Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy

The week after I signed my first N.F.L. contract with the Dallas Cowboys, I checked into the dormitory at their training camp in Thousand Oaks, California, carrying a little tack--some reefer, some acid and a couple hits of THC. I had no inkling of what that camp would be like, no inkling whatsoever. I had played football for 15 years, but I'd never seen it done the way Tom Landry did it. I didn't even know what a computer was before I got to the Cowboys' camp, and I suddenly found myself in a world of computerized systems. There was a quality-control system, a system of execution, a system of consistency, a system of percentages and a system of tendencies. Tendencies, man--that's what Landry is all about. He has the response to any tendency in football. Why, Landry does so much research that he knows what George Allen is thinking at night while Allen is sitting alone in his house.

So I show up at Thousand Oaks believing that the first time out on the field, all I got to do is just go and kick somebody's ass. I mean, that's all there is to it--just come out and kick ass. Our basic defense when I played in college was a Five-Two Sic'm. Five-Two Sic'm generally played the whole game, with only minor adjustments. But the Cowboys wanted me to sit in the classroom for four hours a day, looking at film, taking tests, learning these defenses called 31 Safety Zone or 48 Banjo-Flex Weak, or 41-46, Flex Strong, Flex Weak, Inside-Outside, Fly, Jet, Tango. And mind you, all this was just everyday routine stuff you had to know to really begin to understand the system.

The Dallas linebacker coach was Jerry Tubbs, a good old guy from Oklahoma. Tubbs never says a bad word about anybody personally, but he's cold when it comes to rating ability. He'll just look at a player's moves and comment, "He's sorry" or, "He's good." Jerry was something special to me, because no matter how bad I talked, he saw through to my ability. Then there were my linebacker friends--D. D. Lewis, Bob Breunig, Mike Hegman and the rest--the guys I sat around with in the classroom every day, who started telling me I was either dumb or wasn't trying. But it wasn't that I couldn't learn the system. I just didn't want to learn it, because I already knew I could play.

I don't give a damn what defense you call it. Just bring me that motherfucker out of the corner and I'll have his ass. Fuck the Banjo Flex defense. I mean, you can sing The Star-Spangled Banner while you're calling your plays, but I'm gonna tear your motherfucking ass up with London Bridge Is Falling Down. One of my gifts was that I was always around the ball. I had a knack for it. I mean, I loved to get around that ball. I'll stab you right in the face, nail you. And a loose ball, I'll take off with it in a minute. You drop that football and I'm gone with it. Bye.

So, of course, I thought the Cowboys should have started me. But they just put me on the specialty teams, and I played damn good there, too. Against the St. Louis Cardinals that year, I took a hand-off on a reverse at the three-yard line and went up the side line all the way. Ninety-seven yards for a touchdown, with high-top shoes on and a hip pointer. I had just gotten a shot for it at halftime from Dr. Knight and that put me on top of the world. I spiked the ball clear over the top of the goal post, the first slam dunk ever in the N.F.L.

My rookie year in Dallas, there were still a lot of night clubs that didn't want blacks, and black men dating white women weren't very popular, either. The Cowboy management's attitude was ... well, let's just say I saw some decisions made about a couple of black rookies with white wives that had nothing to do with football ability. But I dated a few white women, anyway; I was just discreet about it. Plus, I'm so big, so intimidating, such a giant of a black man, people just didn't want to waste their energy fucking with me. So during my first year in pro football, I did pretty much what I wanted--a little reefer, a little acid, a little speed and a whole lot of women.

I broke up with my old girlfriend from college and found a new lady named Ruth, a black nurse who halfway moved in and took care of me. (Of course, I always had other women outside.) Probably the worst thing about my first year in Dallas was figuring out my income tax. I earned about $150,000, but I spent a lot, too.

All things considered, it was a great season. I ran a hell of a reverse on the first play of Super Bowl X, the Super Bowl of '75. It went for 48 yards, I think, and I almost broke it but was tackled by Pittsburgh's goddamn kicker, Roy Gerela. That should have been the story: A guy comes all the way from the ghetto of Austin, through a little black college, to be number-one draft pick by America's Team, goes to the Super Bowl and runs the first play of the game for a big gain. Sounds nice, huh? It should have ended right there.

Because during that Super Bowl week in Miami, I had my first taste of genuine stone-pure Peruvian flake cocaine.

•

One day in Houston, just before the end of the 1980 season, Bum Phillips, the Oilers coach, said something that really set off my paranoia.

We were having a team meeting and Bum suddenly said, "You know, fellas, I want to share something with y'all today," but he was looking right at me. "You know we can all learn to be successful, but we don't learn how to handle success." I felt like jumping across the room and hitting him right between the eyes when he said that. Of course, I was coked out of my mind, which made me paranoid to begin with, but I felt he was singling me out. Anyway, he was only half right. It's true that nobody teaches you how to handle success, but nobody teaches you how to be successful, either. At least nobody taught me.

My momma, Violet Faye Henderson, always said, "Nobody deserves credit for Thomas' success in pro football but Thomas and God." And she's right.

I was born March 1, 1953, in Austin, Texas, at 12:05 A.M.--partying time. My natural father's name is Billy Goree, but he didn't raise me. He and Momma just had a one-night stand. One day, when he walked her home from work, my grandmother was away at a prayer meeting. The way my mother tells it, there was a big white swinging chair on the porch. And that's where Thomas Henderson started, right there on that chair.

Anyway, I was raised by Momma and Mr. Rivers, who I called Dad, even though I knew he wasn't my real father. Daddy pumped gas in the same service station for 27 years and stayed with my mother for 20. They even got married, eventually. There were four of us, in all: Momma, Mr. Rivers, me and my little sister, Cookie, living in one room on 13th and Chicon, right off the Cut. (The Cut is 12th and Chicon in Austin. There're a lot of bars there, loud talk, wine drinking and fights all the time.) There was a partition in our place to set off the stove and the toilet, and at night Momma hung a blanket in the middle of the room to divide it. Me and Cookie slept on a mattress on the floor on one side and Momma and Mr. Rivers slept in bed on the other.

By the time I was five, I started to get out in the street, hanging around with a bunch of other little boys, playing ball and wandering around the neighborhood. I was pretty adventurous. Once I started first grade, though, a change came over me and I was really scared of the big kids. To me, all big kids were ugly. I was used to either my own people or the kids on my street. I was just terrified of the big, ugly kids who used to run me home from school every day. Momma would whip me because I wouldn't fight back, but I just couldn't do it. I was afraid of getting hit.

By third grade, I started to get bigger, so I wasn't so afraid of the older kids anymore. After school, I collected and sold pop bottles, slopped hogs, shined shoes, swept the barbershop, racked balls in the pool hall, anything. I was always busy, always hustling and always talking a lot of shit. I used to ask people to lend me money on my future. I'd say, "When I'm famous, I'll pay you back." They'd laugh and lay a quarter on me. At one point, I was actually selling stocks in myself. Somebody'd give me a dollar and I'd give him a piece of paper saying he'd bought one share of stock in Thomas Henderson.

At school, I was the starting quarterback on the playground team and was really getting good at football. I could play with the big boys, the upperclassmen, the guys from fourth and fifth grade. In games, I'd go crazy, diving for balls on the pavement, skinning my knees all to hell. I was also crazy into hide-and-go-get-it with the girls.

Between having some money in my pocket, living in the house and playing football, I made it to seventh grade without getting in much trouble. I did hang out at the pool hall a lot, but Momma always came and got me with her metal flyswatter and beat my ass all the way back home.

When I turned 12, though, it seems like everything got bad all at once. First, my mother said she wanted me to go to a white school, so she sent me to University Junior High, which was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. I was the only boy in my sixth-grade class who didn't go on to the all-black junior high for seventh grade. My partners called me square and crazy for goin' to a school that was some kind of experimental project--advanced teaching techniques or something. There were blacks and Mexicans and a lot of whites. I felt sorry for the white kids, who were always getting their asses kicked by somebody.

I also felt funny there myself. All the kids dressed better than I did, they had better bicycles, lived in better houses. They'd invite me to spend the night at their place, but I couldn't invite them overnight with me. They would have had to sleep on pissy sheets, and we never had a shower in our house, just a number-three washtub that Momma bathed us in. So it was like my life was in two halves and I couldn't get them together.

It was about that time that my parents started arguing more than usual. Now, they had always argued and fought. Every two weeks or so, one or the other of them would drink too much and then they'd go at it--usually because one of them thought the other was looking at someone else. My father would pin Momma down and hit her right in the face with his fist. I'd try to pull him off or hit him with something, but he always pushed me away. I'd go cry on my bed with my sister until the fight was over.

Finally, one night, Momma just shot him. Daddy had been drinking a lot (continued on page 290) Cocaine Cowboy (continued from page 180) more than usual, and that night he was piss mad. Us kids were asleep when he jumped on Momma and started to hit her. I got up and tried to stop 'em from fighting, and wound up outside the front door with Daddy. Then Momma came out carrying a .22-caliber rifle Daddy had just bought for Christmas and she let him have it, right there in front of me. The bullet passed just over me, he fell, and I went to my momma. I didn't feel anything. The police came and arrested my mother that evening, but they released her later that night, because Daddy wouldn't press any charges. Even though he was hurt pretty bad, I couldn't feel too sorry for him. The way I looked at it, if he didn't have sense enough to run when he saw that gun coming, he deserved to get shot. He had a choice. We all have choices.

I guess everything that was going on at home had something to do with the fact that I was flunking at UJH. But I finally made it to Anderson High School, and during those years--like, from 12 to 15--I was learning, I was watching. I saw the grownups around me working in some factory or maybe just working odd jobs. People grew up and did the same things their parents did. If the father was a farmer, the son was a farmer; the father a roofer, the son a roofer. My father pumped gas, and I didn't want to pump gas. So I decided to be a burglar.

I asked my daddy, who was a pretty good auto mechanic, to teach me how to hot-wire a car. I don't think he realized why I wanted to know, but he showed me. Every weekend, me and a couple of partners would "borrow" a car, drive through the white neighborhoods, break into houses and steal TVs and stereo equipment. We'd take 'em to pawnshops and the man would give us maybe $20 or $30. I did this all the way through freshman and sophomore years, then one night we got caught in a house by the owner and I got shot at. That scared me so much--I mean, I would have pissed on myself if I hadn't been running so fast--it put a permanent freeze on my burgling career.

Meanwhile, my grades got so bad that I wasn't eligible for football, which was the only thing I really liked about school. I decided to get the hell out of Austin. My grandma Nettie Mae--actually, she's my cousin, but she seemed like a grandma to me--lived in Oklahoma and I had always thought she was rich, so I wrote to her and begged her to let me come live with her. Of course, she wasn't rich, but she was better off than my family. She said I could come, provided I did what she told me.

And I have to say, Nettie Mae helped me by trying to straighten me out. I'd been fooling around with bad drugs in Austin--snorting heroin, drinking Robitussin, smoking reefer, dropping pills. I knew Nettie Mae wouldn't stand for that, so I gave that up when I went to Oklahoma. I got a driver's license, found myself a job with a truck line and bought a car. I didn't even think about stealing, because Nettie Mae would give me anything within reason. Back in Austin, there was nothing, man. Rock bottom.

My junior and senior years were good for me. My life had a little structure to it, you know. I really wanted to play football, but because of my grades, I still wasn't eligible. So I filmed the games with my welding teacher, Mr. Seward, who took his movie camera to every Douglas High football game and gave the films to the coach. The more games Mr. Seward took me to, the more I wanted to play.

During my senior year in high school, my grades finally qualified me for the team. From the first practice, I realized that I was going to be excellent at football.

I was outstanding that year. I played linebacker, and the local press nicknamed me Wild Man Henderson. Any kid who came around my end, I had his ass. If the quarterback took too long, I'd have his ass. At the end of the season, I got a few letters from coaches, but nothing solid. My dream was to go to college on a scholarship and be a star, but no school seemed to want me.

Instead of giving up, though, I drove to Langston University, a small all-black school in Langston, Oklahoma, and asked the coach for a tryout. It was already September and I hadn't even filled out an application, but the coach, Albert Schoats, let me in on a team scrimmage and he was so impressed with me that he told me to move on campus. After about a month, he had me all straightened out with financial aid, room and board, books and a job on the work-study program, and I wanted to live up to what he expected. Schoats and his line coach, Big Daddy Nivens, encouraged me. I felt like they believed they could get great things out of me. I even studied, 'cause I knew they were going to play me.

The main reason I did so well at Langston was coach Nivens. Big Daddy was a black, burly son of a bitch, who looked like King Kong's little twin. He's the kind of dude who'll call you mother-fucker in practice, but he's fair. He liked me because I played good football for him. Of course, the other side was that Big Daddy heard around campus that I was doing reefer. (After I got away from Nettie Mae, I got back into it.) Little did he know that I also got into psychedelics, dropping a lot of sunshine acid. Still, my first season on the team in 1971, I was all-conference and for two of the next three years, I was Little All-American. On the campus, I was a star from the first year. I even had a dentist put a gold star on my front tooth. By the end of my sophomore year, I was the man. Everybody on campus knew me. I was gettin' all the pussy, all the virgins. (I loved those virgins and I know they all still remember me, too.)

Big Daddy kept me from getting too far out of line. He loved to high-side you on the football field, really get on your ass: "What you doin', man? What are you doin'? This ain't football, this is knockerball or something, but it ain't football." But off the field, he was always talking to me about Christ, talking about the Lord all the time. I knew Big Daddy was good to me, even though I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me about Jesus until much later.

The Langston team was 11--0 my junior year and 1--9 when I was a senior (a lot of our starters from the year before had graduated). But I was Little All-American both years, and in the middle of my senior year, I was drafted in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys.

I was kind of a surprise pick. Sports-writers outside Oklahoma were saying "Thomas Who?" But they figured if Tom Landry's computers said I was that good, I must really be a monster. That day, I went out and bought a new Corvette--just went and told a dealer that I'd been drafted number one by the Cowboys. He gave me a car to drive away in, simple as that. Didn't even ask for a down payment.

I went back to Langston and bought five cases of wine for all the fellas, then drove up and down the sidewalks on campus, passing out bottles. For the next few weeks, I was walking around campus talking shit. But then, I was getting everything I wanted, everything going my way. I was getting all the pussy I wanted, all the pussy I hadn't got. I was getting quickies. I wouldn't even take off my shoes. I was also doing THC and acid and a lot of reefer. I even got into some threesomes with white chicks from the University of Oklahoma. I did everything because I was going to be rich. And everybody else knew I was going to be rich. Forever.

•

While I was in Miami for the Super Bowl at the end of my rookie season, I went over to a club in Fort Lauderdale to catch The Pointer Sisters. I got to sit right in the front row every night, making eyes and putting the moves on Anita Pointer. I was star-struck. After a while, me and Anita were introduced and she invited me up to her room. A friend of hers laid this pure Peruvian flake on her, and I tried it and liked it fine. I'd had coke before, but it was shit compared with this. She and I started dating, and I spent a lot of time with her at her place in Sausalito for a while.

Now that I look back, I can't believe how country I was when I met her. I had seven polyester suits made up by some designer, real corny suits, and I wore them in Sausalito when I was with her. I used to put them on every day and walk around the house and let her look at me. I would say, "Am I clean, man?" And then I would reflect on how clean I was. She was wearing silks and gabardines and wools and cashmeres and there I was with seven double-knit polyesters. You know, I was a joke, but she didn't tell me. She just quietly helped me out. She was the first person who put gold on my neck. I was wearing this silver dolphin on a silver chain and she just politely bought me some gold for my birthday.

My second year in Dallas, 1976, was another good year for me socially. In fact, it may have been my best year all around. I hardly got in any trouble at all. I was doing a little reefer, a little coke now and then, but the coke was still no big thing. I'd get maybe a gram a week and do it mostly on weekends. My main thing during the football season, though, was sex, not drugs. The only outrageous things I did were the things I did with women.

In the first part of the season, I hooked up again with Ruth, but that winter I also dated the upper-class, college-educated chicks from the black side of South Dallas, who all the brothers called the unfuckables. I would take them out and fuck them.

But then, by that time, I only dealt with the best--the best steak, the best seafood, the best caviar, the works. Somebody would ask me, "What's happening?" and I'd say, "Anything I want to happen, baby, anything I want."

I remember during that year, I went back to Austin to see Momma. I saw all my old partners on the Cut. They were so stunned, they couldn't figure out who the hell I was, couldn't put it together, me having gone from there, drinking Robitussin and doing rip-offs to playing pro ball on national television. One guy asked me right out: "Hey, man, how is it you drink all that wine and be shittin' milk?" I couldn't explain it to him.

About the middle of the 1976 season, I moved in with Ed "Too Tall" Jones. Too Tall is a clean liver in a lot of ways: takes no drugs, only drinks beer. But Too Tall is a Pisces like me and, like me, he loves sex. If you were to charge him with some crime, it would have to be for screwing more women than any one man. Too Tall dated one particular woman on and off, but his favorite thing was to go out and round up five, six, sometimes ten or eleven girls, and have these orgies. Just me and Too Tall and all that pussy.

We almost always had four or five women in our house at the same time, morning and night. As soon as a chick would come in, we'd have her change into a T-shirt and that's all. (Usually, it'd be a Cowboys T-shirt.) Then, from the T-shirt, it was an easy step to naked. Every night after practice, Too Tall and I had a scene. The girls got out of their clothes and we had them on the floor, on the pool table, wherever. But I never could keep up with Too Tall. Many nights when I was played out, asleep next to some chick, he would come into my room and tap me on the foot and say, "You mind if I get me some?"

On Too Tall's birthday one year, I gave him a blonde, a redhead and a brunette. When he came home, they were all spread out for him. I admit I shared his birthday present with him. After all, one man is too much for any one woman, but two women are a little too much for one man, and three women are ridiculous. I know I'm too much for one woman and not enough for two. Three is out of my league. I figure one and a half are just about right for the average guy.

I wasn't a starter for the Cowboys that year, either, and to be honest, I still didn't know the system well enough to start. I played specialty teams again and had another pretty good season on the field, but we didn't go to the Super Bowl and that made the whole year a letdown.

My third season with Dallas was the first year I started. I came to training camp on the last day, instead of coming early, like I had the two years before. I figured I was a veteran, and so I didn't need to come early. I was tired of it. During the off season, Lee Roy Jordan and Dave Edwards had retired, which left two linebacker spots open. There were three guys competing for the two spots: Bob Breunig, Randy White and me. When I got to camp, they'd already slated Breunig and White. They wanted me to work for it. Finally, the day before the season started, Landry announced that he was benching one of the veteran linebackers and putting me in there. I think I made only three interceptions all that season, but I knocked down a hell of a lot of passes and made the all-N.F.C. team.

In the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans that year, we beat Denver 27--10 in the Super Bowl. I had a badly strained neck muscle and really shouldn't have played, but I ended up making seven tackles. It was after that game that Thomas Henderson became Hollywood Henderson. The guys on the team had been calling me that for a couple of years, kind of like Hot Dog Henderson. They teased me with it because I was always going to L.A. whenever I had a chance. But after we beat the Broncos (whose front line was nicknamed the Orange Crush), I got hold of some Orange Crush pop cans, and while the television cameras were rolling and trophies were being passed out, I was in the background with this can, turning it, bending it, squeezing it and gritting my teeth.

The next day, the newspapers carried a picture of me with that can of Orange Crush, and the captions said I was known as Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson. The day after that, I rented a limousine, bought some cocaine and went to L.A. And that was when I really started snorting. I stayed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, kept the limousine and went to see everybody I knew, carrying caviar and coke. I was the world champion. I had met a lot of famous people through the Pointer Sisters--Richard Pryor and The Temptations and a whole bunch of other singers--and I went to see them all. My coke intake went up to about a gram a day for the two weeks I partied in L.A. and, what with having the limousine around the clock, I guess I spent maybe $500 a day while I was there. But everybody knew me. Everybody knew that Hollywood Henderson was on the rise.

When I went back to Dallas, I went down to only two, three grams a week, maybe half a gram a day. It wasn't as bad as the gram a day I did in L.A. but was up from a gram a week I'd been doing during the season. Still, it wasn't uncontrollable. I didn't carry it with me all the time like I did later. I'd usually just take a huge snort before I went out somewhere, leave the rest at home and forget about it.

One reason I didn't do it too much was that I'd begun dating a lady named Wyetta pretty regularly and she didn't do it. Also, I was still living with Too Tall and although he wasn't the type of cat to say anything if he saw me snorting, I felt uncomfortable doing it around him, because he didn't do it. So most of 1977, I was still blowing it alone most of the time.

I was always a loner on the team, anyway. I didn't have too many what you would call buddies on the Cowboys except Too Tall. Besides, I don't think any player really wanted the other guys to know his personal business. We were all made very conscious of our image as America's Team. So the most we did together in the way of recreation was have a few beers or maybe a joint now and then. But, man, nobody even talked about cocaine. Some of the other guys may have been doing it, but I wouldn't have noticed. I was too much into being Thomas Henderson to pay much attention to anybody else.

The summer before my fourth season, I earned some extra money playing basketball for an exhibition team, the Dallas Hoopsters, and going on speaking engagements. That summer, I bought me a custom Mercedes-Benz, which I drove to training camp for my fourth season as a Cowboy.

Me and Too Tall had been having scenes nearly every day during the summer, and we kept it up through training camp, though not as often. There were four or five dorm buildings out there, and the coaches didn't keep close check on them. A lot of guys brought one woman in now and then, but only me and Too Tall managed to sneak in five or six at a time. Most of the time, though, when I wasn't doing scenes, I was seeing Wyetta.

I had brought a lot of coke to camp with me, so I was always hung over during practices and meetings. I was sleeping through the meetings all the time. I just wasn't concerned with what was happening. I finally felt like I knew the system and I just wanted to play.

Overall, I think I had a great training camp. I felt sharp and strong when the season started. I even don't remember the first game of that year, but I'll never forget the second.

We were playing the Giants in New York. On the first play of the second quarter, they called a slant and I caught it. The halfback was running the ball, with the fullback blocking on me. As the play unfolded, here comes Larry Csonka, Big Zonk, the fullback, right at me. When I put my shoulder into him, I had my right foot off the ground and my left ankle, which had no support, just popped. It rolled over, all the way over, and it felt like somebody had shot me in the ankle. The play didn't go far, because the halfback fell over me and Csonka. But I had to leave the game.

Landry kept me on the side lines until half time before sending me to get X-rayed. Meanwhile, the fans in the stands were giving me shit, razzing me, you know. I gave the crowd the finger. I was in so much pain when I left the stadium, I can't really describe it.

The X rays showed I hadn't broken the ankle, but I popped all the outside lateral ligaments. I had hoped I'd be ready to play in a week, but I could hardly walk.

And to make matters worse, the coaches had told me to come back in the morning. They wanted me to get up and come over there and practice, and I couldn't even get out of bed, couldn't even raise my leg up. They didn't care. They just wanted me there, even if I had to come on crutches. And I felt like I was dying. I mean, dying.

The ankle was four times its normal size and throbbing so bad I couldn't even put it on the floor. The doctors wouldn't give me anything stronger for the pain than Tylenol with Codeine, so I began doing a lot of cocaine. I mean, I was snorting maybe two grams a day for about a week. Then I began going in to get treatments on the ankle, which were nothing but ice on it for a few hours every day. I think that was when I really started my coke dependency. The coke always helped me with pain. With coke, I either forgot about it or it just kind of disappeared; headaches, toothaches, everything.

In about four weeks, I was ready to play again. I slacked off on the cocaine, figuring that when you have to go to work and perform, you can't abuse yourself too much. The first game back, I didn't do so well, because the ankle was irritated and I didn't have much lateral movement. But after that, it got better and so did I.

That year, my name became a household word. Just before our Thanksgiving Day game with the Redskins, I told the media that the Redskins were turkeys. That made headlines. Then I followed it up by playing a great game. And just before the championship game with L.A., I said the Rams didn't have no class. That made headlines, too. Seems like every radio station in the world called me to get me to badmouth the L.A. Rams. And the Rams were hot about it. All the papers said so. But we got to L.A. and beat them 28--0, and I scored the last touchdown of the game on an interception. I ran it back 68 yards. I had ten tackles and caused two fumbles.

Then, before the Super Bowl with Pittsburgh, I told the newspapers that Terry Bradshaw couldn't spell cat if you spotted him a C and an A. That made headlines. But we almost beat them and I had eight tackles and completely shut down the run around my end.

I made All-Pro that year, and when we played the Pro Bowl in Los Angeles, I was scoring coke everywhere. I even found a couple of restaurants where you can order it after dinner. They have to know you, of course, and you have to know how to find it on the menu. But if you know, it's right there.

I had a great game in the Pro Bowl, but more than that, I remember the hostility of the L.A. fans. When I was announced--"Linebacker, from the Dallas Cowboys, Thomas Henderson"--they booed me. I had a lot of death threats in Los Angeles, but then, that happened all the time. It happened when we played the Redskins, the Eagles and the Steelers. They'd call me up at my hotel: "Hey, you black motherfucker, when you get to the stadium, I'm going to blow your fucking brains out, you loudmouth." But I didn't give a shit. I told them they would probably be doing me a favor, putting me out of my misery.

During the off season, Wyetta had a baby, my daughter. She was trying to put the move on to get married, but I was still fucking all the girls and having fun. I told her, "We can get married, but I'll always be a bachelor, no matter what. I can treat you nice, pay your rent, buy you clothes, send you to school, but I ain't gonna stop getting pussy."

And she was so jealous. She caught me with other women a couple of times and she'd scream and call me a bunch of names and act crazy. A couple of times I had to hold her back from jumping on the women. And she particularly disliked white women. Whenever we had an argument, she'd holler at me, "Why don't you go sleep with your white girls?" I'd say, "I think I will." And I would.

•

By the time I went to training camp at the beginning of the 1979 season, I was completely into coke. I rented a limousine--one of those stretch jobs with the dark windows and a TV in back--and I had the driver pull up alongside the practice field and park. I just sat there for a half hour, sniffed coke and watched. Landry and the players kept looking over at the limo, but I didn't get out. I tortured the fuck out of them. Can you see it? California Lutheran College, Thousand Oaks, California. The scene is set. A silver-black limousine pulls up. Cadillac, stretch. Just sits there. And all of a sudden the door opens and I step out wearing a cowboy hat, T-shirt, cowboy boots and tennis shorts. And I'm high as a kite. I walk all the way across the field to Landry, who isn't smiling. Suddenly, all the guys come over, yelling, "Hey, Hollywood!" and we give five all around. And as Landry stands there, I calmly get back into the limousine and drive back to L.A.

I got in trouble for that. They fined me. But, see, I had a reason. I was going for more money. I wanted $250,000. My base salary was still much less than I thought I deserved for an All-Pro in his fifth year. When I finally came back to camp, I barked and talked shit and finally begged, but Landry kept telling me I was already making too much.

All during camp, me and Landry kept having meetings, but when the season started, I still hadn't negotiated my raise. Just the same, I started out playing great. We were automatic contenders for the Super Bowl, but I didn't much want to go to practice. Part of the reason was that my coke consumption was way up, which didn't help matters on the home front, either. Wyetta and I couldn't live together, so I moved out a month after my baby was born. I'm not proud of it, but we had had a fight about my bringing two women into our apartment, and that was that. But, see, Wyetta had changed, too. I mean, I understand pregnancy, but, shit, she gained a lot of weight. Her ass got twice as big as it used to be.

So I was depressed about that. And I was doing coke all night and waking up hung over and calling into practice sick. And I was sick. Every morning I would wake up and just be shaking. My nervous system was getting fucked up from the coke. I kept getting pissed off at the coaches in practice all the time. Even Jerry Tubbs, who was a nice guy, started to tell me that I should just cool out.

Finally, two days before a game with the Steelers, we were all eating dinner and Landry came over to my table to tell me that because I hadn't come to practice all week, I wouldn't start the game. It was about the third game of the season. And this was when my life with the Dallas Cowboys began to end. He said he was going to start Mike Hegman. I said I had a legitimate reason for missing the practices, but he just went back to his table. I waited a minute, then went over and said, right in front of his assistants, "If I don't start tomorrow, I ain't going to play." And I walked off. You just don't do Tom Landry like that. He told Bob Breunig to tell me that if I ever did that again, he would get rid of me.

But the day of the game, he came to me with his head down and said, "I didn't expect to start you today, Thomas, but...." And he let me have my way. To be honest, I was surprised. It's not normal for Landry to bend.

I played on through the season, still doing a lot of coke and not having a great year, but a good year. Then came that weekend in Washington.

Just before the game with the Redskins, Preston Pearson asked me if I'd take some bandannas he was selling and give them some advertisement on TV if I got a chance. So I took a bandanna, and at the end of the game, which we lost, I had a camera focused on me and I tied the bandanna around my waist and raised one finger.

So after the game, Tubbs comes up and says, "Thomas, I saw you with that bullshit on the side line." I thought it was no big deal. I wasn't trying to fuck with the team. But Tubbs said something like, "You know, Thomas, you're getting to be a pain in the ass." And I told him, "Get off my fucking back. Fuck you! Fuck Tom Landry. Fuck Landry and the Cowboys and all you motherfuckers."

He walked off, madder than hell, and went back and told Landry what I'd said. The next morning, at nine o'clock, Landry's secretary called me and said the coach wanted to see me in his office. So I threw on some clothes and went in. I didn't think he was going to fire me, because Landry had never fired a player in the middle of the season.

But when I walked into his office, he looked pretty sad. He said he didn't like what he was going to do, but he had to do it. He said. "Thomas, we've been meeting all year and having discussions, but it hasn't seemed to work. I have a football team that has all my best interests, and if I bench you, you'll be a disruptive force, because you won't be happy on the bench." He was right about that, but I still couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Thomas," he said, "I'm waiving you."

So I went back to the house and told Wyetta I was fired. She cried, but I thought it was funny. Then I went out and got a quarter bag of cocaine and called a press conference for that afternoon at the Marriott. The reporters were falling all over themselves trying to get in. I got real emotional and said I had a lot of fans and friends in Dallas and that I'd miss playing for them. And then I said Tom Landry couldn't fire me, because I quit. I retire.

•

Rita was a sluttish-looking girl, all the way a freak. She would play with your cock under the table in the middle of a club, but that was just her technique for getting free coke. Get her some coke and you could play with her the rest of the night. I'd met her a couple of weeks before I got fired, and sometimes I'd call her up at three in the morning and go meet her somewhere to snort. It wasn't about sex, though. She'd give me a hand job sometimes and every now and then I'd do her, but actually, our whole relationship revolved around coke. She had been telling me, "Stop messing around with this snorting. Cook it, baby. Try basing it."

So the night after I got fired, I left Wyetta and the baby and went to meet Rita. I brought the coke and she got the ether and ammonia and stuff together and before long, it was on the stove, cooking up. I'll never forget my first hit. She put this little ball of it in a pipe and I took one hit and I got high as hell. I mean, compared with the high of snorting pure Peruvian flake, it was about ten times better. I never thought anything could feel so good.

From then on, free-basing became a part of every day. I started to get wild. Wyetta and my daughter didn't see much of me, since I was goin' out at least four nights a week and coming home about six in the morning. Then I'd sleep until about three, get up and play with my daughter for a while, eat something, and then argue with Wyetta. In the mornings, when I came in, she would get on my case, so I'd chase her around the apartment and try to slap her and all the while she'd be screaming and kicking. I'd finally tell her to kiss my ass and just go out coking.

Then she'd get on the phone and tell everybody. Every time I stayed out late, she'd make ten phone calls to her relatives, our mutual friends, the neighbors. That's when all my teammates found out that I was doing coke. She must have called them all: "The motherfucker ain't home yet. Out with some white bitch doin' coke."

We had monstrous phone bills. And then we'd argue about her calling everybody in the whole fucking world and telling them that I was on drugs.

Pretty soon, every day was just nothing but coke. I was buying maybe a half ounce a week, basing it with chicks and screwing everything that moved. Well, not really screwing. I was having these coke affairs. I'd stay up with chicks all night, talking about sex, getting deep, tripping out about our sexual fantasies. And finally, after talking about it all night, just when maybe she'd get undressed and lie back on the bed, we'd be out of coke. And I'd tell her to just lie right there till I got back. But I never came back. I'd go cop some more coke and go home. I don't know how many times I did that. I know there's chicks right now still waiting for me to come back. Of course, Wyetta thought I was fucking the whole world, when actually I was almost fucking the world.

Then, in May, I was traded to San Francisco. Knowing I'd be working again, I decided to marry Wyetta. She'd been with me for four years and I'd put her through so much shit, and she was the mother of my daughter, after all. We had a big, beautiful wedding at the 2001 Club in Bryan Tower in Dallas; then we bought a house in Redwood City, California. I had negotiated a tremendous contract with the 49ers--what we call a "laughter contract." I had a base salary of $145,000, with another $40,000 available through incentive clauses--$1000 for every game we won, $1000 if I played on special teams, $500 for every week I didn't get fined and $1000 for every game I showed up on time, ready to play. It was almost like I could make an extra $3000 a week for just showing up and keeping out of trouble.

In July, I went to training camp in Santa Clara. Here I was, an All-Pro from Tom Landry's system, which was so much more advanced than the 49ers', so they were expecting me to be some kind of leader. But the fact was, I couldn't hold up my own ass, because I was too loaded. From the first day of training camp, I was coking and basing and staying up all night in my dorm room till it was time to go to practice. In the dorms, guys could hear me blowing my nose all night. I was constantly sneezing and asking the trainer for nasal spray. Going for days with no sleep began to take its toll. I was tired, had no go power. All I had was a lot of scabs coming inside my nose.

Of course, it wasn't long before I got sick, and every time I'd recover, I'd get sick again one way or the other. I had the flu for two weeks, had a wisdom tooth extracted, which knocked me out for five practices or so, injured my hamstring, injured my neck. By the time the exhibition season got started, I'd missed 27 out of 50 practices. The coaches were taking bets on which part of my body would go next.

Just before the six-week pre-season started, I had the flu again, so I was pretty weak for the opening exhibition game. The first team we played was the Chiefs, and on the second series of the game, J. T. Smith, a Kansas City receiver, caught a short pass out in the flat. I tucked my head to throw my shoulder into him, but somehow the back of my neck jammed into him full force, and suddenly I heard this pop and felt electricity shooting up and down my back. Then I just lost all feeling in my body for a couple of seconds. It turns out I popped the second vertebra, up high, almost at the back of my scalp. They took me out of the game and sent me home at half time. By the time I got there, I couldn't stand and had no control of my neck. Once I put my head on the pillow, I couldn't lift it up again. That was the scariest injury I've ever had. I lay flat on my back for a week and couldn't rejoin the team for three weeks. When the regular season started, I was still hurting. I suited up for the first game, but they started a kid named Bobby Leopold in my place.

I got into that first game for a couple of plays, but they didn't even play me in the second game. Before the third game of the season, they fired me. The director, John McVay, called me in on Friday afternoon and said they were putting me on waivers. He made it clear that there was absolutely no question of my ever coming back to the team. "However," he said, "I hear Houston is interested in you. But they're not interested in picking up the contract you signed with us." Which meant I'd have to renegotiate with Houston, starting from zero.

The next day, I called the Oilers and asked to speak to Bum Phillips. Bum called me back in a few hours. "Hey, boy, what you doing?" I said, "Bum, is that you?" He said, "Yeah, boy. What you doing?" I said, "I'm out of work, Bum. You need a good linebacker?" He said there was a linebacker hurt down there, so he had a spot open. Wyetta and I agreed that I'd fly down to play in Houston and she'd stay at our home in Redwood. We weren't getting along too well, anyway. She had this diary she kept of all the pussy she thought I got. Every night she'd turn the pages and read aloud, "Right here, page 67, Molly. Remember that bitch Molly?" She was getting on my nerves.

So I flew to Houston, checked in at the Marriott and went over to the Oilers' offices to meet Bum. I walked in and here was this little guy wearing blue cowboy boots and custom-made Western pants and shirt. He said, "Thomas, do you want to play?" I said I sure did. He said, "Well, if you want to play, I think you're a hell of a linebacker. Do you want to play for me?" That was all he seemed concerned about. Not the contract. Just if I wanted to play.

I got into Houston's next two games on specialty teams, but at least I was always in there. I rented a house and flew Wyetta and my daughter down. I was starting to feel pretty good. I was still coking a lot, but I wasn't basing too much. I liked knowing that Bum wanted to play me.

But then, in the third game, against the Kansas City Chiefs, I pulled a hamstring so bad you could see blood pooled up under my skin. Seems like every time I played the Chiefs, something happened to me. I could hardly walk and had to go on six-week injured reserve.

I had to go into the Oilers' headquarters every day for treatments on my ankle, but other than that and a few hours of light exercise they made me do, I had a lot of time on my hands. Just about that time, I met a guy named Tee who had a free-base catering service. He'd come over and serve you and your lady drinks, lay out cigarettes in a nice wood box, lay out the pipes and screens, cook it up and serve it to you by the pipe. It cost $125 a pipe and you'd get between 10 and 15 hits per bowl.

I kept a room at the Marriott for free-basing with my coke-freak women-friends. It was getting to the point where I was never home with Wyetta. I'd stay out for days at a time, really draining my money. Every bit of my Houston pay check was going into free-basing. I was taking out $2000 to $3000 every week and spending it with Tee. I probably spent more than $20,000 cash during that six weeks on injured reserve.

During that time, I started to get real paranoid about Wyetta. Because I was never home, I started thinking she must be having an affair. I'd go home after a two-day basing binge and look through the garbage. If I thought there was too much garbage, or if I found a strange brand of cigarette or a wine bottle, I'd start throwing the garbage all over the floor and tormenting her with accusations. Then I'd go back to the Marriott and crash.

The day before I went off the reserve list, around the first week of December, my wife had me served with divorce papers at my room in the Marriott. There was also a restraining order saying I couldn't come within a certain number of feet of our house in Houston. I just looked at the stuff and threw it in the garbage can. I based all night and then went to the stadium the next morning for a game against Pittsburgh. Bum played me man to man on Pittsburgh's tight end and the guy caught only one pass, for eight yards. We beat them 6--0. I had a good game. Bum even told me so afterward. In fact, it was probably the best game I'd played in a year. But my private life was falling apart.

That week, I had a visit from Charlie Jackson, assistant director of N.F.L. security who comes around and talks to the players every year about drugs ("Fellas, if you have a problem and you're on that shit, call us," he always says. "We can get you help."). Charlie's a brother, an ex--FBI agent and a very nice cat. He came to my hotel room and said, "Thomas, you have a problem. Let's talk about it." Then he pulled out this dossier on me. He told me I had been under investigation since I was with the Cowboys and that the night I left Dallas, narcotics agents had a stake-out for me at a room I had in the Doubletree Inns. They had a warrant for my arrest on charges of possession of controlled substances, but I left town before they got me. Then he told me I had been under surveillance in San Francisco and that the week I was fired, I'd been seen snorting by a narcotics detective who had been trying to bust one of my connections. Rather than arrest me, the agent informed Bill Walsh, the 49ers coach, that I was hanging out with drug dealers and Walsh cut me loose right away.

Charlie told me to cool out on the coke fast or I wouldn't have any hope of a career in the N.F.L. He suggested that I go into treatment for it rather than try to hide it. I thanked him and said I'd keep his advice in mind. I should have taken it right then. But I still didn't realize how sick I was.

I played out the rest of the season for Houston, but my room in the Marriott was paranoid hell. When I wasn't at the practice field or in a game, I was in that room standing next to the window. Every car that went through the parking lot, every light that shined across the curb, every car door I heard close, every engine I heard start, I thought someone was coming to bust me.

Even when I was with the team, I was paranoid, and got that way about the press, too. In the last game of the regular season, we had to beat the Vikings to make the play-offs. On their last play, I made an interception that I feel clinched the play-off spot for Houston, but there wasn't a word about it in any of the newspapers. I felt like they were trying to smother my rep. When I made the play, I rolled on the fuckin' ground and acted a fool. But in the newspapers, it was just an itty-bitty line: Interceptions: 1--Henderson.

•

We lost to Oakland in the play-offs, and I went back to my hotel room and holed up with about a half ounce of cocaine. By then, I'd learned to cook it up myself. I mostly stayed in that room until one night, toward the end of January, when I decided to go for a drive. Somehow, I wound up in the vicinity of the Astrodome at about 4:30 in the morning. I saw two cars following me in the rearview mirror and I slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car and started walking. The cars behind me parked and I saw the shadows of four men getting out.

I was in the middle of a parking lot and I had a free-base pipe with me and about a quarter ounce of cooked-up coke balls in my pocket. So I started walking out across the lot, just basing like a maniac. Finally, I saw these four guys dressed like businessmen come around the corner of the building and I started screaming, "I see y'all; I know what you're trying to do! I ain't got a damn thing on me except this pipe and I'm going to break it if you come near me. You're going to be looking for glass on the cement out here until next week, because there ain't gonna be no goddamn pipe in my hand when you get here!" I took the rocks I had left, stuck them down in the pipe and swush ... I melted them down. Then I just smashed the pipe all over the sidewalk. I started waving my arms and daring them to come get me. They went back to their cars and drove away.

When I got back to my hotel room, I was tripping out, wired to the gills. Every 45 seconds, I'm running to the window. My pupils are dilated, I'm shaking. I've got total paranoia.

I decided to go to Dallas. I left the hotel, left my clothes and my suitcases in the room and took a cab to the airport. I had to get out of town before they busted me.

In Dallas, an old girlfriend took me in and tried to get me cooled out. She'd feed me, keep me up talking, keep me going to movies, whatever it took to keep my mind off free-basing. It was hard, but after a few weeks, I started to unwind.

By then, it was the end of January, a few days before the Super Bowl, and I ran into this guy I knew who invited me over. Lo and behold, he had three ounces of coke, pipes, the whole deal. And I thought to myself: Fate is a motherfucker. It didn't take long before I was back into basing.

I gave my Super Bowl tickets to some friends, stayed in Dallas and watched the game on TV in a restaurant. I sat there checking out my feelings about football. Did I really want to be in that game? Would it be possible for me to play football again? And if I could, how would I face the N.F.L., the players, the media, the fans, the niggers, whites, the Puerto Ricans, who all knew that Thomas Henderson was getting high? I never thought I could become so infected with something that I couldn't quit, something I couldn't walk away from, something that made me crawl around on the floor picking up ceiling droppings.

On February 1, 1981, I was sitting in the living room of a friend's house getting a quarter ounce ready to cook when I turned to the cat I was free-basing with and said, "Look here, man. I think I'm going to the hospital, because I'm sick. I do too much of this shit."

He didn't believe me, but I picked up the phone and started dialing. I called N.F.L. headquarters in New York and I got hold of Charlie Jackson. Our conversation went something like this:

"Charlie, this is Tom Henderson."

"Hi, how you doing, Tommy?"

"Charlie, I'm sick."

"You're sick? What's wrong?"

"Charlie ... wait a minute. Hold on."

"Tommy, what are you doing?"

"Hold on, Charlie ... give me a light, man ... I'm free-basing, I'm free-basing, hold on ... I'm sick, Charlie."

"Well, I appreciate you calling me, Thomas."

"Charlie ... give me another light, man ... hold it.... Charlie? Charlie, it's no disrespect to you, but I'm free-basing right now. I can't quit. I've been trying. I quit for a day or two and then come back to it. I can't quit."

"OK, Thomas, OK. How much are you doing, Thomas?"

"A half ounce a day, if I can get my hands on it."

"That's pretty urgent, Thomas."

Right away, he had me get in touch with a psychiatrist in Dallas. I called the guy and set up an appointment for the next day. I got high before I went up there; I mean high, all the way back. And he sat in his office with his little glasses on the end of his nose and he looked at me over his little pad and he said, "Tell me about your childhood."

I said, "Oh, fuck you, motherfucker. I ain't talking about my goddamn childhood. I'm talking about today. I'm sick on these drugs. What I need is to go to a hospital, somewhere away from here. If I don't get out of town, if I don't get out of society, I'm going to get fucked up. That's the bottom line."

I think I left a definite impression on him, because early the next morning, he called me and told me to call Dr. Ted Reid, the medical director of Scottsdale Camelback Hospital in Arizona. He told me Reid was a brother. I gave him a call. Our conversation was short. I told him I'd be there in 24 hours.

Before I walked into the hospital the next day, I smoked my last ball of coke and threw the pipe against the fucking wall. I strolled in cross-eyed, buzzing, electrified. The nurse took one look at me and took me straight to my room.

I have no idea what happened during my first ten days there. I was totally depressed, asleep most of the time. For a week and a half, I was in that room, but I wasn't really there at all. They had me confined to my quarters because I would have found any excuse to get out of that place. I really wanted that shit.

But after ten days, I started getting out of my room, checking out the people sitting in the lounge, wondering what they were like. After a while, I realized that this was the first time in my life when I'd ever been someplace where nobody recognized me.

So I started to go to therapy. I went through psychodrama, group meetings to talk about why people abuse intoxicants, all kinds of group therapy. They even had Alcoholics Anonymous meetings there. I had to go to those as part of my program.

The idea was that the philosophy of A.A. can be applied to any kind of problem in life: First realize that you have a problem, then use the higher power within yourself to overcome it.

At the first A.A. meeting, the instructor gives a little rap and then recites The Serenity Prayer--you know, the one asking for courage to change the things you can change. And I'm thinking, Yeah, but free-base is different. And then, when it was time to introduce myself, I couldn't say, "Hi, I'm Thomas, I'm an alcoholic," so I said, "Hi, my name is Thomas. I'm a junkie." And then I said, "I wish I was an alcoholic."

I started to get better. I had surgery on my nose, I started to eat again and I began to get out and play a little racquetball. The program I was in lasted three weeks, but when my time was up, I talked to my doctors and convinced them that I wasn't ready to be turned loose yet. They let me sign on for another three weeks, but at the end of the second three-week period, I knew I still wasn't ready. I liked my psychiatrist, and talking to him was really doing me good. He helped me sort out some of the issues around my marriage and about the early part of my life.

After about eight weeks, I told the doctor I wanted to leave. He asked if I thought I was ready to be a nonabuser of drugs and I said I wanted to clean up my life and accept it the way it was.

I went back to Dallas and tried to get my situation together. I had to sell a few things, pay a few bills, but I found out that I wasn't absolutely broke, that I didn't have to file bankruptcy.

So I started getting back into shape. I was up in the morning doing workouts, facing life and all the daily responsibilities. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't hiding behind "Hollywood." I was just plain Thomas Henderson, and I liked it that way just fine.

Once I cleared my head and got my health back, I realized that I had been totally lost in space. I mean, I had been so crazy with paranoia and tension that I was trying to shoot ducks with a rake. I was sick, man, on that damn cocaine.

The first thing I figured I'd better do was try to get my career going again. Bum had said he might give me a contract for the next season, but I didn't have much hope that he would. So I started calling around to various teams to see if they were interested in picking me up. After I'd called about the sixth team and nobody called back, my career flashed in front of my eyes.

I got depressed again, which I knew was dangerous, so I made one last call, to Don Shula in Miami. Shula called me back in ten minutes. He said he had a speaking engagement in Amarillo and would be passing through Dallas the next day. He wanted to meet and talk at the airport.

When I met him the next morning, he seemed glad to see me. I think he was surprised that I was about 20 pounds heavier than he'd ever seen me, since he knew I'd lost a lot of weight basing.

Shula had had a couple of other players, Donald Reese and Randy Crowder, busted for selling a pound of cocaine a couple of years earlier, so he was familiar with drugs and with the problems of players who get involved with them. He said, "Thomas, I want you to join N.A. [Narcotics Anonymous], and I want you to go to at least one meeting a week, every week, if I sign you." I promised him I'd do that and we arranged to talk some more the following week.

I called him in Miami the next week and he said for me to come on down there to take some conditioning tests. Even though I had gotten my health back, I still wasn't in shape for the tests. Fortunately, the one thing I did that I think impressed him was run two consecutive 40-yard dashes in 4.7 seconds. That's slow for me, but Shula's fastest linebacker had run the 40 in 4.9.

I had a good physical. The doctors loved my knees and said I was in great health. When I left the Dolphins' camp, Shula said, "I think I'm going to sign you, Thomas." He didn't give me any more warnings or mention the cocaine again. I don't think he wants me or anybody else to dwell on it. If he hires me, it'll be because of his good faith and because he believes that I'm serious about playing football again.

•

I talked to a taxi driver in New Orleans once who had read about my going into the hospital to kick the coke. He said, "You know, I'm 70 years old, but I'll tell you, I look at you boys on television knocking each other's heads in, beating each other in the face, and I can see how much pressure you're under. If you drop a ball or miss a big play, you're in trouble. It seems to me that living that kind of life, you'd need something. As old as I am, I believe I'd get high if I had to do that for a living."

I laughed like hell. But, in reality, it isn't the failures and the beatings that make a guy want to take cocaine. It's the success. You win a Super Bowl or make a big play and, afterward, you don't want that exhilaration to end. Somebody will come up and say, "Goddamn, you played a great game. Let's party. How's about some coke?" So it goes.

Or so it went, that is. What it's finally come around to for me is this: I know it may sound funny for Hollywood Henderson, big-time ladies' man and free-baser, to say he's found God, but I have.

After I got out of the hospital, I began reading the Bible again. I saw things in Jesus' words that I hadn't seen before--things about forgiveness. I started talking to a well-known evangelical minister and he began putting some heavy preaching on me. I was ready for it. He helped me face the fact that I've been very selfish in my life. With my gift for gab and my notoriety, I could have done a lot for others. He made me see that it was time I grew up and started thinking about other people and their problems instead of me and my problems all the time.

So I've accepted Christ. Because I know that no matter what I've done, how many people I've let down and disappointed, he will forgive me. I've been talking to this evangelist about going on tour with him to talk to parents about the telltale signs of their kids' being on drugs, so that they can stop a small problem before it gets big.

Cocaine is the most dangerous drug in our society right now. It turns people into animals. I haven't seen anybody who's gotten deeply into it without destroying his life. It leads to bankruptcy, at the very least, and it's led some guys I know as far as trading their wives or girlfriends for some base. It's kind of a paradox, but nobody who can afford to base will ever survive it.

Somebody ought to be out there telling people that. And if Hollywood can't do it, nobody can.

"Then Momma came out carrying a .22-caliber rifle ... and she let him have it, right in front of me."