Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (59 page)

Croc and I were at a New Year’s Eve 2006 party in Phoenix. Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley were there too. At the end of the night I saw this beautiful, beautiful girl, one of the most exquisite women I had ever seen. She was an actress and she kept dropping names, like Charlie Sheen. The girl was in close proximity to Crocodile but I couldn’t tell if she was really with him. I was looking at her and I said, “Who are you with?” And the next thing I knew, she said she was with Crocodile.
This is going to be interesting,
I thought.

We brought her back to a house that I had purchased in Phoenix and we started messing with the girl but we were both so high that we couldn’t get an erection, even though we were kissing on her and licking her. So we went out to some twenty-four-hour porn shop and brought some dirty movies back. And that didn’t even work. Man, it was so frustrating. This was the best-looking person I’d ever seen in my life and I couldn’t do anything. Croc and I were like two little kids at Christmas who weren’t strong enough to open the toy box. I was so pissed that I wasn’t packing my Cialis that night. I was just out getting high, I didn’t think I was going to run into any pussy.

I was able to buy that house in Phoenix because from time to time I’d make some money that didn’t have to go right to the creditors. A company in Japan gave me $800,000 to do a Pachinko gambling machine and an extra $100,000 to allow them to put me in trunks that were not black.

So my partying shifted to Phoenix then. I had spent a lot of time with Shelly Finkel in Phoenix so I was pretty connected to some wealthy people there. If I needed a place to stay before I bought the house, they’d find me someplace. Phoenix is a smaller party scene than Vegas but in some ways it’s much more intense. It looks like a quiet town, but at night it turned into a little animal. The partying there was really high end, everyone getting down in mansions or in great hotel suites.

I got into a party circle there that included a lot of doctors. One of the doctors was a plastic surgeon and he used to have me come to his office and he’d set me up in one of the examining rooms. I had my cocaine to one side, my weed to the other, Viagra out on the table.

“Hey, Doc, I’m coming down. I don’t like the way I’m feeling,” I told him one day.

“Don’t worry, I’ll set you up,” he said and he went into the other room.

A few minutes later he wheeled in one of those intravenous drip things. He hooked me up to it.

“This’ll take the edge right off,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“A morphine drip,” he said.

This plastic surgeon could party like crazy. One time, he was driving alone in his car, doing all this coke, and he rolled the car. He went through the window and his face got all scraped up by the trees and the brush he plowed through.

Shortly after this I went to his house. I was shocked when he opened the door.

“You better look at your face, man,” I said. “You’re fucked up.”

All of the skin of his face had been peeled off by the brush and his whole face was one mask of blood. He was lucky he was a plastic surgeon.

I would get so fucked in Phoenix that I would start hallucinating. One time, I was in a car, and my assistant Darryl was driving. We were coming up to one of my friend’s houses and I said to Darryl, “Look! There are all these people outside the house waving at us.” There weren’t no people, it was the trees’ branches moving from the wind.

In July of 2006 I got another visit from the FBI. I had been partying the night before and when I saw an FBI SWAT team coming up the front steps of my house, I ran to the back door but they were right there too.

“Mr. Tyson? We need to talk to you, champ.”

Oh shit,
I thought.
Whose ass did I grab last night?

“We’d like to know your association with this gentleman in the picture. His name is Dale Hausner,” one of the agents said.

I looked at the picture. It showed this guy Dale and me shaking hands like we were buddies.

“Do you know this man? He’s a boxing writer and a photographer,” the agent said.

“I do remember this man. He came to visit me when I was working out in my gym. There were a few of the Mexican fighters there and they started hassling him.

“ ‘Get out of here, you fucking fag,’ one of the Mexican fighters said to him. ‘The champ don’t want to talk to you.’

“But it was Ramadan so I interceded and explained to the other fighters that this was a time of peace and that everybody had a place. So I let him interview me. I’m sorry if he was offended in any way. I didn’t mean to cause him any discomfort.”

“No, no, he liked you, Mr. Tyson,” the FBI agent said. “He just didn’t like the eight people that he murdered and the other nineteen people that he shot.”

It turned out that the police were investigating Hausner and his friend for a string of drive-by shootings in Arizona from May 2005 through July 2006. It was a good thing that I stopped those guys and showed this guy some respect or he might have been waiting outside the gym to shoot me.

At the end of August, I got a gig doing boxing exhibitions at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. It was a sweet deal. They gave me a nice suite and paid me to work out in a room where they set up a boxing ring. Thousands of people coming through the hotel could see me sparring and hitting the heavy bag. I got free food, whatever I wanted, carte blanche. So I called all my friends.

“Come on over. I’m here for a month. You can order anything, it’s on the bitch, nigga.”

I called the hotel “the bitch” then. I was in that pimp mentality.

Bobby Brown was in town and I invited him and Karrine Steffans, aka Superhead, the girl he was currently seeing, to come up to see me. I had fooled around with her before too, so it was all good, so I thought. She was one of those girls who you couldn’t get ahold of that often but when you did it was a great time.

Bobby didn’t want to do that. I didn’t realize that he was actually serious about her. So he brought his father and some other friends down. They came there first and I gave them the royal treatment. Then Bobby came. I was down in the lobby when he arrived and we went up the elevator together. People were going crazy when they saw the two of us. The wife in one couple said, “Oh shit! Mike Tyson and Bobby Brown. These two niggas together, it’s on, baby, it is on.” They knew that we were trouble.

I wanted Bobby to chill for a while with me. It was great to hang out with Bobby because when he was married to Whitney she would never let him hang out with me – although I couldn’t blame her.

Around this time, I started to have difficulty acquiring my coke. It wasn’t like there was any shortage of blow in Vegas; it was that the dealers didn’t want to provide coke to my ass. Dealers were always notoriously late when they said they’d be by with the stuff, and I had no patience so sometimes I’d wind up copping in a burger joint. My drought began in the ghetto. First, they wouldn’t let me in the bathroom of the bars on the Westside. Then the drug dealers started refusing to service me.

“Go train, Mike, we need you to train,” they’d tell me. These guys had grown up with me in Vegas, seen me hanging around the barbershop for years, and they didn’t want to contribute to my downfall. I used to hand out free turkeys to these guys when they were kids so they felt a real bond with me. So out of necessity I started fucking with the white people on the Strip. The casino greeters, the doormen at the clubs, they all had connections.

I was at the Aladdin during the time I was doing the exhibitions and I called up a guy to have an eight ball sent up to my suite. They sent this fucking country nigga with the blow. He was all excited, he thought that he was going to be partying with me and a bunch of girls. He was going to be the life of the party and hold everyone captive with that coke. I opened the door for him and let him in.

“You got the stuff?” I said.

“Yeah, but where the people at?”

“There ain’t nobody. Just me here, nigga,” I said. “You sell drugs, right? So just sell me the motherfucking drugs, okay?”

I grabbed the package from his hands.

“Fuck that shit, you don’t need to do this stuff, Mike,” he said. “You’re the champ. We love you, Mike.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ll work out by escorting your ass to the door.”

I opened the door and the fucker grabbed the bag of coke and ran out. “Go fucking train, Mike,” he yelled back at me. I ran after him but I was fat and mad and I didn’t have no clothes on. I was clutching a towel that was around my waist.

“You come back, motherfucker. I’m going to kill you!”

He was in shape and he got away. I really wanted to beat his ass. Who did he think he was, Florence Fucking Nightingale?

I started strong-arming the few dealers that would still sell to me when I was low on cash. One day a dealer came to me for help.

“Listen, Mike, can you help me out? Please tell Crocodile to pay me my money. I gave him all this coke.”

Once he told me that, he was finished. I knew this guy was a pussy and I knew that I’d never have to pay him for drugs anymore if he couldn’t get Crocodile to pay him.

“Sure, I’ll talk to Crocodile, but give me that stuff you’ve got right now,” and I snatched his coke right out of his hand.

“Oh, man, my boss is going to kill me. I need to bring back some money,” he said.

“Your boss needs that money from that other nigga,” I said.

“Nah, man, I got to get it from you.”

“Well, you tell your boss to come and talk to me about the money then. Listen, you got me addicted, now you want to charge me money, motherfucker? I’m strung out on the coke, nigga.”

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 then favorite strip club in Vegas. The owner would let me go to the bathroom and smoke. He was helping me kill myself. In Phoenix one place 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.