As a 20-year-old, however, Marshall was arrested for an involvement with a drive-by shooting -- with a paint ball. A friend was the triggerman, and the paint ball didn't even break, police said. The case was dismissed after the alleged victim didn't show up for court.

But his home life was seldom stable. Mike Mazur, Marshall's manager when he worked at a local restaurant, recalled that he crashed so often with friends -- reportedly because of fights with his mother -- that he had dozens of addresses in the more than three years they worked together.

But Mathers-Briggs bristles at any suggestion that she was less than an ideal mother. "Anything Marshall wanted he got," she now says from St. Joseph, where she runs a taxi service. "I sheltered him too much and I think there's a little resentment from that." Mathers-Briggs says she took care of her son's cleaning, car insurance and bank accounts until he was about 25.

But court records and interviews indicate that there was plenty of turmoil, too. A welfare mom who volunteered in a recent conversation that she once filed for bankruptcy, Mathers-Briggs has a history of settling disputes with lawsuits. While some neighbors remember her as a sweet and devoted mother, others called Mathers-Briggs irrational or, less charitably, "crazy" or "a bitch."

Marshall's former co-workers remember her calling him constantly at the restaurant, demanding to speak to her son even during peak times when he couldn't come to the phone. St. Clair Shores police said she often summoned them with unfounded complaints about neighbors.

Eminem does not recall his mother fondly. On "The Slim Shady LP" and in several interviews, he accused his mother of grabbing chunks of his paychecks, tossing him out and popping pills. She has steadfastly denied the allegations.

But the most damning accusation came from St. Clair Shores school officials, who in juvenile court proceedings in 1996 accused her of abusing her younger son, Nathan, now 14. Nathan was removed from her custody. Alleging that she "exhibits a very suspicious, almost paranoid personality," a social worker suggested that Mathers-Briggs had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, an affliction in which a parent injures a child to gain attention and sympathy for herself.

School officials also said she accused neighbors of beating Nathan, blowing up her mailbox and killing her dog in a satanic ritual. They added that she told them video cameras were monitoring her from trees outside her house and that enemies had sent her a tarantula in the mail.

Mathers-Briggs pleaded no contest to reduced charges that she was emotionally unstable and had failed her son by keeping him out of school and isolating him from other children; with that, she regained custody. By then, Nathan had been in foster homes for more than a year.

Attorney Betsy Mellos, who represented Mathers-Briggs through much of the court battle, says the school brought the charges because the mother had threatened to sue them. "She was a pretty good mother," contends Mellos, who now prosecutes child abuse and neglect cases for Macomb County, Mich. "If anything, she was overprotective."

The rest of the milieu around the future star wasn't much better. Marshall's male role models were his mother's boyfriends -- one of whom left Mathers-Briggs after learning she was pregnant with Nathan -- and his uncles. Todd Nelson, Mathers-Briggs' brother, served six years in a Missouri prison for manslaughter after a fatal fight with the brother of his wife. The couple moved to Michigan after his release, but are now divorced. Eminem is still in touch with Nelson.

But Marshall was closest to his Uncle Ronnie, a sensitive soul who family members said was so repulsed by guns he was kicked out of the U.S. Army. Not much older than Marshall, Ronnie introduced his nephew to rap before dying from a gunshot wound about 10 years ago. The death was ruled a suicide.

By the time Eminem attended high school, his love of rap and black culture were the only things that distinguished him. "He hung around with a different kind of crowd than I did; I don't want to say rougher, but not really a good crowd," said classmate Eric Reiter, who remembered the otherwise unremarkable Marshall rapping confidently as part of a duo at a school talent show.

Another classmate, Aubrey Moylan, was less impressed. Calling Marshall "a dork," she says, "He came off as trying to be a poseur or a wannabe. He was into the whole rap scene even back then, and would try to imitate their style, speech and movements.

"He was the type of person that would have me rolling my eyes, thinking, 'Good grief, get a life.'"

Little did she know that's precisely what Mathers was doing.

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Marshall dropped out of school in 1989. Mike Ruby, his partner from the talent show, recommended that he join him cooking and washing dishes at Gilbert's Lodge, a rustic, family-style St. Clair Shores restaurant. Neither rapper planned on making a career of the $5.50-an-hour gig.

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