When Steve-O and Mike Tyson smoked cocaine and solved race relations
A genuinely relentless force of chaos and comedy combines, Steve-O of Jackass fame might be best known for his ridiculous stunts. They persistently teeter on the border between courage and insanity, and his careless attitude has established a reputation for all manner of craziness.
Perhaps that commitment to fearless stunts came from a period of heavy drug and alcohol addiction, which Steve-O has never hidden from. His vulnerable spirit has led to several highly publicised incidents of depravity and recklessness.
With great fame naturally comes the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in entertainment. Steve-O was once privy to a night of cocaine talk with the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Mike Tyson, a moment in which two very different worlds collided.
“We spent three hours locked in a bathroom together,” Steve-O once told GQ. “There was this house party in the Hollywood Hills. And I remember I was distinctly not invited, but I showed up and rang the doorbell. Mike Tyson opened up the door. I said, ‘Hey, is it cool if I come in?’ And he said, ‘You got any coke?’ And I told him, ‘’Yeah, dude, I got a bunch.’”
Later into the evening, Steve-O found himself locked in the bathroom with the legendary boxer, at which point Tyson showed him an ingenious way of taking coke. After asking for a cigarette, Tyson “rolled it back and forth between his fingers, and all the tobacco fell out, and he kept doing it until nothing was left except a tube of paper connected to the cylinder. And he turned it right side up and started scooping cocaine into it.”
With the cigarette packed out, or “fucking full as fuck”, as Steve-O put it, the pair smoked the “whole deal” and got high out of their minds. It was then that Steve-O and Tyson began setting the world to rights, beginning with the touchy subject of race relations, with Steve-O kicking things off.
He noted, “I said to him, my exact words, ‘You know, Mike, I don’t have a racist bone in my body, but I like to consider myself a n—-r.’ I’ll never forget, he said, ‘You ask me, the definition of that word is anybody who uses it.’ And I was like, ‘Damn! Iron Mike, deep as fuck!’ [We’re] just sort of philosophising about how to make the world a better place, and it was just fucking incredible, man.”
The next time the pair saw one another was fittingly in a psychiatric ward, followed by a Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen. Summing up his relationship with the iconic fighter, Steve-O signed off, “I don’t see him a whole lot, but whenever I do, it’s great, man. He’s just the nicest guy. He really is.”
