I never forget Dennis Rodman’s birthday. It’s the same as my mom’s — today, May 13 — which confuses my idea of what a Taurus is supposed to be like. (Well… a Bull!) I keep up with Dennis, my hero, on Instagram, where he Writes. Everything. Like. This. and dabbles in all sorts of MLM schemes: an NFT collection called Rodman’s Barber Shop, a testosterone-boosting supplement called ManTFup. (“It’s pretty much just vitamins,” Dennis said of the latter in a GQ profile last year. “If you want to do it, do it. Shit, whatever.”) He used to post sometimes about his sobriety, too, after a gnarly 2018 DUI and mandatory rehab, but in the profile, he was very much drinking again. None of my business. Just I hope he’s doing well.
Here’s how it used to be, writing about Dennis: “a 72-hour odyssey of Rodman-inspired insanity, a boundless weekend bender that has spanned three states and five figures’ worth of frequent flier miles, and collected an entourage that at various times included Hollywood celebrities and fawning women, awestruck gamblers and acid-eating Deadheads, sultry strippers and a Bill Laimbeer-sized drag queen.” All this transpires between Game 6 of the 1995 Western Conference semifinals, where the Spurs clinch the series over the Lakers, and the start of the Western Conference finals. Beforehand, the rest of the Spurs will pore over the Game 5 tapes, and Dennis will sit alone in headphones, pretending that he is the drummer for Pearl Jam. (Their coach Bob Hill, whom Dennis calls “Boner,” had previously benched him a full game for taking off his shoes and lying on the floor with a towel over his head during a timeout.) Nevertheless, he’s the only one with any rings here — two of ‘em — and when his teammates ask him what needs to be done, he tells them they need to stop thinking so much.
That’s from his 1995 Sports Illustrated cover, the one with the parrot and all the homoerotic fantasies, back when they let the journalists party. (Though I manage to still sometimes.) In any case, I have two copies. And then two copies, just in case, of his autobiography Bad As I Wanna Be, which I like for its use of six fonts per page and the way it addresses the reader as “bro,” and one copy of his follow-up autobiography, I Should Be Dead By Now. At my old apartment, they sat alongside my autographed Hall of Fame plaque, and my set of McDonald’s Rodman collector cups from 1996 where, you may recall, the color of his hair changed depending on the coolness of your drink (still do!), in an arrangement some might describe as a religious altar.
“I woke up one day and said to myself, Hey, my life has been a big cycle. One month I'm bleeding to death, one month I'm in a psycho zone. Then, all of a sudden, the cycles were in balance.” - Dennis Rodman
My friend Ernest came up with a great philosophy, “30% Bro,” to which I happily subscribe. He could tell you better than I can, but it sort of goes like this: to exist in a way that doesn’t alienate strangers and exasperate your loved ones, it’s good to maintain a 30% bro quotient to counter your position as an artiste with a moderate Twitter following and strong opinions about the music of Drain Gang, or whatever it is you do that the average joe next to you at the bar will likely greet with revulsion. You needn’t necessarily care about sports in order to keep it 30% Bro, though it obviousy helps. However you keep yourself humble and conversational, that’s what 30% Bro’s all about. Salt of the earth.
I’m not sure where Dennis Rodman fits into my personal bro quotient, but I’ve loved him forever, or at least since ‘95. In middle school I had the black pinstriped Bulls 91 jersey, the Dennis “Got Milk?” ad taped over my bed; I drew on fake tattoos to become him for my friend Allison’s “Halloween in July” birthday party. (Not in blackface, you sickos.) Once, my cousin was riding her Harley through the Loop, or so she said one Thanksgiving of my youth, when a deep voice from the Harley to her right rumbled out into the night: “Nice hog.” And it was Dennis! He was OUT THERE!
It wasn’t a crush I had on him, exactly. It was more, let’s say… a pull. It’s hard for me to explain. I was a quiet and well-behaved kid with a bowl cut, loving parents, and minimal athletic prowess, addicted to reading Animorphs and minding my own business. But we were tethered, me and Dennis. We just were.
When the opportunity arose, nearly two decades later, to finally meet Dennis at some godforsaken sports bar adjacent to the United Center to the tune of $59, I could not say yes fast enough. It was winter, the end of the year 2012. Some of you may have known me back then as the annoying chick with the Skrillex hair who “did art” pertaining to rap music and the occult; some of you may have even been fooled that I “did art” for “a living.” Well, okay, I was selling weed — not in kingpin amounts, but surely enough to live happy and free back when you could rent a Logan Square two-bedroom for under $800. I sold weed to all sorts of interesting people: art school freaks, elderly suburbanites, a steel worker from Gary who I thought might literally punch my face in when I told him I didn’t like Social Distortion… maybe even you, dear reader!
Sunday nights at that time, I’d stop by Longman & Eagle to drop off a bag or two for the bartenders and enjoy a few glasses of Old Grand-Dad whiskey before getting back on my bike and heading home. I wouldn’t advise this, not when it’s snowing, but I’ve always been kind of stupid like that. The next thing I knew it was daylight and I was ripping tubes out of my arms at Swedish Covenant Hospital, memory wiped as I hauled my mangled bike home. That’s where I caught a glimpse of my face. I looked like one of the Bogdanoff twins. “Fuuuuuuuck!” I cried to the mirror. “I’m meeting Dennis Rodman in five days!!!!”
The swelling in my face had gone down by the Friday of the meet-and-greet, but the black eye persisted, and my attempts at concealing it were some kind of bad joke. But if anyone were to understand, I said to myself, it’d be Dennis, and with a manic delusional swagger donned my finest American Apparel disco pants and made out for the bus. At the bar, a moderate crowd awaited Dennis’ arrival from the giant party bus parked out front, until all of a sudden, there he was — comically lanky in silky white track pants and dark wraparound sunglasses, through which it was plainly evident that the man was fucked up on pills. I ordered myself a double shot. I was going to make him love me.
It was my turn in line for a photo with Dennis, who flashed a perfunctory “hang loose” in every one. I had, of course, prepared a brief yet rousing monologue regarding his role as my childhood idol, the only thing resembling a role model I’ve known, how I’d recently made a series of screenprints entitled “Untitled (Twelve Dennis Rodmans)”, how my father and I would bond in the ‘90s over the Bulls repeating the three-peat… I stepped beside him, wedged under his armpit, looking up at his pierced and pill-bloated face. He looked back down at me.
“Baby, do you have a black eye?”
“I, uhhhh…”
The camera flashed. Dennis busted a “hang loose.” Next!
Okay, so he’d gotten a little hung up on the whole “black eye” thing. Whatever! I ordered myself another shot. I had another angle. After the photo ops had wrapped, Dennis took a seat at a back corner table, flanked by an entourage of doughy white guys who, if they weren’t wearing vests and newsie caps, may as well have been. “What I’ll do,” I said to myself, “is I’ll go back there and I’ll show him the tattoo. And then...!” I’ve got this tattoo on my upper left thigh: Dennis, naked on his first book’s back cover, holding a basketball over his cock. (For reference, see “Untitled [Twelve Dennis Rodmans],” above.)
The Bulls game was on, and Dennis was lost in a plate of chicken wings. I tapped his shoulder. “I have a tattoo of you naked,” I said. “Right here.” I pointed. “Right there?” he said, giant mitts briefly grazing my thigh. “Ahh, I don’t believe you.” I showed him a picture I’d snapped in the bathroom. “Wow,” he said. He showed his friends. They mumbled in appreciation, returned to their wings, and Dennis did too. By halftime he was gone. He didn’t want to be there. Well, who would? We all knew what this was. An act of desperation.
I wasn’t really trying to seduce Dennis Rodman that night. That’s how I framed it back then to my friends; it was a funnier story that way. But I wanted something else from Dennis. There was so much I needed to tell him. “There was a time when I was innocent,” I wanted to say. “Dennis, what’s happened to me?”
When Dennis joined the Pistons, a 25-year old rookie, it was the first time he’d ever been beloved, the most pure he ever was. His coach, Chuck Daly, was his father; the Bad Boys were his brothers. He’d spent the years after high school living behind a 7/11, working as an airport janitor, moving to a farm in Oklahoma to share a bedroom with his 13-year old white best friend, who’d shot his previous best friend to death on Halloween. He’d never touched a drop of alcohol. “Imagine Dennis Rodman in a nightclub, ordering milk. That’s the kind of guy he was,” said his teammate John Salley in Dennis’ 30 for 30, which I watched in Mississippi on a laptop with my boyfriend, hours after he had dumped me. “He was not ready. He was not ready for this really cruel world.”
Two minutes into his Hall of Fame induction speech, the same year I met him, is when Dennis begins to cry. “I didn’t play the game for money. I didn’t play to be famous. What you see here is just an illusion,” he says, his eyes bright with tears. “I just wish…” he chokes out later. “I would love to set the record straight, I’m sorry it has to be on this main stage here. Me and my mother have never got along. I was a very good kid when I was young, and once I became to the age of 16, 18, 19, 20, I could care less what I did to my mother. And my mother worked three jobs. She kicked me out the house and said, ‘You have to leave here. I can’t take you anymore.’ I resented her for a long time. My mother rarely ever hugged me or hugged my siblings. She didn’t know how. But she managed. I’m not like most of you guys that say, ‘When I make money in the NBA, I’m going to take care of my mother and father.’ I was a little selfish for that. But as I got older, things changed.” His mother is in the audience, crying too. “Maybe, hopefully in the future, I can actually try to be somewhat of a good individual. A good father to my kids. And hopefully I can love you, like I did when I was born.”