Real Niggas Don’t Send Dick Flicks

It only occurs to me after midnight that it might be past 8 P.M. Normally, due to domestic circumstances, I’m asleep by ten. But it doesn’t feel late. Rick Ross lives in his own personal time zone, and when you’re around him, you’re subject to it. Though I do notice a strange lull in the house, a subtle shift in metabolic state. Ross’s bodyguard, a gentle-looking man with sleepy eyes who is nearly seven feet tall, lopes through the kitchen still wearing this strange headset that makes him look like he’s getting translation at the U.N. General Assembly. Darren, a kid from Milwaukee, is still in the basement, editing what must be just server-melting amounts of Rick Ross video. I confuse two of the other guys who work for Ross—one’s name is Red and the other’s is Black, and I think Red wears a black hat. One of them is stripping the tobacco out of several packs of grape Swisher Sweets and then reassembling them into precise blunts. It’s mesmerizing, like watching someone who’s really good at knitting. But despite all this activity, it feels like the house—the sense of industry that’s been ratcheted up for the nine hours I’ve been here—has slipped into standby mode. It occurs to me that it might be the weed, the same way it feels like you’re driving ninety miles an hour when you’re crawling along at five. Then it occurs to me that a better explanation is that Rick Ross has disappeared.

In the den, Gucci Pucci, Ross’s manager, is lying on one of the black leather sofas. There’s a television channel whose programming seems to consist entirely of people getting into car crashes, and Mr. Pucci is watching it.

"Where’s Ross?" I ask.

A conversion van plows through the front of a 7-Eleven and surprises a woman buying milk. "Asleep," Pucci says without turning his head. "Or..." Then he makes the "banging someone" gesture with his fist.

It’s not hard to figure out who that someone might be. Since I arrived in Atlanta nine hours ago, I have met at least a dozen men at Rick Ross’s house/recording studio, all of whom kind of work for him and are also hoping to get their big break from him. But I have met exactly one woman. When I arrived this afternoon, Ross was reclining in a cushioned dining chair wearing camouflage cargo shorts, a blindingly white T-shirt, and giant Louis Vuitton sunglasses. The room was fragrant with cocoa butter, and a slender blonde woman in black leggings had both hands up the legs of his shorts. She had skin that looked like it smelled good and a face like Whitney Houston in 1987. Ross dismissed her wordlessly, with a nod, put one warm paw on my shoulder, and let me know that should there be anything I need, anything, all I had to do was ask. He said the word "anything" like someone who embraced the scope of what that might mean. He spoke in that deep creamy voice that seems to come from six miles down in his chest. A voice you instantly recognize from his music.

You can’t listen to any station that plays hip-hop for an hour and not hear a Rick Ross song. He’s become one of the very few people who pretty much anyone would list if you said, "Name some famous rappers" (and they didn’t say, like, MC Hammer). And one of fewer still who can make millions of dollars a year rapping. Elliott Wilson, the editor of Rap Radar, classifies Ross this way: Right now he’s still technically a street rapper, though just barely. "Street" means his bread-and-butter demographic is black people, and mostly males. But he is at the very pinnacle of street. He has started to exhibit the signs of mainstream iconic status—appealing to the full spectrum of teenage boys, culturally curious white people, ironic college kids. Basically anyone who listens to rap on the radio sometimes. "There’s Jay-Z, Kanye, and Wayne—and Eminem is the king of his own domain," Wilson says. "And then there’s Rick Ross, right on that cusp." Three of his last four albums have debuted at no. 1 on the hip-hop charts (the other one at no. 2). If his new record, God Forgives, I Don’t, doesn’t follow suit, it will shock everyone in the music industry who knows anything.