Usher's Wild Ride

The April Fools' punking has been going on all day. First Usher called his A&R rep and said a producer he once had a beef with had come by his house with a baseball bat and smashed his elaborate glass-plate front door, so he'd grabbed a gun and was driving over to his house — "I'm gonna handle this like a real man! I'm gonna kill this dude!" Next, he called a friend and told him that he was about to commit suicide because of all the pressure of his career, and then he told his mother, who is also his manager, that he wouldn't drive an Aston Martin in the tour video, as planned, unless he had an endorsement deal — "Aston Martin think they gonna use me? Use me? I don't think so." He even called his publicist and said he didn't want to do this story. "I sold millions of albums in my time and never been on the cover of Rolling Stone before?" he says. "Shoot, I thought they don't put black faces on those covers."

Usher leans back in the dressing-room chair, content with the havoc he has wreaked. His body, cut like a professional tennis player's, hums with energy, and he's wearing jeans slung so low that you not only see the waistband of his boxers but can actually make out cheeks. His personal assistant and best friend, Keith Thomas, starts to trim his hair and the room goes quiet, the buzz of the razor and snip of the scissors all there is to hear. Then Thomas breaks up. "The best was waking Usher up this morning," he says, snickering. "We were like, 'Forget 1.1 million! You sold 2 million albums yesterday!' He was all, 'Duh, I did?'"

Usher laughs, and then he nods slowly, staring at his reflection in the mirror. "Yes, sir," he says.

Selling 1.1 Million albums the first week out gives you some serious bragging rights, and Usher isn't above taking them. "This is just the beginning," he says of the success of Confessions, his fifth album — the fastest seller since 'NSync's Celebrity in 2001 and an R&B record-setter — which kicks off with the up-tempo "Yeah!" with Lil Jon and Ludacris and is chockablock R&B from there on out. "I see a sea of people in an auditorium — no, a dome, full of people, as far as you can see," he says, splaying his arms out. "I see millions of albums, huge houses, much prosperity — I'm going to be one of the richest motherfuckers in the world. I've always been highly favored. There is a reason I've been kept the way I have, to make it out of situations that men normally wouldn't have been out of with women."

One of these situations, of course, is the one that contributed to Confessions' staggering sales: his breakup with Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, seven years his senior, the girl he coveted as the hottest chick in TLC way before they met. After they dated for two years, Thomas moved into his house. Then they started to fight, over stupid things, and they finally broke up a few days after New Year's 2004. Usher says Thomas kept calling, though, obsessing about whether he'd been with other women (he'd previously said he hadn't, but she wasn't so sure). "I said I didn't want to talk about it over the telephone," Usher says, "So she came over, but I had to do an interview. She said, 'You running.' I canceled it and sat down. I didn't take the blame out on her, say that she as a woman didn't give me what I needed. I said, 'This is something I did, it was a fucked-up decision.' She wanted to know who and how many times, and I said, 'That's not important.' Then she got on the radio and talked about it — I could not believe that she did that."

On Atlanta's Q100, Thomas told a DJ that Usher had committed the "ultimate no-no"; Usher retaliated by publicly claiming that she had applied pressure to get married. But now he says that he'd thought about marriage, too. "I had a ring for that girl and everything, and she never knew it," he says. A jeweler in LA made him a ten-carat diamond ring, and he had it right in his pocket. "Something was not right," he says. "I felt like I was in a desert, running, and then there was this mirage. It's beautiful, but wait a minute: Let's make sure it's real." Nevertheless, a couple of months later, he asked her to marry him — while they were having sex. "She was like, 'You coming on crazy,'" Usher says now. "Thank God she didn't take me serious. It was just that it felt so good, you know? And I had been talking to my friend, who told me that's how he proposed to his woman."