The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Eminem put his side across in a statement that afternoon. “The details surrounding my marriage and subsequent filing for divorce are private, and I had hoped to keep them that way for the sake of my family. However, a few of Kim’s statements … this morning need to be addressed. First, her allegations regarding my status post-rehab are both untrue and unfortunate. Second, she was aware that I was filing for divorce. We both tried to give our marriage another chance, and quickly realised that a wedding doesn’t fix the underlying problems.”

  That spat aside, Kim needn’t have worried about the split, which was conducted in the mood of ‘Mockingbird’, not ‘Puke’. On December 19, divorce was amicably finalised between a couple who “conducted themselves with dignity and respect”, presiding judge Antonio P. Viviano observed (years before, he had spared Eminem jail for pistol-whipping John Guerra). Custody of the children would be shared. Kim and Eminem remained entwined.

  But by now Eminem’s world was narrowing and darkening almost daily. Only six days after he filed for divorce Proof was shot dead. As Eminem went into shock, he wondered if he had left his best friend at risk in some karmic balance. He had cast his friend in the character of the rapper’s posse-member who is shot dead for his boss’s beef in the video for ‘Like Toy Soldiers’. There, Proof’s body jerked and flapped on the operating table, smeared with blood that also covered the shirt and hands of Eminem, who clutched his wide-eyed head in horror, too late.

  “It was a year before I could really do anything normally again,” he wrote in The Way I Am. Sometimes, he stayed in bed. Sometimes, he couldn’t walk, paralysed by grief. Brain “scattered”, “I wasn’t making sense when I spoke, so everyone was trying to keep me off TV and away from the press.” Slim Shady was dead, Eminem was shutting down, and Marshall Mathers was falling apart.

  The death of Proof, on top of his divorce, accelerated a deeper, more secret malaise. A cancelled tour and a quick rehab spell for sleeping pills didn’t sound serious. But between The Eminem Show and Encore, recreational gulping of the sedatives Ambien, Vicodin and Valium became an addiction. The latter album would become an unlistenable repository of bad memories for him. “I remember going to LA recording [Encore] with Dre and being in the studio high, taking too many pills, getting in this slap-happy mood and making songs like ‘Big Weenie’ and ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Ass Like That’,” he told Vibe in 2010, when the truth was out. “Dre would just laugh. He didn’t understand what was going on. Nobody understood what was going on with me or why I was acting so fucking goofy.”

  Proof’s death “gave me a real legitimate excuse, in my own head at least, to take more drugs,” he told the Guardian. “I didn’t care if my drug problem got worse at that point so I took more pills. And the more I said fuck it and took more pills, the higher my tolerance got.” He was taking “10 to 20 Vicodin” a day and countless Ambien and Valium, just to sleep, he told Spin. Proof’s death had also made him fearful. “He started to worry that he might be next,” an associate told the Independent. “It also made him realise his responsibilities. He didn’t need any more money, and he hated being away from his daughter, so he decided that he wouldn’t leave her alone to go touring any more.”

  But this wasn’t the happy, family-friendly ending of ‘When I’m Gone’. It seemed more like an excuse to lock the world out, and entomb himself. He divided his time between his two gated houses on Detroit’s wooded outskirts – a six-bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bathroom behemoth with swimming pools and helipad in Rochester Hills, and a smaller, more discrete mansion in Clinton Township. When I wandered Detroit in 2002, Eminem was still a regular weekend visitor to his old haunts. When Guy Adams went on his trail for the Independent in February 2009, he seemed more like a ghost. “No one had seen him at all,” he says. “Everyone knew someone who’d seen him – ‘a friend of a friend saw him three weeks ago in a bar …’”

  Every rapper in Detroit knew Eminem was still working. “He’s never stopped recording. Ever,” Terry Simaan, owner of local hip-hop label Oh Trey 9 told Adams. “I hear they’ve got over 300 songs in the can.” No one Adams spoke to even considered their local hero had lost it. “Everyone kept the faith. They all think he’s a genius.”

  Perhaps only Eminem knew that the pills had given him crippling writer’s block. “I never stopped working, but I had a problem I was hiding,” he told the Guardian. “A combination of writer’s block and being lazy … I couldn’t write a line to save my life.” The man whose dense, cryptic notebooks were part of his myth now freestyled in the studio, rather than focus on words. The mush of barely there, mumbled lyrics which made Encore‘s comic songs sound so daring in isolation now seemed the product of a dissolving, stoned mind. “I had this slurry tone,” he told Spin of the failed recordings he made next. “It sounded like I was talking-rapping. I’d become so fucking lazy. Songs where I would talk about eating so much and getting fat and saying, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care.’” The rumours of 300 recordings were true. Only one would be salvaged. The writer’s block lasted four years, and Eminem never stopped recording hazy, despairing shit.

  Songs on his 2009 album Relapse retrospectively sketched the sloth and furtiveness of a functioning addict. He spent the morning slumped nude on his sofa in ‘3 a.m.’, idly musing if it was too early for naked breasts on TV. ‘Déjà Vu’ plotted his addiction’s course, as rap’s most gifted and wealthy man decides to get wasted until the kids walk in from school, and stashes pills in his porn video boxes, so his beloved, worried children won’t find them. He feels alone and shivers as his home’s gates close behind him, but doesn’t really struggle. “My Dad’s gone crazy,” this song’s Hailie clearly thinks, no longer joking.

  As the pills muffled his mood, Eminem would creep down to his basement and eat “nachos and popcorn, just sitting around getting fat,” he told Spin. “I just gave up.” In his basement cinema, he watched the Rocky films, Boogie Nights and Shooter 150 times each, clinging to the comforting familiarity like a child to nursery tales. He may also have seen himself in Rocky Balboa’s humbling and gutsy resurrection in each film, so like the story spun around his own character in 8 Mile; he may have felt closer to the seedy decline of Boogie Nights’ ageing porn star Dirk Diggler. The Rocky-style willpower that pounds through ‘Lose Yourself’ had left him.

  Watching the rap world go by in the summer of 2006, he became consumed with jealousy at the latest hot talents, Lil Wayne and Kanye West. He thought of firing off a battle-rap, showing the upstarts who was still boss. But he knew he was no longer good enough. The man who once happily called out Clinton and Bush would be crucified.

  He did put out one album on December 5 that year. Eminem Presents The Re-Up was part of his vague plan to withdraw from front-line rapping and fame, to focus on producing and promoting his Shady Records protégés. The Shady Midas touch was fading now, but Obie Trice (himself shot while driving in Detroit on New Year’s Eve 2005, though he quickly recovered), 50 Cent and D12 gamely helped Eminem prop up Stat Quo and new signings Bobby Creekwater and Cashis. It was a lively old-school mix-tape, nothing more. Eminem’s own contributions, though, were strong and revealing. ‘Public Enemy #1’ was a promising scenario of Eminem as a target for FBI assassination, recording furiously before the bullets hit. On ‘We’re Back’, he felt slighted he wasn’t ranked as a “hip-hop legend, which amazes me.” Best of all, the stark ‘No Apologies’ admitted he was “wounded”, but furiously restated his need to rap in a flurry of aggressive rhymes, “to salvage me inside”. This music wasn’t “for you, it’s for me”. The most surprising evidence of abiding talent was Eminem’s illustrations of the rappers on the sleeve. The life-long fan of Marvel Comics who’d become his own super-villain, Slim Shady, drew a decent line.

  Nothing followed from this flicker of life. As 2006 became 2007, Eminem completed half-a-dozen secret trips to Dr. Dre’s studios. He arrived with no real songs and left the same way. He felt he was wasting the time of the producer who had helped save his life al
most a decade before. He went to a few Narcotics Anonymous and AA meetings in Detroit, but was stared at like “Bugs Bunny” when he walked in, he told Spin.

  In December 2007, he finally hit rock bottom, 10 years after the events of the song of the same name when, penniless and despairing of amounting to anything as a rapper, he had overdosed on Tylenol 3 pills. Trying out some new blue pills he’d been handed this time, he overdosed on metha-done. The last thing he remembered was saying goodnight to his children. He was found collapsed in his bathroom. He woke up in the ambulance. “They say that if I got to the hospital two hours later then I would be gone,” he later told Vibe. The thought terrified him. He was photographed in a wheelchair at the hospital. It was announced he had pneumonia. His jarring visit to rock bottom in 1997 had kickstarted his greatness. Now, he stirred again.

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  INFINITE

  Eminem’s brush with death barely dented his addiction at first. His metha-done overdose had been equivalent to “shooting up four bags of heroin,” doctors warned him as they detoxified his body. “My kidneys, my organs, everything was shutting down,” he later told 60 Minutes. He hadn’t even known, or cared, what the blue capsules he had gobbled were. “I was just taking anything that anyone was giving me,” he confessed. Sweet-talking hangers-on were always ready to help, many working from plush surgeries. “Where you’re famous, doctors will kiss your ass because they love the celebrity,” he told Vibe. “‘Oh, I can call Eminem and get him on the phone right now. Oh, hi, Marshall, how are you doing? Do you need that [prescription]?’ … You tell them what you need. You don’t need to go in and see them. They will just write you a [prescription] because they want that connection with you.” On ‘Déjà Vu’, he wondered what Elvis would do in his place. In his echoing mansions, watching TV and eating junk food, doped by sycophant physicians and discovered almost dead in his bathroom, he was learning every day.

  The methadone had hardly been flushed from his system when, in January 2008, he relapsed. The National Enquirer spotted him puffily out of shape in a car park. They sneered at his “droopy man-breasts” and ran photos under the headline: “EMINEM STARTING TO LOOK LIKE AN M&M”. He had been gone so long that sightings of him had slipped from paparazzi snaps for the pop pages to true Howard Hughes terrain: wheelchair-bound with “pneumonia” one month, worryingly fat the next. Few bothered to join the dots to this showbiz ghost’s rehab stay of two years before.

  Privately, though, the overdose had shaken him. Early in 2008, he admitted his addiction, and began to truly fight it. He checked himself back into hospital, and began the classic addict’s 12-step programme with a sponsor, and a rehab counsellor he still sees once a week. His earlier rehab had been disrupted by star-struck fellow addicts asking for autographs, and pocketing his notebooks, pens and hats. This time, a man with a better understanding of what Elvis, or Eminem, might do was his saviour. “Elton John calls me once a week,” he told Spin. “He used to tell me stuff like, ‘You’re going to start seeing certain things you’ve been overlooking.’ And it came true. I’d walk around like, ‘Damn, that tree looks crazy, look at all those leaves!’ Things I didn’t notice when I was fucked up.” On April 20, 2008, he stopped taking pills.

  Like a montage from the Rocky films he’d also been addicted to, he burned off his flab with legendary Detroit boxing trainer Emanuel Steward. “Eminem’s a workout maven, and one of those healthy mind, healthy body people,” a Steward associate told the Independent. As the opiate cloud that had oppressed his mind lifted, he tentatively started to write. “I had been writing songs without beats,” he told the Guardian. “I was making beats in my head and writing lyrics down just like I used to … I had a couple of songs and a few loose verses. In hindsight I was doing mind exercises, getting myself back in shape.” He elaborated on the process to the New York Times. “I’d stack a bunch of words and just go down the line and try to fill in the blanks and make sense of them. For three or your years I [hadn’t been able] to.” He had read a dictionary as a boy, in his hunger for words. Now he was a student again. As if he had been in a coma or suffered a mild stroke, he had to relearn his rapper’s language.

  In June, he nervously rang Dr. Dre. “I wasn’t sure if I was ready,” he remembered to Anthony Bozza in the Guardian. “But I called him anyway and was like, ‘Yo, homie, I think I’m starting to come out of this writer’s block.’ He was like, ‘All right. That’s what I like to hear.’ “

  Eminem was fearful before his latest trip to Dre’s studio in Orlando, Florida, desperate not to let his mentor down again. In two weeks, they blazed through 11 songs. Dre kept things simple, handing Eminem beats to choose from and write words to. He’d record them till his voice was hoarse. Then as he recovered, he’d start writing again. “When we were done I felt like I did when we made the first two records,” he recalled to the Guardian in wonder. “The word ‘relapse’ kept playing over and over in my head.” He worried the mood would peter out back in Detroit. “But we came back and it never stopped … it was a whole shit-storm … these thoughts that I could not control.” He snapped awake in the middle of the night, thinking of lines he had to write down. To the New York Times, he talked of “the lid” blowing off his creativity: “In seven months I accomplished more than I could in three or four years doing drugs.” Again like Elvis in his last years, he had got used to lazily recording aimless sessions in his home studio. Now he bought a new facility in Ferndale, Detroit, Effigy (leaving loyal musicians from the albums made at Studio 54, including Luis Resto, behind). It was stocked with his favourite old arcade games, a soda fountain, a barbecue and a giant mixing desk bought from Dre. At least for the half-hour drive from his house to the studio, he would have to face the world to make music. On October 15, 2008, during a late-night interview on Shade 45, a satellite radio station he part-owns, he announced he was working on a new record: Relapse. The comeback had begun.

  His first substantial work in three years, The Way I Am, was published the next week. Touted as an autobiography and certainly going deeper than his first book, 2000’s annotated lyrics collection Angry Blonde, it remained more like the “scrapbook for my fans” Eminem had originally intended. A man who had only read two picture-free books, a dictionary and LL Cool J’s autobiography, preferring to absorb language from rap records and the vividly colourful fictions of Marvel comics, was never going to use the medium to say anything definitive about himself. This wasn’t Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, revelling or even interested in the literary form. Instead it offered crumpled mementoes such as a hand-written flyer for the teenage Marshall’s fledgling business painting jeans and jackets in hip-hop styles (“Call M + M” …), and photos of him as a young unknown stoked to have opened for the Wu-Tang Clan in Staten Island, and performing, his eyes wild with unvarnished passion. Forty-five pages of his fabled lyric sheets were the centrepiece. Fragments of future great songs could be spotted amidst a sometimes staggering density of phrases and stanzas, ink colours and even handwriting changing on a single page of hotel stationery as he stocked lyrical ammunition, in the days when his mind and pen never stopped. Younger rappers poured ideas into mobile phones and BlackBerries, and in his depression Eminem had tried to copy Jay-Z’s technique of storing lines in his head then freestyling in the studio. But in this way at least, the true Eminem was an old-fashioned writer, thoughts shooting from his mind onto worked-over, scribbled pages. “I’ve got some letters from some crazy people, and it looks like this,” Anderson Cooper said, when Eminem showed him some sheets during a 60 Minutes TV interview two years later. “Either all in capitals or scrawled on pages.” Eminem chose not to rise to the bait from this interrogator from the mainstream world, mildly offering: “Yeah, well. That’s probably because I’m crazy.” Told the rapper saved all his rhyme books, Cooper suggested they might one day go in an Eminem museum. “Maybe,” the rapper said, interested. He took his achievements seriously now, and spoke of them as art. “I always was good at English,” the high school dr
opout let his posh interviewer know.

  “The guy has been out of the mix and not interacting with a lot of people, let alone a writer,” Sacha Jenkins, Eminem’s ghost-writer, told the New York Times of interviewing him for the book. “But this was an opportunity for him to get a lot of stuff off his chest, especially in the wake of the death of his best friend.” Eminem addressed Proof’s loss head-on in the introduction. It was a steady beat beneath what followed, stories inevitably circling back to some crucial kindness or intervention. He vividly recalled Proof fist-fighting him till his knuckles were bloody, knocking him down but never keeping him there, outside the house Debbie had moved him to in Detroit’s East Side ghetto. Proof was training him to fight back, and survive. When Marshall was living with Kim at her mother’s in an attic too cramped to even stand, and becoming “hermit-ish” as he obsessively recorded demos – exactly as he had just been behaving for three years as an adult superstar in a gated mansion – it was Proof who dragged him out to The Hip-Hop Shop, and his future.

  “Guns and violence have been around me my whole life – in my family life, in my social life, everywhere,” he also revealed in The Way I Am. He had often spoken of his Uncle Ronnie’s shotgun suicide in 1992, but now gave new details of the moment he heard: “I just threw the phone down and dropped to my knees.” And then there was another uncle, Todd Nelson, who “allegedly ended up murdering a dude in a supermarket parking lot”, and on release from jail in 2004, “blew his brains out on my birthday”. These violent deaths had already taken “chunks out of my life”, Eminem said, before Proof’s. Physical abuse was a constant presence around his family. “It’s no surprise I became who I am. Someone I don’t really want to be.”