Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (65 page)

“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or, self-seeking motives.”

I’m reading this and Marilyn’s yelling, “READ IT LOUDER!! LOUDER!!”

I never hung up on her or told her I was busy, because I wanted to be helped.

“Working with others, practical experience shows that nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics.”

The reading reminded me that I thought I was just a cokehead but no, I was an alcoholic. The only time I’d do coke was after a drink. And once I took a drink, everyone was in danger, even me.

I wanted to party in New York but that plan got derailed when I was accused of putting up $50,000 for a hit on the guys who had allegedly killed my buddy Darryl “Homicide” Baum back in 2000. This came out at a trial of one of the Cash Money Brothers organization that controlled the drug traffic in some of the projects in Brooklyn. Supposedly one of the guys who murdered Homicide heard about the bounty and then he put out a hit on my head and that it was almost carried out in the summer of 2000 when I was in Brooklyn. I had been spotted in one of my Range Rovers on Atlantic Avenue but some of the Cash Money guys objected to killing me because I was a Muslim.

All of this was bullshit, of course, but just mentioning my name in connection with hits on drug dealers helped perpetuate the idea that I was some crazy, hard-core guy. I was on probation then too, so now they were telling me that I can’t even go to my hometown.

That was the world I grew up in. All my friends killed people, robbed their drugs. I went one direction and they went the other, but we kept in touch. Now I was getting dragged back into that world and it was a nightmare. I felt like the whole world was caving in on me.

So I stayed out in the west and kept getting fucked up. I took one of my call-girl girlfriends to the premiere of Will Smith’s new film
Seven Pounds
in December. Kiki saw a picture of me and the girl on the red carpet while she was in jail and flipped out. I was flipping out too but it was because I was feeling like shit. I called my old friend Hope right before the after-party was going to begin and asked her to come and get me. She drove up to the place and I ran out got into her car and left my girl and my bodyguards back in the party.

I just had to get away. My bodyguards were calling, all freaked out, and I put Hope on the phone.

“He’ll be fine. Let me just give him some space. I’ll bring him back,” she told them.

But I didn’t want to go back; I just wanted to disappear. Hope took me back and she came to the party with us. I was walking around, just completely out of it.

Later that month, I went to one of my clubs in Vegas. I was going to my usual spot in the VIP area when I saw that there was a big crowd around the rope. Some of the big drug guys who normally sat in the VIP section were being refused admittance by the bouncer. But when he saw me he let me right in. So I took up my normal spot at my table and started drinking my Hennessy. There were a bunch of people at the next table drinking and having fun and I looked over at them, thinking to myself,
Who the fuck do they think they are sitting over here? This is our spot.
Then I saw one of the Olsen twins. So now I was figuring that this was a showbiz crowd. All these white people were looking over at me, the black interloper in the corner. But this was my place. In my mind I was some cool Las Vegas big shot. Then all of a sudden that comic actor Zach Galifianakis came over to me.

“Hey, we’re shooting a movie with you in two weeks,” he said.

“Fuck you are. For real?”

Zach laughed. He must have thought I was putting him on but it was news to me. I didn’t know anything about any movie. I was doing my normal meet and greets to pick up enough money to keep me in drugs. Hey, if I had a movie, cool, let’s go do a movie. I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.

“Come sit with us and have a drink,” Zach said. He was a great guy.

In a couple of weeks I was on the set of
The Hangover
. I was fat, out of shape, and moody. But Todd Phillips, the director, and those actors were just so awesome. I don’t know if they thought I was going to be some psycho on the set but Todd and the producers were all over me all the time.

“Is everything okay? Do you want to take a break?” Todd said. “Can you do one more take now? You don’t have to do it now if you don’t want to.”

I was just so happy to work. I had been asking God to just give me another chance and I would never get high again, even though I couldn’t stop using coke. I was high on coke the entire time we shot
The Hangover.
I had one of my hooker girlfriends with me on the set. And then Seano stopped in to see the filming. He took one look at my girl’s ass and shook his head.

“I can see that me and the brothers are not on your mind too often these days, huh, Mike?” he said.

But I loved being on the set. They put up these craft services tables just stocked with the best cookies, cake, and food. I was stopping scenes to go get me some more of those cookies.

I didn’t expect much from this film. But Todd kept telling me how this was going to be a huge movie and that I’d be on top again after it came out. That was cool, but it was more exciting for me just to be able to entertain people again. I realized that even when I was a fighter, entertaining the people was more paramount than winning the fights. Cus always had me around all these charismatic show-business and media people with magnetic personalities. I realized that Cus was all about the arts. When Cus talked about putting his thoughts in other people’s minds, that was an art too, even if it was a dark art. The art of war, the art of survival, we always looked at everything as art. I’m not a good artist but I know the arts. It was like I said that I wasn’t a good fighter, but I knew how to fight real good.

Kiki gave birth to our daughter Milan on December 24, 2008. She had just been released from jail and she went to a hospital in Philadelphia where Milan was induced because she was a couple of weeks late. Kiki called to tell me and I was stunned. That was my mother’s birthday. I had gotten a small apartment for Kiki near my house in Vegas and had fixed it up for her and the baby. She was about to come out when fate intervened. I had a dirty urine test and the Phoenix people were thinking about putting me back in jail. But my lawyer convinced them that rehab would be better for me so in January, I checked myself into a posh rehab in Malibu called Promises.

Promises was awesome. I was in this mansion. It was just like doing rehab at home. Here we would go to meetings and also see our therapists. They were working me from all angles so I could get a good report and get off my drug case. Everything was going good until four weeks in. My time was up. I didn’t want to leave but they already had booked someone else for my room. I really wasn’t well yet. So I called my friend Jeff Greene and told him to come get me.

Jeff picked me up and took me to a friend’s house, a guy who owned one of those energy drink companies. Jeff didn’t know it but there was a full-fledged party going on at the house, complete with lots of pretty, young girls.

“Sit right here, Mike. Don’t move,” Jeff said. But of course, the party came to us and I was soon surrounded by beautiful women in their bathing suits.

Jeff was going to take me to another rehab the next day so I was going to stay at his house that night. So Jeff put the clamps on me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t flirt with the girls, I was his prisoner. Eventually we went home and then the next day Jeff drove me to a branch of Promises that was in West L.A.

“Hey, Jeff, I’m flat broke. You’re gonna have to pay for this shit, man. I want to get well. Okay?” I said.

We sat down to talk to the administration lady who would check me in. I saw that she had a Star of David on. She left to get some forms to fill out and I pounced on Jeff.

“Look, Jeff, she’s one of your people. This is going to be good, we’re going to get a good deal. They know the protocol. Talk to her, Jeff.”

She came back and sat down but she was playing hardball – she wasn’t giving nobody no play. Every time she said another aspect of treatment it was more money. Three grand for this, four grand for that, twenty-five grand for another thing. You take another pill that’s another five grand.

Jeff was “plotzing,” as he would say, as he heard how much money he was going to have to lay out.

“What the fuck, Mike? God, man, get sober,” he said.

On January twenty-first, they let me out of rehab for a day to attend the U.S. premiere of my documentary film at Sundance. Seano came with me as a sober companion. And that was the first time that I was going to see Milan. We met Kiki at the airport. She came off the plane with our little girl and she was all bummy-looking, like a homeless person. I was looking at Milan, saying “Hi,” trying to see if she looked like me. Kiki was crying at the airport and I was still fucked up from the drugs in my system so I didn’t really have much empathy for her. Even seeing Milan was strange. It was almost like,
Well, another out-of-wedlock baby again. I could do another one.
It wasn’t the response we both anticipated. I don’t even think I kissed Kiki when I saw her. It was just awkward.

We went to the movie premiere, and then afterwards we went back to the hotel. I couldn’t have sex with Kiki because she was all stitched up from having Milan and also because Seano was there to block me from having sex with her anyway. I loved Milan, but all her crying just irritated me. I didn’t feel like dealing with noise then. So we didn’t get off to the best start, for sure.

The next morning, I went back to rehab in L.A. and Kiki and Milan went to the townhouse apartment I set up for them in Vegas. Kiki was all alone because her mom was still in a halfway house in Philly because of her bullshit conviction. I talked to Kiki from Promises and she was all depressed, but so was I. She didn’t have much compassion for me then, she just saw me as some big spoiled brat moaning about things while I was in a country club for junkies. But the Promises branch I was in was nothing like the one in Malibu. It was in town, on the corner of some street where anybody could go in and kidnap you or something.

Kiki was really stressed about money then because I couldn’t give her anything for the baby. She could barely afford diapers. She even threatened to take our child down to welfare and sign up for assistance. But I was really broke. I had something like $7,000 in my bank account and I owed over $8,000 a month in child support payments. Jeff was paying for my rehab. Whenever I could, I’d book an appearance for $10,000 to get some cash. So threatening to go on welfare didn’t faze me. I told her she wasn’t going to be living in the lap of luxury with me. Let her get her ass in the welfare line. I think she was actually in the line when Darryl came by and gave her $250 from my ATM for diapers and food.

In February, I got out of rehab and went back to Vegas. My plan was that I would live in my house and go visit Kiki and the baby, who were in the nearby townhouse. But I was so fucked up and fragile from rehab that I went over to the townhouse and just stayed there with Kiki for two weeks. I was literally afraid to leave the house because I didn’t trust myself to stay clean. Kiki and I picked up where we left off before she went to prison. We laughed a lot and talked and watched TV and played with Milan. After two weeks Crocodile started coming around and we’d go out and go to Mack’s barbershop and hang out for a couple of hours in the afternoon. But I was staying out of trouble.

When I had tested dirty, my probation went back to Phoenix from Vegas. But the probation officer in Phoenix was a great guy. Kiki and Milan and I drove down there and he saw that I was struggling and he knew about the new baby so he allowed me to live in Vegas and just report to him once a month in Phoenix. We drove back to Vegas after a day or two and I decided to stop by my house before dropping Kiki and Milan off at the townhouse. And fate intervened again. A pipe in my dishwasher had burst and the whole house was flooded. I don’t know if it was divine intervention to get me and Kiki even closer, but it did inconvenience me like a motherfucker.

I moved in with them into the small townhouse. We were so broke that when we went shopping we would have to count the items in our cart as we went along, just to be certain that we didn’t go over our budget. As we shopped I would keep taking things out of the cart even though Kiki had assured me she had counted correctly. I just didn’t want to be embarrassed at the checkout counter. The last time I remember doing that was when my mother was on welfare. The checkout lady would have to put stuff aside that we wanted to purchase because we didn’t have enough money. All that anxiety came back to me when Kiki and I would shop. My concept of buying things my whole adult life had been whatever I could see, I could buy. Now the sight of ordinary groceries intimidated me. Can you imagine that? I was the most vicious, feared fighter of my lifetime and the price of a fucking box of cereal was intimidating me.

Kiki and I continued bonding. We played a lot of trivia games, just for days on end, trivia, trivia, trivia. I was still too sick to go out and face the world. Kiki was probably secretly happy that she had me for herself. I think my old image was still weighing heavy on her.

A few weeks after Kiki and I moved in together, I left the house with Crocodile in the afternoon. We went to the gym to watch some fighters train. But this time after we did that I told Crocodile I wanted to get some blow. We got back to the townhouse at about ten, which was real late for me. Kiki was asleep upstairs and I went in the bedroom all happy, talking real hyper.

She popped out of bed like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
.

“You did coke, didn’t you!” she screamed.

“No, no, baby.”

“Then why the fuck are you talking so fast? And fuck that Crocodile. He’s supposed to be helping you and he’s going off and doing drugs with you,” she said.