Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [96]
“Why did that bitch have to say that?” he says, turning back toward us. “Fucking bitch, I never liked her. Always watching MTV. She probably doesn’t even have a TV.” He pauses. “Bitch.”
Paul looks at Eminem, scanning him. “Well, she’s still here and you’re not,” he says. “She’s jealous.”
“Ahh, yeah,” Eminem says. “I’m getting another shot.”
He ambles to the bar and shakes the bartender’s hand. He downs the liquor and brings a refill with him to the end of the bar, where some of his former coworkers chat.
“Man, everything can be going right,” Paul says, eyeing Eminem, “but a comment like that will stick with him for days. She’s seen the video, you know she’s seen the video.” He sips his pint.
“This is his reality,” Paul continues. “He came from this. And after everything is over, this is the reality he has to go back to.”
Eminem lopes back to the table, his spirits lifted by Bacardi and Kathleen, a coworker who always believed in him.
“You know, Paulie, a lot of the shit that’s happened to me,” he says, dropping into his chair, “is because you’re fat.”
He stares at Paul. He laughs, two quick chops. “Heh-ha!”
Eminem knocks back some beer. “I can’t wait to do my second album. That shit is gonna be fucking bananas. Every time I make music, I know more and more what I’m doing, so it’s gonna get hotter and hotter.”
He looks at us and then at the waitress by the bar. “Lots of drugs and lots of fuzz,” he says, throwing his hand in the air. “Hey! Can we get some more beers over here?”
Eminem surveys the room, the backdrop to a past too recent for nostalgia but just far enough away for examination. “You don’t even know how much at home I felt here,” he says to me, leaning in a little. “My home away from home. Dog, I fucking lived here, man. I worked forty-eight hours a week. Sometimes I pulled sixtyhour weeks and still wasn’t making shit. I started off at five-fifty. That’s not a lot of money.”
He isn’t proud or ashamed of the details of his life, even the darkest; his mood is bittersweet. Sitting here, watching his old coworkers react to him, warmly, coolly, mockingly, or not at all, I see Detroit’s mixed message in his life. Eminem endured here in an isolated rap scene, rejected by the radio stations that now play his song; in New York and L.A. he is a celebrity already, but his former coworkers at home don’t come to his table. There is a territorial pride in Detroit; it doesn’t allow its own to grow an ego. I will watch this play out as Eminem’s fame grows. When Eminem buys his first house, fans will swim in his pool, flip him off, take his mailbox, and wait in his driveway until he resorts to guns as a deterrent. In 2000, after the same guns get him in trouble with the law, he will return to his hometown with Dr. Dre’s Up in Smoke Tour for two concerts. City officials will successfully pressure promoters not to screen a pre-show video in which Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre hold up a liquor store and sit in a hot tub with seminaked women. The mayor’s office will ask to preview and edit the video to their approval; they will be refused. Hours before the show, city officials will threaten to cut the power to the stage if the video is shown. They will also strongly recommend that Eminem not bring an inflatable sex doll onstage. He has been using it to represent his wife, Kim. Eminem will comply; he will have been in court already that day, for the initial proceedings of one of his two trials. Dr. Dre will be ticketed for promoting pornography for screening the video at the first night’s concert. Detroit will be the only city in the country to censure the tour, one of the most high-quality, incident-free, and professionally run (from sets to security) hip-hop tours ever. Dr. Dre will sue Detroit for violating his First Amendment rights and will win $25,000. It will hardly be a homecoming for Eminem. I understand now why he thrives in the face of adversity; it is a way of life here.
“Hey, Marshall, how