I asked Tyson if the young prisoners from Indiana resembled the young men from his Brooklyn neighborhood. He said that many of them did. When he was champion, Tyson refused to offer himself as a role model; he certainly doesn’t see himself as one now. But he does understand the Brownsvilles of America.
“At the age of ten or fifteen, you become very influenced by what you see,” he said. “You see these guys looking good, with fly cars, nice girls on their arms. You think this is what you want to be. But any kind of proper success has to do with education, unless you’re an athlete, and everyone’s not going to be Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali. You fall in bad company. You see drug dealers and gangsters with all their bullshit. You know they didn’t go to school. So you don’t fill the holes. You go after the wrong shit. The thing I’ve noticed in here, with the white kids and the black kids and the Latin kids and the Asian kids — the only thing they have in common is poverty.”
I asked him if drugs were another common factor. Tyson himself was never a druggie in the conventional sense; his drugs were liquor and celebrity. He whispered, “Of course.
“Drugs and women,” he said. “You know, we all run through the same complexities in life.”
Among those many complexities in American life is racism.
“It’s very difficult being black,” he said one evening. “These reporters came to interview me from South Africa, and one of them asked me was I racist. And I said, ‘Yes, I am a racist — to people who are racist toward me.’ I never liked to believe that I’m a racist because of the way I was brought up, both from my mother and from Cus and Camille. But, you know what I mean, sometimes things are in the air and people say or do things detrimental or hurtful towards you. You strike back at them. That’s what I meant in that interview. Not all white people. Shit, no. Those people. Those specific people. I just want to be treated the way I treat people.”
Behind many of these feelings are jagged memories of that Brownsville childhood. “Too many guys, too many black people, men and women, hate themselves. They see the shit around them and they give up before they ever start. They get one or two little tastes of power — sticking a gun in somebody’s face — and then it’s over.”
He was in jail when the riots erupted in Los Angeles, and he hated what he saw on CNN.
“It could have all been prevented if people believed in fairness and equality. But you have to understand: The things that people do and what they should do are totally different. We should live like every man is equal, every woman is equal. But how we do live is, You get yours, I get mine, fuck you.” He talked about Rodney King. “Some guys in here, they heard Rodney King and they laughed. But what he said was powerful, man. Why can’t we live together? Why the fuck can’t we all live together?”
In jail Mike Tyson is engaged in an admirable attempt to find out who he is, to discover and shape the man who exists behind the surface of fame and notoriety. There is no Cus to explain the world, to tell him what to do. In the end, there’s only himself. And because he is in prison, this is no easy process.
“You have good days, and you have bad days, but you just think to yourself, This isn’t the end. You say, i was kind of wild out there; maybe I was heading for something more drastic’ Which is all a part of playing head games so you won’t get insane.”
Like anyone in prison, Tyson misses life on the outside. He misses certain people, and in most of our talks he circles back to Cus D’Amato. “A lot of things Cus told me, they are happening now,” he says. “But at that time, I didn’t keep them in mind, because I was just a kid. Cus tried to store everything in my mind so fast. He didn’t think that he was gonna be around. He tried to pack everything in at one moment, you know what I mean? I’m trying to be a fighter, I’m trying to have some fun on the side, and I’m just running crazy. Now I think about him all the time. Like, damn! Cus told me that. And God! He told me this too. And, oh! He told me that.
“He was always saying to me, before I was anything: ‘What are you gonna do? Look how you talk to me now, J he said. ‘Look how you act. How you gonna act when you’re a big-time fighter? You’re just gonna dump me.’ I said, ’I’m not gonna do that, Cus. I’m not gonna do it.’ And I didn’t.” He laughs. “I used to say, ‘Cus, I’ll sell my soul to be a great fighter.’ And he said, ‘Be careful what you wish for, ’cause you might get it.’
“I miss him still. I miss him. I think about him. No, I don’t dream about him; I don’t dream much in this place. But I miss Cus. I still take care of him, make sure nothing bad happens, ’cause I promised Cus before he died to take care of Camille. I was young, I was, like, eighteen, and I said, ’I can’t fight if you’re not around, Cus.’ And he said, ‘You better fight, ’cause if you don’t fight, I’m gonna come back and haunt you.’
“The ghost of Cus D’Amato doesn’t haunt Tyson; if anything, the old manager instilled in the young man a respect for knowledge and a demand for discipline that are only now being fully developed. “Cus had flaws, like any man,” Tyson says. “But he was right most of the time. One thing I remember most clearly that he said: ‘Your brain is a muscle like any other; if you don’t use it, it gets soft and flabby.’”
Other things do haunt Tyson. One of them is that fatal trip to Indianapolis. “I had a dick problem,” he admits. “I didn’t even want to go to Indianapolis. But I went. I’m in town with the best girl [rapper B Angie BJ that everybody wants. And I had to get this — why’d I have to do that, huh, man? Why’d I have to do that? I had a girl with me. Why’d I have to make that call? Why’d I have to let her come to my room?”
He has his regrets too, and says that he is trying hard to acquire some measure of humility, leaning on the Koran.
“Remember, when I accomplished all that I did, I was just a kid,” he says quietly. “I was just a kid doing all that crazy stuff. I wanted to be like the old-time fighters, like Harry Greb or Mickey Walker, who would drink and fight. But a lot of the things I did I’m so embarrassed about,” he says. “It was very wrong and disrespectful for me to dehumanize my opponents by saying the things I said. If you could quote me, say that anything I ever said to any fighters that they remember- like making Tyrell Biggs cry like a girl, like putting a guy’s nose into his brain, like making Razor Ruddock my girlfriend — I’m deeply sorry. I will appreciate their forgiveness.”
He isn’t just embarrassed by the words he said to fighters. “I have girls that wrote to me and said they met me in a club,” he says. “And I said something crazy to them. And I know I said that, you know, ’cause that was my style. And I say, wow, what was going through my mind to say that? I don’t dwell on it too much. But I just think: What the hell was I thinking* To say this to another human being?”