Two weeks earlier, Nas performed “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” the first single from his forthcoming album, on “Saturday Night Live.” The song is about one man’s lust for another, and its stage performance - derived from the song’s video, in which the singer gives Satan a lap dance - was an all-male leather orgy, diluted just enough to be shown on broadcast television. Minutes later, my pastrami sandwich arrived. “It looks like somebody got bored and just murdered any animal and skinned it alive,” he said, disgusted. We sat in a booth beneath a series of framed portraits of sandwiches, overstuffed with cuts of meat.
At one point, our server, assuming we were on a date, chastised the singer for looking at his phone. Free from the shackles of celebrity respectability - who would recognize him here, among all these khaki pants? - we got increasingly silly, eventually conducting a brief conversation entirely in fart noises. īecause the Chateau Marmont was closed, and the Sunset Tower Hotel stopped serving food 15 minutes earlier, and the food at SoHo House wasn’t even that good anyway, Lil Nas X and I ended up eating lunch in a mostly empty Jewish deli in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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