Chicago, May 23, 2005. It’s 10:45 p.m., and I’m running late— not the first time. The changeover from Dennis into “Dennis Rodman” is taking a little longer than usual. It’s a top problem. I’ve got the tails of a solid black, button-front shirt tied off just below my nipples revealing the tattoo of two charging bulls, the ripped stomach, the pierced navel, but it’s still not right.
This top problem had come up about five o’clock after this pretty white girl showed up at our suite at the Allegro Hotel toting a manila grocery bag—a fucking grocery bag—full of sequins, buttons, seamstress supplies, with the job of converting a T-shirt supplied by the event sponsor, a leading rum company, into some kind of Dennis-Rodman-fabulous top. Well the T-shirt hadn’t made it, and somebody got on the phone trying to track it down while the pretty white girl pulled out this stack of hats. I’d asked for a pinstripe. I try the thing on, and it’s sitting on top of my head like a donut perched on a bowling ball. The pretty white girl says something like, “You need an extra large.” No shit—most six-foot-eight guys would be wearing your larger sizes. I would have said something, but I was too busy checking out her piercings.
She’s got nose rings, lip rings, earrings, brow rings—silver metal sticking out everywhere. And she’s got multicolored hair that looks like woven cotton candy, and she’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a jacket, and a pair of platform shoes in some neon color—seems like it was lime green—that looked like the gold ones I wore with the psychedelic Cleopatra outfit for my New Year’s Eve bash back in 1997. Long story short, this is a girl who would look good on my arm— if I had a taste for pretty white girls.
That’s a joke.
So the pretty white girl is talking, and she says the folks who sent her over said that the “rum company”T-shirts were too big— that “they would just hang on me.” This came from people who’d been in the same room with Dennis Rodman.
Let me give you an idea just how fucking dumb that is:
We’re riding up to the suite in a packed elevator, and the guy behind me—this six-foot-something reporter who’s following me around—is bitching that my butt is hitting him in the chest. He could just nod and bite a chunk out of my ass. So Dennis Rodman is tall. There’s more. I’ve been lifting weights religiously for about 20 years now, and so Dennis Rodman is also wide. There’s not an extra-large T-shirt on the planet that would be hanging on my ass.
The pretty white girl is going on, something about mesh T-shirts, cut-outs so my tattoos—front, back, arms, and side—will show, and I’m counting the girl’s piercings, trying to figure out who has more, me or her, not that you can ever be sure with your clothes on and your legs crossed. It’s looking like she’s the winner.
Anyway, all this turns out to be a waste of time. The T-shirt never arrives, and I tell the pretty white girl to forget about the mesh shirt. So, left to my own wardrobe devices, it’s now 10:50 p.m. in Chicago; I’m still late, still having a top problem. I stroll into the suite living room and ask Darren—Darren Prince, my friend and agent, the guy who’s going to negotiate my way back in the NBA— how the top looks. Now Darren is a great agent, but when it comes to fashion, he’s just another clueless white guy.
“Okay, whatever,” he says.
The boy just don’t get it.
“Should I wear the shiny shirt?” I ask.
Darren looks stumped. He checks out his watch. It’s his job to get me places on time when he’s not negotiating my way back into the NBA.
Fuck it. I throw the shiny black shirt on over the tied-off black shirt, and we’re out the door.
These days Dennis is content to ride around in your standard full-sized passenger car, but “Dennis Rodman” is still riding in style. And tonight not even a limo will cut it. At first, I think the thing is some new model of Bentley or Rolls. But this sleek silver car with copper highlights, which looks like an SUV on steroids, is something called a Maybach, an upscale Mercedes retailing for about $350,000, the driver tells us. The driver is upscale himself. He’s a Harvard graduate—a basketball player no less—who played in the CBA. An Ivy League graduate is driving around Dennis Rodman, a proud dropout from Southeastern Oklahoma State. How fucked up is that?
What I like about the Maybach is it has plenty of legroom, and for a guy who is all legs, that matters. Not that I’ll be getting one any time soon. While I’m doing all right, my days of swapping Bentleys when they get dusty are over—at least for the moment.
So the driver sees a little open road—in downtown Chicago, mind you—and decides to demonstrate the Maybach’s power. He stomps on the car’s zero-to-sixty-in-four-seconds gas, and it feels like falling backwards off the high dive. Damn! I’ll take two.
Minutes later, we pull up to a club called Reserve located in a brick building just across the street from the EL—elevated train. The professional autograph people are at the curb waving shit they want signed, but we bypass them as the security guy leads us around to the side. We’re out of the car and up a set of steep, dimly lit stairs to the back entrance. There’s a five-minute wait while the security people get it together, then the door flies open to a wall of noise.
The place is fucking slammed, people shoulder to shoulder, pushing, shoving, screaming when they spot me. The dance music is ear-splitting. First time I saw a crowd like this, I thought, “No way we’re getting through,” but, like always, the security guys surround us—me, my two bodyguards, one of the bodyguard’s girlfriends, her friend, and the reporter bringing up the rear—then make their move. Reaching out with horizontal arms held shoulder high, they keep us in, outsiders out, as we steadily snake our way through the crowd to a small stage where the DJ whips the crowd into a frenzy. Out of nowhere, four dancers appear and fall in line behind me.
The dancers are stenciled from the bikini line to the neck with body paint—some kind of rum-company motif that seems to be different for each girl. They’ve also got fake black tattoos running up and down their arms and legs. Then there’s the pasties. I’m not sure what they’re made of—looks like smoky plastic, just like at the strip club the night before. But if seeing open-air nipples is your thing, better stay out of Chicago.
The DJ shouts something. People scream. I shout something. People scream. The DJ steps aside, I take off my shirt—what top problem?—revealing what a lifetime of weightlifting can do for a skinny freak’s body. People scream.
Folks are always asking me what I did to get this buff body. What kind of steroid cocktail am I using? None. What kind of top secret, super-athlete diet I’m on? None. While I do eat sushi for lunch most every day, the only real diet I’m on is a steady diet of pain. I work out at least an hour a day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Who says Dennis Rodman isn’t disciplined?
Back at Reserve, I spin around, showing off the X-rated tattoo that fills up most of my back—a spread-eagled beauty pleasuring herself. People scream. I put my arms around the shoulders of the four dancers—two on each side—who are now toasting me with shot glasses full of the rum company’s latest offering. I wave around a black bottle of the stuff, just like the 19 I autographed that afternoon back at the hotel. The crowd goes wild.
Welcome to “Rodman World,” a daylight-to-dawn adult amusement park.
The good folks at a Chicago-based event marketing agency have paid me five figures to help launch the rum company’s newest.
“Promotional work,” Darren calls it.
Basically, I show up, let them use my name and picture for advertising, posters, invitations, whatever, and make media appearances. This morning I did two television shows, two radio interviews, and talked to a bunch of newspaper reporters.
Back in the day, corporate America thought I was too unreliable, too flaky for this kind of work. They wouldn’t get near my ass. Now I’m still edgy, off the wall, daring, this, that, but it’s all dressed up, and you can count on me to show up sober and more or less on time. Not that you should be looking for me in the next Disney World campaign. But if your image is a little bit out there, a little bit renegade, Dennis Rodman is your man.
Take GoldenPalace.com, the online gambling casino. I’ve just signed a lucrative, three-year deal with those guys that—among other things—has me running with the bulls in Pamplona, cruising across America in a customized Lamborghini, and hosting something called a “wife-carrying competition” in Finland. You call this work? Shit, I should be paying them. The sober, but still edgy Dennis also has a deal with The Upper Deck Company, the world’s largest sports licensing and memorabilia company, as well as with adidas, which you know about. Hard to believe: adidas. I can remember a time when I would have kissed their collective asses just for the free shoes and workout gear.
Meanwhile, back at Reserve, everyone is getting his money’s worth. The crowd, the media, the hype—America’s number-one bad ass is endorsing this rum company’s bad-ass drink. It’s a perfect match. And until Darren negotiates my way back into the NBA, I’ll be paying the tab being “Dennis Rodman,” America’s fuck-the-world, number-one bad boy — the man who puts the “free” in freedom. Anybody don’t like it, they can kiss my black ass. That’s the rap.
There’ll be a second stop downstairs at Reserve after the security guys do the snake-through-the-crowd routine again, one body guard taking a pretty good two-handed lick from a drunk woman who didn’t like being pushed aside. The guy didn’t even flinch. Soon we move back upstairs and are seated in a roped-off VIP area.
I sit in one corner of a U-shaped sectional sofa. I’m separated from the crowd by a couple of security guards and a coffee table loaded with carafes of rum, ice, glasses, lemons, limes, mixers, whatever. Behind me and to the right, another security guy is sitting on a ledge. There’s room for two visitors to sit beside me—one on the left and one on the right. My people occupy the seats farther down the couch on both sides: the roving reporter, my security guy, two of his women friends, and another security guy. They’ve got me surrounded.
The four dancers show up on the ledge—more of a runway— behind me, still doing their thing. After a while, they turn into little more than writhing wallpaper, and folks are more likely to stare out the plate glass window at a passing elevated train. Meanwhile the video screen behind my head is playing a rum commercial featuring guess who? Over and over. Music blaring. A beautiful girl in a short, strapless, black velvet dress is handing out glasses with double shots of the new rum.
Shirt back on and shades in place, I settle in, light up a cigar, and host a continuing round of visitors. The usual. I sign autographs, pose for photographs, chat with the people the security and marketing people let through—friends, strangers, media—I do a T.V. interview. I yap. They yap. Flash bulbs. People in. People out. Girls. Men. Women. Young. Old. No boys. Not everybody makes the cut. Over to my left, sitting on the other side of the reporter, some gorgeous young girl, brunette, stares at me, fucking stares at me, all but drooling, for like half an hour straight—you have to admire the focus— before she gives up and goes on her way.
One of the dancers bends over and shouts, “Havin’ a good time?”
“Oh yeah!” somebody yells above the noise.
“Well, I’m sweating my ass off,” she says.
From what I can see, that’s a fucking shame. There’s one thing missing from the picture these days. A few years ago, a reporter from The New York Times reported that he saw me down 19 shots in four hours before he stopped counting. Back then I was determined to treat every day like it was New Year’s Eve and the Mardi Gras. You name it—sex, booze, fun—too much was never enough. Since I wasn’t hurting anybody but myself, I figured, “No harm, no foul.” No more.
In October 2003, the boozing started getting in the way of some things I wanted to do more than party (I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth). The “party animal” had turned into a just plain old “animal,” and I was in danger of losing everything if I didn’t rein in the beast.
It all came to a head in—where else—Las Vegas.