The Marshall Mathers LP – Eminem

Confidence is like a mountain.  Standing at the bottom, the apex looks a mile away.  When you’re down, the higher up you have to look, the more unreachable it seems.  Some like the challenge; they feed off it.  Others, it’s just as easy to say the hell with it; why bother, misery loves company and there are a lot of miserable bastards mulling aimlessly in the overgrown shadows.  There’s comfort in numbers.  Comfortable doesn’t always breed contempt, but if you’re looking for change something has to give; sooner or later you have to start climbing.  When you’re at the top it’s like you’re a cliché; you almost can’t miss: Michael Jordan when he got in the zone seemingly at the end of every important game, Bob Dylan when he wrote “Blowin’ In The Wind” in five minutes on the back of a napkin in some dingy diner, Bernie Madoff for decades before he got busted.  If you listen to what a wise man once said, and the secret to success is paying attention to details, when you’re standing atop the mountain, everything is that much easier; life gives you 20/20 vision.  The execution of things is almost a formality; you become a virtual hot slot machine; with each pull of the lever you hit another jackpot; everything you touch turns to gold.  Even when you misstep the potholes all seem to be filled in.  The people at the top of the mountains, they’re the CEOs, the All-Star athletes, the people who smile.  The people at the bottom, they’re everybody else.

In late summer of 2000 my confidence was all an all-time high.  I was at peace with my past, the fact that I was leaving everything I knew behind.  I was moving away to college; a college I’d never physically seen, but couldn’t wait to get to.  Outside of Ashley, who told me about the college, I didn’t know anyone there.  I’d never been so excited.  The already-beaten-down-by-life people talk about new beginnings as if they’re strictly a hypothetical; a pipedream.  My new beginning was a reality.  Financially, though I was leaving a decent enough paying job to become a non-working college student, I was stable.  I was single and damn excited about the prospect about being a single guy in college.  I was counting down the days, each morning crossing another yesterday from my calendar.  I felt as ease, comfortable in my own skin.  It was easy to smile.

The big social event of that summer was the wedding of two high school friends.  From the group of us invited, I was the only one without a built-in date.  I had to find one.  I wanted to go with Karen, but a few days prior she told me couldn’t go.  Strapped for a second option I swallowed my pride and asked Ellen, a girl whom I worked with in the warehouse that had moved home after having just graduated college.  Throughout the summer Ellen had made her interest in me well-known in more than one drunken email, in more than one stone-sober hint when we passed each at work.  More than once, knowing of the forthcoming wedding, she informed me that she’d like to go; all I had to do was ask.  We had become good friends, she was really easy to have fun with, but I was perfectly content to remain just good friends.  Stonewalling her advances only seemed to intensify her feelings for me.  I knew that by asking her to the wedding, I stood a serious risk of abandoning my pledge to keep it just friends.  But I needed a date.  So I asked her.

The wedding was a bomb, the chicken parmesan like a tire covered in melted cheese.  My friends and I, an entire table’s worth of guests, when the bride and groom were turned we made a jailbreak, reconvening at the Olive Garden.  Over spaghetti and tossed salad we poked fun at each other.  With a decade or more worth of ammunition they tried their best to embarrass me.  Ellen, she didn’t hold back, piling on me with the rest of them.  More than once we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes.  My friends loved her.  By the time we left the restaurant I knew my fate was sealed; this battle of attrition I was trying to fight, it was no use, my white flag was painted across my forehead.  On the way back to my house we listened to the CD everyone was listening to that summer, The Marshall Mathers LP.  Ellen mocked me, throwing up the four-fingered Westside salute, but she couldn’t hold back her laughter when Eminem said, “Skibbedy-be-bop, a-Christopher Reeves/Sonny Bono, skis horses and hittin some trees.”  It made me smile; Ellen’s sense of humor, the fact that she could laugh at a lyric like that as easily as I could.

I was a late comer to Eminem; as a suburban white-male, in terms of white guys in hip-hop, we’d been burned too many times before: 3^rd Base, Vanilla Ice, Young Black Teenagers, Snow.  In the car, “The Way I Am” booming from the speakers, I started thinking that like Eminem, maybe I was a late-comer to Ellen too.  A summer earlier, I was madly—and silently—in love with her sister, Charlotte, who home from college, had worked in the warehouse.  But I never pursued her; I was a coward, awed by her beauty, but I had the built-in excuse of still being in a relationship with Ashley, so I left it at that.  I knew I still had strong feelings for Charlotte, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen her since the previous summer, and that was yet another reason to not pursue things with Ellen.  By the time we pulled into my driveway, however, and Ellen decided she wasn’t ready to go home yet, that she wanted to watch a movie, even if I still felt something for Charlotte, if I still had reservations about my feelings for Ellen, it wouldn’t matter; no wasn’t a word Ellen would accept that night.  People like winning trophies.  For the first time in a long time—maybe ever—I felt like I was someone’s trophy.

A week after the wedding, with a couple that we worked with in the backseat of my car, the four of us cruised the streets of Niagara Falls, as The Marshall Mathers LP, a common language between us and our two Puerto Rican friends, bounced from the speakers.  We rapped—badly—along with Eminem as we looked out on the Technicolor-lit Horseshoe falls.  “The Real Slim Shady” will never be confused as a romantic song, but it felt that way; four people, two couples, hand-in-hand, looking out on a force so powerful that it left Wordsworth speechless.  As we got out and walked around the side streets humming “Bitch Please II” Ellen pulled me aside.  “What’s my middle name?” she asked.  Three days earlier, in a tear-stained confessional that came out of nowhere, Ellen told me her life story, from her insecurities and the reasons behind them, to the number of guys she’d slept with.  Somewhere in the tale was her middle name.  I could tell that Ellen thought I wasn’t exactly listening, as so many others before me apparently had not.  Without hesitation I told her.  She smiled.  “I love you,” she said.  I smiled and bit my bottom lip.  A fear the force of the nearby falls washed over me; I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.  This thing, after this moment it wasn’t going to be a casual thing anymore; it would either have to turn into something or it would have to end.  College, my chance at a new beginning with no commitments to anyone other than myself, it all started to look like the picture of Marty McFly’s fast-fleeting family before George McFly picks himself off the dance floor and reclaims his future wife from Malachai’s clutch.  The dotted-line we’d been carelessly crossing since the night of that wedding, it was being painted solid black underneath us; I could either cross it or turn away.  I’d finally reached the pinnacle of the mountain, stepping forward meant stepping to the edge; I’d have to trust my balance.   “I love you too,” I said.

It just so happened that two weeks before I was to move away to college, Ellen was moving as well.  And it just so happened that where she was moving was fifteen minutes away from where I was going to college.  That’s the kind of coincidence that gets confused as fate when you’re starry-eyed and you think that, “In the third grade, all I used to do was sniff glue through a tube and play Rubix cube/Seventeen years later I’m as rude as Jude, scheming on the first chick with the hugest boobs” is good poetry.  And we did; we were.

Four months after the move Thanksgiving break rolled around.  The break was officially supposed to begin after the conclusion of classes on that Tuesday, which happened to be my 22^nd birthday.  That Monday was unseasonably warm; my friends and I wore shorts when we played our weekly football game.  That night, I went to sleep around 3 a.m., the rain kissing my window.  When I woke up five hours later I couldn’t see my car that was parked twenty feet in front of my dorm.  The snow had covered everything: bushes, signs, Chryslers; the scene looked like the tall tales of your parent’s youth, about the great blizzards where they had to walk thirty miles uphill through chest-high snow to get to school.  It took three hours to dig out my entombed car, and those of my friends who were leaving, and another hour to make the typical ten-minute drive to her apartment.  When I got there Ellen wasn’t home.  I spent two more hours digging a path for Ellen to get her car in her garage.  I went inside to thaw, to breathe, and the phone rang.  “I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight,” she said.  I asked if everything was all right, if she was ok.  “Yeah, it’s not that.  It’s just the roads are really bad.  I should just stay where I am,” she said, her voice trailing off.  “But it’s my birthday,” I said.  “I know,” she said, “I’m sorry.”  Two hours later Ellen was home, convinced that if she didn’t come home, I would take it personally.  I did, regardless of the fact that she made it home just fine.  The next morning, the roads passable, we drove to Buffalo to catch our flight to my sister’s house in North Carolina for Thanksgiving.  Four days later, we flew back.  After a somewhat rocky time, by the time we touched down things seemed to settle back to normal.  The next morning, after returning from my gym class, my phone rang.  “I think we should take some time apart,” she said.  “I just need to figure some things out.”  Ellen used the standard anti-Hallmark line: “It’s not you, it’s me.”   I said, “But…but” too many times, but after five minutes or so of trying to sell another chance Ellen decided she didn’t need time.  Two weeks later, I was wrapping presents while cooking dinner at her apartment.  Ellen was to be home any minute; we were going to have our Christmas together early so I could drive home for the holidays after classes ended the following day.  As I stirred the taco meat the phone rang.  “So I’m not coming home tonight.  I need space.  This isn’t working.  I’m sorry.  I really am.  Goodbye.”  The phone went silent.  Five months prior I was at the pinnacle of the mountain I’d spent a lifetime trying to climb.  As I listened too long to the hum of the dial tone, I was back at the bottom, just like the yodeler guy from Price Is Right when he takes a header off the cliff.  I wanted to throw up.  I wanted to scream.  I wanted to call her back, but I had no idea where she was.

I drove back to the dorm looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to all of the horrible things I was saying to myself in my head.  It was a Friday night though, everyone was out partying.  My roommate had gone home for the weekend.  I stood there, staring into the collage of pictures of my friends from back home; people I hadn’t talked to since I moved away.  The silence was overwhelming.  I sat on my bed and felt like an outsider in my own room.  In the months that I’d lived there, in this new town, in this new bed, with these new people, I realized that I didn’t know any of them.  And none of them knew me.  The one person who did, Ellen, an hour earlier she told me that she wasn’t coming home.  I knew what that meant; her vagueness was crystal clear.

That night, I packed up everything; my clothes, my TV, my laptop, my life.  I drove back to her place and did the same; I grabbed whatever was in view that was mine and threw it into a trash bag.  On the highway, on the drive back to school, there’s a stretch where the falloff from the road to the valley below is pretty steep.  For a second that seemed more like an hour I considered veering beyond the yellow lines, the rumble strips, and the concrete, through the steel barriers to see just how steep that drop-off was.  I knew those thoughts weren’t really me talking, but at that moment I could rationalize that voice.  It was my fault; I went against my better judgment with Ellen, I threw caution to the wind, I compromised what I had worked for and it backfired.

The first day after break had ended, after class was over, I tried my best to sneak out before my friends could see me but I ended up running into every one of them.  At first I tried to conceal my intention but after a while I just told them the truth: “I don’t think I’m coming back next semester.”  They asked why and I told each of them a different version of the non-truth.  When I was through with my goodbyes I got in my car and drove off, taking in the scene as if once I left it, I’d never see it again.  I felt a tear creep into my right eye and I tried my best to fight it off.  I couldn’t.  Furious, beaten, and on the verge of full-blown hysteria I did what anyone who is lost does: I called my mother.  She told me to calm down, that things would be alright, and that she’d have spaghetti and meatballs waiting for me at home.  I knew that I should heed her advice, that she was right.  But it didn’t work.  Driving eighty-miles an hour towards home, towards everything that months ago I was so happy to drive away from, I hated myself.  I was a failure; a complete and utter failure, on par with Crystal Pepsi and Pat Boone going metal.  I was a bad joke, and now I had a 160 mile drive to ponder over the steaming pile of “I told you so” shit that I was going to have to eat; the pile that I was going to force-feed on myself because I deserved it.  This was nobody’s doing by my own.  Everything I told myself not to do I did; I blew my second chance before it even started.

My thoughts were anything but rational, and all of them were soaked in anger.  As I drove I scrolled through the phone book on my cell, looking for a name, any name that I felt I could talk to, that would understand me, the things I was saying, the things I couldn’t.  But there wasn’t anyone; the names all looked like those of strangers.  As far as I could see, the only one who had that power that I was looking for was gone.  I pushed all of my chips to the center of the table, she called my bluff, and that was that; I was busted.

I tried to drown out the thoughts by putting on a CD.  I’d get thirty seconds into the first song and get pissed off at myself for not picking the right CD.  Nothing worked, I couldn’t even be a good DJ; Pantera didn’t work, Billy Joel didn’t work, Bob Dylan didn’t even work.  My one constant, music, my all-time best main squeeze was abandoning me too.  I was one CD away from completely blowing my top when I heard:

“This is another public service announcement brought to you, in part, by Slim Shady

(Tell ‘em I don’t give a fu@k)

Slim Shady does not give a fu@k what you think

(Tell ‘em to suck it)

If you don’t like it, you can suck his fu@king co@k

(Tell ‘em they kissed my ass)

Little did you know, upon purchasing this album You have just kissed his ass

(Tell ‘em I’m fed up)

Slim Shady is fed up with your sh!t and he’s going to kill you

(Yeah)

Anything else?

Yeah, sue me.”

And literally, like that, in an instant, the tears turned into laughter.  Hysterical—the first time you watch the outtakes to Grumpy Old Men—laughter.  In the months since I’d bought The Marshall Mathers LP I’d listened to it a hundred or so times and each listen brought something new: a verse I misheard, a diss that passed me by.  But I’d never heard it, really heard it for what it was; a masterpiece; a scattershot collection of emotional rants that run the creative gamut of someone who, at the height of his creative prowess, is royally pissed off.  And hurt.  And scared.  Eminem dealt with it all the best way he knew how; he spit it back at everyone, including himself, that did him wrong.  Hurt, betrayed, and angry I really listed to “Kim” for the first time and it floored me, the vulnerability behind his voice.  The easy laughs—“Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records/Well I do, so fu@k him, and fu@k you too”—were just as easy as every previous listen, and I was grateful for that.  But it was the balance that I needed that night, on that drive, and I got it.  I was at the bottom of the mountain again, a certified failure, on my way back to my past.  Things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, the way that I expected them to turn out.  And it sucked.  But I had a friend.  His name was Marshall Mathers.  He knew what I was going through, and he wasn’t going to let me ride alone.  And I wasn’t going to let myself become just another Stan.

(**This is entry #2 of the ongoing A Decade Under The Influence essay collection**)