Chingy sits in the lobby of a posh Hollywood hotel, quietly polishing his diamond jewelry with a chamois cloth. First one ring, then another, then the elaborate Disturbing Tha Peace necklace given to him by Ludacris, who signed him to a label deal. Chingy got just three hours of sleep last night -- he performed at a club in Las Vegas and stayed in Nevada just long enough to have a romantic encounter with a fan in a bathroom -- but he's right on time for his 10 a.m. ride.

The St. Louis native has been traveling for three months straight, first promoting "Right Thurr," his supercatchy single of praise to the female booty, and now his debut album, Jackpot. Here's Chingy's inventory of what he needs at all times on the road: cell phone, two-way pager, hot tea, cough drops, natural herbs, extra-long T-shirts, CDs, headphones, Hennessey, the Hpnotiq (a bright blue liqueur) and a box of Magnum condoms.

Chingy and his crew of six troop out to the bus that will take them to Burbank, where they will perform on The Tonight Show. Chingy sits in the back row of the bus, directly behind the two girls in the group, dancers Juanitra Allen and Aja Holmes. Chingy keeps teasing Holmes like he's twelve instead of a baby-faced twenty-three, pulling her ponytail, even throwing a spitball. She swats him away cheerfully, calling him "sillyass."

Allen uses her cell phone to take snapshots of Chingy, who is quick to pose with his forearms raised to chest level. "Take another one," he instructs her, and adjusts his baseball cap so he can look into the phone smolderingly. "Got my sexy face on," he tells her -- and then he laughs.

At the gate to the NBC studios, there's a brief moment of conflict -- the security guards don't seem to believe that Chaka Zulu is the real name of Chingy's manager -- but soon enough the matter is settled and Chingy is on his way to the makeup room for a haircut. While he gets a set of clippers run over his head, I ask him about the spate of double R's that has overwhelmed the charts in the last year, from Nelly's "Hot in Herre" to Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" to his own "Right Thurr" and "Wurrs My Cash."

"That's just how we talk!" he says. "In California, they say it proper." He tries to pronounce "there" so it rhymes with "hair" instead of "her" and after a few attempts gives up. "I can't even say it like that, it'd sound stupid." This seems like a sensible reply for Chingy and his St. Louis homeboy Nelly -- with whom he has a respectful if distant relationship -- but Aguilera will have to fashion her own defense.

Chingy's album Jackpot is a bouncy summer confection, full of jokes and boasts, mostly about sex and money. One of the best tracks, "Holidae In," is about a hotel party/orgy. On it, Chingy raps, "You got that bomb-ass pussy . . . won't you bring four of your friends." At the time he wrote it, Chingy had never been with more than one woman at a time, but now he finds women are propositioning him all the time. "I rapped about having a menage a trois, and it actually came true," he says, genuine wonder in his voice.

In his nonexistent free time, Chingy is thinking about a screenplay. "I'm going to write the scrizzle for rizzle," he says, and giggles. "It's called Struggle for Success, about a guy trying to balance his music life with his street life. He's meeting people, trying to get through school, he doesn't know what to do." Somewhat unnecessarily, Chingy adds, "And the movie's going to star me."

Born Howard Bailey Jr., Chingy grew up in Walnut Park, a rough neighborhood in St. Louis. His dad did yardwork, his mom was a nurse; they split up when he was ten. Chingy loved music from early on. As a kid, he would make extra money by dressing up as Michael Jackson and dancing in the middle of the street, collecting change from passers-by.

"He was a Ritalin kid," says his older brother Larry Pullman. "A handful, constantly running around."

His friend (and backup rapper) Rated R says, "We were doing the stuff kids get into: staying out too late, smoking weed, throwing rocks at people. We didn't get caught a lot."

When he was twelve, Chingy did get caught: He was driving a Blazer he had stolen and hot-wired. The cops spotted him and cut him off. "I hopped out, but I was surrounded," he remembers. "The police put me on the ground, they had a knee on my neck and a gun to my head. You know how spooky that was? I went to juvenile for three weeks. I hate facilities like that, juvenile or jail. With your freedom gone, where's your purpose in life?"

Chingy has had bullets fly past him a couple of times -- once when he got into a fistfight, somebody fired a shot that grazed the back of his skull. "It wasn't my time to go," he says with a shrug.

In high school, Chingy was good at starting trends -- like wearing soccer pads on his forearms -- and battle-rapping. He'd go with friends to the local skate rink and take on other MCs in the bathroom. "I won a lot of times," he says, "but freestyle was getting played out. It was time for pay-style." He joined a hip-hop trio called Without Warning, which released an album in St. Louis but didn't go anyplace. He was living on ramen noodles and grilled-cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

He had experimented with the stage names Thugsy and H Thugs but at age twenty, picked Chingy, which is what he and his friends call somebody with money in his pocket. More important, he hooked up with the St. Louis producers the Trak Starz. They sent out some tapes of their collaboration. Chingy had been doing that all his life, with nothing to show for it but canceled stamps -- but this time, it got him and the Trak Starz a record deal.

"A year ago, I was a loser," Chingy says. "Running the streets, being an asshole, not trying to get a job. Doing the opposite of trying to get a job. Now I'm worth $10,000. But it's going to escalate and I'm going to be worth 100,000, maybe a million, maybe 500 million."

In their dressing room, dancers Allen and Holmes are hanging out with Chingy's road manager, Shay Carter. Chingy comes in, grabs a jar of honey and heads down the hallway to his own dressing room. "He's going to put the honey on somebody's toes or something," Shay shouts after him. "Nasty-ass motherfucker."

Although Chingy spends the afternoon flirting with an ex-girlfriend and the older sister of a little girl who asked him for an autograph, no honey is applied to pedal extremities. Nor does he get freaky with actress Gabrielle Union, although he shyly hangs around outside her dressing room and gets a hug from her when she emerges. Leno announces Chingy's single as "Right Thru" instead of "Right Thurr," but backed by a live funk band and the dancers, Chingy rocks the house. Even Sean Connery is bobbing his head and feeling the groove.

About a dozen Capitol executives are present to congratulate Chingy -- the label's first successful urban act since MC Hammer -- but Chingy has to head straight for the airport for a show in San Francisco. Before he leaves, he tells me about a recent dream. "I was driving, and I drove the car into a river. And then I saw a beautiful mermaid, and we had sex in the water. You think I'm lying, but it's a true dream." Chingy grins and heads out the door, living another true dream.

(July 29, 2003)

Watch the "Right Thurr" video