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

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.
     
    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.