Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (62 page)

I never thought about it at the time but the pressure was enormous on me to be a great lover to all these people who were fucking “Mike Tyson.” That was an encounter that they would talk about forever. I realized though that everybody doesn’t fit with everybody else. Sex is a very complex situation. Everybody brings some kind of baggage to the arena. I still don’t know what’s important about sex. Is it the pleasure part or the actual intimacy? I’ve met people that deviate from the norm. I’ve met people that want to be held and people that want to be hurt or spit on. I knew this person who wanted to be with me and she said, “Oooh, I can take a good punch too.” I just couldn’t do that shit.

After putting in a lot of work in the program I realized that the reason that I always wanted to satisfy women was because I was hoping that they would satisfy me not with sex but with their love. I was using sex to get intimacy. In order for me to get that intimacy and that attachment, I had to have sex. You won’t get it from her if you don’t have the sex but it’s really not about the sex itself. So I was a whore just like my mother. But it was different. This whore had the money. Hey, if I didn’t make you happy and satisfy you sexually, how about this Mercedes-Benz? This car is really orgasmic, isn’t it?

It sounds trite but I was probably looking for someone to mother me. My whole life I was looking for love from my mother. My mother never gave love to a man. She gave them headaches, she scalded them, she stabbed them. I never saw my mother kiss a man. I saw her in bed with them but I never heard “I love you” or saw someone kiss her forehead.

Even though I was on a pedestal at a young age, I was always attracted to street girls. That was from my mother. At least my mother had my back, but these girls had nobody’s back but their baby’s and I wasn’t their baby. These women were horrible, miserable women for relationships. Just like my mother. They’re great for compassion and loving children but a man was just to be used. I always liked that type of woman, that’s why my life was so bad. An executive businesswoman wants to go out with me, forget it. I’m going to fuck the tramp.

When I was in rehab, I saw that film about Edith Piaf,
La Vie en Rose
. That film reminded me so much of my life. Street people take a real liking to you and this bad person teaches you things. Someone kills him and no one cares because he’s a bad guy, but to you he’s great. You’re benefiting by being in his company. You’ve got money, you’ve got clothes, you can buy your sister something. Just like they had that guy in the movie and he beat the shit out of her and they took her away from him. That was the same way with me. To everybody else they did her a favor, but to her, this was her life, she wanted to live with the prostitutes and the pimps, that was her family. It’s so gut-wrenching to watch as they took her away and she was screaming for the prostitutes. That’s when I lost it and just started bawling. That’s one thing about happiness. You could be in hell and be happy there. Some people thrive in misery. You take away their misery and bring them into the light and they die emotionally and spiritually because pain and suffering has been their only comfort. The thought of someone loving them and helping them without wanting anything in return could never enter their minds.

Stopping your sexual addiction is in some ways different than stopping a drug or alcohol addiction, but you still have to just say no like you do with drugs. It’s a lot of self-help work and even though you’re a grown man, you have to conduct yourself like a child in a way. You’re constantly analyzing what you’re doing, how you’re talking to a woman, the amount of time you can even look at them. My limit is three seconds.

One of the ways to break a sexual addiction, at least for me, was to be broke. If I didn’t have any money, that shit wasn’t fun anymore. If I’m broke I can’t even think about fucking anyone because in my delusional mind I need that grandeur. I’ve got to be in a major suite or on some beautiful island. If I’m doing it in a seedy motel that’s just me at my bottom.

It’s really hard to control your sexual addiction. Any little thing can trigger it. I could be walking down the street and I would hear the click, click, click of a woman’s high heels and I’m off. I could be walking down a dark alley at three in the morning and make a turn and see a beautiful woman and think that she’s got to be a hooker or why would she be out that late at night?

I took a lot of trips back to Phoenix for various court appearances and I always traveled with Seano. He was originally from Phoenix. He was the best guy to be with. He knew what I was thinking, he knew I’d listen to those high heels clicking and get aroused. Hearing those high heels was like somebody knocking at my door. Seano and I would go out to eat and he’d know my demons so well. When we’d get back from lunch, he’d come over to me.

“Michael, what’s wrong?”

“I walked into that restaurant and I felt like everyone in there was going, ‘Look at that big, fat washed-up nigga.’ ” So we worked out some signals. When I got real scared, I’d very politely grab his arm. That was the signal for Seano to tell me, “It’s okay, brother, we’re cool.”

Sometimes all of this work really got to me. The first time we went back to Arizona, Seano thought that I was such a high risk that he told me that he was going to stay with me in my hotel room.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Nobody’s going to stay with me in my room.”

“Then let’s get back on the plane. I know what you’re up to. You’re going to have somebody come over here and you are going to disappear on me and that ain’t cool, so what do you want to do?”

I almost clocked him. But we slept side by side in that hotel room.

He could always pick up on my rage.

“What’s going through your mind right now? You want to punch me, don’t you?” Seano said.

“Yeah, I don’t like it when you fucking look at me with those Irish eyes.”

“I know, brother, I know, but let’s just do this thing.”

I had to laugh.

“You are fucking crazy, Seano.”

“Yeah, you’re crazy too, Michael, but let’s just talk this thing out.”

I knew that my life was on the line when I was in Wonderland. I was really trying to win. And in A.A. when you stay clean for a certain amount of time they gave you a token or a chip. I carried those tokens with me religiously. I’m a peacock and I always have to be proving that I’m achieving something. That was just the way I was wired. Those tokens were like my belts. In our community the tokens infer respect. You could have all the money in the world but no tokens, no time, and we don’t respect you. I just loved it, I always looked forward to getting my chips.

As committed to my recovery as I was, I still managed to bend some rules. I had been in the program only a few weeks when I met this dynamite chick at one of the meetings. Her name was Paula and she was an awesome woman from Morocco. One day I went to a meeting and I saw her standing at the door welcoming people. She had this tight Adidas shirt on and she had big torpedo titties that were real!

Nobody really knew me in that room and I was the only black guy there and a pretty intimidating scary-looking figure. After seeing Paula a few times at the meetings I went up to her.

“Listen, I read the whole book. I’m up to my eighth step …”

“Mike, you don’t remember me, do you?” she interrupted me.

She reminded me of an incident a few years earlier. I had been in L.A. driving down Sunset Boulevard and I had seen Paula walking down the street. I rolled down my window and slowed to a crawl and tried to get her to come in my car, like a pervert.

Hey, I can try again.

“Listen, I know we’re not supposed to date in A.A. until after the first year but I’m working on my stuff. Do you think you can be my mentor? I want to be friends with you,” I said.

Paula was four years older than me and she had been in recovery for eighteen years. She was a leading member of the program, a straight-to-the-book type of girl. If a crisis came up, she was going to bring out the A.A. book. Her life revolved around A.A. So she knew that us going out would be what they called “13-stepping,” since I had only been in recovery a few weeks.

So at first we started hanging out as friends, but in a little while, we started dating. I’d get permission from Wonderland to spend the night with Paula. I got so much out of our relationship. I had a girlfriend who was sober for eighteen years and would help me stay clean. I’d never really been with a straight chick like her before. I liked straight women but I didn’t seem to get along with them for long durations. The dysfunctionist in me comes out and I put a crook into their straightness. But with Paula it was different and everything was going good.

I kind of bent some more rules when I shot a documentary about my life while I was in Wonderland. I was approached by my friend Jim Toback, a great filmmaker who I had worked with years earlier on an independent film called
Black and White
. I didn’t really think I was an actor then. I was doing my part as a favor for Jim, I didn’t get paid or anything. I was so high on weed the whole time we were shooting
Black and White
. My dialogue was all improvised because I couldn’t even read a script, I was so blazed. I had a scene with Robert Downey Jr. and Jim wanted me to hit him and I couldn’t even see him I was so high so I kept hitting him in the wrong place. Downey was on the floor kicking me. “Stop fucking hitting me! Stop hitting me!”

I wanted to do this documentary because I was getting some nice bucks for it and I needed that money desperately. I really undersold the whole project when I asked Seano if it was okay to do this. I made it sound like it was going to be a little interview and then it turned out to be hours and hours of shooting me in a rented house in Beverly Hills and by the ocean in Malibu. It’s funny, watching that documentary now even though I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs while we shot it, I see that I’m still in my addict character. I was basically doing a junkie documentary.

My rehab was going well and on September twenty-fourth, Seano and I flew to Arizona to appear in court where I pled guilty to possession of coke. A month later I was back for my sentencing. While I was in rehab, I went all over the city to talk about addiction. I went to drug court, I went to neighborhood youth groups, I gave testimony to release programs and to prisons. I made the rounds and I put in hours and hours of work. It was the least I could do to give back. And it looked very impressive when we showed the judge all my community service. I got wonderful letters from my doctors and counselors in rehab and supportive letters from friends like Sugar Ray Leonard and the great lawyer Robert Shapiro. He had lost a son to drugs and he had started a foundation and he put on a boxing fund-raising exhibition where he fought Danny Bonaduce and I brought him into the ring as his trainer.

The fact that I had voluntarily entered rehab and had done so well impressed the judge who was a nice liberal lady. She could have put my ass away for years. Instead she sentenced me to twenty-four hours in jail, 360 hours of community service, and put me on probation for three years. Everything was looking rosy. Monica had been so supportive of me during this whole process. I would have been in the streets without her help. We were a horrible married couple but great friends. Monica had arranged a nice lunch for all my attorneys and me and Seano and then I was going to fly straight back to California and buy a house and continue my recovery work. Who knows, maybe I would have wound up marrying Paula or someone else in recovery and become one of those hard-core recovery people who would get irritated being around people that drank or smoked weed.

Everything was looking good until the D.A. decided to make one last example out of me. They found out that Wonderland was within a certain distance from a school and as a predator/offender I had to be registered with the state to be in a place in such close proximity. So they told us that if I flew back to California, the state of Arizona was going to have the LAPD arrest me at the airport. It was Wonderland’s fault actually for not registering me. When we found out about this one of my lawyers told me that I could sue Wonderland. I couldn’t believe that. These people had stuck their necks out and saved my life and now I was supposed to sue them? No way, I couldn’t do that shit.

But I could start doing drugs again. My plan to go back to my nurturing community in California had been shot down. They should’ve sent me right back to California, but they brought me to Phoenix and without that support system, I got high six weeks later. And that was the end of my relationship with Paula. We visited each other a couple of times, but it just wasn’t going to work. I was starting to go astray, getting back into the drug world, and she was on that straight path.

I wasn’t back to being a full-blown cokehead though. I was on so many meds from the rehab people that I was pretty much zombied out. Now that I wasn’t going to start a new life in California I decided to sell the house I had in Phoenix and buy a home in Las Vegas. I wanted to be where the real action was. So I bought a house in Henderson. In January, I invited one of my girlfriends out to stay with me and that turned out to be a momentous phone call.

I had known Kiki Spicer since she was thirteen. Her stepfather, Shamsud-din Ali, was a very well-respected and influential Muslim cleric who ran the biggest mosque in Philadelphia and had close ties to the Democratic political machinery there, including the mayor of Philadelphia and the governor of Pennsylvania. Her mother, Rita, was a journalist who had covered many of my fights. When I fought Buster Mathis in 1995, there was an issue with the venue at Atlantic City so Kiki’s dad helped get the fight moved to Philadelphia. He brought Kiki to meet me at a press conference before the fight and she and her family hung out afterwards in my hotel room. I was so used to people offering their children to me that that’s what I thought was happening. I was having a nice conversation about religion with her father the Imam and in my sick mind I was thinking he was offering me Kiki or one of her cousins. I was definitely attracted to Kiki but she looked so stiff and uncomfortable sitting there in front of her parents. She looked like she didn’t want to be there.