The 9 Lives of Katt Williams

I began by asking a simple question. And yet a question Katt Williams couldn’t answer: How old are you?

It’s not that he wouldn’t answer, he told me, but that he couldn’t. Because he doesn’t have an actual age. We’d already been together for the better part of two days, and by now I knew he meant this literally.

Evening was coming on in Miami, and we were, the two of us, shut in his assistant’s bedroom in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne. Williams was pacing, orbiting the room like a shark. He was wearing a baseball hat. He was wearing pool slides. He was holding a Newport that maybe he’d smoke soon.

Outside, a storm had moved up the coast, and all we could hear from the window now was a whisper of surf.

But the Internet, I told him, says you’re 46.

“Please don’t get any of your information from Wikipedia, sir,” he replied crisply.

I can understand it if Katt Williams feels like he can’t trust the Internet. It’s part of a whole sociocultural-legal infrastructure that he feels isn’t interested in understanding the truth, or him. Katt Williams, you should know, is a comic icon. Have you seen Pimp Chronicles Part 1? Or Part 2? Or his new Netflix special? Have you been to one of his thousands of shows in the past decade or so? If you have, you know that Katt became a legend without broadening or diluting himself to become more “mainstream,” which is unusual. But if you look for Katt Williams on the Internet, what you’ll mostly find are stories of weird and purportedly criminal shit he’s done, as well as a lot of people searching “Is Katt Williams still alive?”

As for his age, he told me he grew up in a religion that does not celebrate birthdays, so he didn’t keep track. When I asked what that religion is, he told me that’s not the point.

So what was the point?

“The brain,” he said, “is more like a computer than we now understand.”

He tried to explain it to me: When you tell your brain what age you are, it makes your body be that age. Ah, okay, I said, so it’s like: Age ain’t nothing but a number? Katt Williams stopped pacing and gave me a look. A look that said: You, who cling desperately to the very instruments designed for your imprisonment, are just a limited, blinkered piece of sentient meat.

“I am the ageless one,” he said.

And do you know what? I believed him. And it was clear that he believed him, too.

“That’s why I can still run a 4.1 40-yard dash right now, no stretching, in street clothes, and yet maybe [smoking] like a chimney at the same time.”

He looked at me.

“I lead,” he said, “an experimental existence.” And by now I no longer questioned whether that was true.