by Mike Tyson
Once when I had no money for coke I drove out to Summerlin where the big coke kings lived. I’d meet them in their big mansions and I’d hang with them for hours, taking pictures, doing lines with them. Then when it was time to get down to the negotiations, I’d play them. They’d tell me the price and I’d get indignant.
“Hey, what’s this all about? You really want to sell me this shit, brother? You’ve been hanging out with me all day and you want to make me pay for this shit?”
“Here, take it,” they’d finally say.
Cocaine is the devil, there’s no doubt about it. I was always a chauvinist when it came to women. Even if I was broke, I’d never let them buy me dinner. But when I needed money for blow and I saw my girlfriend drop some money, I’d wait and then put it in my pocket. That was one of the worst feelings I ever felt. I didn’t want to play with the devil any longer, but he still wanted to play and it wouldn’t be over until he said it was over.
I was so destitute that I even went to Youngstown, Ohio, to put on a four-round boxing exhibition on October twentieth with my old sparring partner Corey Sanders. It was promoted by this ex-fighter named Sterling McPherson. I didn’t remember getting paid for the exhibition even though Sterling sold four thousand out of six thousand seats at prices from $25 to $200 and charged $29.95 for the pay-per-view of the event. But I thought that if I stayed busy I could get off drugs. McPherson was talking about touring this exhibition all over the world so maybe I’d get some gwap then.
The whole match was a fiasco. Corey came in at three hundred pounds, about fifty pounds bigger than me. He wore headgear and the crowd booed him for that. We began to spar and I got in a good shot and dropped Corey in the first round. I had him in trouble in the third and the fourth but I didn’t press it. I didn’t have any hurting in my heart back then.
As soon as the exhibition was over I went back to Vegas and got higher and higher. One night I was out on the town and I ran into the guy who had pulled a gun on me back at Bentley’s years earlier in New York. He was still with his wife and they saw me in a club and I was looking so bad that they felt sorry for me.
“Are you all right, man?” he asked me.
He should have kicked my ass right there. I was vulnerable then.
By then, my nose was so fucked up from doing coke that I started smoking it. Not crack, I would take the regular powdered coke and take some tobacco out of one of my cigarettes and add it in. That’s what we used to do when we were kids back in Brooklyn. All the sniffers, the people who sniff cocaine, they all hated me smoking coke. Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined. A friend of mine once told me that when you want to know something about anything, put some fire under it, the fire brings out everything. You want to know something about a motherfucker, but some fire under his ass. Well, when you put some fire under that cocaine, you know what it’s made out of—all that poison, all that shit comes up out of there and it smells like hell.
I even smoked that shit in my favorite strip club in Vegas. The owner would let me go to the bathroom and smoke. He was helping me kill myself. In Phoenix they let me smoke my coke inside the club. Thank God the cops never walked in there when I was doing that. For me, doing coke was very ritualistic, so I re-created my rituals in the strip club. I had my Hennessy, my Cialis, my Marlboros all surrounding me. And, of course, the coke, which I would pass around to all my friends.
During this whole crazy period when I was doing all these drugs and bringing in hookers, I used to hear Cus in my head every day. But I didn’t give a fuck because he wasn’t there in the flesh. Living wasn’t a big priority for me then. Now all I want to do is live, but back then, in the prime of my life, it meant nothing to me. By the time I was the champ at twenty, so many of my friends were dead or decimated. Some of them were sent away to prison for so long that when they came back out they were zombies, they didn’t know what planet they were on. Some even did something intentionally to get back behind bars.
During those years, for me doing an eight ball a day, three and a half grams of coke, was just a good night. The more I did, the more I wanted to do it alone. Maybe I was just a pig or maybe I didn’t want people to see me that sloppy. By then, there was nothing euphoric anymore about coke, it was just numbing. I wasn’t even having sex with women with the coke anymore. Every now and then I had a girl with me but it was more to chill out with than to have sex.
I was living a crazy existence. One day I’d be in the sewage with some street hooker trying to get her to have sex without a condom, and the next night I’d be in Bel-Air with my rich friends with a happy face on, celebrating Rosh Hashanah. Right about then, I hit rock bottom. I was in a hotel suite in Phoenix. I had my morphine drip and my Cialis and my bottle of Hennessy. And seven hookers. All of a sudden, the coke made me paranoid and I thought that these women were trying to set me up and rob me. So I started beating them. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just demons around me, it was the devil himself. And he had won. I kicked those hookers out of the room and did the rest of my coke.
Some of my lady friends, not lovers, just friends, would tell me that it was time that I found a woman to be with. They’d even say bullshit like “to die with.”
“I’m going to do this to the end, baby. I’m going to play to a place I can’t play anymore,” I’d tell them. I was talking bullshit. I had to find myself before I could find somebody else. Jackie Rowe used to try to lecture me about drugs and I’d just tell her, “If you love me, you’d let me do this.”
“Listen, Mike, I refuse to sit here and watch you go out like a loser. We’re winners,” she’d say. She used to actually go through all my pants and jackets before she’d send them down to the hotel cleaners to make sure there weren’t drugs in them.
I knew that all my friends were concerned about my drug use but they knew better than to tell me to stop doing what I loved to my face. I began to isolate myself just so I didn’t have to hear any of that shit. I had only one friend who could get away with telling me that. It was Zip. He did it in such a clever way too. He’d be with me chilling, smoking some weed, and then he’d turn serious on me.
“Don’t worry, Mike, we are going to have a beautiful funeral for you. I’ve already put the money aside. We’ll be smoking some weed and drinking that good Cristal and thinking about you. I’m going to get one of those carriages that the horses pull around and we’ll have your casket behind it and we’re going to flaunt your body through all the boroughs of the city, man. It’s going to be beautiful, man.”
At the end of October, I had lunch in Phoenix with my therapist Marilyn, who was back from Moscow. I was sitting in the restaurant and I saw a pretty young lady by herself at another table and I told the waiter that I would pay for her meal. Then the lady came over to our table and gave me her number.
When she left, Marilyn was quiet for a second. Then she spoke.
“I’ll make you a bet that you couldn’t last six weeks in a rehab.”
That struck my macho nerves.
“Are you crazy? I could do six weeks like nothing, I’m disciplined.”
The truth was, I was ready to do something like that. I had gotten tired of falling through the loopholes. I had a bad relationship with my kids, I had a bad relationship with the mothers of my kids, I had bad relationships with a lot of friends of mine. Some people were scared to be around me.
I was about to leave to do a meet-and-greet tour of England for six weeks so I decided that I would stop doing drugs, even weed, during that tour so that by the time I got back to Phoenix for the rehab, I’d be prepared. So I stopped. I didn’t do coke or weed and I even stopped drinking.
That was when I knew that I really had a problem. The first couple of hours I was just losing my mind. I destroyed my hotel room, I was going crazy, but I didn’t get high. I had a miserable trip but I didn’t get high onc
e. So when I got back to Phoenix, I was all clean and ready to go into rehab. I’d already gone through the severe withdrawals.
Marilyn took me to a place called The Meadows. We walked into that place and right off the bat it looked more like a prison than a rehabilitation center. The first thing they did there was to keep you high on medicine. Everybody in the place was fat and slow. If you’d get into a fight it would take them two hours to get there. So they banged me up on meds and then they took me for an interview with the counselors. I thought that rehab was a place where you just chilled and watched TV until your time was up. I didn’t know I was going to have to talk about my deep past and my inner trauma. But these weird, intrusive motherfuckers were all over me with questions.
“How long have you been getting high?”
“What drugs have you used?”
“What external circumstances trigger your drug use?”
“What was your home life like as a child?”
“By any chance are you a homosexual?”
Holy shit, these guys wouldn’t stop getting in my face. This guy that I didn’t know from a can of paint expected me to answer all these intimate questions. I didn’t want to deal with the reality of who I was and my relationship with my demons.
“Hey, get the fuck out of my head, motherfucker. Fuck all of you!” I said. “How dare you talk to me like this, you uppity piece of white trash.”
And then I left the next day.
15
A week later I checked into another rehab in Tucson. Marilyn was going to kill me if I didn’t go back into treatment. She can give the impression of being a nice, innocent, old grandmotherly white lady, but she’s not. She wouldn’t let me quit. She gave me some real grimy aggressive chastisement. She said, “No, no, you are going to finish this bet.” That’s when I saw another side to her—that fire in her eyes. She was nobody to play with, she meant business. So I tried another place in Phoenix. I liked the people at this second place. I bonded with this young wealthy girl who was going to school to be a fashion designer and was strung out on heroin. I got in trouble there because someone hurt my feelings and said something about me to one of the staff members and I ripped into them. Everybody got scared when I was talking because they weren’t used to a nigga talking to them that way. The people running the place just said, “You have to go, everybody is scared,” so I called this young girl I was dating and she came and got me and I left.
Phoenix is a white-bread by-the-book-assed town. When you’re in a drug rehabilitation program there, you can feel the superciliousness of racism there from these sophisticated doctors and the other people who were supposed to help you.
I was the token Negro there. The staff had a stereotypical preconceived notion of black men, and, in particular, black athletes. The head administrator even had the audacity to say to me, “We had other athletes here and they all had their jewelry on. I noticed you’re not flashy like them.”
“That’s because I don’t have any money,” I responded curtly.
The undertone of his comments wasn’t lost on me. He just omitted the word “black,” although he was thinking it.
Marilyn saw that too and kept trying to find me a place that would work for me. But I had other things to do first. It was Christmas 2006 and I was determined to make it a white Christmas in Arizona. My assistant Darryl was sleeping in another room and I snuck out of the house and got into my BMW. I drove to the Pussycat Lounge, and when I got there, I looked for the manager, this hot Eastern European girl that I had been attracted to.
“Where’s the white bitch at?” I asked her.
“I can get you some, one minute,” she said.
She came back with three small plastic bags with a gram of coke in each one.
Then she shocked me.
“Can I have some?” she said.
I had never had any indication that this girl was interested in me. We went into the office and did a few lines each.
“You’ve been drinking, Mike,” she observed. “Do you need me to drive you somewhere?”
“No, I’m okay,” I said.
I couldn’t believe I said that. Here was my chance to get that pussy that I had coveted for years. The devil was surely working on me then. I was thinking, I’m not going to let her drive me, she just wants my cocaine. Fuck this bitch. I wanted to be alone with my fantasy girl, the real white bitch. I was just being selfish about the cocaine. I could have gotten a ride home with the girl I was trying to get with for such a long time, but I didn’t want to share any of the coke.
So I got in the car. I immediately dumped most of the coke from one of the baggies on the center console. Then I pulled out my Marlboros and took out half the tobacco from one cigarette and scooped up some coke and poured it into the cigarette. I took a few hits and then I started driving home.
Now, I’m not the best driver, even when I am stone-cold sober. So I was driving along, weaving between lanes, when I passed a police sobriety checkpoint. I didn’t realize it but the cops saw the way I was driving so they started following me. After I blew past a stop sign and then nearly swerved into a sheriff’s car, they pulled me over. When the cop approached my car, I frantically tried to brush all the coke off the console but the leather had pores in it and even if you spat and tried to wash it off, the pores would absorb some of the coke.
I rolled down my window and he asked for my license and registration. Then he realized it was me. And he saw the mess on the console.
“I can’t believe this shit, Mike,” he said.
He pulled me out of the car and did some field sobriety tests on me and I was too fucked up to pass. Then he searched me and found the other two baggies in my pants pocket. Then they brought the dope dog in and he sniffed the coke that was still in the car. So they took me in.
They had me in a holding cell before they interrogated me. I was really pissed. I had enough coke on me to warrant a felony. But whenever I was locked up, I’d always find a white guy in there that knows the system. This was no exception.
“Yo, champ, what are you in for?” the white kid asked me.
“Man, they caught me with some cocaine,” I said.
“Have you ever been arrested for drugs before?” he asked.
“I’ve been arrested a lot of times but not for drugs.”
His face brightened.
“Don’t worry, bro. You’re not going to jail,” he said. “They can’t lock you up for your first drug rap, they have to try to help you first.”
Now that I knew what time it was, I was ready for my interrogation. The arresting officer brought me to a room.
“What drugs or medications have you been using?” he asked.
“Zoloft,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“Marijuana and cocaine. I take one Zoloft pill a day.”
“How much marijuana did you smoke?”
“Two joints, earlier in the day.”
“When was the last time you used cocaine before now?” he asked me.
“Yesterday.”
“How often do you use it?”
“Whenever I can get my hands on it. I had some this morning about nine a.m.”
“Why do you use both marijuana and cocaine?”
“I’m an addict.”
“Do you use them at the same time?”
“Yes. It makes me feel good when I use them together.”
“What does the Zoloft do for you?” he asked.
“It regulates me. I’m fucked up.”
“You don’t appear to be fucked up,” he said.
“I know, man, but I am fucked up,” I said and then started laughing loudly like the guy in that movie Reefer Madness after he lit up a joint.
I told him that I smoked the coke in my Marlboros and he was intrigued how I did that so I took him through the whole p
rocess.
Another officer who was there asked me if I felt good because the drug was in my system while I was driving. I told him that I felt good earlier in the day.
“I want to thank you for being so cooperative, Mike,” the first cop said.
“I’m a pretty cool guy,” I said.
“In my town, people would start yelling at me if they knew I brought you in,” he said.
I didn’t know how to react so I just acted like a psycho. I looked down at the ground and spoke deeper than usual.
“Fuck you, I hate you. Fuck you, deadbeat. Fuck you.”
“Does anyone ever give you shit, Mike?” the first cop asked.
“All the time. But I put it away and don’t let it bother me,” I said.
The cop turned off the tape recorder and walked me over to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office mobile unit. They processed me in and set me up in a cell by myself. There was even a phone inside the cell. I spent most of the night making collect calls.
When I made bail the next morning, Darryl came to pick me up. I gave him a hug when I saw him. Darryl had been trying to keep me straight for years now, from Las Vegas to Amsterdam. It was a tough job.
“Yo, Mike, why did you bounce last night and not say anything to me?” he asked.
“Life’s rough, brother. Life’s rough,” I said.
Darryl drove me to Shelley’s house and I took a shower and saw my kids Miguel and Exodus, and had a nice meal. Then I got a lawyer. I called my contacts in Vegas and they came up with David Chesnoff, a really connected lawyer who was partners with Oscar Goodman, who represented me in my attempt to get my boxing license back. Even though it wasn’t mandated, Chesnoff’s strategy was to get me into rehab as soon as possible and for me to do meaningful community service to show the court that I was serious about straightening out my life.
So I went to my third rehab in Phoenix. It was in a small house where the guy who ran it lived. This guy was a real prick who kept trying to play me. I made one real friend there, though, an Italian guy from Brooklyn, one of those “Hey, let’s get it going!” dudes. Great smile, great energy. I would have gotten kicked out a lot quicker if it wasn’t for him. But the other people were afraid of me. The guy who ran the place used the fact that I forgot to lock up my medication as an excuse to boot my ass out.
