Usually, veteran rapper Slim Thug treats his millions of Instagram fans with scenes of #BossLife. Bright and misleading cars from his collection. His white brick mansion in Pearland. Round women. Your children. Your branded product. Smoked blunts in some places.
But in the video he released on March 25, the 39-year-old, a 6-foot-, 6-foot weightlifter, looked strangely small and tired, and his tone was dark. “So take a look at it, ” he said. “No match was played. I did the coronavirus test the other day. And yesterday, it turned out positive.
Deep in the pandemic, it is difficult to march, a more innocent time, when few people knew someone who had been infected and no one yet learned that COVID-19 disproportionately affected other black people.
Slim, the first Houston celebrity to announce a positive check at COVID. “Everyone should take this seriously, ” he told the world. I said, “That’s right.”
Slim first heard about the new coronavirus in January, when a money adviser argued that it could just be the stock market. After a vacation in Mexico, he read how he ran through China and Italy. He told other people to take the blockage seriously and stay home. When he picked up food from the engine, he was dressed in a mask and gloves.
Then, over a weekend, he started having a fever. He knew his circle of relatives would make fun of him, they think he’s a hypochondriac, who still runs to doctors, but still called his sister, “I think I have a coronavirus.”
“No, you, ” he said.
On Monday, March 23, your doctor tested you. Twenty-four hours later, I knew.
The fever’s gone, not much. The doctor told him to quit smoking and quarantine himself. So he hid in the mansion, alone, he is not married, and his friends and his circle of relatives left food and home remedies, such as turmeric tea, outside his door. “I had a lot of love for everyone, ” he said.
On March 26, he posted a video of himself outdoors in the pool sunbathing, recovering like a boss.
But the regime he’s at home has aged temporarily. He released his first album in years, Thug Life, partly a Tupac Shakur trio, but there were no club tours or dates. He did online shopping. He smoked a lot. Ate.
In mid-April, he posted car videos from his collection. There’s El Dorado 75, a vintage Houston sla, with a sweet green paint and lace tires coming out. And there’s its price, the Mack, a Cadillac ’59 convertible swoopy that looks a bit like the Batmobile.
They all shone. There was a pipe in the driveway.
“Look at everything, leave your quarantine blank!” He said. “We’re in a position to go somewhere. But we’re not going anywhere.”
“It doesn’t matter what kind of space you live in,” he says now, “you’re bored.”
It has been out of quarantine for months and COVID infection has left no long-term aftermath. His voice is the same. Now he is back in the gym, dressed in his mask and gloves; and run again 3 miles a day. But he still doesn’t feel confident that he’s going to make a stop with his mother and children. Missing.
He knows he’s lucky. COVID killed a guy he saw every day at the gym. And that missed his friend Scarface, who hit the Geto Boys: Scarface had pneumonia in any of his lungs and his kidneys failed. He’s now on dialysis four days a week.
Then Slim expresses himself. He has become the city’s official critic for COVID prevention, as a component of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s #MaskUp campaign. (He also made the impression with the mayor at George Floyd’s rally in Houston.) A few weeks ago, Slim announced that its BossLife diversity will offer mask and hand sanitizer at moderate prices.
“It’s a little era of our lives,” she says. “I’m just saying, take precautions until we get over this bump.”
A few days ago, he posted a video of a party full of people, one with more cleating than masks. I saw him after interviewing Slim and asked his publicist, La’Torria Lemon, what about this picture? Is it a step backwards, taken last year? Or are you reposting someone else’s video?
“I’m pretty sure he dressed his mask if he shows up,” he replied, “because he always wears his mask.”
Marcy de Luna contributed to this story.
[email protected], twitter.com/LisaGray_HouTX
Lisa Gray is senior editor of the Office of Functions. Previously, she held several of Chronicle’s most attractive positions: virtual editor, corporate editor, editorial board member, interim editor, columnist and, most importantly, founding editor of Gray Matters, the Chronicle named “Best Blog” in Texas for 3 years in a row.
Email [email protected]. Or stay with her on Facebook, where she spends too much time.