EMINEM, A WRITER OF HIP-HOP RECORDS, RETURNS HOME LATE at night, grave and anxious, with a peculiar air of concentration. He looks like a man expecting a police raid or contemplating suicide. Pacing about his rooms, he halts abruptly, ruffles up his hair, and says in the tone in which Laertes announces his intention of avenging his sister: “Shattered, soul-weary, misery on my heart, and then to sit down and write. And this is life! Nobody has described the agonizing pain in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears on command when his heart is light. I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying?”
He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes. Then he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.
“Kim,” he says, “I am sitting down to write. Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring. See, too, that there’s tea and bacon or something. You know that I can’t write without tea. It’s the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.”
Returning to his room, he takes off his coat and boots. He does this very slowly; then, assuming an expression of injured innocence, he sits down to his table.
There is nothing casual, nothing ordinary, on his writing table, down to the smallest trifle, everything bears the stamp of a stern, deliberately planned program. Little busts and photographs of distinguished rappers, heaps of paper filled with scribbles, part of a skull by way of an ashtray, a sheet of newspaper folded carelessly, but so that a passage is uppermost, boldly marked in blue pencil with the word “disgraceful.” There are a dozen sharpened pencils, so that no accidental breaking of a point may for a single second interrupt the flight of his creative fancy.
Eminem throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and lighting the burner beneath the teapot. She is hardly awake; that is apparent from the way she fumbles the knob of the stove. Soon the hissing of the teapot and the spluttering of bacon reaches him.
All at once Eminem starts, opens frightened eyes, and begins to sniff the air.
“Is that gas?” he groans, grimacing with a face of agony. “That woman will kill me yet. How in God’s name am I supposed to write in such surroundings, kindly tell me that?”
He rushes into the kitchen and breaks into a theatrical wail. When a little later his wife, stepping cautiously on tiptoe, brings him a glass of tea, he is sitting in an easy chair as before with his eyes closed, absorbed in his lyrics. He does not stir, drums lightly on his forehead with two fingers, and pretends he is not aware of his wife’s presence. His face wears an expression of injured innocence.
Like a girl who has been presented with a costly necklace, he spends a long time posing to himself before he writes the title of the song. He presses his temples, he wriggles, draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand toward the paper, and with an expression as though he were signing a death warrant, writes the title.
“Can I have some water?” he hears his daughter’s voice.
“Hush, Haley!” says his wife. “Daddy’s writing! Hush!”
Eminem writes very, very quickly, without corrections or pauses. He scarcely has time to turn over the pages. The busts and portraits of celebrated rappers look at his swiftly racing pencil and, keeping stock-still, seem to be thinking: You really are at it!
“Sh!” squeaks the pencil.
“Sh!” whisper the rappers, when his knee jolts the table and they are set trembling.
All at once Eminem draws himself up, lays down his pencil, and listens. He hears an even, monotonous whispering. It is Dr. Dre, who furnishes him with many of his beats. He has come into the house and is speaking softly to Kim.
“Dre, come on!” cries Eminem. “Couldn’t you please speak more quietly? You’re preventing me from writing!”
“Very sorry,” Dr. Dre answers. “But maybe you should close the door if you don’t want to hear people.”
“But then how would you hear me?”
“That wouldn’t be important,” Dr. Dre says. “You wouldn’t need to speak to me. You wouldn’t even know I was here.”
“Why are you here?” Eminem says. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I wanted to see if I left a key-chain drive here yesterday. It has some work I was doing for Snoop.”
After finishing two more songs, Eminem stretches and looks at his watch.
“Three o’clock already,” he moans. “Other people are asleep while I must work!”
Shattered and exhausted, he goes, with his head on one side, to the bedroom to wake his wife, and says in a languid voice:
“Kim, I need some more tea! I feel weak.”
He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Making the most of himself and the inanimate objects around him, far from any critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek man he secretly believes himself to be.
“I am so exhausted that I am afraid I won’t sleep,” he says as he gets into bed. “My work exhausts the soul even more than the body. I had better take a pill. God knows, I’d like to one day be done with this. To write to make a release date that someone else has set? It is awful.”
He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep. How well he would sleep, what dreams he would have, if he could somehow entrust others with the writing of his albums!
“He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Shh!”
No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault.
“Hush!” floats across the house. “Hush!”