Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  I was referred to Sean McFarland, an addictions therapist who specialized in sex addiction. He had an office in Venice. Sheila Balkan came along with me on my first visit. I was kind of skeptical about the whole sex addiction thing.

  “Well, you’re supposed to be the expert on sex addiction. How does that really work and what does that really mean?” I asked him.

  Seano pointed to a picture of his son and his wife that was hanging on the wall of his office.

  “Mike, that’s a great question. I like to fuck street prostitutes and that beautiful boy and woman in that picture are my wife and kid. So when I drink and do blow and act out, I say ‘Fuck you’ to them because they’re fucking my life up because I can’t do what I want to do. That’s sex addiction to me.”

  I signed right up with him. We spent a lot of time together. Seano was running a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting and I started going to that one every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. That group was the most fun for me. I thought the guys were cool and it was interesting to hear about all that dysfunction. One day we had a guy show up who thought he was better than the rest of us guys because of his status.

  “Hey, I don’t think I belong here with you guys,” he said. “I never chase a woman down the street and say I want to fuck her. The only reason I’m here is because my wife is frigid.”

  “Because you even said something like that shows that you belong here,” I told him. “Don’t try to figure it all out in one day. Just keep coming, okay?”

  I was getting a lot of life skills from those meetings. I really changed my whole outlook on the way I relate to women. I never thought I was a sex addict. Being the champ, I thought that having sex with all those women was just a perk. You’re supposed to have all those willing bodies around you. All the people I worshipped were sexual conquerors. I used to read about Errol Flynn, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, all these great people, and what they all had in common was their conquests over women. So I always thought in order to be a great figure you had to have women in your life, and the more women you conquer, the greater the figure you were. I never knew that having sex with so many women takes so much from you, more than what it adds. I never really created my own self-image, so I read about a lot of people who I believed were great men and I took qualities from them. I was too young to know that these were great men that had bad qualities. Even Cus would have a “real man”-oriented mentality. But all that sex only brought me gonorrhea, chlamydia, and all those other scientific-named diseases.

  Women were always available to me but I got too self-indulgent in sex. I’d have ten women in my room getting high and I’d have to do a press conference, so I’d bring a few with me and put them in a room for when I finished the interviews. Whenever a girl was willing, I’d do it. Either I’d hit on them or they’d hit on me. The problem was, I was trying to satisfy each and every one of them and be happy. That’s sick. It’s impossible to satisfy all of them, some of them were crazy, just as sick as I was, if not more. You’d lose your mind trying to do that.

  I had my women in every city on the planet. You should have seen my Rolodex. Thank God they invented computers. I used to date a girl in Phoenix that saw me hanging around with my pigeons one day.

  “Your birds are like your women. You have to have a lot of birds; just in case you lose one, you’ve got all those other ones. That’s why you never have ten or twenty birds, you always have five hundred, because you’re so emotionally attached that if you lose one you still have four hundred ninety-nine left. That’s the same way you are with women.”

  She was just a young chick but she was right. I was so insecure, so scared of loss, so afraid to be alone. Towards the end of my career I was moving in with women and moving from one to the other. When I talked about this shit in the rooms, it evoked such painful feelings. That’s all my mother ever did. Moving from man to man. No matter how much money I had, I still had my mother’s traits. I was going from woman to woman. Right after one, boom, bow, right to the next one, boom, bow, right to the next one, boom, bow, right to the next one.

  I may have said, “I’m crazy,” kidding around from time to time, but something was wrong. The majority of people that I was attracting were violent, hot-blooded people always talking shit. Even the women were crazy. Most celebrities were afraid of their stalkers. I fucked mine. They’d be downstairs and the doorman wouldn’t let them up.

  “Oh, I’m godly to you? Come on up!”

  They might be crazy but they looked great. I actually had one of those scrolling LED lights that you could program with your own message. I had mine read GOOD PUSSY, CRAZY BITCH. GOOD PUSSY, CRAZY BITCH. I had that in the bedroom and it looked great in the pitch-black dark.

  Pussy was like a drug to me. When I was trying to get pussy, there was no one more desperate than me on the face of the planet. The only people that could outdo me were pedophiles or pansexuals. Pansexuals were people that could hit a deer, kill it, take it home, and fuck it. You only know that when you’ve been in the program.

  I was so sex-crazed that I couldn’t control myself even when I was getting an honorary doctorate from Ohio’s Central State University in 1989.

  “I don’t know what kind of doctor I am, but watching all these beautiful sisters here, I’m debating whether I should be a gynecologist,” I said in my speech. I was trying to compliment the women, but they didn’t take it that way. But right after I said that there was a big line of women waiting at my door. It took me years to realize how bad that joke was. I only recently found out that my mother had gone to school right down the street from Central State. My mother and her family thought that education made them somebody. I could have said something awesome. But the first thing I thought about was my dick. I embarrassed five hundred years of our family that day.

  What did all my sexual conquests amount to? When you’re fucking all those girls it makes you feel like shit but you can’t stop doing it. You hate yourself and you feel sorry for the girl. I never loved them. Everything I said was a fucking lie, even if I didn’t realize that at the time. Being with all those women was the equivalent of masturbating. I had a lot of fun but it didn’t produce anything. I thought I’d get emotional satisfaction out of sleeping with them but I was just a smuck. I was in love with love, not the actual individual.

  I felt like I was in a hole and the more people I fucked the more despair I felt. It’s a bad feeling when they’re gone and you’re alone in your bedroom and you can still feel some of their moisture on the bed. That was hell. I just felt so soulless. So then you just get more girls in so you don’t have to think about that feeling. Now I needed someone else to hold me because I felt like a piece of shit. All that energy you’d get from those different people was torture. That’s what made me feel hollow. At one point everything I did sexually consisted of orgies. Me and three, four, or five chicks. I didn’t even know what the fuck was going on in there.

  I never thought about it at the time but the pressure was enormous on me to be a great lover to all these people who were fucking “Mike Tyson.” That was an encounter that they would talk about forever. I realized though that everybody doesn’t fit with everybody else. Sex is a very complex situation. Everybody brings some kind of baggage to the arena. I still don’t know what’s important about sex. Is it the pleasure part or the actual intimacy? I’ve met people that deviate from the norm. I’ve met people that want to be held and people that want to be hurt or spit on. I knew this person who wanted to be with me and she said, “Oooh, I can take a good punch too.” I just couldn’t do that shit.

  After putting in a lot of work in the program I realized that the reason that I always wanted to satisfy women was because I was hoping that they would satisfy me not with sex but with their love. I was using sex to get intimacy. In order for me to get that intimacy and that attachment, I had to have sex. You won’t get it from her if you don’t have the sex but it’s really not about the sex itself. So I was a whore just like my mother. But it was dif
ferent. This whore had the money. Hey, if I didn’t make you happy and satisfy you sexually, how about this Mercedes-Benz? This car is really orgasmic, isn’t it?

  It sounds trite but I was probably looking for someone to mother me. My whole life I was looking for love from my mother. My mother never gave love to a man. She gave them headaches, she scalded them, she stabbed them. I never saw my mother kiss a man. I saw her in bed with them but I never heard “I love you” or saw someone kiss her forehead.

  Even though I was on a pedestal at a young age, I was always attracted to street girls. That was from my mother. At least my mother had my back, but these girls had nobody’s back but their baby’s and I wasn’t their baby. These women were horrible, miserable women for relationships. Just like my mother. They’re great for compassion and loving children but a man was just to be used. I always liked that type of woman, that’s why my life was so bad. An executive businesswoman wants to go out with me, forget it. I’m going to fuck the tramp.

  When I was in rehab, I saw that film about Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose. That film reminded me so much of my life. Street people take a real liking to you and this bad person teaches you things. Someone kills him and no one cares because he’s a bad guy, but to you he’s great. You’re benefiting by being in his company. You’ve got money, you’ve got clothes, you can buy your sister something. Just like they had that guy in the movie and he beat the shit out of her and they took her away from him. That was the same way with me. To everybody else they did her a favor, but to her, this was her life, she wanted to live with the prostitutes and the pimps, that was her family. It’s so gut-wrenching to watch as they took her away and she was screaming for the prostitutes. That’s when I lost it and just started bawling. That’s one thing about happiness. You could be in hell and be happy there. Some people thrive in misery. You take away their misery and bring them into the light and they die emotionally and spiritually because pain and suffering has been their only comfort. The thought of someone loving them and helping them without wanting anything in return could never enter their minds.

  Stopping your sexual addiction is in some ways different than stopping a drug or alcohol addiction, but you still have to just say no like you do with drugs. It’s a lot of self-help work and even though you’re a grown man, you have to conduct yourself like a child in a way. You’re constantly analyzing what you’re doing, how you’re talking to a woman, the amount of time you can even look at them. My limit is three seconds.

  One of the ways to break a sexual addiction, at least for me, was to be broke. If I didn’t have any money, that shit wasn’t fun anymore. If I’m broke I can’t even think about fucking anyone because in my delusional mind I need that grandeur. I’ve got to be in a major suite or on some beautiful island. If I’m doing it in a seedy motel that’s just me at my bottom.

  It’s really hard to control your sexual addiction. Any little thing can trigger it. I could be walking down the street and I would hear the click, click, click of a woman’s high heels and I’m off. I could be walking down a dark alley at three in the morning and make a turn and see a beautiful woman and think that she’s got to be a hooker or why would she be out that late at night?

  I took a lot of trips back to Phoenix for various court appearances and I always traveled with Seano. He was originally from Phoenix. He was the best guy to be with. He knew what I was thinking, he knew I’d listen to those high heels clicking and get aroused. Hearing those high heels was like somebody knocking at my door. Seano and I would go out to eat and he’d know my demons so well. When we’d get back from lunch, he’d come over to me.

  “Michael, what’s wrong?”

  “I walked into that restaurant and I felt like everyone in there was going, ‘Look at that big, fat washed-up nigga.’ ” So we worked out some signals. When I got real scared, I’d very politely grab his arm. That was the signal for Seano to tell me, “It’s okay, brother, we’re cool.”

  Sometimes all of this work really got to me. The first time we went back to Arizona, Seano thought that I was such a high risk that he told me that he was going to stay with me in my hotel room.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “Nobody’s going to stay with me in my room.”

  “Then let’s get back on the plane. I know what you’re up to. You’re going to have somebody come over here and you are going to disappear on me and that ain’t cool, so what do you want to do?”

  I almost clocked him. But we slept side by side in that hotel room.

  He could always pick up on my rage.

  “What’s going through your mind right now? You want to punch me, don’t you?” Seano said.

  “Yeah, I don’t like it when you fucking look at me with those Irish eyes.”

  “I know, brother, I know, but let’s just do this thing.”

  I had to laugh.

  “You are fucking crazy, Seano.”

  “Yeah, you’re crazy too, Michael, but let’s just talk this thing out.”

  I knew that my life was on the line when I was in Wonderland. I was really trying to win. And in A.A. when you stay clean for a certain amount of time they gave you a token or a chip. I carried those tokens with me religiously. I’m a peacock and I always have to be proving that I’m achieving something. That was just the way I was wired. Those tokens were like my belts. In our community the tokens infer respect. You could have all the money in the world but no tokens, no time, and we don’t respect you. I just loved it, I always looked forward to getting my chips.

  As committed to my recovery as I was, I still managed to bend some rules. I had been in the program only a few weeks when I met this dynamite chick at one of the meetings. Her name was Paula and she was an awesome woman from Morocco. One day I went to a meeting and I saw her standing at the door welcoming people. She had this tight Adidas shirt on and she had big torpedo titties that were real!

  Nobody really knew me in that room and I was the only black guy there and a pretty intimidating scary-looking figure. After seeing Paula a few times at the meetings I went up to her.

  “Listen, I read the whole book. I’m up to my eighth step …”

  “Mike, you don’t remember me, do you?” she interrupted me.

  She reminded me of an incident a few years earlier. I had been in L.A. driving down Sunset Boulevard and I had seen Paula walking down the street. I rolled down my window and slowed to a crawl and tried to get her to come in my car, like a pervert.

  Hey, I can try again.

  “Listen, I know we’re not supposed to date in A.A. until after the first year but I’m working on my stuff. Do you think you can be my mentor? I want to be friends with you,” I said.

  Paula was four years older than me and she had been in recovery for eighteen years. She was a leading member of the program, a straight-to-the-book type of girl. If a crisis came up, she was going to bring out the A.A. book. Her life revolved around A.A. So she knew that us going out would be what they called “13-stepping,” since I had only been in recovery a few weeks.

  So at first we started hanging out as friends, but in a little while, we started dating. I’d get permission from Wonderland to spend the night with Paula. I got so much out of our relationship. I had a girlfriend who was sober for eighteen years and would help me stay clean. I’d never really been with a straight chick like her before. I liked straight women but I didn’t seem to get along with them for long durations. The dysfunctionist in me comes out and I put a crook into their straightness. But with Paula it was different and everything was going good.

  I kind of bent some more rules when I shot a documentary about my life while I was in Wonderland. I was approached by my friend Jim Toback, a great filmmaker who I had worked with years earlier on an independent film called Black and White. I didn’t really think I was an actor then. I was doing my part as a favor for Jim, I didn’t get paid or anything. I was so high on weed the whole time we were shooting Black and White. My dialogue was all improvised because I couldn’t even rea
d a script, I was so blazed. I had a scene with Robert Downey Jr. and Jim wanted me to hit him and I couldn’t even see him I was so high so I kept hitting him in the wrong place. Downey was on the floor kicking me. “Stop fucking hitting me! Stop hitting me!”

  I wanted to do this documentary because I was getting some nice bucks for it and I needed that money desperately. I really undersold the whole project when I asked Seano if it was okay to do this. I made it sound like it was going to be a little interview and then it turned out to be hours and hours of shooting me in a rented house in Beverly Hills and by the ocean in Malibu. It’s funny, watching that documentary now even though I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs while we shot it, I see that I’m still in my addict character. I was basically doing a junkie documentary.

  My rehab was going well and on September twenty-fourth, Seano and I flew to Arizona to appear in court where I pled guilty to possession of coke. A month later I was back for my sentencing. While I was in rehab, I went all over the city to talk about addiction. I went to drug court, I went to neighborhood youth groups, I gave testimony to release programs and to prisons. I made the rounds and I put in hours and hours of work. It was the least I could do to give back. And it looked very impressive when we showed the judge all my community service. I got wonderful letters from my doctors and counselors in rehab and supportive letters from friends like Sugar Ray Leonard and the great lawyer Robert Shapiro. He had lost a son to drugs and he had started a foundation and he put on a boxing fund-raising exhibition where he fought Danny Bonaduce and I brought him into the ring as his trainer.

  The fact that I had voluntarily entered rehab and had done so well impressed the judge who was a nice liberal lady. She could have put my ass away for years. Instead she sentenced me to twenty-four hours in jail, 360 hours of community service, and put me on probation for three years. Everything was looking rosy. Monica had been so supportive of me during this whole process. I would have been in the streets without her help. We were a horrible married couple but great friends. Monica had arranged a nice lunch for all my attorneys and me and Seano and then I was going to fly straight back to California and buy a house and continue my recovery work. Who knows, maybe I would have wound up marrying Paula or someone else in recovery and become one of those hard-core recovery people who would get irritated being around people that drank or smoked weed.