by Mike Tyson
I couldn’t believe I said that. Here was my chance to get that pussy that I had coveted for years. The devil was surely working on me then. I was thinking, I’m not going to let her drive me, she just wants my cocaine. Fuck this bitch. I wanted to be alone with my fantasy girl, the real white bitch. I was just being selfish about the cocaine. I could have gotten a ride home with the girl I was trying to get with for such a long time, but I didn’t want to share any of the coke.
So I got in the car. I immediately dumped most of the coke from one of the baggies on the center console. Then I pulled out my Marlboros and took out half the tobacco from one cigarette and scooped up some coke and poured it into the cigarette. I took a few hits and then I started driving home.
Now, I’m not the best driver, even when I am stone-cold sober. So I was driving along, weaving between lanes, when I passed a police sobriety checkpoint. I didn’t realize it but the cops saw the way I was driving so they started following me. After I blew past a stop sign and then nearly swerved into a sheriff’s car, they pulled me over. When the cop approached my car, I frantically tried to brush all the coke off the console but the leather had pores in it and even if you spat and tried to wash it off, the pores would absorb some of the coke.
I rolled down my window and he asked for my license and registration. Then he realized it was me. And he saw the mess on the console.
“I can’t believe this shit, Mike,” he said.
He pulled me out of the car and did some field sobriety tests on me and I was too fucked up to pass. Then he searched me and found the other two baggies in my pants pocket. Then they brought the dope dog in and he sniffed the coke that was still in the car. So they took me in.
They had me in a holding cell before they interrogated me. I was really pissed. I had enough coke on me to warrant a felony. But whenever I was locked up, I’d always find a white guy in there that knows the system. This was no exception.
“Yo, champ, what are you in for?” the white kid asked me.
“Man, they caught me with some cocaine,” I said.
“Have you ever been arrested for drugs before?” he asked.
“I’ve been arrested a lot of times but not for drugs.”
His face brightened.
“Don’t worry, bro. You’re not going to jail,” he said. “They can’t lock you up for your first drug rap, they have to try to help you first.”
Now that I knew what time it was, I was ready for my interrogation. The arresting officer brought me to a room.
“What drugs or medications have you been using?” he asked.
“Zoloft,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“Marijuana and cocaine. I take one Zoloft pill a day.”
“How much marijuana did you smoke?”
“Two joints, earlier in the day.”
“When was the last time you used cocaine before now?” he asked me.
“Yesterday.”
“How often do you use it?”
“Whenever I can get my hands on it. I had some this morning about nine a.m.”
“Why do you use both marijuana and cocaine?”
“I’m an addict.”
“Do you use them at the same time?”
“Yes. It makes me feel good when I use them together.”
“What does the Zoloft do for you?” he asked.
“It regulates me. I’m fucked up.”
“You don’t appear to be fucked up,” he said.
“I know, man, but I am fucked up,” I said and then started laughing loudly like the guy in that movie Reefer Madness after he lit up a joint.
I told him that I smoked the coke in my Marlboros and he was intrigued how I did that so I took him through the whole process.
Another officer who was there asked me if I felt good because the drug was in my system while I was driving. I told him that I felt good earlier in the day.
“I want to thank you for being so cooperative, Mike,” the first cop said.
“I’m a pretty cool guy,” I said.
“In my town, people would start yelling at me if they knew I brought you in,” he said.
I didn’t know how to react so I just acted like a psycho. I looked down at the ground and spoke deeper than usual.
“Fuck you, I hate you. Fuck you, deadbeat. Fuck you.”
“Does anyone ever give you shit, Mike?” the first cop asked.
“All the time. But I put it away and don’t let it bother me,” I said.
The cop turned off the tape recorder and walked me over to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office mobile unit. They processed me in and set me up in a cell by myself. There was even a phone inside the cell. I spent most of the night making collect calls.
When I made bail the next morning, Darryl came to pick me up. I gave him a hug when I saw him. Darryl had been trying to keep me straight for years now, from Las Vegas to Amsterdam. It was a tough job.
“Yo, Mike, why did you bounce last night and not say anything to me?” he asked.
“Life’s rough, brother. Life’s rough,” I said.
Darryl drove me to Shelley’s house and I took a shower and saw my kids Miguel and Exodus, and had a nice meal. Then I got a lawyer. I called my contacts in Vegas and they came up with David Chesnoff, a really connected lawyer who was partners with Oscar Goodman, who represented me in my attempt to get my boxing license back. Even though it wasn’t mandated, Chesnoff’s strategy was to get me into rehab as soon as possible and for me to do meaningful community service to show the court that I was serious about straightening out my life.
So I went to my third rehab in Phoenix. It was in a small house where the guy who ran it lived. This guy was a real prick who kept trying to play me. I made one real friend there, though, an Italian guy from Brooklyn, one of those “Hey, let’s get it going!” dudes. Great smile, great energy. I would have gotten kicked out a lot quicker if it wasn’t for him. But the other people were afraid of me. The guy who ran the place used the fact that I forgot to lock up my medication as an excuse to boot my ass out.
I could have just said “Fuck you all, I ain’t going back” at that point, but Marilyn and I had too strong a bond. So Marilyn and my lawyer did some research and they reached out to Dr. Sheila Balkan, a renowned criminologist who specialized in developing treatment options as an alternative to incarceration. She got me into my next rehab, a place in the Hollywood Hills called Wonderland. Sheila and Harold, one of her associates, came to pick me up and take me there. There was part of me that was so mad that I had to keep going back to these places and I got really high one more time before I left. A lot of junkies get high for the last ride. But these were really cool people, not judgmental at all. We got to Wonderland and I was a mess I was so high.
Wonderland was a universe apart from those other rehab places I had been to. This wasn’t Arizona anymore; we had some liberal shit going on here. We were not dealing with judgmental people now, these are very interesting people who are not scared of difficult guys like me. Wonderland was one of those high-end rehabs that catered to the children of the elite – movie stars, bankers, you name it. This was mansion-style living, just like I had been accustomed to. It cost an arm and a leg, but I think they must have given me a break because I didn’t have any money then.
I immediately fell in love with the place. I felt that this could be a life-saving deal. I had my own room and I was surrounded by all these cool young kids who didn’t give a fuck. We were spitting distance from Marlon Brando’s old house and the place where Jack Nicholson had lived for years. I settled in and started going to A.A. meetings. They let you go out into town on your own, you just had to be back at the house for curfew.
But a few weeks in, a wrench was thrown into the mix. Because I was a convicted level-three felon and I had the rape charge on my package, the administration was afraid of me being there with the other patients. If anything happened, everyone including the state of California could have been sued. I guess Shei
la had called in a favor to get my ass in that place, but now it was touch and go whether I could stay. But I had become friends with all the kids there and they stepped up to the plate. Every night I would go and bring frozen yogurt back for everyone. At the meetings I brought cookies and milk. So we really had a family unit going on. Eventually they had a meeting and everyone was like, “Mike’s got to stay. Don’t let Mike go,” and they voted and I was in.
I always prided myself on my discipline, but withdrawing from coke was a motherfucker. Every pain you ever got from boxing came back during the withdrawals. The coke and the liquor were like Novocaine for me. Once I stopped doing that, all my arthritis came roaring back. I was a cripple, I couldn’t walk, my feet hurt so bad. Even today, I still have to get a cortisone shot every once in a while to get me through the pain.
I kept to the straight and narrow at Wonderland. There were temptations. A famous young actress was in there with me. She was going out every night with her friends. Four or five limos or Benzes would come pick them up. It was a whole convoy. She had a black guy who was running the show for her and he invited me to come along one night.
“Nah, I can’t come. If there’s even a picture of me hanging out with these guys, I’m going straight to prison,” I told him.
I wanted to go so bad, it was still in me, but I resisted. But these kids were bending the rules right and left. One rich kid actually snuck a fifty-inch flat-screen TV into his room so that he could play his video games. They caught his ass and took it right out.
After a while, I got into a rhythm. I threw myself into my meetings. I did the 12-step work better than anyone. I was the poster boy for doing the work. Everybody was required to go to one meeting a day, I’d go to three or four. Marilyn came to visit me about three months after I got there and I took her to one of my meetings on the Sunset Strip. I passed the basket around to get donations for the coffee and tea. Then when the meeting was over, I put away the chairs and swept and mopped the floor. I wanted to feel good doing that stuff.
I still had conflicting feelings about all this. A lot of my heroes were losers when it came to managing their lives but were champions in their field. People wanted to get them off alcohol and drugs to save them, but sometimes without the alcohol and drugs, they’d lose their great qualities. The people in my life were happy when I was sober, but I was miserable. I just wanted to die.
But I always had Marilyn in my face when I thought like that.
“What are you talking about? You are going to be in the program,” she’d yell. She’d go from a nice white-haired lady to a fucking demon. It was meant for that lady to be in my life. You’re so caught up in your vice you don’t even realize how sick you are. I equate sickness with blisters or dripping, not psychological illness.
Because of my celebrity they wanted me to go to the closed meetings. I went to a few of them and I was shocked. I saw some of the biggest names in the world in those rooms. And they liked me; they thought I was a badass. They would say, “Mike, you need money?” and they’d have someone put some cash in my account. One thing I found out in those meetings was everybody knows when you’re getting high. One time, I saw this world-famous actor, one of the biggest, at a closed meeting. He greeted me and said, “Hey, we’ve been waiting for you here. I have a seat reserved for you.”
How the hell did he know that I was using? I thought. But if you’re using, everybody who is using knows you’re using. We think no one sees us but we are more transparent than we believe.
But the closed-door meetings weren’t my thing. I went about four times but I had to go back to the regular meetings. All the guys in the closed programs were elitists so they were going to run their own program. I had to do Bill W.’s program. I had to be in there with the masses.
I owe Marilyn a debt that can never be repaid for getting me into the recovery world. That is one fascinating world. You think cops got the biggest fraternity in the world? You think gangs are big? They’re nothing compared to the recovery world. They got federal judges, marshals, and prosecutors. You be careful about what recovering alcoholic or addict you’re fucking with, because this is one huge powerful family. Don’t ever underestimate the power of recovery, because if you do, you’re going down. They’ve got the ear of everyone, including the President.
They’re a motley crew too. I saw ex-Hells Angels, ex-gangbangers, strange guys whose sole purpose in life is to get people to stop drinking and stop getting high. Do you feel me? Some of these guys have been in prison for most of their lives and their goal in life now is to save as many people as possible and get them to live life on life’s terms and to face their fears sober. These are special people, Marilyn included. They are a different breed of people. All my intimidating, bullshit doesn’t work with them. Big killers with knife scars on their face, mob hit men, these A.A. people don’t get scared. It’s almost impossible to scare an addict. Even if they say they’re afraid of you, they’re really not.
If anybody ever got out of place and said something disrespectful about Marilyn, I would have fucked their world up. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire, you don’t have enough money to pay these people, you’d be slaving and indebted to them for the rest of your life. And they’re at peace with themselves. They don’t do this shit for money, they do it for moral accomplishment. A lot of these guys go through the motions and smile and they’re cool until they have to go into action. We had a puny little Jewish kid who worked at Wonderland and would drive us around. One day we were going to get ice cream so a bunch of us got in the car. One patient came running up late and he got in the car and you could smell the alcohol on his breath. This puny staff guy got out of the car, threw the back door open, and dragged this drunk guy out of the car. “Oh shit,” I said. I was the heavyweight champ, why didn’t I do that? I had so much respect for that puny-assed kid. He didn’t have a violent bone in his body until that switch went off and he did this thing. He’s smiling “Beautiful day, huh?” until he smelled that liquor.
I got so much support when I was at Wonderland. A big rock star in the program called me right away when he heard I was having problems.
“Mike, come see me if you need anything.”
He knew what my mind was doing. He was an incredible guy. One day a famous British actor came to visit me at Wonderland and shared about his bouts with alcoholism. What a beautiful man. People think addicts are bums and horrible people but they’re the geniuses of our times.
It’s not always a happy ending when you talk about recovery, but when endings are happy, they’re almost godsent. People are going to die in our family, they’re going to run away and get high and OD. We’re still going to get sick, we’ll still get the short end of the stick in life, but now we have tools that are remarkable to help us deal with these problems. Getting involved with the recovery program was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. These are great people and they never get enough credit from our society.
Going to Wonderland was really a turning point in my life. I could relate to the idea of improving myself, Cus had drilled that into me years earlier. But it was hard because all those drugs had suppressed all the good shit I had. But just to get back in a daily rhythm – go to work out, go to my meetings, and go out to dinner with my peers – was great. And when I saw all these other people who were supposed to be incurable addicts doing so well at meetings my competitive streak kicked in. I just jumped seeing that. If those guys could do it, I knew I could too. I wasn’t going to let anyone outdo me. One guy had been sober for ten years. If you met this guy you would have thought he was a saint. But his parents still weren’t talking to him. He had been a monster most of his life. But now he had a job, he was supporting his family, and his main goal in life was to get other people like him into recovery.
A lot of people relapse when they’re in rehab but I couldn’t even conceive of that. If I got high in that place then I would feel like the biggest loser. My whole purpose of being there was to not
get high. When I’m around that positive energy I soak it up like a sponge. I’m the biggest cheerleader. “Hey, we’re here to be sober. We’re going to do it together. Yeah, let’s do it!” But if I was by myself it would be, “Hey, you got a syringe?”
One of the scariest and most satisfying things was to go on 12-step calls. Guys who may have been sober for twenty years and you hear they’re in the hospital, that they had a slip and had started drinking again. Some of the kids I was with at Wonderland snuck out and we had to go find them. I was just a patient and they were sending me out to look for those guys. So we drove down to Hollywood and Vine. You go right to the drug spot and that’s where you’ll find them. They were just sitting there on the street. They looked so bad they were hardly recognizable. They’re white but the sun burned their skin so much that they looked dark. I saw a lot of bad stuff that year.
I was seeing all sorts of counselors when I was at Wonderland. Because of the road rage conviction, they sent me to anger management classes. The guy who ran the class was a tiny guy named Ian. I couldn’t see what he could know about anger management. But after a while, I could see that Ian appeared as if he were ready to explode any minute. I guess they’re the right people for the job. He taught me a Jewish proverb the first session we had.
“Bright light, dark shadows. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” He told me that the biggest stars were the darkest ones, that was why I was here with him.
Marilyn suggested that I see a sex counselor too. She had sent me to one in Arizona but it wasn’t until I got to Wonderland that I really got into that work. Whenever Marilyn and I hung out she saw how I reacted to women approaching me. I always felt that girls were coming on to me, that they were the ones with the problem.
“No, you’re putting too much time into the conversation,” Marilyn would lecture me. “You’re not just saying ‘Thank you’ and giving them an autograph. You’re asking them where they’re from, how long they lived here, if they were single. We’ve been here thirty minutes and you have ten phone numbers already. Is there anybody you turn down?”