I had this bizarre dream, and I have not been taking any drugs, that I was hanging out with Snoop Dogg. That's weird for many reasons, not least that I don't often listen to rap and I've never really considered Snoop to be a shining example of Cool. In fact, he's kinda funny looking and leery and permanently stoned, so I find him amusing more than anything else. Maybe for that reason alone he'd be fun to kick around with.
We were at his house, a three-storey colonial which oddly was located on a familiar Auckland street. Snoop was lurking around in his gangly manner, saying indecipherable things in that low-end rhyming tone he uses on the Chrysler commercial ('If the ride is more fly, then you must buy!") and I was thinking to myself in half-assed ebonics, damn, bitch, that's a big house. Snoop must be really loaded from doing all those commercials. Then it occured to me, he was a famous rapper before he sold out to The Man, so he's gotta be pretty flush. Maybe the house should be bigger?
Remembering that small fact made the story take a new turn. Snoop came to life like a droid with a new command sequence. "My nizzle," said he. "Step this way. I'll show you my studio." He had converted the top level of the house into a massive sound studio. We smoked a reefer, then went up to check it out. Most of the room was taken up by several hundred huge speakers. Some of the speakers were so massive they were bigger than the room they were in, a twist of physical impossibility that would've impressed Doctor Who. When Snoop got a beat going the entire room shook. We woke up his roommate.
I didn't immediately stop to question the idea that Snoop would need a roommate. It just seemed plausible - as plausible at least as a white boy like me hanging out with a famous rapper. The roommate was Some Girl, a white chick with red hair who wasn't all that pretty, but she had sass. She asked Snoop if he would please turn down the fucking beatz. It wasn't really a question. Then she lit up a cigarette and her gaze settled on me.
"Who the hell are you?" she said. She sat down on a chair in the middle of the studio floor, which had now become an immense speaker cone covered with black mesh, and started vibrating up and down. Snoop had not turned the sound down. In fact, if anything things were getting louder. Some Girl hadn't seemed to notice. At least, not yet.
I shrugged but had nothing to say. I get this in dreams from time to time: it's not that I'm trying to speak but can't, just that I have nothing to say, so no words get said. I often think I should try to remember to check if I even have a mouth.
"Well," said Some Girl, "Snoop has a--" The rest was unintelligible: the music volume was approaching earth-shaking and the entire room was bumping. Snoop was bobbing up and down over his turntables, braids flicking around his head like the beads on a Miyagi drum. The walls pulsed violently in and out like a warped mescaline trip. Some Girl went on mouthing unheard words and smoking as if nothing was out of the ordinary. For all I knew, it probably wasn't.
For some reason, I felt like an island of calm in the eye of a hurricane. The roommate thing was catching up with me, an oddly calming distraction. I don't get it, I thought to myself very, very slowly. Why the hell does Snoop have a roommate? Is he paying a mortgage?
That very thought brought everything to a grinding halt. The record needle made that nasty scratching sound, the sonic cliche for stop the music! The amps powered down with one of those falling bassy whirring sounds like a nuclear reactor shutting down. Everything stood still. Snoops braids were suspended in mid-swing. Some Girl's cigarette continued to burn but she seemed to have forgotten it. The air was electric but eerily silent. I looked from one to the other. This is it, I thought. The dream ends here. This oughta be good.
Snoop smiled a big stoned smile. "If the ride is more fly," he said, "then you must buy!"
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