Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I had instituted a dress code for the party. Everyone had to dress up sharp, no jeans. Of course I made my entrance later wearing jeans and a nice pair of Cartier diamond bracelets. That was what Cus taught me. You always have to create an environment where you can be what others can’t be. You set the rules. That was more of his psychological warfare. He was all about confusing the enemy.

  Kiki’s parents sent her to Italy for her junior year abroad and I got her number there from them and called her. I asked her for her address and told her that I would come out and visit her. But then I got into that motorcycle accident. I didn’t see her again until the Vargas-Trinidad fight in Vegas on December 2, 2000. She had gotten credentials for the fight. I ran into her by the dressing rooms backstage. When I saw her, I picked her up and gave her a hug. The next day she came over to my place and the five-year wait was finally over.

  “You’re mine now,” I told her. I had to leave later that day for Phoenix to train so I had her come along. She stayed with me for a few days and then went back to New York where she was living. I didn’t want her to go, so I called her a few days later and flew her back to Phoenix. We did that for a while. Kiki was working as a stylist for music videos then so she had the flexibility to leave everything and come out.

  We were having a lot of fun together until I acted like a cad and blew it. One night we were together in Vegas and we had gone to dinner at the Brown Derby and then caught the Kings of Comedy show. It was about 12:30 in the morning and on the way home I got a call from a stripper I was seeing. So when we got home I told her that I was going back out to meet up with my friend. Kiki was really hurt, although she didn’t show it at the time. I just thought people were supposed to accept that behavior from me. All my life that is what they did. When I got back the next morning, her stuff was already packed and Darryl was about to drive her to the airport.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her. “You gonna leave?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Oh, well, I’m an asshole. You knew that already,” I said.

  I called her and asked her to come see me a number of times in 2001, but she wouldn’t talk to me. But we got together again in the summer of 2002. I invited Kiki to the Lennox Lewis fight. She came a week before the fight and stayed with me at a house I had rented. After the fight, Kiki stayed with me at the rented house for a week, tending to my wounds from the fight. Then we flew in a private jet to New York and I moved into her apartment in lower Manhattan. We were living together but not really living together. We were almost like roommates. I would go out at night and hang out. Sometimes she’d meet me at a club and then we’d go home together. Even if I scored with another girl, I’d come back to her house that night. And she never bitched about anything. She was so mellow.

  I had been secretly seeing Liz at the same time. One night, I told her that I had a new girlfriend. She had a delayed response.

  “Of course I don’t like it, but I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  But that feeling changed abruptly. I guess she didn’t want to be a doormat. So after one phone argument we had, she decided she wasn’t going to let me use her apartment as a storage facility so she boxed up all my stuff and FedExed it to my house in Vegas. In just a few months I had gone from living with Lisa to Kiki to Luz. That was my modus operandi then. And when I was living with Kiki, it was the first time ever that I realized that I could do this, I could commit to living with somebody for real.

  After a little over a year, her anger had subsided and we’d hook up here and there. No matter who she was seeing at the time, she’d just take off to hang out with me for a few days. We’d have a lot of fun, and then not see each other for months or even a year. I saw her again in 2004 at that Trinidad fight at the Garden where my new bodyguard got slipped a Mickey from that hustler chick. I invited her to come hang out with me at an after-party at a club in the Meatpacking District. She came and sat at my booth. I was talking to some people, and when Kiki’s back was turned for a second, this white girl who was in their party and who I had never seen before in my life came over to me and without even saying “Hi” just sat on my lap. A second later, boom, Kiki had punched me in the face.

  Everyone just backed up then. Zip thought I might go crazy and beat her ass, but I loved her. I just started laughing. I knew that she had built up all that resentment for me doing her dirty with Luz when she was the one nursing me after the Lewis fight.

  We didn’t talk for a long time after that. I saw her again at the Magic Show convention in Las Vegas at the end of 2005. I bumped into her when I was with two lovely companions that I had just met that night. We hooked up when she was in Vegas and we had our usual good time.

  After I moved into my new house in Vegas after my sentencing on the Phoenix coke bust, I was depressed. The doctors from Wonderland had me on so many meds I was totally lethargic. Darryl was really worried about me.

  “You’re not looking so good, Mike. You okay?” he asked me. “Listen, I got Kiki’s number. I know she makes you happy every time you talk to her. Can I get her on the line?”

  So we called her and I told her to come visit me. Kiki had just broken up with a guy and she was depressed. She later told me that she was finally getting over me and that she asked her mother if she should come visit.

  “What do you have to lose? You always have such a good time with him,” Rita said. “Just go for a pick-me-upper.”

  Kiki came out in January of 2008 to visit. The minute I laid eyes on her it was like my whole perception of her changed. Wow, she’s hot, I thought. Maybe it was because I was seeing her when I was sober for the first time. She had blossomed into a beautiful woman. I really wanted to see if being committed to one person could work for me. But we were both pretty depressed at that time. I was trying to stay clean after my rehab and Kiki had been dealing with a family crisis for the past few years.

  It seemed that the Bush administration was trying to crack down on the Democratic power structure in Philadelphia. They were wiretapping the mayor’s office and the Imam’s office. They went after the Imam and Rita and claimed that the Muslim school that they ran had been misappropriating federal funds. They even charged Kiki and her brother with conspiracy, mail fraud, and theft of federal funds, and slapped Kiki with an additional count of false statements to the grand jury. They were each facing over a hundred years. The case was bullshit to begin with, but Kiki and her mother, brother, and stepfather were convicted. The main issue was whether Kiki had taught the classes at the school that the government had subsidized. Kiki testified that she had, to the best of her knowledge. That wasn’t good enough for the prosecutor.

  “No, it’s a yes or no question. Did you teach?”

  “Yes, to the best of my knowledge,” Kiki repeated. This went on over and over again. She wasn’t going to let that prosecutor intimidate her. They eventually found her guilty of perjury because of that, but they just slapped her on the wrist and gave her six months of house arrest. But the feds weren’t through harassing her, and they appealed her sentence. They won their appeal and she had to go back to be re-sentenced for the same crime that she already done the house arrest time for. When that hit the papers, she was laid off from her job. So she was bummed out too.

  We were both watching a lot of Law & Order on TV all day long. I was hibernating on the couch, filling up on cookies and Dairy Queen. My meds made me quiet. I didn’t have that usual swagger. At night, we’d go out to the clubs, but I was so out of it I hardly recognized my club friends.

  I wasn’t the only one who had a shift of perception. Kiki thought she had known me over the years. One day she came into the room while I was eating Cap’n Crunch and playing a video game.

  “Wow, it’s interesting how you think you know somebody, but you don’t know them at all. You think they are one way and they’re not that way at all. You conduct yourself totally different than what you really
are, Mike,” she said.

  After hanging out with me a few days, Kiki started doing research into all the meds that the rehab doctors had me taking. Here’s the list:

  Depakote

  Neurontin

  Zyprexa

  Abilify

  Cymbalta

  Wellbutrin XL

  Tricor

  Zocor

  The last two were for my high cholesterol and triglycerides. But all the others were head drugs. One was a mood stabilizer. Two were antidepressants. Two were mood regulators for bipolar disorder. And one was used to treat epilepsy, something I never had. Kiki made up a whole list of the adverse side effects of these drugs and showed it to me. So I agreed that I should detox off them. She went out and got some Chinese herbal medicine to cleanse me.

  I supplemented the herbs with my own regimen of cocaine. I was a zombie on these prescribed head pills but I could function in my dysfunction on coke. I would have preferred to smoke weed but I couldn’t because I was still being tested by my probation officer once a month. Weed stays in your system and is detectable in your piss for over six months, more for me probably because I was getting morbidly obese and that THC from the grass binds right to your fat cells. But coke only stays in your system for three days and then it’s gone. Definitely the drug of choice for those on probation.

  Kiki went back to Philadelphia to be re-sentenced, so I was able to hide from her the fact that I was taking coke. On April Fools’ Day, she got fooled when the judge ruled that she had to redo her six-month sentence, but this time she had to go to prison instead of just house arrest. Everyone was shocked. I didn’t want her to go away for six months. She was ready to go right in that day, but they gave her thirty days to put her affairs in order, so she didn’t have to report to jail until May first.

  While Kiki was gone, I decided to try to go to an A.A. meeting in Henderson. It’s a new, sleek-looking town, but the meetings were held in the creepiest section. I went to one meeting and I couldn’t take it. After the meeting, I went out and got high. I was a relapse artist. If you read anything about A.A., you find that relapse is part of recovery. You can’t have recovery without relapse. You’ve still got those demons that you have to struggle with. The devil fucks with me all the time. He knows I’m a relapse artist, that’s why he comes to me. If he thought I was strong he wouldn’t go near me. The devil is aware that I know God doesn’t like me that much, so he wants me to rebel.

  Kiki came back to stay with me before she had to turn herself in on May first. About a week before she was going to leave, I was watching TV downstairs when Kiki came over.

  “Baby, we need to talk,” she told me all dramatically.

  I remembered that Johnny Depp movie Blow where the girl comes in to tell him that she’s dying. I was high and when Kiki gave me that look, I freaked out. I just knew she had the Big C.

  “No, baby, no,” I said. “Are you sick?”

  “No, you dumbass, I’m pregnant.”

  I felt like the weight of the world came off me. I had just been dumped into hell and pulled back out. But I had to read her the riot act.

  “This shit might not work, you know. I’m horrible with marriages. I adore you but I’m not monogamous. I’m never going to have money again. I’m bankrupt now. It won’t be like all your fancy boyfriends before, you ain’t stepping out in limos. You might not have to wait in line in a restaurant but you’re not going to wear any designer stuff unless you go to the discount shop. I’m going to be the brokest boyfriend you’ve ever had in your dating career.”

  “Well, listen, you don’t have to be in the baby’s life,” she said.

  Yeah, that same old bullshit—until the baby comes and hard times come and then I get hit with the fucking subpoena. That’s how that shit goes.

  “Listen,” I said. “What do you want me to do? I’ll help you. We’ll do this together. I will give you the best that I can be.”

  Which I knew would be disastrous.

  “But there won’t be any glory in this. No cameras or nothing. The only cameras will be at my funeral. We’re going to live life on life’s terms. If you’re willing to do this with me, maybe it’ll be okay.”

  I didn’t talk much to Kiki while she was in jail. I was starting to party pretty hard with cocaine again and Kiki refused to call me because she didn’t want to find out that I was in a strip club and listen to all those bitches laughing in the background. I wasn’t responsible for what she wanted to hear. As far as I was concerned, I made my commitment.

  “You’re going to be my girl when you come out. It’s just going to be me and you,” I told her right before she went in. “When you come out, I’m going to be there for you and the baby. I ain’t gonna get nobody pregnant and I’m going to let all these women know that my woman is away and when she gets back home, this is all over.”

  I was basically going to have a six-month bachelor party. Thank God I didn’t catch AIDS or something. Kiki got upset because while she was in prison she saw some photos of me with other women, but she had to take that on the chin. I had to take some stuff on the chin too, that’s just what happens in relationships, you have to eat your partner’s baggage. I wasn’t ashamed of anything I did, because we were living in two different worlds. I don’t know who called or visited her, that wasn’t my concern.

  On May eighteenth my documentary opened at Cannes. I was high on the plane going into Cannes. I brought some girl from D.C. and we partied the whole time I was there. She would get girls and we’d both sleep with them. We had reasons to party too; the film got rave reviews from the critics at Cannes. I gave my own little capsule review to the press.

  “It’s like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I’m the subject.”

  When I got back to Vegas, I kept on partying nonstop. My friend Martin and I had a friend named Paris who was a cool old motherfucker. He was at least eighty years old and he was a big drug dealer. He used to work as a pit boss at one of the casinos on the Strip and he was always a sharp dresser. Martin had been friends with Paris for forty years, but he didn’t like it when I started hanging out with him because Martin thought he was a bad influence on me with the drugs. Martin is a country-assed Mississipi guy. He would see me high on coke and say, “You supposed to be some player from the Himalaya? Nigga, you ain’t shit. You get on that cocaine, you can’t do shit. You can’t get no money, you can’t get no bitch, you can’t get nothing, nigga.”

  Even Paris tried to avoid me. I’d call him to come hang out and at first he was cool but then he saw how I was acting with the cocaine, because he had pure cocaine.

  “Mike, you don’t need none of this,” he told me. He was such an arrogant motherfucker. “Go be with your big-time white friends, use that dirty dope they got. You’re not good enough for this shit, you need that white-folk dope, Mike.”

  So Paris died and at his funeral they read his will.

  “Martin and Mike Tyson are my only two friends. I want them to inherit my worldly possessions,” they read. What are among a drug dealer’s worldly possessions? His stash. So after the funeral, Martin took possession of Paris drug stash. Martin kept telling me that Paris wanted me to have his coke. But when I asked Martin for it, he’d say, “Mike, you’re not doing good now. I can’t in good conscience give you the stuff now.”

  “But that’s my shit, Martin. How can you not give me something that belongs to me? You’re not my father.”

  “Boy, I just can’t do that.”

  Martin is one of those Southern Baptist Christians to the bone. He’d committed every sin in the Book but he was going to die for Jesus and he’d kill you for Jesus. I was convinced that the shit was at Martin’s house and I was so hard up for it that I invited myself to sleep over at Martin.

  “Kiki is locked up. I’m staying with you,” I told Martin.

  As soon as Martin left to go to work, I starte
d ransacking his whole house. He had at least a hundred Stacy Adams suits in the closets and I was frantically going through each of the pockets to find the stash.

  Whoa, let’s calm down, Mike, I told myself. I was sweating like a pig I was so agitated. All right, ghetto survival tactics. Go back to the hood. If you were in the ghetto where would you hide your drugs?

  So I looked into the barrels of Martin’s guns. I looked into each one of his shoes. I looked under the bed and on top of the bed and under the mattress. At one point I was looking through all of Martin’s tin cans and I found a little rock of coke that someone had given to him twenty years earlier. It was literally a rock by then. All of the bacteria and dirt from the last twenty years had singed down on the coke. It wasn’t even white anymore; it was a sickly grayish-greenish color.

  After a couple of hours the cleaning lady came in.

  “GET OUT! GET OUT!” I screamed at her.

  She was a Spanish lady and she didn’t know what was going on with this crazy guy yelling at her, so she called Martin and he told her to come back the next day.

  At the end of the day, Martin came home. He left the house sober but he drank all day at work so he was soused. He saw a do-rag that was lying on the living room table and he picked it up and slammed it down.

  “Motherfucker, you had a woman in here,” he said.

  “No, Martin, I didn’t,” I said.

  Martin had a young kid from the neighborhood with him because he always gave the kid some cash to do chores.

  “Yeah, you had a bitch back there,” he said.

  I held up the do-rag and addressed the kid.

  “Young man, as you are aware, this is not a woman’s stocking, it’s a do-rag.”

  “I know what it is,” the kid said.

  “Well, explain it to him.”

  Martin was so drunk that he didn’t even recognize the do-rag that he would put over his hair every night before he went to sleep.