"They were working on music back then, basically working on music everyday," says Fields, who at the time was known as Vitamin C. "[But they were] not getting anywhere because there was no promotion, just musical talent."

At first, Fields says, Eminem was just a smartass cracking inside jokes with Manix and his cronies. Before long, however, he said Eminem began teaching him what he called "the inside rhyme." "At that time, if you had two lines that rhymed, that was it," Fields says. "Marsh was putting it to the next level. He was trying to put as many words that rhymed into a line as he could fit."

But when Eminem finally decided to make his inside rhymes outside Manix's basement, he found few receptive audiences. Black folks, Eminem and associates have said, just weren't willing to listen to a skinny white dude rhyming -- regardless of his talent.

So Eminem became a battle MC, trading insults with anyone who would take him on, honing his skills at largely black venues like the Hip Hop Shop, a now-defunct fashion and music boutique on Detroit's northwest side.

"He was getting in everybody's ass. It was kind of political at first, because he was an outsider," says House Shoes, a DJ at St. Andrew's Hall, a cornerstone of the Detroit music scene. "After he bit a few heads off people, it got to the point where people looked forward to him coming out there."

Eminem got his first break when a local producer, Marky Bass, heard him freestyling on a Detroit radio station. Within hours, Eminem was in Bass' studio rhyming. "He was phenomenal," Bass recalls. "I dropped everything I was doing and I put everything I had into this kid." Bass helped Eminem put out his first record, "Infinite." But no one cared. "Infinite" was filled with tracks about love, unity and trying to get on in spite of hard times.

While his career was stuck in neutral, Eminem's personal life was veering off in new directions. The most important relationship of his life seems to be with Kim Scott. His mother says she took in Scott, who had left her family home, around 1987, when she was 12 and Eminem was a few years older. After several years, Eminem and Scott started an on-and-off relationship, one that lasts to this day. They had a daughter, Hailie Jade, now five, and were married in 1999.

Mazur, Eminem's manager at the restaurant, says Eminem even gave up music to support his family. Although Eminem had been fired a few times for tardiness and other minor offenses -- he was once canned shortly before Christmas -- Mazur says he became a model employee. He recalls a six-month period shortly after Hailie's birth when Eminem worked 60 hours a week. "He didn't want his daughter to grow up like he did, living from day to day and moving from week to week," Mazur says.

But Eminem was also thinking about a new musical persona. Tapping into his reservoir of rage and resentment, Eminem created Slim Shady, a drug-dealing, bloodthirsty thug who spits furious rhymes about murder, rape, drugs and living by the law of the urban jungle.

Fields says he was shocked by his old friend's new persona. So was another Detroit rapper, Buddha Fulla Rhymes, he says. "Buddha asked [Eminem], 'Why do you rap about doing heroin and smokin' crack? This isn't you.' Marsh said, 'Look, I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm not making any money. I'm making pizzas.'"

As for Bass, he was thrilled when he heard of Eminem's recidivism. "We have the Marilyn Manson of rap, we have the kook of rap," he raved.

Bass wasn't the only one smitten by the reprehensible rapper. Gangsta rap impresario Dr. Dre heard Eminem rapping on an L.A. radio show around 1997. He brought Eminem to Interscope Records, the notorious home of some of the industry's hardest-core rap acts, and produced his first album.

By March 1997, Eminem was fired from Gilbert's for the last time. He was still living in his mother's mobile home with Scott and his daughter. But all that was about to change.

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