The Dark Story of Eminem (12 page)

There’s a rueful playfulness to his explanations (
“See, honey, there’s a place called heaven and there’s a place called hell/ A place called prison and a place called jail/ And Da-da’s probably on his way to all of ‘em, except one”
).

But there’s a disturbing, selfish certainty in his attitude, too, which would resurface in future conflicts with Kim and Debbie, as Slim made him suddenly rear up assertively, after years smarting under the two women’s thumbs.
“Just me and you, baby, is all we need in this world,”
he murmurs blissfully, not having given his child a choice, and after he’s tricked her into helping throw Mama in the lake. In later years, he’d pull not only Hailie but his half-brother Nathan to his side to live, replacing their mothers, quite convinced he was acting for the best. This song shows that pathology’s birth, making him sound more like a mad baby-snatching Dad than a murderer, before reaching the closing lines, which were all he really meant to say:
“If you ever need anything, just ASK/ Da-da will be right there … I love you, baby.”

A murderous, easy-to-miss twist in the tale, meanwhile, was left dangling. As Kim’s rock-weighted legs plunge to the lake’s bed, he asks Hailie,
“just help Dad with two more things out the trunk”
. It was Kim’s new boyfriend and his son, the prequel would reveal. But at the time, this killing spree’s corpses could have been anyone. His mother? Vanilla Ice? Sick Slim Shady left no clues.

‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, ‘If I Had’ and ‘Just The Two Of Us’ made the 8-track
The Slim Shady EP
a startling step up in quality from
Infinite
when he recorded it, in two weeks, in the winter of 1997. But, as the songs’ downbeat nature suggested, this was not a time of creative thrills, but creeping desperation and fear. Slim Shady, and the EP with his name, was part of a last throw of the dice which tumbled through the end of 1997, a gamble which, if Marshall lost it, would condemn him to a dead-end life.

“My daughter was one at the time,” he told
launch.com
. “I couldn’t afford to buy her diapers. I didn’t have a job. I had job after job and just kept getting fired. I failed ninth grade three times. I was basically going nowhere. When I made
The Slim Shady EP
, I told the production people, ‘Yo, if this doesn’t work, I’m about to be 23 [25, of course], I gotta quit, get a job, do something.”

Linked to this feeling of a final chance was an invitation to rap in LA, the mythic home of his gangsta-rap heroes. The offer came from Wendy Day, a white one-time Vice-President of a liquor company who in 1992 had quit, and sunk $500,000 of her money into the Rap Coalition, an organisation intended to combat the often exploited status of young rappers in the record industry. According to one report, she had met Marshall when he and D12, as part of his last-ditch efforts, drove to Miami for an industry seminar, and he gave her an
Infinite
tape; others say it was at a Detroit convention. Either way,
Infinite
convinced her to call Marshall, and invite him to the Rap Coalition-sponsored Rap Olympics, a major battle to be held in South Central LA that October. She’d pay his air fare. The prize for first place would be $500 and a Rolex watch.

Marshall’s need to win ratcheted up in the week of the competition. He was still separated from Kim and Hailie. His time living with a friend and other roommates in a cramped apartment had ended when an acquaintance offered cheaper rent, if he and his friend moved across the street. But the acquaintance pocketed their cash, instead of passing it to the building’s landlord. “So one day we come home and all our shit’s on the fuckin’ front lawn,” Marshall wrote in
Angry Blonde
. “We never could catch that motherfucker. Till this day, we haven’t caught him. It was a real fucked period in my life (no surprise there), and I felt like I had hit ‘rock bottom’.” He wrote the song of the same name that week, a work even bleaker than ‘If I Had’, which also made it on to
The Slim Shady LP
. It begins with a dedication to
“all the happy people who have real nice lives/ And who have no idea what it’s like to be broke as fuck.”
He probably wrote it the night before he flew to LA, when, homeless, he had to break back into the house he’d been evicted from. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “There was no heat, no water, no electricity. I slept on the floor, woke up, went to LA. I was so pissed.”

Homelessness devastates your sense of security and self-esteem, strengths Marshall was already wretchedly short on. But typically, he spent the flight transforming his desperation into iron determination. Now he had to win that $500. So he would. He’d get a record contract, too. He assessed his competition as the plane neared LA, preparing put-downs for the only rapper he thought could challenge him, a boy called Kwest the Mad Lad. He convinced himself that all his hopes came down to what he did that day, in that alien city. Agonising months later, he would be proved right.

It was the 27th of October when he touched down, a Friday. The Rap Olympics were held in the Proud Bird nightclub, in Inglewood, right by the airport. The British journalist William Hall was there that evening, researching his definitive study of young hopeful South Central rappers,
Westsiders
. Before the first round began, Marshall joined the other competitors milling in nervous clusters, practising their freestyles, psyching themselves up. He was the only white boy in the place. Hall glanced up briefly when “M + M” – he thought – was announced, surprised and disappointed by his colour, then returned to his conversation with an ex-member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, who once included one Dr. Dre in their ranks. Hall was forced to look up again, by a crescendo of cheers. He realised it was the white boy who was ripping his opponents apart.
“What you need to do,”
came the first words Hall heard,
“is practise your freestyle/ ‘Cos you come up missin’ more than Snoop Doggy Dogg’s police file …”
“He’s cold,” a man next to Hall hollered in approval.

Paul Rosenberg, convinced by
Infinite
to become Marshall’s manager, was in the crowd too, willing his friend on. “Oh my God,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “There was this black guy sitting next to me in the crowd. After the first round, he yells, ‘Just give it to the white boy. It’s over. Give it to the white boy.’ “

This LA crowd’s difference to the racially hostile audiences Marshall had faced down in Detroit was shown when he moved on to the second round. Standing face to face with his new, black opposition, the latter made a snide comment about Marshall’s skin, and was greeted with loud boos. Marshall, used to such attacks, deflected it back to destroy this crude opponent.
“Every body in this place I miss you,”
he rapped,
“If you try and turn my facial tissue/ Into a racial issue …”
The cheers were for him again.

Marshall kept going, round by round. It was like it was a movie, like it was his destiny to win, as he’d made himself believe it was when he fled his wrecked Detroit life for this night. But in the final, something happened. He faced not Kwest, the obstacle he’d been preparing for, but an unknown. The other rapper walked away when Marshall stepped up to battle him, standing behind a nearby projection screen, destroying the drama of confrontation. Still, Marshall was sure he’d crushed him. “He was garbage,” he told Hall afterwards. But somehow the judges disagreed. And suddenly, his chance to change his life had been and gone. “He really looked like he was going to cry,” Rosenberg remembered.

“Em was so far ahead of all the competition, it was embarrassing,” Dan Geistlinger, then an 18-year-old intern for Dre’s home, Interscope Records, who would be promoted to a top A&R man for what he saw that night, told
NME
. “I think the reason he didn’t win was that if he had he would have had to battle the competition MC, this guy called Juice. I don’t think he could’ve handled the humiliation. Em just crushed everyone that night.” That was no consolation to an appalled Marshall. “When I lost, I was ready to kill somebody,” he told
launch.com
.

He was sitting with Rosenberg, washed out and angry, when two men walked over. Led by Dan Geistlinger, they both worked for Interscope. They’d been watching him carefully. “He came up to me afterwards and I didn’t know he was anybody from anything,” Marshall told
The Source
. “He was like, ‘Yo, you got a tape or anything?’ I was all pissed, like, ‘Yeah, here, just take it.’” He shoved them a demo of
The Slim Shady EP
. He thought nothing more of it. Someone else came over and asked him to appear on the local Sway & Tech radio show the next morning, and he did so. Then he flew back to Detroit, almost broken.

He patched things up with Kim. He returned to work at Gilbert’s Lodge, intending to work overtime at Christmas, to get a present for Hailie’s first birthday. And he held onto one lifeline for a future as a rapper, a promise of a deal from a major label contact. Then, over the last week of December, even these small securities tore apart. He thought he had hit rock bottom earlier that year. But it was now that he smashed into it, and cracked. That week, he thought about killing. Others, for money. Or himself, to get it over with.

First, he lost his job. “That was the lowest I got,” he told
NME
. “It was five days before Christmas, which is Hailie’s birthday, and I had $40 left. I was a cook and this new chef fired everybody. He told me it was because I hadn’t worn my chef’s shirt one day. I was like, ‘I worked here three years and you’re firing me because I didn’t wear the right shirt one day?’ I almost choked him.”

Then, on Christmas Eve, as he recorded ‘Rock Bottom’, the song he had written when made homeless in October, he was told the man who had promised him a major deal was a fraud, who worked in the label’s mail-room. “I didn’t know when I wrote it that it was going to come out so sad,” he said in
Angry Blonde
of the song consuming him that night. “I had actually meant it to be an uplifting song, but when we were sitting around making the track, Head had a sample that we played over that beat and it was just so sad. I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go with this one.’ “

‘Rock Bottom’ wearily reviewed the details of a life that had gotten him down: envy at more successful rappers, disgust at how money corrupted them, and dismay at his own drug-addicted peer group. It described the poverty-stricken enervation that left his daughter short of diapers, as
“yesterday went by so quick/ it seems like it was just today/ My daughter wants to throw the ball but I’m too stressed to play/ Live half my life, and throw the rest away.”
Time itself was closing in on him, evaporating as he lacked the energy to use it, the classic inertia of unemployment and drug use. But ‘Rock Bottom’’s real clue that he had sunk further since the similar ‘It’s OK’ and ‘If I Had’ was his solution in its last verse. As he shivers in the
“house with no furnace, unfurnished”
where he probably wrote it, he realises he’s become
“evil”
, and wants money and fame at any cost. Earlier in the song this closet Christian could
“pray that God answers,”
but by its end, he’s resigned himself to
“Hell”
. Having nothing, the careless, solvent safety of others looks like an affront, which he means to snatch away,
“to kill”
:
“My daughter’s feet ain’t got no shoes or socks on ‘em/ And them rings you wearing look like they got a few rocks on ‘em.”
But before he could turn on the world, and become truly lost, the setbacks which made ‘Rock Bottom’ too appropriate to bear altered his aim. During a break in taping, he chose instead to kill himself.

“There was this one time when I really felt like I wanted to do something to change my life,” he said to music365, remembering those hours in the studio, “whether it would be doing something I regretted, or with rap or whatever. A bunch of other personal shit was happening in my life right about then, and I just thought I wasn’t gonna get a deal no matter what, and I just took a fucking bunch of pills. I puked the shit up. I didn’t want to have to go to hospital but my fucking stomach hurt so bad. I had a little problem and I just took too many. I don’t know if I was necessarily trying to kill myself, I was just really depressed and I kept thinking, more pills, more pills, I just kept takin’ ‘em. I bet I took 20 pills in the course of two hours, [the painkillers] Tylenol 3s. That’s why I like going back and listening to my album, and thinking of what I was feeling back then.”

Though he called himself a
“criminal”
in a later song, it was typical that, with murder on his mind, Marshall turned that malevolence on himself. Even after Slim Shady appeared, he was still too soft-hearted to really hurt others, and too painfully aware of his faults to blame strangers. And the purging of his harshest emotions with that half-meant suicide bid did him good. Those hours of depression, gut agonies, and the pills’ eventual throwing up, which made sure he lived, really were as bad as it got. It was as if he’d passed a test, or his prayers had been listened to after all. Because in early 1998, his wildest teenage dreams came true, all at once. It was Jeff Bass, William Hall was told, who walked in on Marshall in a Detroit motel, and broke the news.

“We got an appointment with Interscope Records on Monday,” Bass said.

“Oh, yeah,” Marshall replied.

“Yeah, some doctor …”

“Doctor? What are you talking about?”

“Some guy who calls himself Dr. Dre.”

Marshall’s stomach twisted again. His mind locked, not daring to believe. He could only keep shouting the same words, for minutes afterwards. “Don’t fuckin’ lie to me, man. Don’t fuckin’ lie to me …”