Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [20]
“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