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

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