Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (71 page)

When you’re a young kid with a ton of money and girls, God is not really paramount in your life. As you get older, you realize that from a spiritual perspective your life has been a waste. You never did anything to help people collectively. I need to be of service rather than just going around doing meet and greets and collecting money. I feel dirty after my appearances. People come up to me and say, “You were great. You were my hero!” No, I’m not. I’m filthy and I’m wretched. But I want to make up for it now, pay back in some way. I don’t want to offend you if you have any veneration for me, but it’s just that I’m very shallow and simple and I just want to do something good and help people.

Kiki and I started a charity called Mike Tyson Cares. We’re providing resources for kids from broken homes but I want to concentrate now on the mental condition of these children. You can’t give kids a fighting chance if you don’t give them a fighting mind. I know what it’s like to be misdiagnosed at an early age and be put on medication that’s capable of killing you. It’s not just kids. Do you know how many people are in prison right now who need to be in a mental hospital and not behind bars? We’ve got to reform that.

People often ask me what I regret in my life. I regret sleeping with all those women. I used to brag about that but now I’m so embarrassed by my conquests. I’m so happy to be with one woman. I still enjoy looking at girls but I never ever think of crossing the line and saying something out of line. You aren’t going to see me on Page Six in a nightclub with a table full of gold diggers.

I finally realized that I had to look for a different type of woman than my mother. All her relationships were dysfunctional. The more my mother fought back the more these men loved her. The more she’d scald them with boiling water or stab them, the more they bought her presents. That was the power structure in my household. Women that fought men. But Kiki is not that kind. I’m so happy I broke that cycle.

Kiki dug me out of the gutter and cleaned me up. I owe a great deal of my blossoming as a functional human being to her. I never thought that after boxing I would be famous, still living my life, making a career out of my life. I figured that I’d be dead or at best owning a bar. I could see myself off the cocaine but I never thought that I’d give up alcohol. I thought I’d be overweight for the rest of my life. And here I am being responsible, working, taking my kids to school. I owe all that to Kiki.

I’m a Cancer and I always tried to rescue women. But I don’t look at Kiki as a damsel in distress who I have to take care of. I see her as an equal in life with me. She’s capable of doing everything that I’m capable of doing. If someone gives me a job to do, I’m great at that. It’s only when I have nothing to do that my mind tempts me to fuck up. I haven’t gotten arrested since being with Kiki because I’ve got something to do. We make this stuff go well. Even if it doesn’t look well from anybody else’s eyes, it is going well for us.

I never thought I’d say something like this but I’m really happy being married to my wife. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m safe here. Some interviewer once asked me where I felt most comfortable – hanging out in Cannes or on the streets of Brooklyn. And I told him that I’m most comfortable in the presence of all my family members and we’re safe. I can wake up in the morning and everybody is there. I can see them.

Sometimes I think that I switched my addiction from drugs and alcohol to getting involved with my family. I know how much trouble and humiliation I can bring down on them with just one hit of blow or one drink of Hennessy. I don’t want to let them down in any kind of fashion. Like I did with boxing, I want to put all my energy into living with my family. I know there’s an empty hole in me and I spent a lot of years trying to fill it with drugs and booze and sex. I think it all goes back to our mortality. We know that all this is temporary. I’m going to grow old and die tomorrow or ten years from now or forty years if I’m lucky. But when you’re with your family, it makes you feel like you’ll last forever.

You get to this age and you just thank God for letting you live another day. He didn’t owe us that day. So you have to live every day like it’s your last. And you have to take personal responsibility. You can’t blame things on society. If you want to be a better person you have to look within and overcome that. You are your own worst enemy. I know I am my own worst enemy. The only guy who wants to kill me is me. If anybody else treated me the way I treat myself, I would blow their fucking brains out.

I don’t mean to preach. I’m the last one to tell anybody how to live their life. I’m not in control of my own life. I’m just following a map. Do you feel me? I’m following the sound of a fucking flute. Living life on life’s terms. I hate that phrase but I use it a lot to keep myself in check. Sometimes I still think I’m in control, even after all that time in rehab and my burning through hundreds of millions of dollars. That is my grand delusion. I think I’m a hell of a motherfucker but I’m just a bum.

I’ve always sought comfort from my pigeons. No matter where I lived, I had them with me. And I collect a special breed of pigeon. They’re called roller pigeons. Sir Anthony Hopkins played Hannibal Lecter in that great movie and he talked about them.

Do you know what a roller pigeon is, Barney? They climb high and fast, then roll over and fall just as fast towards the earth. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers, or their young will roll all the way down, hit, and die.

It’s no surprise that I have an affinity for rollers. It’s really something to watch them fly higher than all the other birds, way up to the top of the sky and the clouds and then just roll and roll and roll down and if they’re lucky, pull out in time before they crash headfirst into the ground. Rollers who are the offspring of a pair of deep rollers can’t do that. They roll so fast that they create a suction and they can’t open their wings and they just explode on impact. It looks horrific to us but if we put ourselves into the heart of that bird there’s nothing like that feeling of plummeting down and rolling. It’s a smorgasbord of endorphins and dopamine and adrenaline. A little like snorting coke and drinking Hennessy while being hooked up to a morphine drip.

Both of my parents were deep rollers. I was bred to climb to the top of the sky and tumble down. And I’m truly grateful that I found my wings before I hit the ground.

Sometimes I wake up and I just know it’s going to be a bad day. I think that no one loves me and how I’m not going to have the life I had planned to have when I first started out, and then I think that I might hurt someone. Then I wish that I was under a rock somewhere. I don’t know how to live every day. I try. I do everything I can to thwart any forms of violence. I’d let somebody kick my ass to prevent me from fighting back. I thought you’re supposed to get more mellow as you age but I’m getting more irritable and bitter.

Even though I have a loving wife and children, I feel like I threw my life away. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. I would die or kill for them. That’s part of the problem. I want my children to have a better life when I’m dead and I don’t know if that will happen. I don’t know if they’ll have a much better life than I had in Brownsville. They might be middle-class kids. These days I drive an Escalade. Some people might think that’s great but in my mind an Escalade isn’t good enough to give to a prostitute. I still owe money to the IRS. I’ll probably die before I pay them off. I’m not making much money now. I’m looking good but I’m making nothing. I’m a bum. I can’t believe my wife is still married to me. I feel like a dog.

I just don’t have a good psychological opinion of myself. I hate myself sometimes. I feel like I don’t deserve anything. Sometimes I just fantasize about blowing somebody’s brains out so I can go to prison for the rest of my life. Working on this book makes me think that my whole life has been a joke. I’m a dark and jaded motherfucker. I hate living like a peasant now. I don’t know if I’ll survive to the next day. I might just say “Fuck it” and jump and leave.

Sometimes I can’t sleep. I think that the reason I get so emotional is because of all the drugs I’ve fucked with for some many years. Your emotions get out of whack. I have a lot of pain and I don’t know how to let it go. I used to be the toughest guy on the planet, and now I cry at the slightest provocation. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think I’m falling to pieces sometimes.

I’m a waste. The only thing I did was fight, fuck, and bring in kids. Boxing, bitches, and babies. My baseline normal is to destroy myself. And when I don’t do that I think I should get rewarded. I’m the quintessential addict. I’m a piece of shit who thinks that the world revolves around them. I have the lowest self-esteem in the world but the biggest ego God could ever create. I’m such a glory junkie that I’ll have to die in front of a crowd. I can’t die in isolation. I’d say shit like, “How many people are there on the planet? Five billion? I could beat every one of them in a fair fight.” Who would say crazy stuff like that? A lot of people have money, a lot of people have fame, but nobody had the gall like I did. Most famous people allow their fame to be bigger than them and their fame rules them. I wanted to be bigger than the fame.

I’ve been betrayed so much in my life that I don’t trust people now. When people make you feel like you’re incapable of being loved, you keep those feelings and they never go away. And when you feel incapable of being loved, then you want to hurt people and do bad things. What’s the purpose of doing good things in a situation like that?

I think about where my mother and father came from. We’re street people. I did things that they never dreamed I could do. I know it doesn’t mean anything to anybody but when you come from sewage it means a lot. Even my kids don’t know who I am. I know they have their childhood issues they deal with but they’ve never lived with rats and dogs in the sewage. They don’t know how to hide in shit-infested sewage water so someone doesn’t kill them. And I’m proud to be from that world. It’s nothing to be proud of, but I’m very proud. My kids can read and write better than me but they can never surpass me in the hard knocks of life. And I don’t want them ever to have to.

And I still hang out in the ghetto. I’m just a ghetto rug rat. Sometimes I’ll look over at Farid and say, “Why are we here, Farid, when we could be on a yacht in Saint-Tropez? Why are we with these broke-assed niggas?” Because those broke-assed niggas are our people. They’re struggling day and night. I love those rotten, dirty motherfuckers even though I can’t trust them as far as I can throw them.

I can take anything. I think about Nietzsche a lot. I know what the Overman is. I know I can endure without killing anybody, because I’m always close. Some people don’t have any decency or respect. When we’re out and we see a guy like that, I’m thinking,
I wish he would say something to my wife, I’d blow his brains out.
Those people are out there but I’ve got to stop that way of thinking. I’m trying to restrain that, to be this new guy. But how much of my balls do I have to cut off to be this new guy?

Why am I not worried about fucking other people since this is going to be my last time around? All my life that’s all I thought about. But now I’m not thinking about fucking nobody else. Am I grown up now? What am I doing being married with two kids? I’m a street dog, I’m not a house dog. If I still thought in my mind that I was this hoe-entangling motherfucker with the big schlong I wouldn’t live like this. So either I’m suppressing my ego or I’m just losing my spirit. I’d like to think that I’m with my wife and not fucking around because I’m ready to be down and I love her. Or is it that I’m just broken down and I don’t have any balls anymore?

All that rage and energy that propelled me to fuck all those women, where did it all go? Why have I lost that sexual growl? Is it just a function of getting older and losing hormones? I might see a girl and think “Wow” but I don’t have the desire to say “Hey, baby.” And don’t tell me about Viagra or Cialis. That shit ain’t the same thing as natural desire. It doesn’t make the mind function. It’s like having a gun with no bullets. It doesn’t give you the fantasy you need in your mind.

All my life all I could ever do was make money for people. My love was always under the circumstances of Mike Tyson providing stuff. Who would I be if I was never Mike Tyson? How would I form relationships? I don’t know what it’s like to go outside and initiate a conversation with someone. I’ve never had to do that. Sometimes I look at myself and I say, “Mike, you’re a pussy. What the fuck are you doing? You’re going to die soon. You’re going to give all this pussy up and you are going to be with this woman that you’ve been sleeping with since she was twenty-four for the rest of your life?” I’m sure that my wife sometimes feels that I’m overbearing because I’m with her too much. I’m that way because I want her to know that the reason I don’t go out much is to show her that I’m here with her. We’ve had those trust issues before. But then I become a burden to her, being home a lot.

I can’t find a balance between the two. I’m not a balanced person. It’s not like I can say, “Well, I’ll just find another woman to be devoted to.” If I’m not going to live this monogamous life with Kiki, then we’re going to get in trouble now. I’m going to do drugs, I’m going to fuck a bunch of strippers and prostitutes, I might catch a disease, and I might make some guy jealous and he’ll blow my brains out.

I’m not a relationship guy. I don’t stand up for myself in a relationship. And I don’t like that about me. If I’m not a pussy in a relationship, then I’m dominating them. Either I’m a henpecked bitch nigga or I’m going to start brutalizing the woman. One or the other, there’s no middle ground. And I don’t want to brutalize them, so I wind up being the wimp.

I’m insecure when it comes to being in a relationship. And why not? Growing up all I saw was men beating their women, women scalding their lovers, or a man killing another man over a woman or vice versa. That was my culture. Now I’m in a relationship where I’m suppressing my baseline normal to be in a normal relationship. And the selfish addict in me is saying, “Where’s my reward? I think I deserve more for behaving this way.” I want a reward for improving myself as a person. In a million years my wife would never understand what my baseline normal is. It would scare her to death. My baseline normal is having a bunch of girls in here, no matter if it’s their mothers or their sisters, and fucking them. No female species allowed on the premises without fornication. It’s that crude. I threw all that away. I spared my wife and the babies from all my diseases and all my filth. And I want something back.

I can’t believe I’m even in a relationship. I don’t think I’m a good catch. I’m ignorant, I have a lisp, I pronounce words the wrong way sometimes but still people want to give me pussy and be in my presence because I’m Mike Tyson. But I’m the worst catch. I’m a self-centered brat. I can’t live with myself; why would anyone want to live with me? Whenever I’ve been in a relationship I’d always think,
Bullshit, this can’t be real. This woman doesn’t love me. How can I be more special than any other people?

Sometimes I think that one of the reasons I got married was to stop women from setting my ass up. It’s better to be married to one woman and be happy with what you have than to be a mark, a sucker to a whole fucking constellation of women.

For me life is a constant struggle for survival. I tell my wife that and she says, “No. The world is beautiful and positive.” My wife is a facilitator. She takes care of people. She wants everybody to be in happy mode, satisfied and not angry. That’s not a reality in life. Kiki wants to be a friend to everybody and when you are a friend of everybody, you are an enemy to yourself.

“Hey, try to put your arms around the world,” I tell her.

She just calls me a miserable vegan. But you just can’t make everyone happy. If you’re not conscious, they’re going to fuck you, hurt you, and take advantage of you. She doesn’t see the evil in people that I do. I look at the world through the eyes of hell.

I’m starting to freak out now that my name is in the papers all the time and I’m constantly on television again. I’m worried that I can’t deal with fame and that I’ll get violent again. My wife keeps saying, “You can handle it now.” But I just don’t like it when I’m a target. Now that my wife is writing, maybe she’ll get some more shows launched. Then she’s in this whole writing world. I get very overprotective about her because she’s all I have. I don’t have forty-five other bitches anymore. I focus my whole energy on this family and all of that energy might be overbearing sometimes. I’m scared. And when I’m scared, that dickhead Iron Mike comes out.

Now I’m an entertainer and I’m entering a whole different world – the world of showbiz. I’m dreaming and thinking that one day we’re going to hit the mother lode and things are going to be great again and I can take care of my kids and I can die with dignity, but that’s not going to happen. Everybody knows how show business can be. And if I get screwed, that’s just going to trigger all the times that I got played by Don and then I have to go into that mode where someone is going to get hurt. That’s the world of show business? Then meet my world of violence. And then I’m back in the joint and my wife is married to somebody else and he’s probably fucking my daughters. That’s how it goes.

There’s no doubt that I have some self-hatred issues. I’ve done some bad things to people. I can read any of the great books on morality – the Torah, the Koran, the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, whatever, and I just know I’m going to hell. And I was born in hell. And any time I came up in life it was one step out of hell. I think that part of the reason that I gave away so much money (and I’m not talking about buying prostitutes cars) was because I’m an ignorant child and I believe this was a way to cleanse my sins and buy my way back to heaven. I was kind and giving to people because my soul was so black from my earlier deeds.

What am I doing with my life? I love entertaining people but I’m only happy for that little time that I’m up on that stage. I was happy for a moment when I was boxing but a lot of it went away when Cus died. I never wanted to be Iron Mike. I hated that guy. That’s the guy I had to be in order to survive. But I’m stupid for doing that.

Sometimes I don’t know if I was even made for life. I think I’m an aberration of fucking nature. I’ve got to deal with people constantly shooting at me and throwing arrows at me. And nobody hears if I scream out in pain. I hate my life, I hate myself. If I had balls, I’d kill myself. That’s it, that’s how I feel …

Then my little sweetheart Milan walks into the room and my cloud is lifted.

This is my reward for acting responsibly, right here. When she’s away at school, I’m always grouchy and the minute she comes in, my whole life changes. This is where my ego stops, right here. I think about some of the crazy things I’ve done, like that road rage incident in Maryland. I’m so mad at myself. I had no hope back then. Even if those feelings came back I can’t even fathom acting out now. I’d never want to disappoint the situation now like I did with my other kids. I could never be at the point of being so out of control that I would jeopardize Milan or Rocco. I’d have to be shot first. I’ve learned to bite my tongue because of my kids. A lot of times when I want to say things that are going to be nasty, I just bite it. It’s my turn to embrace these responsibilities. This stuff is not as stressful as fighting. I might blow it up, but it’s nowhere near as stressful.