I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

Carmen was like, “Whatever.”

  So the woman takes this piece of penne pasta—this uncooked, hard edged, penne pasta, a couple of inches long—and sticks it where the sun don’t shine. Well now, I felt that sharp edge in my tender parts, and I came out of that bed flailing.

  “What the fuck?”

  I accidentally sent Carmen’s tiny little ass flying. Thaer says she actually went airborne. I was trying to wake up, didn’t even know I hit her. She landed on both feet and came back at me like a wounded wolverine, freaking out, hitting and slapping, trying to get at my face, yelling and screaming. I was wide awake by now, standing, buck naked, just trying to keep this whirling dervish off my ass. She was pissed because I hit her, and I was pissed—well you know why I was pissed. After a few minutes, Thaer waded in, broke it up, and took her upstairs to his room to calm her down. Then he came to check on me, and she was right behind him, still screaming. Thaer took her back up to his room and gets her calmed down again. Then I showed up in his room doing a little screaming of my own. That was when I must have thrown the purse.

  “You shouldn’t have hit me!” she screamed.

  “You shouldn’t have—you know!” I replied.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Her room.

  Thaer’s room.

  My room.

  The halls.

  The balconies.

  The lobby.

  Somewhere in here, the $25,000 Rolex I had given her sailed over a balcony railing, and Thaer was out there in the bushes trying to find it. Somebody called the cops (could have been anybody, we woke up the whole hotel) about the “domestic disturbance” (wasn’t anything “domesticated” about it).

  Finally, after a couple of hours of this shit, things were on an even keel, and we were waiting in the lobby for the limo to take Carmen back to the Miccosukee. The hotel security guard was standing around, and Carmen started telling her story.

  “Dennis hit me,” she said. “He did this, he did that.”

  The guard looked at me, looked Carmen up and down, and said, “You probably deserved it.”

  Oh shit!

  That did it. Looking back, I’m thinking the security guard was right. She probably did deserve it. I mean, a man’s butt is his castle, but that wasn’t something anybody needed to be saying aloud—not to a crazy woman. Carmen went absolutely nuts, ratcheting up to an entirely new level of full-throttle, fucking berserk.

  When the limo finally arrived, Thaer literally had to pick the woman up and carry her to the car. She made her getaway, driving right by the arriving cops.

  As I said, the cops talked to me, then they got on the phone with Carmen’s limo driver. First, the driver claimed he didn’t know where she was. Thaer had told him to keep driving, no matter what, determined to keep Carmen and me apart. But the cops were saying, “You don’t bring her back, you’re going to jail too.” So they talked to Carmen.

  All the cops knew was that two people were fighting, one a six-foot-eight man, the other a tiny woman. They didn’t care who was at fault or the extent of the injuries—the cops told CNN there was “very minor facial scratching, very minor”—domestic violence was domestic violence. So when they finished listening, the cops decided they had a genuine case of “domestic battery” on their hands. They handcuffed Carmen and me and hauled us off to the Miami-Dade County Jail where we had our pictures taken.

  These mug shots are far from “Nick Noltes,” but they are memorable. I was wearing this shit-eating grin, looking like I’m really happy to be there. Carmen looks like she could be coaxed into a smile. If her lip was swollen, it didn’t show. The only good thing to come out of this phase of our little adventure was the “note” that Officer Christi Tanner wrote to close out my official police statement.

  NOTE: After being brought to the Miami-Dade County Jail’s holding facility, Defendant stated to please tell the Co-Def that he was sorry, that he overreacted, and that he loved her.

  Two nights before this run-in with the law, I had met attorney Roy Black at a Miami club. Black is the guy who saved William Kennedy Smith’s ass following rape charges in West Palm Beach a few years ago. He has also represented actor Kelsey Grammer, artist Peter Max, and sportscaster Marv Albert.

  He gave me his card and said, “One of these days you’re going to need me. Hang onto that card.”

  So it was Roy Black to the rescue. He sprung us for $25,000 apiece with an agreement to stay at least 500 yards from each other for 30 days.

  “Charging them with this is an overreaction,” he told the media. “Both of them are upset; they’ve been charged, and Dennis is more upset that she’s been charged.

  “They both told me that this was a misunderstanding between the two of them,” continued Black.

  I’ll say—a misunderstanding about my butt.

  They let us loose that afternoon.

  “I’m sorry. It was just one of those situations,” I told the media before leaving in a “white Mercedes,” while Carmen took off in a “Chevy Blazer.”

  Thaer and I went back to the Miccosukee, and all I wanted to do was see Carmen, talk to Carmen—but her publicist booked her on a flight out of there. After that, we were talking every day, pushing Roy Black to get the separation order lifted. That was all we wanted. We wanted to be together. About three weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges.

  “There simply wasn’t a crime,” said Black, “But because of their celebrity, everyone took notice.

  “[It’s] typical of what happens between a married couple,” Black continued.

  What a fucking night.

  Reality Check: Never pass out lying on your stomach.

  In the battle of Miami, there were tons of fireworks, tons of light and noise, but no real damage was done—just two crazy motherfuckers having at it in a balmy climate. The real battles—the ones with the heavy artillery when the buildings were leveled and lives were lost—were triggered not by unofficial uses of pasta. The real battles, the only battles that ever mattered, were about one thing only: other women.

  When I was single, I always had one main girl that I’d kind of cling to, and with the rest of them, I just had sex. The main girl usually wouldn’t be sleeping with anybody else, but I would be. She would know I was fooling around, but she didn’t care—or at least she wasn’t telling me if she did. Some girls even seemed turned on by my philandering.

  When I hooked up with Carmen, she became the main girl, and I just kept on doing what I had always been doing—didn’t see any reason to change. Same thing after we were married. Carmen wasn’t cool with that. Back in January of 1999, reported the New York Post, she told Howard Stern, “If I found out he was cheating on me, I’d leave him. I’m not going to put up with that.”

  Still, the entire time that I was with Carmen, I couldn’t— wouldn’t—stop sleeping with other women. So a couple of things came down, and Carmen was like, “You’re going to have to change your ways.”

  I’m trying to make her believe “It’ll never happen again, it’ll never happen again.” Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “It’ll never stop happening. That’s who I am.”

  Sometimes I wish I could actually be with one person. I’ve had the opportunity many, many times, but that isn’t my lifestyle. Carmen wanted me to live with her, but I never did. If I had, if we had gotten a feel for each other that way, I think we’d still be married. But my lifestyle isn’t to settle down with one woman, you know? My lifestyle is to go out there and be Dennis Rodman—be who I am. In my line of work, Dennis Rodman is expected to do this, this, this; but now I know that in a personal atmosphere, it doesn’t work that way.

  Not in the real world.

  My fantasy woman would appreciate me for all the things I have done. She’d understand I might have some difficulties in life, but she would be there to support me no matter what’s going on. At the same time, she’d understand that a man is a man. You can’t change a leopard’s spots. She’d u
nderstand that I might have a fling or two.

  Yeah, right. Not going to happen.

  A woman will never open her arms, and say, “You know, I’m here. Come, no matter what happens.” There’s always fine print, escape clauses, disclaimers, and shit. Maybe I expect too much.

  It wasn’t meant to be with Carmen, but our love was magic while it lasted, and despite all the pain, I would never take any of it back. If I had an opportunity to have a woman in my life like her again, I would. We had a special connection.

  So here’s to Carmen Electra—Tara Leigh Patrick—she was a true-blue girl to me, and I have nothing but respect for her. She’ll always be in my heart. If I wasn’t married, if she wasn’t married, who knows?

  We’ve now come to the end of my bad-boy-meets-bad-girl, lives-noisily-ever, up-yours, can’t-you-see-that-we’re-busy, heartbreaking Carmen Electra love story.

  What went wrong? When all was said and done, she couldn’t tame the wild man—and neither could I. Our divorce became final in late 1999.

  Reality Check: Like the song says, “Once you have found her, never let her go.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE BATTLE OF NEWPORT BEACH

  “Newport Beach was probably his downfall,” Thaer Mustafa told a reporter.

  “In terms of?”

  “Everything. That’s what screwed him up,” Thaer said. “His partying. He had an unlimited number of worthless friends who would go drink with him.”

  “Parties every night?”

  “Oh, yeah. Any time he went out, he’d bring a party home.”

  “What was a typical day like?”

  “Drinkin’. Drinkin’ every single fucking day. Every single fucking day,” Thaer said. “Not one day off. If he was awake, the guy was drinking.”

  “He even stopped going to the gym, which is strange for him,” Thaer continued. “He wasn’t going to the gym at all. All he was doing was drinking.”

  I was still playing for the Bulls when I bought the Newport Beach duplex in 1996 for $800,000 and change. It was a long way from the Dallas projects. The pink stucco, 3,500 square-foot house faced what the Visitor’s Bureau likes to call “pristine beaches,” had a patio jutting out into the sand, and royal blue awnings shading windows upstairs and down. Nothing but sunshine and surf.

  Why California? Why Newport Beach? My agent at the time, Dwight Manley, had both his office and home in Orange County. At first I thought of the duplex as a vacation home, a place to hang out and party when I was in California. I lived in the upstairs unit and converted the whole downstairs into a full-blown night club, even incorporated the garage. I added a full bar just like you’d find in a commercial club, a dance floor complete with one of those rotating mirrored balls, tables and chairs, and hung up a couple of signs: “Club 4809,” on the gate out back, as in “4809 Seashore Drive,” and a neon “OPEN,” sign on the beach-side, second-floor balcony. The only difference between my house and an actual club was that everything was free, courtesy of the owner, one Dennis Rodman. That and the zoning. The house was in a residential area.

  Early on, there weren’t that many problems because I was on the road playing basketball most of the time. The real trouble began after I signed on with the Lakers in 1999 and decided to settle in Newport Beach permanently. Before that I really didn’t have a home. I was basically a hotel person—a hotel junkie.

  Newport Beach, the home of John Wayne until his death in 1979, was a traditional town with a bunch of old money, and in the early days I was seen as a breath of fresh air. That shit didn’t last. Within months I was on a first-name basis with half the cops in town. Before I moved to Newport Beach, I had been a moving target: drunk in Vegas one day, L.A. the next. The cops would give me a break here, give me a break there, because I was “Dennis Rodman.” But now I was in one place with one police force and way, way, way too much time on my hands. During my playing days, whenever I had a break I would be partying full time. Now I was on one continuous break with one continuous party. Women, sex, rock ‘n’ roll, you name it. When you showed up at Club 4809, better count on an all-night party. It was all good, or at least I thought so at the time.

  Soon the cops started getting noise complaints from my neighbors. So the cops would show up, ask me to hold it down, and I was like, “Fuck you!”

  They let it slide for as long as they could, then they went, “You know, Dennis, we can’t take this anymore. Keep it up, and we’re gonna have to do something.”

  “Have at it!” I said.

  So we had this world-class pissing contest going on. “The Battle of Newport Beach,” I called it. It was mostly skirmishes. We’d crank up a party, the cops would arrive and issue some kind of citation. That happened a lot—about 80 times in the eight years I lived there, if you believe the newspapers.

  “Somebody is calling us,” a police spokesman told the Associated Press. “We’re not just going out there and finding it. People are complaining.”

  Then the cops started shadowing my ass. It was like, “You see that car? He drives that car. Watch him. Watch him.” It got to the point where I was watched all the time.

  I got my first DUI on December 22, 1999. I was hard to miss in what the AP described as a “bright yellow Volkswagen with blue flames shaped like naked women.”

  “We know his vehicle, and we can’t just let him go,” a cop told the wire service. “He’s not above the law.”

  I pleaded guilty to that one, telling the AP, “the police were just doing their job.” They fined me around $2,000 and suspended my license.

  From the tone of some of the newspaper stories written at the time, you would think there was some kind of one-man crime wave going on. But actual arrests were rare. They hauled me in a couple of times for public drunkenness, once in L.A., once at the local Hooters, where I sprayed the patrons with a fire extinguisher. But with all the drinking I was doing, the real issue was never public drunkenness or driving under the influence, but noise, noise, and more noise.

  In early 2001, the AP quoted from a letter one of my neighbors sent to the cops.

  “I have a right to peace and quiet,” the letter said. “And I would hope that the city as well as the police department can accommodate its loyal tenants, rather than appease a disgraced athlete who has nothing better to do than throw parties.”

  So the cops drag me into court on all these noise complaints. Sometimes I won. Sometimes they won. But all in all, nobody won. Meanwhile, my parties grew bigger and bigger, and the neighbors got madder and madder. The Newport Beach City Council took up the challenge, trying to toughen up the noise ordinances. I threatened to run for city council. The Guardian, a British newspaper, would report sightings of “Let Dennis Have Fun!” T-shirts. Turned out I couldn’t run because I wasn’t a registered voter.

  The height of the Battle of Newport Beach came with the “in-your-face party” I threw to celebrate my 40th birthday. It was the biggest spectacle seen in Newport harbor since 1917, when they filmed silent film star Theda Bara in the barge scene for Cleopatra.

  As for the birthday party, I was thinking, “You want noise? I’ll give you fucking noise!” So I hired not one, but two rock bands, and at two in the afternoon on May 13, 2001, I made my grand entrance to the “B-DAY BASH,” as the invitation billed it, in a helicopter that circled a a few times before landing on the beach. I was greeted by 200-300 people. Party time!

  I hopped off dressed in a “red baseball cap, white shirt with orange sleeves, and baggy yellow velvet shorts,” according to the Los Angeles Times. So did I get to enjoy my party? Nope. A couple of dozen cops showed up, some in riot gear, responding to “50 complaints from irate neighbors,” as a police spokesman told the Times.

  “They have to have permits to have live music,” the spokesman told the newspaper, adding they weren’t real thrilled with the helicopter landing, either. So I jawed with the cops off and on for what seemed like hours.

  “We were trying to get him to obey the law without a
n unfortunate confrontation,” Lieutenant Rich Long told the Times.

  After the cops threatened to arrest my ass and charged me with some shit (the Times reported it was “three counts of disturbing the peace and one count of playing live music without a permit”), I agreed to move the party to my restaurant, Josh Slocum’s, which was only a couple of miles away.

  If you believe the media, up to that point the cops had been to my house more than four dozen times in the previous six years. They would make 20 more visits in the next eight months. Not for anything as spectacular as the B-DAY BASH, but enough to keep the pot boiling.

  Reality Check: If you’re spending more time with the cops than your kids, there could be a problem.

  Lieutenant Rich Long from the police department talked to me a couple of times about my antics. “Dennis,” he said, “you have to quit doing these things, because it’s gonna get you in trouble and mess your life up.” He was right. Nobody’s going to get a life sentence for cranking up some window-rattling rock ‘n’ roll at two o’clock in the morning. But when you’re partying so hard you absolutely don’t give a fuck, shit can happen. Stuff comes up missing. People get into fights. Druggies appear. Trouble can come from even the most unexpected places.

  Take the “librarian.”

  I was sleeping with this girl, this nice clean girl, and she wasn’t really a librarian, she just looked like one. She kept coming around, coming around, and after a while she wanted more than I was willing to give.

  So I was in my bedroom at the beach house one night doing what I do, and a couple of my friends spot her coming up the stairs armed with this huge steak knife. They tackled her and took the knife away. I came out to see what all the ruckus was about, and they were like, “Dennis, stop sleeping with this girl, you’re making her crazy.” I don’t know about that, but something was making her ass crazy. Booze likely. Whatever.