It's been 17 months since Lamar Odom cheated death.
With a new lease on life, the former NBA player opens up about his past drug use and cheating on Khloe Kardashian in Us Weekly's Apr. 10 issue (on newsstands Friday). Recalling the night he was found comatose in a Las Vegas brothel, Odom admits the details are a bit fuzzy. "I was home by myself. Bored. I wanted to get out and have a good time. Looking back, I might have had a drink to get the mood started, but was I drunk or on drugs? Not at all. I remember lying in bed. Two women were in bed and then I fell asleep. That's all," the 37-year-old basketball player insists. "When I woke up four days later, I was trying to pull the tubes out of my mouth."
At the time, Khloe flew to Las Vegas to be Lamar's side—much to his surprise. After he was transferred to L.A., she remained by his bedside as he learned to walk again.
"It was definitely a moment of relief. I didn't even know what had just happened. I mean, I'm a big strong dude who has made it to the highest level of doing what he loves. And now I can't walk or talk," Lamar remembers. "She was the first thing I saw. She said, 'Hi, Mookah.' 'Mookah' is a name my mother used to call me. She said it to let me know I wasn't dead. She played a major role in me getting my memory back. She would bring pictures of my mother and my grandmother. I kept thinking, 'Am I paralyzed forever? Am I mute forever?' It was scary s--t."
According to Lamar, "Faith got me through."
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star even delayed their divorce proceedings to support his recovery, but she re-filed papers in 2016 after he was caught drinking at L.A.'s Beverly Center. Lamar, who recently finished a stay at San Diego's Casa Palmera rehab center, is the first to admit he always didn't treat his ex-wife fairly.
In fact, Lamar tells Us Weekly, he was doing drugs behind Khloe's back for years.
"I was hiding it for a while, but then I got frustrated and was like, 'F--k it.' Around two years before we split up [in December 2013], I was in the man cave she had made for me and she caught me. She was disappointed. So was I. The sad thing about it is, I don't know if I was disappointed because I was actually doing the drug or because she caught me," he says. "She knew I was doing cocaine the whole time after that. It was my drug of choice. I'm not going to say she accepted it because that would be the wrong word. Tolerated would be a better word."
Lamar found fame difficult to handle. "When I became Khloe Kardashian's man and on TV, it made me look more enticing. People who didn't even know basketball would approach me because they knew Lammy. Bitches and THOTs came out of the woodwork," he tells the tabloid. "If there is one thing I regret when I was married, it was having multiple affairs with different women. That wasn't the stand-up thing to do. I wish I could have kept my dick in my pants."
Things worsened once Khloe ended things with Lamar. "That's where me and my friend Jamie [Sangouthai], God bless the dead, turned the drug use up to another level. The 'don't give a f—k' place," he says "I was in a very dark place and very confrontational. I wasn't trying to repair my marriage; I was just trying to get high," he says. "My life was all about drugs at that point."
Lamar, who was playing for the Los Angeles Clippers at the time, adds, "It probably helped the end of my career come along a little faster because drugs killed my drive to want to train and be in shape. It killed that and my sex drive. The only time you can f--k is when you take coke."
After all he's been through, the Queens native doesn't take his life for granted.
"I'm a walking miracle. I had no choice but to become stronger," says Lamar, who has been spending more time his two teenage children. "I'm here talking to you. So, I guess I'm winning."
"Living sober, meaning no drugs, is a great feeling. Being in the moment is important—how you react, respond, create," he tells Us Weekly. "If I would have done coke last night, you would have gotten some dickhead here trying to get out of here fast. But you're getting Lamar now."