Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (60 page)

I was living a crazy existence. One day I’d be in the sewage with some street hooker trying to get her to have sex without a condom, and the next night I’d be in Bel-Air with my rich friends with a happy face on, celebrating Rosh Hashanah. Right about then, I hit rock bottom. I was in a hotel suite in Phoenix. I had my morphine drip and my Cialis and my bottle of Hennessy. And seven hookers. All of a sudden, the coke made me paranoid and I thought that these women were trying to set me up and rob me. So I started beating them. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just demons around me, it was the devil himself. And he had won. I kicked those hookers out of the room and did the rest of my coke.

Some of my lady friends, not lovers, just friends, would tell me that it was time that I found a woman to be with. They’d even say bullshit like “to die with.”

“I’m going to do this to the end, baby. I’m going to play to a place I can’t play anymore,” I’d tell them. I was talking bullshit. I had to find myself before I could find somebody else. Jackie Rowe used to try to lecture me about drugs and I’d just tell her, “If you love me, you’d let me do this.”

“Listen, Mike, I refuse to sit here and watch you go out like a loser. We’re winners,” she’d say. She used to actually go through all my pants and jackets before she’d send them down to the hotel cleaners to make sure there weren’t drugs in them.

I knew that all my friends were concerned about my drug use but they knew better than to tell me to stop doing what I loved to my face. I began to isolate myself just so I didn’t have to hear any of that shit. I had only one friend who could get away with telling me that. It was Zip. He did it in such a clever way too. He’d be with me chilling, smoking some weed, and then he’d turn serious on me.

“Don’t worry, Mike, we are going to have a beautiful funeral for you. I’ve already put the money aside. We’ll be smoking some weed and drinking that good Cristal and thinking about you. I’m going to get one of those carriages that the horses pull around and we’ll have your casket behind it and we’re going to flaunt your body through all the boroughs of the city, man. It’s going to be beautiful, man.”

At the end of October, I had lunch in Phoenix with my therapist Marilyn, who was back from Moscow. I was sitting in the restaurant and I saw a pretty young lady by herself at another table and I told the waiter that I would pay for her meal. Then the lady came over to our table and gave me her number.

When she left, Marilyn was quiet for a second. Then she spoke.

“I’ll make you a bet that you couldn’t last six weeks in a rehab.”

That struck my macho nerves.

“Are you crazy? I could do six weeks like nothing, I’m disciplined.”

The truth was, I was ready to do something like that. I had gotten tired of falling through the loopholes. I had a bad relationship with my kids, I had a bad relationship with the mothers of my kids, I had bad relationships with a lot of friends of mine. Some people were scared to be around me.

I was about to leave to do a meet-and-greet tour of England for six weeks so I decided that I would stop doing drugs, even weed, during that tour so that by the time I got back to Phoenix for the rehab, I’d be prepared. So I stopped. I didn’t do coke or weed and I even stopped drinking.

That was when I knew that I really had a problem. The first couple of hours I was just losing my mind. I destroyed my hotel room, I was going crazy, but I didn’t get high. I had a miserable trip but I didn’t get high once. So when I got back to Phoenix, I was all clean and ready to go into rehab. I’d already gone through the severe withdrawals.

Marilyn took me to a place called The Meadows. We walked into that place and right off the bat it looked more like a prison than a rehabilitation center. The first thing they did there was to keep you high on medicine. Everybody in the place was fat and slow. If you’d get into a fight it would take them two hours to get there. So they banged me up on meds and then they took me for an interview with the counselors. I thought that rehab was a place where you just chilled and watched TV until your time was up. I didn’t know I was going to have to talk about my deep past and my inner trauma. But these weird, intrusive motherfuckers were all over me with questions.

“How long have you been getting high?”

“What drugs have you used?”

“What external circumstances trigger your drug use?”

“What was your home life like as a child?”

“By any chance are you a homosexual?”

Holy shit, these guys wouldn’t stop getting in my face. This guy that I didn’t know from a can of paint expected me to answer all these intimate questions. I didn’t want to deal with the reality of who I was and my relationship with my demons.

“Hey, get the fuck out of my head, motherfucker. Fuck all of you!” I said. “How dare you talk to me like this, you uppity piece of white trash.”

And then I left the next day.

A week later I checked into another rehab in Tucson. Marilyn was going to kill me if I didn’t go back into treatment. She can give the impression of being a nice, innocent, old grandmotherly white lady, but she’s not. She wouldn’t let me quit. She gave me some real grimy aggressive chastisement. She said, “No, no, you are going to finish this bet.” That’s when I saw another side to her – that fire in her eyes. She was nobody to play with, she meant business. So I tried another place in Phoenix. I liked the people at this second place. I bonded with this young wealthy girl who was going to school to be a fashion designer and was strung out on heroin. I got in trouble there because someone hurt my feelings and said something about me to one of the staff members and I ripped into them. Everybody got scared when I was talking because they weren’t used to a nigga talking to them that way. The people running the place just said, “You have to go, everybody is scared,” so I called this young girl I was dating and she came and got me and I left.

Phoenix is a white-bread by-the-book-assed town. In my opinion, when you’re in a drug rehabilitation program there, you can feel the superciliousness of racism there from these sophisticated doctors and the other people who were supposed to help you.

I was the token Negro there. The staff had a stereotypical preconceived notion of black men, and, in particular, black athletes. The head administrator even had the audacity to say to me, “We had other athletes here and they all had their jewelry on. I noticed you’re not flashy like them.”

“That’s because I don’t have any money,” I responded curtly.

The undertone of his comments wasn’t lost on me. He just omitted the word “black,” although he was thinking it.

Marilyn saw that too and kept trying to find me a place that would work for me. But I had other things to do first. It was Christmas 2006 and I was determined to make it a white Christmas in Arizona. My assistant Darryl was sleeping in another room and I snuck out of the house and got into my BMW. I drove to the Pussycat Lounge, and when I got there, I looked for the manager, this hot girl that I had been attracted to.

“Where’s the white bitch at?” I asked her.

“I can get you some, one minute,” she said.

She came back with three small plastic bags with a gram of coke in each one.

Then she shocked me.

“Can I have some?” she said.

I had never had any indication that this girl was interested in me. We went into the office and did a few lines each.

“You’ve been drinking, Mike,” she observed. “Do you need me to drive you somewhere?”

“No, I’m okay,” I said.

I couldn’t believe I said that. Here was my chance to get that pussy that I had coveted for years. The devil was surely working on me then. I was thinking,
I’m not going to let her drive me, she just wants my cocaine. Fuck this bitch.
I wanted to be alone with my fantasy girl, the real white bitch. I was just being selfish about the cocaine. I could have gotten a ride home with the girl I was trying to get with for such a long time, but I didn’t want to share any of the coke.

So I got in the car. I immediately dumped most of the coke from one of the baggies on the center console. Then I pulled out my Marlboros and took out half the tobacco from one cigarette and scooped up some coke and poured it into the cigarette. I took a few hits and then I started driving home.

Now, I’m not the best driver, even when I am stone-cold sober. So I was driving along, weaving between lanes, when I passed a police sobriety checkpoint. I didn’t realize it but the cops saw the way I was driving so they started following me. After I blew past a stop sign and then nearly swerved into a sheriff’s car, they pulled me over. When the cop approached my car, I frantically tried to brush all the coke off the console but the leather had pores in it and even if you spat and tried to wash it off, the pores would absorb some of the coke.

I rolled down my window and he asked for my license and registration. Then he realized it was me. And he saw the mess on the console.

“I can’t believe this shit, Mike,” he said.

He pulled me out of the car and did some field sobriety tests on me and I was too fucked up to pass. Then he searched me and found the other two baggies in my pants pocket. Then they brought the dope dog in and he sniffed the coke that was still in the car. So they took me in.

They had me in a holding cell before they interrogated me. I was really pissed. I had enough coke on me to warrant a felony. But whenever I was locked up, I’d always find a white guy in there that knows the system. This was no exception.

“Yo, champ, what are you in for?” the white kid asked me.

“Man, they caught me with some cocaine,” I said.

“Have you ever been arrested for drugs before?” he asked.

“I’ve been arrested a lot of times but not for drugs.”

His face brightened.

“Don’t worry, bro. You’re not going to jail,” he said. “They can’t lock you up for your first drug rap, they have to try to help you first.”

Now that I knew what time it was, I was ready for my interrogation. The arresting officer brought me to a room.

“What drugs or medications have you been using?” he asked.

“Zoloft,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“Marijuana and cocaine. I take one Zoloft pill a day.”

“How much marijuana did you smoke?”

“Two joints, earlier in the day.”

“When was the last time you used cocaine before now?” he asked me.

“Yesterday.”

“How often do you use it?”

“Whenever I can get my hands on it. I had some this morning about nine a.m.”

“Why do you use both marijuana and cocaine?”

“I’m an addict.”

“Do you use them at the same time?”

“Yes. It makes me feel good when I use them together.”

“What does the Zoloft do for you?” he asked.

“It regulates me. I’m fucked up.”

“You don’t appear to be fucked up,” he said.

“I know, man, but I am fucked up,” I said and then started laughing loudly like the guy in that movie
Reefer Madness
after he lit up a joint.

I told him that I smoked the coke in my Marlboros and he was intrigued how I did that so I took him through the whole process.

Another officer who was there asked me if I felt good because the drug was in my system while I was driving. I told him that I felt good earlier in the day.

“I want to thank you for being so cooperative, Mike,” the first cop said.

“I’m a pretty cool guy,” I said.

“In my town, people would start yelling at me if they knew I brought you in,” he said.

I didn’t know how to react so I just acted like a psycho. I looked down at the ground and spoke deeper than usual.

“Fuck you, I hate you. Fuck you, deadbeat. Fuck you.”

“Does anyone ever give you shit, Mike?” the first cop asked.

“All the time. But I put it away and don’t let it bother me,” I said.

The cop turned off the tape recorder and walked me over to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office mobile unit. They processed me in and set me up in a cell by myself. There was even a phone inside the cell. I spent most of the night making collect calls.

When I made bail the next morning, Darryl came to pick me up. I gave him a hug when I saw him. Darryl had been trying to keep me straight for years now, from Las Vegas to Amsterdam. It was a tough job.

“Yo, Mike, why did you bounce last night and not say anything to me?” he asked.

“Life’s rough, brother. Life’s rough,” I said.

Darryl drove me to Shelley’s house and I took a shower and saw my kids Miguel and Exodus, and had a nice meal. Then I got a lawyer. I called my contacts in Vegas and they came up with David Chesnoff, a really connected lawyer who was partners with Oscar Goodman, who represented me in my attempt to get my boxing license back. Even though it wasn’t mandated, Chesnoff’s strategy was to get me into rehab as soon as possible and for me to do meaningful community service to show the court that I was serious about straightening out my life.

So I went to my third rehab in Phoenix. It was in a small house where the guy who ran it lived. This guy was a real prick who kept trying to play me. I made one real friend there, though, an Italian guy from Brooklyn, one of those “Hey, let’s get it going!” dudes. Great smile, great energy. I would have gotten kicked out a lot quicker if it wasn’t for him. But the other people were afraid of me. The guy who ran the place used the fact that I forgot to lock up my medication as an excuse to boot my ass out.

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.