Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  In prison, through his teacher, Muhammad Siddeeq, Tyson started more slowly, reading on his own about the religion, asking questions. He insists that Siddeeq is not a newer version of Cus D’Amato. “He’s just a good man,” he says, “and a good teacher.” Nor does Tyson sound like a man who is making a convenient choice as a means of surviving in jail. He admits that “there are guys who become Muslims in jail to feel safe — and give it up the day they hit the streets again.” Tyson might do the same. But in repeated conversations, he sounded as if he’d found in Islam another means of filling some of those holes.

  “I believe in Islam,” he told me one night. “That’s true. It’s given me a great deal of understanding. And the Koran gives me insight into the world, and the belief of a man who believes that God has given him the right to speak his word, the prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him. I look at Islam from different perspectives, just as I look at everything else. I find it so beautiful because in Islam you have to tolerate every religion, you know what I mean? ‘Cause everyone has different beliefs. Most so-called religious leaders are bullshit. Voltaire knew that, knew organized religion was a scam. Their object is power. They want power.”

  Tyson’s skepticism about organized religion includes some of the sects and factions within Islam. He pledges his allegiance to none of them.

  “One guy says, ’I believe in Islam, I live out of the Koran.’ Well, I believe in that but other than that, please.…They got a sect here and a sect there. Unbelievable. I just don’t understand that. How can / be a Muslim and you be a Muslim, but we have two different beliefs?”

  Tyson thinks of Islam as not simply a religion but a kind of discipline. He says he prays five times a day. The Koran is a daily part of his reading (but obviously not the only reading he does). “And you know, I got a sailor’s mouth,” he laughed. “But I’ve cut down my cursing at least 50 percent.” He clearly needs to believe in something larger than himself, but his choice of Islam is entwined with a revulsion against certain aspects of Christianity.

  “If you’re a Christian,” he says, “and somebody’s a Christian longer than you, they can dictate to you about your life. You know, this is what you should do, and if you don’t do this, you’re excommunicated. I just found that bizarre … in conflict with human qualities, you know what I mean? I couldn’t understand why a person couldn’t be a human and have problems and just be dealt with and helped. In Islam there’s nobody who can put you in your place. They can let you know this is wrong, you need help on this. But the only one that can judge you is Allah.”

  I asked Tyson how he could reconcile his embrace of Islam with the fact that many of the slave traders were Muslims. The horrors of the Middle Passage often began with men who said they accepted Allah. Tyson answered in a cool way.

  “Look, everyone in Arabia was a slave, know what I mean? They had white slaves, black slaves, Arab slaves, Muslim slaves. Everybody there was a slave. But the slave traders were contradicting Islam and the beliefs of Islam. The prophet Muhammad, he wasn’t a slave trader or a slave. As a matter of fact, the Arabs were trying to kill him, to enslave him. People were people. But Europeans took slavery to a totally different level. Brutalized, submissive, abhorrent. But you can’t condemn all the Jews or all the Romans because they crucified Christ, can you?”

  Tyson emphasizes one thing: He’s a neophyte in his understanding of Islam and has much to learn.

  “Being a Muslim,” Tyson says, “is probably not going to make me an angel in heaven, but it’s going to make me a better person. In Islam we’re not supposed to compete. Muslims only compete for righteousness. I know I’m probably at the back of the line. But I know I’ll be a better person when I get out than I was when I came in.”

  For the moment, jail is the great reality of Tyson’s life. Unless a court orders a new trial or overturns his conviction, he will remain in prison until the spring of 1995. The Indiana Youth Center is a medium- to high-security facility and looks relatively tame compared with some of the others I’ve seen in New York and California. Boredom is the great enemy. “I get up and eat and go to class,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t eat in the prison dining room, because “the food is aaaccch” but goes to a commissary where he can buy packaged milk, cereals, and other food, paying from a drawing account called the Book. He works out in the gym every day, shadowboxing, doing push-ups, running laps to keep his legs strong and lithe. “There’s nothing else to do,” he says. “You gotta keep busy so you don’t go crazy.”

  But it’s still prison. For now it’s the place where Mike Tyson is doing time, using all of his self-discipline to get through it alive.

  “I’m never on nobody’s bad side,” he says. “Even though there’s guys in here just don’t like the way you walk, the way you look, or whatever, I just — I’m never on nobody’s bad side. I don’t like to be judgmental, because we’re all in the same boat. I have to remember to be humble. But sometimes I get caught up with who I was at one time, and I must remind myself my circumstances have changed.”

  There are still a lot of hard cases on the premises, including Klansmen and members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Tyson laughs about their swastikas, shaved heads, white-power tattoos. “They talk back and forth,” he said. “But they realize once they’re in prison, no one gives a fuck about them.”

  More dangerous are people who seem to crack under the stress of doing time. “A couple of days ago, this guy who never bothered nobody just cracked a guy on the head with a lock in his sock,” he said in an amazed tone. “And there are other guys — they’ll do something disrespectful to some guy, and they’ll walk around with their headphones on, acting like they didn’t do anything, jamming, dancing, then, next thing you know — ka-pow! — they get clocked.”

  In the bad old days, Tyson might have empathized with such people; he is, after all, the man who as champion once socked an off-duty heavyweight named Mitch Green in Harlem at 4:00 in the morning. But in prison, he is at once part of the general population and detached from it because of his celebrity. “When I get out, I have a future,” he says. “A lot of these guys don’t.” Sometimes he even volunteers for a form of solitary confinement (“to be alone, to focus, to meditate, to read, to get some fucking sleep”). But he also looks with compassion on his fellow prisoners.

  “They send some guys to prison that don’t necessarily have bad records,” he says. “Instead of rehabilitating him, they Rehabilitate him by sending him to prison. Without him even being attacked or molested, just from what he witnesses, some things that are so taboo to his humanity. It could totally drive him insane.”

  Among the scarier aspects of prison these days is AIDS. “They are falling like flies in here,” Tyson said. “And some of these guys keep boning each other over in the dorms.” There are other people for whom prison is life itself. “There’s one guy here who’s been inside for thirty-one years. Not in here but in other prisons. There are other guys with so much time…. I watch them adapt. This is their home. You don’t go in their door without knocking.”

  Tyson said that much of what he has seen is sad and comic at the same time.

  “You see a guy, he’s doing all the time in a lifetime, he’s talking to a girl on a phone. I mean, he’s doing ninety years. And what’s he saying? ‘Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby.’”

  Tyson laughed in a sad, rueful way.

  “Most guys that are in here, they got a lot of time, so they lose hope. They get caught up in the sideshows, like homosexuality, drugs, you know what I mean? It’s very difficult for me to think about participating in the things these guys do. You talk to the guys, and to me they seem rather sane. But to see their conduct, some of them, they’re in a totally insane frame of mind. The fact is, prison is like a slave plantation. We have no rights which the authorities respect. I wasn’t a criminal when I got put in here. I didn’t commit no crime. But we become the problem out there, because we’re no
t aware. We become the problem because out there we’re robbing, we’re stealing, we’re selling drugs, we’re killing. I hear people talk about revolution. They mention Castro, Mao, Lenin, the Black Panthers. But how can you have a revolution when you have crime, when you have people selling drugs, you have people murdering? There’s no collective ideas there.”

  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?”

  Tyson tries to live in the present tense of jail, containing his longing for freedom through a sustained act of will. But when I pressed him one evening, he admitted that he does yearn for certain aspects of the outside world.

  “I miss the very simple things,” he says. “I miss a woman sexually. But more important, I miss the pleasure of being in a woman’s presence. To speak to a woman in private and discuss things. Not just Oh! Oh! Oh! More subtle than that. I just want to be able to have privacy, where no one can say, ‘Time, Tyson! Let’s go!’ You miss being with people. I miss flying my birds. They’re not gonna know me, I’m not gonna know them, ’cause there’re so many new ones now ’cause of the babies. I miss being able to hang out. Talk to Camille. Laugh. I miss long drives. Sometimes I used to just get in the car and drive to Washington. I miss that a lot. I miss, sometimes, going to Brooklyn in the middle of the night, pulling up in front of the projects and one
of my friends will be there, shooting baskets. I’ll get out of the car, and we’ll talk there, like from 4:00 in the morning until 9:00 or 10:00. People are going to work, and we’re just talking.” A pause. “I miss that.”

  He insists that he doesn’t miss what he calls the craziness. “It was all unreal. Want to go to Paris? Want to fly to Russia? Sure. Why not? Let me have two of those and three of them and five of those. Nobody knows what it’s like — fame, millions — unless they went through it. It was unreal, unreal. I had a thousand women, the best champagne, the fanciest hotels, the fanciest cars, the greatest meals — and it got me here.”

  He does have some specific plans for the future. “I want to visit all the great cities, I want to see the great libraries,” he says. “One of the few things I did that impressed me was going to Paris that time and visiting the Louvre. I was devastated by that place, man. I want to see all of that, everywhere.”

  Yes, he said, he will box again. He will be twenty-eight when he returns, the same age as Ali when he made his comeback and certainly younger than George Foreman when he made his. He asks repeatedly about active fighters and how they looked in their latest bouts, because he only sees brief clips on CNN. “I’m a fighter,” he says. “That’s what I do. I was born to do that.”

  He wants to make money; nobody knows how much Tyson has left, not even Tyson, but his return to boxing could be the most lucrative campaign in the history of sport. “I want to have money for a family,” he says. “In the end, that’s how you can decide what kind of man I was. Not by how many guys I knocked out. But by the way I took care of my kids, how I made sure they went to college, that they had good lives and never wanted for nothing. And what I taught them. About the world. About character.”

  Tyson would even like to try college himself. “I’d like to go to a black college that’s not well-known,” he says, “to study and learn. But also to have some kind of exhibitions, too, fights to benefit the college. 1 don’t have to fight benefits for a church or a mosque. But the black colleges, that I want to do. …”