Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [57]
Four years after our drive in his old neighborhood, I walk behind Eminem, up a flight of stairs in a Detroit club to a floor reserved for his party. Mirrors line one wall. Red velvet booths, with curtains, line another. The DJ mixes into “The Real Slim Shady” when he sees Eminem. Women in high-slit dresses proffer free shots of red and green liquor in test tubes. Eminem scans the room and takes a seat deep in a booth, behind the curtains. The half-circle of couch is visible from only one side.
Select guests arrive, more women than men. They line the walls of the room, and park on the dance floor. A few stare at the curtain that hides Eminem, but none approach. In the booth, he praises rappers past and present and describes new beats he’s made. He tells me he thinks each new OutKast album is a breath of fresh air to hip-hop. His friends leave their seats to meet some women. Some return, some don’t. Eminem remains, talking to me and whoever else sits down.
Two robust ladies appear at one side of the curtain.
“Hi, are you Marshall?”
“Yeah, how you doin’?” Eminem says.
“Why are you sitting in there hiding from us? Isn’t this your party?” one of the ladies asks.
“Yeah, it’s my party,” he says. “I’m just chillin’, you know.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, come out here! Talk to us.”
“Yeah, okay, in a minute,” he says. One of his crew is happy to occupy these two in the meantime.
“This shit is funny, man,” Eminem says. “Probation and all that sobered me up. It’s a blessing in disguise.” He watches the room, greeting the eyes that meet his when he shows himself. “Yeah, I’ll be back,” he says.
The dance floor is full now, but no one is dancing. These VIPs pose, striking a stiff posture of nonchalance while shifting to glimpse the party’s honoree walk across the room. Eminem has seen enough of these events to expect that he’s still onstage at private parties, that everyone here is either desperate or too proud to talk to him. Others are nightlife fixtures, the people who frequent VIP rooms, often sporting attitudes haughtier than the poutiest star. Eminem walks through the room, and I think of the awkward social machinations of an elementary-school dance. He moves slowly, looking at people, talking to no one. Guests approach him cautiously. A few women flirt with him. His friends circle around and joke with him.
He returns to the booth soon.
“See anything interesting?” I ask him.
“Nah, man,” he says. “These things are all the same, you know. It’s weird to meet people like this. It’s funny, I mean, most of them want something from you. They might just want you to tell them stories and shit and entertain them. Some people are cool, but some don’t realize when I go out like this with my friends, I just want to have a good time. I don’t really take too many days off, so why do I want to entertain like that when I’m out with my friends? That’s what I do on stage.”
“You can’t really let loose when everyone here is here to meet you, I guess.”
“I can’t really let loose at all right now, I’m on probation,” he says, and laughs. “But yeah, I wouldn’t want to anyway; you never know what people want from you or what they’d do. I’ve had so many fucking lawsuits, man, it just isn’t worth it to me. I just hang out when I’m in Detroit. Just hang out with my friends, that’s it.” Eminem looks past me at a girl waving to him from across the room.
“I thought I knew her for a second,” he says. “You know all this shit really isn’t important to me. All I care about is making music, man. If I could live my life in the studio, except to be with my daughter, that’s what I would do.”
The next day I drive a tan rental car in the middle lane of a three-lane road, following a silver-blue Mercedes. Behind the tinted windows, Eminem is in the passenger seat and Paul Rosenberg drives. At the photo shoot we’ve just left, I heard Eminem quip about fixing the photos “in post,” short for postproduction. “I can’t believe I even know what that means,” Eminem told me, chuckling