Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (18 page)

“Hey, Charlie.”

Charlie turned around and, POW, Rick hit him so hard that you could see the impression “RJ” from Rick’s big diamond ring on Charlie’s face.

The next day, I went back to Eddie’s house and Eddie and Charlie were marveling over the fact that Prince and his guys had kicked their ass playing basketball. Prince had on his high-heel shoes and he was still hitting every bucket. Swoosh. Swoosh.

But if I had to credit one person for mentoring me in the ways of celebrityhood it has to be Anthony Michael Hall, of all people. When I was coming up in fame, before I became champ, I’d hang with him a lot. He was the man. He was the first guy I knew who had celeb money. And he was burning it up, man, with limos everywhere. He was so generous. So when I crashed my Caddy, I went out and bought a limo because I had seen how cool it was when we’d ride around in Michael’s.

I used that limo to go to Eddie Murphy’s New Year’s Eve party in 1987 at his New Jersey mansion. It was a star-studded party with Al B. Sure!, Bobby Brown, Run-DMC, and Heavy D. I was cocky but I was still a little shy. But not too shy to pile three girls in the back of the limo and take them back to my apartment in Manhattan.

My days of abstinence were over. I was an extremist at everything I did, including sex. Once I started banging women, the floodgates opened. Short, tall, sophisticated, ugly, high-society, street girls, my criteria was breathing. But I still had no line and for the most part didn’t know how to approach women.

When I went to Brownsville, I’d visit a childhood friend of mine who had become a pimp. We’d be sitting in his brand-new limo just talking and he’d suddenly stop and get out of the car.

“Go get the motherfucking trick,” he’d yell at one of the girls congregating on the street. “You see that motherfucker on the corner? What are you doing bullshitting with these bitches?”

Then he’d get back in the car.

“These bitches need direction, Ike,” he’d say. “They get distracted real quick. I need to get a seeing-eye dog to guide these bitches.”

One time, I came to see him at four in the morning.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Mike?” he said.

I had never told him that I wanted to fuck some of his girls before, but he didn’t even let me get it out of my mouth.

“Get the fuck out of here, Mike, all right? You are Mike Tyson. Don’t be fucking these hos and nasty bitches.”

Sometimes I’d be with my friends that I used to stick up places with. By then, they had their Mercedeses and were looking just as good as me. We were laughing, hanging out in a club, and a beautiful woman would walk by with a guy. I started talking to her and my guys would stand all around and block her man off. Oh, I ain’t worth a damn. Stupid, ignorant, distinguished gorillas with guns. They’re looking at this guy, like,
What the fuck are you doing, nigga?
Meanwhile, another guy is saying to the girl, “You’d better be nice to my motherfucking man or I’m gonna kill your fucking husband.” That was the eighties. That’s how people rolled back then in Brownsville.

I never talked to girls in Brownsville. They were scared of me because I was real crude when I was young and I had a nasty attitude back then. The girls in my neighborhood could always see through me. I didn’t have enough game for them. So my friends would go, “Come here, baby, let me talk to you.” It was easier to meet girls back in my white world. I’d meet them at photo shoots or when they’d interview me, or they’d be the model working with you on the shoot. Being the champ made me slightly more confident around women, but it also made the women a lot more aggressive. So that made me feel it was okay to do things. Like if they were hugging me, it made me feel that it was okay to grab their ass and kiss them because at twenty I still didn’t know any better. I really believed that every women who approached me wanted to have sex with me. Before I was “Mike Tyson” nobody wanted anything to do with me. Since I wasn’t particularly adept with women, if I slept with someone once, I’d try to see them again.

I still didn’t have the tools to decipher women’s intentions. Beautiful women would hit on me but I was such a smuck. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s go to my car” or “Let’s go hook up in my apartment,” I’d make plans to go to a movie with her the next day. Then I’d go home and jerk off thinking about her. I could have had her right there in the room. I should have just said, “Why don’t you come over right now.” I once was talking to a girl for hours and finally she said, “Hey, listen, I’m just going to get in this car and come over to your apartment.” In my head I was going,
Thank God. Oh, thank God.
And I sprayed the deodorant thing even though my house looked good and I got my condoms and some porn movies out. Everything was ready. I was just so happy.

I’d be hanging out with older celebrities at Columbus and they’d see that girls would like me and they’d say, “Why don’t you bring her over to my hotel and we’ll have dinner?” They could see that I wasn’t too cool with the girls. When girls started coming on to me at Columbus, I’d take them downstairs to where the bathrooms were. The place would be packed and they’d see us go down. And then when we came back up, the girl’s back would be all dirty from the bathroom floor. And Paulie would go, “Yo, Mike. They’re all coming up dirty.”

Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I got too self-indulgent. I’d have ten women hanging out in my hotel room in Vegas. When I had to go down for the press conference, I’d bring one and leave the rest in the room for when I was finished. Sometimes I’d get naked and put the championship belt on and have sex with a girl. Whenever there was a willing partner, I wanted to do it. The crazy part was that I was trying to satisfy each one of them. That was impossible; these ladies were nuts. After a while, I put together a Rolodex of girls in different cities. I had my Vegas girls, my L.A. girls, my Florida girls, my Detroit girls. Oh, man, why would I want to do that?

I just went totally off the track. I was burning the candle at both ends, training hard and partying just as hard as I was training – drinking, fucking, and fighting with these women all night. Just stupid selfish shit that you do when you’re a young kid with some loot.

Around this time, I met a girl who was more than my match. I had been introduced to some people who were at the top of the fashion world. This wasn’t Columbus, this was the real international jet-setting dining-with-royalty scene. I was going out with a model at the time but my friend Q got angry with her over some money. “Forget her, Mike. I am going to put you in touch with perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s just a teenager now but she will be the highest-paid model soon. You better get with her now because she won’t talk to anyone in a few years.”

Q invited me to a party that this girl would be attending. It was at an exquisite apartment on Fifth Avenue. We’re chilling and Q brings this model over to meet me. She was everything Q said she was, plus she had an amazing English accent. You could tell she was on top of her game. We started talking and she knew who I was and she seemed intrigued with me.

We had exchanged numbers, so the next day I looked for the piece of paper she gave me. I found it. She had written “Naomi Campbell” on it along with her number.

The next thing I knew, we were dating. We couldn’t keep away from each other. She was a very passionate, physical kind of person. We actually had a lot in common. She was raised by a single parent. Her mother broke her ass to save enough money to send her to private schools in England. Naomi was a privileged little young lady all her life.

We fought a lot. I was always with other girls and she didn’t like that. I don’t think we were meant to be in a great love affair but we were two people who really liked being around each other. She was so focused on her career. She was just an awesome strong-willed person. And she’d fight for you. If I’d get in a scrap she’d be right alongside me, she wasn’t afraid to fight. She wouldn’t let anyone talk back about me either. She was just a little girl trying to find her way back then, both of us were really, and the world was devouring us. We didn’t know anything about life then, or at least I didn’t. But in a few years, she was on top of the world and no one could withstand her. She could have any man on the planet. Her presence was too strong. They had to give in.

But I wasn’t ready to settle down with one woman. So besides the young ladies that I’d have casual sex with, I also started seeing Suzette Charles. Suzette was a runner-up to Miss America, who had stepped in and assumed the crown when Vanessa Williams had to give up her title when nude photographs of her were published in
Penthouse
magazine. Suzette was a very nice, mature girl, a few years older than me.

But what was I doing juggling all these women? I couldn’t imagine doing that today. Go to somebody’s house and by the time you get bored with them, you go to somebody else’s house to spend time. And then at the end of the night, after visiting two or three women, you go home and you call somebody else to spend the night with you. That’s a crazy lifestyle, but everyone I was around then was telling me it was normal, because I was hanging around celebrities who were doing the same thing as I was.

So in a short time I had gone from famine to feast with women. And then I added one more to the buffet. I met Robin Givens. I was in England in bed with this British chick and we had the television on in the background. They were showing
Soul Train
and I turned to look at the screen and there was this beautiful black girl on the show.

“Who’s that girl?” I asked the British chick.

She didn’t know, so I started watching closely and they said that the guest stars were the cast of
Head of the Class
. So I called my friend John Horne in L.A. and he called Robin’s agent and we set up a dinner in L.A. when I got back to the States. I went with my friend Rory Holloway, an old friend from Catskill. We met at Le Dome, a nice restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I was always late then, I thought that everybody should wait for me, but I should have known things weren’t going to work when I walked into the restaurant and Robin was sitting there with her sister, her mother, and her publicist.

But I felt a strong sexual vibe from her, some sort of chemistry. She says that later that night the two of us were alone and that I fell asleep on her lap and drooled on her. I guess that’s the way to win a woman over, drool on her.

It struck me that her mother was a professional stage mom, investing in her daughter so that she could be, or at least marry, somebody big. I certainly didn’t want to put any money in her pocket, but to read Robin’s account of our time together is like reading the worst romance/horror novel imaginable. In her description of the first days we spent together in L.A., she talks about a time when her mother and her sister had to go to Japan, and Robin and I would be alone.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do or what this boy is all about, I don’t know who you are trying to hurt,” her mother told her. “Sometimes I believe it’s me, because you think I demand too much and other times I feel it’s you yourself, because of your word, you can’t live up to what I demand. But I do know one thing, when you play with fire, you’re going to get burned, and mark my words, some things are just too dangerous to play with.”

This shit sounds like a bad Lifetime movie. Robin went on:

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“I’ve worked too hard to have you throw it away on some …”

“Mom, we’re just having fun. Don’t you think I deserve to have some fun?”

Ruth was acting like I was some freeloader trying to get my hands on some of that
Head of the Class
money, which couldn’t pay a month’s worth of my rent. The truth is they had nothing until I came on the scene. They were flat broke. They didn’t own anything. They were just one big illusion.

In her book, Robin implied that we hadn’t slept together, but I actually nailed her the first or second night when she came to my hotel. Instead she claimed that we strolled through the mall and played with puppies at pet shops for hours. Can you see me in a motherfucking mall, the heavyweight champ of the world? What the fuck am I doing in a mall?

The truth is I wasn’t petting puppies with her, I was introducing her to my friends the heroin dealers. One night a few months later, we were walking in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue and Forty-first Street and we passed by Bryant Park and I saw this dope dealer who I knew from Brownsville. I walked over to him and slapped him five and Robin was blown away that I knew this guy. I’m sure she was mortified to be around someone like that, she was so artificial. At that time, she just wasn’t comfortable being around normal everyday folk. But to me, the neighborhood heroin dealer was normal everyday people.

I had been out of action for over three months, the longest layoff in my career at that point. Action in the ring, that is. Now it was time to grab another belt. James “Bonecrusher” Smith was the WBA champion and I took him on in Vegas on March seventh.

I didn’t go into the fight at 100 percent. I was suffering from a pinched nerve in my neck that would haunt me for years, so I was in a bit of pain. But I walked into the ring like I owned that place. I thought that the ring was my home and it was where I lived and I was totally comfortable in its circumference. But I still wasn’t a seasoned fighter.

My ego was so out of whack then. I felt like John McEnroe.
Fuck you, who cares?
I had so much respect for him. He was a beast, and that was just how I felt. I felt entitled to anything concerning the boxing world, and if I wasn’t getting it, then you were going to hear from me.

I went into the ring first. When Bonecrusher came in and we faced off, I didn’t feel any threat at all. I knew I’d be too elusive and he wouldn’t be able to hit me. He was a good strong fighter. He knocked out a lot of guys, but it was difficult for him to get to me.

The fight began and by the second round, Bonecrusher’s strategy was obvious. He was going to hold me or backpedal away from me. The crowd started booing as early as the second round and at the end of that round, referee Mills Lane deducted a point from him for holding. I was happy that he was holding me because I was in such tremendous pain from my pinched nerve that it could have been an ugly night. I just couldn’t get comfortable and I kept twitching from the pain the whole fight. My equilibrium was all messed up. He pretty much gave me an easy night off. The only time he connected was about ten seconds before the fight was over. I won every round.