I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

  Then I took it to a whole new level.

  While Michelle was still pregnant, I called her on the phone one day and said, “Open your door.” Out on her doorstep, she found a Faberge egg and a note. “Will you marry me?” the note read. Inside the egg, an engagement ring. Two years later, already the proud parents of two, we were married at the Orange County Courthouse. A year after that, Michelle filed for divorce.

  This was in the spring of 2004, after I had stopped drinking. So I asked her, “Why do you want a divorce now that I’m sober?”

  “You aren’t treating me right,” she replied.

  I was like, “Well how the fuck you want me to treat you?”

  She had a long list of things she wanted me to do to prove to her that I really wanted a wife and family: get rid of the beach house, spend more time with her and the kids, go to church. So I did all that and more.

  As Thaer told a reporter, “He does whatever a girl tells him to do when she’s leavin’ him. He does that over and over again.”

  “He’s changed completely to try to make this work,” Michelle said. “He stopped drinking. He sold his crazy beach house. He tried to make a life for us.

  “He did everything he could to prove to me that he wanted me back and he wanted a family,” Michelle continued. “He went on shows—Howard Stern called me to try to get us back together. He went on television shows with shirts with my face on the front of them that he had made to try to prove to me that he was for real. Pretty cute things.”

  After I sold the beach house, I was ready for us to buy a house together, but Michelle wanted to rent for a year to see if it was going to work out. So that’s how we ended up in the house in Huntington Beach. I also asked my mother for help in saving the marriage. My mother and I had a falling out when she took my sister Debra’s side after I fired her as my business manager a few years back. But I swallowed my pride and gave her a phone call for the first time in like five years.

  “Could you talk to my wife? Let her know I’m serious,” I said. “Explain to her that she’s the only person who understands me.”

  She called and left a message. Michelle didn’t call back.

  There were two more things I did to get Michelle back. I took her on a belated honeymoon to Hawaii, and then came the capper, something I picked up from an old transvestite friend, and, trust me, bro, it was better than 1,000 empty promises. I went into Michelle’s closet and took one shoe out of every shoe box, must have been a hundred of them. I made a Polaroid picture of each shoe and pasted it on the end of the box and surprised her with a super-organized shoe closet when she got back from church.

  Home run.

  So I got her back, and things were good for about two seconds. Then I started drifting again—back to my old tricks—never at home, ignoring her and the kids, stopped going to church.

  “If he’s after her, she’s running,” said Jeremy. “If she’s after him, he’s not really running, he’s just still being Dennis.”

  By now, you know that “just being Dennis” is code for a lifestyle that includes sleeping around. So Michelle was already pissed before she had the motorcycle accident on May 30, and then came the last straw, when in her mind, I was not “there for her” when she was laid up. She was telling everybody, “He didn’t do a damn thing. And that’s why we’re where we are right now.”

  Where we were was right back where we started when she filed for divorce in 2004. Michelle still wanted a normal life, and I was not giving it to her. Or at least that’s what she said.

  “I’m your wife,” she said. “You need to include me in your life. I’m a part of you.”

  I went for the full-court press this time. I asked her to renew our vows in Hawaii, promised to finally get that will taken care of and buy that house together like we’d been talking about. I was willing to do whatever it took to make Michelle see that I was serious about us being together, being a family.

  I told her, “I think it’s kind of fucked up how we’ve been living our lives the last five years, and we should plan on just saying ‘Fuck it!’ and being together forever. Let’s just go do it and do it right and make it official, let people know that we’re married.”

  All my friends were telling me I was crazy, that the woman was jerking me around.

  “I think Dennis’s issue, anytime a woman treats him like shit,” Darren told a reporter. “He respects them more, because it reminds him of his relationship with his mom.”

  Darren wasn’t alone. Everybody was saying she treats you bad, that’s why you stay with her. Nope. That has nothing to do with it. I stay with her because I love her. She’s probably the only girl with whom I’ve shared a real, clear connection.

  And if we ever get our shit together, this could turn out to be a life-long relationship. Michelle is hopeful. “I think that honestly that Dennis and I will always be,” she said. “We’ll always be. We will be together for good.

  “We love each other, love each other to death,” she continued. “Everything’s good. Everything. Everything.”

  So despite all the fussing and fighting, coming and going, I love Michelle, and Michelle loves me. This much we know is true.

  So we’re talking “happily ever after,” right?

  Wrong.

  Reality Check: Just because something is true, doesn’t mean it’s the “truth.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MR. AND MRS. RODMAN

  Here’s what my love life is like. I always have this mother ship I call home. That ship is surrounded by lifeboats, which I call “Rodman’s Navy.” Sometimes I will visit a lifeboat, but I always come back to the mother ship. If the mother ship springs a leak, I hop on a lifeboat to keep me afloat until the mother ship is patched up or another ship comes along. Then I start all over—been doing that all my adult life. Everybody tells me if I want a lasting relationship, I’m going to have to give up those lifeboats, go solo on the mother ship. If I go down, I go down. To me that feels like betting all your money on one roll of the dice.

  Did I mention the mother ship sometimes fires on the lifeboats? Swivels her 16-inch guns and fires away, trying to blow them out of the water. A few salvos here, a few salvos there, then the people on the lifeboats break out the UZIs, everybody’s blazing away, and boats start going down. The mother ship catches fire. There are secondary explosions. Then the lifeboats start firing on each other, fighter planes appear out of nowhere, and suddenly it’s the Battle of fucking Midway—total chaos—or what I like to call, “Just another evening with Michelle.”

  I don’t know exactly when Michelle’s jealousy thing became a full-blown, put-it-in-capital-letters PROBLEM. When we first got together, I was fooling around, she was fooling around, not to mention married, and everything was more or less cool. Maybe it became an issue after the kids came along or after we got married. Whatever. A couple of years into our relationship, Michelle became a living, breathing example of “crazy jealous.” Sometimes there was good reason.

  “I’ve had women right in front of me come up to Dennis and say, ‘I want to fuck you,’” Michelle told a reporter. “Right in front of me. I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’”

  Other times, Michelle’s jealousy made no sense at all, like in September of 2003, when we were at the Vision Expo West eyewear convention in LasVegas. I was there to help the Revolution Eyewear company sell frames, sunglasses, whatever. The night before I was to do my “personal appearance,” Michelle, Darren, bodyguard William Castleberry and I were at a strip club. I cozied up to one of the strippers and gave her a couple hundred bucks for lap dances.

  Suddenly, Michelle goes ape shit. She was like, “What are you doing with your money? You stupid son of a bitch! We have kids. How could you throw away that money?” She grabbed the money from the stripper and put it in her pocketbook. Then she started smacking me—right there in the middle of the club. William hustled our asses out of there before club security got involved.

  So we piled in the limo, and Michel
le was still ripping me up one side and down the other. She started throwing beer bottles at me, glasses. We’re talking really close quarters inside the limo, so it was hard for her to miss. I was dodging, trying to talk her down. No luck. Finally, William got between the two of us. He was like, “Michelle, if you don’t stop it, I’m gonna knock your ass out. I’m getting paid to protect this guy.” So she backed off, and the first thing I did when we got to Olympic Gardens was buy her a lap dance. That calmed her down. But Michelle wasn’t done.

  At about 7:00 a.m., we headed back to the Palm, and everybody went to bed except me. I decided to go to the Crazy Horse strip club to meet some friends. Michelle woke up about three hours later and started pounding on Darren’s door, freaking out. “Where the fuck is Dennis?” she screamed. Darren was clueless, but after she tore out of there, he called William’s cell and told us to get our asses back to the hotel before Michelle had a meltdown. Meanwhile Michelle went downstairs and lit into the hotel security people. “Where’s my husband?” this, that. Finally, the president of the Palm called Darren and said, “This woman’s out of control. If you don’t get her to chill out, we’re going to kick her out of here.”

  There’s more.

  In December of 2004, I went to Houston to finish shooting the “Diana Pearl” Super Bowl commercial. I stayed over an extra night, and when I got home, Michelle was waiting for me. Darren and his fiancé Symone were there, and they watched as Michelle, as Darren recalled it, “Just winds up and hits him in the face—like as hard as you’ve ever seen anybody hit somebody.”

  “You lying son of a bitch,” Michelle screamed. “Where the fuck were you last night?”

  I lost it.

  “If I wasn’t who I was, I would knock your fucking teeth out right now,” I yelled. “You beat the shit out of me all fuckin’ day long. If I lay a hand on you, I go to jail.”

  Later I asked Darren if he thought Michelle had a jealousy problem. “Oh, a psychotic jealousy problem,” he answered.

  I’ve got as many examples of this shit as you’d like. There was the time Michelle was following me and a couple of friends in broad daylight, including this woman I wasn’t sleeping with. Michelle jumps out and starts screaming and yelling at her, “Who the hell are you? This is my husband.”

  “This is my husband .”

  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Michelle say that when some woman gets within five yards of my ass—that, and “We have babies.” It was like somebody waving a cross in front of Dracula, y’know? Ward off them bitches. She then added another weapon to her arsenal.

  We were out drinking one night at this bar, got drunk, naturally, and ended up in the tattoo parlor next door. Michelle started joking around about getting “Rodman” tattooed on her back. And I was like, “Why don’t you add a ‘Mrs.?’” So the tattoo guy did the drawing, we took a look at it, and said “What the fuck?” Shortly thereafter, Michelle had a “Mrs. Rodman” tattoo on the small of her back, which she would soon begin flashing whenever some threatening “chick” was in my vicinity, as if her saying, “This is my husband. We have babies,” wasn’t enough. She needed more evidence. Like anybody gave a shit. I know it wouldn’t have stopped Michelle. Not even locked doors stopped her ass.

  I was upstairs in the beach house one time with some girl. Michelle broke down the first door and then outdid herself on the second one, breaking it in half. By the time she got through the second door, the girl was dressed, and I was hiding behind the door naked. She slapped the shit out of me and screamed, “I’m fucking through with you!” She ran outside. I chased her, and I ended up naked in the street talking to the cops. (These days, Michelle giggles when she tells this story.) By then, the cops were tired of being called to my house in the middle of the night. “One more call,” they said, “and we’ll haul both of you in. We’re sick of this shit with you two.”

  Then there was the time we were on the way to this Super Bowl party in San Diego. This black girl walks up and wants to get her picture taken with me—standard operating procedure, y’know?

  Michelle went nuts. “That’s my husband! We have babies,” she screamed. She created a fucking scene in the middle of the street— and for what?

  “She wants to be part of his life, but every time he makes her part of his life, she goes crazy,”Thaer said. “She does something stupid.”

  “She’s so bad that we don’t bring her out,” Darren told a reporter. “She wants to know why she isn’t invited to events— because she would fucking ruin him if we took her.

  “It’s the truth,” Darren continued. “Thaer knows it. Dennis knows it. One girl just walks up to Dennis the wrong way, kisses him on the lips, grabs him or hugs him, and she’ll lose her mind.”

  “Whenever she went on a trip, I wouldn’t go,” Thaer said. “’Cause I knew there was gonna be drama. So I wouldn’t even go. And Darren was like, ‘You gotta go.’ I’m like, ‘I ain’t going. Michelle’s going with him. I’ll get ’em to the airport, and they’re on their own.’”

  So you’ve got Michelle, this crazy jealous woman with a bad temper, married to Dennis Rodman, this man who fucks everything that moves.

  Gasoline and matches.

  No wonder Darren has called it “a psychotic relationship.”

  “That’s the match made in hell, those two,” Thaer said. “Mr. and Mrs. Rodman.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FORSAKING ALL OTHERS?

  The Newport Beach house was pink with bright-blue awnings. The Huntington Beach house was beige with a red-tile roof. One was party central on a popular beach. The other was a single-family home on a quiet residential street. One was for raising hell—the other for raising a family. So in June of 2004, I said goodbye to a house that had seen more parties than the Playboy mansion, said goodbye to the full bar and rotating mirrored ball at 4809 Seashore Drive, and said hello to the three-car garage and automated sprinkler system at 6621 Horseshoe Lane. It was the end of an era.

  The new house was in an upscale cluster development, houses shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the street: stone and stucco, gray, grayer, and beige. On one typical afternoon, kids on bikes, skateboards, and motorized scooters cruised up and down the street in front of the house. My black BMW 745-Li was parked out front, and sitting on a concrete driveway made to look like terra cotta tile, Michelle’s white Mercedes S-600. It was “trash night,” and up and down the street, plastic garbage cans sat waiting at the curb.

  Beginning at 6:15 p.m., hidden sprinklers, little black pipes, rose about three inches out of the ground in front of my house. There was a spitting sound, then a steady hiss. Five minutes later, that first set of sprinklers sunk back into the ground, and a new set rose to water another corner of the lawn. The first time I saw that shit, I was like, “What the fuck? Does Dennis Rodman really live here?” The lawn is tiny, and it’s not like you couldn’t water it with a garden hose in 15 minutes. The place wasn’t me. And neither was the settling down bullshit—no matter what I’d said.

  When I was dictating all that mushy stuff that you read a few pages back about Michelle, when I said, “I love her. She’s probably the only girl I’ve ever had a real, clear connection with.” At that very moment, there was this other girl I was sleeping with sitting beside me. Right when I was saying it. Then that same night I slept with another girl I hang out with a lot. That doesn’t mean what I said about Michelle isn’t true. It just means it isn’t true in the way an average person would think it’s true. I do love Michelle. I do think we have a “real, clear connection.” But don’t expect me to stop “being Dennis.” As for old I-want-a-normal-family Michelle, she’s got her own line of bullshit going.

  “I’m at a point in my life now,” she said, “I’m 38, our kids need a family, I don’t want to party anymore. I’m over it.”

  Yeah, right. Time to can the June Cleaver crap. The very same day I was laying down that “Michelle-4-Ever” rap, she was on the back of a motorcycle headed for the Black Hi
lls Motor Classic in Sturgis, South Dakota—this huge gathering of bike freaks. There wouldn’t be any partying going on out there. Lights out at 9:30 for the “Harley Nation.”

  What I’m trying to get at is: all this lovey-dovey talk coming from both of us doesn’t mean what it means with normal people in a normal relationship. When I say I want to “settle down,” that doesn’t mean I’m willing to give up my lifeboats. When she says she wants a normal family … actually, I have no idea what she means by that. But it doesn’t mean what most people would think it means. Normal for Michelle ain’t “normal.”

  So it’s time to knock off the bullshit and tell the truth rather than what our family, friends, and Oprah might want to hear. Time to talk about what we really want.

  People are always asking me if I am ready to settle down. Wrong question. The question is whether I want Michelle in my life forever. The answer is “yes.”What will I do to keep her there? Whatever she wants—for a while. And I mean it when I say that. Then I walk out on the beach, and the harbor is full of lifeboats.

  You know that phrase in the wedding vows about “forsaking all others?” I’m Dennis Rodman. That just ain’t gonna happen. Never was gonna happen. Never will happen. Meanwhile, I want Michelle to be true to me.

  So if you take all this and throw it in a pot, is it possible for us to cook up something permanent, some kind of fucked-up family? So far, we haven’t been able to make it work. Like I said, we’re always either breaking up or making up: Michelle going postal, me saying anything, doing anything, buying anything, to get her back. This go-around, I bought her a 10-carat diamond ring. She said, “I don’t want that. I want you .”

  Well, she’s already got as much of me as she’s going to get, as much as anybody is going to get. Is it enough? Can it ever really work?

  Who the fuck knows?