By Buck Wolf

Aug. 31, 2000 — There’s a candy-covered chocolate, M&M, that melts in your mouth.

And then there’s a bad-boy rapper, Eminem, who melts in the hands of his manager — if you believe his ex-bodyguard.

Byron “Big Naz” Williams says that behind Eminem’s violent, misogynistic lyrics stands a miserable, drug-addled young man, a mere “paper gangsta,” who is manipulated by his manager and handlers who keep him “high and intoxicated.”

24-Hour-a-Day Baby Sitter

Williams made his forthcoming, self-published book, Shady Bizzness, available to The Wolf Files. In it, he describes himself as a “24-hour-a-day baby sitter” for the 26-year-old white rapper who takes drug-abusing, woman-hating, gay-bashing music to new extremes.

Williams, who guarded Eminem from May to December 1999, claims that behind the tough-guy image, the rap star is losing control of his life, even as he reaches new heights.

Eminem’s latest release, The Marshall Mathers LP, is the fastest-selling rap album in history, with more than 1.7 million purchased in its first week. It’s been at the top of the charts since May, and in February he won Grammy awards for best rap album and best solo performance.

Perhaps no other rap artist has risen to such fame with songs as graphic and vulgar as “Kill You,” a psychotic rant about raping his mother as revenge for a lousy childhood.

Eminem’s defense: He says he is not advising people how to live. He is merely purging his psyche, which he often does using an alter ego known as “Slim Shady.”

In “Role Model, “ he sings:

“Now follow me and do exactly what you see, Don’tcha wanna grow up to be just like me? I slap women and eat ’shrooms then OD, Don’tcha wanna grow up to be just like me?”

That may sound a bit like a warning to his audience not to take him literally. But these days, Eminem’s life increasingly resembles the violence in his music. In June, he was accused of pulling a gun on a man who kissed his wife at a bar outside Detroit. Soon after, he was accused of pulling a gun on a person connected with the rap group Insane Clown Posse.