The Super Anti Hero
Eminem’s press representative sticks his head around the door to check how everything is going.The rapper, dressed in plain gray sweatpants and a hooded top, looks up. “OK,” he says.
The man from the record company turns to leave. “Oh,” calls Eminem. “Can you grab me some heroin?”
“What?”
“Like, a whole bag,” Eminem deadpans. “And some syringes. And some crack. Thanks.”
“OK.”
Joke. The fact is, Eminem, 28, no longer does drugs. The man who has a Vicodin pill tattooed on his arm and who once proudly taunted, “Last night I O.D.’d on rush, mushrooms and dust” is now drug-free. He has to be. He’s currently on probation for two offenses involving carrying a concealed 9-mm automatic handgun. Probation includes what Eminem dryly refers to as “random piss tests.” If he’s caught with drugs in his system, or indulges in more than “moderate” drinking, he could go to prison.
“Do I miss drugs? I ain’t going to lie. Sometimes I wish I could dabble. . . . ”
But he can’t.
His arrests came during the most turbulent few days in Marshall Mathers’s already drama-filled life: the first weekend of June 2000. It was a heady time. The previous Wednesday, SoundScan had released figures showing that his Marshall Mathers LP had sold a phenomenal 1.7 million copies in its first week — smashing all sales records for a solo artist.
The following Saturday, June 3, Eminem was visiting a car-stereo store in Royal Oak, Michigan, when he began arguing with Douglas Dail, an associate of rival hip-hop clique Insane Clown Posse. The pair already had a history: Eminem has derided ICP countless times on disc and in concert. On this day, during a heated argument, Eminem’s gun fell out of his jacket. He picked it up and supposedly waved it at Dail. Mistake number one.
Later that night, Eminem drove with a friend to the Hot Rocks Café in nearby Warren, Michigan, looking for his wife, Kimberly. She and Eminem had been married a year, and their relationship was stormy. He spotted her in the parking lot. She was with another man, John Guerra — hugging and kissing him.
Anyone who has followed Eminem’s career knows of his turbulent marriage. He and Kim have been fighting and making up since high school. She’s the fictionalized subject of the tracks “ ’97 Bonnie and Clyde” on The Slim Shady LP and “Kim” on the The Marshall Mathers LP, and on both she winds up having her throat brutally slit.
Kim and Guerra insist that what Eminem saw was merely a friendly hug. But the rapper saw red: This dude is kissing my wife.
Brandishing a gun, he ran toward them. Guerra claims Eminem struck him at least twice with the weapon, which, luckily, wasn’t loaded.
Remembering that night, Eminem sighs. He starts to explain how furious he was: “I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for saying this — ” He stops, as if aware that revealing too much is only going to intensify the scrutiny he’s been under. “I fuckin’ . . . ” he struggles. “Anything could have happened.”
He describes it more clearly on his new song “Cleanin’ Out My Closet”: “The smartest shit I done/Was to take the bullets out of that gun/’Cause I would’ve killed them. . . . ”
At 2:20 A.M. that night, Hot Rocks security called the police, who took Eminem and Kim into custody. It was a crazy night, he says; he didn’t know where his 4-year-old daughter, Hailie, was — or whether she had heard what had happened. He didn’t know how he was going to explain it to her. To cap it all, Eminem remembers the cops asking for his autograph while they were fingerprinting him.
“All this shit,” he says, “just came to a head at once.”
He also remembers taking a call on his cell phone as he walked out of jail the next day. It was another police officer, telling him he’d have to come back to face charges over the earlier incident with ICP’s Douglas Dail.
Eminem says it appeared that things were rapidly closing in around him: “There were times when I really did feel, ‘This is it. I’m going to jail. Nobody’s going to care anymore.’ ”
Two years later, we’re in Birmingham, Michigan, a leafy suburb of Detroit, not far from the home Eminem shares full-time with his teenage half-brother, Nathan, and part-time with Hailie.
Eminem hasn’t been sleeping well. He never does in the run-up to a record release. “I drive myself crazy,” he says.
In the weeks before a CD hits the streets, he becomes jumpy and agitated. His first thought this morning: “Uh, shit. I got to get my girl to school.”
But this is a good week. Hailie has received a favorable progress report at school, and the new album is finally finished. Sending the master tape off means he can’t beat himself up anymore.
Eminem’s third record for Interscope Records completes a kind of cycle — 1999’s Slim Shady LP, 2000’s Marshall Mathers LP and now the final part in the trifecta of names we know him by, The Eminem Show.
Eminem’s records have always reflected his true identity, no matter which alter ego he was inhabiting. In his early twenties, he was a wide-eyed rapper impatient for the world to fall at his feet. He was in love with Kim. Though he’d flunked ninth grade three times, he had enrolled in evening classes. You can barely recognize Eminem on his first, independently released album, 1996’s The Infinite. His music was, of all things, “positive rap” — Eminem talking about not doing drugs: “I quit smoking cess [weed]/To open my chest.”
The album sold a dismal 500 copies. Evicted from his apartment and with nothing going for him, Mathers couldn’t even afford to buy Hailie diapers.
Bitterness kicked in. Mathers’s world darkened. This period of rejection spawned his depraved cartoon identity, Slim Shady. The persona of the self-loathing, embittered, dark-hearted, white-trash bogeyman — mixed with Mathers’s uniquely incandescent delivery — proved irresistible on The Slim Shady LP, and Eminem has been toying with us ever since: Where does the bug-eyed cartoon stop and the real Marshall Mathers begin?
Eminem alchemized rejection into stardom only to wonder: What happens when you get what you wish for? With fame came virulent criticism from all quarters about Slim Shady’s misogyny, homophobia and potty-mouthed attitude.
Relishing the havoc he’d created, Eminem cranked up the volume. The Marshall Mathers LP was a furious, deliberately scurrilous response. The more scatological and provocative he became, the more units he sold.
As he rhymes on the new single “Without Me”: “I’ve created a monster/’Cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more/They want Shady.”
The Eminem Show is vastly different from his previous two records. Whether it’s sobriety, or fatherhood, or that at 28 he’s growing up, the new album is the most clearheaded and focused work of his career — and maybe the best.
The basic theme is unchanged: Eminem versus the rest of the world. With his longtime sponsor and producer, Dr. Dre, by his side, Eminem’s targets of scorn these days include everyone from George W. Bush and the Federal Communications Commission to the vice-president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, and even hip-hop’s old-school whipping girl Tipper Gore. “I go for whoever has tried to stop freedom of speech,” he says. “Whoever I think is gunning for me.”
What would you say to George W. Bush if you met him face to face?
He hems and haws. “I would tell him I didn’t vote, but if I had, I would have voted for Gore.”
Even after what you said about Tipper on your record?
“She’s why I didn’t vote.”
He also takes a few halfhearted swipes at contemporaries who he feels have dissed him — from ’N Sync’s Chris Kirkpatrick and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst to Moby, who has criticized him for delivering homophobic and mysogynistic lyrics to 10-year-olds (“You don’t know me, you’re too old, let go/Nobody listens to techno”).
Eminem smiles mischievously at the line. “The whole Moby thing — honestly,” he says. “How ridiculous would it look if I was really serious about kickin’ Moby’s ass? It’s like stepping on a flea. His music is horrible.”
And then there are Eminem’s nearest and dearest.
If, as he explains, the idea behind the new album’s title is that his personal life has become public sport, then the team’s roster remains the same. At the center again and again are the three women in Eminem’s life: Hailie, Kim and his mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs. His love for Hailie and his loathing for the other two remain mostly unchanged.
True, a hint of reconciliation creeps in on “Cleanin’ Out My Closet”: “I’m sorry, Mama, I didn’t want to make you cry,” he raps. But then he flays her for 1) telling Marshall that she wished it was he and not his beloved Uncle Ronnie who had committed suicide; 2) never giving him anything, then filing a $10 million defamation suit against him; and 3) suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a rare psychological condition in which parents harm their children to get sympathy and attention. “That’s my closure song,” he offers helpfully.
OK, he’s still as gloriously crude as ever when he wants to be. Take “Drips,” a stomach-turning tale of exchanging sexually transmitted diseases with a pal. But listen carefully — the song responsibly advises men to always wear protection.
“It’s a socially conscious song,” Eminem confesses. “I don’t know how it ended up becoming that,” he adds, disappointed at his lapse into good taste. He doesn’t think his critics will notice. “If there’s a positive message in one of my songs, it’s going to get overlooked, believe me,” he cracks.
One thing that makes the new album startlingly unlike his last two is the virtual absence of homophobia in the lyrics. “Hate fags? The answer’s yes!” he taunted on The Marshall Mathers LP. On The Eminem Show, the gay-baiting has for the most part vanished.
Is this a conversion?
“Well,” he says, smiling, “don’t think I won’t say fag — but I want this album to show growth. Why keep going there again? You beat this controversy. Why dig yourself back in?”
Do you think any of the criticism of your lyrics was reasonable?
“No!” he says, horrified at the suggestion. “I mean, Slim Shady’s still runnin’ around goin’ ‘Faggot-faggot-faggot!’ But frankly, it was becoming not about the music. I spent so long sitting around saying, ‘Well, what I meant was . . . ’ ‘What I said was . . . ’ ”
Is Eminem really that sick? Or is he just toying with us? Mathers still relishes messing with his critics. “You probably think I’m a negative person,” he raps earnestly on 1999’s “Bad Influence.” “Don’t be sure of it/I don’t promote violence.” Then the punch line: “I just encourage it.”
But it’s not just suburban America’s taboos he’s aiming for now. For the first time, he’s tackled one of hip-hop’s minefields too. For years, he has brushed aside any mention of his race as irrelevant. This time, though, Eminem tackles the subject head-on in “White America,” admitting the uncomfortable truth: His whiteness is part of his success.
“Look at these eyes, baby blue just like yourself/If they be brown, Shady sits on the shelf. . . . ”
“You know,” he says, “I don’t go door to door, but I see that probably 80 percent of my fan base is white, suburban America.” It’s one of the uncomfortable dynamics behind hip-hop. Though it’s music produced by — and, in theory, for — the inner cities, it’s actually the demographic power of white suburbs that sends the discs to platinum sales.
On the new “Sing for the Moment,” which plugs Aerosmith’s stadium anthem “Dream On” into its chorus, Eminem imagines the parents of a suburban boy: “It’s so scary/In a house that allows no swearin’/To see him walking around with his headphones’ blarin’, ” he rhymes. “Talkin’ black/Rags and a stocking cap/Brainwashed from rock and rap.”
While he was making the new album, Eminem was also filming his first movie. This November, he’ll star in 8 Mile, directed by L.A. Confidential’s Curtis Hanson. It’s a story about a struggling white rapper named Jimmy Smith Jr. growing up around Detroit’s infamous 8 Mile Road, just as Eminem did.
“8 Mile is like the color line for Detroit,” he explains. “On one side it’s [mostly black] Detroit; the other side it’s [mostly white] Warren. I grew up on the Detroit side, but everywhere I lived was on those borderlines.”
Jimmy Smith Jr. isn’t 100 percent Marshall Mathers, he says, “but it’s pretty close.” Making the movie was like revisiting his life, pre–Slim Shady. “What I had to do was almost be me, before me. I had to strip myself of my ego completely. I’m probably the humblest person you’d ever meet,” he insists. “There’s a certain cockiness that I portray, but I had to strip myself of that.”
Jimmy Smith Jr. lives with his mom in a trailer park, just as Marshall Mathers did for a spell. Eminem’s relationship with his mother is as famously dysfunctional as that with his ex-wife. Recently, Mathers-Briggs lost her $10 million lawsuit against her son; she sued him for saying, on The Slim Shady LP, that she took more drugs than he did. A judge ordered Eminem to pay only $25,000. Or, as the rapper gleefully puts it on the new album’s “Without Me”: “I just settled all my lawsuits/Fuck you, Debbie!”
Your mother is presumably eager to see the movie.
“I don’t know what her take is. Honestly. I heard she was calling up, threatening the movie people. I don’t ask. It’s not her fucking movie.”
Now you have two Kims in your life. In 8 Mile, Kim Basinger plays your mom.
“Right.”
Your mother must at least be pleased to be portrayed by a glamorous Hollywood star.
“Well, anyone else would probably take that as a compliment. But I don’t think my mother will.”
Mathers-Briggs recently said that Eminem had reconciled with her during his court case, seeking her out for support during his hectic few months.
This is news to Eminem. “She did?” he says incredulously.
Eminem approached acting with the same determination to succeed he puts into his music. He admits it was tough work: “Not the hardest thing I’ve done, but definitely not the easiest.”
His release from the pressures of anchoring a big-budget Hollywood picture came in the film’s fight scenes. But the parts he enjoyed most were the improvised “battle scenes,” in which he and the other rappers tested one another’s microphone skills. It took him back to his early days, when he was a pure freestyler, an unknown, standing toe to toe at the annual “Scribble Jam” MC competition or at Wendy Day’s Rap Olympics in 1997, when he was first spotted by Interscope.
“The most fun part of the movie,” he notes, “was the rapping.”
From the time his Uncle Ronnie first played him Ice-T’s “Reckless,” all Marshall Mathers wanted to do was be an MC. He remains sweetly in awe of rappers whose sales he eclipses. The way he sees it, he will always be Robin to Dr. Dre’s Batman.
If anything, he worries that his success erodes his chance of being taken seriously by the world he reveres. “My respect. That’s what I’ve always fought for and struggled for. Respect from my peers and just hip-hop in general,” he says. “I don’t rap my heart out on every song just to get money. That’s ridiculous.”
A photo session. Marshall Mathers looks good — healthier and leaner than ever. Curtis Hanson asked him to shed weight for the movie, to make him fit the part of a lean and hungry adolescent. His hair was brown in the film too — he’s only recently returned it to its usual platinum-blond tint.
While the camera reloads, Eminem stands there, his gaze elsewhere. He doesn’t make eye contact if he doesn’t need to.
The photographer’s job is to build a rapport with his subject, a hard job with Eminem. He’s polite and cooperative, but his small talk is minimal.
8 Mile’s producer, Brian Grazer — whose credits include A Beautiful Mind and the TV series 24 — remembers the same thing happening when he met Eminem for the first time: The star sat for 15 minutes, looking into the distance.
Marshall Mathers is curiously self-contained. Despite his stardom, he still inhabits a relatively small world. One thing he notes on The Eminem Show is that after three albums, the cast in his life remains constant and relatively closed — his hip-hop group, D12; his executive producer, Dr. Dre; his manager, Paul Rosenberg; and his daughter. Around him are people he trusts and is loyal to. But he keeps the rest of the world at a distance.
For all his lyrical daring, he has a cautious side. For example, he doesn’t enjoy spending money. Having grown up without much of it, he’s prone to worrying that it can all disappear again.
Though he recognizes that he’s set for life, he doesn’t see any point in spending money unless there’s good reason to. He doesn’t gamble. Ask him the last thing he bought that gave him pleasure, and he “ums” and “ahs” for a full minute. “You sound like Paul [Rosenberg]. ‘When was the last time you did something for yourself?’ ” he says, then asks whether “things that give him pleasure” can include the clothes and dolls he buys for Hailie.
Even the Rolex on his wrist was given to him a year and a half ago by Dr. Dre and Interscope chief Jimmy Iovine. Eminem doesn’t buy cars, either; his Mercedes-Benz is leased.
His distaste for spending large amounts of money, oddly, was one of the causes of his paranoid tailspin a couple of years ago.
When he decided to buy a house for himself, Kim and Hailie, he chose to move to the middle-class Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, across the street from that emblematic symbol of his white-trash past — a trailer park.
“Fuck,” he says. “I bought a house on a main road. I had no idea I was that famous. I thought it was going to be the first and last house I ever bought.”
Fans stalked his family. They swam in his pool. He became paranoid about stepping outside to check his mail without protection. In fact, someone even torched his mailbox.
For a while, Eminem was baffled by his own fame. He would go out with his face almost entirely shrouded. “Literally, this much of me would get recognized,” he says, covering all but his eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. It made me paranoid.” And no one looks more obviously like a star than someone that paranoid.
Fear can make celebrities oddly dependent on their bodyguards. One who had entered Eminem’s circle of trust was Byron Williams. But when Eminem discovered that Williams was planning to write a book about him, he felt betrayed.
He marks that betrayal as the point when his life began to unravel, culminating in his June 2000 arrests. “I thought he was my friend,” he says. “I came to find out that he was keeping a fucking journal! That was his plan ever since he met me. I was his shot at fame. After that happened, I didn’t trust anybody.”
As the release date of The Marshall Mathers LP approached, Eminem was heading for the full stardom flip-out. Drugs probably didn’t help. “There was a time when I had a little problem,” he concedes. “And alcohol, and getting caught up in the whirlwind of fame. Everything.”
His success, he felt, was unmooring him considerably from reality. “What I’ve always been afraid of is, What if you blow up too big and you lose touch?” he says. “It’s like being in a hot-air balloon and letting go of the rope. You just get farther and farther away.”
Maybe that’s why, instead of simply hiring a more ethical bodyguard, Eminem did a stupid thing: He decided he could handle his personal security himself. “I was irrational,” he says. “I was acting like a kid. I was literally in fear for my life — of somebody punking me, somebody snuffing me from behind. The truth is, I acted like an idiot.”
It was then he started carrying the 9-mm handgun. “I was like, ‘I’m not walking around with security. Who the fuck am I? The president? My security just stabbed me in the back. You see where security gets you? Fuck that. I’m a grown man. I’m a father. Who the fuck is going to protect my daughter if her own father can’t?’ ”
Eminem’s work has always had a strong self-destructive streak. His beloved Uncle Ronnie, the one who introduced him to hip-hop, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1991 after a fight with his girlfriend. He was just 19, only a couple of years older than Marshall. For years after, Eminem was obsessed with killing himself. Listen to The Slim Shady LP’s “Cum on Everybody,” on which he fetishizes a rock & roll suicide: “My favoite color is red, like the blood shed/From Kurt Cobain’s head, when he shot himself dead.”
If there was ever a time when Eminem was bound to self-destruct, the period around his arrests would probably have been it. “Yeah, I could have easily done that,” he says. “It’s so easy. Especially having success and money. What else have you got time to do?”
But he didn’t. Facing a jail term, a potentially bitter divorce and the chance that he’d lose custody of his daughter, he swallowed hard and grew up.
“I guess I’ve always been the type of person who, if a brick is thrown my way, I set it up the wrong way and stand on it. Whatever obstacle is thrown my way, I try to use it to my advantage and run with it. It was a dark time for me, I guess, but I can honestly say I probably would be a different person sitting here right now if it wasn’t for my little girl,” he says quietly.
“My worst fear was picturing the look on Hailie’s face if I had to tell her that I was going away — the look on Hailie’s face coming to visit me in jail and not being able to touch, to hold. You know? Like, fuck the divorce. Fuck everything else. How am I going to explain it to this little girl I’ve struggled all these years to keep from situations like this, that I’m about to do this to her?”
Eminem believes things would have been far different had Hailie not been there during his turmoil. “If she had never been born, I would have had nothing around me to make me truly happy,” he says.
His October 2001 divorce from Kim stipulated that the couple share custody of their daughter. He’s written the new track “Hailie’s Song” for her as a thank-you note. It’s about his love for her, his relief that he didn’t lose custody and his gratitude to her for saving his sanity. It’s the sort of pure, unrestrained sentimentality you wouldn’t expect from Slim Shady. It may not be the sort of thing his most rabid fans want to hear, but there’s no doubting Eminem’s sincerity this time: “Then I see Hailie/And suddenly I’m not crazy.”
For the last year, Eminem has been leading as regular a suburban life as the bad white boy of hip-hop can. He takes Hailie to Elton John concerts, popping backstage to offer best wishes to his most famous gay rock pal — the man who took his side by duetting with him at the Grammys in 2001, to the outrage of many gay and lesbian activists. At John’s recent show in Detroit, Eminem and Hailie sat in front of his friend Kid Rock, who had brought his family as well.
Eminem takes Hailie to the studio with him; she plays video games, watches movies, colors and plays with her dolls.
His fame is such that there’s even an Eminem action figure, scowling and brandishing a chainsaw. Eminem gave one to Hailie to play with. “I don’t think she was crazy about it: ‘Oh, cool,’ ” he says with a sigh, imitating her underwhelmed response. “ ‘It’s my dad.’ ”
There are no other significant women in his life at the moment. “Hailie, she’s my ball and chain now. My new, ‘Daddy, when are you going to get home?’ As opposed to ‘Motherfucker, what the fuck are you doing?’ ”
Are you done with relationships?
“Yeah. Well, I don’t want to say forever — but as far as marriage and the whole nine? No way.”
No desire to have more kids?
“No. No plans.”
You also seem to have run out of places to put tattoos.
“I could use my legs. Actually, I think I’m done with the tattoo thing.”
Eminem is — for the time being at least — a changed man. Looking back on the last two years, he says, “I honestly feel that getting into all this trouble, all this happening — the divorce, everything — could have been a blessing in disguise, because it made me more focused. Now I’m aware of everything around me. I feel like a wide-eyed kid: ‘Holy shit! Where have I been these years?’ ”
A hotel waiter interrupts the conversation, entering the room with a trolley loaded with cheeseburgers, iced tea and French fries.
“You can leave it there, that’s fine,” Eminem says.
As the waiter exits, he says, “Have a good evening, gentlemen.”
Eminem blinks and does a quick double-take. “Why,” he says, “I’m a gentleman!” He frowns. He’s not sure if he likes the sound of that at all. “Well, I’ve been called worse,” he says with a shrug.
Home Sweet Homie
Exactly how much trouble has Eminem gotten into on the mean streets of his hometown, Detroit? A lot
Sterling Heights, Michigan
Middle-class suburb in which Eminem bought a house in July 1999. He later moved to a more secluded neighborhood after “fans” pelted his security guard with batteries, scattered M&M wrappers on his lawn and set fire to his mailbox.
Micky Schorr Car Audio Shop; Royal Oak, Michigan
Scene of a June 2000 altercation between Eminem and Insane Clown Posse associate Douglas Dail, which allegedly culminated with Eminem pulling out a 9-mm handgun.
8 Mile Road
Detroit’s main artery; traditionally serves as the dividing line between the city’s black and white communities. Eminem grew up on the “wrong” side, two blocks away on Dresden Street. Also inspired the name of, and is the setting for, Eminem’s new film.
Lincoln High School; Warren, Michigan
Eminem attended Lincoln from 1986 to 1989. He was repeatedly beaten up by classmates for wearing rap-style outfits, including a Flavor Flav–inspired wall clock. He dropped out after repeating the ninth grade three times.
Hot Rocks Café; Warren, Michigan
Scene of an incident that occurred hours after Eminem’s scuffle with Douglas Dail. This time, he allegedly attacked a man he saw kissing wife Kim Mathers. Pleaded guilty to charges of carrying a concealed weapon.
Gilbert’s Lodge; St. Claire Shore, Michigan
The family restaurant where Eminem worked as a short-order cook and dishwasher from 1996 to 1998. Waitresses recall him rapping their orders back to them to pass the time.
Dort Elementary School; Roseville, Michigan
Eminem’s elementary school where, when he was 9, he was allegedly beaten so badly by fellow pupil DeAngelo Bailey that he fell into a coma. Eminem referred to the incident on The Slim Shady LP’s “Brain Damage.” Bailey, in turn, launched a $1 million lawsuit in December 2001, claiming Eminem had damaged his reputation.
— Anya Estrov
“You’ve Got A Nice Body . . . ”
First, the good news: In Eminem’s upcoming movie, 8 Mile, Kim Basinger begs him to please her when her white-trash boyfriend won’t. The bad news? She’s playing Eminem’s character’s mom! Nasty, yo! Blender sneaks a peek at the script of Eminem’s big-screen debut and presents 8 Mile’s most romantic, tender-hearted moment. . . .
The story so far: Eminem, playing Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith Jr., is sick of his loser friends, his menial job, his clingy ex-girlfriend — and particularly Stephanie (Kim Basinger), his trashy mother, whose no-good boyfriend, Greg, leaves her desperate for her son’s affection in their mobile home.
Jimmy heads for the bathroom. Getting ready for bed. He peels off his shirt. Stephanie follows after him.
STEPHANIE Hey you’ve got a nice body, Rabbit —
JIMMY (stops) What?
STEPHANIE Greg won’t go down on me.
JIMMY Mom!
STEPHANIE (whispers) He won’t go down on me. I mean, I keep askin’ him an’ like I have no problem goin’ down on —
Jimmy puts his hands over his ears, running into the bathroom —
JIMMY Mom, stop, I’m not hearin’ this —
He closes the door in her face.
