Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [2]
Behind me a group of teenage boys bustled in place and hooted when the line started moving into the theater. They discussed where on the Internet to best get a free MP3 copy of the 8 Mile soundtrack and where they had downloaded “Lose Yourself.” They debated whether Brittany Murphy was hot or not and whether her character was a caricature of Eminem’s on-again, off-again love, Kim. “Nah,” one of them said, “she’s supposed to be Christina Aguilera.” I had to laugh with them, as they evoked one of Eminem’s enemies.
I was as eager as anyone there to see how closely the real life of the rapper wove its way into the script and how a persona swathed in rumor and controversy was defined against a Hollywood recreation. Everyone around me knew that Eminem’s story occupied the center of the film—just like he inhabited the core of our collective American thought at that moment. Like them, I’d come to see how much of his life he bled onto the celluloid. Unlike them, I had an unfair advantage.
I had been in a trailer with Eminem, not on-set in Detroit or at a video shoot in L.A., but in a suburban trailer park forty minutes outside of his hometown back in 1999. It was at the end of a long day shadowed by the looming gray clouds that roam Midwestern skies from September through May. We had spent the afternoon and evening on a driving tour of Detroit, Eminem acting as tour guide, showing me the places that formed and malformed him: his high school, the home where he grew up—the one that two years later was reproduced for the The Marshall Mathers LP stage show. We passed the stretch of 8 Mile Road in front of the Bel-Air Shopping Center where he was chased by a carload of black guys he’d flipped off. He was beaten right out of his clothes. He had thought it was for his LL-Cool-J-Troop sneakers which, at the time, were one of the most expensive models on the market. His mother told me later how he was dropped off, bruised and bleeding, in his underwear by a trucker who had intervened. We ate at Gilbert’s Lodge, the restaurant where he’d worked as a dishwasher and cook for five years. Rolling through the byways of his past, Eminem was the calmest I’d seen him in the days we’d spent together. He told me the stories of the scenery around us—tales more sad than happy—in heartfelt, heartbroken, matter-of-fact tones. He relived his life for my benefit as a tourist in his own past, as engaged in the telling as I was in the learning.
I was there with him to write my first cover story for Rolling Stone. It became the first national glossy coverage on Eminem and remains the most thorough chronicle of his upbringing, until (and if) Eminem decides to tell us all the secrets he’s kept to himself. That first Rolling Stone cover, which was meant to feature a naked Eminem holding a lit stick of dynamite over his manhood, made history for us both: It increased my profile as a writer and helped Eminem reach a new dimension of success—whether he was ready for it or not. Our journey in 1999 ended in a snowy trailer park, but it began in New York in the bathroom at his manager’s office, where I met Eminem by accident just after he’d finished throwing up a fifth of Bacardi and a slice of pizza. It was all he’d eaten that day but was only an appetizer for what was to follow: three club appearances spiced with four ecstasy caps, chased with ginger ale.
Cruising from Staten Island back to Manhattan