The Dark Story of Eminem (3 page)

Eminem’s own life suggests how much Detroit’s racial divide has frayed along the edge of 8 Mile, in recent years. But think of the unbroken black faces less than a mile to the south of Lincoln, and the small number of black children in its classrooms, and the gap remains stark. Walk down these corridors with Paul Young, and white and black children look up at you suspiciously, wary of a stranger.

Peer into the lunchroom where Eminem used to eat, and you start to see the child he once was. The food is cheap, ladled out in a small serving room by what in Britain would be dinner ladies. Boys and girls sit at small round tables eating quietly. One boy is dressed as a military cadet. Another has pink punk hair. But no one still here has such distinct pictures in their mind of Eminem.

“When he was here, he was Marshall Mathers,” Young says. “I wasn’t even aware of him then. Because I didn’t have him in any classes. And his attendance wasn’t very good. Certainly he’s a very popular person now. I’ve had film crews and newspaper reporters turn up here, wanting to walk in and talk to the children. He was only here three semesters. When he left, I don’t know where he went. I checked once with our counselling office, and there was no record of any other school asking for his transcripts. I heard at one time that he might have gone to an adult education programme someplace. But he was not a graduate. He only got to ninth grade.

“There are one or two teachers still here who had him in classes. But he was nothing out of the ordinary. It’s not like he was suspended a lot, or had a lot of fights. He was a pretty okay kid when he was in school.

I looked through his records, and I don’t see anything like he was expelled, or suspended. Not good attendance. Not good grades. But he stayed pretty much to himself. He was here. He wasn’t any trouble. He was kind of nondescript. He didn’t make a big mark.”

When Eminem remembers Lincoln in interviews, it’s usually to rage at an unnamed teacher who told him he’d never amount to anything. With an irony he must see as sweet vengeance, he’s now recalled in its corridors only for being the success he is today.

“I’m interested in the fact that he’s made a name for himself,” Young says. “The coolest thing is that when I tell kids, ‘Marshall Mathers went to Lincoln High School,’ they go, ‘Oh, that’s neat.’”

There is one more thing to see here, on the way out. Open a thick, heavy door, and you’re in a darkened auditorium. There is a plain wood, half-moon-shaped stage area, flush with the rows of seats looking at it from the shadows. Eminem performed in a talent show here once, the first time this shy, nondescript boy pushed himself forward in public. He didn’t win, of course. His talent hadn’t yet been found.

There is another school out here in the suburbs that figures importantly in his story. To reach it, you now have to bear north-east, till you’ve left Warren, and risen above 10 Mile, into the township of Roseville. The neat rows of identical, two-storey clapboard houses announce you’re in a slightly better neighbourhood now. And Dort Elementary School, a small, low building, looks an inviting place to start your education. But it was in Dort’s playground that Eminem, aged 10, was shoved into a snowbank so hard by an older boy who had been bullying him for weeks, De Angelo Bailey, that his brain haemorrhaged, and he fell into a coma for five days. The song ‘Brain Damage’ on
The Slim Shady LP
recounts the attack. Its central impact on his life, and mind, can only be guessed at. It happened during playtime, on a schoolday, according to interview accounts. But here, even more than at Lincoln, Eminem’s passing seems to have left no trace.

Principal Betty Yee came here 11 years ago, long after the incident. But she has had to look into it before. “You know why Dort has become so famous?” she asks a passing teacher. “They think Eminem was a former student here, from years ago! He had an accident out on the playground. So we’re in the newspaper, I guess. But we have no record of him attending, apart from the situation that happened on the playground, many years ago. And you know what? From what I remember, it was on a weekend.”

If Eminem, in his wandering childhood, did ever alight at Dort for more than one vicious, weekend hour, seeing it now, he could not have been luckier. All the facilities that might have helped him are on hand, from a music room to experts to help pupils “who need extra reinforcement”. The children look happy and involved in their work. This is as far from the ghetto, or any suburban hell, as you can get. It is also far from the rundown trailer park where Eminem spent much of his time this side of 8 Mile. But as Yee talks, you begin to wonder if all the bad things that scarred him can be the fault of the places he was raised.

“Roseville is a blue-collar community, of hard-working parents, who really do want the best for their children,” she says, echoing Lincoln’s principal. “For me, it’s a good community.”

When you reach the playground itself, the place where Eminem’s brain was jarred and his body shut down when he was just a boy, the violence is easier to picture. A plain stretch of concrete ground in the open air, empty of children now, only playthings at one end break up its hard surface.

“Yes, I can’t imagine,” Yee says, looking out. “The playground is pretty much the way it was, except we’ve added equipment – swings, and monkey bars. They weren’t there, way back when he was pushed.”

Walking away from this brutal landmark, Yee runs into an ex-pupil she recalls better than any place of education seems to remember Eminem. The teenager happily recites a motto she learned in her Dort days: “If my mind can conceive it, and in my heart I believe it, with hard work I
will
achieve it.” “We do it every day, after our Pledge of Allegiance,” Yee explains. You wonder if, in an uprooted life which could have moved him through Dort too swiftly for any record, Eminem was taught such an all-American promise, to battle in his head with the sneering dismissal of that high school teacher, as he forged his utterly American path to self-creation and success. But all anyone knows for sure about what happened to him here is the sudden, spilled blood he left on its concrete, and how close he came to being a corpse.

Bear south-east now, for one last stop. You are leaving Roseville, for St. Clair Shores, close to the wealthy white enclave of Grosse Point, and to Lake St. Clair, where the Detroit River rolls. You’re leaving Eminem’s schooldays, too, and looking for an adult milestone: Gilbert’s Lodge, the restaurant where he worked between 1996 and 1998, right up until worldwide fame seemed to snatch him from everything he had known before.

You head down Harper, a bit beneath 9 Mile. Shady Lane stands opportunely to the right. The future Real Slim would have seen it every day. Walk across Gilbert’s Lodge’s gravel car park, and cement bear-prints lead you into a mock-hunting cabin. Stuffed pheasant, bear, sturgeon and snow-shoes are mounted on the walls. There’s a long bar, and TVs showing sport. Groups of working-class families and friends sit eating and laughing in shadowed corner booths. “BUY AMERICAN. EAT HERE”, says a sign. The food is straight domestic, burgers and meatloaf. This is the place the unknown Eminem worked the most, out of sight behind that bar, as a short-order cook. A waitress comes to take your order. Her name is Jennifer Yezvack. And at last the trail you’ve followed, which has seemed so faint, glows white-hot. As she speaks, it is as if Eminem has only just left the room.

“He’s here in Detroit right now. I just talked to him,” she says. “When he’s doing something downtown he comes in here, Friday and Saturday nights. Then it gets too crazy, and he has to leave. He’s loyal to Detroit. He still goes to all the bars downtown – Lush, Pure, all the different clubs, he hangs out at Marilyn’s, on Monroe. He has to call ahead so that everybody can be taken care of. But he still hangs out.”

Newspaper reports say, though, that Eminem now has to live far from downtown, and from Warren, in some plush outpost of the wealthy. But as Yezvack recalls the reasons, zigzagging casually through intimate details of his life, you know that his roots here, at least, are still strong.

“Yeah, there were a lot of problems in his last house,” she says. “It was on a main road, people could just come into the backyard. People were looking in the windows, stealing stuff from the house, from the mailbox, from the lawn. So he lives in a gated community now. His main goal is living a normal life, with his daughter, and that is the honest to God’s truth. His daughter is everything to him, and he wants her life to be as normal as it can. She knows who her father is, though. Hailie knows Daddy can’t go to the movies like any Joe Dad would. Even though he
does
– he’s put a baseball cap on and gone to the movies with her. I’m like, ‘You’re crazy !’ But he just sneaks right in, and sneaks right out. But she’s in school now, and the other kids at school know who she is. It’s hard, just too hard. People are too starstruck. Everybody’s just flabbergasted that someone made it in this area, that they can approach. So they do.”

What was he like when he worked here, when he was just Marshall Mathers, you wonder. Yezvack talks on freely, with no apparent fear that Detroit’s most powerful son will swoop down on her and exact a paranoid vengeance. In this place, even now, it seems Eminem can feel trust for old friends.

“I know him, and he hasn’t changed to me at all,” she says. “He’s a very nice guy. He’s not how he comes across in public. He was very quiet when he was here. I mean, he was always a smartass, sarcastic, but only every now and again. He was never mean or harmful to anyone, although him and I used to argue all the time, and he was quick, very quick with his responses. When he was here, he had no enemies. He just did his own thing. He was very into his music, always. Not even girls, really. Kim he was with, but he was never into drinking, never did drugs, nothing like that. He would bring a change of clothes into work, and from the minute he was finished, he would change in the break room in the evening and go round one of his friends’ houses to rap. We knew he was going to do it. We were all happy for him. He kept saying it forever, when he was here – ‘All I wanna do is rap.’ He was always involved downtown. He’d go to open mics, all that stuff. I’ve been through a lot with him, over the years. We dated, on and off. He’s a good guy. It’s all a show, in a sense. We’re talking about Marshall,” she says casually, to a manager.

You digest the inadvertent gossip, that Yezvack was probably seeing Eminem at the same time as his fractious, notorious relationship with Kim, his now ex-wife, mother of his child, and brutalised subject of his songs. And a moment later, you’re brought one last step towards your quarry.

“Who was here,” Yezvack politely asks, “so I can tell him?”

You tell her your name, knowing this is the closest your life will brush his. You ask if you could speak to him like she does, anyway.

“No,” she smiles, “he doesn’t even like it when I talk this much.”

So you say goodbye, and you leave Detroit, and you go back home, and start to think about the things you’ve seen and heard. You can see what Eminem loves about his fallen, forgotten city. It’s a place that educates you in how race and money work in America, every day you walk its streets. It’s a place so hard, it leaves no room for the illusions peddled on his country’s coasts. It’s one reason he makes the music he does. Of course, Eminem is not just the city he’s from. He’s the things he’s done, too, and the people he was with. So you go back again, to the day he was born.

Everything about Eminem’s early life is unstable. Details of homes, relations, schools, jobs, all shimmer and fluctuate from one reminiscence to the next, as if nothing stayed still long enough to be sure of, and no one cared enough to take notes. Even his date of birth was a matter of conjecture till recently, the rapper seemingly pushing it forward two years in interviews, apparently wanting to be even more of a prodigy than he was. After the date was challenged by his mother last year, new publicity quietly started to admit he was born on October 17, 1972. Immediately, all the other “facts” and dates assumed about him pre-fame lock into a different, more believable shape. But still, many things have stayed in flux, maybe for good. You can even take your pick of names. But in the years before the world got to know him, he was always Marshall Mathers.

His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, was the one constant factor in all that time, the itch he would scratch with escalating, obsessive violence on his subsequent records. She was just Debbie Briggs, a 15-year-old girl, when she met the 21-year-old Marshall Bruce Mathers, Jnr. in 1970. Her family was of Scandinavian origin, and scattered across Missouri and Michigan, his father’s family was from Wales, and he was from Dakota. They played together for a while in a band called Daddy Warbucks, touring Ramada Inns along the Dakota-Montana border. “My mother used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and shit like that,” their son would recall to
FHM
. “She was like a little flower child growing up in the Sixties. A little hippie.” His tone had a rare touch of affection, in an interview characteristically hostile to her, as he recognised her own rebellious streak. His grandmother, Betty Kresin, remembered the wilful and passionate way her daughter forced the under-age marriage with Marshall Jnr. into being. When Kresin first refused to give special permission, she told
The Source
, “She threatened me about six months later. ‘Okay, if you won’t let me get married and go to school, I’ll get pregnant and get married.’” It was a typically teenage impulsive ultimatum, in the heat of first love, and at a time when teenage Americans were resisting parents and following sexual desires as never before. Kresin backed down, and in 1972, Debbie and Marshall, Jnr. were married. They lived for a year in his parents’ basement in North Dakota. And before that year’s end, in Kansas City, Missouri, Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born.