by Mike Tyson
When I got back to my room, the butler was just finishing up. He had ironed the contents of both of my suitcases. He was still laughing about my call. I gave the guy a huge tip and went out and partied.
The next day I flew down to Florida to see Roy Jones Jr. fight Antonio Tarver. I was high and I was tired but the whole time I was down there Tarver was chasing me around saying, “Me and you have got to fight, man.” He was in my ear constantly.
“No, man,” I finally told him. “I’m having a rough time. I don’t even know if I want to be in America now. I’m really down now. I don’t want to fight anybody.”
I was still wired from coke, I’d been doing it nonstop since I went to Europe four months before. All I wanted to do was take a shit. When you’ve got all that cocaine in your system, you take these cocaine dumps because your guts are all wrapped up. But all that didn’t stop me from driving over to the Overtown and Liberty City areas of Miami to score coke and some Cuban hookers. Of course, whenever I was in the ghettos, I’d get stopped by the police.
“Mike Tyson! What the hell are you doing here, man? This is a dangerous place, Mike,” the cop said. “Get in the car, let us take you someplace safe.”
“No, I’m fine, Officer. Please, you can just go. You’re causing problems for me, sir.”
“Mr. Tyson, please. They don’t care that you’re the champ, this is not the place to be,” the cop insisted.
“Sir, I’ll be in a lot of trouble if you keep hanging around. I’m fine.”
I was trying to score some blow and some Cuban girls and these guys were making me hot. When I went to these neighborhoods, the people would see me and say, “What’s up, champ, what are you looking for?”
They just saw it on me. They knew I wanted to get high.
I partied with drugs and alcohol nonstop from the time that I got out of the ring with McBride. After my trips around the world, I settled back into Vegas and established my drug routine. I’d try to wake up by ten p.m. and be out of the shower and all pretty and ready to go out by eleven p.m. By then, someone was on the way over here and I’d do a little coke before I left. We’d drive to the hood in North Vegas and hit the bars until about one a.m. unless there was something interesting going on there, like a new drug individual coming to town. Then I’d hit some clubs on the Strip. There it was all about knowing the maître d’s, hanging out in the suites, and hustling girls. I’d hang out there until four or five a.m. when we’d hit the after-hours spots like Drai’s. After staying there for an hour we’d go to the strip clubs like Seamless that had a crowd that came there to hang out. At these after-hours spots you’d see everyone from celebrities and beautiful models to hard-core hustlers.
These beautiful people were all drugpires. You never saw them in the daytime, going to a dentist’s office or at a mall. Their life was just like mine; they’d be sleeping all day and partying all night. So we’d hang out with them one morning after the after-hours club and they all had beautiful homes. They were either drug dealers or rich, bad-seed kids. There were always tons of people hanging out with them at the clubs and they’d always get the bill.
I’d be out in the clubs and the next thing I knew, I was in a room in a big mansion with all these people. I don’t even know how we got from the club to this house. By now I’d lost my woman. And I want to be the facilitator. When people do blow, for some reason they think I’m cute. And the women of these very scary guys decide that they want to touch me. I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, this is not what it’s about right here. It’s all about togetherness.”
Now I get nervous. This guy is watching his woman touch me. I’m getting sober because the fear and the high just don’t go together. Now I feel like a disgusting fat motherfucker. I can tell that this guy is a bad person. He’s probably done time already and he’s not afraid to kill someone. And he’s got a crazy lady who’s intent on touching me.
I’ve learned how to deal with women in these kinds of situations. I always put myself down, don’t make myself important. I’m really good at that.
“Oh, baby, I’m a junkie. Please, girl, don’t mess with me. I’ve caught so many diseases. I’m surprised you didn’t get one just by being in my presence.”
I know how to turn a woman off. And that’s good for my health. Sometimes a woman is a man’s whole life. A woman can invade a man’s mind. She can take a pussy-whipped boyfriend and turn him into a gut-wrenching psychopath. So I never underestimate a guy like that.
One of the interesting people I met around then was a pimp I called Chance. I was at one of the strip club/after-hours clubs and he came over to me.
“Hey, Mr. Tyson. Wow, I always wanted to meet you because you always say you’re the baddest man on the planet, and I’m always saying I’m the baddest pimp on the planet. The way you fight is the way I pimp.”
“Is that true, nigga?” I said.
“Yeah, man, I ain’t shitting. I know about your bankruptcy, I know about them stealing your money. Nigga, you’re with me now, I’ve got nothing but money. You see all these men here? They’re on the wagon until I come. I supply everything.”
I started hanging out with Chance and he had all these pretty cars, Porsches, Ferraris, the Maseratis and Lamborghinis. I thought that he must like cocaine but this guy was a country pimp. He’d tell all these lies to make it seem like he was a man of the world but all he did was sissy drugs like ecstasy.
I was broke, so one night I said, “Get me some cocaine, nigga.”
“Who got cocaine?” he said. “Let me call my man.”
The next time I saw him, he had the coke. He called a weed dealer friend of his who had some. So I snorted some and then I passed it to him.
“Go ahead, man, do that shit, nigga,” I said. “It’s just like ecstasy but chopped up.”
He did a couple of lines but he immediately had a bad reaction to the coke.
“Oh, my head!” he screamed and fell to the floor. “Oh shit, Mike! Pimp down! Pimp down!”
I was thinking, Oh shit, this guy is about to die. We were with his nephew so I got him to drive Chance home. I was in the front seat and Chance was lying down and moaning in the back of his four-door Maserati. Meanwhile, I was such a druggie, I was snorting the bad coke, I didn’t care if it was killing Chance. We dropped him off at his house and I took the whole stash with me. Hey, bad coke is better than no coke. Chance recovered in a few days.
Around that time I started hanging out with this guy named Michael Politz. We had actually been in jail together in Maryland. He was in and out every once in a while because he said his crazy girlfriend at the time was slapping him with restraining orders that he kept violating so he could see his kid. Michael was totally plugged into the Vegas nightlife scene. He was straight, he didn’t drink or do drugs, so he was a perfect sober companion for me. I was doing enough drugs for the two of us. One night he heard about this party that the strip club Scores was throwing in the bowling alley suite at the Palms Hotel. The adult video convention was in town and the party was packed full of beautiful porn stars. I was eyeing two of them, but they had their boyfriends with them. Meanwhile, Michael was hitting on a pretty waitress. I had a brief conversation with one of the girls out of earshot of the boyfriends and then I went back to Michael.
“Come here,” I told him and I pulled him away from his waitress. We were whispering like little girls.
“Look behind me,” I said. “That’s the bathroom. I’m going to take these two girls into the bathroom and fuck them. Here’s what I want you to do. See those two guys? Those are the girls’ boyfriends. You’re going to keep them busy.”
“What!” Michael said.
“It’s going to be fine, brother, don’t worry,” I said.
“And what if these guys fuck with me?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be able to hear it. If I hear a commotion and they start to kick your ass, I’ll be right out of the bathroom in seconds and help you out. It’s going to be fine,” I assured him.
&
nbsp; My face was pressing against his ear, whispering all this shit. So to bust my balls, Michael blurted out all loud, “Mike, I’m not that comfortable right now with your mouth so close to my ear.”
The whole room heard him. I started laughing hysterically. This was one crazy white boy.
“Now you really owe me, motherfucker,” I said.
“All right, go,” he told me.
I went into the bathroom with the one girl while Michael diverted the guys’ attention. Then the other girl snuck in while he was telling them all these Mike Tyson stories. By the time the guys realized the girls were gone and asked where they went, Michael told them we all probably stepped outside for a second to smoke a joint.
That’s just how I was back then. I was fucked up and attracting that kind of energy. I was gaining weight and I was starting to look like a fat rock star. But because of the blow, my confidence was sky-high.
I was getting more and more blatant with the coke while I was out in clubs. I was with my friend Mack the barber one night and we were hanging out at the bar at the Wynn Hotel. Between signing autographs and posing for pictures with people, I kept going to the bathroom. Finally, Security came up to Mack.
“You need to come get your friend,” they told him. I had gotten caught doing blow in the bathroom and they were kicking me out of the hotel. That was the way it was then. I’d either get the royal treatment at the nightclubs or I’d be thrown out because people would report that I was doing coke in the bathroom or I was banging some broad in there. I was friendly with a lot of the doormen so they’d let me back in but some clubs totally barred me.
That’s why I always liked going to strip clubs more.
“Why do we hang out at these dance clubs when we can go to the strip clubs?” I’d tell my friends. “These girls have their clothes on and they’ve got an attitude. At the strip clubs the girls are naked and they’ve got good attitudes. Let’s get right to the nitty-gritty.”
The strip club owners all worked with me. I had my own private bathroom in some of those clubs. I’d be in there for hours and then I’d come out and talk with the owner. I was such a prima donna that when the security guy would come up to me, I’d scream at him.
“Get away from me! Get away from me, I’m not bothering nobody.”
It got so blatant that I’d be carrying my bag of coke openly with a straw coming out of it like it was a milkshake. I’d give a friend a hit and they’d think they’d be getting a little bump but then they’d squeal because so much coke was in the bag. They’d start coughing and spitting.
I started dating some of the strippers, and that was a volatile situation. I’d be high and I’d see one of my girls with a client, and I’d barge right over to her.
“Why are you not returning my calls?” I’d yell at her. She was doing a lap dance for some guy and I was in her face, harassing her.
“Hey, if there’s a problem …” the scared customer would say to me.
“Just mind your business, I’m talking to her,” I’d snarl.
Then the girls I was dating would get jealous and they’d start fighting with one another in the middle of the club. So I started getting banned from certain shifts.
The next thing you know, I started sleeping in the strip clubs. I’d get a box of fried chicken and I’d be eating it and then I’d just pass out from staying up for days on end. I’d be sleeping and the strippers were eating my chicken and going through my pockets. Then I’d wake up and start fighting with the G-string divas, not because they were going through my pockets but because they were eating my chicken and I was ravenously hungry. When you come down from coke, you’re famished.
By November of 2005, I was really gone. I went to L.A. for the premiere of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I was really high on cocaine and Robin was there. She must have seen me running around before the movie started, hitting on girls and just being silly. When the movie was over, I got up from my seat and she was right there. She gave me a hug and I kissed her. I was hoping that I might get to fuck her again. But she just went “Whoa” and walked away. As soon as she walked away, I turned around and Naomi Campbell grabbed me and hugged me. She must have seen me hugging Robin and she was probably thinking, He shouldn’t be hugging that bitch. With all that shit he went through with her, he’s hugging her?
Naomi pulled out of the hug and looked me in the eyes.
“Mike, the word is out you’re doing a lot of blow. You need to stop. You’re fucking your life up.”
She was mad and she was reading me a couple of paragraphs of the riot act. Nay Nay always cared deeply about me, and vice versa. She was a true friend.
But I didn’t heed her advice. I kept right on doing blow. Now, if you get high on coke and you don’t have girls around, that’s not a good high. And if you have girls without the coke, that’s not good either. You need both of them for the optimal experience. I used to say I needed “a ho and some blow.” Now, you might think that doing a lot of cocaine was not conducive to having sex, but that’s what Cialis and Viagra were for.
Around this time I started hanging out with Crocodile again. He would come back from training someone for a fight and he’d be in full party mode. One time, we were in my hotel room in Vegas with a famous porn star and her boyfriend. We had arranged for her to come to the room to have sex with us. As soon as they came into the room, Crocodile and I started taking off our clothes. Her boyfriend supposedly was okay with us both having sex with the porn star until he saw us naked.
“No, please don’t do it,” he cried to his girlfriend.
“What’s the deal with homeboy here?” I asked her. “I thought he was cool with this.”
“No, no! Just have oral sex with them,” he pleaded.
“No, man, we want to step on this pussy,” I told him.
He started crying so much that the porn star got up.
“I can’t do this. I got to go with him,” she said, and they both left.
Crocodile was too much. Every time he saw me with a girl, he automatically started taking his clothes off.
“Crocodile, this is my woman,” I’d tell him. “Not this time.”
“Oh, my bad, my bad,” he’d apologize.
Croc and I were at a New Year’s Eve 2006 party in Phoenix. Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley were there too. At the end of the night I saw this beautiful, beautiful girl, one of the most exquisite women I had ever seen. She was an actress and she kept dropping names, like Charlie Sheen. The girl was in close proximity to Crocodile but I couldn’t tell if she was really with him. I was looking at her and I said, “Who are you with?” And the next thing I knew, she said she was with Crocodile. This is going to be interesting, I thought.
We brought her back to a house that I had purchased in Phoenix and we started messing with the girl but we were both so high that we couldn’t get an erection, even though we were kissing on her and licking her. So we went out to some twenty-four-hour porn shop and brought some dirty movies back. And that didn’t even work. Man, it was so frustrating. This was the best-looking person I’d ever seen in my life and I couldn’t do anything. Croc and I were like two little kids at Christmas who weren’t strong enough to open the toy box. I was so pissed that I wasn’t packing my Cialis that night. I was just out getting high, I didn’t think I was going to run into any pussy.
I was able to buy that house in Phoenix because from time to time I’d make some money that didn’t have to go right to the creditors. A company in Japan gave me $800,000 to do a Pachinko gambling machine and an extra $100,000 to allow them to put me in trunks that were not black.
So my partying shifted to Phoenix then. I had spent a lot of time with Shelly Finkel in Phoenix so I was pretty connected to some wealthy people there. If I needed a place to stay before I bought the house, they’d find me someplace. Phoenix is a smaller party scene than Vegas but in some ways it’s much more intense. It looks like a quiet town, but at night it turned into a little animal. The partying there
was really high end, everyone getting down in mansions or in great hotel suites.
I got into a party circle there that included a lot of doctors. One of the doctors was a plastic surgeon and he used to have me come to his office and he’d set me up in one of the examining rooms. I had my cocaine to one side, my weed to the other, Viagra out on the table.
“Hey, Doc, I’m coming down. I don’t like the way I’m feeling,” I told him one day.
“Don’t worry, I’ll set you up,” he said and he went into the other room.
A few minutes later he wheeled in one of those intravenous drip things. He hooked me up to it.
“This’ll take the edge right off,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“A morphine drip,” he said.
This plastic surgeon could party like crazy. One time, he was driving alone in his car, doing all this coke, and he rolled the car. He went through the window and his face got all scraped up by the trees and the brush he plowed through.
Shortly after this I went to his house. I was shocked when he opened the door.
“You better look at your face, man,” I said. “You’re fucked up.”
All of the skin of his face had been peeled off by the brush and his whole face was one mask of blood. He was lucky he was a plastic surgeon.
I would get so fucked in Phoenix that I would start hallucinating. One time, I was in a car, and my assistant Darryl was driving. We were coming up to one of my friend’s houses and I said to Darryl, “Look! There are all these people outside the house waving at us.” There weren’t no people, it was the trees’ branches moving from the wind.
In July of 2006 I got another visit from the FBI. I had been partying the night before and when I saw an FBI SWAT team coming up the front steps of my house, I ran to the back door but they were right there too.