Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  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 started 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.

  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.

  “Where 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 admittanc
e 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.