The Newport Beach house was pink with bright-blue awnings. The Huntington Beach house was beige with a red-tile roof. One was party central on a popular beach. The other was a single-family home on a quiet residential street. One was for raising hell—the other for raising a family. So in June of 2004, I said goodbye to a house that had seen more parties than the Playboy mansion, said goodbye to the full bar and rotating mirrored ball at 4809 Seashore Drive, and said hello to the three-car garage and automated sprinkler system at 6621 Horseshoe Lane. It was the end of an era.
The new house was in an upscale cluster development, houses shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the street: stone and stucco, gray, grayer, and beige. On one typical afternoon, kids on bikes, skateboards, and motorized scooters cruised up and down the street in front of the house. My black BMW 745-Li was parked out front, and sitting on a concrete driveway made to look like terra cotta tile, Michelle’s white Mercedes S-600. It was “trash night,” and up and down the street, plastic garbage cans sat waiting at the curb.
Beginning at 6:15 p.m., hidden sprinklers, little black pipes, rose about three inches out of the ground in front of my house. There was a spitting sound, then a steady hiss. Five minutes later, that first set of sprinklers sunk back into the ground, and a new set rose to water another corner of the lawn. The first time I saw that shit, I was like, “What the fuck? Does Dennis Rodman really live here?” The lawn is tiny, and it’s not like you couldn’t water it with a garden hose in 15 minutes. The place wasn’t me. And neither was the settling down bullshit—no matter what I’d said.
When I was dictating all that mushy stuff that you read a few pages back about Michelle, when I said, “I love her. She’s probably the only girl I’ve ever had a real, clear connection with.” At that very moment, there was this other girl I was sleeping with sitting beside me. Right when I was saying it. Then that same night I slept with another girl I hang out with a lot. That doesn’t mean what I said about Michelle isn’t true. It just means it isn’t true in the way an average person would think it’s true. I do love Michelle. I do think we have a “real, clear connection.” But don’t expect me to stop “being Dennis.” As for old I-want-a-normal-family Michelle, she’s got her own line of bullshit going.
“I’m at a point in my life now,” she said, “I’m 38, our kids need a family, I don’t want to party anymore. I’m over it.”
Yeah, right. Time to can the June Cleaver crap. The very same day I was laying down that “Michelle-4-Ever” rap, she was on the back of a motorcycle headed for the Black Hills Motor Classic in Sturgis, South Dakota—this huge gathering of bike freaks. There wouldn’t be any partying going on out there. Lights out at 9:30 for the “Harley Nation.”
What I’m trying to get at is: all this lovey-dovey talk coming from both of us doesn’t mean what it means with normal people in a normal relationship. When I say I want to “settle down,” that doesn’t mean I’m willing to give up my lifeboats. When she says she wants a normal family … actually, I have no idea what she means by that. But it doesn’t mean what most people would think it means. Normal for Michelle ain’t “normal.”
So it’s time to knock off the bullshit and tell the truth rather than what our family, friends, and Oprah might want to hear. Time to talk about what we really want.
People are always asking me if I am ready to settle down. Wrong question. The question is whether I want Michelle in my life forever. The answer is “yes.”What will I do to keep her there? Whatever she wants—for a while. And I mean it when I say that. Then I walk out on the beach, and the harbor is full of lifeboats.
You know that phrase in the wedding vows about “forsaking all others?” I’m Dennis Rodman. That just ain’t gonna happen. Never was gonna happen. Never will happen. Meanwhile, I want Michelle to be true to me.
So if you take all this and throw it in a pot, is it possible for us to cook up something permanent, some kind of fucked-up family? So far, we haven’t been able to make it work. Like I said, we’re always either breaking up or making up: Michelle going postal, me saying anything, doing anything, buying anything, to get her back. This go-around, I bought her a 10-carat diamond ring. She said, “I don’t want that. I want you .”
Well, she’s already got as much of me as she’s going to get, as much as anybody is going to get. Is it enough? Can it ever really work?
Who the fuck knows?
“He’ll always be out there in the limelight,” Michelle told an interviewer. “He’ll never be able to just be my husband, my kids’ father. There’s always something more to it.”
She’s got that right. Cue the violins.
“And I don’t know if I can do that anymore,” Michelle said to a reporter. “It’s taken a lot of strength to get through as much as we’ve gone through. And I knew it going in.
“Eventually you have to grow up. We have children. They need to be taken care of. They need a father.”
Not to mention a mother.
And what about her jealousy problem? “I’ve changed a lot. I don’t fight anymore,” Michelle said. “It’s not worth it. I’ve got children, and I’m just not gonna go through that anymore over some skanky chick.”
The jury is still out on that one.
Then, as if our real problems are not enough, Michelle is forever finding bullshit problems (she probably picks them up reading those fucking women’s magazines) that she says are threatening our marriage. I’m going to run through them one at a time.
Not Even A Problem Number One: I show my love by buying her things.
“He’s got a heart of gold. He really does. He’s very generous. And not knowing how to love me and the children, y’know, his way of loving is to buy me things,” Michelle told a reporter. “He tries to give me things to show me that he loves me. And he just doesn’t get that I don’t want it. I want him to just love me.”
Guilty as charged. I’m trying to be more of a touchy-feely kind of guy. Meanwhile Michelle isn’t turning down many gifts.
I take that back. That was a cheap shot.
Not Even A Problem Number Two: I’m irresponsible.
“He has no responsibilities. None,” Michelle told a reporter. “And for that matter, neither have I.
“Those accountants take care of everything,” Michelle continued. “They pay the house payments, they pay for the cable, they pay the phone—you know there’s not too much really left to do.”
Sounds pretty good to me, but not to Michelle.
“I’ve been living this kind of fairy tale life, and it sucked,” she said. “I want responsibility back, y’know? I want to be normal.”
Where do I start?
First, for a guy with “no responsibilities,” I sure seem to be paying a lot of bills—like that cable bill and house payment. In the divorce papers she filed in 2004, Michelle claimed monthly expenses for her and the kids ran to $17,000, including about $2,000 for Michelle’s personal trainer and $500 and change for “hair, nails, tanning, and Botox.” Take all that and the $15,000 per month in child support I was paying for Alexis and Chance, and the $4,000 I send my mother, and you have a man who feels like he has a shitload of responsibilities.
Not Even A Problem Number Three: Religion.
“I’m a Christian and I need for him to be as well. That’s another thing we’re kind of struggling with.”
I’m not going to touch that one.
Not Even A Problem Number Four: Dennis is a slut for attention.
“He needs to know from people that he still has it,” Michelle said. “And he needs to know that from the public and other women, other people saying, ‘Oh wow! Dennis Rodman,’ instead of me and just his kids being enough. That’s what I’m looking for—one day for us to be enough for him.”
I’m a celebrity. Getting attention is what I do. It’s how I make a living. And like Michelle said, with a laugh, “He’s gotta keep doin’ that. Got too many kids.”
Could Be a Little Bit of a Problem Number One: We ’re both guarded.
Michelle says her dad pulled out when she was 14, and then her brother passed away.
“I’ve been through some things with men. So in this relationship with Dennis, I’m pretty guarded,” Michelle told a reporter.
And since both of us are guarded, “It’s really hard to get close, because I think I’m afraid that he’s going to hurt me. He’s afraid I’m going to hurt him.
“The one thing we do know,” continued Michelle, “is that we love each other.”
Could Be a Little Bit of a Problem Number Two: I don’t know how to live together.
“He doesn’t know how to do it. He just doesn’t know.”
Like she does. This is a woman who pulled out of a relationship of 11 years to chase my sorry ass, a woman who had a kid with her “first love” when she was 22 and couldn’t parlay that into a marriage—much less something that lasted. And here she sits: a couple of decades into her adult life, making up one half of the most fucked-up relationship since Adam chomped down on the apple, trying to play the “girl card” on me?
Bullshit. She’s no better at this than I am.
As for all her crap about wanting us to be normal—Girl, have you checked me out lately? Are the nose studs and lip rings a clue? Do you know what I do for a living? Do you know what a 10-carat diamond ring costs?
Normal ain’t an option.
Now I don’t pretend to be a marriage counselor, but I can tell you one thing: our real problems don’t have shit to do with how I show love, whether or not I need attention, who pays the cable bill, takes out the fucking garbage, or leaves the toilet seat up. Our real problems are my lifeboats and her insane jealousy. Throw in our backburner issues, my drinking, and her temper, and you have a melodrama in the making.
There is one woman’s-magazine upside to all this: Michelle is really good at expressing her emotions.
As of right now, Michelle and I are still hanging in there. Last I heard, she has decided not to file because “it’s not over.” Me, I’m hanging in because Michelle is Michelle.
As many problems as we’ve had, I still put her right up there with Carmen. But Carmen was a shooting star. You can say anything you want about Michelle, but the girl does have staying power.
“I’ve been by his side. I’ve stayed there. I’ve been through a lot of crap with him, and I haven’t left,” she told a reporter.
“How long have you been together?” the reporter asked.
“Five and a half years—it’ll be six years.”
“So you’re his longest relationship.”
“Uh huh—and his closest.”
And as far as my friends are concerned, “the most fucked-up.” These days, it’s hard to find Michelle fans in my posse. “That’s his last infection that he needs to cure himself of,” said one. So what’s the general drift?
She’s a gold digger.
“She left her husband and went for the bigger, better deal,” a friend said.
She’s jealous.
“That’s a jealous girl. She’s very, very jealous,” said a friend.
“That would be the understatement of the century,” seconded another friend. “That’s like saying Dennis can kind of rebound .”
She trapped me by getting pregnant.
“Michelle knew what she was doing when she had those kids. Ka-ching! Let’s forget the pill today, and let’s cash the fuck in,” said a friend. “I don’t have any respect for a woman that uses kids as a meal ticket.”
All this is pretty much bullshit. Take the money thing. Hello. One of the kids was planned. And if Michelle was just in it for the dough, she could have cashed in a long time ago. As for the jealousy, I give her good reason for that, and it’s understandable right up until the point her hand meets my jaw or she coughs up that “He’s my husband, we have babies,” bullshit and creates an ugly scene.
While my friends are hammering Michelle, they’re usually giving me a free ride, saying, “Oh that’s just Dennis being Dennis,” and she knew what she was getting into before she married him. Hey, that’s what friends are for—but the truth is, I ain’t exactly a Fat Burger with homemade onion rings myself. The philandering, the drinking—Michelle has put up with her share of crap, and we are still together, much to the amazement of my friends.
“Those two don’t belong together. They should have called it quits a long time ago,” one friend told a reporter. “Neither one of ’em is going to get out of it alive.
“They do have a dysfunctional relationship,” he continued. “If you can call it a relationship. It’s just pure dysfunction.”
“It’s nuts,” said another friend. “Their relationship is completely fucking nuts.”
I know my friends just want what’s best for me, but sometimes I get tired of people who think they know what I want and need better than I do. I know my body. I know my mind. I know my soul better than anybody else. And when someone sits there and says, “I know you, Dennis.” I’m like, “Oh, great. You know me? Great.”
Reality Check: You don’t know me.
If you did, you’d know I love Michelle more than anything in the world.
Over the past five or so years, Darren and Thaer have come to understand this. They know how I feel about Michelle and that, as the mother of my children, she will always be in our lives. So I can honestly say that, at the end of the day, Darren and Thaer really do care about Michelle and the kids, and all of us on “Team Rodman” are pulling together, trying to make it work—up to a point. There comes a time when the best thing to do, even for our closest friends, is just to get out of the way and let the two of us work it out.
For even if Michelle and I do have a fucked-up relationship, it’s our fucked-up relationship. It may be psychotic, dysfunctional, this, that. But as Michelle said, the one thing you can’t say is, “It’s over.”
So just let us be. And I promise that if it ever does fall completely apart, you guys will be the first to hear. Just listen for breaking glass, a thunderous slap, and one last cry of “He’s my husband, we have babies.”