by Mike Tyson
Even Dundee praised me after the fight.
“Tyson throws combinations I never saw before. I was stunned. I worked with Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, but I’m seeing from Tyson a three-punch combination second to none. When have you seen a guy throw a right hand to the kidney, come up the middle with an uppercut, then throw a left hook?”
I didn’t take that belt off that whole night. I wore it around the lobby of the hotel. I wore it to the after-party, and I wore it when I went out drinking later with Jay Bright, my roommate at Cus’s house; Bobby Stewart’s son; and Matthew Hilton, the fighter. We went to a dive bar in Vegas called The Landmark, across the street from the Hilton. Nobody was in there, but we just sat and drank all night. I was drinking vodka straight and I got truly smashed. At the end of the night, Matthew passed out and I went around to different girls’ houses, showing them my championship belt. I didn’t have sex with them, I just hung out with them for a while, and then I’d leave and call another girl and go over to her house and hang out. It was crazy. You have to understand that I was still only twenty years old. And when you think about it, a lot of my friends were only fifteen or sixteen. That wasn’t a big difference at that age. Now all of a sudden, because I’m champion of the world, everyone expected me to be a totally together guy because of the title and what it represents. But I was just a little kid having fun.
And I was lost. By the time I won the belt I was truly a wrecked soul because I didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t have Cus. I had to win the belt for Cus. We were going to do that or else we were going to die. There wasn’t any way I was leaving that ring without that belt. All that sacrifice, suffering, dedication, sacrifice, suffering. Day by day in every way. When I finally got back to my hotel room early that morning, I looked at myself in the mirror wearing that belt, and I realized that I had accomplished our mission. And now I was free.
But then I remembered reading something Lenin wrote in one of Cus’s books. “Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.” That was a statement I should have taken into consideration in the years that followed.
5
“My name is Mike Tyson. I’m a professional fighter. Boxing is a lonely sport. The sparring, the training, and especially the roadwork, give me plenty of time to think. One of the things I think about most is how bad drugs are and how much they hurt people. Well, we can get rid of drugs if each of us, one by one, decides to say ‘No.’ It’s a small word with a big meaning. Say it, SAY NO TO DRUGS!”
That was a public service announcement I did for the Drug Enforcement Administration to be broadcast right before my first title defense in 1987. I also did PSAs for New York State. They showed me hitting a heavy bag and then turning to the camera. “That’s right, stay off crack, so you can win.”
The irony of all this is that while I was filming these spots, I was financing my friend Albert in his crack enterprise back in Brownsville. Right around the time that Cus died, I started giving Albert five thousand dollars here, twenty thousand there, just so that he didn’t have to work for someone else. I wasn’t a partner and I never wanted any return from my investment. I was just worried about his safety. Albert and I had grown up and robbed and stolen together. I didn’t want him to worry if one of the dealers he was working for said, “Where’s my shit?” The drug business in Brownsville in the ’80s was like 1820s slavery. When you’re working for these guys, your life meant nothing. If you had that man’s package, you couldn’t quit when you wanted to. Once you held that hand and made that deal, you were his property.
I thought about getting Albert to come to work with me. But guys like him were just too antisocial. They didn’t believe in hanging out, carrying no bag, being a yes-man, kissing ass because I was champ. Nobody was going to be bossing him around. The only thing we knew was violence in Brownsville, even with people we love. Albert was much too hard-core to be part of my entourage. He wasn’t going to do a Mike Tyson “Yes, ma’am, how are you doing? May I help you?” Guys like him would get angry and they’d have no control over their emotions. So rather I said, “Here. You take this money.”
But my plan didn’t work. A young Turk ready to get his meat shot Albert and a couple of my other friends in 1989. They were only twenty at that time and there was also a sixteen-year-old who wanted a piece of the dream. The Benz, the girls, and the status killed them. There was a lot of dying then. I paid for a lot of funerals.
• • •
I did two things right away when I went back to New York after winning the title. I went up to Catskill and showed my belt off everywhere. I wore it outside for three weeks, sometimes even sleeping with it on. One day I walked into the kitchen and told Jay Bright to come with me for a ride. There was one more person I wanted to show the belt to. I told Jay to drive to the liquor store and I gave him some money to buy a large magnum of Dom Pérignon champagne. Then I had him drive to Cus’s grave. When we got to his stone, we were both crying. We both said a little prayer and then I popped the cork and we both took a big swig and then I poured the rest of the bottle on Cus’s grave, left the empty bottle on the grass, and left.
The second thing I did was to go down to New Jersey and deal with my mom’s grave. Her boyfriend Eddie had been hit by a car and died right before the Berbick fight, and he was buried next to my mother. So I had both of them exhumed and put into nice bronze caskets, and then I bought a massive seven-foot-tall headstone for her, so every time people came to the cemetery, they’d know that that was the Mike Tyson’s mother there.
By that point, I had moved into my own apartment in Jimmy and Steve Lott’s building. Probably so they could spy on me because I was their cash cow. I really wanted to enjoy being the champion. It was the first time we had ever set a goal and gone through all the blood, sweat, and tears to accomplish it. Now I could be mentioned in the same breath as Joe Louis and Ali. I wanted to bask in that, but I felt guilty and empty. Cus wasn’t there to enjoy it with me or to give me direction. For the first time in years, I didn’t have a goal or a desire to do anything. It might have been different if I had a companion or a child. All of my friends had kids by then. But I had been too busy fighting.
I also felt like a fake. Jimmy and Bill were intent on stripping away all the Brownsville from me and giving me a positive image. But Brownsville was who I was, my personality and my barometer. That was the important essence that Cus wanted me to keep. They had me doing those anti-drug messages and posing for posters for the NYPD but everyone knew I was a criminal. I had come from a detention home. Now all of a sudden I was a good guy? No, I was a fake fucking Uncle Tom nigga.
I felt like a trained monkey. Everything I did now was critiqued, everything had to be premeditated. I’d go on a talk show and they didn’t want me to wear nice jewelry. Steve actually asked me to take off my matching gold bracelets. I didn’t want to live with restrictions like that. I didn’t become the heavyweight champ of the world to be a submissive nice guy.
Jimmy and Cayton wanted me to be another Joe Louis, not Ali or Sonny Liston. They wanted me to be a hero, but I wanted to be a villain. The villain is always remembered, even when he doesn’t outshine the hero. Even though the hero kills him, he makes the hero the hero. The villain is immortal. Besides, I knew that Joe Louis’s hero image was manufactured. In real life he liked to snort cocaine and screw lots of girls.
I wanted people bowing at my feet; I wanted people catering to me; I wanted to be chasing the women away from me. This was what Cus told me I would be doing, but I was not getting it. But it was supposed to be my time in the ring now. I was still sitting in the bleachers; they were not letting me in the ring.
When I moved into my apartment, Steve hooked me up with a great stereo system that cost about twelve grand, and he got shit from Jimmy for spending that much of my money on it. Later that year, we were walking through the Forum shops in Caesar’s and I saw a watch.
“Use your card, get
me that watch,” I said.
“No fucking way,” Steve said.
“Why not? You know I’ll pay you back,” I protested.
“No way, Jim will fucking kill me,” he said.
It was then that my demons would tell me, “These white guys don’t care about you like Cus.”
I loved Jimmy, but he was always trying to keep me in line.
“Mike, you have to do this because if you don’t, this multimillion-dollar company will sue us.” So we had to do this fight or that commercial. I was still an immature kid. In the middle of shooting a commercial I’d say, “I don’t want to do this shit. I want to go to Brownsville and hang out with my friends.”
I went back to Brownsville almost every night that I wasn’t in training. I got the royal treatment there. Literally. When my Jamaican friends would see my limo roll up, they’d take out their guns.
“They’re shooting for you, Mike, twenty-one guns, nigga!” one of them would say.
And they’d give me a twenty-one-gun salute. Boom, boom, boom.
Sometimes I’d be walking down the street with a few friends and I’d see some guy who had bullied me years before. My friends didn’t know I had a beef with this guy, but they could tell just by the way the cat was looking at me that there was no love between us.
“You know this motherfucker looking at you? Who’s this bitch?” one of my friends would ask me.
I didn’t have to answer.
“Who the fuck are you looking at, motherfucker?” my friend said. And it’s on. They’d just crack him. I’d have to tell them to leave him alone.
Once I began making a lot of money boxing, I got a reputation as being a Robin Hood in the hood. People who didn’t know me would make a big deal about me going back to Brownsville and giving my money away. But it wasn’t like that. People who came from where I had come from had a responsibility to take care of their friends even if it was twenty years later. So if I went away and made this money and I went back I had to break off some for my friends who weren’t doing as well. I would pick up cash from Cayton’s office and divide the hundred-dollar bills into packets of a thousand dollars. I’d usually carry about twenty-five thousand in cash with me and would go around and distribute it to my friends when I’d see them. I’d tell them to go buy a tailored suit and then we’d go out that night.
I didn’t even have to know the people who I gave money to. I’d stop my car and give out hundred-dollar bills to bums and homeless people. I’d gather up a bunch of street urchins and take them to Lester’s Sporting Goods store and buy them all new sneakers. I later found out that Harry Houdini did the same thing when he started to make it. I guess that’s what poor people who get rich real quick do. They don’t feel like they deserve it. I felt that way sometimes, because I forgot how much hard work I had put into my career.
This was a really fucking downtrodden, drug-infested, gang-infested, sex-infested, filth-infested neighborhood. And you’re from this cesspool, you know? Just giving them money and helping these people, it doesn’t solve their problems, but it makes them happy.
Whenever I was handing out money, I’d be sure to go and track down all the old ladies who were my mother’s friends. I’d be with a friend in the car and I’d drive to a certain project where I knew this one old lady lived and my friend would wait in the car and I’d get out and knock on her door and give her some cash. Then I’d do the same thing again and again. I didn’t think that I was noble doing all this. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Maybe I believed that that was how I could clean my sins and buy my way back to heaven. I guess I was looking for redemption.
I got down on myself a lot, but I always had friends in Brownsville who wouldn’t let me go there. I’d sit there and complain how hard life was and this one guy, who I prefer not to name, would look at me.
“Oh, it’s hard? Who did you kill lately, Mike? What house did you go into and tie everybody up, huh, Mike?”
Whenever I had something negative to say about myself, he’d say, “There’s nothing bad about you, Mike. You’re a good man. You don’t escape where you come from because you have money now. If you weren’t a good man, we would all have you in the trunk, Mike.”
A lot of my friends from Brownsville wound up incarcerated in Coxsackie, which was not too far from Catskill. I had gone to school with most of the people who worked at the prison there, so when I’d go up there to visit my friends who were in jail, I wasn’t going to the visiting room, I would hang out with them in their cells, because I knew the warden and all the guards. I gave my friends the shoes off my feet, the jewelry off my neck, and the guards were all looking the other way. One time, I was walking through the range, where the cells were, and I saw Little Spike from the Bronx who had been locked up with me in Spofford. Now he’s not so little, he’s a monster.
“Yo, Mike. What’s up, man? What are you doing?” he shouted.
He thought I had been busted again and they were taking me to a cell.
I was living this crazy dual life. One day visiting friends in their prison cells, the next day hanging out with Rick James. I had met him a few times before but the first time we really spoke to each other was at an after-party for some new movie. We were at a big club, maybe a thousand people were there, but you’re going to notice Rick James. He called me over.
“Hey Mike, get in this picture with us.”
He was posing with Eddie Murphy and Sylvester Stallone. Right around then he had made a lot of money from Hammer sampling him on “U Can’t Touch This,” so Rick was back in business.
Next time I saw him I was in the lobby of a hotel on Sunset Boulevard. I was sitting outside with Ricky Schroder and Alfonso Ribeiro from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, just chilling. Ricky was probably seventeen then and Alfonso was maybe sixteen. But we’re sitting there drinking, and I looked up and I saw a convertible Corniche Rolls-Royce pull up and Rick get out. He was wearing a loud shirt with a tie, but the tie wasn’t tied and the shirt was unbuttoned. He came over to us, slapped me five, and then he looked at Alfonso, and then, boom, he hit him hard in the chest.
“Gimme that fucking beer,” he said and grabbed Alfonso’s beer.
“Rick, this is a kid, you can’t hit this guy like that,” I protested.
He just took that bottle and swigged from it.
“What’s up, nigga?” he said to me.
Rick just didn’t give a fuck. Eddie Murphy and his brother Charles told me a great Rick James story. He once was working on some music with Eddie and he was over at Eddie’s house. I went in and Eddie came up to me.
“Mike, this nigga’s put his feet on my chairs,” Eddie said. He was complaining about Rick. Eddie had an immaculate house; everything had to be just right. And Rick was putting his smelly feet up on the chairs and they had asked him to stop, but Rick didn’t give a shit.
“Fuck this. I can do what I want,” he said.
So Charlie, Eddie’s brother, went over to Rick.
“Motherfucker, this ain’t no joke up here,” he said and started choking Rick to restrain him.
That didn’t go over too well with Rick. He got up and dusted himself off. And when Charlie turned his back to him, Rick called out.
“Hey, Charlie.”
Charlie turned around and, POW, Rick hit him so hard that you could see the impression “RJ” from Rick’s big diamond ring on Charlie’s face.
The next day, I went back to Eddie’s house and Eddie and Charlie were marveling over the fact that Prince and his guys had kicked their ass playing basketball. Prince had on his high-heel shoes and he was still hitting every bucket. Swoosh. Swoosh.
But if I had to credit one person for mentoring me in the ways of celebrityhood it has to be Anthony Michael Hall, of all people. When I was coming up in fame, before I became champ, I’d hang with him a lot. He was the man. He was the first guy I knew who had celeb
money. And he was burning it up, man, with limos everywhere. He was so generous. So when I crashed my Caddy, I went out and bought a limo because I had seen how cool it was when we’d ride around in Michael’s.
I used that limo to go to Eddie Murphy’s New Year’s Eve party in 1987 at his New Jersey mansion. It was a star-studded party with Al B. Sure!, Bobby Brown, Run-DMC, and Heavy D. I was cocky but I was still a little shy. But not too shy to pile three girls in the back of the limo and take them back to my apartment in Manhattan.
My days of abstinence were over. I was an extremist at everything I did, including sex. Once I started banging women, the floodgates opened. Short, tall, sophisticated, ugly, high-society, street girls, my criteria was breathing. But I still had no line and for the most part didn’t know how to approach women.
When I went to Brownsville, I’d visit a childhood friend of mine who had become a pimp. We’d be sitting in his brand-new limo just talking and he’d suddenly stop and get out of the car.
“Go get the motherfucking trick,” he’d yell at one of the girls congregating on the street. “You see that motherfucker on the corner? What are you doing bullshitting with these bitches?”
Then he’d get back in the car.
“These bitches need direction, Ike,” he’d say. “They get distracted real quick. I need to get a seeing-eye dog to guide these bitches.”
One time, I came to see him at four in the morning.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Mike?” he said.
I had never told him that I wanted to fuck some of his girls before, but he didn’t even let me get it out of my mouth.
“Get the fuck out of here, Mike, all right? You are Mike Tyson. Don’t be fucking these hos and nasty bitches.”
Sometimes I’d be with my friends that I used to stick up places with. By then, they had their Mercedeses and were looking just as good as me. We were laughing, hanging out in a club, and a beautiful woman would walk by with a guy. I started talking to her and my guys would stand all around and block her man off. Oh, I ain’t worth a damn. Stupid, ignorant, distinguished gorillas with guns. They’re looking at this guy, like, What the fuck are you doing, nigga? Meanwhile, another guy is saying to the girl, “You’d better be nice to my motherfucking man or I’m gonna kill your fucking husband.” That was the eighties. That’s how people rolled back then in Brownsville.
