The Dark Story of Eminem Read Online Free PDF Page B

constantly and the scenery is changing around,” he said, “it makes you feel real nervous and shit, especially being so little. I mean, fuck it, now it’s done and over with …”
     
    In another early interview, to
Spin
, he gave more concrete details, this time with a dutiful attempt to understand his mother. “I was born in Kansas City, then when I was five we moved to a real bad part of Detroit. I was getting beat up a lot, so we moved back to K.C., then back to Detroit again when I was 11. My mother couldn’t afford to raise me, but then she had my little brother” – his half-brother, Nathan – “so when we moved back to Michigan, we were just staying wherever we could, with my grandmother or whatever family would put us up. I know my mother tried to do the best she could, but I was bounced around so much – it seemed like we moved every two or three months, I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.”
     
    By the time he talked to
NME
a little later, he had told the story enough times to start to resent what it meant, and be certain who was to blame. “My mother never had a job,” he re-emphasised, “so … in Kansas City when I was a kid we stayed with my aunts, my uncles, and when they got fed up with us – not really with me, but my mother, she can’t get along with no one – they would kick us out. That’s how we ended up in Detroit.”
     
    His mother’s response came in the
Mail On Sunday
. “Obviously, I became over-protective,” she said. “I was single, he was my only son. Years later, he abused me because he changed school so many times. Yet the truth is whenever he had a problem at school, he came home and demanded to move. And I gave in to him.”
     
    Such private, partially remembered conversations between relatives now in bitter dispute can’t be checked for accuracy now. But Mathers-Briggs’ reason for their moves at least tallies with Marshall’s memory of fleeing Detroit’s bullies as a child for Kansas City. Records entered into court during the libel trial about her raising of him – taken with his albums, the most public inquiry into a mother’s duties in American history – meanwhile confirmed that Marshall attended five elementary schools in four cities as a child. While not quite as erratic an education as he remembered, it was obviously deeply destabilising, for a boy already feeling abandoned by one parent. As he said, the scenery kept changing. It must have been hard to feel trust in the world.
     
    Instead, it was in these first nomad years that he was forced to turn inwards, and start to nurture an artist’s mind. He became absorbed in TV, and comic-books. The latter was a traditional source of inspiration for poor black rappers, especially the superhero genre, with its garish, primal fantasies of impotent, misunderstood striplings with enormous, secret strengths – his D12 bandmate Kuniva would note that “being a rapper in high school was like being one of the X-Men, like being a mutant with hidden powers.” Marshall gained so much from comics that drawing them was his first artistic ambition, a daring one for someone from a background with such limited horizons. He would later turn up in superhero costume in videos, and joined the superhero (and rap) tradition of “secret identity” aliases. He gained his first aged five – Eminem, from his initials, and the M’n’M sweets he loved. But puny Marshall Mathers remained his real self.
     
    The wounded, self-protectively sealed nature of that boy was agreed on by him and his mother. “He was a really talented boy,” she told the
Mail On Sunday
. “He was very artistic but he was a very shy child. He was too shy. He was a loner and he never wanted to pal up with people.” In that sad, court-quoted interview, he gave more reasons why. “It was real difficult making friends when I was growing up, because we used to bounce from house to house