After the shooting, Gravy slipped inside and freestyled on Funkmaster Flex's show. Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

On the last Wednesday in April, a former drug dealer named Jamal Woolard, from the Lafayette Garden housing projects, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was preparing for his big break. Woolard, whose hip-hop name is Gravy and whose songs include “Drugs, Drugs, Drugs,” “Get Wet, Get Wet,” “I Know, I Know,” and “Murder, Murder,” has for several years been a figure on the Brooklyn underground circuit, cutting mix tapes with better-known performers like Busta Rhymes, Foxy Brown, and 50 Cent. A year and a half ago, he signed a major-label recording deal, with Warner Bros., but outside the bootleg market on Canal Street, where you can collect the latest rap demos and mix tapes (CDs, actually) for five dollars apiece, Gravy remained an unknown. That Wednesday night, he was due to make an appearance on “Riding with Funkmaster Flex,” a popular radio show on WQHT, otherwise known as Hot 97. He’d been invited by Flex, a veteran d.j. who wields a kingmaking power in the hip-hop industry, to perform in an improvisatory freestyle session with a couple of other rappers, Joell Ortiz and Saigon.

For moral support, Gravy had assembled a sizable entourage—three or four dozen men—and outfitted them with extra-large blue T-shirts that read “Gravy” on the front and, on the back, “Brooklyn ‘Get Up,’ ” a reference to the first single from his forthcoming album. Punctuality is unusual in the rap world, but Gravy and his crew arrived early for his session, and when he presented himself at the Hot 97 studio, on Hudson Street in the West Village, at a quarter to seven, Flex sent him away and told him not to return until ten. Gravy went around the corner to get something to eat.

A couple of hours passed. “Then, after I got a sandwich and came out of the store—da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da! ” Gravy told me later, mimicking the sound of gunfire. “The only thing I remember is falling, and knowing that I’m shot—just don’t know where. It’s not like, when you get shot, ‘Oh, I got shot here.’ Nah. You know you hit, so your mind frame is—you pumped, your adrenaline is going. I reach my hand over, and I see I’m bleeding. I didn’t see the hole. I can’t see behind my ass.”

Gravy is an enormous man—well over six feet, and more than three hundred pounds—with a caboose to match. The bullet, it turned out, had struck him in his left buttock. “Straight clean shot— through the ass, through the thigh,” he said, gently rubbing the front of his pants leg.

Five stories up that night, in the building that houses Hot 97, Amy Hackett, the director of institutional relations at Legal Momentum, a women’s-rights nonprofit, was at her desk, working late. She heard the shots, followed by shouting, and decided to wait another hour or so before attempting to leave. Hackett’s taste in radio tends toward NPR. When she finally ventured downstairs, she saw police lights and yellow tape everywhere, and asked one of the detectives, “Is this another gangster-rap event?”

The police were bewildered. They found nearly a dozen shell casings but no victims. Gravy had scrambled inside and up to the seventh floor, to Hot 97, where he proceeded with the interview and the freestyle, as planned. Joell Ortiz didn’t notice that anything was amiss. “Gravy seemed relaxed up there, and he killed it when called on to rhyme,” Ortiz said.

“Nobody knew what the situation was, because I didn’t want it to be known,” Gravy explained to me. “I was there to do my job, so I did my job. Now, to people it looks like ‘Well, you got shot. And you still went in there and did your job?’ Like, O.K., let’s put the shoe on the other foot. What was I supposed to tell a powerful influence like Flex, at Hot 97? ‘You know what, Flex? I’m sorry, man. I can’t do the show. I was standing downstairs—got shot in the ass.’ What, are you nuts? Right? It wouldn’t make any sense. So I had to do what I had to do.”

He continued, “I just went on with the rhymes, but it was hard, because the bullet, it’s hot—like, I don’t know how to describe it. You got to just get shot to understand. It’s real warm. It makes you feel like you can’t move, like something is holding you.”

Around midnight, when Flex went off the air, Gravy made his way back down to the lobby, and found that the police hadn’t left. “And I still respected Hot 97,” he said. “I’m telling everyone, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Look, I’m great.’ Got a big old shirt on, hiding the blood, and everything. ‘I just want to leave.’ They’re saying, ‘You can’t leave, you can’t leave. Got to answer some questions.’ Then it got so bad, with my pants bleeding, that that’s how they found out—’cause they kept me for so long. I was already up in Hot 97 for at least two hours, with the bullet in me, you understand? Bleeding crazy.”

An ambulance took Gravy to St. Vincent’s, while a distraught girlfriend followed close behind, in a Bentley. “By the time I got to the hospital, when the cops took all my clothes off, they found the bullet—inside my sneaker,” he said. “Yeah, so it came through the hole and, you know, got baggy pants on, so it fell and trickled down to my shoe. They were, like, ‘What the hell? This is a .45. Oh, man.’ Then they told me about the eleven rounds.” He arched his eyebrows. “Somebody was trying to really do some damage.”

Not everyone agrees with Gravy on that point. “I wonder—no one has ever really seen the wound,” Flex told me. “Probably the person who treated it is the only one who saw it. It couldn’t have been excruciating pain. He was moving his hips up there. I mean, I’d like to see it. I’m sure we all would.”

Barry Mayo, who was the station’s general manager at the time, was more direct. “There are some people who felt that that surreal chain of events was life imitating art,” he said, and brought up a “Sopranos” episode that had aired a few weeks before the shooting, in which Tony’s brother-in-law, Bobby, persuades an up-and-coming rapper named Marvin to take a bullet for the sake of raising his profile. Marvin ends up paying Bobby seven thousand dollars for the favor, and, when the time comes, Bobby’s bullet hits Marvin in the left buttock.

Gravy maintains that he’s never watched “The Sopranos.” “I’m not really trying to promote this,” he said, again stroking his thigh. “That’s not what it’s about. What happened happened, and I’m still alive, God willing. You know, just like the name of my album, ‘God Willing.’ ”

Two weeks had passed since the big night, and Gravy and I were sitting in a spacious thirty-second-floor office in Rockefeller Center belonging to Kevin Liles, the executive vice-president of the Warner Music Group. (Liles co-wrote the Milli Vanilli song “Girl You Know It’s True.”) Gravy had on jeans, a zip-up sweatshirt, orange-and-green Nike dunks, and a Mets camouflage hat. Despite his size, and his lyrics (“They ain’t bulletproof / Fuck them boys / We put holes in they badges”), Gravy has a gentle, almost vulnerable, affect, with an impish smile and glassy, deep-set eyes that undermine any attempts at a scowl. News accounts of the shooting gave his age as thirty, but he told me that he was twenty-seven. He said he’d been mostly lying low, doing physical therapy and working on his MySpace page. (“It’s addictive—lot of hot women on there, boy,” he said. “You could be on there for hours.”)