by Mike Tyson
They had me saying I was born-again in Jet magazine. “Remember this: Reach for God, don’t reach for the stars, you might get a cloud and nothing is in the clouds. Reach for God, reach to shake God’s hands.” That was all bullshit. The only spirituality I had back then was in my dick.
I spent a lot of time in L.A. in the late ’80s. I had an apartment in Century City off Wilshire. A friend of mine was christening his boat and he had a party where I met this beautiful girl named Hope. She was with a girlfriend of hers and they arrived near the end of the party when the food had run out. I was sitting at a table with a big plate of food in front of me, so Hope walked up to me out of the blue and went into a great Andrew Dice Clay imitation.
“Look, my friend will blow you if you buy dinner. Me and my friend are starving.”
I thought she was hilarious. I invited them to pull up a seat and I shared my food with them. I didn’t get any feeling that she wanted to be intimate with me so we just became running dogs. She had a lot of girlfriends and I would say, “Hope, I really like that girl a lot.” So she hooked me up. I became a big brother to her. She was always having problems with men. I would take one look at a guy and tell her, “Hope, that guy’s gay,” or, “This guy will never care about you.” I was really good at seeing through people’s bullshit. Except for the women in my life.
We became close. Hope was going to college then and she didn’t have much money, so I let her stay in the spare bedroom in my apartment. But we were just platonic friends. No one could believe it because Hope was so hot.
“Mike, you’re fucking her. I know you are,” all of my friends would say. “I saw you fuck that ugly fat bitch, you got to be fucking this one.”
I became super protective of Hope. One of our favorite places to go was this club called RnB Live. That was where Hope bumped into Wesley Snipes. She started dating him while I was out of town. When I got back to L.A., she came to me crying. Wesley had broken her heart; he didn’t want to see her anymore.
“See, Hope, this is what happens when you mess with those kinds of guys in your life. You need a straight guy,” I told her.
But Hope didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to hear “Why are you crying, Hope? I’m going to kick his ass.”
Hope didn’t get what she wanted from me, so she said to me, “Oh, and Wesley didn’t get why I was, with you. He said, ‘What are you doing with a guy like Tyson?’ to me.”
I knew that was bullshit.
A few days later I made plans to meet Hope at RnB. I sat next to her and asked her how school was, when we saw Wesley Snipes walk in. I excused myself and walked over to him. Wesley looked up, saw me, and panicked.
“Mike, please don’t hit me in my face, that’s how I make my living,” he said.
“Man, don’t worry about that thing with Hope. She’s just hurt.” We both laughed about it.
But I had been drinking a lot of champagne that night, so when I saw Keenen Ivory Wayans, I had to tell him something. He had been doing an impersonation of me on his show In Living Color.
“Yo, Keenen, can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked.
“Yeah, Mike, what’s up?”
“Did I do something to you or your family?” I said.
“No, why?”
“Because these motherfucking jokes about me have got to stop.”
He got all apologetic. And the jokes about me stopped. All those comedian guys talk shit on stage or in front of the cameras, but when they see me, they want to slap five.
The same time I was running with Hope, I started hanging out with this incredible guy named Kevin Sawyer. He had a pager company in L.A. and his store had become a hangout spot for all the players, hustlers, and pimps. Jamie Foxx and Joe Torry worked there before they were famous. It was a business place. People would go in to buy pagers and I would be there shooting dice in my Versace clothes with my big diamond watches and my Rolls parked outside.
Kevin was an incredible ladies’ man. He was very charismatic and the women loved him, even though he stuttered. Me and Kevin and my friend Craig Boogie would have competitions to see how many women we could get in a day. The sex scene was crazy then. I’d meet girls on the street, say, “Come, let’s go,” and we’d go. I’d be in a club and I’d be touching girls, putting my tongue on their backs, licking their skin, and I didn’t even know them. But I’d take them home and let my friends have sex with them too. My reputation began to spread. I was the guy who might take you shopping, but then we would go home to have sex.
One time, Boogie was driving me around Philadelphia. I was there training for the Buster Mathis Jr. fight. I saw a beautiful girl walking down the street. I didn’t even have to say anything to her; the girl just hopped right in the back of the car.
“Where are we going?” she said.
Another time I was in a cab in New York with this girl I had met. She started taking off her clothes in the cab and having sex with me. It wasn’t even a limo; it was a regular yellow cab. I was, like, “Whoa. Okay, let’s go.”
In my mind I was ordained to do this. All my heroes had had all these women. Someone should have said to me, “This is going to have an ugly ending.” But there was nobody there to do that.
I started making sex videos at home. Boogie would direct the scene, place the camera in the right spot, and then he’d hide in the closet and watch. They started calling me “the Womb Shifter” or “the Pelvis Pulverizer.” I’d show the tapes to my friends and then I’d destroy them. Man, if one of them had gotten out, it would have made the Kardashian tape look PG-13.
I was drinking a lot in those days and partying wherever I found myself. I had a girlfriend in Chicago named Carmen. She was a nice Catholic girl from a solid family – too nice to be hanging around us. I was in a nightclub in Chicago one night with her and Eric Brown, who everyone called EB. They had a sexy-lady contest and some guy disrespected Carmen during it. I didn’t say anything, but I was fuming. I guess the guy thought that he had punked Mike Tyson, but I followed him, sneaky-like, downstairs to the bathroom.
“Listen, man, I don’t care about no pussy. But you don’t ever fuck with me like that, man. This championship shit don’t mean nothing. We can get it on right here.”
The guy looked terrified. Just then EB and some of the club security guys barged into the bathroom and pulled me away from the guy. I was pretty drunk, so I bolted out of the club and jumped into my car. I had my long stretch limo with the hot tub in the back that night. I told the driver to drive me over to the south side. EB was frantic when he realized I was gone, so he called the limo driver’s car phone.
“Where are you?”
“We’re on Sixty-seventh and …” the driver said.
“What! I don’t even go over there,” EB worried.
“What do you want me to do?” the driver asked.
“Meet me back at the Ritz-Carlton,” EB said.
We headed back to the hotel. Little did I know, but about thirty cars were following my limo, all filled with women. They had been on our tail since I left the club. When I got out of the limo in front of the Ritz, EB was waiting for me. But first, I walked over to each of the cars that followed us, pulled out my roll of cash, and threw hundred-dollar bills on each car.
“What the hell are you doin’, Mike?” EB said.
“That’s all they want. Money,” I said.
I walked into the hotel, EB beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I said to him.
“I’m waiting on you,” EB answered.
“I don’t need nobody waiting on me. I came into this world by myself and I’m going to leave by myself,” I said.
“Well, I got to stay with you for the night, so you’ve just got to get mad at me,” EB said.
We got into the elevator to go up to the room.
By then, I was hungry, so we got off the elevator and went to the restaurant. This little white dude came up to us and said, “Sorry, Mr. Tyson, the restaurant is closed.”
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I grabbed the guy around the neck, picked him up and said, “Feed me, don’t treat me like no nigga.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had an amazing spread before us. I ate all my food, then started in on EB’s too. Suddenly I broke down.
“Man, why’d she do me like that?”
I still hadn’t gotten over Robin.
“Man, take it easy,” EB said.
“That bitch. I loved her. She didn’t have to do me like that,” I moaned.
My mood was spiraling downward, so EB pulled out his phone and called Isaiah Thomas’s mother, Mary. She was a beautiful lady. Mary started consoling me and after a few minutes, I felt better.
It seemed that every time I went out, trouble was following in my wake. Sometimes it wasn’t even my fault. I once was in New York and picked up this Spanish girl. She was a transit cop in one of the city projects, but I knew that with a little sprucing up, she’d be stunning. So I got her a whole makeover and some nice new clothes and she was gorgeous. That night I invited her and a few of my female friends to the China Club, a hot club at that time, and we got a table. Just me and eight girls. I looked like a Mack. So naturally some guy was going to come over to the table to talk to the girls. I didn’t act like it was a big thing, I was cool. The guy wasn’t even talking to my girl, the cop, but the next thing I knew, she jumped up with both of her hands up. “Halt! Do not advance any further. These ladies do not want your attention,” she said to the guy.
I was looking at this, thinking, What the fuck is going on?
The guy was with a bunch of his friends and they were at the next table laughing at this lady. The next thing I knew, she went over to the guy laughing the loudest, grabbed him upright, and, ba-boom, kicked the guy in the head. She was in full-on combat mode.
You would have thought that the girls at the table would be happy she was defending them, but they were all afraid of her.
“You have to tell this bitch to get out of here, Mike,” one of my female friends said. “What if the press hears about this, Mike?”
“Baby, everybody is scared,” I told the cop. “You got to go.”
I couldn’t believe it. She smacked and kicked a big man and he and his friends had done nothing wrong. Oh, my God.
One of the reasons that I didn’t think I was going to live long was because I thought I was the baddest man in the world, both in the arena and out on the streets. When you add the alcohol to that giant ego, anything could happen. It felt like I was always on a mission, but what was I looking for, what was the problem? I was always mad at the world. I always felt empty. Even after Mexico, I had a chip on my shoulder about being poor, my mother dying, that I had no family life. Being champ of the world just accelerated and intensified those feelings.
Then I created that Iron Mike persona, that monster, and the media picked up on it and the whole world was afraid of that guy, the guy who could make women leave their husbands for a night and cheat. That image of being the big bad motherfucker was really intoxicating but inside I was still just a little pussy – this scared kid who didn’t want to get picked on.
But I had to play that role, I didn’t know what else to do. One night I was at Bentley’s, the New York club. I was drunk and thinking I was a tough guy. I was hitting on some girl and the girl’s husband didn’t like it and he pulled out a gun and aimed it at me.
“Go ahead and shoot, motherfucker. You bitch nigga. I’m going to fuck your wife,” I said.
I was talking stupid, un-fucking-legible English. Allah is my witness, I’m just grateful the guy didn’t have the guts to kill me. He was just talking shit but he wasn’t working no fingers, just working that tongue.
When I started working with Don, I had two of my friends from Albany, Rory Holloway and John Horne, come to work with me. They were always trying to get me to stay away from the gangster rap crowd, but I loved those rappers. Back then those guys helped me, they understood my pain. One time, I was at a club in L.A. with John Horne and James Anderson, my bodyguard at the time. We were with Felipe, who ran the club. I had a room with Felipe’s cousin Michael. As we walked in someone yelled out, “Yo, Mike, when you want a real bodyguard, come get some Long Beach Crips.”
Horne thought he was some kind of stand-up comedian and he made some crack about being in a Crip neighborhood once with his wife wearing a red jumpsuit. He thought the guys would laugh. But the guy didn’t even let him finish his sentence.
“You’re lying. You were never in my motherfucking hood with red on.” Once he said this, it was on.
He went all left field and he and all his friends pulled out their guns.
“Get your man, Mike, get your man,” the guy said.
I didn’t know what to do. I just started talking some slick bullshit and I put out my hand.
“Nigga, slap my hand,” I said. “My friend thinks he’s a comedian.” And I defused it. That guy, Tracy Brown, became one of my best friends. He was a cold cat. He did fifteen years and then came home and got killed. He was a beautiful brother.
I always had to save Horne’s ass. He was an arrogant guy. We went to a Bulls game in Chicago one night. Walter Payton came with us and I had EB and John along. We had the long limo with the hot tub in the back and we were wearing our white mink coats. John and I had gone to the bathroom and this little guy came up and wanted to shake my hand. John just said, “Get out of the way,” and pushed on by. He really dissed him. The guy turned real cold.
“Just say sorry right now and it’s over. If you don’t, it’s gonna be a problem.”
I immediately read the situation. A bitty guy fronting like that, he’s got to be in a gang.
John finally picked up on it and he apologized and shook the guy’s hand.
“Thank you, sir,” the little guy said. Then he shook my hand and kissed me. When we left the bathroom, the little guy had about fifty guys around him.
“We love you, champ,” the guys yelled at me.
I told Horne I was tired of stepping in and protecting him, tired of squashing things. I was the guy going out there with guns in my face, the one who cools the shit down, when these guys were supposed to be protecting me.
At the beginning, I was my own bodyguard. But that didn’t turn out so good. I couldn’t be beating up people because they wanted an autograph and I happened to be in a shitty mood. So I went out and got some real bodyguards. Not to protect me from the public, but to protect the public from me. I had a friend named Anthony Pitts. We would hang out together in L.A. I knew that Anthony could be good bodyguard material because one night we were courtside at a Lakers game and this disrespectful, out-of-control fan stumbled and knocked into Anthony and didn’t apologize. Anthony got up and knocked this motherfucker out right onto the court. I said, “Oh shit!” The game was playing and this guy was laid out cold right out on the court. The police came to get the guy and we had to walk over his body because the game was still on!
Anthony decided I needed a real bodyguard one night when we were at a club in downtown L.A. I was there with Anthony and my friend Johnny, a white dude. We were outside talking to some girls. I had drawn quite a crowd of attractive young women when I heard someone say, “Fuck Mike Tyson!” All of a sudden the whole club was running into the street. So I grabbed this girl I had been talking to and we started running to my limo and I heard, boom. The guy had a gun and had shot at me, but he missed me and hit the girl in the leg. I was such a selfish pig that I still tried to get the wounded girl into my car to take her home. Her girlfriend was screaming, “They shot her because of you, Mike. They wanted to get you.” I wanted to get out of there, but my chauffeur wasn’t behind the wheel. I looked in the back window and he was curled up hiding in the back. That’s when Anthony decided to be my bodyguard. We took off and I left the girl behind. I felt bad that she got shot. Needless to say, she never talked to me again.
With all this drinking and partying, my weight shot up to 255 that December. My next fight was with Frank Bruno, but tha
t wasn’t until the end of February 1989. Then I found myself without a trainer. Kevin was always in the papers talking negative bullshit, saying I didn’t know what I was doing. He was very anti-Don, always pro-Cayton. I think that his hatred for Don was blinding him. Kevin really fired himself. He didn’t want to be with us. He wanted the whole Cayton team back. We were going to hire him back at the same price, but he didn’t want it. And then he sued me.
I hired my Catskill roommate Jay Bright to be my new trainer. I wanted Jay to get some money because he was part of Cus’s family upstate. We also hired Aaron Snowell, who claimed he had trained Tim Witherspoon. Tim later told me that Snowell was just his running partner who had carried the bucket into the ring, but I didn’t care. I was a pugilistic god. My opponents should die with fright at the thought of fighting me. Oh, God!
Before we started training, I had some legal matters to resolve. In January a girl filed a million-dollar suit against me for grabbing her buttocks at Bentley’s, a nightclub just blocks from my apartment in Manhattan. Anthony was with me then and he told me to say that I didn’t grab her buttocks but that I was behind her and fell into her as I tried to break my fall. Anthony always came up with plausible deniability. And he would often take the fall for me. Another time we were at Bentley’s and I grabbed some girl’s ass and when she turned around Anthony piped in.
“No, no, that was me, baby. I’m sorry. I thought you were my ex-girl,” he told the girl. He defused that one.
But the first girl was taking me to court and she planned on having her friend who was there with her testify against me. I had seen the friend in court the day before she was supposed to testify against me, so I went looking for her and, amazingly enough, I found her out that night with a friend of mine.
“Hey, you’re the girl from the case,” I approached her.
“Don’t you get in my face,” she said.
