The Dark Story of Eminem (6 page)

Two years later, a more disruptive addition to the household arrived, one that would ripple through all his life and music, inspiring songs, violent rages, near-jail, marriage and helpless love. “I have always loved kids,” Mathers-Briggs recalled of the newcomer’s route in to the
Mail On Sunday
, “and fostered four. The house was always full of waifs and strays. One of those troubled souls was Kim Scott, who moved in with us when she was 12. Marshall was about 15, and she lied about her age, saying she was the same. They got together and that was it. Chaos reigned.”

Kim and her twin sister had had their own difficult histories, frequently being sent for stays at the local children’s home, frequently escaping from it. By whatever means, she was out the day she met Marshall. He was spending his morning as he often did by then, dodging out of school with a friend once they knew the friend’s mother was working, cranking up the friend’s stereo to hear the latest raps. Kim was visiting the friend’s sister. “I had a red kangol,” Marshall said, still able to picture every detail of the moment for
The Source
, 14 years later. “I was jumping on the coffee table, singing along to an LL song. I was really into it. I kinda saw her come in the doorway out the corner of my eye. I just kept going. Showing off. She watched until I finished the song, and then my friend’s sister introduced us.”

They rowed and wrestled like brother and sister at first, but soon became inseparable and, after a few years, lovers. Mathers-Briggs’ account of the start of what remains Marshall’s only serious relationship, one so consuming and exhausting he seems to have nothing left for another, and which stoked such furies he rapped about strangling Kim, sounds truthful.

“He went through a lot with Kim,” she told the
Sydney Sun-Herald
. “A lot of his anger came from that. I could tell they were getting too chummy. Kim was jealous of Marshall and his friends and anyone who took attention away from her, including me. There was a lot of chaos in the house.”

“Until then, Marshall was a normal, happy boy,” she added to the
Mail On Sunday
. “She changed him, she wound him up, and they had the most terrible rows. I had to break up the cursing between them. The girl thrives on confrontation. But Marshall was never violent towards her. He may rap about raping and murdering her, but he has never laid a finger on her. When they had a row he took it out on his car, he would come screaming home and punch the car. I’ve never seen a vehicle with so many dents in it.”

“I’ve been very betrayed by Kim,” she revealed to
Tonight
, sadly, when her relationship with her son had fractured. “There are a lot of things that have happened that Marshall’s not even aware of.”

His home was now a pressure cooker of conflicting, escalating insecurities and needs, an emotional war-zone. Mathers-Briggs’ habit of serial fostering, despite subsisting on Welfare, when added to her early pregnancy with Marshall, suggests a classic woman’s attempted short cut to affection and fulfilment. As boyfriends passed briefly through her life, surely children would love her? It says more about her vulnerabilities and desires than any of her words. With the children’s home habitué and confrontation-addicted Kim now also under her roof, the atmosphere of neediness must have been intense. It’s hard to tell who in the apartment had the lowest self-esteem. But as Kim sided with Marshall against his mother, when not angrily arguing with him, the unhealthiness of the manipulations for control which seemed to fill the two young women’s days together, till anger and spite became the norm, can only have added to the teenage boy’s misery, and his later music’s misogyny.

Mathers-Briggs meanwhile continued to change addresses, this time, according to Marshall, one step ahead of unpaid rent. He hid their Welfare food when friends visited, still ashamed of his poverty. And, around the time Kim arrived, when he was 15, he claimed financial need made his jobless mother force him out to work. He had just failed Lincoln’s ninth grade for the third time, anyway. But he saw the abrupt end of his schooling as part of yet another pattern of parental abuse.

“As soon as I turned 15,” he told
Rolling Stone
, “my mother was like, ‘Get a fucking job and help me with these bills or your ass is out. Then she would fucking kick me out anyway.” His mother denied it to the magazine. “A friend told me, ‘Debbie, he’s saying this stuff for publicity.’ He was always well-provided for.” But he stuck to his story, adding angry details to
Rap Pages
. “I would end up getting kicked out like every fucking day, literally just for nothing. Sometimes it was for coming in late, hanging out on the streets with my friends. My mother felt like I was too young to be running the streets. That would be her excuses.”

His description of her own daily life was withering. “It was a complicated thing, ‘cos my mother was taking a lot of drugs, so she would be in and out of different mood swings. My mother would take three or four naps a day and just get up and start running around the house stomping – ‘This house is a goddamned mess’ – and start throwing shit, breaking dishes and stuff, ‘You get out, motherfucker, you get out and never …’ blah, blah, blah. I would end up sleeping over a friend’s house for a while and shit like that.”

When his mother sued him over these comments and others, he became more specific, admitting that the drugs he meant were the prescription anti-depressants Valium and Vicatin. She gave her own version of her usage in the
Mail On Sunday
. “Marshall has accused me of being addicted to prescription pills,” she declared. “Well, back in 1990 I was run over by a drunk driver. I had to eat baby food as I couldn’t swallow, and during that time I was on medication. It wasn’t pill-popping and, whatever he says, I brought Marshall up in an alcohol, drug and smoke-free zone.” Still, her regular use of anti-depressants was not disputed in court; whatever she was doing to her son, her own life still seems to have been unhappy and shapeless. As to his evictions, his grandmother confirmed that he regularly appeared at her door in Warren at night, sighing, “Grandma, she kicked me out again.” Kresin added that sometimes her daughter would abuse her, too. “She would get mad at me, and punish me by keeping him away from me and my son, Marshall’s Uncle Ronnie. They were best friends and really close, and she would keep them from each other.”

To
Rap Pages
, Marshall added tired details of his situation: “I had one factory job sweeping floors a mile from home. Doing good. My mother used to keep all of my cheques and give me like 40 bucks outta each cheque, and I made over 140 bucks. My mother would keep the hundred and pay the phone bill or the light bill. That’s how I was able to stay. I ended up getting kicked out and staying at my boy’s house, three miles away, so I ended up losing that job.”

It was to
NME
, though, that he revealed the full scale of his resentment and hurt at this latest round of changing backdrops to his life, and the screaming matches soundtracking them. “I had to stay with friends for two months at a time,” he complained. “I would bounce from house to house. It was shitty. I had a lot of friends who I would stay with and their parents were always cooler than my mother. I would tape my mother throwing me out and play them to my friends’ parents just to show them how crazy she is. I’d stay at Proof’s house and his mother did not care what we did as long as we were safe. My friends’ parents liked me!” he suddenly pleaded, like he needed witnesses to prove he wasn’t worthless. “They liked me! I was a likeable person, it was just me and my mother did not get along.” He shook his head to himself. “It was not my fault. It was not my fault.”

In this mood of introspection, he considered the whole nature of his teenage life. “You only realise how bad it was later. I look back now, dog, and I lived a crazy-assed life. I mean, getting kicked out all the time, having no money, getting jumped all the time. I failed ninth grade three times and then left school. I was a fuck-up.” Then he reconsidered his earlier excusing of himself, with the diffidence and wish for fairness he would never quite bury, even at his most outrageous: “But it wasn’t entirely my fault.”

In the midst of all this turmoil, in a place where many teenagers would go wildly astray, Marshall was spoken to by Detroit’s police only twice. The first time was for standing up for his mother, another clue that things were not always poisonous between them, but sometimes loyal and loving. In his early teens a woman on their block was threatening Mathers-Briggs, and jabbing her finger in her face. Marshall jumped between them, shouting, “You’re not hurting my Mom !” The woman’s husband then attacked him with a baseball bat, which Marshall took off him as they wrestled to the ground. That was when the police arrived to drag Marshall away. But enough neighbours had witnessed the scuffle for his innocence to be proved.

Two more crucial incidents, though, combined at the end of his adolescence to ruin it further, and to cripple his love for his mother for good. In 1991, when he was 19, his Uncle Ronnie – son of Kresin, and brother of Mathers-Briggs – killed himself after a girl rejected him. The apparent trigger for his death cannot have helped Marshall’s increasingly defensive, hostile attitude to women, as they ruled and warred in his home. But Ronnie dying at all was the worst.

“The two were just six weeks apart and were more like brothers,” Mathers-Briggs told the
Mail On Sunday
. “They did everything together. But when they were about 16, Marshall got into rap, and Ronnie liked Bon Jovi. They fell out and didn’t speak for two years. When Ronnie killed himself, Marshall was devastated.”

“I don’t know whether it takes balls or a fucking coward to kill themselves,” Marshall, who would later toy with suicide himself, as would his wife, wondered to
Rolling Stone
. “I ain’t figured it all out yet. With my uncle, I just wish I could have talked to him before he did it to find out what the fuck was really on his mind.” At the time, he was simply wrecked. “I didn’t talk for days,” he told
Q
. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral.” His uncle’s name was one of the tattoos of key people in his life with which he would later ink his body.

Ronnie’s suicide then burst to the surface again, during another fierce row between his sister and nephew. “I wish it was you who died,” Mathers-Briggs screamed, “and Ronnie was still here!” It’s not an unknown thing for a mother to wish on an adolescent son when at snapping point; she needn’t mean it for more than the second she says it, and we don’t know the provocation. Her own upset at her brother’s death should also be remembered. But for Marshall, emotionally fragile and already resentful, something broke with those words. “It got quiet,” he remembered to
The Source
. “I could see in my friends’ faces. Even they kinda looked at me like, ‘Damn, that’s fucked up.’” He focused on his mother’s furious sentence with the same intensity as he had that Lincoln teacher’s dismissal of his hopes. He would not forget, or forgive. “She said that,” he said this year, then paused. “So I’m gonna be as dead to her as I can get.”

No one has said when this happened. But, with friends round, and after he and Ronnie were 19, it cannot have been far from the night of his twentieth birthday. He had his second brush with the law then, and it was very different from his first. His mother called the police to accuse him of assault and battery. The once-puny Marshall had been lifting weights since he was 17, after coming so close to violent death the year before. In photos of him with his mother as an adult, he towers above her, with muscular arms. The thought of him attacking her is not pleasant. But perhaps, like her savage words to him, it just shows how oppressive their life together had become. Both had now been driven to lash out without restraint. Their future lives would move towards open battle.

Ronnie had done one more pivotal thing for his nephew, while he was still alive. Mathers-Briggs might remember their musical differences. All Marshall knew was that his uncle left him the gift which let him hang on to sanity, without which his life would have shaken apart. Age 11, Ronnie played him his first rap record.

“The first hip-hop shit I ever heard was that song ‘Reckless’ from the
Breakin’
soundtrack,” Marshall told
Spin
in 1999. “My cousin played me the tape when I was, like, 9. Then there was this mixed school I went to in fifth grade, one with lots of Asian and black kids, and everybody was into breakdancing. They always had the latest rap tapes – the Fat Boys, L.L. Cool J’s
Radio
. I thought it was the most incredible shit I’d ever heard.”

The element of calculation in Marshall’s first public appearances as Eminem is underscored in that statement’s inaccuracies. He certainly could have been nine when the early hip-hop exploitation movie
Breakin’
(
Breakdance
in the UK) came out in 1984, if he’d been born in 1974. As we know, though, he was born two years earlier. The mental readjustment of each key event of his life into different parts of his youth every time a question was asked in his hundreds of early interviews, so that the odd deception would hold, must have done strange things to his mind. All the time he was Eminem to the world, he had to think as if he really was two years younger. Calling Uncle Ronnie his cousin shows how mutable his floating, fractious family unit could become in his head, too, thanks to such initial, contradictory recountings.

At any rate, Marshall was not a precocious little boy when hip-hop first seized him, but nearing adolescence, with its extra dose of frustrated anger. The music’s almost mystical answering of every need in his insecure young life was remembered in one of his most nakedly autobiographical verses, in D12’s 2000 rap, ‘Revelation’. After dismissing his mother for failing to raise him, he spits:
“Full of crazy rage, an angry teenager/ nothing could change me back/ gangsta-rap had me acting like a maniac/ I was boostin’, so influenced by rap, I used it/ as an excuse to do shit/ no one could tell me nothin’/ hip-hop overwhelmed me, to the point where it had me in a whole ‘nother realm/ it was like isolatin’ myself was healthy/ it felt like we was on welfare but wealthy/ compelled me to excel in school and failed me, expelled me …”
The sense that he had been transformed by rap, changed into a more furious, powerful, criminal (
boostin’
) boy than he had ever been before, flows through the verse. Probably there’s an element of play, too, with credulous critics’ belief that rap fans dumbly do whatever rap records say. But the idea that it was
“an excuse to do shit”
, to act positively for himself at last, is no joke. And the feeling of being
“overwhelmed … in a whole ‘nother realm … on welfare but wealthy”
, rapped in a tone of fervent transport, suggests gospel transcendence: that gangsta-rap’s gritty street tales lifted him out of his poverty-stricken, unhappy existence, into something better.