me by keeping him away from me and my son, Marshall’s Uncle Ronnie. They were best friends and really close, and she would keep them from each other.”
To
Rap Pages
, Marshall added tired details of his situation: “I had one factory job sweeping floors a mile from home. Doing good. My mother used to keep all of my cheques and give me like 40 bucks outta each cheque, and I made over 140 bucks. My mother would keep the hundred and pay the phone bill or the light bill. That’s how I was able to stay. I ended up getting kicked out and staying at my boy’s house, three miles away, so I ended up losing that job.”
It was to
NME
, though, that he revealed the full scale of his resentment and hurt at this latest round of changing backdrops to his life, and the screaming matches soundtracking them. “I had to stay with friends for two months at a time,” he complained. “I would bounce from house to house. It was shitty. I had a lot of friends who I would stay with and their parents were always cooler than my mother. I would tape my mother throwing me out and play them to my friends’ parents just to show them how crazy she is. I’d stay at Proof’s house and his mother did not care what we did as long as we were safe. My friends’ parents liked me!” he suddenly pleaded, like he needed witnesses to prove he wasn’t worthless. “They liked me! I was a likeable person, it was just me and my mother did not get along.” He shook his head to himself. “It was not my fault. It was not my fault.”
In this mood of introspection, he considered the whole nature of his teenage life. “You only realise how bad it was later. I look back now, dog, and I lived a crazy-assed life. I mean, getting kicked out all the time, having no money, getting jumped all the time. I failed ninth grade three times and then left school. I was a fuck-up.” Then he reconsidered his earlier excusing of himself, with the diffidence and wish for fairness he would never quite bury, even at his most outrageous: “But it wasn’t entirely my fault.”
In the midst of all this turmoil, in a place where many teenagers would go wildly astray, Marshall was spoken to by Detroit’s police only twice. The first time was for standing up for his mother, another clue that things were not always poisonous between them, but sometimes loyal and loving. In his early teens a woman on their block was threatening Mathers-Briggs, and jabbing her finger in her face. Marshall jumped between them, shouting, “You’re not hurting my Mom !” The woman’s husband then attacked him with a baseball bat, which Marshall took off him as they wrestled to the ground. That was when the police arrived to drag Marshall away. But enough neighbours had witnessed the scuffle for his innocence to be proved.
Two more crucial incidents, though, combined at the end of his adolescence to ruin it further, and to cripple his love for his mother for good. In 1991, when he was 19, his Uncle Ronnie – son of Kresin, and brother of Mathers-Briggs – killed himself after a girl rejected him. The apparent trigger for his death cannot have helped Marshall’s increasingly defensive, hostile attitude to women, as they ruled and warred in his home. But Ronnie dying at all was the worst.
“The two were just six weeks apart and were more like brothers,” Mathers-Briggs told the
Mail On Sunday
. “They did everything together. But when they were about 16, Marshall got into rap, and Ronnie liked Bon Jovi. They fell out and didn’t speak for two years. When Ronnie killed himself, Marshall was devastated.”
“I don’t know whether it takes balls or a fucking coward to kill themselves,” Marshall, who would later toy with suicide himself, as would his wife, wondered to
Rolling Stone
. “I ain’t figured it all out yet. With my uncle, I just wish I could have talked to him before he did it to find out what the fuck was really on his mind.” At the time, he
To
Rap Pages
, Marshall added tired details of his situation: “I had one factory job sweeping floors a mile from home. Doing good. My mother used to keep all of my cheques and give me like 40 bucks outta each cheque, and I made over 140 bucks. My mother would keep the hundred and pay the phone bill or the light bill. That’s how I was able to stay. I ended up getting kicked out and staying at my boy’s house, three miles away, so I ended up losing that job.”
It was to
NME
, though, that he revealed the full scale of his resentment and hurt at this latest round of changing backdrops to his life, and the screaming matches soundtracking them. “I had to stay with friends for two months at a time,” he complained. “I would bounce from house to house. It was shitty. I had a lot of friends who I would stay with and their parents were always cooler than my mother. I would tape my mother throwing me out and play them to my friends’ parents just to show them how crazy she is. I’d stay at Proof’s house and his mother did not care what we did as long as we were safe. My friends’ parents liked me!” he suddenly pleaded, like he needed witnesses to prove he wasn’t worthless. “They liked me! I was a likeable person, it was just me and my mother did not get along.” He shook his head to himself. “It was not my fault. It was not my fault.”
In this mood of introspection, he considered the whole nature of his teenage life. “You only realise how bad it was later. I look back now, dog, and I lived a crazy-assed life. I mean, getting kicked out all the time, having no money, getting jumped all the time. I failed ninth grade three times and then left school. I was a fuck-up.” Then he reconsidered his earlier excusing of himself, with the diffidence and wish for fairness he would never quite bury, even at his most outrageous: “But it wasn’t entirely my fault.”
In the midst of all this turmoil, in a place where many teenagers would go wildly astray, Marshall was spoken to by Detroit’s police only twice. The first time was for standing up for his mother, another clue that things were not always poisonous between them, but sometimes loyal and loving. In his early teens a woman on their block was threatening Mathers-Briggs, and jabbing her finger in her face. Marshall jumped between them, shouting, “You’re not hurting my Mom !” The woman’s husband then attacked him with a baseball bat, which Marshall took off him as they wrestled to the ground. That was when the police arrived to drag Marshall away. But enough neighbours had witnessed the scuffle for his innocence to be proved.
Two more crucial incidents, though, combined at the end of his adolescence to ruin it further, and to cripple his love for his mother for good. In 1991, when he was 19, his Uncle Ronnie – son of Kresin, and brother of Mathers-Briggs – killed himself after a girl rejected him. The apparent trigger for his death cannot have helped Marshall’s increasingly defensive, hostile attitude to women, as they ruled and warred in his home. But Ronnie dying at all was the worst.
“The two were just six weeks apart and were more like brothers,” Mathers-Briggs told the
Mail On Sunday
. “They did everything together. But when they were about 16, Marshall got into rap, and Ronnie liked Bon Jovi. They fell out and didn’t speak for two years. When Ronnie killed himself, Marshall was devastated.”
“I don’t know whether it takes balls or a fucking coward to kill themselves,” Marshall, who would later toy with suicide himself, as would his wife, wondered to
Rolling Stone
. “I ain’t figured it all out yet. With my uncle, I just wish I could have talked to him before he did it to find out what the fuck was really on his mind.” At the time, he
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