Fifth Wheel: Hanging out with Flo Rida
By Joel Stein
Despite your many kind offers, I have no interest in having a posse. From what I've gathered from watching HBO's Entourage, it looks expensive, claustrophobic and as if it would require pretending to care about your posse members' problems. Instead, I wanted to be in someone else's entourage. And not some overly serious movie star who keeps talking about the environment, since that would mean doing things that involve helping the environment. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to join a rap posse.
So I got Flo Rida--a once struggling rapper who exploded late last year with "Low," which became a No. 1 song for 10 weeks--to let me join his Poe Boy crew for his 29th birthday. As a gift, I brought him some Grey Goose vodka and Patron Silver tequila. All the products name-checked in rap songs remove the stress from the gift-giving process.
I stood outside Flo's apartment building in Miami for about 30 minutes while we gathered six members of the posse. Then we waited an hour for them to make calls to inform even more members of the posse about where to meet our part of the posse and to communicate the details of all this to Flo. Logistics, I would discover over the next 10 hours of endless greeting-and-leaving discussions, are the worst part of entourage life: it's like constantly trying to leave and arrive at a Jewish wedding.
All the posse members besides me grew up with Flo in the Miami projects and had been in other jobs before their joint great success. Now Freezy manages Flo's career, Four Million is in charge of logistics, one guy videotapes everything, and the gigantic Four Feet, who went to school for criminal justice and did four years in the Army, serves as the right-hand man. I figured my posse role was to be the one who looked really white in case we got pulled over by the cops.
Riding shotgun as Flo drove to Exclusive Motoring, where he was getting new rims put on his Bentley, I learned the first rule of posseing: you don't get to control the radio. Flo blasted the new album he's working on and sang along loudly. Though I feared it was not within my bounds as posse member, I politely asked if it was proper etiquette to sing along to our own music. "Oh yeah," he assured me. "If you don't feel it, how can you expect anyone else to?" I told him I loved the song with the sample of "Blinded by the Light" and asked him to play it again. I was becoming a very good posse member.
Picking out car accessories, it turns out, is exactly as boring as shopping for women's clothes. But I acted very interested in rims, which I learned to call shoes and not hubcaps. I suggested that his Bentley would look a lot friendlier if he lined the back window with a row of small stuffed animals. It turns out it is above the pay grade of a posse member to suggest such things. After the rims were put on the Bentley, we spent about an hour outside, posse-gathering. Then Flo decided to get someone to drive his Escalade over so it could get new rims as well. I became very nervous when I found out Flo has 10 cars.
We then headed to the new, very expensive restaurant Philippe Chow, where Flo was taking about 20 people out to dinner. On the ride over, as he showed me his $40,000 diamond-encrusted watch, I asked Flo, whose success is pretty recent and fragile, if spending all this money was such a good idea. He told me that rapper Rick Ross told him that you have to spend money with the confidence of someone who knows he's going to make a lot more. I informed him that Rick Ross is not a certified financial adviser. "He's certified. He makes a lot of money," he told me. I could not argue with that logic. Not if I wanted to stay in the posse.
At dinner we drank a bottle of Dom Perignon, and Flo picked up the $6,000 tab. He called it "a Disney World dinner," since Flo seems to think going to Disney World costs $6,000. Then we went outside and made lots of calls to one another about which gas station we were going to stop at on the way to Diamonds Cabaret, a gentlemen's club, where we would tip the entertainers 5,000 $1 bills that we had brought in a leather satchel. I got in the Bentley while Flo lay down in the backseat and began one of those phone discussions I knew too well from my 20s; it started out about nothing but escalated, with a lot about "your tone" and "Why you gotta be like that?" and "Stop playing me," followed by "I wrote you a poem." When the phone call ended, I said, "Flo, you've got 100 problems." He said, "Why's that?" I said, "99 plus one." It was the first rap joke I'd ever made. Trust me, if you know Jay-Z, it's a good one.
As we parted ways at 2:30, having learned a lot about each other and how quickly entertainers can sweep up 5,000 dollar bills with a broom and put them into plastic bags, I was sad to give up my posse membership. Sure, there was a lot of waiting around and being very sensitive to Flo's moods, but it was fun being in a really tight group. Especially because I didn't pay for anything.