There’s #BossLife, then there’s #COVIDlife
Usually veteran rapper Slim Thug treats his million-plus Instagram followers to scenes from #BossLife. Glossy, tricked-out cars from his collection. His white-brick Pearland mansion. Curvy women. His sons. His branded merch. Blunts smoked in beautiful places.
But in the video he posted March 25, the 39-yearold — a 6’6” weight lifter — looked strangely small and tired, and his tone was somber. “So check this out,” he said. “No games being played. The other day I got tested for the coronavirus. And yesterday it came back positive.”
This deep into the pandemic, it’s hard to remember March, a more innocent time — back when few people knew anyone who’d been infected, and when nobody yet realized that COVID-19 was disproportionately hitting Black people. Slim was the first Houston celebrity to announce testing positive for COVID. “Y’all gotta take this serious,” he told the world. “It’s real.”
Slim first heard of the novel coronavirus in January, when a financial advisor mentioned that it could affect the stock market. After a spring break trip to Mexico, he read about how it was racing through China and Italy. He told people to take the lockdown seriously and stay home. When he picked up food at the drive
thru, he wore a mask and gloves.
Then, over a weekend, he began running a fever. He knew his family would tease him — they think he’s a hypochondriac, always running to doctors — but he called his sister anyway: “I think I’ve got coronavirus.”
“No, you don’t,” she told him.
That Monday, March 23, his doctor gave him a quickturnaround test. Twentyfour hours later he knew.
The fever passed, no big thing. The doctor told him to stop smoking and to quarantine. So he holed up in the mansion, alone — he’s single — and friends and family left food and home remedies, like turmeric tea, outside his door. “I had so much love from everybody,” he said.
Recovering like a boss
On March 26, he posted a video of himself, outside by the pool, soaking up sun, recovering like a boss.
But the home-alone routine got old fast. He dropped his first album in ages — Thug Life, in part a salute to Tupac Shakur — but there were no tours, no club dates. He shopped online. He smoked a lot. He ate.
By mid-April he was posting video of cars from his collection. There was the ’75 El Dorado, a classic Houston slab, with a green candy paint job and wire rims poking out. And there was his prize, The Mack, a swoopy ’59 Cadillac convertible that looks a little like the Batmobile.
They all sparkled. A hose lay in the driveway.
“Look at everything, quarantine-clean!” he said. “We’re ready to go somewhere. But we ain’t going nowhere.”
“No matter what kind of house you live in,” he says now, “you still get bored.”
‘One small time’
He’s been out of quarantine for months now, and the COVID infection left no long-term after-effects. His voice is the same. He’s back at the gym now, wearing his mask and gloves; and back to running 3 miles a day. But he still doesn’t feel it’s safe to visit his mom and sons. He misses them.
He knows he was lucky. COVID killed a guy he used to see every day at the gym. And it walloped his friend Scarface, who rapped with the Geto Boys: Scarface had pneumonia in both lungs, and his kidneys failed. Now he’s on dialysis four days a week.
So sometimes Slim speaks out. He’s become an official city spokesman for COVID prevention, part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s #MaskUp campaign. (He also appeared alongside the mayor at Houston’s George Floyd rally.) A couple of weeks ago, Slim announced that his BossLife line will bring out reasonably priced masks and hand sanitizer.
“This is one small time in our lifetime,” he says. “I just say, take the precautions until we get over this hump.”
A few days ago, he posted a video of a crowded party, one with more cleavage than face masks. I saw it after I’d interviewed Slim, and asked his publicist, La’Torria Lemon, what was up with that photo — was it a throwback, taken last year? Or was he reposting someone else’s video?
“I’m pretty certain he had his mask on if he was present,” she replied, “as he ALWAYS wears his mask.”
Marcy de Luna contributed
to this report.