My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (7 page)

As I went to dial 911 for the police, the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Your daughter just beat me up,” I mumbled.

“You mean she didn’t kill you,” she said. Mom was always making crazy accusations about me. Her previous partner was a city bus driver. I’d not long moved back to Saint Joe when he would sometimes pop in to see me. Out of courtesy I would offer him coffee. He still loved Mom, even though they’d split up. I think he hoped I could persuade her to get back with him. I told him to stay away from her. I said she was like a stuck record: it was the same old drama over and over again.

The police arrived and told me to go to the hospital. I had a concussion, my nose was broken, I had a dislocated shoulder, three or four broken ribs, and gravel embedded in the gashes on my face, arms, and legs. I had also suffered a bad injury to my back, though I didn’t know it at the time.

“You look like you’ve been run over by a train,” the doctor said.

I was an absolute bloody mess. My hair had to be cut shorter because I couldn’t get a comb through the knots. Worse, I needed to wear a thick plastic brace around my torso, and I couldn’t even take a step forward without the aid of a walker. I had to learn how to walk again. One week I managed three steps, the next six. I was spending several days a week going to physical therapy; my lovely therapist, Chris Marsh, kept me feeling positive during what was a really hard time. Without his and my doctor’s support and encouragement, I don’t think I could have done it.

The court prosecutors refused to take any action against my attackers. My sister claimed I’d invited them all over for a barbecue, then I’d suddenly lunged at them with a big grilling fork. They had apparently fought me off.

Since childhood, I’d been accused of all sorts of things by Mom. On an earlier occasion she took off her earrings, rolled up her sleeves, and went for me. “You’re not too old for me to beat your ass,” she snarled—all because I was standing up for my brother Todd.

Marshall and I had stopped by one evening after my beauty school. My mom, stepdad, and siblings were eating supper, and Marshall, too young to understand, jumped up to the table. Mom immediately got up, saying that it figured I’d stop by while they were eating. Todd had offered his sandwich to Marshall, but Mom yelled at him not to—so Todd headed up to his room, swiftly followed by my stepdad, who demanded he come back down. I ran over to the stairs and told him not to dare touch Todd—but by this time he was trying to pull my brother down the stairs.

People who know my family are amazed at the way I turned out. By rights I should have been an alcoholic sitting on a barstool with my kids running wild outside on the streets. Instead, I fought to be the complete opposite of that.

The last person I wanted to be like was my mom. The mother in a family is supposed to be the rock—mine was more like a piece of gravel. I don’t hate my mother because I believe it is a sin to hate. Despite everything, I still love her. But back then whatever I did was never good enough for her. I called her merely my birth mother because that was the only bit of mothering I recall she ever did for me.

When I was growing up, Mom twice attempted suicide in front of me by swallowing handfuls of pills. Once, when I went to visit her in the hospital after yet another failed overdose, she punched me on the nose. There was no reason for all the craziness. But Mom thrived on it.

Music was my escape. And then, to make up for Mom, I gave Marshall too much love.

In the summer of 1985 I discovered I was pregnant. No one was more surprised than I was. A few years earlier I’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy—the baby had started to develop outside the womb in my left fallopian tube, which I then lost. The doctor warned me it was highly unlikely I’d ever conceive again. Now I was expecting—and ecstatic. Unfortunately, Fred and Marshall didn’t share my excitement.

Marshall was twelve and still crazy about all things prehistoric. When I asked him if he preferred a little brother or a little sister he joked, “Why can’t we have a baby dinosaur?”

Fred’s reaction was even stranger. He was almost forty, he loved kids, Marshall called him Dad, and this was going to be his first natural child. I was two months pregnant when his mother phoned to say she needed him back in Michigan because she was having eye surgery.

I asked Fred not to leave. But he packed his bags regardless.

“If you walk out the door, that’s it. Don’t come back,” I said.

But he just smiled sweetly, kissed me on the head, and promised to return.

Weeks went by and he didn’t come back. I phoned Samra’s Meat Market—his dad was always so lovely. He promised he’d get Fred to call. Then his mother would snatch up the phone and order me to stop calling. I heard through the grapevine that Fred was having an affair with a young girl called Tina. I phoned and phoned, but he would not return my calls. I was a total wreck. I couldn’t believe he had left me after almost seven years together.

I was selling Avon cosmetics door to door but, as my pregnancy progressed, it became harder to walk up and down the hills around Saint Joseph. I was high-risk and was not allowed to do any lifting or many household chores. I hired a friend of Theresa’s family to do the chores in exchange for room and board. It worked out well for a time, as I could not have afforded to pay for help.

Aside from his allowance, Marshall was determined to earn money too. He was crazy about breakdancing, so he made a big cardboard sign, announcing it cost twenty-five cents to watch. Then he got me to stand in the parking lot, with the sign around my neck, and hold a cup to collect the money. For some reason he would wear only white to breakdance. By the time he’d finished spinning on the ground he was filthy.

For the second time in my life I was forced to go on welfare. I hated it but had no choice. Fred wouldn’t even talk to me, let alone send any money. Then, just when things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

In the seventh month of my pregnancy I was talking to my brother Todd when a crazy man called Mike Harris appeared from nowhere. He grabbed me, pulled up my top, held a knife to my belly, and growled, “I’ll cut the baby out and hand it to you.”

I saw his eyes—they were fiery. He was clearly high on drugs. My legs buckled underneath me. Todd beat him off and chased him down the street. Then, as I was gasping for air, he helped me back into my car.

The doctor sent me to the hospital, ordering me to stay there for the remainder of my pregnancy. The baby’s food supply had somehow got cut off and he wasn’t growing properly. It was the shock of the knife attack.

A friend cared for Marshall while I lay on my side in a nondescript hospital room for two long months, hoping and praying that my baby would grow and be healthy.

The six high-risk specialists gathered around my hospital bed preparing me for the worst—there was a chance my baby would need to be rushed off to another hospital for heart surgery. Thank God he was okay.

Nathan Kane came screaming into the world on February 3, 1986. He had jaundice and colic, and he would not stop crying. He was considered premature.

Marshall was not impressed.

“Send him back,” he ordered. Then as a joke he added, “I want a baby dinosaur, not him.”

A couple of the neighbors said that at thirteen Marshall was too old to be obsessed with dinosaurs. I ignored them. The women said the same thing when Marshall did his drumbeats or would breakdance over and over. They’d try to say he was retarded. He wasn’t retarded; he was making music. And he’d won a poetry competition at school. His verse was displayed in the local shopping mall. I dismissed the other mothers’ words as jealousy.

Flushed by his poetry success, Marshall now knew exactly what he wanted to do for a living. He idolized LL Cool J and wanted to be a hip-hop artist. His peers laughed at him, but I told him he could achieve anything he wanted in life.

He scribbled lyrics over napkins, scraps of paper, even grocery-store receipts, and he woke me up constantly in the middle of the night to ask what words meant. I bought him a dictionary. He pored over it, memorizing unusual words and meanings.

Marshall worried constantly about the state of the world—he hated wars, famines, and poverty. He was all for peace and prosperity; his lyrics reflected those things.

He also had drawing books full of cartoon characters he’d created. He never mentioned his father, but once when I couldn’t get to his school’s parents’ evening, he left me a drawing of himself sitting alone on the porch. It was his way of saying he was upset. When he was happy, he made me pictures of butterflies, knowing I loved them.

I got annoyed when his teachers gave him C grades for art. His drawings were so good they accused him of copying. But he did well in music, often getting a B grade. I had Marshall prove to one of his teachers that he really could draw. They still had a hard time believing it.

He and Ronnie had silly quarrels over pop. Ronnie moved away from hip-hop and was into Bon Jovi, rock, and heavy metal. So Marshall honed his rapping skills on Todd and Nan. And, despite his initial reservations, he soon fell in love with his baby brother. He cradled Nathan to sleep, gave him his bottle, and mothered him to pieces.

Nathan’s front four baby teeth had to be pulled after he contracted a rare bacterial infection. It was heartbreaking—he was only two and a half years old and had beautiful white teeth. His adult teeth didn’t grow until he was nearly eight. Until the age of three, he refused to be parted from his bottle, sucking on it even when it was empty. I tried throwing it away, but somehow he always managed to retrieve it.

Fred called once: he wanted to come back. But I couldn’t forgive him again. He’d left me pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. Then his mother begged me to take him back—she didn’t like his girlfriend, Tina. I told her he’d made his bed and he could lie in it. There was also the issue of child support. He’d declared bankruptcy to avoid paying my hospital bills when I was pregnant. He didn’t pay a penny until 1995. Even then he claimed hardships to the court, and I couldn’t count on the money, which was thirty-five dollars every two weeks and only ever came off and on. Fred continually asked for his rights to his son to be severed, which I refused, as he had gotten off lightly as it was. But he did start paying maintenance right before Nathan’s sixteenth birthday.

Thank God my doctor had given me something to calm my nerves—I don’t think I could have got through the many trials and tribulations without some help. I’ll never forget Dr. B. telling baby Nathan, “Listen, little man, when you’re grown up, if you see your dad, give him a good punch on the nose for me.”

Marshall loved our duplex apartment in Savannah. It was brand-new, and he had the entire top floor to himself. But just like Marshall after he was beaten by DeAngelo Bailey, I remained scared that the crazy man who’d attacked me when I was pregnant would return.

It was time to return to Michigan, but Marshall did not want to go. He threatened to run away, begged me to let him stay behind and get a job—anything to stay in Missouri. Even though he loved Nathan, he still had flashes of jealousy. He accused me of ignoring him and giving Nate too much attention. Threatening to run away was his way of fighting back. I insisted he was too young to live on his own, and asked how he was going to earn a living.

“I’ll get a job in a factory or on a farm,” he said. I knew he wasn’t serious—he was just rebelling.

It was a tough few weeks, but eventually Marshall came around. Once we were back in Michigan, he soon reconnected with his old friends and started to make new ones.

Our house was always full of kids. I joined Parents Without Partners, a group for the divorced and separated that encouraged families to get to know each other. There were picnics, lake beach parties, and barbecues.

I soon fell for a landscape gardener called B. J. He had several kids but saw them only rarely. I noticed how good B. J. was around my boys. They were both frightened of water, and neither really wanted to learn how to swim. But B. J. encouraged Nathan to splash about in the lake, wading out with him hand in hand. I was very strict about the men in my life—my kids were everything—and I gauged how they treated my boys and their pets. And, of course, they had to be sober. B. J. passed every test at the time.

B. J. had been badly hurt by his last wife, but that didn’t stop him from proposing to me after just three months. Marshall was fifteen, and I valued his opinion when it came to the men in my life. He told me to go for it.

We were married by B. J.’s minister. He was a big, surly man who asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with it. I thought that was a bit odd. He did the ceremony in a small office. I wore a long pink satin dress. B. J. had on a suit and tie.

But there was something preying on Marshall’s mind when we got home that night.

“Where’s he sleeping?” he asked, glaring at B. J.

“My room,” I said.

“Oh, no, he’s not!” Marshall screamed. “He can sleep outside in his truck.”

With that, Marshall ordered B. J. outside. He stood glowering in front of the door. I pleaded with Marshall not to be silly. “We’re married,” I said.

Marshall stormed off to his bedroom.

B. J. spent our wedding night in his truck. I remained inside. The overprotective mother now had an overprotective son.

Marshall had a violent temper. He’d pushed me a few times. He also threatened men he thought were admiring me. Sometimes at traffic lights, he’d roll down the car window and shout at unsuspecting male drivers, “What are you looking at? She’s my mom.”

His father had been insanely jealous, too, constantly accusing me of having affairs. At the time I thought it was ironic that the cheating Bruce lashed out at me for perceived adultery. But now Marshall was exhibiting the same jealous streak. We talked throughout my wedding night. He finally let B. J. back into the house the following day.

B. J. was strict, but I told him there was no way he was going to discipline my kids. I refused to let him raise his voice to Marshall or Nathan. Meanwhile, I smothered him with love. He’d had such an awful first marriage that I wanted him to know I truly cared about him.