Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (73 page)

I am so appreciative of Kiki. I don’t care if my wife was a prostitute with full-blown AIDS, I wouldn’t deserve her. That’s real talk. I don’t deserve my wife. I got her probably because of who I am and what my accomplishments were and because basically I’m a decent person but no way in life do I deserve to be with my wife. I’m such a bum compared to her.

What do we really know about love? Love commands us, we don’t command love. And when it commands you, you have to answer that call. No one ever refuses love’s call even if the nature of love is ruthless. I don’t know what love is but I suffer from its symptoms: insanity and total bondage at an unfathomable level. But it also can command you to rise to the highest of your potential. Love can be just an orgasm to some people. To others it can be the thought of love, a fantasy we strive to grasp and live out. I tell my wife that I love her every second of the day but my love is what? My love is jaded, my love is toxic sometimes, my love is romantic, my love is lustful, my love is celibate, my love is many things. Love sacrifices control on its altar. It’s disastrous to give up control and still don’t know what you are giving it up for, but you’re willing to do that because love felt good. But you still don’t know if it’s going to feel better than giving up the control. So you’ve got one foot in hell and one foot in heaven. Sometimes we like to conceive of lust as love because we think it feels so good it has to be love. Love is sacrifice, love is worth dying and killing for, history proves that. But we must have some kind of moral compass in our journey through life. All enjoyment is not good enjoyment.

I have a favorite book that I try to read every day. It’s called
The World’s Greatest Letters: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century
. I love connecting to the past this way. You learn so much about these people by reading their letters. Some of these people are so self-centered they don’t think that anyone else is capable of loving the way they do. A lot of these guys are control freaks and they get frustrated because their love is not answered quickly enough. What these people are writing is so poetic, the way they express themselves in language is so breathtaking. And sometimes the person they’re writing to doesn’t give a shit about them.

I read these letters and I cry. You think about Napoleon, this great world leader, and you read a letter where he’s begging to his love Josephine to come to him and she doesn’t. Check it out:

April 4th, 1796

By what art have you become able to captivate all my faculties, to concentrate in your self my moral existence? It is a magic, my sweet love which will end only with me. To live for Josephine, that is the history of my life. I am trying to reach you, I am dying to be near you. Time was when I prided myself on my courage and sometimes when considering the evil which men might be able to do me, a fate which I have expected. I fixed my eyes most steadfastly on the most unheard-of misfortunes without frowning, without being surprised. But today the idea that my Josephine might be unwell, the idea that she might be ill and above all, the cruel, the fatal thought that she might love me less, it withers my soul, stops my blood, makes me sad cast down, and leaves me not even the courage of fury and despair. I have often used to say to myself that man could have no power over him who dies without regrets. But today, to die without being loved by you, to die without that certainty is the torment of hell, is the lifelike and striking image of absolute annihilation. I feel as if I will be stifled, my only companion, you who fate has decreed to make with me the painful journey of life, the day when I shall no longer possess your heart, will be that when parched nature will be without warmth and without vegetation. Love thee as your eyes, but that is not enough, as yourself, more than yourself, as your thoughts, your mind, your sight, your all. Sweet beloved, forgive me, I am worn out. Nature is weak for him who feels keenly, for him whom you love.

Your illness, that is what occupies my mind night and day. Without appetite, without sleep, without care for my friendships, for glory, for fatherland, you, and the rest of the world exists no more for me than if it were annihilated. I prize honor since you prize it, I prize victory since that gave you pleasure, without which I shall have left all to throw myself at your feet. In your letter, my darling, be careful to tell me that you are convinced that I love you beyond all imagination. That you are persuaded that every moment of my life is consecrated to you; that never an hour passes without my thinking of you, that never has the thought of thinking of another woman has entered my head.

I love this guy’s stuff! Napoleon is a nut. He’s turned out! Josephine didn’t care a damn about Napoleon. That was a Robin Givens deal right there. Sometimes I take the book up to our bedroom and I read these letters to Kiki. This is my favorite. It’s a letter written by the great German poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. In the fall of 1811 he fell in love with a housewife named Henriette Vogel. He was thirty-four, she was thirty-one. They shared a passion for music. But Henriette was dying of uterine cancer. Heinrich was a depressive type and he was poor and was looking for immortality. Vogel wasn’t the first lady that he asked to enter into a double-suicide pact, but she was the first to say yes. They spent the night at a small inn drinking wine and coffee with rum. The next morning they seemed ecstatic as they went down to the lake. First he shot Henriette and then he shot himself. This is one of his last letters to her:

My Jeanette, my little heart, my dear thing, my devout, my love, my dear, my sweet, my life, my light, my all good, my shadow, my castle, my acre, my lawn, my vineyards, O sun, oh my life, sun, moon, the stars, the heavens, my past, my future, my bride, my girl, my dear friend, my innermost being, my heart blood, my internal star of my eyes, O dearest what should I call you? My golden child, my pearl, my precious stone, my crown, my queen, my empress. You dear darling of my life, my highest, my most precious, my baptism, my children. You are my tragic plays, you are my posthumous reputation, you are my second, a better self, you are my virtue, you are my merit, you are my hope, my heaven, my child of God, you are my intercessor, you are my guardian, my angel, my concubine. How I love you so.

I read that out loud and then Kiki and I cry together.

Ain’t that something?

That was the way I intended to end the book. Kiki and I all misty-eyed, reading the love letters of great people in bed – my darkness gone, my spirit soaring from the inspirational words of our giants of history. But you have to live life on life’s terms, as I’ve said in the book. And I couldn’t live with myself if I lied and tried to cover up what happened in the last few months.

Maybe part of it was searching my soul and digging into the darkest corners of my psyche to honestly answer Ratso’s questions about my life. It also could have been the pressure of going back into the world of boxing and entering the ring once again, this time as a promoter and nurturer of young boxing talent. Of course, my chronic negative self-image doesn’t need much ammunition to act out and sabotage whatever joy and happiness comes into my life.

But it happened and I have to tell you about it. About a month or so after I completed work on the book, in April of 2013, I had a slip, my first one since January of 2010. I went out one night and I had a drink. And then another. And another. I told you I’m a bad, bad drunk so I smoked some pot to make me mellow again. I felt horrible when I came back to Kiki and the kids that night. But not terrible enough to stop me from repeating my slip a few more times in June and July of this year. And then in August, a week before my first Iron Mike fight promotion, which was broadcast on ESPN, I fell off the wagon again.

Look, I’m a vicious addict and if I don’t follow my steps, I’m going to die. So I started going to A.A. meetings again. One of the most important steps is to make amends. So right before the first fight on my first card as a promoter I walked over to Teddy Atlas, my old trainer, who was doing the color commentary for ESPN. I extended my hand and I apologized to him for my part in what happened back there in Catskill in the ’80s. I hadn’t talked to Teddy for almost twenty years. It felt good to make amends. I guess that gesture meant a lot to people because that was the first thing they wanted to talk about both during the fights and in the interview I did between fights.

I was already dealing with a lot of emotions of guilt and shame for my recent relapses so seeing Teddy and making amends to him seemed to put me over the top. I realized that I couldn’t just keep on lying and pretending that I was still clean; that I hadn’t had some drinks or smoked some pot. So when someone at the postfight press conference asked me what it was like seeing Teddy again, I had to unburden myself.

“I knew that there was a possibility that I would be here with Teddy and I didn’t have a good thought in mind about that at first, because I’m negative and I’m dark. And I wanna do bad stuff. I wanna hang out in this neighborhood alone [I pointed to my head], that’s dangerous to hang out in this neighborhood alone up here, right? It wants to kill everything. It wants to kill me too. So I went to my A.A. meeting and I explained to my fellow alcoholics and junkies that I was gonna deal with this certain situation here, and I explained the feelings that I evoked from it. Almost like, um, something like a Hatfields and McCoys, I kind of explained to them. I made the right decision. I made Cus proud of me. I made myself proud of me.

“I hate myself. I’m trying to kill myself. I hate myself a lot, but I made myself proud of myself, and I don’t do that much. I was happy I did that. Maybe it was overwhelming to Teddy and he didn’t get it yet. But he has to know this is sincere. I don’t wanna fight you no more. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I just wanted to make my amends. If he accepted it or not, at least I could die and go to my grave and say I made my amends with everybody I hurt. It’s all about love and forgiveness, and in order for those guys to forgive me – other guys – you know, I want people to forgive the things I’ve done.

“I’m a motherfucker. I did a lot of bad things, and I want to be forgiven. So in order for me to be forgiven, I hope they can forgive me. I wanna change my life; I wanna live a different life now. I wanna live my sober life. I don’t wanna die. I’m on the verge of dying, because I’m a vicious alcoholic. Wow. God, this is some interesting stuff.”

I choked up. And then I confessed.

“I haven’t drank or took drugs in six days, and for me that’s a miracle. I’ve been lying to everybody else that thinks I was sober. I’m not. This is my sixth day. I’m never gonna use again.”

The press in the audience gave me a standing ovation but that meant nothing to me. No one gives you standing ovations when you share in the rooms.

That was on August twenty-third. I’ve added a few days to my total as I’m writing this now. I hope that I can keep clean and add more and more days and get more and more chips. I guess I was arrogant thinking that I could beat this thing without the help of my support team and my A.A. family, who belong to the only club that accepts people like me as members. I don’t want to die. I want to continue my boxing career as a promoter. I want to do my one-man show again. I want to do more movies.

After my recent relapse I was no fun to be around. Kiki and I were having a lot of rough times. Part of me was even trying to blame the pressures of being married as the reason for my relapse. Then the galleys for the book came. In going over the book with Kiki I had a spiritual rebirth. When we got to the section about Exodus it was very difficult to get through. We both cried our eyes out. And I realized in that very moment why I was married to Kiki. I suddenly knew the answer to the question “Why would a guy like me be married?” I realized that our marriage was more than the union of Kiki and me. I had to be married to Kiki to fulfill Exodus’s legacy. My marriage will allow me to do that and to bolster my ability to be a good father. I’m a better person now because Exodus was in my life and I vow to continue to be a better person now that she’s gone. I truly want to deepen my relationship with Kiki and see my kids grow up to be healthy and happy. But I can’t do any of those things if I don’t have control over myself. I can’t help anyone if I’m not well myself, and I desperately want to get well. I have a lot of pain and I just want to heal. And I’m going to do my best to do just that. One day at a time.

There are two words that I frequently use in this book that deserve a bit of explanation. One of them is “nigga.” This word gained widespread traction in the younger black community through its use by early hip hop and rap artists such as Grandmaster Flash, N.W.A., Tupac, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, as well as comedians such as Paul Mooney and Chris Rock. Whether I use the term pejoratively or endearingly depends on the context. I’m as apt to say “Fuck that nigga, I hate him” as I am to say “I love this nigga, I’d die for him.” And I do not use the term exclusively to denote people of color. Back in Brownsville, we’d often say, “Man, those big old white stupid Italian niggas, they’re trying to play me.” Later in my life, after I’d meet with HBO or Showtime executives to discuss my fights, I’d say, “Fuck them niggas.” “What the fuck are you talking about? Those are Jews,” one of my friends would say. “No, they are niggas. A nigga is a state of mind.”

While “nigga” can be used in both a positive and negative fashion, when you combine “nigga” with “shit” it can only be seen as a condemnation. For example, a friend of yours may have several fine ladies that he wishes to have fun with. He may ask a few of your friends to participate in the party but you are required by him to watch the door, effectively excluding you from the social intercourse. That is known as “nigga shit” – behavior characteristic of a selfish, no good motherfucker.

The other word that needs explanation is the term “smuck.” My collaborator, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, is of the Jewish persuasion. After hearing me say “smuck” a few times, Ratso was quick to point out that I was mispronouncing the Yiddish word “schmuck.” “Schmuck” originally meant penis, but its meaning was broadened to denote someone who was foolish or, in extreme cases, contemptible or detestable. In some Jewish homes, the word “schmuck” was thought to be so vulgar that it was actually taboo. After being corrected a few times, I informed Ratso that I had coined the term “smuck” quite properly. In my usage, a “smuck” is half a “schmuck.” By preceding “smuck” with the “shhhh” you are, in fact, giving that contemptible person too much credit. A schmuck is a schmuck, but a smuck is not even worthy of schmuck status. In this book, I use both words advisedly.