Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I could have just said “Fuck you all, I ain’t going back” at that point, but Marilyn and I had too strong a bond. So Marilyn and my lawyer did some research and they reached out to Dr. Sheila Balkan, a renowned criminologist who specialized in developing treatment options as an alternative to incarceration. She got me into my next rehab, a place in the Hollywood Hills called Wonderland. Sheila and Harold, one of her associates, came to pick me up and take me there. There was part of me that was so mad that I had to keep going back to these places and I got really high one more time before I left. A lot of junkies get high for the last ride. But these were really cool people, not judgmental at all. We got to Wonderland and I was a mess I was so high.

  Wonderland was a universe apart from those other rehab places I had been to. This wasn’t Arizona anymore; we had some liberal shit going on here. We were not dealing with judgmental people now, these are very interesting people who are not scared of difficult guys like me. Wonderland was one of those high-end rehabs that catered to the children of the elite—movie stars, bankers, you name it. This was mansion-style living, just like I had been accustomed to. It cost an arm and a leg, but I think they must have given me a break because I didn’t have any money then.

  I immediately fell in love with the place. I felt that this could be a life-saving deal. I had my own room and I was surrounded by all these cool young kids who didn’t give a fuck. We were spitting distance from Marlon Brando’s old house and the place where Jack Nicholson had lived for years. I settled in and started going to A.A. meetings. They let you go out into town on your own, you just had to be back at the house for curfew.

  But a few weeks in, a wrench was thrown into the mix. Because I was a convicted level-three felon and I had the rape charge on my package, the administration was afraid of me being there with the other patients. If anything happened, everyone including the state of California could have been sued. I guess Sheila had called in a favor to get my ass in that place, but now it was touch and go whether I could stay. But I had become friends with all the kids there and they stepped up to the plate. Every night I would go and bring frozen yogurt back for everyone. At the meetings I brought cookies and milk. So we really had a family unit going on. Eventually they had a meeting and everyone was like, “Mike’s got to stay. Don’t let Mike go,” and they voted and I was in.

  I always prided myself on my discipline, but withdrawing from coke was a motherfucker. Every pain you ever got from boxing came back during the withdrawals. The coke and the liquor were like Novocaine for me. Once I stopped doing that, all my arthritis came roaring back. I was a cripple, I couldn’t walk, my feet hurt so bad. Even today, I still have to get a cortisone shot every once in a while to get me through the pain.

  I kept to the straight and narrow at Wonderland. There were temptations. A famous young actress was in there with me. She was going out every night with her friends. Four or five limos or Benzes would come pick them up. It was a whole convoy. She had a black guy who was running the show for her and he invited me to come along one night.

  “Nah, I can’t come. If there’s even a picture of me hanging out with these guys, I’m going straight to prison,” I told him.

  I wanted to go so bad, it was still in me, but I resisted. But these kids were bending the rules right and left. One rich kid actually snuck a fifty-inch flat-screen TV into his room so that he could play his video games. They caught his ass and took it right out.

  After a while, I got into a rhythm. I threw myself into my meetings. I did the 12-step work better than anyone. I was the poster boy for doing the work. Everybody was required to go to one meeting a day, I’d go to three or four. Marilyn came to visit me about three months after I got there and I took her to one of my meetings on the Sunset Strip. I passed the basket around to get donations for the coffee and tea. Then when the meeting was over, I put away the chairs and swept and mopped the floor. I wanted to feel good doing that stuff.

  I still had conflicting feelings about all this. A lot of my heroes were losers when it came to managing their lives but were champions in their field. People wanted to get them off alcohol and drugs to save them, but sometimes without the alcohol and drugs, they’d lose their great qualities. The people in my life were happy when I was sober, but I was miserable. I just wanted to die.

  But I always had Marilyn in my face when I thought like that.

  “What are you talking about? You are going to be in the program,” she’d yell. She’d go from a nice white-haired lady to a fucking demon. It was meant for that lady to be in my life. You’re so caught up in your vice you don’t even realize how sick you are. I equate sickness with blisters or dripping, not psychological illness.

  Because of my celebrity they wanted me to go to the closed meetings. I went to a few of them and I was shocked. I saw some of the biggest names in the world in those rooms. And they liked me; they thought I was a badass. They would say, “Mike, you need money?” and they’d have someone put some cash in my account. One thing I found out in those meetings was everybody knows when you’re getting high. One time, I saw this world-famous actor, one of the biggest, at a closed meeting. He greeted me and said, “Hey, we’ve been waiting for you here. I have a seat reserved for you.”

  How the hell did he know that I was using? I thought. But if you’re using, everybody who is using knows you’re using. We think no one sees us but we are more transparent than we believe.

  But the closed-door meetings weren’t my thing. I went about four times but I had to go back to the regular meetings. All the guys in the closed programs were elitists so they were going to run their own program. I had to do Bill W.’s program. I had to be in there with the masses.

  I owe Marilyn a debt that can never be repaid for getting me into the recovery world. That is one fascinating world. You think cops got the biggest fraternity in the world? You think gangs are big? They’re nothing compared to the recovery world. They got federal judges, marshals, and prosecutors. You be careful about what recovering alcoholic or addict you’re fucking with, because this is one huge powerful family. Don’t ever underestimate the power of recovery, because if you do, you’re going down. They’ve got the ear of everyone, including the President.

  They’re a motley crew too. I saw ex–Hells Angels, ex-gangbangers, strange guys whose sole purpose in life is to get people to stop drinking and stop getting high. Do you feel me? Some of these guys have been in prison for most of their lives and their goal in life now is to save as many people as possible and get them to live life on life’s terms and to face their fears sober. These are special people, Marilyn included. They are a different breed of people. All my intimidating, bullshit doesn’t work with them. Big killers with knife scars on their face, mob hit men, these A.A. people don’t get scared. It’s almost impossible to scare an addict. Even if they say they’re afraid of you, they’re really not.

  If anybody ever got out of place and said something disrespectful about Marilyn, I would have fucked their world up. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire, you don’t have enough money to pay these people, you’d be slaving and indebted to them for the rest of your life. And they’re at peace with themselves. They don’t do this shit for money, they do it for moral accomplishment. A lot of these guys go through the motions and smile and they’re cool until they have to go into action. We had a puny little Jewish kid who worked at Wonderland and would drive us around. One day we were going to get ice cream so a bunch of us got in the car. One patient came running up late and he got in the car and you could smell the alcohol on his breath. This puny staff guy got out of the car, threw the back door open, and dragged this drunk guy out of the car. “Oh shit,” I said. I was the heavyweight champ, why didn’t I do that? I had so much respect for that puny-assed kid. He didn’t have a violent bone in his body until that switch went off and he did this thing. He’s smiling “Beautiful day, huh?” until he smelled that liquor.

 
I got so much support when I was at Wonderland. A big rock star in the program called me right away when he heard I was having problems.

  “Mike, come see me if you need anything.”

  He knew what my mind was doing. He was an incredible guy. One day a famous British actor came to visit me at Wonderland and shared about his bouts with alcoholism. What a beautiful man. People think addicts are bums and horrible people but they’re the geniuses of our times.

  It’s not always a happy ending when you talk about recovery, but when endings are happy, they’re almost godsent. People are going to die in our family, they’re going to run away and get high and OD. We’re still going to get sick, we’ll still get the short end of the stick in life, but now we have tools that are remarkable to help us deal with these problems. Getting involved with the recovery program was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. These are great people and they never get enough credit from our society.

  Going to Wonderland was really a turning point in my life. I could relate to the idea of improving myself, Cus had drilled that into me years earlier. But it was hard because all those drugs had suppressed all the good shit I had. But just to get back in a daily rhythm—go to work out, go to my meetings, and go out to dinner with my peers—was great. And when I saw all these other people who were supposed to be incurable addicts doing so well at meetings my competitive streak kicked in. I just jumped seeing that. If those guys could do it, I knew I could too. I wasn’t going to let anyone outdo me. One guy had been sober for ten years. If you met this guy you would have thought he was a saint. But his parents still weren’t talking to him. He had been a monster most of his life. But now he had a job, he was supporting his family, and his main goal in life was to get other people like him into recovery.

  A lot of people relapse when they’re in rehab but I couldn’t even conceive of that. If I got high in that place then I would feel like the biggest loser. My whole purpose of being there was to not get high. When I’m around that positive energy I soak it up like a sponge. I’m the biggest cheerleader. “Hey, we’re here to be sober. We’re going to do it together. Yeah, let’s do it!” But if I was by myself it would be, “Hey, you got a syringe?”

  One of the scariest and most satisfying things was to go on 12-step calls. Guys who may have been sober for twenty years and you hear they’re in the hospital, that they had a slip and had started drinking again. Some of the kids I was with at Wonderland snuck out and we had to go find them. I was just a patient and they were sending me out to look for those guys. So we drove down to Hollywood and Vine. You go right to the drug spot and that’s where you’ll find them. They were just sitting there on the street. They looked so bad they were hardly recognizable. They’re white but the sun burned their skin so much that they looked dark. I saw a lot of bad stuff that year.

  I was seeing all sorts of counselors when I was at Wonderland. Because of the road rage conviction, they sent me to anger management classes. The guy who ran the class was a tiny guy named Ian. I couldn’t see what he could know about anger management. But after a while, I could see that Ian appeared as if he were ready to explode any minute. I guess they’re the right people for the job. He taught me a Jewish proverb the first session we had.

  “Bright light, dark shadows. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” He told me that the biggest stars were the darkest ones, that was why I was here with him.

  Marilyn suggested that I see a sex counselor too. She had sent me to one in Arizona but it wasn’t until I got to Wonderland that I really got into that work. Whenever Marilyn and I hung out she saw how I reacted to women approaching me. I always felt that girls were coming on to me, that they were the ones with the problem.

  “No, you’re putting too much time into the conversation,” Marilyn would lecture me. “You’re not just saying ‘Thank you’ and giving them an autograph. You’re asking them where they’re from, how long they lived here, if they were single. We’ve been here thirty minutes and you have ten phone numbers already. Is there anybody you turn down?”

  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.