The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Turn right along the old city limit, Grand Boulevard, and you’ve entered the Lower East Side, still the ghetto’s rotted core. There are charred frames of houses turned to ash here, cracked roofs, large muddy lots. Destroyed things aren’t replaced down here, just left as gaps and ghosts. Eminem lived here for a while, with Kim and Hailie. But not long enough to make you stop. To get where you’re headed next, you could speed up Gratiot, the freeway that splits this old neighbourhood. You’d move fast and see nothing, the way most whites from the suburbs like it; it would help explain how this place has gotten so isolated. But Eminem had no car, growing up. And going slower, a different way, will keep you to his path.

  So keep going, straight across Grand Boulevard. Before long, you’ll be on 8 Mile Road. Eminem has talked about it so often in interviews, naming it “the racial borderline”, even calling his film 8 Mile, so large does it loom in his mind, that you expect a simmering ghetto cauldron. It is certainly Detroit’s central fact, the end result of its racial history, the track Eminem boldly crossed onto the wrong side of, to make “black” rap music. But walk as far as you like along it, as it runs the length of Detroit’s northern edge, and its potency is invisible. It looks like just another American highway. It is lined with auto repair shops, warehouses, cheap motels. It is only when you choose a side of it that 8 Mile’s mystery is unlocked, and you truly start to step in Eminem’s shoes.

  Turn right, back down into Detroit, towards 7 Mile (you can count a lot with numbers in this place; they go up to 19 Mile, and down into hell). Depending which junction you choose, you might not be sure on which side of Eminem’s border you’ve fallen at first. Walk one way, and you could be in a leafy English suburb, with mock-Tudor stone houses, substantial with wealth. Except every person you see is black. This is Bagley, one of Detroit’s oldest black middle-class districts. Keep going along 7 Mile and the ghetto soon appears. There are more broken-windowed factories, burned houses, scrubland. There are outposts of life, too: schools, churches, recording studios. Every face you see is black again. In Detroit, skin separates you.

  Eminem lived here on 7 Mile, for a while. The Hip-Hop Shop where he honed his rapping skills was there (it’s now moved), so were his black friends in D12. And, as a teenager, he lived with his mother just south enough of 8 Mile, in a small, two-storey home, one of three white families on his block, behind the sprawling, ugly Bel-Air mall. And it was outside this mall that black teenagers stripped him to his underwear and jammed a pistol to his head, because he was white, before a passing, armed white trucker saved his life.

  “If they grew up in Detroit, in the city,” Eminem complained to City Detroit magazine of his critics, when he first tasted fame, “they would know what the fuck is going on. They would know why I feel the way I do, and why I say the things I do. When you’re white and in hip-hop, everybody wants to know your background. You have to come from the ‘hood. And I don’t see the point in it. But it’s like, okay; if everybody in the world wants to know where I came from, then this is where I came from. And I’m gonna show you.”

  The day before, he had done just that, taking MTV to his old home behind the mall. But he was being too defensive, back then. And he was only telling half the story. He was never just some white foundling, abandoned in a black world. The boy who as a national star would give himself new names and identities at will understood Detroit’s dangerously split personality from both sides. Step off 8 Mile the other way, into the white suburbs, and you’re still walking in his world.

  You’ve left Detroit altogether now, according to the statutes barring its borders. You’re now in the city of Warren. Like 8 Mile, it is a place hardly anyone would have heard of, if Eminem hadn’t left it.

  It is a sprawling grid of small, one-storey frame houses, replicas of the crumbling East Side it was built to replace, in the decade of the suburban dream, the Fifties. In the years afterwards, smashed windows, arson and violent threats greeted black Detroiters who tried to join whites’ flight to it. Eminem’s grandmother, Betty Kresin, lived in a trailer park here, and Eminem spent much of his youth there too. He has called this place “the white trash capital of the world”. Not for the last time, he exaggerated for effect. Walk through Warren to the school where he spent the most years, Lincoln Junior High, and the white ghetto you expect from his interviews is hard to find.

  It has the feel of a quiet English coastal town, off-season. It certainly isn’t the home of people made wealthy by whiteness. It is just where Detroit’s white working class retreated to, as their own futures shrank. The strolling teenagers of 7 Mile, or the cramped bustle of the Lower East Side, are absent. Adults drive to and from here in their cars, some to factory jobs, still. More kids stick in school. American flags flutter in yards. Neighbourhood Watch signs are prominent. The few, white faces you can see are working on their small gardens. Their subtly, determinedly different wood houses are often chipped, as on 8 Mile’s other side. Some toys are left in the street, slovenly, but safe. There are wide mud alleys between the backs of some streets. The impression is of a place just keeping itself above the flood-line. “White trash” is too harsh.

  Lincoln Junior High is on the corner of one of the wider avenues. A Drive-Thru Pizza place, a Rustproofing shop and a fire station are the nearby landmarks. “Thoughts and Prayers are with the Rescuers and Victims”, says a post-9/11 sign in this peaceful-looking, loyal American backwater. A white boy is crossing the school’s large parking lot suspiciously early in the day, with a rapper’s low jeans and lope.

  Eminem was here from 1986 to 1989, when, at 14, he quit education, to rap. It is the only school where he stayed long enough to make friends. When his nomadic mother moved again to Detroit, he walked two miles back every day, so he could keep them. So this is as close as you will ever get to picturing his school days.

  Those were over a decade ago, of course. But the long corridors, metal lockers, and din of fractious, spirited adolescents can’t have changed much. Only a small, significant number of black faces, and a few more white boys with a hopeful hint of hip-hop style suggest time’s passing. Principal Paul Young has been here three decades. In Eminem’s time, he was an English teacher. His take on Warren differs from his ex-pupil’s.

  “It’s very much a blue-collar neighbourhood, of hard-working, honest people,” he says in his office. “It has areas that are very poor, and areas that are relatively well-off. Quite a few families moved here from the South, to work in the auto industry. To some extent, it’s been hit by that industry’s decline. And it’s an older neighbourhood. Some of the folks who have retired from the industry have moved further north. The area’s become somewhat more transient. When homes go up for sale, in many cases, they’re turned into rentals. As a result, the population’s become more fluid, and lost some of the sense of community it used to have. But it’s always supported the schools.”

  His view of 8 Mile, a short walk from his school gates, is sanguine too. “At one time, there were some racial issues here,” he admits. “But I think that 8 Mile symbolism is less true today than it might have been when Eminem was a youngster. I think one of the reasons is that many of the whites who moved in to Warren from the South have retired and moved on. It’s now their kids that are here, and they’re more culturally aware, and more tolerant of diversity. Our school’s much more diverse than it was even 10 years ago, when he was here.”

  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.