Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [22]
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 victorious 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