“He’ll always be out there in the limelight,” Michelle told an interviewer. “He’ll never be able to just be my husband, my kids’ father. There’s always something more to it.”
She’s got that right. Cue the violins.
“And I don’t know if I can do that anymore,” Michelle said to a reporter. “It’s taken a lot of strength to get through as much as we’ve gone through. And I knew it going in.
“Eventually you have to grow up. We have children. They need to be taken care of. They need a father.”
Not to mention a mother.
And what about her jealousy problem? “I’ve changed a lot. I don’t fight anymore,” Michelle said. “It’s not worth it. I’ve got children, and I’m just not gonna go through that anymore over some skanky chick.”
The jury is still out on that one.
Then, as if our real problems are not enough, Michelle is forever finding bullshit problems (she probably picks them up reading those fucking women’s magazines) that she says are threatening our marriage. I’m going to run through them one at a time.
Not Even A Problem Number One: I show my love by buying her things.
“He’s got a heart of gold. He really does. He’s very generous. And not knowing how to love me and the children, y’know, his way of loving is to buy me things,” Michelle told a reporter. “He tries to give me things to show me that he loves me. And he just doesn’t get that I don’t want it. I want him to just love me.”
Guilty as charged. I’m trying to be more of a touchy-feely kind of guy. Meanwhile Michelle isn’t turning down many gifts.
I take that back. That was a cheap shot.
Not Even A Problem Number Two: I’m irresponsible.
“He has no responsibilities. None,” Michelle told a reporter. “And for that matter, neither have I.
“Those accountants take care of everything,” Michelle continued. “They pay the house payments, they pay for the cable, they pay the phone—you know there’s not too much really left to do.”
Sounds pretty good to me, but not to Michelle.
“I’ve been living this kind of fairy tale life, and it sucked,” she said. “I want responsibility back, y’know? I want to be normal.”
Where do I start?
First, for a guy with “no responsibilities,” I sure seem to be paying a lot of bills—like that cable bill and house payment. In the divorce papers she filed in 2004, Michelle claimed monthly expenses for her and the kids ran to $17,000, including about $2,000 for Michelle’s personal trainer and $500 and change for “hair, nails, tanning, and Botox.” Take all that and the $15,000 per month in child support I was paying for Alexis and Chance, and the $4,000 I send my mother, and you have a man who feels like he has a shitload of responsibilities.
Not Even A Problem Number Three: Religion.
“I’m a Christian and I need for him to be as well. That’s another thing we’re kind of struggling with.”
I’m not going to touch that one.
Not Even A Problem Number Four: Dennis is a slut for attention.
“He needs to know from people that he still has it,” Michelle said. “And he needs to know that from the public and other women, other people saying, ‘Oh wow! Dennis Rodman,’ instead of me and just his kids being enough. That’s what I’m looking for—one day for us to be enough for him.”
I’m a celebrity. Getting attention is what I do. It’s how I make a living. And like Michelle said, with a laugh, “He’s gotta keep doin’ that. Got too many kids.”
Could Be a Little Bit of a Problem Number One: We ’re both guarded.
Michelle says her dad pulled out when she was 14, and then her brother passed away.
“I’ve been through some things with men. So in this relationship with Dennis, I’m pretty guarded,” Michelle told a reporter.
And since both of us are guarded, “It’s really hard to get close, because I think I’m afraid that he’s going to hurt me. He’s afraid I’m going to hurt him.
“The one thing we do know,” continued Michelle, “is that we love each other.”
Could Be a Little Bit of a Problem Number Two: I don’t know how to live together.
“He doesn’t know how to do it. He just doesn’t know.”
Like she does. This is a woman who pulled out of a relationship of 11 years to chase my sorry ass, a woman who had a kid with her “first love” when she was 22 and couldn’t parlay that into a marriage—much less something that lasted. And here she sits: a couple of decades into her adult life, making up one half of the most fucked-up relationship since Adam chomped down on the apple, trying to play the “girl card” on me?
Bullshit. She’s no better at this than I am.
As for all her crap about wanting us to be normal—Girl, have you checked me out lately? Are the nose studs and lip rings a clue? Do you know what I do for a living? Do you know what a 10-carat diamond ring costs?
Normal ain’t an option.
Now I don’t pretend to be a marriage counselor, but I can tell you one thing: our real problems don’t have shit to do with how I show love, whether or not I need attention, who pays the cable bill, takes out the fucking garbage, or leaves the toilet seat up. Our real problems are my lifeboats and her insane jealousy. Throw in our backburner issues, my drinking, and her temper, and you have a melodrama in the making.
There is one woman’s-magazine upside to all this: Michelle is really good at expressing her emotions.
As of right now, Michelle and I are still hanging in there. Last I heard, she has decided not to file because “it’s not over.” Me, I’m hanging in because Michelle is Michelle.
As many problems as we’ve had, I still put her right up there with Carmen. But Carmen was a shooting star. You can say anything you want about Michelle, but the girl does have staying power.
“I’ve been by his side. I’ve stayed there. I’ve been through a lot of crap with him, and I haven’t left,” she told a reporter.
“How long have you been together?” the reporter asked.
“Five and a half years—it’ll be six years.”
“So you’re his longest relationship.”
“Uh huh—and his closest.”
And as far as my friends are concerned, “the most fucked-up.” These days, it’s hard to find Michelle fans in my posse. “That’s his last infection that he needs to cure himself of,” said one. So what’s the general drift?
She’s a gold digger.
“She left her husband and went for the bigger, better deal,” a friend said.
She’s jealous.
“That’s a jealous girl. She’s very, very jealous,” said a friend.
“That would be the understatement of the century,” seconded another friend. “That’s like saying Dennis can kind of rebound .”
She trapped me by getting pregnant.
“Michelle knew what she was doing when she had those kids. Ka-ching! Let’s forget the pill today, and let’s cash the fuck in,” said a friend. “I don’t have any respect for a woman that uses kids as a meal ticket.”
All this is pretty much bullshit. Take the money thing. Hello. One of the kids was planned. And if Michelle was just in it for the dough, she could have cashed in a long time ago. As for the jealousy, I give her good reason for that, and it’s understandable right up until the point her hand meets my jaw or she coughs up that “He’s my husband, we have babies,” bullshit and creates an ugly scene.
While my friends are hammering Michelle, they’re usually giving me a free ride, saying, “Oh that’s just Dennis being Dennis,” and she knew what she was getting into before she married him. Hey, that’s what friends are for—but the truth is, I ain’t exactly a Fat Burger with homemade onion rings myself. The philandering, the drinking—Michelle has put up with her share of crap, and we are still together, much to the amazement of my friends.
“Those two don’t belong together. They should have called it quits a long time ago,” one friend
told a reporter. “Neither one of ’em is going to get out of it alive.
“They do have a dysfunctional relationship,” he continued. “If you can call it a relationship. It’s just pure dysfunction.”
“It’s nuts,” said another friend. “Their relationship is completely fucking nuts.”
I know my friends just want what’s best for me, but sometimes I get tired of people who think they know what I want and need better than I do. I know my body. I know my mind. I know my soul better than anybody else. And when someone sits there and says, “I know you, Dennis.” I’m like, “Oh, great. You know me? Great.”
Reality Check: You don’t know me.
If you did, you’d know I love Michelle more than anything in the world.
Over the past five or so years, Darren and Thaer have come to understand this. They know how I feel about Michelle and that, as the mother of my children, she will always be in our lives. So I can honestly say that, at the end of the day, Darren and Thaer really do care about Michelle and the kids, and all of us on “Team Rodman” are pulling together, trying to make it work—up to a point. There comes a time when the best thing to do, even for our closest friends, is just to get out of the way and let the two of us work it out.
For even if Michelle and I do have a fucked-up relationship, it’s our fucked-up relationship. It may be psychotic, dysfunctional, this, that. But as Michelle said, the one thing you can’t say is, “It’s over.”
So just let us be. And I promise that if it ever does fall completely apart, you guys will be the first to hear. Just listen for breaking glass, a thunderous slap, and one last cry of “He’s my husband, we have babies.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MEDIA SLIGHTINGS
Huntington Beach, California, June 11, 2005.The black Cadillac Escalade pulled up in front of my house around 6:00 p.m., and Thaer and the reporter he had just picked up at the Orange County Airport hopped out. Despite past experience, I had agreed to let the reporter follow me around for a couple of days. I never learn. Later he would write that, when he arrived at the house, I “never really said hello, made eye contact, or offered my hand.” He didn’t take offense—just mentioned it. Whatever. I never do that bullshit with strangers.
I tossed a pair of autographed basketball shoes into the back of the Escalade, and then I led the reporter inside to meet Michelle. D.J. and Trinity met me at the door—that lasted about two seconds—and then went tearing down the hall. Michelle shuffle-stepped into the foyer, moving slowly on her wheeled walker, a white, plastic neck brace propping up her chin. This was only 11 days after her motorcycle accident up at Big Bear, but if you ignored the medical hardware, she looked none the worse for wear—blond and beautiful as ever in jeans and a T-shirt. Miraculously, her face didn’t have a mark on it. There were a couple of small bandages on her left foot, and if you made the effort, you could see it was swollen.
“This is my wife, Michelle,” I said, and she and the reporter started making small talk.
Later the reporter would write that, when introducing Michelle, my “shy, gentle, self-effacing manner,” reminded him of “a young Jimmy Stewart.”
Mr. Stewart would be rolling over in his grave.
Michelle told the reporter that her shoulder was giving her the most trouble at the moment. Said when she got to the emergency room up in Loma Linda, there was a bone sticking out of her leg. That’s the left leg, the one in which they inserted the rod. She had a picture somewhere.
Trinity ran through as the nanny watched from the shadows of an adjoining room. D.J. collared the reporter and showed him this toy motorcycle ramp sitting on the floor—start ’em early, I say— then took off again.
“You have beautiful children,” the reporter said.
I gave Michelle all the props and then said my goodbyes to the kids. We were headed to L.A. for an overnighter—a Cedars-Sinai benefit where Thaer had said they would be auctioning off the autographed shoes. Back outside, we hopped in the Escalade, Thaer at the wheel, the reporter in back, already jotting down a bunch of shit in his notebook. At the time, it gave me the creeps. I mean, what kind of pissy little detail had this guy spotted in the last 15 minutes that was worth writing down? It was another reminder that letting a reporter into your life is not always a good thing.
In the spring of 2003, Stephen Rodrick, this reporter from The New York Times, came down to Newport Beach to catch up on Dennis Rodman. At the time, I was partying my ass off—pretty much 24 hours a day—but I’d agreed to let him follow me around.
Bad move. The title of the story alone, “No Rebound,” gives you an idea of how it went.
In the very first paragraph of a piece that appeared in The New York Times Magazine on June 1, 2003, Rodrick described me as “giddy and a little incoherent.” Translation: I was drunk. So why didn’t the guy just say, “Fuck it! We’ll try it another day”? He had a deadline and an agenda.
The gist: Dennis Rodman is finished.
“Like an aging sitcom that keeps getting moved to a worse and worse time slot,” he wrote, “Dennis Rodman’s celebrity is near cancellation.
“[He] has no endorsements, no public appearances, and few prospects,” he continued. “Rodman’s collapse is classic American overexposure.”
I won’t go through my entire 2003 schedule, but at the time this article was written, I had just finished shooting Celebrity Mole; had a nice, fat contract with GoldenPalace.com; and ESPN was poised to shoot Rodman on the Rebound. So news of my “collapse” was greatly exaggerated. But as they say in the newsroom, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
To prove his point about my failing career, Rodrick talked to my former agent, Dwight Manley. Well Manley hadn’t represented my ass in like four and a half years and didn’t know jack shit about what was happening in my life. Of course, that didn’t stop Dwight from offering an opinion—anything to get a little ink in The New York Times.
“Dennis could earn $200,000 a year just being Dennis Rodman, making personal appearances and doing events,” said Manley. “He could have a nice life.”
I’m not saying what I made that year, but it was a hell of a lot more than that. If he had called Darren, who had been representing me for about two years at that point, he could have found out how my career was really going.
After declaring my career had tanked, The New York Times guy moved on. He seemed determined not only to prove I was a loser in the celebrity sweepstakes, but a loser in life as well. I helped him out on that one. I was drunk and obnoxious, putting myself in a position to be fucked, and I paid the price. Not that it was fair—the guy was holding his nose the whole time he was there, but he didn’t just come out and say that up front. Didn’t say, “I don’t like this guy. I don’t like his lifestyle.” Instead, he piled up one cheap-shot detail after another.
For example, the Times reporter didn’t approve of these two stray guys who had washed up on the patio at the beach house, their “ample white guts basting in the spring sun.” He wasn’t any easier on me, writing, “His chiseled body has gone a bit to seed; a tiny potbelly pokes out …” and “… a hangdog smile [spread] across his chapped lips.”
What an asshole.
After we left the beach house and went to Josh Slocum’s, the Times reporter hung out with me until the wee hours. Watching me get drunker and drunker. (This is the guy who quit counting after I had 19 shots.) He made note of all the stupid shit I did: cranking up the stereo to “ear-bleeding levels,” and “wildly dancing, kicking his massive legs into the air within just a yard or so from middle-aged patrons” causing “more than a dozen guests [to] abandon dinner and leave the restaurant.” I showed my ass, and the reporter used it to “prove” that I was an over-the-hill loser.
Cue Mr. Manley.
“He’s just a shadow of what he was,” Dwight told the reporter. “It breaks my heart.”
Oh, please.
About a month later, ESPN came to town to begin shooting Rodman on th
e Rebound. Working from the same Rodman-partying-his-ass-off set of facts, ESPN produced very different results. Like the reporter from the Times, they had an angle: theirs was Rodman’s NBA comeback. But unlike the Times, there were no cheap shots. Not that they didn’t have the opportunity—they caught me drunk on camera twice. The difference is, they didn’t seem happy about it.
There was many a time that Thaer drove the ESPN crew around from bar to bar looking for my drunken ass. When they couldn’t find me, they’d interview Thaer, and in the finished show,Thaer was on camera so much that we took to calling it Mustafa on the Rebound.
In the ESPN case, having an angle, an agenda, worked in my favor in a couple of ways. First, they were totally committed to documenting my comeback, because that’s how they sold the story to the boss—got him to agree to spend six months and a lot of bucks following me around. So that made the drunk-on-the-rampage angle a subplot. Secondly, once they were on the ground, they were so set on telling that comeback story, I’m guessing that they genuinely couldn’t see that the story was making a U-turn and heading in a whole new drunken direction. And while the final product would showcase my drinking problem, the program was still built around the comeback angle with these “supers”—superimposed headlines—used throughout to track my progress toward that goal. Sometimes it seemed a little silly. For example, over video showing me licking my wounds in a room at the Hard Rock after my motorcycle accident, they supered, “10 Days to NBA Tip-Off,” although at that point my comeback was beyond dead. If they had been true to what was really going on, there would have been an entirely different set of supers: “Seven Days to the Intervention” maybe, or “20 Days to Sobriety,” because what they had on tape was not a comeback, but a downfall.
While The New York Times and ESPN had the same basic “downfall” raw material to work with, they shaped it in different ways. Rodrick took a “holier than thou” slant; ESPN a more “This is just the facts, ma’am” approach. There was an undercurrent of preaching in the Times story. ESPN was more straightforward, telling the story with less spin. While I didn’t like either story, I had to admit that ESPN was at least fair. And when it comes to the media, that’s about the best you can hope for. I guess I should be thankful. If ESPN had come in with the same “Let’s-fuck-Rodman” attitude as the Times, they could have absolutely buried my ass.
I Should Be Dead By Now Page 16