Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (67 page)

But we didn’t exchange rings or go on a honeymoon. We wouldn’t get the rings for another year and the honeymoon was over in a couple of days. Kiki and I had never fought. We were cool until we said, “I do,” and then we starting fighting like a motherfucker. When the reality hit me I thought,
What the fuck is going on here?
I was still in my addiction and I was just overstepping the boundaries a lot. I was fighting them about leaving the house. I was doing a good job; instead of doing coke every day I was doing it once a week now. Then it went from once a week to once every two weeks, then once every three weeks to once a month.

Every time I slipped I felt shame because now I was coming home to Kiki and her mom and our little baby. I’d come back sweating like a pig, burning up, and Rita would put the cold compresses on me while Kiki was running her mouth at me.

“Don’t you see your mother? Don’t fucking say nothing,” I told Kiki. “Be like your mother.”

“My mother is not married to you,” she said.

A week after my birthday I went out with a friend and I stayed out all night doing coke. Kiki couldn’t sleep because I hadn’t come home so she started Googling my name to see if I had been arrested. Then she let out a scream and ran into Rita’s room.

“Mike is dead! I just saw it on the Internet.” They reported that I was out celebrating my birthday with friends and that I had succumbed to a massive heart attack.

Rita got on the phone immediately and called the coroner’s office.

“Do you have a Mike Tyson there?” she asked.

“Why do you ask?” they answered.

“Because he’s dead,” she said.

“How do you know he’s dead?”

“That’s just the point. We don’t know if he’s dead, that’s why we’re calling,” Rita said. “This is his mother-in-law and his wife. We’re trying to find out if you have his body.”

They put Rita on hold and then another guy picked up.

“No, we don’t have anyone here by that name.”

The next day, I walked jauntily into the house.

“Hey, guys,” I said. I was high as a kite.

“You are such an asshole,” Kiki said. “I was looking for you and I went online and it said that you died of a heart attack.”

I started laughing.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I paraphrased Mark Twain.

Kiki didn’t think it was funny. She grabbed Milan.

“I’m getting out of here,” she said and stormed down the stairs to the car.

“Where are you going?” Rita asked.

“I’m just leaving,” Kiki said. “Are you staying with him?”

“Yeah, somebody needs to,” Rita said.

“Don’t worry, Momma. I’ll take care of you,” I offered. As if my high ass was in any condition to take care of anyone. I could barely stand up straight.

Kiki blew off some steam and came home. She was worried that she had forced me into marrying her and that’s why we were fighting and I was slipping out.

“Do you feel like you settled with me?” she’d ask me.

“You know that no one can make me do anything I don’t want to do,” I reassured her.

I was getting sick of the slips myself. A few weeks earlier
The Hangover
had come out and it was a runaway smash. I was still getting high but I called up Todd Phillips, the director.

“When is the next fucking movie, Todd? Yo, I want in that movie, Todd. Don’t play me, man.”

In July we all went to L.A. to the Teen Choice Awards because
The Hangover
had been nominated. I brought Rayna, my daughter with Monica, and she was so excited to meet the Jonas Brothers. They were hosting it and they wanted to do a skit with me where I was a sadistic barber and I cut off one of the brothers’ hair.

A few weeks later we were back in L.A. for the ESPY awards. That visit didn’t go as well as the last one. We were so broke that we couldn’t even afford to stay in the hotel room that ESPN put us up in for any additional days. When the show was over, Kiki and I had a fight on the way back to the hotel so when we got there she and Milan and Rita and Darryl went up to the rooms but I snuck off and went and got our car. I had brought some coke with me without them knowing it and I had snuck off periodically to do it and to have a few drinks so I was pretty high by now. I started the car and then remembered I had left my phone on the valet bench where I was waiting so I got out and got the phone but locked myself out of the car.

All the people from the show were spilling out and I saw this young Caucasian lady who I had had a one-night stand with a few years earlier. She was staying at the hotel too.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I said.

She took one look at my face and got scared. She could see I wasn’t right.

“No, no, I’m just going back to my room,” she said and scurried off.

Okay, I guess it was only a one-night stand for her too. So I called AAA and they came and opened the car and wouldn’t even take any money. I got behind the wheel and I pulled out. A friend of mine was having a cocaine party at his house in Beverly Hills so I wasn’t going to miss that, but I had no idea how to get to the freeway to Beverly Hills from this hotel in downtown L.A. I guess I was weaving a bit and then I made a weird turn. Then I saw lights in the rearview mirror and I heard a siren and then an amplified voice: “Pull over to the side of the road.”

I not only pulled over, I pulled up onto the fucking curb I was so high.
Oh shit,
I thought. I was going straight back to jail. The cop got out of his car and approached my vehicle. I rolled down the window.

“Mike Tyson! Holy shit!” he said. “Hey, you were great in
The Hangover.
We’ve been following you for a while, Mike. You’ve been swerving all over the road.”

I must have gotten this from Cus but in a tenth of a second, as soon as I detected any friendliness from him, I opened up all my love on him. I had to do something because my license was suspended and I had no documents in the car.

“Hey, guy, I’m sorry if I was driving erratically because I’m kind of lost. I’m trying to find my friend’s house in Beverly Hills but I don’t know how to get to the freeway. Can you help me with this address?”

I handed him my friend’s address. He took the paper and he went back to his car. He was taking an awfully long time so I got paranoid that he was checking my record and would see my license suspension. I was sweating bullets when he came back to my car.

“Okay, Mike, we got it. Why don’t you just follow us and we’ll escort you there.”

Yes! I had played my get-out-of-jail-free celebrity card tonight. I didn’t think that officer was going to show me any love but he did. They got me to the party and then they actually escorted me to the front door!

My friend looked pretty shocked to see me and two LAPD police officers there.

“We’re leaving Mike Tyson in your custody and you’d better make sure he gets home safely in the morning. If we hear that he was driving we have your address on file,” the one cop said.

There’s no bigger buzzkill than to show up at a coke party with two cops. So as soon as the cops pulled away, everybody left the party. So I went back into my car, high and drunk as hell, and somehow wound up at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I dropped my car off and I went into the hotel to have a drink and make a call to score more coke. When I came back, the valet wouldn’t give me my car keys.

“You cannot drive like that, man. I’m keeping your car,” he said. So I called Kiki and told her to come pick me up. Before she got there I had changed my mind and I hailed a cab instead. I went down Sunset to my friend Mark’s cigar bar. He wasn’t in but his partner was there. As soon as he saw me, he looked so concerned that he immediately kicked everyone out and closed the place and called Mark. Mark came and picked me up and drove me to my friend Jeff Greene’s house.

Meanwhile, Kiki had rushed over to the hotel and found the car but not me. But she was getting calls from friends of hers with Mike sightings. By the time she got to the cigar bar I was long gone. We eventually met up at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset and spent the night before returning to Vegas.

I had a few more relapses when we were back in Vegas and Kiki decided it was time to send me back to rehab. This time we had zero money and she certainly wasn’t going to send me to a cushy summer camp for celebrities place like Wonderland or Promises. She thought I needed a real program. So she went online and found a program called Impact, about an hour outside of L.A. in Palm Springs. She read the online brochure and thought that all that discipline they were talking about would be good for me. I needed some no-frills, no-nonsense approach, not some bullshit celebrity pampering. She didn’t know anything about rehabs so she had no idea that this place was looked at as the rehab place for lowlifes and dead-enders. She kept beating up on me until I finally agreed to go.

I copped a couple of eight balls of coke and packed a bag and off Darryl and I went to California. I was doing my last hurrah with the coke when we got to the place. I checked in and then one of the rehab counselors asked me if I had any drugs to surrender. So I gave him what I had left which was almost an eight ball.

“That’s good,” he said and disappeared in the back. When he came out again, he was acting strange. This motherfucker did my coke. And it was some good coke too. They had a junkie running the rehab! They showed me to my room and it was in a trailer. The whole place was basically a trailer park.

I was not a happy rehab camper. The place was crawling with violent meth heads and some court-sanctioned gangbangers who I really thought I might have to fight. I lasted the night and then at eight a.m. I told them I was leaving. They called Kiki and told her that I wasn’t happy and wanted to leave. At eleven a.m. they called her back.

“Look, he’s really not happy.”

Then I called her.

“I can’t believe you put me in this place. I can’t stay here, I’m going to go.”

“Try it for a little while,” she begged.

A half hour later I broke one of the chairs, which was like lawn furniture, and they drove me to the nearest bus station. That place was way too hard-core for me. But I have to admit that when I was at Wonderland or Promises it took me eight to fourteen months to get my life together. I spent a half a day at this place and I came home and except for one small slip, I haven’t had a drink or any coke since.

The success of
The Hangover
played a major role in getting me cleaned up. I remember the movie had just premiered and a small kid and his father walked by me on the street.

“Look, Daddy.” The kid stopped and pointed at me. “That’s the actor Mike Tyson.”

“Hey, at one time I was the best fighter in the world too, kid,” I said.

That began happening again and again. A whole generation of kids started knowing me as an actor, not a boxer. It just happened within a blink of an eye. I was drugged out on coke, almost suicidal, living the life of a loser and, BOOM. It happened so fast it was almost uncomfortable. But I knew I couldn’t blow this opportunity to reinvent myself again. But before I could do that I had to do some serious reprogramming.

“I’m going to change, I’m going to win, I’m not going to end like this,” I kept telling myself. I went back to my Cus shit. No one could stop me. My reign would be invincible. I had been on coke, I didn’t even know what reign I was going to have. I knew it wasn’t boxing but I had the same ideology and thrust and thirst and hunger to draw on.

But it was a different hunger and thirst. I wasn’t hopeless back when I was a kid coming up. I still believed I was something back then. But now I had been in bed with some very bad spirits and I had annihilated all my dreams and hopes.

Prominent directors and actors were calling me and telling me that I had to do more film work.

“You have to keep doing comedic roles,” they’d say. “Forget that tough-guy shit. You’re a nice guy, Mike. Nobody sees that because it’s been pushed down by all that dark shit that you’ve experienced in life. But you have to stay lit, because when you’re in that light, you shine so brightly.”

They were right. All that dark stuff was a pose, a persona that Cus had imposed on me. Cus wanted me to intimidate. He was using me to fulfill his own legacy. Don’t get me wrong. It was a cool legacy to fulfill and if he asked me to do it again, I would do it but be even meaner and more vicious.

So I went from being hopeless to having a goal again. What happens now? My vanity kicks in. Everybody was telling me, “You’re so good in movies, you have to pursue it.” Then I looked in the mirror.

This body isn’t good for the movies,
I thought.
Who’s going to want to hump this guy? Who’s going to think I’m hot? I’m fucking Fat Albert. I weighed 380 pounds and the way the screen magnifies your ass, I’m going to look 680. Omar the Tentmaker is gonna have to make my suits.

Now I had to get into serious shape. So for five weeks I ate nothing but tomato basil soup. My wife decided to go on a vegan diet for a week and I was right there next to her. Only I didn’t stop. What’s that? Vegan? Okay, I’m a full-on vegan.

I was sick of being a fat pig. I was embarrassed to have sex with my wife I was so fat. The narcissist with delusions of grandeur again! I come from a line of morbidly obese people. That’s who I am. But I’m so vain, I’d rather literally work my ass off and do everything I hate to do rather than be the fat guy I truly am. Now my discipline kicked in. It has to be planned. I have to convene a little meeting of the committee in my head and give out the orders. “This is what we’re going to do. These are the concrete steps we need to achieve this goal.”

I didn’t miss eating meat. I cheated one time and had the tiniest piece of beef and I was in pain and started throwing up. It was like poison to my body now. Eating all that meat just fueled my aggression. And dairy products made me bloat up. Now I was eating a lot of beans and Kiki was making me delicious fruit and vegetable shakes. Once I was in the full throes of my veganism all my ailments disappeared. My high blood pressure, my arthritis, my high glucose, poof, gone. I had been a walking dead man, eating like shit and smoking those Al Capone cigarillos. And now I was eating healthy and doing three hours of exercise and cardio a day. I’m just an extremist. It was either the yoga or the needle in my arm. One or the other.