In praise of waiting until the coast is clear

You know I don't do this, but... props to Dr. Dre for being kind of a pussy. No homo.

I read the other day that he's suing Death Row for something like 13 years worth of back royalties on The Chronic, and you know good and well he never would have done that shit, if it hadn't been bought by some white woman from Canada.

If Suge Knight were still at the helm, he probably would have been like, fuck it. He's got a shedload of money; why run the risk of being the next 2Pac? Even though Dr. Dre could probably whoop Suge Knight's ass these days. Suge Knight always was kinda built like a high capacity water heater, but you assumed that was mostly muscle. He played football at UNLV, then he tried out for the Rams, back before they moved to St. Louis. Then he was Bobby Brown's bodyguard - and you know he had to be a fucking hoss to look after Bobby Brown, back when he was banging dudes' girlfriends and going to buy coke like it was going out of style. But that was a long-ass time ago. I knew Suge Knight had seen better days, when Nick Broomfield went to interview him in prison, for the great Biggie and Tupac, and he was hobbling around the yard with a cane, like an old-ass man. Obviously, he couldn't have been working out much, if he could barely walk. It's a wonder he finished his sentence without getting effed in the a. Or did he? Maybe that's how his leg got messed up: he ran into Fleece "Booty Warrior" Johnson, and he chose to do things the hard way, rather than the easy way.

It's a well known fact that once a man reaches a certain age, he's basically useless in a fight, because he can easily be taken out at the knees. It's because human beings were only designed to live to be like, 40 years old. Through the miracle of modern medicine, we're now living way longer than our bodies were designed for. That's why a woman, at least in terms of her appearance (which is not as important as her personality), peaks in her late teens and is hardly worth a shit by the time she's 30. When I was in high school, I had this wrestling coach who thought he was kind of a badass, and who knows, he may have been, back in the 1970s. He'd try to bust a move on one of us teenagers (no Boutros), and his knee would slip out of place, and we'd have to stop practice for like 15 minutes so he could walk it off. It's something I've always kept in mind, in case I had to beat up an old man.

Dr. Dre is just as old as Suge Knight, if not older, but he's been hitting the gym. I don't know if he's planning on posing for the cover of Detox with his shirt off, or what. You know how guys get when they start to reach middle age. Part of it's that, if you spent your 20s constantly celebrating for no apparent reason, like I have, and like I'm sure Dr. Dre did, you realize you could fuck around and drop dead in your 40s, but I'm sure part of it's just about getting some stank. By the time you get to be 26, let alone 46, girls your age just don't put you in the mood necessary for love-making. All of the best ones were snatched up by the time they were like, 22, and even they don't look like they used - though, if given an opportunity, you'd still hit it, for purposes of "closure." You're gonna have to start hollering at girls who weren't born when you were in college, which I'm sure is a lot easier when you don't look like someone's grandpa.

But not completely necessary. When I was in my early 20s, I saw a movie that gave me hope that one day I might be able to achieve a level of success with women commensurate with my blogging ability, i.e. higher than a motherfucker. It was a documentary about Charles Bukowski. People with a hip-hop head's sense of cultural literacy might be familiar with him from the references to him on the last MF Doom album. He always had real bad acne, and he could only get with the sorriest of women. (Could that be why Doom wears that mask?) He worked at a post office and wrote novels (and poetry, nullus) his entire life, but his career didn't start to take off until he was like retirement age. Then he started fucking. Constantly. Day in and day out there was a stream of skanks in and out of his front door. Then his wife tried to call him on it in some weird TV interview, and he slapped the shit out of her. Then he died.

Aside from a relationship strategy, what I took from that movie was an appreciation for the concept of delayed gratification, which is often lost on the black community in general, let alone the hip-hop community in particular. It's the rare occasion when you see one of these rappers make a smart decision that pays out in the long run, rather than a dumb decision that pays out right away. Dr. Dre could have gone to Suge Knight and demanded his publishing from The Chronic back in 1996, but Suge Knight probably would have beaten the crap out of him and dangled him from a 14th floor balcony. I heard he also used to make people drink cups of piss, like JD Salinger. (Eww!) Instead, Dr. Dre waited until the point when Suge Knight doesn't own Death Row anymore anyway, and even if he did, Dr. Dre could easily cold cock him, like Akon's weed carrier and that guy Greg the Barber. If I were Dr. Dre, I'd also bang his wife, on GP, even if I wasn't really interested.