Jon: So, what sorts of things do you like to do in your spare time?

JonBenet Ramsey: (long pause)

Jon: (sips juice box)

This time, though, it's going to be different. To the shock and amazement of myself and soon the world, Tupac Shakur is alive. In seclusion, but alive. For the last seven years, he's holed himself up in the old high-rise apartment building across the street from me, unbeknownst to nearly everyone. I didn't discover this until the other day, when my ballcap-wearing friends and I decided to play a game of stickball. We normally played in the old sandlot facing the fence, but a few days before we hit a ball over it and our Erector set got crushed by Darth Vader's mutant dog. So now we play facing the high-rise. Of course, my friends pressured me into going up there and asking for the ball back. Oh yeah, and I hit a ball in his window. When I yelled for someone to toss it back down to us, Sean Connery stuck his head out three windows over, threw out a backpack full of articles and said, "THESHE OUGHT TO HELP WITH YOUR WEBSITE. THEY'RE ABOUT ME, WILLIAM FORRESTER." I yelled back, "This isn't really what I'm looking for!", to which he responded, "YOU'RE THE MAN NOW, DOG!", smiled smugly, and closed the window. I was still without my baseball.

So what did you think of my articles, Mr. Forrester?
"I'm waiting to be impresshed."

So I went up there with Busta Rhymes, who is my stepdad, or real dad, or brother, or whatever. I knocked on the door, it opened, and there he stood. I was dumbfounded. There was no mistaking that this was Tupac. He was even bald, just like Tupac was. He knew what I was suspecting. "Yeah, it's me." he said. I believed him, but Busta was all like "Its kinda funny. Wanna be Pac, wanna fake like you a thug, runnin around talkin shit that you ain't capable of." I got rid of him by sticking a $100 bill inside a bucket of fried chicken and throwing it out the window, and he jumped after it, since black people will do anything for those sorts of things, and plunged to his death. "Soda pop?" asked Tupac.

If Pac was still here now, he would never ride with Ja. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.

Jon: Sure! I enjoy soda pops!

Tupac: Or is it...sodas pop?

J: Whoa! You know proper pluralization? Were you one of those experimental black kids that they put in white kid schools to make them smarter?

T: Not really at all. I grew up in a neighborhood a lot harder than this one.

J: Really? Do tell.

T: Well, I grew up in the New York and L.A. ghettos. Childhoods are tough there. It was--

J: I have some lyrics here from the Dr. Dre and Eminem song, "Forgot about Dre". Was this about your childhood?

T: What? No.

J: Oh. What kinds of things do you do in your spare time?

I was blowing it. There were people out there who would pay millions of dollars for the privilege of interviewing Tupac Shakur, and I was completely flushing my opportunity down the shitter. It was time to ditch the script.

Jon: Okay. So I've been hearing for almost seven years that you've been dead. But you don't look very dead to me. I don't see any strings of any sorts that are tied to your hands and feet that would make your corpse walk around. Are you a robot or something?

Tupac: Nope. It's actually me.

J: Well then, we have a lot to talk about. How did you survive that L.A. shooting?

T: (laughs) Well, it's actually kind of a funny story.

J: (leans expectantly)

T: It was the night after a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas, like everyone knows. I was sitting in the car with Suge Knight, and we were bullshitting like we always did. And I said, "Hey, let's play guess the number." He said, "How do you play?" And I said, "I pick a number and you have to guess it. And if you guess it right, I have to fake my death and go into hiding for that many years. But if you guess it right, you have to hold your breath for a full minute." So we played, and he guessed seven. So...yeah. That's pretty much how it happened.

J: What?...That's like the lamest possible reason ever.

T: Meh. It was actually kind of fun. Besides, I just wanted to see if that fat fuck could keep his mouth shut for a full sixty seconds without talking or eating.

J: So you're coming back?

T: Yeah. September 13th, exactly seven years after I "died". It fits with the whole Seven Year Theory.  You know - I got shot 7 times, on the 7th day of the month, and died 7 days later, and my last album to be released was "The 7 Day Theory"...it was really neat the way it all turned out.  Can you write down that I'm doing the little quotation mark things with my hands when I say "died"?

J: Wow, you know your punctuation, too. You're a lot different from most black people!

T: Tell me about it. Once when I was being questioned by the cops, classical music was playing down the hall from the interrogation room. They wanted to turn it off, but I said, "No, no. I enjoy Mozart." That impressed the hell out of them. Then they offered me some menthol cigarettes if I could name all fifty states, which I did. They all came in and gave me this huge round of applause, then let me go. It was really remarkable.

J: See, a lot of people would call that racist. But really, that's just being nice!

T: That's what I'm saying! I like menthol cigarettes!

J: So, what have you been doing these last seven years?

T: Well, the last year I spent in the public eye, I recorded upwards of one hundred songs. That's more than some popular artists ever release. I had a little studio put in here, and I've spent most of my waking hours laying tracks. I've been working so efficiently that time-wise, I actually have more material than the amount I've spent recording it. By my calculations, if one were to start listening to all my songs right now, and keep them on twenty-four hours a day, he would be finished in March of the year 2006

J: That's impressive.

T: Yeah, the day before I come back, they're going to release double-disc tribute CDs every forty-five seconds.

J: What do you think of what they've done with the tribute CDs so far, by the way?

T: I can't help but laugh. Remember "Until the End of Time"? They had some guy come in and sing a chorus talking about how I was in Heaven to make the song, and me, sound prophetic. I mean, I had predicted "the end" several times before, but that's just blatant. And I also like how all my CD covers show me in a state of deep contemplation. Let me tell you something, if some punkass came up and started pulling that shit, I'd cap him for being soft. The big one was when they made the documentary of me called "Thug Angel". They were like, "Take your shirt off and look like you're praying." Who the hell prays when they're about to step into the shower? I'm a skinny nigga, but I ain't scared I'm gonna slip down the drain.

J: But you are! You're a thug angel!

T: At first it was really funny, but I'm starting to get tired of that shit. I was the best in the rap game - no question about it. I had an incredible voice, my rhymes were better than anything else out there, and I lived the thug lifestyle, which gave me street cred. And they call me an angel because I asked "Is there a heaven for a G"? in about ten different songs, and I would rap about how it's wrong to beat women. Hell, I didn't know it was that easy. You have any idea how much drug running I did as a kid? Can you count on one hand how many women I've treated like shit? You know how much I glorified the idea of busting caps and splitting wigs?

J: But you couldn't help it! That's the sort of thing that black folks do!

T: That's pure bullshit. We were created equal to white people. We aren't genetically predisposed to crime. We can change if we want. It's just that we don't really want to. Yeah, it's hard to change, but it's not so hard that we have to resort to copping out and saying, "It's not my fault I do these things."

J: Wow. That actually makes a lot of sense.

T: Yeah, well when you're cooped up in an apartment with a recording studio and a Nintendo 64 for seven years, you have plenty of time to get your thoughts straight. Don't get me wrong, I loved the N64. But when I went into hiding, the only games they had out were Mario 64 and Pilotwings. Mario 64 was a damn great game, and it took me a while to get all the stars. But then it's like, great. Let's hop in the airplane and fly through magical hoops to score points. FOR SEVEN YEARS.

J: You missed it, man. You should have waited until Goldeneye came out.

T: Yeah. Honestly, that's really the only regret about the whole thing. Of course, I was filthy rich anyway, but after this cash-in I'm going to buy $100 bills by the sheet from the Treasury Department so I can roll them up and use them as toilet paper.

J: That's bad for the plumbing. At least, that's the way it is with Monopoly money. And gerbils.

T: Oh?

J: Yeah. Toilet paper's much cheaper anyway. So, do you feel upstaged by all the rap that's out there today? I mean, look at 50 Cent. He's fast becoming another Tupac.

T: Okay, now you done fucked up. I'm tired of everyone riding 50's nuts. His rhymes are stupid, his lyrics are completely unoriginal, and he raps-- wait, no, he talks-- with the energy of a sack full of pennies. At his best, he's bearable, and at his worst, he makes me want to jump off the balcony. Here. Here, let's try something. Compare one of my raps with one of his. About, let's say, fucking some girl. Check this out:

J: Uhh...hold on. Let's see.

T: Wow, he threw two rhymes in there. I'm impressed. Oh, wait, one of them is a word rhyming with itself. Then again, he's been shot almost as many times as I have, so there you go.

J: Well, they do say that the best rap is in the underground anyway. Heard of Aesop Rock?

T: See, I just don't know about Aesop Rock. His raps always have something to say, and some of his rhymes are the sickest shit out there right now. But maybe he should go write a book or something. I like to read it, but I can't stand hearing it. It's just annoying. I'm like, man, vary in the inflection in your voice once in a while. He sounds like a Gregorian monk trying to rap.

J: You're going to lose a lot of cred with the backpack-rap crowd.

T: Well fuck, I guess I better pack heat next time I walk into a coffee shop.

J: Pac, it's been real chillin' with you, man.

T: Call me sir.

J: See, whenever I see this part of an interview in magazines, it never ends with a "see you later." The interviewee always closes with a summarizing comment, or just an inconsequential answer to a question. Then the font switches to italic and it says something like,

But I can't really do that here. Any ideas?

T: You could just do what I did on my last compilation album, and say something cryptic, yet stupid.

J: Huh. That'll work.