Crying Foul

"If I was white, I would be like John Wayne," Shakur believes. "I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play. Somebody who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, from poverty."

He stares pensively into his water glass. "I never robbed anybody," he says. "I never took anything that didn't belong to me. I never hurt anybody. The thing with the female? I did not do it."

Across his washboard belly, Shakur has the words "THUG LIFE" tattooed. It's the mantra of his personal philosophy, but what it means is anybody's guess. ("The Hate U Gave. Little Interest. F--- Everybody," is one definition Shakur has given.) "I play with the media," he says. "None of the definitions I've ever given the press are true. I could give you one if you want. It means you hang out, you wear your hat to the back, your pants sag. It's a way of us having power instead of being defenseless. It's a street ethic."

Another media fake-out? "Ding."

Whatever it means, it's apparently a new development in this thug's life. His friends say Shakur was once a highly sensitive soul, the sort of teenager who penned poetry ("There is no fear in a shallow heart," he began one poem, "because shallow hearts don't fall apart").

Sometime around the filming of Juice, though, he began tinkering with a more fashionable personality. He started peppering his songs with angry lyrics about "pimp niggaz" and "dropping" cops (Dan Quayle singled out his album 2Pacalypse Now in his family values campaign). He started packing a gun and adorning himself in gaudy gangsta accessories. He became, in short, a lot like his Juice character — a thug.

"It's an evolution," nods Shakur. "Half of where I came from is the African Independence Movement. Self-defense by any means necessary. The Panthers element. That came from my family." Shakur's mother, Afeni, was one of the New York 21, a Black Panthers cell alleged to have plotted a series of late-'60s bombings; Tupac was born a month after her 1971 acquittal and release from prison. "But my thug half comes from the street element. My reality was the gutter and the street. So I had to follow those rules, too."

Now that he's a film star, he'll have to learn Hollywood's rules, too, and those may be the toughest of all. His troubles with the law recently got him fired from John Singleton's Higher Learning. "Columbia wanted to work with him," says a studio source, "but when you're making a movie, you want to make sure your star won't have to do postproduction work from jail."

"From what Singleton told me, the part was written for me," Shakur says. "He told me he wanted me to be one of his actors, like De Niro and Scorsese. But what was the point of that camaraderie if he didn't fight for me?" Still, Shakur insists, "I don't have any bad feelings. I don't blame him." Singleton declines to comment.

Toward the end of lunch, Shakur slips into a funk. "I live in hell," he complains. "I have no friends (not exactly true; he recently hung with Madonna in the front row of Saturday Night Live). I never sleep. I can never close my eyes. Can you imagine what it's like to be who I am? For them to say I raped a woman and for the world to actually be entertaining the thought that I did?"

But he perks up at the photo session an hour later, pumping for the camera. Where does he see himself in the future, when he grows old and fat? "Worst case, in a cemetery," he offers. "Best case, a multimillionaire." He grins at the thought.

"Hey, Tupac," one of his entourage cracks, "when you're old and fat, all you'll be able to see of your tattoo is 'HUG LIF.'"

Shakur will undoubtedly find some sort of meaning in those words, as well.