and he's finally doing the work he's been preparing himself for all night. He's crawling through the lyrics and making them double back on themselves, doing the subtle piecework while he also creates something big and anthemic that teenagers will want to pay money for. Wayne has the whole world greased, on runners, to get him to this moment. He's spent years constructing an apparatus around himself so that he can exist without having any concerns he doesn't want to have, obeying no laws he doesn't want to obey. He may have two Bentleys and a Maybach, but the only thing he really wants his money for is to be carried through life on a virtual sedan chair so he doesn't have to do anything other than pursue his creative state. But the world tends to resist. The smoother he engineers things, the more slight his tolerance for turbulence becomes. The first time I ever saw Wayne was at the photo shoot for this story. He was nearly six hours late, but everything was ready when he arrived. His wardrobe guy had all his clothes laid out. There were bowls of candy. He'd asked that there be some good fried food available and that the studio allow him to smoke weed\u2014and those hurdles had been cleared. One of his advance men had arrived with a computer full of Wayne's favorite music, a lot of it by Wayne himself, and it was cued up and waiting when Wayne ambled in. And once he was there, he was there. He was stalking through the studio, he was puffing himself up, he was rapping at the walls. The music and the weed and the syrup and the famous photographer and all his people assembled watching him were all conspiring to work him into a frenzy. He was like a Sufi dervish or a Pentecostal who speaks in tongues. He was freestyling while he was being shot, too: GQ? I'm more like GG / That's Gucci / I don't each sushi / I eat coochie / A hundred twenty-five women seeking me no matter what they said / But sexier than fuck when I'm naked in their bed.\n\n Then a song came on that he didn't like.\n\n What the fuck is this? he yelled out. Get this off! Get this fucking off. Whose computer is this? It's the stupidest computer I've ever heard of. He will go to almost any length not to be pulled out of the ether like that.\n\n Now Wayne comes out of the sound booth. It's no longer early morning. The people in the bungalows have gone to work, and the street is quiet again. It's nearly 9 A.M. Eddie has been snoring on the sofa but has somehow picked up that Wayne's out of the booth and that the night could be over soon. He rouses himself. Ron Jaworski's head is again on-screen, doing the same jabberwocky routine. Mr. Q has freshened himself up and is standing at attention near the Maybach, with its curtained windows. Wayne tells someone on the phone that he'll be back at the condo soon and he can let them in. He counts his blunts. He swirls his drink around and around in its Styrofoam and checks to see that there's ice. He wants to hear the song played back one more time, and until then, the apparatus stands ready, waiting.\n\nDevin Friedman is  gq's senior correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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