Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  Time will tell, but I’m not putting my money on Joy. One of Eminem’s strengths is his instinct to critique himself first, the world second. He has been pointing out his faults and weaknesses nationally for four years and it has hardly hurt his profile.

  After the release of 8 Mile, Eminem avoided the spotlight as much as possible. In paparazzi photos he looked somber, and at the forty-fourth Grammys on February 23, 2003, he looked stoic but emotional. After the ceremony, Eminem passed on the parties much as he did at the L.A. premiere for 8 Mile, where he left the business of Hollywood to his costars and ran the red carpet like a fifty-yard dash. Eminem stopped for just one interview that night, with the hosts of a local hip-hop radio station. At the premiere party for the film, he sat surrounded by his friends, separated from the two thousand or so guests by a phalanx of security. I didn’t go to the 8 Mile premiere, although I was invited. I preferred to see the film on opening night, premiering to a crowd without VIP parking. I was glad to hear, though, how Eminem navigated his big night. He went to Hollywood on his own terms; he showed up, but he didn’t play any game but his own.

  chapter 2

  i only cuss to make your mom upset a lot of truth is said in jest

  “Buuuuhhhhhpp,” the blond kid blurts from inside the bathroom stall. There is silence for a minute, then he emerges, his face red and his eyes watery. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and leans on the sink. He looks at me, then washes his hands and his face. I don’t know him yet, so I stand a little to the side, not knowing whether to say hello. I must look like I want something from him, maybe just a clear path to the stall, because he stands there tense, his body language betraying his awareness of my presence. When he’s done washing, before I can even say “hey,” he swaggers by me woozily, eyeing me on the way out.

  “I just threw up everything I had,” he announces to the people in the conference room down the hall. “All I ate today was that slice of pizza and that fifth of Bacardi. Feel good now, though.” He ducks into his manager’s office, leaving the rest of us, his fellow rapper Royce Da 5′9″ and his boys, Dennis the security guard, and me to chat among ourselves. When he comes back in, it is to crack jokes on every topic in the air and every person in the room but me. Sure, he sees me, but he says nothing to me for the first twelve hours that I’m in his orbit. It’s a blessing and a curse: I’m never the target of his pointed jokes, but that only means that to him I don’t exist.

  Two hours later, nine of us get into two limos, one of them white and immense, the other black and shorter. DJ Stretch Armstrong ducks his lanky frame through the car door and sits next to Eminem; he is singing, as he was in the elevator, an appropriate interpretation of a Cream song: “In the white room, with white people and white rappers.” The long white limo is now full; Eminem is deepest in, sitting behind the passenger seat. His manager and bodyguard are on one side, and as I get in, I am last on the bench. The radio is tuned to New York hip-hop station Hot 97 and Jay-Z’s “Can I Get a …” from the soundtrack to Rush Hour pumps from the speakers. “Can I get a fat fuck to all these chickens on these nuts,” Eminem says, substituting lyrics. There is a rap at the window and the security guard rolls it down. A guy in a hood looks in at me with his hand out, nodding for me to do the same. I do and a pile of pills falls into my hand. I feel a kick in my knee and turn to see Eminem, crouched forward with his arm outstretched, holding money at me. I exchange the pills for the cash through the window.

  Eminem’s manager, Paul, puts his head in his hands. “I don’t believe this. Are you fucking stupid?” he says. “Do you know what you just did? The guy from Rolling Stone just bought your drugs. That’s it, fuck it. You’re on your own tonight.” Paul gets out of the car. He will rejoin us when we leave thirty minutes later.

  “Hey, Paul, you’re already fired, you fat fuck,” Eminem yells at the slammed door. “You’re so fired and rehired, you’re tired, you skinny fat fuck! Fuck you, you bald fat fuckin’ fuck. Fuck you fuckin’ fuck, your life, it’s over.” Eminem loves the word fuck. He uses it like a basketball player uses a dribble, to get from here to there.

  “Ohh, yeahh,” Stretch Armstrong says, imitating Eminem’s lecherous gay character, Ken Kaniff, from his albums’ skits. “Paul’s sexy when he’s mad. Oh, yeah.” Ken Kaniff was the goof persona of underground rapper Aristotle, who recorded a skit of a prank phone call to Eminem on The Slim Shady LP. After the album’s success, as with so many relationships ruptured by unequal fame, Aristotle and Eminem had a falling out over who had the right to play Ken. On his next records, Eminem, an able mimic of any voice, performed the Ken Kaniff skits. For his part, Aristotle recorded anti-Eminem songs in the Ken Kaniff persona and set up a website to sell an album of Ken Kaniff raps.

  “Yo, pass me a ginger ale,” Eminem says. “I need some shit to settle my stomach.” He swallows a hit of ecstasy with his first gulp.

  “Ohh, Eminem, yeah, I bet you melt in the mouth, not in the hand,” Stretch says, bugging out his eyes and baring his teeth.

  “Ohh, yeah, you fuckin’ fuck,” Eminem says. “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck. You’re Stretched, you fuck. You’re so thin you can’t spin, you skinny fat fuck.”

  The car moves away from the curb and heads downtown, slowly, through traffic toward the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. We’re already two hours late. As the E starts to hit him, Eminem becomes a word dervish, a rhyme tornado, a spaz, and a force that can’t be reckoned with. In most people, ecstasy brings on a state of bliss. In Eminem, it brings out Slim Shady. Right now Slim Shady is cranked up to eleven and bristling with energy he can’t contain. His drug-fueled rhymes are sharp, and he cannot sit still. When the radio catches his ear, he’ll rap along perfectly with OutKast’s “Rosa Parks” or DMX’s “Ruff Ryders Anthem,” until the next bit of stimuli redirects him. At a red light, behind the blacktinted windows that keep the New York noise out and the riders’ noise in, he starts talking to the Sikh cabdriver next to us in Shady’s version of Hindi.

  “S’cuse me, talkin’ a me, no?” he says, banging hard on the window. “S’cuse me fuckin’ a talkin’ a me? No? I’m a fuckin’ a talkin’ a you!”

  The man sits resolute and unaware, less than a foot away through the glass. He doesn’t hear and doesn’t respond, so Slim Shady fills in his half of the dialogue, too, all the while banging on the window. He’s soon conducting both sides of the “conversation” in a wacked-out language known only to him. The rest of us can’t even hear it because we’re laughing so hard.

  “You’re all fired!” he yells at us, as the cab pulls away. “You fat fuckin’ fucks!”

  At the next light, a couple sits next to us in a Lexus. “Oh, yeahh,” Eminem says. “Mmm, yeah. Ohh, yeah. I’m Ken Kaniff from Connecticut. Can I ride with you? I wanna ride in that car of yours, mmm, yeah.” The more oblivious the other motorists, the more incited the joker. When a nearby driver suspects something, it kills us even more; the poor guy might hear Eminem pounding on the window or might be trying to divine who is in the stretch, but when he stares at Slim Shady while the rapper screams, “Oh, talkin’ a me!,” it’s like witnessing a police lineup, performance art, The Tom Green Show, and the greatest Candid Camera episode ever imagined, all combined.

  “Somebody tell Paul he’s fired,” Eminem says. “Right now. Fire that fat fuck. Then rehire him. He’s over. He’s done. His life is garbage. Ay yo, Paul, what’s up?” At the opposite end of the limo, Paul cocks his head and looks at Eminem, then back out the window.

  Eminem is starting to burn—his face is flushed and his eyes are wild and hungry. They twinkle with the unbalance of a madman and the steel focus of an athlete; his pupils are the size of pennies. Five blocks from Staten Island’s Club Carbon we see it: a mass of kids in the street, blocking traffic. It’s hard to tell how big the club is, but this mob looks big enough to fill it—and they’re the kids who didn’t make it inside. They are a teen amoeba on the blacktop: Every time a car comes through, they separate in blobs to
let it pass, then rejoin. The limo creates a frenzied reaction. As we inch slowly into the crowd, the kids realize that the show has arrived and they move in to consume it. They surround the car entirely, forming a layer of insulation between us and the building. Guided by two harried beat cops trying to direct traffic, the limo turns around slowly, honking constantly, and pulls up to the curb. Kids are trying to look in, waving, banging on the windows, and pulling the door handles.

  “Look at this place, man,” Eminem says, dead serious for a moment. “Fuckin’ fuck.”

  “Staten Island in the house,” Stretch Armstrong says, grinning ear to ear. “We’ve got white rap in the house, Staten Island. We’ve got white people and white rappers in this white car for you.”

  We sit in the limo at the curb and wait while the police and venue security clear a path for us. Along with Eminem’s bodyguard, we form a phalanx at the car door as the crowd starts to freak out. The kids push forward, some getting stuck between the cops and our ride, some climb over the limo’s wide hood. They yell at Eminem, or just about him, as if he were in front of them, not live, but still in two dimensions, on their MTV.

  “You look good!” shouts one girl, who can’t be more than fifteen.

  “Oh my gawd, he looks so much better in person,” another says, as much to us as to her friends.

  We are in a tight circle, being pushed and pulled along, the kids packing in against the guards who can’t quite surround us. It is slow going, like swimming upstream, and we won’t fit through the doors of the venue without breaking rank. I’m holding on to one of the crew members as we push through the doors, flattening a few teenagers on the way. I start slipping behind as bodies push in against me and try to break our human chain. Eminem’s security guard pulls me forward by the neck of my shirt just before I’m squeezed out of the pocket and into the mob. Kids are screaming all of his names now—Shady! Em! Slim!—and trying to high-five him over the human wall.

  Inside, this former movie theater is pitch-black except for the tiny toothpick-size glow-sticks that dot the dark. The fans have them stuck in loops of their clothing, in their hair, in their nostrils, and in their mouths. A boy trying to push through me into the circle has them jammed in his braces. It is the grand opening of this all-ages spot, and either the club handed out several gross of these glowing party favors or Staten Island teens are oddly obsessed with disposable light sources.

  The club is basically still a movie theater. There’s no backstage and little security, and the dressing room/storage closet is a well-lit attic located at the top of a ladder at an end of the top row of seats. We make our way up the aisles, and while I hold on to the jacket of one member of the entourage in front of me, I look to the side and watch as the seated kids in the rows realize who leads this human train. Their faces change to those of tots on Christmas morning: They shake themselves out of a groggy recline and rush at us as if to tear the paper off of Eminem like he’s their new video game. After we are all up the ladder, a trapdoor shuts the fans out.

  Waiting in the room, between boxes of plastic cups, is a man sporting Sopranos chic. “Hey, nice ta meet ya,” says the club owner in a thick Staten Island accent. “This is our big night. My daughter told me to get Eminem, so I got Eminem. It’s her fourteenth birthday today. Come on over here, say hi to her and her friends.”

  Eminem is ruddy, bewildered, high, and suddenly shy. He looks pissed off. But he switches gears, takes off his coat, and poses for pictures while answering statements pronounced as questions, such as “You’ve got a cool video?” The girls say little beyond how much they totally love “My Name Is.” These fourteen-year-olds, little women, are like many of their peers downstairs, dressed older than their years, carrying themselves with a disturbing self-aware sexuality.

  When his guests leave, Eminem retreats to a back corner by the chips and salsa with his stage gear: a towel and four bottles of water. He sits backward on a chair, resting his arms on its top. He is brewing, silently fuming. He’s quiet for the first time in hours, giving Paul Rosenberg a break in the hire-fire cycle and not talking to or about anyone else in the room. The rest of us chat, Stretch Armstrong cracks jokes as we all steal looks at Eminem. I’m trying to read him; wondering how much of his static stare is raw intensity how much meditation, how much preparation or chemical side effects. I’m wondering if he’s freaked by the crowd, their numbers, ferocity, or demographic. He must see, as I do, that these aren’t all underground hip-hop heads; these are MTV kids waiting to see him, their Total-ly Request-ed favorite, Live.

  A snapshot of things to come: Staten Island shorties show Shady mad love at Club Carbon, March 5, 1999.

  We climb down the ladder and once again fall into a tight pack, gripping each other’s clothes and pulling and pushing our way to where the screen used to be. These predominantly white kids are in such a frenzy, shouting, waving, and shoving so much that our entire entourage is coralled onto the tiny stage. We take positions along the back wall, forming a semicircle that touches the front edge of the stage at both ends. We’re told by venue security, military style, that after the last song we must immediately exit stage right, where police officers will escort us through the side door into the alley to our vehicles. Venue management and the present law enforcement officials are concerned about the possibility of a riot. I stand third from the edge of stage right, an arm’s reach from kids piled on top of each other. It doesn’t matter to the trio of girls at my feet why I am there; I am some avenue to Slim Shady, and they wave to get my attention. They ask if they can dance with me onstage and ask where we’re going afterward. They want backstage passes, but I point out that there isn’t a backstage to have passes to, so they ask me if they can come wherever we’re going or just meet us at Eminem’s hotel later.

  The entire front row is young, shouting, and female, most with long nails and skimpy tops, and don’t notice the crowd piling up against them. I wonder how well they know Eminem’s lyrics and if they’d heard the last verse in the song “As the World Turns,” where Slim Shady kills a “trailer park bitch” with his go-go-gadget dick: “I shouted, ‘Now, bitch, let’s see who gets the best!’ / Stuffed that shit in crooked and fucked that fat slut to death!”; or his devilish advice in “Guilty Conscience” to Stan, a twenty-one-year-old minding a drunken fifteen-year-old at a party: “Fuck this bitch right here on the spot bare / Till she passes out and forgot how she got there.” If The Slim Shady LP came with lyrics, and these teenagers read them, I wonder if the girls would even care about these lines.

  Eminem grabs a mike and flips the Shady switch on. “Ay, yo, how you doin’?” he says to the screaming mass, tossing water over their heads. “Hi! Fuck you!”

  The loudest teens can still be heard over the roar.

  “He’s so fuckin’ hot!”

  “Oh my god!”

  “I wanna fuck you!”

  “You’re hot!”

  “Shady!”

  “Over here! Hi! Hey!”

  “Yeah, dog!”

  Stretch Armstrong drops the needle on “Scary Movies,” a track by Bad Meets Evil, a.k.a., Eminem and Royce Da 5′9″ that was released as a twelve-inch single in 1998. It’s two long battle verses of breath control and verbal dexterity. Eminem paces the stage, crouching lower, holding his crotch and slowly losing his pants. He spits his words furiously, breaks a sweat, and strains the veins in his neck. His verse builds, skipping topically from migraines to Monica Lewinsky, from being hit by a Mack truck to Celebrity Deathmatch to Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

  The crowd flips for “My Fault,” a tale as adolescent as they are, about a mushroom trip gone wrong. They shout along to the shuffling funk chorus with their hands in the air: “I never meant to give you mushrooms girl / I never meant to bring you to my world.” Eminem heads over to the front of the stage, in front of me, and leans out over the audience. One of his more aggressive female fans reaches up and grabs his crotch, then looks at her friend with the wide-eyed pride of a vict
orious daredevil. Her friend gives her an “I don’t know” look, spying Eminem’s crotch where it hovers a foot in front of her face before she foists a demure grab of it. If Eminem feels the action through his baggy pants and boxer shorts, it doesn’t show; he’s so engaged in rapping the third verse of the song that it sounds like he may inhale the mike. He’s rattling off words, and heaving, and he looks like he might fall down, but instead he wanders back to the front of the stage as the beat stops and for a second there is silence.

  “I touched his dick!” one of the two girls says loudly to the other.

  “I love you!” screams a different girl, directly in front of him, with her arms outstretched.

  “I love you, too,” he says, and in a moment of ecstasy-fueled affection and poor judgment bends over to give her a hug. She lays a kiss on his lips, and instantly the girl next to her clasps his head with talon-tipped hands and pries his face away. She kisses him, completely, with opened mouth and tongue. A forest of arms reaches out and nearly pulls Eminem forward into the crowd.