“Hey! I’m naked here,” she said.
“Shut the fuck up!” George said as he hustled over to check me out. I was sitting on the bed, passed out, head down, with a full hard-on propping up my chin (as George tells it.)
George shook me and saw I was still breathing.
“I think he overdosed,” the girl said.
“Bullshit. He just passed out,” said George, knowing I never do drugs.
“No, guys can’t keep it up when they pass out,” she said.
“This guy can,” said George.
George called for his backup, another one of Chicago’s finest, and the guy walked in the bedroom.
“Hey! I’m naked here,” the girl said.
“Shut the fuck up!” he said.
George decided to get me dressed and haul me into the hotel to sleep it off. So they dressed me in these baggy pants, shirt, Birkenstocks, but they couldn’t do a thing with my member that was making a goddamn circus tent in the front of my pants. What the hell? They were dragging my ass down the aisle of the bus when I woke up. Now I couldn’t walk, I could barely talk, but I still wanted to stay with the girl. I wanted to keep partying.
“Sure. No problem,” said George. “So tell me, Dennis. What’s the state fish of Hawaii?”
That’s what it’s like when you live every day like it’s New Year’s Eve—lots of fun, lots of great stories. And I lived that life for almost 10 years. But after a while—a long, long while—I began to realize that there was a New Year’s Day following New Year’s Eve. A day I’d been sleeping through.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHO LOVES DENNIS RODMAN?
The question was simple enough: “Who loves Dennis Rodman, and who does Dennis Rodman love?” But it got me stammering.
“Who loves Dennis Rodman?” I finally asked, stalling.
I really don’t know who loves Dennis Rodman. My kids for sure—at least the two little ones, Dennis Jr.—“D.J.,” we call him— and Trinity. But they’re so young, four and three; they’re blind right now. They just know daddy, daddy, daddy.
They don’t know “Dennis Rodman.”
As for Alexis and Chance, my 16-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son, they are part of my life just one day a month—payday. Other than that, we haven’t been in contact for a long, long time. I still love them both, but if they love me, they aren’t showing it. There are scars—literally—when it comes to Alexis. When she was a toddler, she grabbed my right earring, splitting the ear wide open. It hurt like hell for a minute, and I still have a big notch in my ear lobe. In those days,Alexis was the light of my life, but now she won’t even talk to me. Oprah tried to get us back together on her show a few years ago, and that turned into a disaster. My publicity-hound ex-wife wouldn’t let Alexis come on stage unless she was included, and I ended up crying on national television.
Love has too often been just another word for “pain” in my life.
What is love anyway?
I hear tell you’re supposed to learn that as you’re growing up— not in my family. My father, Philander (that’s not a typo), who was career Air Force, disappeared when I was three. People tell me he’s living in the Philippines and reportedly brags about having a couple of dozen children. What an asshole.
As for my mother down in Texas, I could never say, “I love my mother.” I don’t know what that is—have never known—to be honest. My mother never hugged me, or my two younger sisters, Debra and Kim. Never even gave us a hug. That’s just how she was—I don’t hold it against her. She worked as many as four jobs at once, usually managing to keep us living a lifestyle I guess you’d call “lower middle class,” and all three of us kids made it to college on basketball scholarships. My sisters even graduated. I mean the woman was busy. Maybe she loved us; she just didn’t know how to show it. She had her own problems with love, seemed to be always be hooking up with some sorry-ass man. We would hear her crying all the time in the bedroom by herself. We didn’t know what to do. We were kids, you know? We didn’t know why she was crying.
And there are unhealed wounds—tough love gone wrong, you might say. When I was 19, my mother let me cool my heels in jail overnight when I got caught stealing some watches. Later, she kicked me out of the house, trying to shock some sense into me, and I was homeless for months. She was just a hardcore black woman. Now I know “it was for my own good,” but I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive or forget.
Today I guess you could call my family “estranged.” My mother has never even seen my three youngest kids, and I can’t remember the last time the family spent Christmas—or any holidays— together. I was 20-something. I’ve always said that I’m not going home until I make something of my life. And even after all I’ve done, I don’t think I’ve accomplished enough to sit down and talk to my mother about anything.
Reality Check: You have to get love to give love.
In some ways, I’ve turned out like my mother. I don’t show love on the outside. I don’t show it. I’ve been so scarred and calloused. Another one of those amateur shrinks said, after looking at the way I deal with women, the way I treat women, I may be taking out the anger I feel for my mother on women in general. I don’t think so. First off, I’m not mad at my mother. It’s more like indifference. Second, I’ve had many bad things happen with women that don’t have a damn thing to do with my mother.
As I said, before I made it in the NBA, I thought women were shit, and they returned the favor. I didn’t have any money, no car, this, that, so they weren’t interested. That left me feeling vindictive. Then I made the pros, and all those girls who didn’t like me came back all of a sudden and wanted to date me. I thought that was bullshit.
These days I like to say women are adaptable. They may come into a relationship humble and poor, but they adapt really quickly. You end up in court, and it’s like, “I gotta live a certain way. I gotta have this, I gotta have that.”
“What do you mean, you gotta have that? You didn’t have shit when I met you.”
Men have no choice but to sit there and take it. Whoever came up with the divorce laws in this country ought to have their ass kicked.
Who do I love? Coaches Chuck Daly and Phil Jackson, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, and James Rich, the head of the Oklahoma family I lived with during my college years. Each has been like a father to me—the “four wise men” I call them. Put them all together, and they are the winter, spring, summer, and fall of fatherhood. These were guys who set me straight when I needed setting straight—who hung with me when they didn’t have to. I can say I love them. Do they love me back? You’ll have to ask them.
Friends? I’ve never had the ability to have one true friend forever. And I’m not sure the word “love” applies. I have trusted friends and counted on them, but love? Get back to me when the money and fame are a distant memory.
I guess when somebody’s time runs out, making a list of who loved them and who they loved would be one way of tallying up a life, measuring success and failure. As for me, right now, I can say my children loved me, and I loved them back; a segment of the public loved me, the image anyway, it still does, although I’m not sure that counts. They don’t really know me. My family? Forget it. Women? That is probably my biggest failure in the love department. While I hope it will happen with my wife Michelle, so far, I haven’t been able to get anything to last. Dennis Rodman can tell you how to sleep with dozens of women in one year, but don’t ask him how to sleep with one woman for a dozen years.
In the market for an orgasm? I’m your man.
Want to set up housekeeping? I don’t have a clue.
“Who loved Dennis Rodman, and who did Dennis Rodman love?”
When I look back over all the people I have known in my life, only one name keeps popping up in both columns with no qualifiers, no asides, no doubt. While I may have fucked it up completely—from the tarmac of the Orange County Airport to the wedding chapel in Las Vegas through our headline-making brawl at the Bentley Ho
tel in South Beach—I have to say it was all done with a certain bad-boy-meets-bad-girl, lives-noisily-ever-after, up-yours, can’t-you-see-that-we’re-busy, Dennis-Rodman style. I mean we may have become a punch-line on the late-night talk shows, but if you’d been there beside us, known what was really going on, you would have been cheering for us. For as messed up as it was, this was purely and simply a love story: a funny, sexy, touching, and, in the end, heartbreaking love story.
“Who loved Dennis Rodman, and who did Dennis Rodman love?”
Tara Leigh Patrick, a.k.a. Carmen Electra—the love of my life.
Our tale begins in Los Angeles.
CHAPTER SIX
CARMEN-CHANTED EVENINGS
Once upon a fucking time in Los Angeles, I met Carmen Electra. It happened at Billboard Live, a dance club in West Hollywood. This was in early 1998, midway through my last season with the Bulls, when we were in town to play the Lakers. I was upstairs at the club, standing at the bar working on a Coors Light, when “Joe Jr.,” the kid you may remember from the orgy, walked up to me rubbing his chin like someone had just busted him in the chops.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“My hard-on just hit me in the chin,” he said. “Carmen Electra’s here.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
I’d never even heard of her.
“The Baywatch babe,” said Joe Jr. “She’s so beautiful. She’s gorgeous.”
Whatever.
By then I was used to meeting beautiful girls, even bored with it.
They comes. They goes.
But Joe Jr. persisted and talked this friend of ours, Floyd Ragland, “Mr. Social” we called him, into chatting up Carmen. A few minutes later, Floyd escorted her over to the bar.
“This is Carmen Electra,” he said.
A striking brunette a few inches over five feet with a body to kill for, I could see what Joe Jr. meant. Not that it was love at first sight. I don’t do love at first sight—lust maybe, but not love. It’s not in me.
“How you doing?” I said, and she looked like she wasn’t any more thrilled meeting me than I was meeting her. I’m guessing I wasn’t the first athlete she’d met. She hung around for a minute and then disappeared.
Whatever.
I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. I wasn’t looking for true love, let alone a wife. I wasn’t even looking for a one-on-one relationship. Far from it. Never had one. Didn’t see any need for one. I was perfectly happy with my girl-at-every-NBA-franchise lifestyle. At that moment, Carmen Electra was just another beautiful woman in a long line of beautiful women.
But later, like two or three o’clock in the morning, we went downstairs and somehow Carmen ended up sitting in my lap. How? Don’t know. I was hammered. Anyway, Carmen is a talking machine, and we were talking, talking, talking, and having a good time. Nothing much physical was going on. We hung out until like five in the morning.
I would learn later that Carmen, born Tara Leigh Patrick, about 26 years before, was one of five children from a nice, middle-class family that lived in the Cincinnati area. She had spent her childhood training to be a performer and moved to La-La Land when she came of age in the early 1990s. It took her all of two weeks, by one account, to hook up with the artist again known as Prince, who would launch her career. Early highlights were an album on Prince’s Paisley Park label in 1993, a nude pictorial in Playboy in 1996, and a couple of television shows. Then came the Baywatch gig.
Come time to go at Billboard Live, I thought Carmen and I had clicked, and I was sure of it when she blew off the girlfriend who was with her. This wasn’t one of your typical, “catch-a-cab, see-ya-later” deals. The girlfriend had managed to fall on her ass and break her arm, yet Carmen ended up accompanying me to my favorite late-night haunt, a snazzy joint called “Fat Burger.” So I guess you could say my first one-on-one date with Carmen Electra was at the Fat Burger. Fitting.
Then the really strange things started to happen.
First, Carmen said her good nights and went home alone. When I woke up the next morning, it dawned on me: she hadn’t given me her phone number. No, I didn’t ask for it—I don’t have to—girls usually want to give me their numbers. I’d come home after a long night of partying with a scrap of paper in one pocket, a napkin in another, a stray matchbook in a third—phone numbers everywhere—in pencil, pen, lipstick.
“Don’t worry about the number, dude,” a friend said at breakfast. “My cousin knows her.”
So Carmen and I hooked up again the next night at a club called Garden of Eden on Hollywood Boulevard. She and another girlfriend showed up, I took their coats, and about that time a friend of mine cruises in—surprising me with this girl I’d been dating. I handed her the coats, and while she was trying to figure out what to do with them in coatroom-challenged L.A., Carmen and I slipped out the door and into my Rolls.
Nothing strange about that—standard Dennis.
What was strange was that, although I had a game the next day, I ended up staying up all night talking, again; and she ended up going home alone, again. For two nights in a row, the notoriously quiet ladies man named Dennis Rodman had talked himself silly and slept alone. Stranger still, I was cool with it. Something was happening. I invited her to the game that night, but she didn’t show.
I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was because, at that time in my life, I was having sex with lots of different women. So many that, sometimes, it became like a job, y’know? With Carmen, it was different. It was nice to be hanging with someone, waiting for the right time, the right place, the right moment.
A week or so later, I invited Carmen to meet me in Las Vegas. At the time, when I was in Vegas, I was dating this stripper—a beautiful blonde who worked at my favorite strip joint, O.G.’s, Olympic Gardens. So there was one Dennis and two babes—three actually, since Carmen again brought a girlfriend. The trick was keeping everybody separated. When we went to dinner, bodyguard George Triantafillo handled the seating arrangements. If it was a long, rectangular table, George would put me in the center and the girls at each end. If it was a round table, he’d surround me with guys, and put the girls at 12 and six, so they wouldn’t get into a conversation. Every now and then, I would get up and make the rounds, making sure everybody was happy. There was still nothing much physical happening with Carmen. We had kissed, but that was about it. We didn’t sleep together, and George made sure her room was on a different floor to head off any potential problems when I hooked up with my stripper friend come bedtime.
In those days, juggling women was commonplace. Many times George and I would go to O’Hare, and I’d drop off one girl at one terminal and pick up a second at another—shuttled them in and out. Wherever I went, I always “brought sand to the beach,” as George used to put it. I’d fly in a girl I was comfortable with, keep her there until I found somebody local, and then ship the first one back home. As often as I traveled, there would be different girls three or four times a week.
When Carmen came along, there was not only women juggling, there was schedule juggling as we tried to hook up. Remember: this was in the middle of the NBA season, and I was constantly on the road. We finally got together again in Chicago, I don’t remember exactly when, but I’m thinking it was the middle of February. I picked her up at the airport and took her to the little brick ranch house I had in Northbrook. The place was all right, but a shack by NBA standards—not the kind of house to impress a Hollywood starlet.
“Do you really live here?” Carmen asked.
“Yep,” I said.
We went to eat sushi, came home and just lay there in bed and looked at each other and talked, talked, talked. She was there four or five days, sleeping at my house—in my bed—and we never made love.
Unreal.
When people ask me when things really got going with Carmen, I always say, “In Chicago.” That was when the Dennis/Carmen thing went places Dennis Rodman had never been before. We had some strange kind of spiritual connection. Wh
at I now know was a real relationship was developing. This wasn’t just about flesh and bone. I’m looking at her, and I’m not seeing her beauty. I’m not seeing Carmen Electra, the Baywatch babe, the Playboy pin-up. I’m seeing the heart of Tara Leigh Patrick, the feisty gal from White Oak, Ohio. I was falling in love—not that I knew it. I’d figure that out months later. However, this wouldn’t play out like some white-bread fairy tale. No, no, no. After all, this was Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra, and our particular fairy tale was destined to be twisted—and, of course, X-rated.
Toronto, February 19, 1998. The Bulls came to town, and after kicking Raptor butt 123-86, Carmen and I jump-started our evening by teaming up to corrupt this young trainer for the Bulls. We hired this pro to put on a live sex show in the kid’s room. The girl came in, did this strip tease and the rest for me, Carmen, the kid, George, and a couple of Bulls teammates. Everybody was taking all this in, having a good time, and when Carmen and I had been sufficiently “entertained,” we decided to break out and ended up in my bedroom at the suite.
George, as always, was right outside.
I don’t know if it was the booze, the sex show, or the brisk Canadian climate, but there wouldn’t be any talking, talking, talking that night. I turned on the television, cranked it up very loud, and we began making love.
It took a while, but the television was so loud that there were complaints, and hotel security came calling. George tiptoed into the bedroom to turn off the television, and his timing was really bad— or good—depending on your point of view. Carmen was getting close, and right about then, she got a little carried away.
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