Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (27 page)

Anthony decided I needed a real bodyguard one night when we were at a club in downtown L.A. I was there with Anthony and my friend Johnny, a white dude. We were outside talking to some girls. I had drawn quite a crowd of attractive young women when I heard someone say, “Fuck Mike Tyson!” All of a sudden the whole club was running into the street. So I grabbed this girl I had been talking to and we started running to my limo and I heard, boom. The guy had a gun and had shot at me, but he missed me and hit the girl in the leg. I was such a selfish pig that I still tried to get the wounded girl into my car to take her home. Her girlfriend was screaming, “They shot her because of you, Mike. They wanted to get you.” I wanted to get out of there, but my chauffeur wasn’t behind the wheel. I looked in the back window and he was curled up hiding in the back. That’s when Anthony decided to be my bodyguard. We took off and I left the girl behind. I felt bad that she got shot. Needless to say, she never talked to me again.

With all this drinking and partying, my weight shot up to 255 that December. My next fight was with Frank Bruno, but that wasn’t until the end of February 1989. Then I found myself without a trainer. Kevin was always in the papers talking negative bullshit, saying I didn’t know what I was doing. He was very anti-Don, always pro-Cayton. I think that his hatred for Don was blinding him. Kevin really fired himself. He didn’t want to be with us. He wanted the whole Cayton team back. We were going to hire him back at the same price, but he didn’t want it. And then he sued me.

I hired my Catskill roommate Jay Bright to be my new trainer. I wanted Jay to get some money because he was part of Cus’s family upstate. We also hired Aaron Snowell, who claimed he had trained Tim Witherspoon. Tim later told me that Snowell was just his running partner who had carried the bucket into the ring, but I didn’t care. I was a pugilistic god. My opponents should die with fright at the thought of fighting me. Oh, God!

Before we started training, I had some legal matters to resolve. In January a girl filed a million-dollar suit against me for grabbing her buttocks at Bentley’s, a nightclub just blocks from my apartment in Manhattan. Anthony was with me then and he told me to say that I didn’t grab her buttocks but that I was behind her and fell into her as I tried to break my fall. Anthony always came up with plausible deniability. And he would often take the fall for me. Another time we were at Bentley’s and I grabbed some girl’s ass and when she turned around Anthony piped in.

“No, no, that was me, baby. I’m sorry. I thought you were my ex-girl,” he told the girl. He defused that one.

But the first girl was taking me to court and she planned on having her friend who was there with her testify against me. I had seen the friend in court the day before she was supposed to testify against me, so I went looking for her and, amazingly enough, I found her out that night with a friend of mine.

“Hey, you’re the girl from the case,” I approached her.

“Don’t you get in my face,” she said.

“Hey, I don’t want to get in your face,” I said calmly. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your friend. I didn’t do anything to her.”

I figured that if I fucked this girl, she couldn’t testify against me the next day.

“Hey, it’s no problem, sister. Why don’t you and me go for a ride in the Rolls?” My strategy worked. The girl didn’t testify.

In January I also had to appear in court for a deposition in connection with Cayton’s suit versus Don King. Thomas Puccio, a famous attorney, was Cayton’s man. He asked me about the Spinks fight payment and I told him that I couldn’t recall if I had been paid. When Puccio showed him that I had been paid my full twelve million dollars, I couldn’t recall what I did with the money. I didn’t even have my own accountant at the time; I was just using Don’s. I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to protect myself. All my friends were dependent on me. I had the biggest loser friends in the history of loser friends.

But the deposition got interesting when Puccio asked me about Jimmy and the revised managerial contract I had signed right before he died.

“I had total trust, implicitly, totally, with every soul of my body, in Jim,” I testified. “I signed that agreement because Jimmy asked me to sign it. I always trusted Jimmy, I never believed my listening to Jimmy would all come down to this, and being here facing you. I didn’t understand Cayton was my manager, because Jimmy, by some means, I can’t understand why, Jimmy had me sign this. Like I said, I trusted him and I signed it. I wanted to fight in the glory of Jim, I loved Jim,” I said. “He could have informed me about Mr. Cayton being my manager, which he didn’t.”

But Puccio kept pressing me. He grilled me about the specific terms of my contract with King. I had no idea what was in the contract. Do you think I read that shit?

“You’re stressing me out,” I told Puccio.

The truth was, I was more interested in putting the moves on Puccio’s hot young assistant lawyer, Joanna Crispi. I told her she had a nice ass and I kept trying to get her attention. I’m sorry you have to read about this. What was I thinking? You can’t do shit like that. But I did.

My own litigation with Robin was still in the courts, but that didn’t keep us from seeing each other. Whenever I was in L.A., I’d stop by for a booty call. I once drove up to her house in my Lamborghini Countach. I knocked on the door and there was no one there. That was odd. So I went back to my car, when I spotted Robin pulling up in her nice white BMW convertible. I should have recognized it, I bought the motherfucker.
Great, I can still get my quickie in,
I thought, but then I spotted a white silhouette with flowing blond hair in the passenger’s seat. Shit, it was probably one of her girlfriends from
Head of the Class
. But I looked closer and saw that it was a dude. Someone she was probably giving head to. They pulled up and got out of the car and I saw that the guy was Brad Pitt. When Brad saw me standing there in front of the house, you had to see the look on his face. He looked like he was ready to receive his last rites. Plus, he looked stoned out of his gourd. Then he went all pre-
Matrix
on me. “Dude, don’t strike me, don’t strike me. We were just going over some lines. She was talking about you the whole time.”

“Please, Michael, please, Michael don’t do anything,” Robin was crying. She was scared to death. But I wasn’t going to beat no one up. I wasn’t trying to go to jail for her, I was just trying to get in some humps before the divorce.

“Come back later, Mike,” she said. “I’ll be home, come back later.”

It was what it was. Brad beat me to the punch that day so I went back the next day.

That wasn’t the last time I saw Robin. While I was training for the Bruno fight, Robin was shooting some B movie up in Vancouver. She kept calling me for help, saying she was being stalked. I wanted to be by her side to protect her. I ditched my security team and immediately flew up there. I was grateful to get out of town because I was tired of training anyway. I was in full romantic mode, so I walked up to the hotel carrying a big bottle of Dom Pérignon. Suddenly I was surrounded by a swarm of reporters and camera crews. Robin had set me up. She had told the media that I was the one stalking her. They were swarming me, asking why I was stalking her, so I acted on instinct. I transformed my champagne bottle into a bludgeon to escape with. Of course, I scared a few reporters and broke a really expensive camera in doing so, which set me back a few pennies. I spent the night with Robin, but I was so disgusted by her behavior that I left the next morning. That was the official end of my relationship with her.

Our divorce was finalized on February fourteenth. Ironic, huh? Robin got some cash money and got to keep all the jewelry I had bought her, which was worth a fortune. Ruthless took some of Robin’s booty and opened up an indie film production company in New York.

Robin also tried to keep my Lamborghini. She took that car and put it in her garage and then had someone put cement blocks into the ground in front of the garage door so we couldn’t get it out. But that was no problem for Howard. He hired some private investigators who were ex-Mossad agents and they had the car out in twenty minutes without waking up anyone.

I was free of Robin officially, but instead of being elated, I was really down. I didn’t want to be married to her anymore but I felt humiliated by the whole process. I felt like half a person. I had endured the dark side of love – betrayal – and I was ashamed because it had played out in front of millions of people. This was the first time I had made myself vulnerable to someone else. Here was someone I would have died for and now I didn’t even care if she died. How does love change like that?

But it was time to go back to fighting. The entire boxing industry was waiting for my next fight. We had brought the whole entertainment base back to the sport. My fights were sold out the minute they were announced. Everybody was going to Vegas to hang out at the MGM Grand. The place was packed like sardines when we were there. The word was out that I’d go to the mall at the MGM Grand and spend two hundred and fifty thousand the night before the fight, so there were all these Mike Tyson look-alikes there. They’d do my walk. I’d be in the room sleeping and there were all these Tyson sightings. Every high roller from around the world was there. Billionaires, actors, actresses, hustlers, they were all there. There’d be whores sitting next to U.S. senators ringside.

But I was in no shape, especially mental, to fight. Bruno should have kicked my ass. I just didn’t care anymore. I was tired of fighting. I didn’t have Cus’s system in my head. But I put up a good front. At one of the first press conferences before the fight I tried to sound upbeat.

“I’m happy to be back. I’ve gone through a lot of distractions recently, but I really think it’s good for someone to go through something like this. Actually, I’ve been through this pain before but this time it was publicized,” I said. “I know I learned a great deal about myself and had to deal with adversity. My main objective now is to get back on top. It doesn’t matter if I’m famous, or recognizable. You can’t be on top if you don’t perform and I plan on performing again and getting back on top.”

But the reporters just wanted to know about my storybook romance with Robin and what happened.

“Hey, I went through a stage, fell in love, and I might fall in love again, but not the same way.”

I showed a little more bravado as the fight approached.

“People say ‘poor guy’ about me. That insults me. I despise sympathy. So I screwed up and made some mistakes. ‘Poor guy’ sounds like I’m a victim. There’s nothing poor about me.”

We put Rory and John Horne up at the Hilton a few weeks before the fight. A few days later, they were wearing gold watches and jewelry from the hotel shops.

I didn’t train particularly hard for the fight. I had sparred with Bruno when I was sixteen at Cus’s and had gotten the best of him then. I had no strategy to fight him. I knew I could pick off his jab and he couldn’t hurt me with his power punches. At the weigh-in, Bruno attempted to stare me down, so I pulled my shorts down and showed him my pubic hair.

When the fight began, I felt a little rusty but I was punching pretty hard. I dropped him with the first punch. Then I got a little reckless trying to finish him off and I misanticipated his speed and he hit me with a left hook and a short right. People made a big deal that I was wobbled with the punches, but that wasn’t so. It was just za-bang and then I was back in charge. I almost finished him off at the very end of the second round. After that, he held me after every punishing blow I got off. With a minute to go in the fifth, I wobbled him and then spent the next forty seconds stalking him. He was ready to go and I got him against the ropes and landed a devastating right uppercut, and Richard Steele stopped the fight. He was out on his feet.

In the postfight interview, I lorded over my opponents.

“How dare they challenge me with their primitive skills?” I sneered.

I was quoting Apocalypse from the X-Men. I was just a big kid, quoting a comic book.

I was scheduled to fight again in July, but HBO wanted to sign me to a lifetime contract. I was constantly the slave nigga. They needed me just like the head slave on a plantation. Just imagine that shit; these suits were fighting over me to rip my soul apart.

I started training for the fight in Ohio. I had bought a house right near Don’s. On May thirty-first, the HBO guys went out to Don’s to talk about the proposed deal. I didn’t show up. I had been partying the night before.

King met with the press and painted a rosy picture of our relationship.

“It’s a family affair, where togetherness, solidarity, and unity prevail. Mike understands he has to be better than he is. My job is to be honest with him. He’s the man, to allow him to make his own mistakes,” he said. “He has to grow up like everyone else, it’s all about Mike growing up and I can’t wait to make him independent of me.”

“I do not try to emasculate him, decide what is right and wrong for him. He decides, I’m not his father, but the heart of the father, that many kids in the ghetto don’t have. I could relate to what Mike Tyson is suffering.”

What can I say about this guy? Now the motherfucker was just copying Cus.

I hadn’t shown up by lunchtime so they started the meeting without me. I rolled in about four in the afternoon, wearing black-and-white-striped lederhosen that Dapper Dan had made for me.

I didn’t give a shit about that meeting. I was so bored in Ohio. Sometimes I would get a gun and shoot up the cars on Don’s estate. One of the reasons that I was out in Ohio was that I had been banned from a lot of clubs in the city. I even got Paulie Herman kicked out of his own club. He was an investor in the China Club and Paulie and I were there one day and something happened with me and a woman. I think I bossed around a waitress and got mad because she was slow bringing us our champagne. She ratted me out to the boss and he came back to our table and threw us out. So we went to Columbus and Paulie opened the place and we drank there.