The Dark Story of Eminem by Nick Hasted Read Free Book Online

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