Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (61 page)

Because of my celebrity they wanted me to go to the closed meetings. I went to a few of them and I was shocked. I saw some of the biggest names in the world in those rooms. And they liked me; they thought I was a badass. They would say, “Mike, you need money?” and they’d have someone put some cash in my account. One thing I found out in those meetings was everybody knows when you’re getting high. One time, I saw this world-famous actor, one of the biggest, at a closed meeting. He greeted me and said, “Hey, we’ve been waiting for you here. I have a seat reserved for you.”

How the hell did he know that I was using?
I thought. But if you’re using, everybody who is using knows you’re using. We think no one sees us but we are more transparent than we believe.

But the closed-door meetings weren’t my thing. I went about four times but I had to go back to the regular meetings. All the guys in the closed programs were elitists so they were going to run their own program. I had to do Bill W.’s program. I had to be in there with the masses.

I owe Marilyn a debt that can never be repaid for getting me into the recovery world. That is one fascinating world. You think cops got the biggest fraternity in the world? You think gangs are big? They’re nothing compared to the recovery world. They got federal judges, marshals, and prosecutors. You be careful about what recovering alcoholic or addict you’re fucking with, because this is one huge powerful family. Don’t ever underestimate the power of recovery, because if you do, you’re going down. They’ve got the ear of everyone, including the President.

They’re a motley crew too. I saw ex-Hells Angels, ex-gangbangers, strange guys whose sole purpose in life is to get people to stop drinking and stop getting high. Do you feel me? Some of these guys have been in prison for most of their lives and their goal in life now is to save as many people as possible and get them to live life on life’s terms and to face their fears sober. These are special people, Marilyn included. They are a different breed of people. All my intimidating, bullshit doesn’t work with them. Big killers with knife scars on their face, mob hit men, these A.A. people don’t get scared. It’s almost impossible to scare an addict. Even if they say they’re afraid of you, they’re really not.

If anybody ever got out of place and said something disrespectful about Marilyn, I would have fucked their world up. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire, you don’t have enough money to pay these people, you’d be slaving and indebted to them for the rest of your life. And they’re at peace with themselves. They don’t do this shit for money, they do it for moral accomplishment. A lot of these guys go through the motions and smile and they’re cool until they have to go into action. We had a puny little Jewish kid who worked at Wonderland and would drive us around. One day we were going to get ice cream so a bunch of us got in the car. One patient came running up late and he got in the car and you could smell the alcohol on his breath. This puny staff guy got out of the car, threw the back door open, and dragged this drunk guy out of the car. “Oh shit,” I said. I was the heavyweight champ, why didn’t I do that? I had so much respect for that puny-assed kid. He didn’t have a violent bone in his body until that switch went off and he did this thing. He’s smiling “Beautiful day, huh?” until he smelled that liquor.

I got so much support when I was at Wonderland. A big rock star in the program called me right away when he heard I was having problems.

“Mike, come see me if you need anything.”

He knew what my mind was doing. He was an incredible guy. One day a famous British actor came to visit me at Wonderland and shared about his bouts with alcoholism. What a beautiful man. People think addicts are bums and horrible people but they’re the geniuses of our times.

It’s not always a happy ending when you talk about recovery, but when endings are happy, they’re almost godsent. People are going to die in our family, they’re going to run away and get high and OD. We’re still going to get sick, we’ll still get the short end of the stick in life, but now we have tools that are remarkable to help us deal with these problems. Getting involved with the recovery program was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. These are great people and they never get enough credit from our society.

Going to Wonderland was really a turning point in my life. I could relate to the idea of improving myself, Cus had drilled that into me years earlier. But it was hard because all those drugs had suppressed all the good shit I had. But just to get back in a daily rhythm – go to work out, go to my meetings, and go out to dinner with my peers – was great. And when I saw all these other people who were supposed to be incurable addicts doing so well at meetings my competitive streak kicked in. I just jumped seeing that. If those guys could do it, I knew I could too. I wasn’t going to let anyone outdo me. One guy had been sober for ten years. If you met this guy you would have thought he was a saint. But his parents still weren’t talking to him. He had been a monster most of his life. But now he had a job, he was supporting his family, and his main goal in life was to get other people like him into recovery.

A lot of people relapse when they’re in rehab but I couldn’t even conceive of that. If I got high in that place then I would feel like the biggest loser. My whole purpose of being there was to not get high. When I’m around that positive energy I soak it up like a sponge. I’m the biggest cheerleader. “Hey, we’re here to be sober. We’re going to do it together. Yeah, let’s do it!” But if I was by myself it would be, “Hey, you got a syringe?”

One of the scariest and most satisfying things was to go on 12-step calls. Guys who may have been sober for twenty years and you hear they’re in the hospital, that they had a slip and had started drinking again. Some of the kids I was with at Wonderland snuck out and we had to go find them. I was just a patient and they were sending me out to look for those guys. So we drove down to Hollywood and Vine. You go right to the drug spot and that’s where you’ll find them. They were just sitting there on the street. They looked so bad they were hardly recognizable. They’re white but the sun burned their skin so much that they looked dark. I saw a lot of bad stuff that year.

I was seeing all sorts of counselors when I was at Wonderland. Because of the road rage conviction, they sent me to anger management classes. The guy who ran the class was a tiny guy named Ian. I couldn’t see what he could know about anger management. But after a while, I could see that Ian appeared as if he were ready to explode any minute. I guess they’re the right people for the job. He taught me a Jewish proverb the first session we had.

“Bright light, dark shadows. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” He told me that the biggest stars were the darkest ones, that was why I was here with him.

Marilyn suggested that I see a sex counselor too. She had sent me to one in Arizona but it wasn’t until I got to Wonderland that I really got into that work. Whenever Marilyn and I hung out she saw how I reacted to women approaching me. I always felt that girls were coming on to me, that they were the ones with the problem.

“No, you’re putting too much time into the conversation,” Marilyn would lecture me. “You’re not just saying ‘Thank you’ and giving them an autograph. You’re asking them where they’re from, how long they lived here, if they were single. We’ve been here thirty minutes and you have ten phone numbers already. Is there anybody you turn down?”

I was referred to Sean McFarland, an addictions therapist who specialized in sex addiction. He had an office in Venice. Sheila Balkan came along with me on my first visit. I was kind of skeptical about the whole sex addiction thing.

“Well, you’re supposed to be the expert on sex addiction. How does that really work and what does that really mean?” I asked him.

Seano pointed to a picture of his son and his wife that was hanging on the wall of his office.

“Mike, that’s a great question. I like to fuck street prostitutes and that beautiful boy and woman in that picture are my wife and kid. So when I drink and do blow and act out, I say ‘Fuck you’ to them because they’re fucking my life up because I can’t do what I want to do. That’s sex addiction to me.”

I signed right up with him. We spent a lot of time together. Seano was running a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting and I started going to that one every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. That group was the most fun for me. I thought the guys were cool and it was interesting to hear about all that dysfunction. One day we had a guy show up who thought he was better than the rest of us guys because of his status.

“Hey, I don’t think I belong here with you guys,” he said. “I never chase a woman down the street and say I want to fuck her. The only reason I’m here is because my wife is frigid.”

“Because you even said something like that shows that you belong here,” I told him. “Don’t try to figure it all out in one day. Just keep coming, okay?”

I was getting a lot of life skills from those meetings. I really changed my whole outlook on the way I relate to women. I never thought I was a sex addict. Being the champ, I thought that having sex with all those women was just a perk. You’re supposed to have all those willing bodies around you. All the people I worshipped were sexual conquerors. I used to read about Errol Flynn, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, all these great people, and what they all had in common was their conquests over women. So I always thought in order to be a great figure you had to have women in your life, and the more women you conquer, the greater the figure you were. I never knew that having sex with so many women takes so much from you, more than what it adds. I never really created my own self-image, so I read about a lot of people who I believed were great men and I took qualities from them. I was too young to know that these were great men that had bad qualities. Even Cus would have a “real man”-oriented mentality. But all that sex only brought me gonorrhea, chlamydia, and all those other scientific-named diseases.

Women were always available to me but I got too self-indulgent in sex. I’d have ten women in my room getting high and I’d have to do a press conference, so I’d bring a few with me and put them in a room for when I finished the interviews. Whenever a girl was willing, I’d do it. Either I’d hit on them or they’d hit on me. The problem was, I was trying to satisfy each and every one of them and be happy. That’s sick. It’s impossible to satisfy all of them, some of them were crazy, just as sick as I was, if not more. You’d lose your mind trying to do that.

I had my women in every city on the planet. You should have seen my Rolodex. Thank God they invented computers. I used to date a girl in Phoenix that saw me hanging around with my pigeons one day.

“Your birds are like your women. You have to have a lot of birds; just in case you lose one, you’ve got all those other ones. That’s why you never have ten or twenty birds, you always have five hundred, because you’re so emotionally attached that if you lose one you still have four hundred ninety-nine left. That’s the same way you are with women.”

She was just a young chick but she was right. I was so insecure, so scared of loss, so afraid to be alone. Towards the end of my career I was moving in with women and moving from one to the other. When I talked about this shit in the rooms, it evoked such painful feelings. That’s all my mother ever did. Moving from man to man. No matter how much money I had, I still had my mother’s traits. I was going from woman to woman. Right after one, boom, bow, right to the next one, boom, bow, right to the next one, boom, bow, right to the next one.

I may have said, “I’m crazy,” kidding around from time to time, but something was wrong. The majority of people that I was attracting were violent, hot-blooded people always talking shit. Even the women were crazy. Most celebrities were afraid of their stalkers. I fucked mine. They’d be downstairs and the doorman wouldn’t let them up.

“Oh, I’m godly to you? Come on up!”

They might be crazy but they looked great. I actually had one of those scrolling LED lights that you could program with your own message. I had mine read
GOOD PUSSY, CRAZY BITCH. GOOD PUSSY, CRAZY BITCH.
I had that in the bedroom and it looked great in the pitch-black dark.

Pussy was like a drug to me. When I was trying to get pussy, there was no one more desperate than me on the face of the planet. The only people that could outdo me were pedophiles or pansexuals. Pansexuals were people that could hit a deer, kill it, take it home, and fuck it. You only know that when you’ve been in the program.

I was so sex-crazed that I couldn’t control myself even when I was getting an honorary doctorate from Ohio’s Central State University in 1989.

“I don’t know what kind of doctor I am, but watching all these beautiful sisters here, I’m debating whether I should be a gynecologist,” I said in my speech. I was trying to compliment the women, but they didn’t take it that way. But right after I said that there was a big line of women waiting at my door. It took me years to realize how bad that joke was. I only recently found out that my mother had gone to school right down the street from Central State. My mother and her family thought that education made them somebody. I could have said something awesome. But the first thing I thought about was my dick. I embarrassed five hundred years of our family that day.

What did all my sexual conquests amount to? When you’re fucking all those girls it makes you feel like shit but you can’t stop doing it. You hate yourself and you feel sorry for the girl. I never loved them. Everything I said was a fucking lie, even if I didn’t realize that at the time. Being with all those women was the equivalent of masturbating. I had a lot of fun but it didn’t produce anything. I thought I’d get emotional satisfaction out of sleeping with them but I was just a smuck. I was in love with love, not the actual individual.

I felt like I was in a hole and the more people I fucked the more despair I felt. It’s a bad feeling when they’re gone and you’re alone in your bedroom and you can still feel some of their moisture on the bed. That was hell. I just felt so soulless. So then you just get more girls in so you don’t have to think about that feeling. Now I needed someone else to hold me because I felt like a piece of shit. All that energy you’d get from those different people was torture. That’s what made me feel hollow. At one point everything I did sexually consisted of orgies. Me and three, four, or five chicks. I didn’t even know what the fuck was going on in there.