T.I.'s 25th Hour

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T.I. is weaving through cars on an Atlanta highway at 85 miles an hour in a black Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG with a crisp Colorado Rockies baseball hat cocked at a sharp angle atop his head, a BlackBerry and an iPhone laying on his lap, and 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me on the stereo. The International Watch Company clock embedded in the dash says 2:20 p.m. The Benz keeps beeping at him to put on his seat belt, but he keeps ignoring it. It’s just another fly day in the life of a rap star. But there’s also an electronic monitoring device strapped to his leg, a sheriff riding in the car behind, watching him, and in a few weeks, T.I.’s going to jail.

His iPhone rings.

“What up, homey?” he drawls. Then, a millisecond later, he corrects himself. “What’s up, Mama.” This is the second of four brief phone conversations he’ll have with his mom today, and all of them include T.I. saying “yes, ma’am” at least twice. He may pay the bills, but he’s still got a polite child’s deep respect for his mother, a short, sweet, no-nonsense woman who doesn’t hesitate to put her only child in his place.

He hangs up and flips to Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak—which he says reminds him of Marvin Gaye’s response to a painful breakup, Here, My Dear—then to Maroon 5, another favorite. “I bought Katy Perry, too,” he says. “How can you not buy a record about two girls kissing?”

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At 28, he’s one of the many former man-children who inhabit hip-hop, who had to grow up quickly with less innocence and more awareness of his family’s challenges and the world’s valleys than kids should have. He started selling crack at 13. “When we were hustling, we had a certain discipline about ourselves at a young age,” he says. “We carried ourselves like adults. We played at times, but we weren’t the silly kids. We knew how to take a joke, we knew how to crack a joke, but we ain’t no joke. Also, ain’t no room for bein’ silly and playin’ when you’re in and out of jail a lot.” He made his first trip to prison at 15, after he was arrested carrying three pounds of weed, $6,000 and a pistol. These arrests would become commonplace. He says, “I’ve been arrested somewhere around 32 times.”

The last was on October 13, 2007, when he was nabbed by ATF agents in the parking lot of a Walgreen’s in Atlanta as he was about to buy unregistered machine guns and silencers. There were nine guns in his car and in his home, a problem for a felon on probation. He pled guilty and was sentenced to a thousand hours of community service and a year and a day in prison, which he’ll begin serving in March.

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T.I. has served time on several occasions, never longer than a year, so he’s not afraid of jail. “You stay to yourself as much as possible,” he says. “Speak when spoken to. And just mind your business. You ain’t there to make friends. You ain’t there to join in on the jailhouse games. You just there to do your time and go home.” So how will he get through each day? “Well, that depends on the facility. Some luxuries are available in some facilities that aren’t available in others. Some facilities have a TV, but you can’t watch it ’cause cats in there wild out so much. I’ll read the Bible a lot. Biographies, magazines. I don’t really read fiction. I read for information, rather than for entertainment. I’ll talk on the phone a lot. I’ll spend a whole day on the phone, checkin’ on what’s goin’ on, makin’ sure things are taken care of. Ain’t a lot to do.” He says his fame won’t really make much of a difference: “People are in awe at times about who I am. I can’t believe I’m in here with T.I., but that usually goes away in about three, four days. After so long, everybody just inmates.”

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