The Dark Story of Eminem (5 page)

“People used to find things about me to make fun of,” he told
Bliss
. “My hair, the way I dressed – anything. Sometimes my mother used to send me to school in these blue pyjamas. I’ll never forget them. I used to roll them up in the summertime and say they were shorts. I used to get beaten up after school because of that.”

It was during his first period on the East Side of Detroit, from the age of five, as he struggled to survive in a series of elementary schools, that this violent intimidation became another factor in alienating the attitude of a child who had begun so happily. He was chased and beaten by gangs, other children, local drunks and addicts. “I was always getting jumped, dog,” he told the
Guardian
. “On the way to school, at school, on the way back from school. I was always getting fucked with. I was puny, timid. Fuckwithable.”

“Marshall’s an itty-bitty thing who wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight,” his mother helpfully confirmed to the
Mail On Sunday
, when his own reputation as some kind of violent bad boy was at its height.

This terrifying childhood reached its savage nadir in the events described in ‘Brain Damage’, the afternoon when, aged 10, he had his head smashed into that snowbank in Dort Elementary’s playground, by 12-year-old De Angelo Bailey. The song is a dark fantasia of Franken-steinian brain operations, naked school nurses and superheroic, broom-wielding vengeance on bullies. But its atmosphere of resented, relentless fear, and the events at its core, are truthful.

“One guy used to beat my ass every day,” he told
FHM
. “I was in the fourth grade and he was a sixth-grader [eighth-grader in the song, typical of his life’s slurred imprecision]. Everybody was afraid of him. I was never the type to kiss ass, so he used to beat me instead.”

Marshall names Bailey in ‘Brain Damage’, remembering him as a fat black kid with a boxer father. He recounts being shoved daily into lockers by the bully, having his lunchroom seat, orange juice and chocolate milk stolen, the pathetic, helpless sufferings of a little boy. Then one day, Bailey came up behind him as he was pissing in the school urinal, hammering his face into the cold enamel till his nose was broken, and he was dripping blood, then choking him by the throat, ignoring Marshall’s begging, just looking him in the eye and saying, “You’re gonna die, honkey.” From there the song enters pure fantasy, with the school principal walking in, and helping in the beating, the whole verse seeming like a death-dream, a nightmare of what could have happened with another minute or two of being held down, bruised and cut. Really, ‘Brain Damage’ conflated Bailey’s two worst attacks.

“Everything in the song is true,” Marshall told
Rolling Stone
. “He beat the shit out of me. Pissed all over myself. But that’s not how I got really fucked up.”

By some accounts, the assault that followed on Dort’s playground was the fourth by Bailey on his victim. Whether Marshall even went to that school, or was attacked at playtime or a weekend, may also be in dispute. But what happened to him there is not. He insulted a friend of Bailey’s, in response to which, he told
Rolling Stone
, the bully “came running from across the yard and hit me so hard into this snowbank that I blacked out.”

“He was the one we used to pick on,” the adult Bailey, married with children, happily confirmed to the magazine. “There was a bunch of us that used to mess with him. You know, bully-type things. We was having fun. Sometimes he’d fight back – depend on what mood he’d be in. Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess. When we didn’t see him moving we took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice.”

‘Brain Damage’ picks up the story just after the attack:
“… Made it home, later that same day/ Started reading a comic and suddenly everything became grey/ I couldn’t even see what I was tryin’ to read/ I went deaf, and my left ear started to bleed.”

His mother’s reaction in the song – screaming,
“What, are you on drugs?”
, complaining he’s bleeding on the carpet, then hitting him with the remote control till his brain falls out of his skull – is another fantastic riff which may start with a germ of truth. But his attempt to sit and read a comic after getting back from such a brutal assault, trying to quietly carry on as if nothing had happened, gives an undeniable insight into the suppressed way he lived his life at 10. And the clinically chilling description of his symptoms’ onset tells how it felt as that life almost ended. Sight then sound remorselessly shutting down, and blood dribbling from his ear, like any child he must have felt confusion and helpless panic, like this day of fear would never end. Taken to the hospital by his mother for a brain scan, he collapsed into a coma. He had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, and did not fully regain consciousness for five days. “I remember waking up and saying, ‘I can spell elephant,’” he told
Rolling Stone
.

Even that was not the end of his ordeal. “It was a living nightmare,” his mother recalled to
Tonight
. “The doctors gave up on him in a couple of months, and they wanted to institutionalise Marshall. They told me they didn’t think there would be anything else they could do, besides keeping him on a lot of seizure medicines. I decided, ‘I’m taking him home. I will work with him, I know he’ll bounce back.’ And he did. It took several months, and a lot of hard work.” “He had to relearn how to do simple things like speak and eat,” she added to the
Mail On Sunday
, “and one of the side-effects from the head injury, I believe, was his behavioural problems.”

No one has ever denied Mathers-Briggs did at least this much for her son. And the seriousness of his injury, so early in his life, was as grave as she said. He was lucky to survive a cerebral haemorrhage with his faculties intact. The tone and title of ‘Brain Damage’ gave his mature reaction to this pivotal incident. Everyone thought he was some kind of mental cripple as he grew up anyway, a weird kid who didn’t fit, someone to hit. So the song grimly revelled in sickness, claimed he really hadn’t come back from the hospital quite right.
“It’s probably brain damage … I got brain damage,”
he murmured at its fade. The truth is, no one can know how such a bloody mauling of his brain, and the reconstruction of its functions when so young, affected him. Maybe this was when one of the synaptic triggers for the utterly unprecedented lyrical flow with which as an adult he would tear apart Bailey and other enemies was set. If so, it was still hard to be grateful.

“De Angelo Bailey – I’ll never forget that kid,” Marshall laughed ruefully in
Rolling Stone
. “That motherfucker nearly killed me …”

“Hey, you have his phone number?” the unrepentant one-time thug cheerily asked the magazine.

It was soon after this that Marshall and his mother retreated to the relative safety of Kansas City. When their options there ran out again, and they returned to the Detroit area, Marshall was, as near as can be gathered from his own subtly conflicting accounts, 11. The teenage years ahead of him would just intensify the fears and frustrations he had already suffered. But, living for the first couple of years in his grandmother’s suburban trailer, he also experienced something like stability for the first time. Starting seventh grade at Lincoln Junior High in 1986, aged 12, he even had enough confidence to make friends.

“It was in seventh grade that I started making friends,” he confirmed to Howard Stern. “I didn’t really start opening up until eighth grade, going into ninth. I didn’t want to leave the school when we moved to Detroit on the East Side, so it was like two miles for me to walk to school. My choice boiled down to if I wanted to stay at Lincoln and keep the same friends, or start over at a new school.”

He chose the long walk, showing the importance of these tentative social roots to him, and a degree of independent, determined freedom from his mother’s choices not evident before. But as an adult, even Lincoln was not remembered with affection. He was still scrawny and funny-looking, not let near the “cool” kids on the small round tables of Lincoln’s modest lunchroom. He barely raised a ripple when he was at the school, still staying mostly inside his simmering head. But it was here, as in other areas of his teenage life, that anger at how he was being treated at last began to bubble up.

“I was kinda nerdy, man,” he told
The Source
. “I used to try and dress hip-hop, and my hair was all fucked up. I think my first year of ninth grade, I had a fuckin’ mullet or something until I started to rock the fade. It’d be all shaved on the sides and the back, and my hair used to be spiked up, like a flat-top.” He was a quietly surly, reluctant student too, the boy who would grow up to update Pink Floyd’s
“We don’t need no education”
chant on D12’s ‘Revelation’. “I was kind of a smart-ass,” he told a website. “Teachers always gave me shit ‘cos I never went to school. Then when I did show up, they would fuck with me. They’d be like, ‘Oh, Mr. Mathers decided to join us today.’” This was standard teacher sarcasm, of course, not exactly undeserved. But eventually, one educator went far enough to lodge himself in Marshall’s brain, doubting him with such scorn that the memory became a spur, an irritant he could scratch only by proving him wrong.

“There was this teacher,” he told
The Source
, “he once singled me out and told me I wasn’t gonna be shit. Everybody in class laughed. I don’t even remember why he said that. But it stands out in my head … it really hurt my feelings, and I was thinking that it shouldn’t. Here’s this guy I didn’t give a fuck about saying this, but it hurt.”

He was still rapping about the incident on ‘Revelation’, written when he was 28. Added to the crushing weight on his self-esteem of an absent father, erratic home life, obvious poverty, and constant street beatings he was too weak to do anything about, he was wide open to be bruised by such words. But these aspects were also coalescing into the fury that turned him into an artist, the need to prove himself and strike back, or else vanish. “I run on vengeance,” he said in his most revealing interview, and these were the years when he stored up his fuel.

When his mother left Warren for Detroit’s East Side, probably when Marshall was 13, and probably following a boyfriend, a further, vital kind of violent friction entered his life. Living in a black neighbourhood, and making black friends, while still crossing 8 Mile into Warren for school every day, was like trying to blithely pass the Berlin Wall. Marshall and his friends attempted to ignore their city’s racial blockade. But others coldly enforced it. “I’m colour-blind – it wasn’t an issue,” Mathers-Briggs told
Rolling Stone
of being among three white families on their block. “But the younger people in the area gave us trouble. Marshall got jumped a lot.”

“Most of the time it was relatively cool,” he considered generously to
Spin
, “but I would get beat up sometimes when I’d walk around the neighbourhood and kids didn’t know me. One day I got jumped by, like, six dudes, for no reason.”

Worse than that was the second time his young, vulnerable life was almost finished, as he walked back from a friend’s one afternoon through 8 Mile’s Bel-Air mall, aged 16 (15, in one version). “All these black dudes rode by in a car, flippin’ me off,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “I flipped them off back, they drove away, and I didn’t think nothin’ of it.” But they’d parked, and were coming for him. “One dude came up, hit me in the face and knocked me down,” Marshall continued. “Then he pulled out a gun. I ran right out my shoes, dog. I thought that’s what they wanted.” He was crying as he ran, he admitted to
Spin
. “I was 15 years old and I didn’t know how to handle that shit.” But they kept after him, stripping him of his clothes and holding the gun to him. Only a white trucker who stopped, got out and pointed his own pistol scattered the attackers. The trucker drove him the short distance home. “He came in wearing just his socks and underwear,” his mother remembered. “They had taken his jogging suit off him, taken his boombox. They would have taken him out too.” Walking the same way the next day, Marshall found his trainers where he had abandoned them. “That’s how I knew it was racial,” he said. The same year, he was shot at by a black gang member. He didn’t know if the bullet was to frighten, or kill.

Living in a white minority, victimised and twice almost murdered by blacks, Marshall could be excused for starting to feel racist himself. The tribal nature of city hostility works that way everywhere, more so in America, and more so still in Detroit’s huddled, severed communities. But, crucially for his future career, he took the opposite view. He had, after all, also seen white bikers point guns at his black friend Proof, taunting him for daring to enter Warren, when Marshall lived there. They had shot at them right outside his mother’s door, when Marshall challenged them. In this way, his wandering early life had at last done him good. He had walked between white and black America so often, his feet had smeared the borderline. He saw both sides with double-vision, from inside and out. He knew too much to be racist. Instead, his Detroit days made him hair-trigger sensitive to racism, from whatever skin colour, from then on.

At home, his life was becoming more complicated, too. In 1986, his half-brother Nathan was born. “Marshall was 13 when I became pregnant,” Mathers-Briggs remembered to the
Mail On Sunday
. “He was delighted.” For once, their memories tally. Nathan brought out in Marshall a need to give the parental love he had felt deprived of himself. “I think parenthood comes naturally to me,” he told
Spin
, after he’d had his daughter Hailie. “My little brother was born when I was 11 years old [still carefully lying about his age at this point], so I pretty much raised him from the cradle.” The two boys would remain devoted to each other.