Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

“Mr. Tyson? We need to talk to you, champ.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Whose ass did I grab last night?

  “We’d like to know your association with this gentleman in the picture. His name is Dale Hausner,” one of the agents said.

  I looked at the picture. It showed this guy Dale and me shaking hands like we were buddies.

  “Do you know this man? He’s a boxing writer and a photographer,” the agent said.

  “I do remember this man. He came to visit me when I was working out in my gym. There were a few of the Mexican fighters there and they started hassling him.

  “ ‘Get out of here, you fucking fag,’ one of the Mexican fighters said to him. ‘The champ don’t want to talk to you.’

  “But it was Ramadan so I interceded and explained to the other fighters that this was a time of peace and that everybody had a place. So I let him interview me. I’m sorry if he was offended in any way. I didn’t mean to cause him any discomfort.”

  “No, no, he liked you, Mr. Tyson,” the FBI agent said. “He just didn’t like the eight people that he murdered and the other nineteen people that he shot.”

  It turned out that the police were investigating Hausner and his friend for a string of drive-by shootings in Arizona from May 2005 through July 2006. It was a good thing that I stopped those guys and showed this guy some respect or he might have been waiting outside the gym to shoot me.

  At the end of August, I got a gig doing boxing exhibitions at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. It was a sweet deal. They gave me a nice suite and paid me to work out in a room where they set up a boxing ring. Thousands of people coming through the hotel could see me sparring and hitting the heavy bag. I got free food, whatever I wanted, carte blanche. So I called all my friends.

  “Come on over. I’m here for a month. You can order anything, it’s on the bitch, nigga.”

  I called the hotel “the bitch” then. I was in that pimp mentality.

  Bobby Brown was in town and I invited him and Karrine Steffans, aka Superhead, the girl he was currently seeing, to come up to see me. I had fooled around with her before too, so it was all good, so I thought. She was one of those girls who you couldn’t get ahold of that often but when you did it was a great time.

  Bobby didn’t want to do that. I didn’t realize that he was actually serious about her. So he brought his father and some other friends down. They came there first and I gave them the royal treatment. Then Bobby came. I was down in the lobby when he arrived and we went up the elevator together. People were going crazy when they saw the two of us. The wife in one couple said, “Oh shit! Mike Tyson and Bobby Brown. These two niggas together, it’s on, baby, it is on.” They knew that we were trouble.

  I wanted Bobby to chill for a while with me. It was great to hang out with Bobby because when he was married to Whitney she would never let him hang out with me – although I couldn’t blame her.

  Around this time, I started to have difficulty acquiring my coke. It wasn’t like there was any shortage of blow in Vegas; it was that the dealers didn’t want to provide coke to my ass. Dealers were always notoriously late when they said they’d be by with the stuff, and I had no patience so sometimes I’d wind up copping in a burger joint. My drought began in the ghetto. First, they wouldn’t let me in the bathroom of the bars on the Westside. Then the drug dealers started refusing to service me.

  “Go train, Mike, we need you to train,” they’d tell me. These guys had grown up with me in Vegas, seen me hanging around the barbershop for years, and they didn’t want to contribute to my downfall. I used to hand out free turkeys to these guys when they were kids so they felt a real bond with me. So out of necessity I started fucking with the white people on the Strip. The casino greeters, the doormen at the clubs, they all had connections.

  I was at the Aladdin during the time I was doing the exhibitions and I called up a guy to have an eight ball sent up to my suite. They sent this fucking country nigga with the blow. He was all excited, he thought that he was going to be partying with me and a bunch of girls. He was going to be the life of the party and hold everyone captive with that coke. I opened the door for him and let him in.

  “You got the stuff?” I said.

  “Yeah, but where the people at?”

  “There ain’t nobody. Just me here, nigga,” I said. “You sell drugs, right? So just sell me the motherfucking drugs, okay?”

  I grabbed the package from his hands.

  “Fuck that shit, you don’t need to do this stuff, Mike,” he said. “You’re the champ. We love you, Mike.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ll work out by escorting your ass to the door.”

  I opened the door and the fucker grabbed the bag of coke and ran out. “Go fucking train, Mike,” he yelled back at me. I ran after him but I was fat and mad and I didn’t have no clothes on. I was clutching a towel that was around my waist.

  “You come back, motherfucker. I’m going to kill you!”

  He was in shape and he got away. I really wanted to beat his ass. Who did he think he was, Florence Fucking Nightingale?

  I started strong-arming the few dealers that would still sell to me when I was low on cash. One day a dealer came to me for help.

  “Listen, Mike, can you help me out? Please tell Crocodile to pay me my money. I gave him all this coke.”

  Once he told me that, he was finished. I knew this guy was a pussy and I knew that I’d never have to pay him for drugs anymore if he couldn’t get Crocodile to pay him.

  “Sure, I’ll talk to Crocodile, but give me that stuff you’ve got right now,” and I snatched his coke right out of his hand.

  “Oh, man, my boss is going to kill me. I need to bring back some money,” he said.

  “Your boss needs that money from that other nigga,” I said.

  “Nah, man, I got to get it from you.”

  “Well, you tell your boss to come and talk to me about the money then. Listen, you got me addicted, now you want to charge me money, motherfucker? I’m strung out on the coke, nigga.”

  Once when I had no money for coke I drove out to Summerlin where the big coke kings lived. I’d meet them in their big mansions and I’d hang with them for hours, taking pictures, doing lines with them. Then when it was time to get down to the negotiations, I’d play them. They’d tell me the price and I’d get indignant.

  “Hey, what’s this all about? You really want to sell me this shit, brother? You’ve been hanging out with me all day and you want to make me pay for this shit?”

  “Here, take it,” they’d finally say.

  Cocaine is the devil, there’s no doubt about it. I was always a chauvinist when it came to women. Even if I was broke, I’d never let them buy me dinner. But when I needed money for blow and I saw my girlfriend drop some money, I’d wait and then put it in my pocket. That was one of the worst feelings I ever felt. I didn’t want to play with the devil any longer, but he still wanted to play and it wouldn’t be over until he said it was over.

  I was so destitute that I even went to Youngstown, Ohio, to put on a four-round boxing exhibition on October twentieth with my old sparring partner Corey Sanders. It was promoted by this ex-fighter named Sterling McPherson. I didn’t remember getting paid for the exhibition even though Sterling sold four thousand out of six thousand seats at prices from $25 to $200 and charged $29.95 for the pay-per-view of the event. But I thought that if I stayed busy I could get off drugs. McPherson was talking about touring this exhibition all over the world so maybe I’d get some gwap then.

  The whole match was a fiasco. Corey came in at three hundred pounds, about fifty pounds bigger than me. He wore headgear and the crowd booed him for that. We began to spar and I got in a good shot and dropped Corey in the first round. I had him in trouble in the third and the fourth but I didn’t press it. I didn’t have any hurting in my heart back then.

  As soon as the exhibition was over I went back to Vegas and got higher and higher. One night I was out on the town and I ran into the guy
who had pulled a gun on me back at Bentley’s years earlier in New York. He was still with his wife and they saw me in a club and I was looking so bad that they felt sorry for me.

  “Are you all right, man?” he asked me.

  He should have kicked my ass right there. I was vulnerable then.

  By then, my nose was so fucked up from doing coke that I started smoking it. Not crack, I would take the regular powdered coke and take some tobacco out of one of my cigarettes and add it in. That’s what we used to do when we were kids back in Brooklyn. All the sniffers, the people who sniff cocaine, they all hated me smoking coke. Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined. A friend of mine once told me that when you want to know something about anything, put some fire under it, the fire brings out everything. You want to know something about a motherfucker, but some fire under his ass. Well, when you put some fire under that cocaine, you know what it’s made out of – all that poison, all that shit comes up out of there and it smells like hell.

  I even smoked that shit in my then favorite strip club in Vegas. The owner would let me go to the bathroom and smoke. He was helping me kill myself. In Phoenix one place let me smoke my coke inside the club. Thank God the cops never walked in there when I was doing that. For me, doing coke was very ritualistic, so I re-created my rituals in the strip club. I had my Hennessy, my Cialis, my Marlboros all surrounding me. And, of course, the coke, which I would pass around to all my friends.

  During this whole crazy period when I was doing all these drugs and bringing in hookers, I used to hear Cus in my head every day. But I didn’t give a fuck because he wasn’t there in the flesh. Living wasn’t a big priority for me then. Now all I want to do is live, but back then, in the prime of my life, it meant nothing to me. By the time I was the champ at twenty, so many of my friends were dead or decimated. Some of them were sent away to prison for so long that when they came back out they were zombies, they didn’t know what planet they were on. Some even did something intentionally to get back behind bars.

  During those years, for me doing an eight ball a day, three and a half grams of coke, was just a good night. The more I did, the more I wanted to do it alone. Maybe I was just a pig or maybe I didn’t want people to see me that sloppy. By then, there was nothing euphoric anymore about coke, it was just numbing. I wasn’t even having sex with women with the coke anymore. Every now and then I had a girl with me but it was more to chill out with than to have sex.

  I was living a crazy existence. One day I’d be in the sewage with some street hooker trying to get her to have sex without a condom, and the next night I’d be in Bel-Air with my rich friends with a happy face on, celebrating Rosh Hashanah. Right about then, I hit rock bottom. I was in a hotel suite in Phoenix. I had my morphine drip and my Cialis and my bottle of Hennessy. And seven hookers. All of a sudden, the coke made me paranoid and I thought that these women were trying to set me up and rob me. So I started beating them. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just demons around me, it was the devil himself. And he had won. I kicked those hookers out of the room and did the rest of my coke.

  Some of my lady friends, not lovers, just friends, would tell me that it was time that I found a woman to be with. They’d even say bullshit like “to die with.”

  “I’m going to do this to the end, baby. I’m going to play to a place I can’t play anymore,” I’d tell them. I was talking bullshit. I had to find myself before I could find somebody else. Jackie Rowe used to try to lecture me about drugs and I’d just tell her, “If you love me, you’d let me do this.”

  “Listen, Mike, I refuse to sit here and watch you go out like a loser. We’re winners,” she’d say. She used to actually go through all my pants and jackets before she’d send them down to the hotel cleaners to make sure there weren’t drugs in them.

  I knew that all my friends were concerned about my drug use but they knew better than to tell me to stop doing what I loved to my face. I began to isolate myself just so I didn’t have to hear any of that shit. I had only one friend who could get away with telling me that. It was Zip. He did it in such a clever way too. He’d be with me chilling, smoking some weed, and then he’d turn serious on me.

  “Don’t worry, Mike, we are going to have a beautiful funeral for you. I’ve already put the money aside. We’ll be smoking some weed and drinking that good Cristal and thinking about you. I’m going to get one of those carriages that the horses pull around and we’ll have your casket behind it and we’re going to flaunt your body through all the boroughs of the city, man. It’s going to be beautiful, man.”

  At the end of October, I had lunch in Phoenix with my therapist Marilyn, who was back from Moscow. I was sitting in the restaurant and I saw a pretty young lady by herself at another table and I told the waiter that I would pay for her meal. Then the lady came over to our table and gave me her number.

  When she left, Marilyn was quiet for a second. Then she spoke.

  “I’ll make you a bet that you couldn’t last six weeks in a rehab.”

  That struck my macho nerves.

  “Are you crazy? I could do six weeks like nothing, I’m disciplined.”

  The truth was, I was ready to do something like that. I had gotten tired of falling through the loopholes. I had a bad relationship with my kids, I had a bad relationship with the mothers of my kids, I had bad relationships with a lot of friends of mine. Some people were scared to be around me.

  I was about to leave to do a meet-and-greet tour of England for six weeks so I decided that I would stop doing drugs, even weed, during that tour so that by the time I got back to Phoenix for the rehab, I’d be prepared. So I stopped. I didn’t do coke or weed and I even stopped drinking.

  That was when I knew that I really had a problem. The first couple of hours I was just losing my mind. I destroyed my hotel room, I was going crazy, but I didn’t get high. I had a miserable trip but I didn’t get high once. So when I got back to Phoenix, I was all clean and ready to go into rehab. I’d already gone through the severe withdrawals.

  Marilyn took me to a place called The Meadows. We walked into that place and right off the bat it looked more like a prison than a rehabilitation center. The first thing they did there was to keep you high on medicine. Everybody in the place was fat and slow. If you’d get into a fight it would take them two hours to get there. So they banged me up on meds and then they took me for an interview with the counselors. I thought that rehab was a place where you just chilled and watched TV until your time was up. I didn’t know I was going to have to talk about my deep past and my inner trauma. But these weird, intrusive motherfuckers were all over me with questions.

  “How long have you been getting high?”

  “What drugs have you used?”

  “What external circumstances trigger your drug use?”

  “What was your home life like as a child?”

  “By any chance are you a homosexual?”

  Holy shit, these guys wouldn’t stop getting in my face. This guy that I didn’t know from a can of paint expected me to answer all these intimate questions. I didn’t want to deal with the reality of who I was and my relationship with my demons.

  “Hey, get the fuck out of my head, motherfucker. Fuck all of you!” I said. “How dare you talk to me like this, you uppity piece of white trash.”

  And then I left the next day.

  A week later I checked into another rehab in Tucson. Marilyn was going to kill me if I didn’t go back into treatment. She can give the impression of being a nice, innocent, old grandmotherly white lady, but she’s not. She wouldn’t let me quit. She gave me some real grimy aggressive chastisement. She said, “No, no, you are going to finish this bet.” That’s when I saw another side to her – that fire in her eyes. She was nobody to play with, she meant business. So I tried another place in Phoenix. I liked the people at this second place. I bonded with this young wealthy girl who was going to school to be a fashion d
esigner and was strung out on heroin. I got in trouble there because someone hurt my feelings and said something about me to one of the staff members and I ripped into them. Everybody got scared when I was talking because they weren’t used to a nigga talking to them that way. The people running the place just said, “You have to go, everybody is scared,” so I called this young girl I was dating and she came and got me and I left.

  Phoenix is a white-bread by-the-book-assed town. In my opinion, when you’re in a drug rehabilitation program there, you can feel the superciliousness of racism there from these sophisticated doctors and the other people who were supposed to help you.

  I was the token Negro there. The staff had a stereotypical preconceived notion of black men, and, in particular, black athletes. The head administrator even had the audacity to say to me, “We had other athletes here and they all had their jewelry on. I noticed you’re not flashy like them.”

  “That’s because I don’t have any money,” I responded curtly.

  The undertone of his comments wasn’t lost on me. He just omitted the word “black,” although he was thinking it.

  Marilyn saw that too and kept trying to find me a place that would work for me. But I had other things to do first. It was Christmas 2006 and I was determined to make it a white Christmas in Arizona. My assistant Darryl was sleeping in another room and I snuck out of the house and got into my BMW. I drove to the Pussycat Lounge, and when I got there, I looked for the manager, this hot girl that I had been attracted to.

  “Where’s the white bitch at?” I asked her.

  “I can get you some, one minute,” she said.

  She came back with three small plastic bags with a gram of coke in each one.

  Then she shocked me.

  “Can I have some?” she said.

  I had never had any indication that this girl was interested in me. We went into the office and did a few lines each.

  “You’ve been drinking, Mike,” she observed. “Do you need me to drive you somewhere?”

  “No, I’m okay,” I said.