Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  The rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond this point, and wait for a steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there are other such doors, with guards and a few prisoners moving languidly along a corridor that is lit like an aquarium. The door in front of me pops open with a click. I turn right to a guard’s booth, where I hand over my pass and am told to thrust my right hand into a hole in a wooden box. An ultraviolet light certifies the stamp. I am then instructed to go through the door to the left, into the visitors’ lounge, and give the pass to the guard behind the high desk in the corner. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, maintaining space and privacy, drinking soda bought from machines, trying hard to be loose, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of gray grass and blank, tan walls. The Indiana sky is the color of steel.

  Then, suddenly, from another door, Mike Tyson appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, “How are ya, buddy?”

  Twenty-two months have passed since he vanished from the nightsides of cities, from the bubble of champagne and the musk of women, from the gyms where he prepared for his violent trade, from the arenas that roared when he came after an opponent in a ferocious rush, his eyes hooded, gleaming with bad intentions. Twenty-two months have passed since he was convicted of raping an eighteen-year-old beauty-pageant contestant who consented to leave her own Indianapolis hotel room at nearly 1:30 in the morning, who moved around the streets for a while with Tyson in his rented limousine, who then went to Tyson’s suite in the Canterbury Hotel, where she sat on the bed with him, went to the bathroom and removed her panty shield, on the way passing the door that led to the corridor and the possibility of flight. Twenty-two months since the jury believed Desiree Washington lay helpless while Tyson had sex with her. Twenty-two months since the jury believed that it was perfectly normal for a rape victim to spend two more days taking part in the Miss Black America pageant of 1991. Twenty-two months since Michael Gerard Tyson, twenty-five-year-old child of Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn, was led away — refusing to express remorse for a crime he insists he didn’t commit — deprived of his freedom, his ability to earn millions, his pride.

  But if there is anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on this gray morning. He is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt — with his prison number, 922335, hand-lettered over his heart — and to a visitor who first met him when he was sixteen, he looks taller somehow. In the TV-news clip that plays every time his name is mentioned, Tyson weighs about 250 pounds, swollen and suety in a tight-fitting suit as he smiles in an ironic way and holds up his cuffed hands on his way to a cell. Now, a few days before his second Christmas in prison, he is about 220, the belly as flat as a table, the arms as hard as stone. He looks capable of punching a hole in a prison wall.

  “Yeah, I’m in good shape,” he says, “but not boxing shape.” He works out in the prison gym every day, a self-imposed regimen of calisthenics, weights, running. “No boxing,” he says, the familiar whispery voice darkened by a hint of regret. “They don’t allow boxing in prison in Indiana.” He smiles, nodding his head. “That’s the rules. Ya gotta obey the rules.”

  We walk over to the chairs, and Tyson sits with his back to the picture windows. His hair is cropped tight, and he’s wearing a mustache and trimmed beard that emphasize the lean look. Then I notice the tattoos. On his left bicep, outlined ir blue against Tyson’s ocher-colored skin, is the bespectacled face of Arthur Ashe, and above it is the title of that splendid man’s book Days of Grace. On his right bicep is a tattooed portrait of Mao Tsetung, with the name MAO underneath it, in cartoony “Chinese” lettering. I tell Tyson that it’s unlikely that any other of the planet’s six billion inhabitants are adorned with that combination of tattoos. He laughs, the familiar gold-capped tooth gleaming. He rubs the tattoos fondly with his huge hands.

  “I love reading about Mao,” he says. “Especially about the Long March and what they went through. I mean, they came into a village one time and all the trees were white, and Mao wanted to know what happened, and they told him the people were so hungry they ate the bark right off the trees! What they went through. I mean, that was adversity. This …”

  He waves a hand airily around the visiting room but never finishes the sentence; he certainly feels that the Indiana Youth Center can’t be compared to the Long March. I don’t have to ask him about Arthur Ashe. For weeks Tyson and I have been talking by telephone, and he has spoken several times about Ashe’s book.

  “I never knew him,” Tyson said one night. “I never liked him. He was a tennis player, know what I mean? And he looked like a black bourgeois, someone I couldn’t have nothin’ to do with. Just looking at him I said, ’Yaaagh, he’s weak.’ That was my way of thinking back then.” A pause. “But then Spike Lee sent me his book, and I started reading it, and in there I read this: ’AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear …being black is the greatest burden I’ve had to bear.…Race has always been my biggest burden.…Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me.’ It was like wham! An extra weight tied around me! I mean, wow, that really got me, and I kept reading, excited on every page.”

  On the telephone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room of the Indiana Youth Center, Tyson makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk much about the past. He doesn’t encourage sentimental evocations of the days when, as a raw teenager from a reform school, he learned his trade from the old trainer Cus D’Amato in the gym above the police station in Catskill, New York. He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship with Don King, the flamboyant promoter whose slithery influence many blamed for Tyson’s decline as a fighter and calamitous fall from grace. He is uncomfortable and embarrassed discussing his lost friends and squandered millions. He has no interest in retailing the details of the case, like another Lenny Bruce, endlessly rehashing what happened on July 19, 1991, in room 606 of the Canterbury Hotel or the astonishingly feeble defense offered by his high-priced lawyers or his chances for a new trial. He wants to talk about what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.

  History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves. Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City more than three hundred years later. In this dreadful century, thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind. In the end, Solzhenitsyn triumphed over Stalin’s gulags, Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini’s jails, Malcolm X over the joints of Massachusetts. From Primo Levi to Václav Havel, books, the mind, the imagination, have offered consolation, insight, even hope to men cast into dungeons. I don’t mean to compare Mike Tyson to such men or the Indiana Youth Center to the gulags; Tyson is not serving his six-year sentence for his ideas. But he understands the opportunity offered by doing time and has chosen to seize the day.

  “Sometime in that first month here,” he said one night, “I met an old con, and.he pointed at all the guys playing ball or exercising, and he said to me, ‘You see them guys? If that’s all they do when they’re in here, they’ll go out and mess up and come right back.’ He said to me, ‘You want to make this worth something? Go to the library. Read books. Work your mind. Start with the Constitution.’ And I knew he was right.”

  And so Tyson embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education. Early on he read George Jackson’s prison classic, Soledad Brother, “and the guy knocked me out. It was like any good book: The guy sounded like he was talking directly to me. I could hear him, I can hear him now. He made me understand a lot about the way black men end up in prison, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. That’s what I liked. I got so caught up with this guy, he became a part of my life.”

  Tyson has be
en reading black history too. He is fascinated by the revolution in Haiti in the early nineteenth century, “the only really successful slave revolt, because blacks took power” He can quote from John Quincy Adams’s defense of the slaves who mutinied on the Spanish ship Amistad in 1839 off the coast of Cuba and sailed for fifty-five days all the way to New York. “They landed in Long Island,” he says. “Imagine! Long Island.”

  The process of self-education did not begin smoothly. In his first weeks in jail, Tyson enrolled in a school program, then quickly dropped out. “You know, I’m out on the streets, I’m out there, or I’m training, or I’m in the bars, I’m chasing these women. Then I come to this place after not going to school since I was what? Sixteen? Seventeen? They hit me with this thing, they said, ‘Bang! Do this, do this work….’ It was like putting a preliminary fighter in with a world champion.”

  Dispirited, angry at the teachers and himself, he dropped out for a while. “Then I started very gradually studying on my own, preparing for these things. Then I took that literacy test — and blew it out of the water.”

  He went back to classes, studying to take a high school equivalency examination, and met a visiting teacher from Indianapolis named Muhammad Siddeeq.

  “He was just talking to the other kids one day and said, ‘Does anybody need any help? If so, I’ll help you in the school process.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I need help.’ So he showed me things, in a simple way. …”

  One thing Tyson learned quickly was the use of percentages and decimals. “I never learned that before,” he says, still excited. “It’s a small thing, maybe, something I shoulda learned in grammar school. But you come from a scrambled family, you’re running between the streets and school, missing days, fucking up, and you end up with these holes. One thing never connects to another, and you don’t know why. You don’t know what you didn’t learn. Like percentages. I just never learned it, it was one of the holes. I mean, later on I knew what a percentage was, you know, from a $10 million purse, but I didn’t know how to do it myself. That was always the job of someone else.” He laughs. “One thing now, I can figure out how to leave a tip. There’s restaurants out there where I should eat for free for a couple of years.”

  He isn’t simply filling those gaping holes in his education that should have been bricked up in grammar school. He reads constantly, hungrily, voraciously. One day it could be a book on pigeons, which he raised with great knowledge and affection in the Victorian house where he lived with D’Amato and D’Amato’s longtime companion, Camille Ewald, whom Tyson calls “my mother.” But on other days he could be reading into the history of organized crime, thrilled to discover that the old Jewish gangsters of Murder Inc. hung out near Georgia and Livonia avenues in Brownsville, walking distance from his own childhood turf. He discovered that Al Capone was from Brooklyn and went west to Chicago. And there were black gangsters too.

  He talks about Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello — some of the Founding Fathers of the Mob — with the same intensity and passion he gave as a teenage fighter to Ray Robinson, Mickey Walker, and Roberto Duran. The old gangster he’s most impressed by is the gambler Arnold Rothstein. “He was smart — Damon Runyon called him the Brain — and figured out everything without ever picking up a gun. He helped teach these younger guys, like Lansky and Luciano, you know, how to act, how to dress, how to behave. In The Great Gatsby — you know, by this guy F. Scott Fitzgerald? — the gambler called Meyer Wolfshiem, he’s based on Arnold Rothstein. I mean, this guy was big.”

  In one way, of course, studying such histories is a consolation; in a country where the percentage of young black males in prisons is way out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, it must be a relief to learn that the Irish, Italians, and Jews once filled similar cells. But Tyson’s study of organized crime is part of a larger project.

  “I want to find out how things really work. Not everything is in the history books, you know.” A pause. “Some of those guys didn’t like blacks. They sold drugs to blacks. They poisoned black history. They didn’t respect us as human beings. But most of them couldn’t read and write. The first ones came to this country ignorant, out of school, making money. They didn’t have any kind of morals. They wanted to be big shots and they wanted to be respected by decent people. They tried to be gentlemen, and that was their downfall. When you try to be more than what you really are you always get screwed up.”

  He emphasizes that gangsters are not heroes. “You can read about people without wanting to be like them,” he says. “I can read about Hitler, for example, and not want to be like him, right? But you gotta know about him. You gotta know what you’re talking about. You gotta know what other people are talking about before you can have any kind of intelligent discussion or argument.”

  So it isn’t just gangsters or pigeons that are crowding Tyson’s mind. He has been poring over Niccolò Machiavelli. “He wrote about the world we live in. The way it really is, without all the bullshit. Not just in The Prince, but in The Art of War, Discourses. … He saw how important it was to find out what someone’s motivation was. ‘What do they want?’ he says. What do they want, man?”

  And Voltaire. “I loved Candide. That was also about the world and how you start out one thing and end up another, ’cause the world don’t let you do the right thing most of the time. And Voltaire himself, he was something, man. He wasn’t afraid. They kept putting him in jail, and he kept writing the truth.”

  He has recently read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. “I identify with that book,” he says. “With Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. He was unjustly imprisoned, too. And he gets educated in prison by this Italian priest.” He laughs out loud. “And he gets his revenge too. I understand that; I feel that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want revenge against any person. I don’t mean that. I mean against fate, bad luck, whatever you want to call it.”

  He is familiar with the Hemingway myth that so exhilarated earlier generations of Americans: Hemingway the warrior, Hemingway the hard drinker, Hemingway the boxer. But he talks most passionately about Hemingway the writer. “He uses those short, hard words, just like hooks and uppercuts inside. You always know what he’s saying, ’cause he says it very clearly. But a guy like Francis Bacon, hey, the sentences just go on and on and on. …”

  Obviously, Tyson is not reading literature for simple entertainment, as a diversion from the tedium of prison routine. He is making connections between books and writers, noting distinctions about style and ideas, measuring the content of books against his life as he knows it. But he is not taking a formal course in literature, so I asked him one night how he made the choices about what he reads.

  “Sometimes it’s just the books that come to me. People send them and I read them. But sometimes, most of the time, I’m looking. For example, I’m reading this thing about Hemingway and he says he doesn’t ever want to fight ten rounds with Tolstoy. So I say, ‘Hey, I better check out this guy Tolstoy!’ I did, too. It was hard. I sat there with the dictionary beside me, looking up words. But I like him. I don’t like his writing that much because it’s so complicated, but I just like the guy’s way of thinking.”

  Along with literature, Tyson has been reading biographies: Mao, Karl Marx, Genghis Khan, Hernán Cortés. In casual talk, he scatters references to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell. “When you read about these individuals, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, they contribute to us a different way of thinking. But no one can really label them good or bad. Who actually knows the definition of good or bad? Good and bad might have a different definition to me than it may have in Webster’s Dictionary, than it may have to you.”

  He knows that for his life, the models in books might not always apply. But in all such books, he insists that he finds something of value.

  “I was reading Maya Angelou,” he said one evening, “and
she said something that equates with me so much. People always say how great a writer she is, and people used to say to me, ‘Mike, you’re great, you could beat anybody, you don’t even have to train.’ But you know how hard it is for me to do that? To win in ninety-one seconds? Do you know what it takes away from me? And Maya Angelou said about herself it takes so much from me to write, takes a lot out of me. In order for me to do that, she says, to perform at that level, it takes everything. It takes my personality. It takes my creativity as an individual. It takes away my social life. It takes away so much. And when she said that, I said, ‘Holy moley, this person understands me.’ They don’t understand why a person can go crazy, when you’re totally normal and you’re involved in a situation that takes all of your normal qualities away. It takes away all your sane qualities.”

  In prison Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.

  One of those roads is called Islam. Tyson was raised a Catholic by his mother, Lorna, and during the upheaval in that time before he went to jail, he was baptized as a favor to Don King in a much-photographed ceremony presided over by Jesse Jackson. But water, prayer, and photographs didn’t make him a born-again Christian. “That wasn’t real,” he says now. “As soon as I got baptized, I got one of the girls in the choir and went to a hotel room or my place or something.”

  Now he has embraced Islam. In a vague way, he’d known about Islam for years; you could not grow up in the era of Muhammad Ali and know nothing about it. “But I was avoiding it because people would press it on me. I always avoided what people pressed on me. They wanted me to do the right thing — and Islam, I believe, is the right thing — but all these people wanted me to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”