Shady Bizzness: Life as Eminem's Bodyguard in an Industry of Paper Gangsters

by Williams, Byron

  On top of that, the food was terrible. They didn’t believe in regular food—all they served us was pork and rabbit food (vegetables) and you really couldn’t get full. I must have lost about fifteen pounds on that tour. If you did eat any of the food over there, it tore up your stomach. We all must have had the runs for about a week. Another problem was that the bathroom on the bus was like five feet high and three feet wide, so that totally eliminated me from using the bathroom. When I went to the bathroom, I had to stand on the stairs that led to the bathroom, pee in a cup, and then pour the pee into the toilet. And forget about taking a dump because it wasn’t even happening. My ass is three feet wide. I couldn’t even get in the door—period, so it was torture. Between the food and the restroom facilities in Europe, by this time I was really missing home. And we had one cell phone on the bus, which was used to communicate with the US, like Interscope and home.

  At night, we would take turns using the phone. I would always wait until nighttime when everyone else was asleep to call home, since Europe was six hours ahead anyway. I would rather wait than stand in line behind everyone else to call the US. The only bad part about that was if my wife or someone were to call, I would never get the message because so many people used the phone that we wouldn’t get our messages for a couple of days, so I always made it a point to call home at least twice a day. Other than that, we still had the other problems, like the Mark and Slim situation. Mark was still pissed, and I couldn’t blame him. He was going to quit, but Paul convinced him to stay on, and Slim was kissing his ass and was real apologetic whenever he was sober, which was usually a short-lived moment in the morning. That was basically the pattern on the tour. For about a week, the Mark and Slim situation was the hot topic. Kessia wasn’t opening up to Slim, figuratively and literally, and she spoke to me about overhearing the things Slim said about her, so of course she was hurt. She was ready to go home, but all she did was smoke some weed to pacify her feelings and try to make Slim miserable in the process, and that’s what he deserved.

  On October 29th, we were in Chemnitz, Germany, the ghetto of all ghettos.This ghetto was worse than any ghetto you can imagine in the US. On top of that, this was an area in Germany where there used to be Nazi concentration camps. That made Mark Labelle nervous because he was a Jew. I wasn’t really nervous because I had dealt with the Nazis before, as well as the Klan, so I had nothing to worry about. But Mark was as nervous as a dog in a Chinese restaurant. We all stuck together, and no one went out of his or her way to do anything extra because it was really dark there. I mean dark all the time. It was depressing! You could actually sense the racial problems they had in the past. It was sick, seeing all the racial slurs written on the walls, seeing the bunkers and the locked-up sheds with racial graffiti on them. It was sick. It looked exactly like the concentration camps we had seen in our history books. We couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there. It was eerie. We did a hype show, but I told Slim I had a bad feeling about the place and warned him not to do any stage dives that night. I told him, “As the Nazis tell it, they can’t stand any of us, so don’t jump off the stage tonight because you could get stabbed or something. ” They weren’t known for shootings, but they were known for stabbings in that particular part of Germany. Fortunately, he listened to me, and we did the show and we got the hell out of there.

  A few days had gone by, and we did a few more shows, and everyone was trying to get accustomed to this small tour bus with its limited amount of sitting and standing space. It was horrible. Slim was getting tired of Kessia being on the tour, and he was going to cut her little vacation short. All she wanted to do was see Amsterdam, but she was supposed to be on for the length of the entire tour. Kessia and Slim were getting tired of each other, and she wasn’t giving him any sex. He was hurting, so he started making preparations to fly in another young lady, Nicole, from California, whom he had met during the Hawaii Death Row incident. He started making up this story to tell Kessia, that he was flying his “girl” out. He always referred to Kim as his girl and not his wife. Kessia knew about Kim, but Kim didn’t know about Kessia. He proceeded to tell Kessia this story that he and Kim were having some problems, and that he needed to see her in order to work them out. This was just to get Kessia out of there, since she wasn’t giving him any sex. I really couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t treating her right, so she cut off the goods. She was like, “Well, I guess I’m not going to make it to Amsterdam, huh?” Slim said, “No. I’m going to send you home on November 2nd. ” She was upset about that. I told her to just look at this like it was a little vacation. “Now you can go home and tend to whatever personal business you may have. ” At least, now you see how he operates. This is his lifestyle. He is going to run through a lot of people like toilet paper. He’s going wipe himself then throws them away.

  I told her it was unfortunate that she had to go through this but to take it as a lesson. We all would go through it in some way. She thanked me for the advice and said I always managed to say the right things. I told her how I really didn’t want to come back out on this tour. I would have rather stayed home and resolved some of my own family issues and spent more time with my sons and made things right with my wife. She told me that Slim told her that about me, but that he needed me with him because I was like a positive force for him, and he knew that things would get done with me being there. My total focus was always on him. I wasn’t chasing any women or smoking any weed. I wasn’t taking any Ecstasy or Vicodin. Sometimes Slim and Paul would ask me to take something with them. I would decline every time. I always felt as if they were testing me. If I had, then they would have something to hold against me. I always told them, “I’m not here for that. If I were to do that, then who would take care of y’all?” I was trying to do the right thing. It felt good to hear Kessia tell me Slim felt that I was a positive influence. I feel that he meant it, but unfortunately, Paul has that man’s mind in the palm of his hands. Slim never did express how he really felt.The sad part of it all is that Slim’s not going to realize this until it’s too late, when Paul is finished using him and throws him away. Slim’s going to find himself alone. Everyone around him sees this, but he either can’t see it or he won’t see it.

  Between Mark’s black eye, Kessia being disrespected, and Slim’s sexual escapades with minors, things were unbearable. I felt as if there was not one positive thing coming out of this whole tour. I knew I had to find something to keep my mind focused and to keep myself from being depressed, because everybody was depressed on this tour. People were depressed about their money not being right while these groupies were being flown out, and things of that nature. People weren’t feeling as though they were being treated fairly, and it was only the first week of the tour. A lot of tension had been carried over from previous tours, and it was building up. You could hear people saying that this would be their last tour and things like that. I even promised myself that this would be my last European tour, and my only recourse to keep my sanity was to get deeper and deeper into my Bible. That’s all I had. I had the Lord, I had my faith, I had the thoughts of my wife and kids, I had their pictures that I kept inside my Bible that I kissed good night every night, and that’s all I had to keep me going. I got into my Bible like never before, because among so many negative elements, that’s all I had to look to. I couldn’t run from it because I was there. This European tour let me reinvent myself. It let me look back on my mistakes of the past, and try to correct things and handle things the right way. I was looking at Slim and seeing the mistakes that he was making and I was like, Man, this guy is going to have hell to pay. I mean, I know people can change their ways, but he was doing one negative thing after another.

  It was November 2nd, and we were in Stuttgart, Germany, and this was to be Kessia’s last day on the tour. She was ready to go home after the nonsense she had been going through,accompanied by the embarrassment and the way Slim was talking to her. He would make comments in front of everyone like, “Kessia, when you goin
g to give me some head, when

  Slim’s crew celebrating Platinum success in the UK. you going to give me some pussy?” He would be saying it jokingly, but you could tell he really meant that shit. That’s the way he used to play; he would say shit in a joking manner, but you could tell he was dead serious. He belittled her, and she had finally reached a point where she realized she didn’t have to deal with that shit. She had taken all she could take, and from talking to her, I could tell she was ready to go. She had also figured out that he was flying in someone else, and it wasn’t his wife. What Slim saw in Kessia was that she was someone he could communicate with. They could laugh together, plus she was a nice-looking young lady. I guess he started letting the fame go to his head. He decided he needed bigger and better things, he needed finer women. He needed more. At one time, Kessia was his whole world. I remember when we were leaving Phoenix, Arizona, and he told Kessia he loved her on the cell phone. However, he was high on Ecstasy. From what I understand, Ecstasy can do those things to you. She was his way to escape. He didn’t deal with all the drama with Kessia that he did with Kim, his wife.

  On November 3rd, we reached Zurich, Switzerland. For some reason, at this one show, a local group strong-armed the promoter to let them perform at this venue. We found out about this after all the drama happened. We had the largest dressing room, but the dressing room was like Grand Central Station because each group had to pass through our dressing room to get to the stage. This is where the drama started. The group that strong-armed the promoter was comprised of some Haitians, and everywhere we went, to do interviews, for example, they tried to come through, but I always shut them down. I told them, “Man, back up. We are doing an interview, so back up, ” and they would pretend they couldn’t speak English, but I had heard them speak English earlier. I said, “Man don’t play, just get back, and speak English when you talk to me. ”They said, “Well, we’re just trying to get back to our dressing room, ” and I was like, “Well, whatever. Y’all just have to wait because we are in here conducting interviews, so y’all can’t be running through here with your people and your little groupies or whatever. ” So, the promoter stepped in and was like, “Well, they need to get to their dressing rooms, ” and I was like, “Well, y’all should have given us a different dressing room because we don’t want all this traffic running through here. We got valuable stuff in here, and if people come in here and take our stuff there’s gonna be a problem. ”

  So the promoter talked to these guys and told them to notify us before going into our dressing room. They ignored that, though, because when we were on stage they were all in our dressing room, eating Slim’s food and drinking Slim’s liquor and the whole nine. There was no one who could stop them since our room was on the way to their room. Upon our return to our room, we found that we had basically been looted. Luckily, however, we hid the “Chronic 2001” tape, because it could have been stolen and bootlegged. I always felt like Slim’s road manager/ babysitter. I always had to make sure he kept up with the “Chronic 2001” tape before the release. I often found myself carrying his tapes and his rhyme books around, plus keeping up with his personal property. I can recall a time in California when Slim thought he lost his rhyme book. I had to look every place we had been in the last twenty-four hours, only to find out that he left it at the studio. Those types of situations always made me feel like I wasn’t being paid enough. With this situation, with this group stealing our liquor, Mark and I basically had to go fetch it from these guys’ dressing room. Of course, this group fronted and was speaking shit in a foreign language. They were too scared to speak in English because they knew they would get their asses kicked. We took back the little bit of liquor that was left for Slim.

  After a show, Slim’s crew liked to smoke their weed and get drunk. Slim was angry about our liquor being boosted. We told the promoter of the show what happened. I knew this group was going to be trouble from the beginning. We wanted them out of our area—period! We ended up throwing them out of their dressing room. Their little female manager came to say something about us “sharing. ” She tried to be cute, but we weren’t going for it. “The group had already strong-armed their way on to the show, then stole our liquor. Please! We have no words for y’all. Ain’t nobody coming back through here—NOBODY!” She was mad, speaking that German shit again. Regardless, we put them out. So our crew started to cool out and the promoter bought us some more liquor. Then one of the Haitian guys from the local group decided to come up and battle Slim in a battle rap. He was outside our door talking to Proof, who didn’t know these guys had tried to give us a problem earlier because he wasn’t around, so he brought him into our dressing room. I was like, “Yo, what is my man doing in here?” They were exchanging numbers. I said, “Y’all are going to have to do that outside! They were stealing our shit earlier. ” The guy from the local group was like, “Anyway!” I cut him off. “Anyway nothing! You come up in here keeping up traffic, starting all that shit earlier, stealing our shit and now you want to come and politic with us? Fuck that shit! You got to get the fuck out!” Proof didn’t know all that shit went down. The guy still had his pen in his hand from trying to get Proof’s number. The dude gave me a funny look. I grabbed his wrist because I didn’t know if he was going to try to stab Proof or me with the pen. Then he was reaching for his pocket, so I grabbed that arm. I shook him up, then threw him out of our room. He tried to say some words. I told him, “If you come back in here, I will beat the shit out of you, flat out! Just because we are in your country, don’t think you won’t get your ass whipped!”

  The promoter then came into our room to see what the problem was. I said, “It’s those same guys you let on the show—that weren’t even supposed to be on the show—keeping up all kinds of shit. I want them out of this building. ” Now, the venue had a hotel attached to it, and the guys were staying at the hotel and kept sending people down to start shit, so I told that group, “If y’all are going to do something, do it, because I’m not going to keep going back and forth with y’all. Nobody has time for this shit!” Now, when I thought of Switzerland, I thought of snow and ski slopes, pretty women, furs, and diamonds. The last thing I expected was to be getting into it with some ghetto people at a show. We ended up getting out of there without anything happening, but these guys were some unruly characters. Finally, we signed a few autographs, got on the bus, and we were out!

  November 4th, 1999—Offenbach, Germany Nicole, the one from LA, had arrived. She was fine, too; she was definitely hot. She made all the women Slim has ever dealt with look like beauty pageant trainees. She was gorgeous. She was Puerto Rican and Mexican mixed. When I first met her, I didn’t care too much for her, but she turned out to be good people. She was wealthy and really didn’t seem to want for anything. She seemed to have more than Slim, to be honest with you. My first impression of her was that she thought her shit didn’t stink, that she was arrogant and snooty, but all in all, she was nice. Plus, Europe has a way of making people adjust. Besides, you can’t have two arrogant, obnoxious people in the same room—that would be her and Slim. She was the only female who kept Slim in check. She didn’t play those little word games when he would ask her for head in front of everyone. Sister didn’t play that. She was cool. She read a lot, and we got close. For some strange reason, all of Slim’s mistresses would confide in me. I guess because, aside from Proof and myself, we were the most levelheaded people there. We were always sober and driven by family. She was family oriented too, because she had a little girl. She knew who to talk to and who was full of shit. She also brought a different feel to the tour. By the time she arrived things were looking better because we were all adjusting to being over there.

  Our stomachs were feeling better as we adapted. We even found a Kentucky Fried Chicken to make up for all the pork we had been served. Things were looking better, but of course Slim had spent $4, 000 to fly Nicole to Europe. At this point, none of that even mattered because we knew where we stood. We knew, his
crew and me, his bodyguard, that we weren’t his first priority. Therefore, we lacked in loyalty as he lacked in appreciation for us. That’s basically where we stood.

  We boarded the tour bus on November 5th, heading for Koln. Koln was the spot. It was everything we thought it would be. Koln was the best part of the tour for many of us. It reminded me of Manhattan mixed with Paris. There were a lot of English-speaking people there and a wide variety of ethnic groups, as well, from Indians to Germans to Ethiopians to Italians. A lot of military guys were there, too. Probably some of the most beautiful women in the world stayed in Koln. I mean, they were hot!

  Stockholm had some fine women, but Koln had some exotic women.The women looked like Vanity, Apollonia, Jennifer Lopez—they were built and always wore spandex and halter tops—it was a nice sight to see. And they loved American men, especially black men. To be from Detroit was the icing on the cake. Slim rocked the show, and it was off the chain. All the shows were basically the same—same show, different city. The fun started after the show. I figured Slim was in with Nicole, so it was my chance to get out and see some sights.