DON'T TOUCH MIKE TYSON

I used to think I thrived in chaos.

That was the story, anyway.

The truth is, if chaos wasn’t around, I’d usually create it myself. Then I’d complain about it. Obsess over it. Tell everyone how fucking exhausting my life was while conveniently leaving out the part where I had personally poured gasoline all over the floor and was standing there holding the match.

It gave me an identity.

Sometimes I was the hero. Sometimes I was the arsonist. Most of the time I was the arsonist who started the fire, ran back into the burning building, and then wanted credit for saving everybody.

With enough substances and creative accounting, I could make almost anything look heroic.

And chaos did give me some incredible experiences.

Jobs. Money. Women. Acclaim. Access. Stories. Rooms I had no business being in. Opportunities I probably wasn’t ready for but somehow convinced someone—and usually myself—that I was.

It taught me how to work under pressure. Sometimes really fucking well. Sometimes not so much.

I became useful in emergencies. A fixer. A doer. The guy you could call when something had gone sideways because chaos was where I felt most comfortable. Give me a problem, a ridiculous deadline, a disaster, a room full of people losing their shit—I could suddenly become remarkably focused.

There were people I respected who saw that in me. Mentors who trusted me with real responsibility because underneath all the bullshit, they saw something capable. Something worth betting on.

Sometimes I proved them right.

Other times I failed miserably.

And there’s a particular kind of shame that comes with disappointing someone who saw more in you than you were willing to see in yourself. Someone hands you an opportunity because they believe you’re worthy of it, and instead of rising to meet it, you confirm every shitty thing you secretly believe about yourself.

Then you make a joke about it.

That was another one of my specialties.

Because somewhere along the way, being a fuck-up had become part of the brand.

I wore it like a badge of honor.

Yeah, I’m a fucking mess. That’s just me.

As if being self-aware about self-destruction somehow made the self-destruction less pathetic.

I was proud of being the guy who could stay out all night, get completely fucked up, walk into a room the next morning looking like death and somehow still pull something off. I thought the impressive part was that I could function inside the wreckage.

It never occurred to me that maybe the impressive thing would have been to stop creating so much fucking wreckage.

I was a fuck-up and I used it as a badge of honor.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Chaos also gave me a surprisingly long list of creative ways I almost died.

Like the time I almost got punched in the face by Mike Tyson.

It was 2005. The Maxim Super Bowl party in Detroit.

My best friend and I had somehow conned our way into the VIP area because I was telling people I was Scott Storch—the white Jewish music producer who, aside from also being a white Jewish music producer, I looked absolutely fucking nothing like.

My disguise apparently consisted of a Scarface T-shirt, baggy designer jeans, a Burberry sport coat I had inherited from my grandfather after rummaging through his clothes, a sideways orange-and-white Tigers hat and Tiffany Nikes.

It looked like Mr. Alan’s and Neiman Marcus threw up on me.

Real ones know.

I looked like a clown dressed like Turtle from Entourage.

I had no business being there.

Which, at twenty-one years old, drunk as fuck and stoned, I interpreted as proof that I absolutely belonged there.

The whole night had that weird early-2000s celebrity fever-dream quality to it. Before everybody had a camera pointed at everybody else at all times. Before every interaction immediately became content. You could just stumble around a Super Bowl party completely annihilated and suddenly Jim Belushi was standing there.

So I met Jim Belushi.

At another point Terry Crews—who remains the nicest celebrity I have ever met—asked me to take a picture of him and his brother.

Not with him.

Of them.

He handed me the camera like I was just some normal trustworthy person at a party and not a chemically compromised asshole impersonating Scott Storch.

I remember thinking, Terry Crews just asked ME to take HIS picture.

This somehow registered as a major accomplishment.

Then there was Jessica Alba.

I saw her across the VIP area and, for a second, we locked eyes.

At least I believe we locked eyes.

Her eyes were stunning.

Mine were basically rolling into the back of my skull.

So while I remember it as this beautiful cinematic moment—Jessica Alba and me staring across a crowded room—there is a very real possibility she was simply looking at me thinking, Is that guy having a medical emergency?

Still counts.

Earlier I had been maybe five feet from Wyclef while he serenaded this bizarre pre-Super Bowl collection of athletes, celebrities, industry people, Detroit royalty and people like me who had apparently slipped through a crack in the building.

Everything felt important because I was fucked up.

That’s one of the great tricks of getting completely annihilated: every stupid thought arrives wearing a tuxedo.

And somewhere during all of this, VIP stopped being enough.

I wanted A-list.

Why?

Because I was high.

And because somewhere inside my completely poisoned brain, I had decided I deserved it.

Then the VI-VIP door fucking exploded open.

The energy of the room changed before I even understood why.

Security came pouring through first—a wall of enormous men moving fast, clearing space, barking at people to move—and in the middle of them was Mike Tyson.

Not celebrity Mike Tyson.

Not funny-cameo Mike Tyson.

Mike. Fucking. Tyson.

Even surrounded by security, he looked enormous. Not necessarily tall. Dense. Like somebody had somehow compressed violence into the approximate shape of a human being.

And he was moving quickly.

I have no idea what had happened behind that door. From where I stood, it certainly looked like something had happened. He was being whisked out of there with the urgency usually reserved for fires, presidents and wild animals that have escaped their enclosures.

Everyone around me had the same instinct.

Back up.

Make room.

Do not touch Mike Tyson.

My instinct was different.

My eyes lit up like a dog who had just seen a chipmunk.

I made a fucking beeline for him.

“Excuse me! Please! Everyone out of the way for the champ!”

I was apparently now assisting security.

Security, meanwhile, was yelling the exact opposite message.

“EVERYONE MOVE BACK!”

“DON’T GO NEAR MR. TYSON!”

What I heard was:

Go tell Tyson you love him and ask him how to beat him in Punch-Out!! since you spent years of your childhood trying to figure that shit out.

So I kept going.

People were physically moving away from him as I moved toward him, which should have been another clue.

But clues were not really my thing.

I got through the opening and suddenly I was right there.

Inches away.

Mike Tyson.

This fucking saber-toothed tiger of a human being. In my opinion, the greatest boxer who ever lived. A man whose job had once been to render other enormous professional fighters unconscious while millions of people watched.

And somehow my brain determined that simply speaking to him wasn’t enough.

I needed physical contact.

I put my hand on Mike Tyson’s gigantic shoulder.

“YO, WHAT’S UP TYSON?”

There are moments when time actually stops.

This was one of them.

His head turned.

His fist came back.

“Man, get the fuck offa me.”

And I saw his eyes.

That’s the part I remember most.

Not anger.

Something much darker.

Emptiness. Dread. Death.

The eyes of a man who had experienced all three far too many times and who, at that particular moment, had absolutely no interest in being touched by some drunk asshole dressed like Turtle from Entourage.

His fist was coming.

I can still picture the distance between it and me.

Not much.

And then a security guard caught it.

In midair.

“NO, NO, NO!”

Another one was already pushing me backward.

“MAN, BACK THE FUCK OFF!”

And Tyson was gone almost as quickly as he had appeared, security dragging him down the hallway like a pit bull on a chain who had spotted the same chipmunk I had.

And then the strangest thing happened.

Nothing.

The room healed itself around the moment.

The opening in the crowd disappeared. The music reclaimed the air. People turned back toward their conversations. Drinks went back toward mouths. Whatever tiny brush with catastrophe had just occurred was swallowed whole by the party.

I just stood there.

Mouth open.

Hand probably still suspended somewhere near where Mike Tyson’s shoulder had been.

I looked at my friend.

He looked at me.

And we started fucking dying laughing.

Not because it was particularly funny.

Because that’s what I did back then.

Everything became a story before I had even survived it.

Danger was funny. Consequences were funny. Blackouts were funny. Drugs were funny. Waking up somewhere and having no idea how I got there was funny. Almost getting my head removed from my body by the former heavyweight champion of the world was fucking hilarious.

It had to be.

Because the alternative would have required asking myself why I kept walking toward things everyone else had the good sense to back away from.

That question took me another seventeen years to start answering.

I used to call that fearlessness.

It wasn’t.

I used to say I thrived in chaos.

I didn’t.

I was addicted to it.

Chaos gave me permission not to look too closely at myself. If everything around me was loud enough, dangerous enough, fucked up enough, there was never any silence in which I might have to wonder what exactly I was running from.

So I kept finding bigger fires.

And when there wasn’t one, I lit one.

Then I ran into it and waited for everyone to tell me how brave I was for surviving.

Mike Tyson just happened to be one of the few fires that almost punched back.