After several years in which he was doted on by his father's aunt while his mother held down several menial jobs, Marshall and his mother moved to Michigan. The pair lived in modest, working-class Detroit neighborhoods a notch or two above, but never far from, the ghetto. For many years he was the only white teen in a black neighborhood of otherwise white and middle-class St. Clair Shores. Friends and family said Marshall was a happy kid who had his mother wrapped around his finger. But he was also a bit of a loner -- the kind of kid who got picked on.

As a 9-year-old student at Dort Elementary School, Marshall suffered the first in a series of beatings that ultimately left him in a coma, relatives say. His persecutor was DeAngelo Bailey, an African-American classmate who played center on the school basketball team. Bailey allegedly subjected Marshall to a four-month reign of terror: He attacked him at recess, cornered him in a restroom and floored him with a heavy snowball that gave him a severe head injury.

According to a lawsuit Mathers-Briggs filed against the school in 1982, Bailey beat her boy so badly that he suffered headaches, post-concussion syndrome, intermittent loss of vision and hearing, nightmares, nausea and a tendency toward anti-social behavior. (The lawsuit makes no mention of the coma, however.)

Marshall's head injury "made me even more protective of him," Mathers-Briggs says.

The lawsuit was dismissed in 1983; a Macomb County (Mich.) judge said the schools were immune from lawsuits. But Slim Shady settled the score 17 years later, beating Bailey into a bloody pulp on "Brain Damage," a track from his debut major-label album, "The Slim Shady LP."

The beefy, 5-foot-8 Bailey is now a laborer who lives in a squalid house near the neighborhood where the pair went to school. As Eminem's music booms out of a nearby car, he sits in a Roseville park and chuckles at the mention of his former whipping boy.

"He was small, plus he had a big mouth," recalls Bailey, who is married with four children.

Seeming friendly and soft-spoken, Bailey says he is amused by his secondhand celebrity. He says he has signed autographs for teeny-bopper fans and has had to disconnect his phone. His kids are big Eminem fans; they holler, he says, when Eminem mentions his name on "Brain Damage."

Bailey is sheepish but amused by the fruits of his former bullydom: "Damn, that must have scarred him for life," he says.

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Marshall's life of childhood poverty in and around metro Detroit's hardscrabble neighborhoods continued. He bounced from school to school: By the time he enrolled in Warren's Lincoln High, he had attended as many as 20 schools, his mother estimates. Much of that time he lived in his great-grandmother's home on the south side of Warren, a gritty suburb just across the Detroit border.

Warren's residents are known for their red necks as well as their blue collars; the town's south side is particularly low-rent. Small houses are packed together along streets named for long-dead auto pioneers and lined with long-dead autos.

It's a short walk to the liquor store from most homes. Lonely hearts needn't go far to find the local adult bookstore or, a bit further along "8 Mile," a major boulevard dividing Warren from Detroit, prostitutes and topless bars with names like the Booby Trap and Trumpps.

Slim Shady is the kind of tough guy who callously advocates shooting a withered cashier and raping a 15-year-old. But friends and neighbors remember Marshall Mathers as a polite boy -- one who comes back every so often to sign autographs and encourage neighborhood kids.

"He was an all right kid, no worse than a lot and a lot better than some," says Ramona Dorsey, who lives next door to Eminem's former house in St. Clair Shores.

"He was good to his brother," says Rose Slone, another former family friend who knew Marshall from when he visited his mother and brother in a rundown Warren trailer park. "He was always there for Nathan."

Former co-workers, too, said Marshall was hard-working and upbeat, playing music and rhyming to keep things lively. Until his arrests in June, Eminem had no adult criminal record.

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