The Dark Story of Eminem Read online

  Anthony Bozza, a journalist uniquely trusted among Eminem’s inner circle, quoted H. Mack, himself shot through the hand by a stray bullet, in a report on the shootings for the Observer: “The fight wasn’t just the two of them [Proof and Bender], everyone in the club was involved. Guns started goin’ off. P. hit the guy, and then his cousin Etheridge fired shots into the ceiling … Yeah, they were fighting over some bullshit but [I do not believe] P. would ever, ever shoot someone over the bullshit. It was all just fucked up.”

  Mudd, real name Reginald Moorer, had been a friend of Proof since school days, and a member of his early Detroit rap crew 5 ELA. He dismissed Mack’s version of events: “I heard at the time Horny Mack’s story changed so many different times.” And in a long, emotional interview with XXL, Mudd remembered Proof’s last minutes in intimate detail.

  Everyone but Mudd was searched as they entered the club. “I had my pistol on me, of course. We had some drinks, everybody buzzed up.” In the early hours of Tuesday, the place was quiet. Frustrated by the lack of girls, Mudd left Proof and the man he’d later know as Keith Bender playing pool, and stepped outside. Meeting two girls from previous strip-club stop the Rolex, Mudd drifted back inside, where Proof joined him in boisterous flirting. Distracted by his own girl, Mudd didn’t notice the argument between Proof and Bender start. As their heated voices grew louder, he heard Bender shout: “I don’t care who the fuck you are.” The pair were separated, Mudd telling Bender: “Calm down. It ain’t that serious.” As Proof placated the club’s owner, and peace seemed restored, Bender sucker-punched Proof in the face. The crowd scattered to let them fight. The bouncer Mario Etheridge fired shots in the air. Mudd reached for his gun, but Proof tackled him onto the pool table, demanding the pistol then grabbing it. Walking back deliberately to where he and Bender had fought, Proof fired his pistol into the ceiling. Bender lunged at him to renew their struggle. Shots were fired, and both men fell. Smoke hung over the scene as if it was a Wild West gunfight. Blood pooled under the bodies. “There was this look in Proof’s eyes. He wasn’t there any more.”

  Mudd went outside with H. Mack and Chop. He couldn’t dial 911. He couldn’t remember where his car keys were. He couldn’t find his car. Mudd picked his pistol up where his dead friend had dropped it. Then he went home.

  Many police witnesses disagree with Mudd’s memories. He even heard H. Mack had told the story of Proof the cold executioner. The truthfulness in Mudd’s account comes in the blank spots of inattentiveness, the sudden jumps in action he was too slow to stop; the slurred skips in time and explosions of drunken danger which are hazards of establishments such as the Triple C at the wrong end of the night. Everyone is drunk, and anything can happen. The whole truth is hard to reach.

  “It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for Proof to get drunk and fight,” Mudd told XXL. “He had that personality, the Derrty Harry [Proof’s other D12 alias], scrap-happy type.” Eminem later confirmed his friend’s “dual personality” in his autobiography, The Way I Am. “He wasn’t one to back down. If you pushed the wrong button, something could go off in him.” Whatever really happened that morning – and in Mudd’s account there is a messy internal logic to everyone’s actions that a skilled novelist would envy – Proof marched towards his fate.

  There was one further detail in the narrative Mudd told to XXL. Each protagonist had met as schoolboys at Osborn High, whose wall Proof had been sitting on when 15-year-old Marshall Mathers walked up, and they both rhymed “first place” with “birthday”. It was a chance meeting as significant to Eminem as Lennon and McCartney colliding at that Liverpool church fête in 1957. It was in Osborn’s cafeteria that Proof made Eminem battle-rap, and began his hip-hop education. He became his mentor and, Eminem bluntly admitted in The Way I Am, the white boy’s “ghetto pass”. That pass led Eminem to a gated community outside Detroit’s city borders. It wasn’t in Proof to leave. “I found out that Proof and Keith Bender were at Osborn together,” said Mudd. “Everybody in the place knows each other from somewhere … It almost seemed like this was some high-school grudge shit, as petty as it is.” Proof died aged 32 in a fight left over from the school yard during a game of pool. Another member of D12, Bugz, had been killed in a row over water pistols. The waste waiting in Detroit for its sons was a crying, relentless shame.

  “I can’t even bring myself back to the place I was when I heard what happened to Proof,” Eminem wrote in The Way I Am. “I have never felt so much pain in my life … It was the worst day of my life. I just remember thinking, NOT PROOF, NOT PROOF, NOT PROOF. Proof was kind of my rock … His death brought me to my knees … This is the biggest tragedy I can imagine, aside from something happening to one of my kids.”

  Eminem drove to the hospital to see his friend’s body at 7 am on the day of his death. Two days later, Swift called Mudd from the studio where he and Eminem were holed up, phoning lawyers and acquaintances, desperate to know how Proof had died. About 100 friends gathered at one of Detroit’s surviving rap meccas, St. Andrews Hall, as news of the death spread. On April 18, his body lay in a 24-carat gold casket in the city’s Fellowship Chapel, as mourners filed past for 12 hours. On the morning of April 19, 2,000 filled the church, and many others packed its car park to listen to the two-hour service on loudspeakers. Dre, 50 Cent and D12’s remnants were among those in the pews. Anthony Bozza observed Eminem all in black, moving slowly, “hunched over … crying with [Proof’s family], hugging them, and rocking back and forth.” Before a horse-drawn carriage took Proof on the long ride to Woodlawn Cemetery, and before the Good Life Lounge held one last raucous hip-hop party in his honour, tributes were paid.

  Obie Trice, who Proof had also mentored, changing Obie’s name from Obie 1 back to his real one as he was about to rap at The Hip-Hop Shop, pleaded with tears in his eyes. “We been comin’ up in this struggle and we killin’ each other. Yeah, I know you ‘hood, you gangsta. We all from the ‘hood. Detroit is the ‘hood. We all killin’ each other, dawg, and it’s about nothin’.” Bozza reported Eminem admitting his absolute debt. “Without Proof, there would be a Marshall Mathers, but there would not be an Eminem, there would not be a D12 and there would not be a Slim Shady.”

  Everyone commented on Proof’s boundless generosity, to individuals and to Detroit hip-hop, for which he was the catalyst, and Eminem the explosion. Public tributes to Keith Bender, Jr., who died the morning Proof was buried, were harder to find. By everyone’s account he didn’t pull a gun, and was just as dead.

  Proof’s most concrete memorial stood well away from his association with Eminem, or his aid to others. His solo album, Searching For Jerry Garcia, had been released on August 9, 2005. He avoided the Shady and Aftermath empires, which would almost have assured him a hit, putting the album out on his Iron Man imprint. The release date was the tenth anniversary of Garcia’s death. Always the hip older brother to Eminem, whose taste in rock stopped at blowsy power ballads, Proof admired the Grateful Dead’s late leader as a “genius … who went against the grain”. He was also a Miles Davis fan, who Mudd remembered had till recently been into “pills and weed-smoking … deep into metaphysics. Anything that he was doing, he was fully aware of the concepts … very intelligent … very spiritual.” Proof was, by this description, a thug pothead, a black Detroit hippie bohemian.

  Searching For Jerry Garcia portrayed him riven by contradictions and, like Eminem, painfully abandoned by his father. It began with Proof in his dressing room at the Detroit Hip-Hop Recognition Award feeling a worthless failure, and ended with a suicide note. In between pimp and gangsta stories, Proof’s rough lisping voice and bittersweet soul samples listed the sins of a broken man, regretting hot temper and neglected daughter. There were declarations of toughness with fists or pistols, alongside premonitions of death. But then it’s almost impossible not to find premonitions of death in hip-hop albums. Proof didn’t prophesy or seek his doom.

  On his album’s last track, however, he did leave one major, metaphysical
hip-hop song. ‘Kurt Kobain’ showed this was the man who had once schooled Eminem, and still texted him advice and lyrical ammunition till his death. It was styled as a suicide note. Gospel-soul organ snaked through the music, and in the lyrics Proof flinched at his own touch, breathing in again, feeling too much. He was out on the existential edge, as he gave parting advice to those close to him. This Proof would rather be “real” than alive. His voice only found a sickly enthusiasm as he ordered Eminem not to cry on his grave. He asked his friend not to let riches change them, but felt it already had. ‘Kurt Kobain’ kept true to its namesake, and ended with a gunshot. In its dying seconds, the organ became the wheezing sound of a life-support machine or spectral waiting room, as if the song had slipped to the other side. “Love … killed me,” Proof exhaled. The real man his friends had loved was full of vigorous life. But in his final piece of art, he considered his failings and his end. It was a last will and testament to hip-hop’s possibilities and the cause of personal authenticity. That cause sent him through the doors of the Triple C. It made the song a parting gift.

  The problems that would cripple Eminem’s life for the next three years had begun when Proof was still alive. They would make the most famous rapper in history vanish and become a creature of rumour: hip-hop’s Howard Hughes.

  The first warning sign flashed on August 17, 2005. Eminem had just finished a 23-date US tour in Detroit. But he would not be leaving home for the Anger Management 3 tour’s European leg, which was due to climax on September 17 with a prestigious gig for 80,000 fans at Ireland’s Slaine Castle. “Eminem is currently being treated for exhaustion, complicated by other medical issues,” Interscope announced.

  Two days later, truer news seeped out. Eminem was “in the hospital [in Brighton, Michigan] under doctors’ care” for addiction to sleeping pills. He would spend six weeks in rehab, officially attempting to kick the sedative Ambien. But it would transpire he had other problems. The rehab failed. “I wasn’t ready to go,” he would reflect to the Guardian later. “So when I came out I relapsed right away, within a week.” That July, he had denied Proof’s comment to a Detroit newspaper that he would retire after the Slaine Castle gig. But such thoughts were swirling round his mind. “I was sitting in rehab reflecting for the first time in a while,” he told the Guardian. “I felt like I needed to pull back from the spotlight, because it was getting out of control.”

  The December 5 release of a greatest hits collection put a full stop to his major label story to date. Its title, Curtain Call: The Hits, completed the conceit of The Eminem Show and Encore. All he could do now was leave the theatre. Hearing his biggest singles in one place made Eminem the subject of nostalgia for the first time, mixed with amazement at the scope and sustained potency of his six years’ work. The youthful cheek of the unprecedented Slim Shady’s introduction on ‘My Name Is’; the comic unifying of a generation of burger-flippers in ‘The Real Slim Shady’; the slashing barbs at the Columbine killings and class as ‘The Way I Am’ rounded on his tormentors; the motivational anthem ‘Lose Yourself’; his prayerful responsibility for hip-hop’s fans in ‘Sing For The Moment’ and its practitioners in ‘Like Toy Soldiers’; and richly emotional conversations with his own family in ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ and ‘Mockingbird’: this was chart pop at its most resourcefully ambitious, by a pop star reckoning with every problem and pleasure that was put in his way. On top of these, ‘Stan’ sounded like a miracle. How on earth had such a perfectly twisted piece of fiction ever been a hit? Who else could have written it, or made us listen?

  Not Eminem in 2005, or ever again, you were tempted to think, listening to the new tracks scattered through Curtain Call. ‘Fack’ was sex-crazed doggerel inspired by a South Park episode: Slim Shady regressing to his sick childhood. ‘Shake That’ was a dumb party tune about sex. The scattershot humour of Encore songs such as ‘Ass Like That’ plunged lower in throw-away efforts which seemed designed to piss on the legacy surrounding them. This was the first clear sign that whatever was wrong with Eminem was infecting his music.

  Curtain Call‘s last new track, ‘When I’m Gone’, redeemed the record. It was Eminem’s final single of 2005, and in most countries would not be followed up for four years. In the mode of ‘Mockingbird’, it was heavy on syrupy strings from Luis Resto’s keyboards, and addressed Hailie with near-mawkish sentiment. But the anger that made it bite came from Hailie, here confronting her dad in a series of dreams that he crashes through like a hall of mirrors. He was here and Mom would be back, he had sung at the conclusion of ‘Mockingbird’. Now he was the one abandoning Hailie to write another song and start another tour, even physically attacking the mother who looked so much like her. Real events blurred, as they do in bad dreams, and Eminem found himself taking the stage in Sweden while Hailie wailed for help with Kim back home, perhaps after her suicide attempt in 2000. But then, there was Hailie accusing him from the crowd, and the stage curtains folded around him, trapping him in the dark. His daughter’s words came in Shady’s angry growl, and confronted him with current sins: a man whose debased authenticity now amounted to guiltily gulping pills, just as he’d rapped about.

  The song became a death-dream, sharing the wish for posthumous comfort to loved ones of Proof’s ‘Kurt Kobain’. But the only corpse left behind in ‘When I’m Gone’ is that of Slim Shady, who has a bullet put in him. “Slim Shady eventually became a metaphor for the trappings of fame for me,” his creator explained in The Way I Am. “I was basically saying, I don’t want this life any more … he’d become so famous he had damn near destroyed my family.”

  The video for ‘When I’m Gone’ showed where the song began, and where Eminem wanted it to end. It starts in a shadowy AA-style meeting. “Hi, my name is Marshall Mathers,” the newest recruit says, replacing the jittery fun of “My name is … Slim Shady” with sober confession. When the song’s nightmares are reversed and erased – the plane which would have flown him to Sweden turning to ash without him on it – Eminem finds himself miraculously back with Hailie and Kim (played by actresses, as always). They embrace under the blue skies of a home he’ll never leave. “I don’t ever want to become soft. I don’t want to compromise my music for my life at home,” he had told Vanity Fair only a year before. But he had already known then that if he could have only one, the music would stop.

  ‘When I’m Gone’ entered the Top 10 on either side of the Atlantic, while Curtain Call topped Christmas charts and sold 2.5 million in the US. That was the only predictable thing to hang onto as Eminem entered a period of buffeting change. His new video was, it turned out, more than wishful thinking. His relationship with Kim, “neutral at best” and the subject of ‘Puke’ at worst, when she became a coke-snorting fugitive from justice in 2004, had evolved again: she was now his fiancée for the second time. The first most people had seen of her in years was on the cover of Hello! magazine on February 1, 2006, which announced: “A New-Look Eminem Remarries His Childhood Sweetheart”. As in previous photos, she seemed to dwarf her lover, in a tuxedo for the occasion as he squinted at the camera.

  The invitations were touchingly hopeful: “This day I will marry my best friend, the one I laugh with, live for, love. Kimberley Anne Mathers and Marshall Bruce Mathers III. On January 14 at 5 pm they hope you will join them as they exchange vows and the celebration of their new life together.” They repeated the vows from their first marriage at Michigan’s Meadow Brook Hall mansion, walking down the aisle as Luis Resto tinkled ‘Mockingbird’ on the piano. Proof, Eminem’s best man, was at his side. Hailie (then 10), Alaina (12), and the newest adopted member of what sometimes seemed to be the groom’s family of saved refugees, Whitney, Kim’s three-year-old by another man, formed the bridal party. Debbie Mathers-Briggs, reportedly very ill now, was not invited. He “should get a prenup this time”, grandmother Betty Kresin advised, unimpressed. They did, the week before. It was still a romantic, sweet-natured day. On April 5, 82 days later, Eminem filed for divorce.

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sp; “We decided [to get married] on January 14,” Kim soon explained to People magazine. “Marshall wanted to do it because it was our fifteenth year together from our original day we started going out. And even on that day I said, ‘Let’s just go through the ceremony and not sign the marriage license.’ Because I was just afraid of what would happen if we had to go through a divorce, our kids. And then 41 days later, February 25, Marshall left.”

  The day after papers were filed, Kim was explicit about the reasons when she rang a Detroit radio show. “He’s having problems with, you know, his problem that he had,” she said, referring to his pill addiction. “Right after he came home from his rehab we started having a few problems, and I thought it was going to be in our best interest to delay the wedding. But he really pushed it and I really thought it was going to be something that worked this time. I don’t really necessarily want to get divorced. I was hoping he was going to come home and say, ‘I got us a counsellor, let’s go.’ But you know, it didn’t work out that way. I got an attorney at the door instead.”