The Harder They Fall Read Online Free

African musicians assembled in Kinshasa, Zaire, for an unbelievable musical event. Being a huge fight fan, I immediately headed for the Ali training camp and eventually was introduced to Drew “Bundini” Brown, Ali’s inimitable corner man. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, Bundini and I were riding with our guide into neighboring Swaziland, a postage stamp–sized country where we heard that the German pharmaceutical giant, Merck, had a factory producing pharmaceutical cocaine. Talk about kids in a candy store!
    Even when my drug use escalated to the point where I lost touch with my business and watched it disintegrate, I still didn’t recognize that I had a problem. Another career was what I thought would fix it.
    Because of the success of my public relations firm, I was given a chance at producing a movie. Universal Studios decided that a concept for a film I had come up with called
Car Wash
was worth a shot. Two years of hard work, ever-increasing drug use, and more than my share of good fortune found me riding high once again. The movie was a pretty big hit, and I was believing all the bullshit.
    Before long I was producing my second movie, a little confection entitled
The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh
, a loony comedy about basketball and astrology, with a strong dose of R & B music, that was conceived and written in one rollicking night of gluttonous coke snorting. It was during the filming of
Fish
that things really began to take a turn for the worse. By now I was using with complete abandon, ingesting dangerous amounts of cocaine and heroin. I was on location in Pittsburgh, ostensibly in charge of the production of the movie, but things were out of control. Costs for the filming were skyrocketing, and no one was running the show. The studio bosses, needless to say, were losing patience, and several phone calls to meexpressing their concern did little good. Finally they took matters into their own hands and sent a pair of representatives to our location and physically removed me from command. The next thing I remember was waking up in some fancy hotel room and looking around, trying to figure out what was going on. Merritt Island, Florida, is where they forced me to detox and come to my senses before I was allowed back on the film set.
    The movie was a financial disaster, as was my career. Word began to spread that my drug use was out of control and that my work was erratic, at best. I was quickly becoming unemployable, and it wasn’t long till the roof fell in.
    In the summer of 1980, after losing my house, my woman, and my career to the excesses of wild living and drug abuse, I took the suggestion of one of my last remaining friends, Shep Gordon, and moved to Kihei, Hawaii, on the sun-baked island of Maui. Shep, Alice Cooper’s manager and a real maven in the music business, had a sprawling beachfront home there and thought getting away from Los Angeles would do me some good. Nothing like carefree island life to get one’s shit together.
    My game plan was simple. Try to stop using drugs, excluding the ubiquitous Maui Wowie pot everyone over there smokes, and the five, six, or ten daily beers you need to keep hydrated under the powerful tropical sun.
    On Maui I had nothing to do but be with me, and that didn’t seem like such a great gig. True, the islands are spectacular and the living was easy and grand, but alone at night, I had plenty of time to contemplate the mess I had created. I also had some physical healing to do. Years of abuse had left me worn down, and I took this opportunity to repair some of the damage. Having kicked my heroin addiction for the third or fourth time and knowing that coke use in Hawaii was absurd—why would anyone want to be jacked up in such a laid-back place—I started on a mission of wellness. I attacked it like most things in my life, with blind resolve to accomplish something. Hawaii is a mecca of health, so this was a relatively easy task. I took up running