This past Sunday, when Mickey Rourke was heinously denied of an Academy Award, one local relative wasn't watching in outrage. That's because stepbrother Michael Scott Addis, who was raised with Rourke, doesn't have a television set; he lives on the street behind a dilapidated upholstery shop in North Miami Beach. one relative wasn't watching. That's because stepbrother Michael Scott Addis, who was raised with Rourke, doesn't have a TV set; he lives on the street behind a dilapidated upholstery shop in North Miami Beach. If history is any indication, Oscar night probably found Addis, who once had a speaking role in a big-money film thanks to his stepbrother, partaking in one of his favorite hobbies: making art or smoking crack. "I'm not addicted to rock," Addis explains over a scrambled egg breakfast. "For me, it's almost a medicine. When I'm not feeling too good, I smoke a little rock, and I feel great! And my mind processes everything more clearly."
Addis is something of a fixture in North Miami Beach, where he panhandles on the corner of NE Second Avenue and 82nd Street. He affixes unique masks, made from a soap-suds-and-newspaper mâche recipe he invented in jail, to lampposts throughout the neighborhood. The whippet-thin 56-year-old, who bears a toothless resemblance to family-movie impresario Ernest (of Ernest Goes to Camp fame), recently greeted Riptide by pulling at his clothing and revealing constellations of old scars and burns. "This is when I blowtorched myself setting Gene Hackman on fire," he begins matter-of-factly, tugging at his arm. "This is when my leg was shattered when I was hit by a car. Here's where I stabbed myself in the leg trying to kill a blue crab that was pinching me."
He can spin a yarn. So we didn't rush to stop the presses when he added, "And get this: I'm Mickey Rourke's stepbrother!" — until a rep for the actor confirmed it. When Rourke was seven, he and his mother moved in with her new husband, Eugene Addis, who lived in Miami Beach, where he worked as a cop. Michael Scott bonded quickly with his new stepbrother, he says, who was only five months his senior.
When Rourke was a budding Hollywood star — the first time around — he hooked Addis up with a gig in the shockingly terrible Eureka, a 1983 Citizen Kane rip-off filmed partly in Miami about a paranoid gold tycoon, starring Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Hackman.
Addis says he was paid $3,000 for the movie, which he has never seen. "The director, Nick Roeg, asked me if I'd be interested in going to England to be an understudy for James Bond," he says. "I used to have my teeth, and I considered myself a very good-looking guy."
Alas, that was not to be. A criminal records search reveals Addis's activities for the past two decades have consisted mostly of getting arrested. He has a couple dozen misdemeanors, most of them for panhandling, trespassing, and weed possession, plus a felony for coke possession. So has his newly A-list-again stepbrother helped him out in these hard times? They met recently, Addis says, when Rourke spotted him panhandling. "He wanted to give me a lot of money, but his driver told him: 'Don't give him any money — he's a rock-head!' So he didn't give me anything."
