I’ve had sex with more than two thousand women.
I don’t remember most of their names. Many of them were one-night stands. There were too many strippers to count. It wasn’t a big deal, but often I would pay them. I would just give them money in the morning. I never thought less of them. I would make love to them and leave $2,000 on the dresser. It was understood that they would be gone when I got out of the shower because I usually had to be at practice or shootaround.
I have been obsessed with sex as long as I can remember. I love to touch women, and I need to feel close to women and feel their skin on mine. To touch a woman is to feel safe. The physical contact is something that I need. It doesn’t even have to always be sex. If it’s spooning on the bed, it will satisfy me just the same. I just need the connection.
And I know you won’t believe this, but I don’t remember my first time. That sounds crazy, right? I think I was fourteen. It was during the two-year period right after my mother died, and I’ve purged almost every memory of that time. My first memory of sex is with Liza when I was in the eleventh grade. It was the summer of 1996 after I came back from Las Vegas.
We conceived Destiny, our first child, the following year.
I’ve been looking for my mother ever since she died. I looked for her in the women I took home. I used sex to fill the void . . . to make me feel complete. I wanted to be loved, but I could never find love. I could be physically fulfilled, but I was always left emotionally empty. I would fuck five or six girls a week, but my demons tormented me the one night I went home alone. I needed women as an outlet . . . an escape. But this does not come without problems. Most of my sex had been unprotected, and I’ve paid for plenty of abortions over the years. I’m not proud of it. It’s the law and legal, but I don’t feel proud about it at all.
I am a sex addict.
My sex addiction and my cocaine addiction go hand in hand. They afflicted me from the moment I woke up until I laid my head down to sleep. Try this with a day job.
The first time I did cocaine, sometime in the summer of 2004, was an eye-opening experience. I was at the Shore Club, a high-end hotel in Miami that caters to celebrities and the super-rich. I was at the pool with a bunch of friends and happened to walk past a rich white couple sitting poolside. The man got up from a lounge chair and asked me if I had any cocaine. It was a weird question to which I gave a really strange response.
“I think I can get some,” I replied. I don’t know why I said that.
I walked over to my boys and they slipped me a little baggie of coke.
I was a little nervous to do it. I didn’t know how it was going to make me feel. Worse, I was afraid that I would like it. And my fears were confirmed. The first time I did cocaine it felt like I had a full-body orgasm. Actually, I kind of did.
The stranger, his wife, and I went into a secluded area away from the pool. The woman was about thirty-five, blonde, and beautiful. She looked like a Playboy Playmate straight out of the 1970s. They were both excited that I could score so quickly. They were also excited to meet a famous black basketball player. We sat at a little table and the woman told her husband to leave. He did so dutifully and quickly.
“About fucking time,” she said.
We emptied the bag onto the table and I pulled my American Express Black Card out of my pocket and began separating the coke into several lines. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I had seen it done in movies. The woman took off her top. She had amazing tan lines. I stared at her tits as she leaned over and snorted a line with a rolled-up one-hundred-dollar bill.
She handed the bill to me. Fuck it. I leaned over, put the bill to my nose, and inhaled with my left nostril. My mind went blank. I immediately jumped up. The rush was like nothing I had ever felt before or since. It went straight to my cock, and I got hard instantly. She did the third line, and I did the fourth. The woman then got down on her knees, pulled my shorts down, and took my manhood in her mouth.
I couldn’t believe how it felt, and I came after a couple minutes. She got up, pulled her top back on, and fluffed her hair.
“It was nice to meet you,” she said before walking away.
I stood there wondering what the fuck just happened. I was blown away. A new dimension had come into my life. Cocaine. And the way it made me feel. How it went straight to my cock. I had to feel that way again. Like, right then. I wanted to fuck on cocaine.
I spent the better part of the next fifteen years chasing the feeling of that first high. I needed to feel like that again. I would kill myself to do it if I had to.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Once we got back to Los Angeles at the end of summer 2004, I decided to make a few changes for what would be my second fresh start in as many years. I moved to a new place right on the ocean.
It felt good to be back in LA with its familiar routes, beautiful views, and old haunts. Al Harris and Kamal McQueen were still living out in the Valley, and I was looking forward to reconnecting with them. As usual, Greg moved in with me and began to take care of all house-related issues and remained my driver/manager.
In late September, the Lakers players began to return to LA and gather for pickup games at the practice facility in El Segundo, just south of LAX. I was coming off my best season as a pro and was in great shape to start the season thanks to playing for Team USA in Greece.
But there was one person in camp who was already in better shape than anyone. In fact, in his first eight years in the league, I don’t think he was ever out of shape. I marveled at the way he treated his body. At twenty-six, with three NBA championships and six All-Star appearances, Kobe Bryant was on a meteoric rise and had without a doubt claimed the title of best player in the NBA.
Everything Kobe did was in the pursuit of perfection. Whether it was how he conditioned his mind and body, religiously watched film, or competed like a demon on the floor, it was easy to be in awe of him. When you were around Kobe, he either rubbed off on you or grated on you. He set the tone and it was up to everyone else to adjust.
But this was a different Kobe Bryant and a different Lakers team. Phil Jackson had retired and taken his three rings and four Finals appearances in the last four years with him. Shaq passed me in the night on the way to Miami. For the first time in decades, the Lakers were a rebuilding team.
The previous year, Kobe had played under a dark cloud in the form of a year-long sexual assault investigation stemming from an incident in a hotel room in Eagle, Colorado, in which a hotel employee accused him of rape. The hearings and discoveries dominated the headlines, and Kobe had the poorest season of his prime years.
Shortly after I got back to LA, the charges against Kobe were dropped because his accuser refused to testify. Although Kobe’s public image took a beating, and his reputation as the clean-cut face of the league had been shattered, Kobe was determined to put everything behind him and focus all his energy into basketball.
You could sense that Kobe wasn’t the happiest person in the world. He had narrowly avoided what would have been a psychologically draining and image-crushing trial—win or lose—that would have changed the course of his life. The mental anguish of losing basketball and facing a decade-long prison sentence took its toll on Kobe.
Still, he arrived at training camp in phenomenal shape. From pickup games to shooting drills, he was ultra-competitive and would be furious if he lost. Or worse, if someone’s lackluster play contributed to that loss. And Kobe talked a lot. He threw elbows while berating opponents and teammates alike. When he walked into the gym, the tenor of the room changed noticeably. It was all business. If pickup games started at eleven in the morning, Kobe would likely have already been up since five. Sometimes I’d just be getting home at that point.
I never had another teammate with the drive Kobe had. Even when his personal life was in utter turmoil he never lost that drive. But I knew being in such close proximity to someone as competitive as Kobe would be perfect for me. In those early days of pickup ball and practice, Kobe put everyone through what he called his “vetting process” to see what they were made of.
Kobe would walk right up to you and ask, “What are you gonna do?”
“I ain’t scared of you,” I would shoot back. I had to let him know right away.
He dished out loads of trash talk to see how we’d respond. He was hard-fucking-core. You were no one to him unless you proved yourself first. If you got rattled and didn’t hand it right back, you would immediately lose points in his book. And he would come harder at you with the intention of running you off. If he couldn’t trust you in practice, he wouldn’t trust you during the games. But I’m from Queens, so nothing he could say to me was new.
As storied as the franchise was, the mystique didn’t feel quite as I expected it. The Lakers were still the jewel in the NBA’s crown, but the 2004–2005 Lakers weren’t Riley’s Lakers. Or Phil Jackson’s, either. Over the summer the Lakers hired Rudy Tomjanovich to a five-year, $30 million contract to guide the team back to glory. But as intense as Rudy was on the bench and in his preparation, he ran a pretty loose ship with his players. The team had a decidedly different feel than the way Riley presided over the Heat, which I had grown to love.
My friends and trainer could now fly on the team plane and show up to practice whenever they wanted. Riley didn’t even let my boys attend team dinners at Joe’s Stone Crab.
The team was uneven and disjointed, but as predicted, Kobe helped me elevate my play, and I averaged 15.2 points, 10.2 rebounds, 3.7 assists, and a career-high 47 percent shooting from the field. But we were a lost cause, finishing 34–48 and missing the playoffs for the first time in eleven years. The eleventh-place finish in the Western Conference standings was the worst in franchise history.
I was glad to be back in Los Angeles, but as a whole, we were ready to put this forgettable season behind us.
My love affair with cocaine wasn’t going to go away. You know how you meet a new girl and fall head over heels in love and can’t see enough of that person? Yeah, that’s what happened when I first did coke. And when you first do it, you don’t realize the power it has. Both the potency and the control it has over you. I started to surround myself with people who did the same thing. It’s not hard to find enablers. They are a dime a dozen. They want to bask in your fame, and they’ll provide you with a fix. Sign me up, I thought.
The Shore Club in Miami became our home away from home, leaving work in LA for escape on the other side of the country. It was a playground where nothing was off-limits and rules didn’t exist. When the night was either too debaucherous, scandalous, or illegal, I knew the comfortable confines of my favorite beach paradise would be someplace to go where the only thing that would fade away faster than my inhibitions was my better judgment.
On some nights it seemed like there was almost as much cocaine in South Beach as there was sand. As my drug use slowly escalated, I found that strippers made cocaine better and coke made sex better. I felt the kind of invincibility that basketball, money, and fame never brought me. That was a high in itself.
As my cocaine use transformed from experimental to habitual, I hid it from my closest friends—my New York crew. Greg, Al, and Kamal would have flipped if they found out the level I had taken it to. As far as they were concerned, this was a pastime for the new group of friends that I so easily let into my trusted circle.
My collection of friends grew as fast as my “hobby,” and sometime early during my stint with the Lakers, I met music producer Scott Storch. He was at the top of his game producing music in his Miami studio for the likes of 50 Cent, Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg, and even Paris Hilton. At his height in the mid-2000s, he was one of the biggest hip-hop producers in the game. He’d charge $250,000 for a single beat.
Scott lived in a $10 million mansion in Palm Island, Florida, and had a fleet of twenty cars. It was like he lived in a music video. But Scott had a way of winning people over by telling them what they wanted to hear. His atmosphere was a twenty-four-hour party, swirling, pulsating, and scooping up everyone in its path with gale-force velocity.
But it was also cool that Scott was a self-made man from Long Island who accomplished what no one thought he could, and he always tried to hold on to that New York grittiness. He had everything . . . including cocaine. I’d spend hours . . . days . . . at his mansion with pounds of coke everywhere. It was modern-day Tony Montana shit.
“Okay, I’m reloaded!”
I used to love that quote from Scarface. Because I always reloaded.
When you have a burgeoning drug habit, surrounding yourself with enablers and habitual users is one thing, but rolling with people who have bigger narcotic appetites than yours is like hitting fast-forward on your drug problem.
Coke was everywhere. If I wasn’t crushing it at Scott’s mansion or at the Shore Club with famous one-name superstars, I would sneak it back to my house in California. It was easier if Liza and the kids weren’t visiting. (Liza had moved back to New York after Miami.) Definitely if Greg and Kamal weren’t in LA. I was still perfecting my standard speech about how it wasn’t mine. It’s for the strippers. I give them coke and they fuck. I just want to make sure they have a good time.
I was a drug addict plain and simple. I had arrived at this terrible, unwanted, inevitable conclusion almost on cruise control. It felt like destiny. I had been building the résumé before I had ever rolled my first joint. Or, to be clearer, others had been writing it for me.
My father physically abused my mother, my only source of protection, right in front of me. She screamed and cried and struggled. I was helpless and felt like a coward because I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It stripped me of any power before I knew what those things meant. I’d see my mom beaten. Then we’d go to sleep several feet from one another in our twin beds in the upstairs bedroom of my grandmother’s house on 131st. I could hear Mom struggling to turn over. Her sighs clouded the air like a suffocating black smoke that would be way more destructive than any puff of narcotic smoke I could ever inhale.
These were things that I would never recover from. I haven’t to this day.
My strung-out father disappeared. People made fun of me when they saw him bingeing. I was an only child and any positive view of myself was taken from me before I could even comprehend that I had it in the first place.
I convinced myself that everything I was doing was destiny, but I cringed when I heard Cathy Odom’s voice in those moments of indecision and despair. “Lamar, you are your own light,” she’d tell me. “You are a light for all others.”
But at Scott Storch’s house or the Shore Club, that light went out. I was still, unbeknownst to myself, two years away from the pit of hell, but at least I could get high right now. On one particular weekend at Scott’s house, I poured out what I thought was a reasonable portion and used my Black Card to divide the lines. I would snort each nostril. The lines looked like they went on forever. I would wait for the drip. Then the aftertaste.
But most of all I craved the rush, the high. That’s why you do coke. It’s the best friend you’ve ever had. All the blood rushed to my cock. I wanted to fuck. I’d get two strippers from the club. Always two. Money on the dresser and gone by the time I got out of the shower. I did this almost every night.
I chased the high, hit after hit, wanting it to feel like that first time. If it didn’t work, I’d do another line. Then another.
One night, after several hours of chasing that first time, I had no clue what time it was or even how in the world I’d ended up at Scott’s mansion. A strange feeling began to come over my body. Time slowed down. I couldn’t swallow. My body was burning. I was cold. Then I was hot. I had what I thought was the worst case of nausea ever. A wave of anxiety like I’d never felt in my life hit me like a tidal wave. The fear paralyzed me.
I tried to stand, but my 230-pound body felt like air. I lifted off the ground . . . floating to nowhere and everywhere. The light went out and I crashed to the floor. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes rolled back in my head. My lungs tightened. My heart fluttered.
People rushed into the room screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything. Someone threw a towel over my head and ushered me through the back door of University of Miami Hospital. The official diagnosis was that I was dehydrated and needed IVs and fluids to bring me back around. Yeah, that was it. Anything but the truth.
But I knew the truth.
That was the first time I overdosed. I came within minutes of dying. I nearly killed myself chasing that high.
Depression is like having a demon with a sword at the back of your neck every step you take, but when you turn, he won’t talk to you. The fact that you can’t look him in the eye, or are unable to, is the most frightening of all. You don’t want to acknowledge him. But he’s there. His presence compounded my anxiety. Where do I go? How do I escape? How do I sleep? Everything affects everything else, and no escape is ever good enough . . . not even the cocaine and strippers. You know ahead of time nothing will ever make the demon go away. He will always be there. Drugs are your best defense and worst enemy.
I was no longer in control.
That demon will always be on the back of a twelve-year-old kid. That’s when I first saw him. A kid with no power. It’s easy to torment a kid who can’t fight back. But I’m not twelve anymore, and that’s the most frustrating thing about it. I’m thirty-nine as I write this. I’m not supposed to be afraid or weak.
But I am.
My mother is still dead. Sometimes I had to ask myself if I was, too.
After my overdose, doctors begged me to slow down, get rest, and eat right. Take care of your body, Lamar; it’s the only one you’ve got. Back at home, I felt like I’d been hit by a train. I stayed in bed for days and was frustrated at how weak my body felt. I was angry at myself for letting it come to this. I vowed I’d straighten out and get my life back on track. But deep down I could feel it coming, festering, waiting, calling my name. The demon was gone, but I knew he’d be back. But no! This time I would win. I had to.
Training camp for the 2005–06 season was only five weeks away.