My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (3 page)

Bruce, who’d been born a few miles from the Canadian border in Fort Fairfield, Maine, was part Blackfoot Indian. The Mathers name originated in Scotland, although he thought his branch came from rural Wales. He’d grown up hearing stories of a book about the black arts, apparently detailing the Mathers’s links to witchcraft. We discovered a creepy British occultist called Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers, who’d founded the Order of the Golden Dawn. He was an early mentor of the hedonistic witch Aleister Crowley. Bruce loved that. He was crazy about heavy metal music, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page lived in Crowley’s Scottish mansion. Now when Bruce bared his teeth at me and pretended to be a warlock, I really was frightened.

He also terrorized my brothers, who spent most of their time with us. I had no problems feeding them and helping with homework, but it really started to get to Bruce, especially when he was trying to sleep after his night shift at the factory. He took it out mainly on Todd, who was big and could be clumsy, screaming constantly at him to leave us in peace.

Bruce had a terrible temper, but he’d never lost it with me. That changed in the seventh month of my pregnancy, as I finished decorating our baby’s bedroom. I had been told by a doctor that I was expecting a girl, and I wanted everything to be just right for the big arrival. I called to Bruce to help me carry the paint tins back down the stairs. Out of nowhere, he started shouting at me, yelling abuse.

“I don’t want a fucking child,” he screamed. “What about me, you selfish bitch?”

He ran up the stairs, got in my face and demanded to know why he was being ignored, starved of affection. I told him to drop it and tried to get out of his way. He shoved me hard. My legs gave way and I tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, landing hard on my side. Bruce was with me in an instant, apologizing.

He’d never been violent before, and I didn’t want to believe he was becoming abusive. I wanted to believe it was just an accident, but I couldn’t get over the fact that he’d hurt me, and possibly the baby we’d tried so hard to conceive. That night, I sobbed myself to sleep, praying to God my baby would be okay.

Then there was sex: Bruce wanted to make love two or three times a day. As the birth date neared, I couldn’t fulfill his needs. He started to disappear at odd times. I was convinced he was having an affair, although he denied it time and again.

I’d suffered menstrual bleeding throughout my pregnancy and feared I could lose my baby. I was always at the doctor’s office demanding to hear the heartbeat. On October 13, my water broke. Bruce’s Aunt Edna rushed me off to Saint Joseph’s Sisters’ Hospital, an old Catholic institution on Cathedral Hill. I had mild contractions that lasted on and off for most of that day and the next.

Finally, the labor pains began in earnest. They continued for the next seventy-two hours. I didn’t know it, but I had toxicoma blood poisoning. I remember holding a nurse’s hand and counting spots on the ceiling to take my mind off of the contractions. Doctors rarely did Cesareans back then. Instead, after sixty hours in labor, I was offered some medicine in a paper cup.

I heard a nurse shouting at me, “You’re both going to die if you don’t push, Debbie.” Then I recall someone saying it was a boy. But that was it: I blacked out.

I’d started having a seizure and fell into a coma in the recovery room. This lasted for several days until the sound of a ringing bell brought me round. My eyes slowly focused on the shape of a man in black waving a bell. He was a priest and apparently he’d given me the last rites. As I awoke a nurse grabbed my arm and started to take my blood pressure, and gradually I became aware of lots of noise and commotion all around me. It was enough to make me want to go back to sleep, until someone brought in my baby. I had a baby son!

I saw the faces of my aunts, my mother, my brothers Steven and Todd. They were all crying. Dr. Claude Dumont was sitting at the end of the bed with an unlit cigar in his mouth—you could smoke in hospitals then.

“You gave everyone a bit of a scare,” the doctor said. “We didn’t think you were going to make it.”

Bruce was missing when I came to. He’d gone off to celebrate the baby’s birth—I found out later—with one of my friends. They were having an affair. But at that stage, all I wanted to do was see my baby.

The nurse handed me a tiny bundle and said his name was Marshall Bruce Mathers III. Bruce had named him when everyone thought I wasn’t going to make it. We hadn’t discussed it, but I didn’t mind. I loved my father-in-law—the original Marshall B. Mathers—and thought it was a privilege to call my child after him.

Marshall was so tiny: he weighed just five-pounds-two-ounces. He had a blister bubble between his eyebrows. He had long dark eyelashes and a few tufts of blond hair. He was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen, and I was filled with overwhelming love. He was mine, and no one was going to hurt him.

Dr. Dumont charged ninety dollars for prenatal care, the delivery, and Marshall’s circumcision. I was worried we’d be charged more because of my coma and blood poisoning. But Dr. Dumont just kept repeating he was glad I’d survived.

Todd, who was ten, was jumping up and down. He and Steve had seen a shooting star outside in the sky just moments after Marshall was born, and he wanted to drag me out of bed to see if it was still there.

Years later when Marshall was first famous he told me not to believe everything I read about him in the media. I laughed because his very first mention—in the “Hello, World” births section of the Saint Joseph newspaper—was wrong. It said he was born on October 16, instead of the 17th, at the Methodist Hospital. Marshall himself added to the confusion when he hit the big time in 1999 and his record company shaved a couple of years off his age. One of his staff once called me when they were trying to update his biography. Marshall thought he’d been born in Kansas City, sixtyodd miles away.

Recently I was going through some old Saint Joseph newspapers and found Marshall’s horoscope for the day he was born. For Tuesday, October 17, 1972, it said, “You have a great love of color and beauty but you are practical enough to realize that, unlike many other Librans, you probably could not commercialize art to any great extent. You would do much better in the theater, where you could shine as an actor.” It also suggested that the future Eminem was “endowed with a great sense of justice, would make an excellent jurist, arbitrator, or mediator.”

All these years later, it’s hard to imagine my son as a keeper of the peace. His early career consisted of dissing me, his wife, and his musical rivals. He also turned his love of the arts into a multimillion-dollar empire. But the astrologer got one thing right. From the moment he was born, my son Marshall was a beautiful actor. He knew exactly how to look at me from under his long dark eyelashes and put on a show.

Marshall was two months old when Bruce suggested we move to his hometown of Williston, North Dakota. He was sick of my family, and I had to agree. Mom was interfering as usual. She’d given birth to her sixth child, Ronnie, a couple of months before Marshall was born, and she constantly compared my child-rearing skills unfavorably with her own.

Bruce was offered his dad’s job as assistant manager at the Plainsman Hotel in Williston, where his mom, Rae, also worked as a bookkeeper. My father-in-law had heart problems and was forced to retire early.

I knew no one except my in-laws, but everyone was so welcoming that I felt at home almost immediately. During my childhood we’d moved many times, so I had no qualms about starting over in a new place, even though I missed my brothers terribly and worried about them all the time.

Williston’s a tiny town, thirty miles from the Montana border and famous only for the crossing of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. At first we lived with Bruce’s parents until I found us an apartment, and I got a part-time job as a cashier at the Red Owl grocery store. Everyone loved Marshall. He was so cute I entered him in bonny-baby competitions. He was seven months old when he won a hundred dollars in a Gerber Baby Food contest.

Bonnie and a friend came to visit, and we went on a day trip over the border into Canada. All went well until we tried to return. We had drivers’ licenses but no identity papers for Marshall. Immigration officers took him away. We could hear him crying in an adjoining room. I too was in floods of tears. The officials said they had to check hospitals and police reports to make sure we hadn’t abducted him. We finally got him back four hours later. I couldn’t stop kissing his tearstained cheeks as we drove back into the United States. It was such a horrible ordeal that I vowed never to leave America again.

I sang to Marshall all the time and made up silly alternative rhymes to his nursery rhyme and Mother Goose books. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jumped over the stupid candlestick” was one that made Marshall smile. He loved hearing the hymns in church on Sundays, so I sang those to him at home too. His favorite was “The Old Rugged Cross.” He’d reach up and touch my face. If I attempted to sing something else he’d shake his head and put his hand across my mouth. I tried “Amazing Grace,” but he didn’t like that at all.

The women at church asked me to join the choir, but I was too shy. Anyway, Bruce always wanted me to be home. He got furious when Marshall cried, claiming I spent all my time with him. Sometimes he’d storm in, put Marshall in his playpen, then pin me down on the couch and demand I ask him how his day had gone.

He started drinking heavily and doing drugs. He didn’t bother to hide it from me. He invited friends over, but if I complained, he just turned the music up louder. I was forever finding empty whiskey and Bacardi bottles in the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

The physical violence started within weeks of our arrival in North Dakota. He came screaming into the house one evening and ordered me to put Marshall into his playpen. Then he grabbed me by the hair and slammed my face into the wall.

“Cook me a meal, bitch,” he chanted over and over as he bounced my head off the wall. Then he threw me into the kitchen. Crying, I quickly reheated the dinner I’d made for him earlier and put it on the table in front of him. He threw it on the floor.

“Now clean up the mess, bitch,” he ordered.

As I got down on my hands and knees to pick everything up, he started kicking me. Then he stormed out and went drinking. This became a pattern, although he alternated between slamming my face into walls and pinning me on the sofa to punch me. Every week I had to pretend I’d walked into a door or tripped over something to explain the marks on my face. I must have seemed like the most accident-prone person ever.

John, who ran the grocery store, didn’t buy my excuses. He urged me to leave Bruce and move in with his family. I insisted nothing was wrong, but John said, “If I see you with a black eye or busted lip again, I will hurt Bruce.”

Once, I was actually working at the cash register when Bruce stormed into the store and yanked me by my arm outside. John kept telling me to go to the police, but I was too scared. The Matherses were important people in Williston.

Bruce’s mother didn’t like me. She’d long ago picked her idea of a bride for Bruce, and I wasn’t it. But my father-in-law, Marshall Senior, was wonderful. He’d had open-heart surgery and was becoming frailer by the day, but his eyes always lit up when I arrived with baby Marshall.

One day in the summer he was sitting in the garden in a big old lounge chair, when he asked me to move closer to him. I’d learned to mask my bruises with make-up and thought I hid my injuries well. But Mr. Mathers knew otherwise.

“Bruce is my son,” he said as tears welled up in his eyes. “I love him. But I’m so ashamed of him. I can’t stand the fact that I’ve brought up a son who beats women. I didn’t raise him this way.

“I beg you, on my deathbed, that you please leave my son. Take the baby and go. Get out while you can.”

He held his arms out to me. We hugged and I told my father-in-law that I loved him. He was still tall, like Bruce, but he was skin and bones. He knew he was dying.

He was a hard worker all his life and was not the sort of man to just sit in a chair all day. Even when he’d been told not to do any manual labor, as his heart couldn’t take it, he still tilled the big yard at the back of his house. I truly admired him; he was a lovely man. Bruce and his mom made it very clear I was not welcome at his funeral.

Bruce’s drinking, cheating, and abuse got worse after his father died. When Marshall was released from the hospital after treatment for pneumonia I took him to the hotel to see his daddy. I thought Bruce would be pleased, but I found him with a receptionist called Heather giggling over a copy of
Playboy
magazine. They were rubbing each other. I cleared my throat and they turned around. Bruce went berserk, ordering me to leave. I drove home crying. He still didn’t care, even when his son was ill.

He returned a couple of hours later after walking home in the rain. He took his shoes off at the door and threw them at me. I tried to make sure Marshall was out of harm’s way, but Bruce grabbed him, dumped him in his playpen and screamed, “That fucking little brat can wait!”

Then he threw another shoe at me, hit me in the face, and used my stomach as a punching bag. On my nineteenth birthday in January 1974, Bruce had to work late. He gave our friend Kenny, whom I worked with, twenty dollars to take me for a meal at the Stateline Club. I didn’t want to go, but Bruce insisted. It was a forty-five minute drive away, and when we arrived the place was packed. I suggested we take our food and return home hoping Bruce would already be there. But Mary, a friend who was babysitting Marshall, said Bruce had gone out looking for me.

He returned home in the early hours of the next morning. When I asked where he’d been, he accused me of having an affair. Then he grabbed me by the hair, dragged me out of our apartment and up the stairs. He pounded my head off the neighbor’s door. Then he smashed my head into the door over and over. Every time I fell forward he hit me again. This continued until he knocked me out.