Serves her right

A question for the guys (as if any girls read this): What if one of your friends died, and his wife then dedicated her life to talking shit about him and throwing him under a bus, and then she ran out of money and had to move, with his kids, into a homeless shelter?

It's a trickier situation than you'd think. The natural tendency would be to go get the poor bastard's kids, before some homeless guy exposes himself to them, but it's not like you'd be able to. As a man, it's hard enough getting custody of your own kids, even if you're a millionaire and your wife's a crackhead. Word to Busta Rhymes. You guys know I was pre-med anyway, but I'm at a loss for how you could help the kids without also helping the wife.

This is more or less the situation Fat Joe finds himself in as we speak. Big Pun's wife, who let him beat the crap out of her, because he was a rich and famous rapper, has spent the past 8 years or so (really?) throwing his huge corpse under under a bus. She put out that great DVD with security footage of him pistol whipping her because she wouldn't bring him a sandwich (used to be you could watch the entire thing on YouTube - you might still be able), and then there was that story in the late, great Vibe magazine in which some woman tried to take it and extrapolate this entire epidemic in the hip-hop community, rather than, say, the latino community. Now she's broke and living in a homeless shelter with his kids. And of course she's on World Star today trying to act like it's Fat Joe's fault.

She claims she's received $160,000 in royalties from Pun's albums, which is about as much as I'll make in the next 13 years, but it's all been spent paying down the mortgage (you could buy my house three times over with that) and taking care of the kids. No word on whether or not she's been working, or bringing in any income otherwise, but I wouldn't be surprised if she hasn't.

Fat Joe issued a response, in which he explained how much he's already done for Pun's ungrateful bitch of a wife and that she doesn't have anything else coming from him. I wish he would have provided some exact figures, but it sounds like he's gone above and beyond the call of duty, perhaps a lot more so than she's claiming. He's a better man than I am. He says he gave her the entire advance on the Endangered Species album, some of which he should have been entitled to, plus his share of the advance he received from Pun's publishing company. And he's got papers that show he hasn't made jack schitt off of Pun since he died.

Pun's wife argument is not so much that Joe is caking off Pun's corpse, Diddy-style, and not sharing in the wealth, but that Joe should feel obligated to take care of Pun's kids. He probably made enough money from that garbage "I Won't Tell" alone to put them up in one of the foreclosures up the street from here, where they aren't at (as much) risk of getting raped. It's a hard argument to just dismiss. I've got friends with kids, and I'd feel like a douch if their widows had to move into a homeless shelter and I didn't even at least go down there and break them off with some change, even though I wouldn't have much choice in the matter. I could let them move in with me, but obviously I'm not gonna let a woman live in my house, free of charge, unless I get to have sex with her at least once a day. And you know how these women are - they're not gonna do the right thing, just to prevent their kids from getting raped.

Which brings us back to Big Pun's wife. Even now that she needs Fat Joe in order to be able to live indoors, she can't come up with one good thing to say about him. You wonder if she'd be able to show a man a modicum of respect, if her life depended on it. Obviously she couldn't bring Pun that sandwich. If I were Fat Joe, I wouldn't give her any money, if only because she doesn't have the sense to do the right thing with it. Those kids might be fucked, regardless.