The Dark Story of Eminem (41 page)

Whether he would make his mark as a producer wasn’t really answered on
Loyal To The Game
. Leaning on Luis Resto’s understated keyboards, his work was simply atmospheric, without the imaginative leaps of true studio auteurs like the Neptunes or Kanye West. He was at his best when sampling unlikely white musicians, like old pals Elton John (supplying a duet the sexually insecure ‘Pac might have baulked at), and Dido, seemingly only affecting when kidnapped by the man whose ‘Stan’ made her. These tracks added to Eminem’s story too, recalling almost forgotten cast members, distant relatives in his growing “family”.

The insecure, angry boy raised by his real mother, Debbie, seemed almost gone now. He had been replaced by Mr. Mathers, the responsible adult his kids’ friends saw at school field trips or reading to the class, a man who had come through his life’s maelstrom cleansed. And yet, in the studio, Slim Shady still breathed.

“There’s that fine line of walking where I have fans that I don’t want to let down,” he pondered to
Vanity Fair
. “I don’t ever want to become soft. I don’t want to compromise my music for my life at home. It’s almost like I do live a double life. When I get behind those gates and I go home, I’m Dad.”

Slim’s final end might come when that double life tore. How would he choose, he was asked, between a happy family and fame’s needs?

“If there ever comes a day where I would have to pick one or the other,” he said at once, “I already know what it would be. I would walk away from all of this if I had to.”

April 11, 2006, 8 Mile after dark. Proof had been out prowling and partying all night. He had been the same since he was a teenager, never wanting to let go of the wild times until the last bar closed. That Monday night had begun at the Coliseum strip club with his friends, Mudd, Horny Mack and Chop. “We at the titty bar chillin’,” Mudd said later. “Got the booth, drank a little, hollered at the DJ.” They moved on to a second strip bar, Club Rolex, four men in their early thirties exuberantly getting off on the heat of naked women and hip-hop.

Finally, they walked into that last bar, the CCC Club (also known as the Triple C to locals). The doors closed behind them. At 4.30 am, Proof was laid out on the club’s floor, three bullets in him, the life gone from his eyes.

The Triple C was a typical place for a Detroit night to end up, one way or the other. It was a squat red building with a steel door and no windows, on a desolate stretch of road; a tomb-like holding tank for those in no hurry to go home, where the risk of sudden violence is part of the bill for seeing what the next hour brings. “There was a barber shop next door, and a 7-Eleven type place. A pawnbrokers across the road. Very little else for miles,” the
Independent
‘s Guy Adams tells me of visiting the place in 2009 after it had been shut down. “It didn’t look like a fashionable joint. It looked like a retail unit that had been converted into a sort of bar, with blacked-out windows and a few pool tables. It’s on a reasonably busy road in a very deprived area. If you wanted to go for a drink, you’d be very short on options. So the dregs end up there.” Mudd admitted as much to
XXL
. “It was kind of a shady spot. Cats always had they pistols … because Detroit’s a gangsta-ass city, and there’s a lot of cats that want to play gangsta here. Certain cats get down, and the East Side has the reputation for being the grimier side of town.”

The first police version of how Eminem’s best friend Proof, given name Deshaun Holton, was shot dead there aged 32, reeks of bloody pointless-ness. Proof had been playing pool with a Desert Storm veteran, Keith Bender, Jr., 35. When a dispute between them became violent, Bender’s cousin, Triple C bouncer Mario Etheridge, 28, fired warning shots into the ceiling. According to witnesses quoted in the Detroit press, Proof then pistol-whipped Bender and shot him in the head. As Proof stood over his victim, threatening to shoot again, Etheridge shot Proof three times: twice in his chest, and once in his head. April 14’s
New York Times
reported a Detroit police statement that Proof had fired first, and Etheridge’s lawyer, Randall Upshaw, telling WXYZ-TV: “The understanding of every witness we’ve spoken to is that Proof pulled out a weapon. Proof shot Keith in the face, and Keith was unarmed.” On the morning, April 19, that Proof was buried, Bender also died of his injuries. On April 27, the police announced neither Proof nor Etheridge had entered the club armed. On September 20, Etheridge was convicted only of carrying a concealed weapon and discharging it, the bouncer having acted “in lawful defence of another” in killing Proof. During the trial, four witnesses claimed Proof had fought a man at the club before Bender.

Less damning memories of Proof’s part in the shoot-out at the Triple C eventually emerged from the friends who had walked in there with him; three men at the tail-end of the sort of hedonistic trawl through Detroit’s shady clubland that was an almost nightly ritual for Proof. “Wild Woody’s on Wednesday, Tuesday was Northern Lights, Mondays we would hang at a titty bar called Jon-Jon’s, Saturday was the State Theater,” Mudd recalled fondly. “If I wanted to see him or find him, I would know where to go.” Devoted family man and promoter of Detroit hip-hop as he was, rich man as he must have been after D12’s great success, he still lived hungrily in his city’s heart.

Anthony Bozza, a journalist uniquely trusted among Eminem’s inner circle, quoted H. Mack, himself shot through the hand by a stray bullet, in a report on the shootings for the
Observer
: “The fight wasn’t just the two of them [Proof and Bender], everyone in the club was involved. Guns started goin’ off. P. hit the guy, and then his cousin Etheridge fired shots into the ceiling … Yeah, they were fighting over some bullshit but [I do not believe] P. would ever, ever shoot someone over the bullshit. It was all just fucked up.”

Mudd, real name Reginald Moorer, had been a friend of Proof since school days, and a member of his early Detroit rap crew 5 ELA. He dismissed Mack’s version of events: “I heard at the time Horny Mack’s story changed so many different times.” And in a long, emotional interview with
XXL
, Mudd remembered Proof’s last minutes in intimate detail.

Everyone but Mudd was searched as they entered the club. “I had my pistol on me, of course. We had some drinks, everybody buzzed up.” In the early hours of Tuesday, the place was quiet. Frustrated by the lack of girls, Mudd left Proof and the man he’d later know as Keith Bender playing pool, and stepped outside. Meeting two girls from previous strip-club stop the Rolex, Mudd drifted back inside, where Proof joined him in boisterous flirting. Distracted by his own girl, Mudd didn’t notice the argument between Proof and Bender start. As their heated voices grew louder, he heard Bender shout: “I don’t care who the fuck you are.” The pair were separated, Mudd telling Bender: “Calm down. It ain’t that serious.” As Proof placated the club’s owner, and peace seemed restored, Bender sucker-punched Proof in the face. The crowd scattered to let them fight. The bouncer Mario Etheridge fired shots in the air. Mudd reached for his gun, but Proof tackled him onto the pool table, demanding the pistol then grabbing it. Walking back deliberately to where he and Bender had fought, Proof fired his pistol into the ceiling. Bender lunged at him to renew their struggle. Shots were fired, and both men fell. Smoke hung over the scene as if it was a Wild West gunfight. Blood pooled under the bodies. “There was this look in Proof’s eyes. He wasn’t there any more.”

Mudd went outside with H. Mack and Chop. He couldn’t dial 911. He couldn’t remember where his car keys were. He couldn’t find his car. Mudd picked his pistol up where his dead friend had dropped it. Then he went home.

Many police witnesses disagree with Mudd’s memories. He even heard H. Mack had told the story of Proof the cold executioner. The truthfulness in Mudd’s account comes in the blank spots of inattentiveness, the sudden jumps in action he was too slow to stop; the slurred skips in time and explosions of drunken danger which are hazards of establishments such as the Triple C at the wrong end of the night. Everyone is drunk, and anything can happen. The whole truth is hard to reach.

“It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for Proof to get drunk and fight,” Mudd told
XXL
. “He had that personality, the Derrty Harry [Proof’s other D12 alias], scrap-happy type.” Eminem later confirmed his friend’s “dual personality” in his autobiography,
The Way I Am
. “He wasn’t one to back down. If you pushed the wrong button, something could go off in him.” Whatever really happened that morning – and in Mudd’s account there is a messy internal logic to everyone’s actions that a skilled novelist would envy – Proof marched towards his fate.

There was one further detail in the narrative Mudd told to
XXL
. Each protagonist had met as schoolboys at Osborn High, whose wall Proof had been sitting on when 15-year-old Marshall Mathers walked up, and they both rhymed “first place” with “birthday”. It was a chance meeting as significant to Eminem as Lennon and McCartney colliding at that Liverpool church fête in 1957. It was in Osborn’s cafeteria that Proof made Eminem battle-rap, and began his hip-hop education. He became his mentor and, Eminem bluntly admitted in
The Way I Am
, the white boy’s “ghetto pass”. That pass led Eminem to a gated community outside Detroit’s city borders. It wasn’t in Proof to leave. “I found out that Proof and Keith Bender were at Osborn together,” said Mudd. “Everybody in the place knows each other from somewhere … It almost seemed like this was some high-school grudge shit, as petty as it is.” Proof died aged 32 in a fight left over from the school yard during a game of pool. Another member of D12, Bugz, had been killed in a row over water pistols. The waste waiting in Detroit for its sons was a crying, relentless shame.

“I can’t even bring myself back to the place I was when I heard what happened to Proof,” Eminem wrote in
The Way I Am
. “I have never felt so much pain in my life … It was the worst day of my life. I just remember thinking, NOT PROOF, NOT PROOF, NOT PROOF. Proof was kind of my rock … His death brought me to my knees … This is the biggest tragedy I can imagine, aside from something happening to one of my kids.”

Eminem drove to the hospital to see his friend’s body at 7 am on the day of his death. Two days later, Swift called Mudd from the studio where he and Eminem were holed up, phoning lawyers and acquaintances, desperate to know how Proof had died. About 100 friends gathered at one of Detroit’s surviving rap meccas, St. Andrews Hall, as news of the death spread. On April 18, his body lay in a 24-carat gold casket in the city’s Fellowship Chapel, as mourners filed past for 12 hours. On the morning of April 19, 2,000 filled the church, and many others packed its car park to listen to the two-hour service on loudspeakers. Dre, 50 Cent and D12’s remnants were among those in the pews. Anthony Bozza observed Eminem all in black, moving slowly, “hunched over … crying with [Proof’s family], hugging them, and rocking back and forth.” Before a horse-drawn carriage took Proof on the long ride to Woodlawn Cemetery, and before the Good Life Lounge held one last raucous hip-hop party in his honour, tributes were paid.

Obie Trice, who Proof had also mentored, changing Obie’s name from Obie 1 back to his real one as he was about to rap at The Hip-Hop Shop, pleaded with tears in his eyes. “We been comin’ up in this struggle and we killin’ each other. Yeah, I know you ‘hood, you gangsta. We all from the ‘hood. Detroit is the ‘hood. We all killin’ each other, dawg, and it’s about nothin’.” Bozza reported Eminem admitting his absolute debt. “Without Proof, there would be a Marshall Mathers, but there would not be an Eminem, there would not be a D12 and there would not be a Slim Shady.”

Everyone commented on Proof’s boundless generosity, to individuals and to Detroit hip-hop, for which he was the catalyst, and Eminem the explosion. Public tributes to Keith Bender, Jr., who died the morning Proof was buried, were harder to find. By everyone’s account he didn’t pull a gun, and was just as dead.

Proof’s most concrete memorial stood well away from his association with Eminem, or his aid to others. His solo album,
Searching For Jerry Garcia
, had been released on August 9, 2005. He avoided the Shady and Aftermath empires, which would almost have assured him a hit, putting the album out on his Iron Man imprint. The release date was the tenth anniversary of Garcia’s death. Always the hip older brother to Eminem, whose taste in rock stopped at blowsy power ballads, Proof admired the Grateful Dead’s late leader as a “genius … who went against the grain”. He was also a Miles Davis fan, who Mudd remembered had till recently been into “pills and weed-smoking … deep into metaphysics. Anything that he was doing, he was fully aware of the concepts … very intelligent … very spiritual.” Proof was, by this description, a thug pothead, a black Detroit hippie bohemian.

Searching For Jerry Garcia
portrayed him riven by contradictions and, like Eminem, painfully abandoned by his father. It began with Proof in his dressing room at the Detroit Hip-Hop Recognition Award feeling a worthless failure, and ended with a suicide note. In between pimp and gangsta stories, Proof’s rough lisping voice and bittersweet soul samples listed the sins of a broken man, regretting hot temper and neglected daughter. There were declarations of toughness with fists or pistols, alongside premonitions of death. But then it’s almost impossible not to find premonitions of death in hip-hop albums. Proof didn’t prophesy or seek his doom.

On his album’s last track, however, he did leave one major, metaphysical hip-hop song. ‘Kurt Kobain’ showed this was the man who had once schooled Eminem, and still texted him advice and lyrical ammunition till his death. It was styled as a suicide note. Gospel-soul organ snaked through the music, and in the lyrics Proof flinched at his own touch, breathing in again, feeling too much. He was out on the existential edge, as he gave parting advice to those close to him. This Proof would rather be “real” than alive. His voice only found a sickly enthusiasm as he ordered Eminem not to cry on his grave. He asked his friend not to let riches change them, but felt it already had. ‘Kurt Kobain’ kept true to its namesake, and ended with a gunshot. In its dying seconds, the organ became the wheezing sound of a life-support machine or spectral waiting room, as if the song had slipped to the other side. “Love … killed me,” Proof exhaled. The real man his friends had loved was full of vigorous life. But in his final piece of art, he considered his failings and his end. It was a last will and testament to hip-hop’s possibilities and the cause of personal authenticity. That cause sent him through the doors of the Triple C. It made the song a parting gift.