CHAPTER ONE

FEAR AND MOANING
IN LAS VEGAS

I should be dead—crippled anyway. My brain scrambled. If it’s true that God “takes care of drunks and fools,” then he must bend over backwards to take care of drunken fools. It happened in Las Vegas, and it came at a very bad time.

Things were falling into place. Following a fling with showbiz, I was finally coming home to mama—the NBA. It hadn’t been easy. After I bailed out of “Lost” Angeles in 1999, and Dallas shit-canned my ass in 2000, I had been making a living as an actor and entertainer, partying worldwide for a fee and hosting a series of wild parties for a DVD titled Stripper’s Ball. In my free time, I partied free. Why? Because I could. By this time, I had reworked the old “Work hard, play hard” slogan to fit my new lifestyle. Without basketball in my life, it now read, “Play hard, then play hard some more.” Not a bad life, but the Dallas thing had left a bad taste in my mouth.

Dallas owner Mark Cuban had hired me to be Bad Boy Rodman—the rock star who would put butts in seats and put the then-pathetic Mavericks on the map. I even agreed to live in Cuban’s guesthouse, so his security guards could keep an eye on me 24/7 (I couldn’t wipe my ass without three guards surrounding the toilet). So how did the guy repay me? After 12 games, less than a month on the job, I was dumped. Why?

Well, maybe it had something to do with the one-game suspension by the league, the two ejections, the DUI, the 4-9 record, or the fact I challenged NBA commissioner David Stern to a fistfight—somebody needs to whip his arrogant white ass. Whatever. So did Cuban call me with the news? No. I found out about my release on ESPN. But Mark has gotten my back in the media over the past few years, saying that bringing Dennis Rodman onto a NBA team has many more positives than negatives.

After that, I soured on the NBA and spent a little over a year fucking around, being “Dennis Rodman,” getting paid to have a good time. I knew I’d made it when people first started paying me to party. I mean, I’m partying anyway—why not take the cash? Life was good. But the more I thought about what happened in Dallas, the more pissed I got. I didn’t like the way I went out. I wanted to make my farewell to the NBA on my terms. So when I signed with Darren, my number-one priority was to get back on the court. And on July 18, 2003, I held a news conference in L.A.

“The reason why we are here is to formally announce I officially want to come back to the NBA,” I told the reporters, “basically to finish my career the way I want to.”

I dressed down for the occasion: Reebok baseball cap, short-sleeved gray shirt over a white tee, and jeans. I still had the hoop earrings, shades, nose studs, and lip ring. Like I told them, comeback or no comeback, “I’m gonna be Dennis Rodman.”

My comeback would give people a little reminder that Dennis Rodman was not only the proud poster boy for the stripper, biker, WrestleMania crowd, but one of the best professional basketball players of all time. I still can’t believe they left me off the list of the 50 greatest NBA players. I mean, John Stockton? Shit. Listen to my stats. Five championships (more than all but 11 other players), seven rebound titles (second only to Wilt), two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year, seven-time member of NBA defensive first team, and two-time NBA all-star. Telling you this shouldn’t be my job, but who else is going to do it?

Reality Check: You sit around waiting for somebody else to crown you king, you’ll end up a lady in waiting— waiting to take one up the ass.

After dozens of phone calls, months of wrangling, the good news had come in October of 2003. Darren called to say the Denver Nuggets were going to take me on. No long-term contract, no big NBA money—just ten grand a game—but my size-15 foot was in the door.

Not everybody was thrilled. A Denver reporter complained to ESPN about the increased workload. “Now you’re on Rodman watch,” he said. “Now you have to check the police blotter every morning when you wake up before you go to work.”

Whatever … I was psyched—not that the pending deal slowed down my partying. If anything, I cranked it up a notch, figuring what had worked for me during five championship seasons should keep on working with the Denver-fucking-Nuggets, not exactly the NBA elite.

While I was 42 at the time, I felt like I hadn’t lost a step—on the court or in the clubs. So on Sunday, October 19, I was partying at Josh Slocum’s (later “Rodman’s”), my restaurant in Newport Beach, California. It was like 3:30 in the morning, and I had been tossing back one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another followed by shots of Jägermeister chased with Coors Light. (How’s that for product placement?) Now I had been doing this for like eight, nine, 10 hours—who’s counting?—when I got a wild hair up my ass. Let’s go to Vegas!

Soon the Dennis Rodman party mobile—a black Ford 350 XLT club cab pickup truck—pulled out of the Josh Slocum parking lot and headed east on highway 55. On board were driver Mike Diaz and a bodyguard in front, and me sprawled in back sucking down more Coors Light.

A couple of hours down the road; we made what was supposed to be a quick gas stop at this Mobil station just off the main drag in Barstow. Then I was recognized (it might have had something to do with my picture being plastered all over the hood of the truck). Anyway, I got to yapping with this guy and pulled a classic “Dennis,” giving him my shoes, a nice pair of white canvas Chuck Taylor All-Stars with red trim. Then I tried to make a deal for the station’s tow truck. I’m always doing stuff like that—take off my shirt and give it to somebody, buying this, buying that. Luckily the tow-truck deal fell through, and we were back on the road with my new favorite group, the country band Rascal Flatts, still blaring on the stereo, the same song playing over and over. Turned out the fucking thing had been stuck on repeat ever since we left Newport Beach. I was too drunk to care, and Mike and the bodyguard were afraid to do anything, having seen me in action when people bitched about me playing country music at my restaurant. It’s basically, “If you don’t like it, get out.” So Rascal Flatts it was, for like three straight hours.

We made it to Vegas around 7:00 a.m. and pulled into the far side of the empty parking lot at Treasures Gentleman’s Club and Restaurant—a brand-new, $30-million strip club open 24 hours a day. In the Las Vegas Sun, one of the owners described the place as “an upscale nightclub in an elegant, tasteful environment.”

Mike woke me up so I could get it together before we made our big entrance. I did what I could with my Levi shorts, oversized T-shirt with a Josh Slocum’s logo, knee-high basketball socks, and black rubber sandals—beachwear—just right for Treasures’ “elegant, tasteful environment.”

We drove around front to valet park. At first glance, the twin-towered joint, in what looks like sandstone, reminds you of a mosque or something, but there ain’t nothing for the religious faithful inside. Just tits and ass and a nice USDA choice 16-ounce “bone-in cowboy ribeye served with garlic mashed potatoes, sautéed vegetables, topped with spicy shoestring fried onions” if you decide to try out the “gourmet” restaurant.

When we walked in, the place was all but empty. No customers, no strippers, no bartenders or waitresses, just a couple of guys who seemed like they were really glad to see me. They stalled, giving us a quick tour of the place, as if I’d never been there before. I don’t know if “state of the art” is what you’d call it, but, as the man said, Treasures does offer a full range of gentlemen’s services: strippers, booze, and lap dances. Why a strip club? I’ll have to go along with Vegas writer Al Mancini, who allowed as how “bare breasts complement just about any leisure activity.”

They rounded up a bartender, a waitress, and a couple of strippers, and soon I was back to my steady diet of Grey Goose and cranberry juice, music blaring, girls stripping down to g-strings before getting very friendly with their poles. There might even have been a lap dance or two. After like an hour of this, the girls were bored; I was bored. So I swapped seven $100 bills for 700 ones and treated my new favorite strippers to a Dennis Rodman forte. I took the 700 ones, stepped up on stage with the girls and started throwing wads of cash up in the air creating what the Las Vegas Sun would call a “green shower.”The girls seemed to like it.

But even that wasn’t enough to hold my interest for long. On a normal night there were—what?—a couple dozen girls in the place, other customers all around raising hell. And here we sat: me, Mike, and the bodyguard, coming up on Sunday School time, with the waitress, two strippers, and a bartender who wanted to go home— seven of us all together—in this big, empty room that seats maybe 150 people. It was bleak. Time to move on. Next stop: Cheetah’s strip club.

As we were on the way out the door, this Treasures manager, bouncer, whatever, came walking in. “Hey, you’re Dennis Rodman,” he said. He laid his motorcycle helmet on the hostess counter, and that got us to talking bikes. He had just bought a new one for like $5,000. He was really proud of the thing; thought he got a good buy; wanted me to see it.

I have a thing for motorcycles. I got my first bike, a Kawasaki 1100, about 15 years ago and haven’t been without one since. I even posed on a Harley for the cover of my autobiography, Bad As I Wanna Be, but—seeing as how I was buck naked—nobody said much about the bike.

Anyway, I love motorcycles. So why not make this guy’s day? So just after 8:00 a.m., I led my little entourage of Mike, the bodyguard, the manager, and one of the strippers outside to look at the cycle. It was a red and black beauty with an attitude—a rocket with handlebars.

“You ride?” the owner asked.

“Yeah, I can ride,” I said.

“You all right to ride?”

“I’m good.”

Not.

Now, I had no helmet—the guy left his inside—no leathers, just the shorts, sandals, and T-shirt, but I hopped on anyway. As for the owner, well … “Dennis Rodman” is a hard guy to refuse.

So I started her up, did a few lazy figure-eights in this huge parking lot, nice and easy. Around about now was when I should’ve thanked the guy for his trouble, hopped off, and gone about my business. I didn’t do that. I had been awake for like 20 hours, been drinking steady for at least 12, had maybe a half-hour’s sleep, and haven’t had anything much to eat since I left Newport Beach. I was not a guy who should be operating heavy machinery. What’s more I was only days away from my last DUI (that one on water in my boat, Sexual Chocolate), and this was far from my first regrettable rendezvous with a motorcycle.

I ran into a tree the first time I ever got on a bike back in my college days in Oklahoma and had suffered through four motorcycle accidents in all—including the one in 1995 when I separated a shoulder and missed 14 games with the Spurs. And even though I was only a few days away from realizing my dream of returning to the NBA, the booze and I decided that Dennis Rodman, the great one, was bulletproof.

So I was making these lazy figure-eights in the parking lot. At that speed, it was like reining in a horse that’s trying to take off on you. What’s Dennis Rodman know about horses? Well, I may have grown up on the streets of Dallas and made a name for myself in Chicago, but during my college days, I lived and worked on a farm in Bokchito, Oklahoma, where I rode a horse or two. The temptation is always to give the horse his head, ride that mother wherever he takes you.

Ya-fucking-hoo!

And since there’s no temptation (except drugs) that Dennis Rodman won’t give in to, not only would I give this bike her head, I would show her who was the fucking boss.

Wheelies, bro, wheelies.

The great Dennis Rodman wouldn’t just be cruising around, he’d be doin’ wheelies in the parking lot of the Treasures Gentlemen’s Club and Restaurant in Las-fucking-Vegas, Nevada. How cool is that?

So wheelies it would be on Sunday, October 19, around 8:35 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. I revved the engine and popped the clutch. Bye-bye. The thing got away from me. I veered into the curb on the left, crashed through a hedge, and the bike took off in the opposite direction headed straight for a light pole. The cops told the Las Vegas Sun I was going 70 miles per hour—that’s bullshit— claimed the thing threw me, then took off on its own. More bullshit. Wish it had. Actually, I was on the motherfucker all the way as the cycle rammed head on into the opposite curb, popped up in the air, and slammed into the light pole. The handlebars snapped off, the front end disintegrated, and the bike came down on my shins.

“When the motorcycle fell on him,” Mike Diaz said later, “it was like a bomb hit him. I thought he was dead. I honestly thought the man had gone head first into the pole. It had hit so hard, so quick, I thought he was dead.”

Later one television reporter said he saw the imprint of my knees in the bike’s gas tank. I can believe that. The motorcycle was totaled. As for me, it looked like I was going to be spending a little time in the body shop.

After the crash, Mike and the bodyguard ran over and hauled the bike off of me. I was lying on the pavement in a total daze, blood everywhere, but I still managed to say, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be all right.”

The stripper ran up and was like, “Oh my God! Oh shit!” She was just all panicky. Panicky. Who could blame her? As Mike describes it, my right leg was “butterflied to the bone” from just below the kneecap to the middle of my shin. I thought it looked more like a split banana. Whatever. It was fucked up. The other shin, said Mike, “looked like it was just burnt up and like somebody took a razor blade and scraped all the skin off.”

“You need a doctor,” the bike owner said.

No shit. 911 time. Meanwhile somebody was yelling, “No cops! No cops!”

Yeah, right.

They wrapped my shins up in T-shirts to stop the bleeding, and in minutes, a fire truck, an ambulance, and a single cop on a motorcycle arrived. They hauled my sorry black ass to the University Medical Center. Mike, the bodyguard, and one of the strippers followed along in the truck. So did the cop toting my DUI. Of all the things I’ve done in Vegas, it was the first time ever the cops had shown up—first time ever.

And while I would swear I wasn’t drunk, and all my reps would back me up, shit, if they’d struck a match, my ass would’ve burst into flames. I admitted as much to Leno a month later. How drunk was I? I would call Darren and ask him to wire me another ten grand so I could keep partying when I got out of medical stir.

We got to the hospital and, as I was lying there all fucked up, hurting like hell—the booze starting to wear off—people began gathering around. It was like, “Hey, what’s going on, Dennis?”

Showtime.

People are taking pictures, asking for autographs, this and that. The “Dennis Rodman Total Entertainment Franchise” was now open for business from a gurney in a Las Vegas hospital.

When they finally got around to stitching me up—more than 70 stitches—the medical staff was amazed that I wouldn’t let them use Novocain. Not a big deal. For some reason, pain doesn’t really affect me as much as other people. I deal with it in the beginning, and then once my body gets adapted to it, I’m cool. So I was just sitting there casually talking to my assembled fans while they were sewing my “butterflied” shin back together.

Meanwhile, my driver, Mike Diaz, was fielding phone calls. “They wore my phone out,” he said. Agent Darren Prince was telling him to get my ass out of Vegas.

“He has a workout with the Denver Nuggets in two days,” Darren said. “I know Dennis. He can suck it up. He can play.”

Now, Mike, he didn’t want to be the one to tell Darren, “That ain’t happening.”

“You’ll have to talk to Dennis,” he said.

The second caller was Thaer Mustafa from Newport Beach. Thaer, a Palestinian-American, calls himself my “babysitter.” Actually, he’s my right-hand man in California and, after he declared a jihad on my ass for slipping out of town without telling him, he told Mike not to talk to the media.

“Do not tell anybody anything period, regardless of who they are, reporters, nothing,” said Thaer. “You know nothing. You saw nothing. You know nothing. You saw nothing.”

By the time Mike and the bodyguard got in to see me (at about three that afternoon), I was holding court with a dozen or so people who had gotten word that Dennis Rodman was in the house. There were firemen, nurses, doctors joking around, amazed I didn’t take any Novocain, laughing because I hadn’t been wearing any underwear, and when the nurses cut off my shorts, they got a little more—a lot more—than they bargained for.

This was not the first time I was the star attraction at a hospital. Any celebrity will attract that kind of staff attention, and that’s especially true if you have a condition that is the least bit interesting from a medical standpoint. Take a “broken dick.”

You get a broken dick by bending a rock solid hard-on at a right angle. The result is ruptured blood vessels and a big ole scary mess. Now this has happened to me three times, and it sounds bad, but it’s not all that serious, and it really doesn’t hurt that much. But bro, it looks bad. It looks really, really bad.

The first time I broke my dick was on the Fourth of July at this lake down along the Texas-Oklahoma border. I was doing what I do with my lady friend, we got crosswise, and suddenly my dick was spurting blood like a water hose. She was screaming, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Something’s happened! Something’s happened!” Everybody came running in to see what the ruckus was. Now I don’t embarrass easy, but hell. … The girlfriend was trying to shut it off, squeezing my dick with a towel. Meanwhile, the damn thing was swelling up like four, five, 10 times its normal size.

The last time I suffered from this ailment was in New York City, and I ended up with my dick in a sling in the emergency room of this huge hospital. They must have announced it on the public address system, because everybody—and I mean everybody—who worked in the damn place was dropping by to check out my “rare” condition. I, of course, was the life of the party, proud to share my very special, educational dick with all of these medical professionals—all in the interests of science, of course.

Time to say goodbye to my new best friends at the University Medical Center in Vegas. Since my Levi shorts and T-shirt were history, the nurses gave me these green medical scrubs to wear, the pants hitting me about mid-calf like Capri pants. Mike picked up a couple of prescriptions for pain and swelling, and I limped out of there. Soon, Mike, the bodyguard, the stripper and I were back in the truck, making our escape. Thaer was on Mike’s cell, still ranting, telling him, “You got Dennis in the truck, get him the hell out of Vegas right now.” Well Mike works for me, and I call the shots, so Cheetah’s it was. Out of the hospital 20 minutes, and I was back in a strip club throwing down one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another, still partying.

Most people after an accident, drunk or sober, would’ve just said, “Fuck it, let’s go home and relax.”

But without the daily routine of playing basketball—the endless round of practices, meetings, travel, games—I had been partying non-stop for a couple of years, and my body was on automatic pilot—automatic partying pilot—and it just wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop. It just kept feeding itself, saying, “We’re gonna keep on going. We’re gonna keep on going. We’re gonna keep on going.” And keep going we did. That’s me. I take it to the limit. I take it as far as I can take it.

So we were at Cheetah’s strip club, and all the girls wanted to do their thing. They’re thinking, “Dennis Rodman, king of the strip clubs, is in the house, and we know what he wants. Couch dances!” Not this time. You’d think they would’ve noticed something wasn’t quite right when I limped in dressed in hospital scrubs. Of course, it was dark in there. Maybe they thought the outfit was just another Dennis Rodman fashion statement. Whatever. Mike and the bodyguard did a good job of keeping them off me. They were like, “Don’t touch this man! He’s all fucked up.”

Meanwhile, this awesome stripper, who had been with us the whole time from inside Treasures through the motorcycle accident to the hospital and now to Cheetah’s, got up on stage and did her thing.

I think she really cared about me and wanted to make sure I was all right before she took off. She was what you might call “a stripper with a heart of gold.” Other nights it could go the other way. You could end up with your run-of-the-mill, star-fucking gold digger—you just never know. Any woman I meet, same basic questions. That’s what fame and money can do to you—and them. Not that I give a shit one way or the other. I think most people who meet me really like me. They think I’m a true motherfucker, honest, down to earth, and pleasant to be around. Others are just there for the ride. To them the money and fame are more attractive than I am, and when I realize that, it’s like “Fuck!” But whatever somebody’s motive is, I can roll with it.

I learned a long time ago that worrying about that shit—trying to judge people—can cut into a man’s party time. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if a particular person uses you or not. If it won’t be this person, it’ll be that person. If it won’t be that person, it’ll be this person. Go down the line. But whatever happens, by my way of thinking, you can’t let that kind of cynical bullshit rule your life. You should always leave the door open.

Reality Check: Trust first, and ask questions later.

After a couple of hours at Cheetah’s, the booze had really kicked in, and I was ready to move on; so we took off for the Hard Rock, got a couple of rooms. The stripper said her goodbyes, and Mike and the bodyguard thought they were done for the night. Wrong. Next stop: the circular bar above the Hard Rock casino where I bought rounds of drinks for everybody. People were cracking up just looking at me. I could hardly walk; I was still in those funky green hospital scrubs, and I was still partying. Mike kept saying, “How do you do this? How do you do this?” I was just used to it. It was normal for me. It was what I did. By now it’s about 11:00 p.m., and I decided I wanted to go to the strip club across the street—that’s the last thing I remember.

By then, I had been partying for almost 48 hours straight—a good showing, but well short of my record of three days. I had wrapped up that binge by passing out in the Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Vegas. Another proud moment.

When I began to sober up the next day, I realized that I was fucked in a million different ways. First, not even Dennis Rodman could play ball anytime soon with the mangled shins and bangedup knees. Second, the Vegas slogan, “What happens here stays here,” was not working for me. If you’re “Dennis Rodman,” what happens here or anywhere, ends up on the AP wire, in every fucking newspaper, and on every television station at home and abroad—including Denver, home of the Nuggets.

Reality Check:If you’re famous, you’re news 24/7, especially when the news is bad.

As if the regular media weren’t bad enough, it just so happened that this was during the time ESPN was taping the reality show Rodman on the Rebound.The idea was to document my comeback to the NBA (what a joke that turned out to be). My close friend and agent Darren Prince calls up the sons-of-bitches at ESPN and gets them to fly to Vegas and get some video of me at the lowest point of my life. It wasn’t pretty. He later told me he hoped that when I saw the tape it would shock me into sobriety. I later told him that— fucked-up shins or not—he was lucky his skinny white ass had been in West Orange, New Jersey.

Since I was a kid, I have always prided myself on being disciplined in the things that really matter—in the weight room, on the court (forget the refs), in how I play the game—defense, rebounding. Off court was my business; but suddenly things had changed.

My partying had made a liar out of Darren. For months, he had been telling every NBA general manager who would listen that Dennis Rodman had cleaned up his act. Based on that half-truth, he had the Denver deal lined up. And if that had gone south, he had the ear of Phil Jackson, who was then coaching L.A. for the first time. But now I was too hot to handle. Two years of Darren’s work, and my comeback, were down the drain. So I was thinking maybe I ought to cut down a bit, and I promised Thaer I would do just that, as soon as I got past the Radio Music Awards.

After the motorcycle accident, Darren was so worried about my partying he called in the cavalry, my former bodyguard, Wendell “Big Will” Williams, a six-foot-four-inch, 400-pound black man. When Wendell talks, people, including Dennis Rodman, tend to listen. Wendell was coming out of bodyguard retirement to make sure I did what I was supposed to do when I was supposed to do it. He started out strong at the Radio Music Awards in Las Vegas. It was exactly a week after the Treasures motorcycle crash.

Despite my usual protests—“I don’t want to do this. This is bullshit. It’s not gonna help my career”—that afternoon Wendell managed to get me, sober no less, to this series of round-robin interviews with every fucking radio station in America.

“So tell me about Madonna, Dennis?”

“What’s Michael Jordan really like, Dennis?”

“Where’s your dress, Dennis?”

This went on for hours before the actual awards show that night, and Wendell wouldn’t let me drink. Afterwards it was like I’d just run a marathon, and I went out by the pool to relax with a cool one while he went upstairs to shower. When Wendell got back down, I was wasted. This was all new to him. In the three years since he’d worked with me, I’d started spending much more time with my friend Herr Jägermeister, and this was his first time to see Dennis Rodman, daytime drunk.

So I went through the “I don’t want to go to any awards ceremony,” “It’s bullshit,” “It’s not gonna help my career,” routine, and he reminded me that they were paying me good money to be there. Money I’d already spent. So he dragged me into the auditorium.

I don’t remember much of this, but Wendell says I was like some wino on skid row. He was holding me up, I was ranting, but my speech was so slurred nobody could understand what the fuck I was saying. The producers of the show got wind I was drunk, cancelled my award presentation, and even denied me a backstage pass. I went backstage anyway, falling-down drunk. A couple of years before, stars like Al Pacino and Meryl Streep were coming up to me, seeking me out, and now B-level celebrity hacks were turning their backs, avoiding me. I saw Puff Daddy giving an interview and started pinching him on the ass. He blew me off, and his crew was like, “Get him the fuck away from us!” Wendell pulled me aside. Then security showed up and drug my ass out of there—no backstage pass. “Fuck this place!” I shouted to Wendell. “Fuck this! Let’s go. Let’s go.” So where were we going? A strip club. Where else?

After the Radio Music Awards, everybody was on my ass. Darren was on my ass. Wendell was on my ass. Thaer was on my ass. Even my wife, Michelle, was on my ass. After the motorcycle accident and my skid-row drunk performance at the Radio Music Awards, ESPN sat Michelle down for an interview.

“I’m done. I’m ready for a divorce,” she told the interviewer.

This from a woman who has “Mrs. Rodman” tattooed just above her butt in letters about an inch high.

“He doesn’t care about himself; he doesn’t care about his kids; he doesn’t care about me. He has no respect for himself.”

It got worse.

“Not only am I gone, and his kids are gone, but his career is gone. He pretty much has lost everything.”

She still wasn’t done.

“He doesn’t want the last thing to be said about him was that he was some drunk has-been. He definitely doesn’t want that.”

So by the end of October 2003, I was royally fucked. The wife and family were gone, Darren, Will, and Thaer had one foot out the door, and my NBA dream was over. Hell, even the “Dennis Rodman” entertainment franchise was in danger.

Reality Check: After almost a decade of steady partying, I wasn’t having the party—the party was having me and having me good.

There was some good news.

Whenever I go through something traumatic like the Treasures motorcycle accident, something so emotionally and physically draining, I have like an out-of-body experience. And shortly after the accident, I found myself sitting there, taking a look across the room at what remained of Dennis Rodman, and I was left wondering: “How exactly did this happen? How did I get here? Is there any way out?”