The ripped pants, it turns out, weren’t even the worst thing to happen to him that night. Aside from the wardrobe mishap, the show felt amazing. He had performed on freakin’ “S.N.L.”! He felt great. So he shot his shot, sending a message to someone he had been chatting with online. The target respectfully knocked that shot out of the air: This person was so flattered by the attention, but they had a boyfriend. Nas respected the honesty a lot of people just throw themselves at him. You forget sometimes that people are, like, really loyal, and it’s like, I want to do that.” “I was like, Damn, you’re that loyal?” he told me. He tried to remind himself that “no matter what I do or accomplish in this life or whatever, I’m never going to get everything I want.” Desires are aroused, wishes are made, but life trundles forward anyway, indifferent. In the past, he would cry himself to sleep over this sort of thing. “I was like, hold on,” he said, with the confidence of a person who has just realized that we’re all, like, specks on a spinning rock in an endless space ocean.īut, he told me beatifically, something inside him had changed. “We’re not doing this this time.” He left the “S.N.L.” after-party and went to his hotel room to get a hold of himself.