Last night I was watching a documentary about the epidemic of heroin use in America, especially among white teenagers in New England. It was very depressing. I've never used heroin and I don't want to sound judgmental, but as I watched these young white teenagers inject themselves all I could think was how when you're an addict, your focus is on getting high, which makes it impossible for you to help anybody else in a meaningful way.
Maybe I'm wrong. Or worse, maybe I'm a hypocrite.
Case in point: this morning when Lev woke up, I carried him into our bed and all I wanted was to go back to sleep for a little while. But he kept asking, "Daddy?" At first I felt like saying, who the hell else do you think I am?
But then I realized he was saying, "Diddy," and since Diddy wasn't in our bed -- for once -- I didn't say anything. Who am I to answer for Diddy?
I was laying there thinking I should really get Lev a bottle of milk and change his diapers. But by then he had snuggled onto my chest and was hugging me in his soft little red velveteen onesie and it felt so good that I didn't want to break the moment. And then I realized, I'm no better than those heroin addicts. Here I am, abdicating all responsibilty and enjoying this buzz of love, while my son doesn't know how to ask for breakfast and keeps shouting for Diddy to come save him.
Spoiler alert. Diddy's not going to save you.
Full disclosure: Sean Combs and I go back like sneakers and hats. The first time I met Diddy his name was still Puffy. It was 1993 and I was music editor at Interview magazine; we had dinner in Soho because he wanted to meet hip-hop journalists who could help him launch Bad Boy Records. He had signed the Notorious B.I.G and told me he was interested in signing a rock band, so after dinner, we sat in his Range Rover and he listened to my CD. For some reason, maybe because my singing sounds like Lou Reed but more awful, he didn't sign me. But we stayed in contact.
About a year later, I interviewed him for another magazine and we had pizza at the Sbarro's in Times Square. This was in 1994, at the height of the east coast west / coast rap feuds, and Tupac had just been shot a few blocks from where we had pizza. When the meal ended I remember being relieved to get away from Puffy because being shot by accident while standing next to Diddy is a stupid way to die.
Over the next 15 years I worked with Puffy on several TV shows--I wrote an MTV Choose or Lose special for him called VOTE OR DIE. I wrote VH1 Hip-Hop Honors and the MTV Video Music Awards the year he hosted the show in Miami.
(The entire two weeks before the VMAs, Diddy had a large room next to the production office that was decorated all white--white carpet, white walls, white DJ booth--and he kept a 24 hour party going in that room with a DJ and open bar and a bunch of girls dancing in white bikinis with sashes indicating which country they came from, like a miss America pageant. That must have cost a few hundred thousand dollars.)
The last time I worked with Puff was writing the Vh1 reality show called "So You Wanna Work for Diddy?" To which my answer is no.
No I don't. Because you see Lev, Diddy owes daddy six grand. That's a lot of diapers.
Back in 1999, Puffy bought a magazine called Notorious. He bought it because it was called Notorious. My friend Tiarra was the editor and assigned me a cover story on Prince. The magazine flew me out to Minneapolis where I spent a day with the Artist Formerly Known As. At one point Prince walked in on me while I was noodling on one of his guitars in Paisley Park recording studio, and he invited me to jam. So I wound up playing guitar with Prince and Larry Graham, and that was fun.
In a way, that almost makes me forgive Diddy. But then Notorious folded and he never paid me the six thousand dollars he owed me. So now when Lev calls me Diddy I don't like it.
The moral of the story is, stay off drugs.
And don't trust Diddy.