by Mike Tyson
When Martin went into his bedroom, he was shocked.
“What the fuck happened to my room?” he said sadly.
I had actually disassembled the frame of his bed. Then, because I thought the coke might be in the legs of the frame, I broke them off. All the drawers of the dresser were out and ransacked. His closet was in a shambles. I had destroyed this man’s house.
“Why the fuck did you do this, Mike?” he said.
“Because I was looking for the coke,” I told him.
“I left it in the safe in my office. It’s not in here.”
“Martin, why didn’t you just tell me? Why don’t you just give me the fucking shit, man? It’s mine.”
“Hell no! I ain’t giving you shit after what you done did.”
And he never gave me the coke.
By then, I was so fat, I was almost 360 pounds. In my right frame of mind, I wouldn’t even look at girl when I was that disgusting, but get some of that coke in me and I got the courage to approach anyone. The next thing you know, I was hanging around with a bunch of strangers thinking that I was beautiful.
I started having orgies at my house again. There’d be twenty naked people in my living room, all high on coke, and nobody saying a damn word. All the girls would walk by me and touch me and rub and kiss me.
One day we had been partying all night at my house. There were people all over the house having sex. I was in my bedroom with two women. I hadn’t slept in two days and all of a sudden another chick ran into my room.
“Mike, your probation officer is outside knocking on the door.”
My dick shrank right down. As soon as the word got out that there was a probation officer at the front door, one of the guys who was on parole threw his clothes on and ran right out the back door and jumped over the fence and split. I kept looking out the window at the front gate, sneaking peeks to see if he was still there. I was scared shitless but after a few minutes he just left.
Things really got weird when I started dating a couple of call girls in Vegas. When we partied late at night on the Strip, we’d get a hotel room to keep getting high instead of going back to Henderson. Once, I was in the room while my girl was turning a trick. Instead of smoking it, I snorted my good coke and my whole nose froze up. I called up my girlfriend. She answered it and I could hear the john fucking her in the background.
“You all right, baby?” she said.
“Oh, my nose is froze. I’m in the hotel room. I’m dying, baby.”
“Take another hit,” she said.
I followed her advice.
“Hey, I’m good. That’s all I had to do?”
I took another snort.
“Now I’m really good,” I said.
“Okay, if you need me, call,” she said and went back to banging her john.
A lot of times we’d party in the after-hours clubs and then go back to someone’s house to continue the party. One time, I was with one of my prostitute girlfriends and we went over to my friend Brian’s house. I went right in the back room with my girl and got high on coke and some mushrooms. I came out and there was a whole new crew of people that had come to the party. They were a happy white-boy crew, nice guys who just wanted to do some lines. I went back to the room and chilled out with my girl and then I went out and the white boys had been replaced by a Mexican crew. Everybody was cool and humble and I partied with them for a while and then went back. When me and my girl came back out, now there was a black crew there. I was still in my happy white mood so I didn’t think anything about this rainbow coalition that was rotating in front of my eyes. I was sure some of these guys wanted to date my girl, but I wasn’t tripping about that, because if they were going to do that, they’d pay her, that was just what it was.
I went up to them.
“Hi, guys, you guys need anything?” I’m doing my best Uncle Tom nonthreatening shit, right? They just looked at me and shook their heads dismissively without responding. Once they did that, my ego started getting caught up.
Whoa, these niggas don’t know who I am? They got to know who I am, I thought. I’m Mike Tyson. How could they not worship me? I’m tripping on the mushrooms now and the coke was propelling it forward.
These motherfuckers are acting like I was the help here, I was thinking. They didn’t even say “No, thank you” or nothing.
I went to the bathroom and when I got back I saw that these guys had slipped my girl a Mickey. Now I was pissed. Why the fuck would they do that with me sitting right there?
These niggas must think I don’t exist. They think I’m a fat nothing, not the guy I used to be, I thought.
I watched one of the guys and he was looking at my girl, soaking in her body. And then he started to laugh and he tapped me on the arm.
“You’re crazy, Mike,” he said.
Something just clicked then in my mind.
I’m going to have to kill these niggas, I thought.
I went into war mode. All the cocaine and the mushrooms and the Hennessy were telling me that these motherfuckers had to bow down to me. So I got up and grabbed a golf club that belonged to the owner of the place and I started swinging at these guys. I was screaming so much that my girl woke up out of her stupor. One guy ran right to the window and jumped out. One guy locked himself in the bathroom. I caught one guy who was cowering behind a sofa.
“Listen, nigga, I’m the motherfucking slaughterhouse here, man, I’m the killer. You all want anything, you ask me nicely. You say, ‘Yes, sir, no sir, Mr. Tyson.’”
Meanwhile, my girl was begging me.
“No, baby, baby, baby, no, no, no, baby. Please come with me, baby, let’s leave.”
Fuck, this ho didn’t know I was like this, huh? I thought.
While this was going on, the guy ran out the front door to join his pals. So we kept partying for about three more hours. Then we heard a voice coming from the bathroom.
“I’m calling the cops right now. I’m calling the cops, if you don’t let me out of here.”
“What the fuck, this nigga is still locked up in the bathroom?” I said. We had forgotten all about him.
I tried to convince myself that I didn’t care that my girl was selling her body but I’m too emotional a guy to truly accept that concept. One night I was hanging at a guy’s house that we were manipulating for drugs and money. My girl came in looking all nice from turning a trick.
“Are you ready to go home?” I asked her.
“You go home, baby. I’m going to stay here with this guy for a while. I’ll see you back at the house later.”
“Okay, baby,” I said and gave her a kiss. As I was walking to my car, I started getting this weird feeling.
Hey, what the fuck just happened? I thought. Did I just get played by that creepy white guy in there?
I went home. When my girl came home she came right over to me.
“I know you’re not tripping about that shit,” she said. “If that motherfucker ever said something disrespectful about you when I was riding him, I would have slit his fucking throat.”
She was one tough Italian chick.
“Baby, this is how we eat,” she said. “You ain’t fighting anymore. That shit don’t mean nothing to me. I’m coming home to you, baby.”
These girls were feeding me because I was broke but I didn’t want them to give their pussy away. I was the only guy that made his prostitute girlfriends leave him because I didn’t want them to work. I guess my father and Iceberg were right. I was never good with women. I wasn’t the pimp type. People reacted to my violent image and thought I was some King Pimp, but I was more the trick than the pimp. I was Mr. Trickarooey.
• • •
I was right back in cocaine hell during my six-month sabbatical from Kiki. And Marilyn tried to keep on my ass. She’d call me when I was getting high.
“W
here is your A.A. book, Mike? Let’s read it together right now. Read fifty-two.”
I’d be high with her on the speakerphone and I’d look up the page she mentioned and started reading it out loud to her.
“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or, self-seeking motives.”
I’m reading this and Marilyn’s yelling, “READ IT LOUDER!! LOUDER!!”
I never hung up on her or told her I was busy, because I wanted to be helped.
“Working with others, practical experience shows that nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics.”
The reading reminded me that I thought I was just a cokehead but no, I was an alcoholic. The only time I’d do coke was after a drink. And once I took a drink, everyone was in danger, even me.
I wanted to party in New York but that plan got derailed when I was accused of putting up $50,000 for a hit on the guys who had allegedly killed my buddy Darryl “Homicide” Baum back in 2000. This came out at a trial of one of the Cash Money Brothers organization that controlled the drug traffic in some of the projects in Brooklyn. Supposedly one of the guys who murdered Homicide heard about the bounty and then he put out a hit on my head and that it was almost carried out in the summer of 2000 when I was in Brooklyn. I had been spotted in one of my Range Rovers on Atlantic Avenue but some of the Cash Money guys objected to killing me because I was a Muslim.
All of this was bullshit, of course, but just mentioning my name in connection with hits on drug dealers helped perpetuate the idea that I was some crazy, hard-core guy. I was on probation then too, so now they were telling me that I can’t even go to my hometown.
That was the world I grew up in. All my friends killed people, robbed their drugs. I went one direction and they went the other, but we kept in touch. Now I was getting dragged back into that world and it was a nightmare. I felt like the whole world was caving in on me.
So I stayed out in the west and kept getting fucked up. I took one of my call-girl girlfriends to the premiere of Will Smith’s new film Seven Pounds in December. Kiki saw a picture of me and the girl on the red carpet while she was in jail and flipped out. I was flipping out too but it was because I was feeling like shit. I called my old friend Hope right before the after-party was going to begin and asked her to come and get me. She drove up to the place and I ran out got into her car and left my girl and my bodyguards back in the party.
I just had to get away. My bodyguards were calling, all freaked out, and I put Hope on the phone.
“He’ll be fine. Let me just give him some space. I’ll bring him back,” she told them.
But I didn’t want to go back; I just wanted to disappear. Hope took me back and she came to the party with us. I was walking around, just completely out of it.
Later that month, I went to one of my clubs in Vegas. I was going to my usual spot in the VIP area when I saw that there was a big crowd around the rope. Some of the big drug guys who normally sat in the VIP section were being refused admittance by the bouncer. But when he saw me he let me right in. So I took up my normal spot at my table and started drinking my Hennessy. There were a bunch of people at the next table drinking and having fun and I looked over at them, thinking to myself, Who the fuck do they think they are sitting over here? This is our spot. Then I saw one of the Olsen twins. So now I was figuring that this was a showbiz crowd. All these white people were looking over at me, the black interloper in the corner. But this was my place. In my mind I was some cool Las Vegas big shot. Then all of a sudden that comic actor Zach Galifianakis came over to me.
“Hey, we’re shooting a movie with you in two weeks,” he said.
“Fuck you are. For real?”
Zach laughed. He must have thought I was putting him on but it was news to me. I didn’t know anything about any movie. I was doing my normal meet and greets to pick up enough money to keep me in drugs. Hey, if I had a movie, cool, let’s go do a movie. I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.
“Come sit with us and have a drink,” Zach said. He was a great guy.
In a couple of weeks I was on the set of The Hangover. I was fat, out of shape, and moody. But Todd Phillips, the director, and those actors were just so awesome. I don’t know if they thought I was going to be some psycho on the set but Todd and the producers were all over me all the time.
“Is everything okay? Do you want to take a break?” Todd said. “Can you do one more take now? You don’t have to do it now if you don’t want to.”
I was just so happy to work. I had been asking God to just give me another chance and I would never get high again, even though I couldn’t stop using coke. I was high on coke the entire time we shot The Hangover. I had one of my hooker girlfriends with me on the set. And then Seano stopped in to see the filming. He took one look at my girl’s ass and shook his head.
“I can see that me and the brothers are not on your mind too often these days, huh, Mike?” he said.
But I loved being on the set. They put up these craft services tables just stocked with the best cookies, cake, and food. I was stopping scenes to go get me some more of those cookies.
I didn’t expect much from this film. But Todd kept telling me how this was going to be a huge movie and that I’d be on top again after it came out. That was cool, but it was more exciting for me just to be able to entertain people again. I realized that even when I was a fighter, entertaining the people was more paramount than winning the fights. Cus always had me around all these charismatic show-business and media people with magnetic personalities. I realized that Cus was all about the arts. When Cus talked about putting his thoughts in other people’s minds, that was an art too, even if it was a dark art. The art of war, the art of survival, we always looked at everything as art. I’m not a good artist but I know the arts. It was like I said that I wasn’t a good fighter, but I knew how to fight real good.
Kiki gave birth to our daughter Milan on December 24, 2008. She had just been released from jail and she went to a hospital in Philadelphia where Milan was induced because she was a couple of weeks late. Kiki called to tell me and I was stunned. That was my mother’s birthday. I had gotten a small apartment for Kiki near my house in Vegas and had fixed it up for her and the baby. She was about to come out when fate intervened. I had a dirty urine test and the Phoenix people were thinking about putting me back in jail. But my lawyer convinced them that rehab would be better for me so in January, I checked myself into a posh rehab in Malibu called Promises.
Promises was awesome. I was in this mansion. It was just like doing rehab at home. Here we would go to meetings and also see our therapists. They were working me from all angles so I could get a good report and get off my drug case. Everything was going good until four weeks in. My time was up. I didn’t want to leave but they already had booked someone else for my room. I really wasn’t well yet. So I called my friend Jeff Greene and told him to come get me.
Jeff picked me up and took me to a friend’s house, a guy who owned one of those energy drink companies. Jeff didn’t know it but there was a full-fledged party going on at the house, complete with lots of pretty, young girls.
“Sit right here, Mike. Don’t move,” Jeff said. But of course, the party came to us and I was soon surrounded by beautiful women in their bathing suits.
Jeff was going to take me to another rehab the next day so I was going to stay at his house that night. So Jeff put the clamps on me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t flirt with the girls, I was his prisoner. Eventually we went home and then the next day Jeff drove me to a branch of Promises that was in West L.A.
“Hey, Jeff, I’m flat broke. You’re gonna have to pay for this shit, man. I want to get well. Okay?” I said.
We sat do
wn to talk to the administration lady who would check me in. I saw that she had a Star of David on. She left to get some forms to fill out and I pounced on Jeff.
“Look, Jeff, she’s one of your people. This is going to be good, we’re going to get a good deal. They know the protocol. Talk to her, Jeff.”
She came back and sat down but she was playing hardball—she wasn’t giving nobody no play. Every time she said another aspect of treatment it was more money. Three grand for this, four grand for that, twenty-five grand for another thing. You take another pill that’s another five grand.
Jeff was “plotzing,” as he would say, as he heard how much money he was going to have to lay out.
“What the fuck, Mike? God, man, get sober,” he said.
On January twenty-first, they let me out of rehab for a day to attend the U.S. premiere of my documentary film at Sundance. Seano came with me as a sober companion. And that was the first time that I was going to see Milan. We met Kiki at the airport. She came off the plane with our little girl and she was all bummy-looking, like a homeless person. I was looking at Milan, saying “Hi,” trying to see if she looked like me. Kiki was crying at the airport and I was still fucked up from the drugs in my system so I didn’t really have much empathy for her. Even seeing Milan was strange. It was almost like, Well, another out-of-wedlock baby again. I could do another one. It wasn’t the response we both anticipated. I don’t even think I kissed Kiki when I saw her. It was just awkward.
We went to the movie premiere, and then afterwards we went back to the hotel. I couldn’t have sex with Kiki because she was all stitched up from having Milan and also because Seano was there to block me from having sex with her anyway. I loved Milan, but all her crying just irritated me. I didn’t feel like dealing with noise then. So we didn’t get off to the best start, for sure.
The next morning, I went back to rehab in L.A. and Kiki and Milan went to the townhouse apartment I set up for them in Vegas. Kiki was all alone because her mom was still in a halfway house in Philly because of her bullshit conviction. I talked to Kiki from Promises and she was all depressed, but so was I. She didn’t have much compassion for me then, she just saw me as some big spoiled brat moaning about things while I was in a country club for junkies. But the Promises branch I was in was nothing like the one in Malibu. It was in town, on the corner of some street where anybody could go in and kidnap you or something.