by Mike Tyson
So we bought some ice cream and walked up Columbus Avenue.
“Enjoy this now, Mike,” Pete said. “Because soon you’re not going to be able to do this anymore.”
Now I couldn’t go out without getting mobbed. I might sneak out to a club before one of my fights and the people in the club would start busting me.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Mike?” they’d say. “We’re going to see you next week, motherfucker. You’d better win. I can’t believe your ass is not in training.”
I might see a pretty girl there and I’d ask some guy, “Who is that girl?”
“Fuck that bitch, Mike,” the guy said. “I don’t know who she is, but I’ll bring her to the fight. Just go train, nigga.”
It was worse when I’d be on the streets of Brownsville. A lot of guys there had no control over their emotions and they took the notion of disrespect very seriously. I’d be standing there with some guys and some stranger would come up to me.
“Hey, what’s up, man?” he’d say all friendly.
I’d do that white shit, “Hey, how are you doing?” but one of my friends would freak.
“Hey, Mike, you know him?”
“Nah.”
“What the fuck you talking to him for?”
They didn’t like to see no man suck up to another man. They’d tell someone who came up to us, “Get the fuck away from him. Leave him alone.”
People in Brownsville didn’t like their space being invaded. That’s bad news in the hood, but that’s par for the course when you’re a celebrity. So I was at war with myself, my own instincts. I was uncomfortable in my skin, as the rehab people say. Sometimes it got ugly too. More than once, I’d be in a bad mood and an obsessive fan would follow me around.
“I love you, Mike. Can I get an autograph?” he’d say.
“Get the fuck away from me you fucking freak,” I’d say and kick his ass. To be honest, I wasn’t meant to be a famous guy.
When I recount these stories, I can’t believe what a disrespectful ignorant monster I was then. All that fame shit just makes you feel hollow if you’re not grounded. Add to that the boozing and the girls and it all began to affect my performance. Guys who I should have been able to knock out in one round would go five, six, sometimes the distance. There was no way that someone could be a sexual Tyrannosaurus and the world’s champion. You have to willingly surrender one of them. You could have sex at any age, but you can’t always be a world-class athlete. But I stuck with the sex.
I was just a miserable person then. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be with me. I didn’t want to be with me. I think that my mother handed down her depression to me. I didn’t know what I was doing when I was the champion. I just wanted to be like my old heroes. I didn’t care if I was going to die tomorrow. I had read a book about Alexander the Great when I was younger. He would rather have a few years of glory than a lifetime of obscurity. So what did I care if I died? I never had no fucking life, what did I have to look forward to?
I had everything I wanted, but I wasn’t happy within myself. The outside world wasn’t making me happy anymore. I didn’t know how to get it from the inside, because happiness, as I realized later, is an inside job. So in this state of despair I did the last thing I should have done. I got married.
I got married to Robin because she was pregnant and I was thrilled to become a father. That’s the only reason. The problem was that Robin didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Jimmy Jacobs did. And he found out when Ruth, Robin’s mother, called him to tell him. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but it was all bullshit. Robin was never pregnant. It should have been a tip-off that the woman I was sleeping with didn’t even tell me herself. Everything about these two women was fugazi. Robin told the world that she had dropped out of Harvard Medical School to pursue an acting career, but when some reporters actually went to check, they found that her name never showed up in their records. I don’t care how much you claim to love someone, when you lie it will always come back to haunt you. That’s what Robin and her mother were. Confidence people, con artists, borderline prostitutes. Ruth publicly sued the great Yankee Dave Winfield for giving her herpes. And you know something ain’t right when you get up at your own college graduation and get booed by all of your 129 classmates like Robin did.
I didn’t know nothing about lying about being pregnant. I didn’t know that kind of stuff went on. I tried to do the honorable thing, but it was the smuck thing. I was El Smucko. Maybe I should have been a dick, like the rest of the black men. No way, Jose. You remember the old Maury Povich Show when the ladies accuse the guy and say, “You are the father of this child”? I should have said, “Naw, see you on Maury.” But I wasn’t that guy. I was the guy who put diamonds under her pillow, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy her. So when we were at the NBA All-Star game in Chicago in February of 1988, I took her to the house of this priest I knew and had him marry us on the spot. I didn’t even ask her if she wanted to get married, it was just an impulsive thing. She played coy and I had to give her a little lightweight intimidation, at least that’s what I thought, and then she agreed and Father Clements married us in the hallway of his house and then we went to my friend’s club to celebrate.
When we got back to New York, Ruth had already called Jimmy and threatened that she was going to fly us to Vegas to get married unless we were immediately legally married in New York. Jimmy wanted to delay it so we could sign a prenup but I was so smitten that I didn’t care about any prenup. So we went to City Hall, got a license, and got legally married. Right away, Ruth started talking about finding a suitable mansion for the three of us to live in. Robin had always told me that she and her mother came as a package, but there was always something really strange about her relationship with her mother. It was too bizarre for even the Freud people to contemplate. They didn’t have a word for it. Robin wasn’t the right sex to have an Oedipus complex. I just think she had a Herdipus complex.
6
Around this time I met the legendary world-famous pimp/author Iceberg Slim. I wish I had met him before I married Robin. He would have set my ass straight. I was out in L.A. one night at a club and I ran into Leon Isaac Kennedy. We were talking and he nonchalantly mentioned that Iceberg had told him something.
“Excuse me, do you mean Iceberg Slim the writer?” I said.
Leon told me he was his friend, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought Iceberg was a mythical character. He had gotten his name because he was sitting in his favorite bar, high on cocaine, when someone shot at the guy next to him. The bullet grazed his friend and then went right through Slim’s hat. But he didn’t flinch, he just took his hat off and inspected the entry and exit holes. His friends thought that he was so cool he should be named Iceberg.
So I told Leon that I wanted to meet him and he picked me up the next day and we drove to Iceberg’s apartment. He was living in a shitty little pad in the rough part of Crenshaw. He was in his seventies and he was living alone. I sat down and talked with him for seven hours straight. We talked about his life and his books. I thought that he would talk like a crude street guy but he was very erudite and spoke nobly. He enunciated each syllable precisely. I was thinking that he became a self-educated man when he was in prison, that he just learned these words from a dictionary. But I later learned that he had gone to college first before he went into the life. He showed me his baby and childhood pictures and he was just a cute, lovable little kid. Berg was an extremely interesting character. You never would have thought you were talking to someone so steeped in the world of vice.
The first thing that I asked him was if he was the best pimp out there.
“No, I was nowhere near the best pimp. It’s just that I was educated and I knew how to read and write and put these stories together. And that’s all probably that I had. Those other guys were monsters,” he said.
He told me
a lot of stories of his escapades, but he was at a point in his life where he wasn’t proud of them. When he got older, he had daughters, so he didn’t play the game anymore. But when he had been in the life, he was brutal to his girls. I found out later that he had used the pimp stick that his mentor had invented. He’d bend a clothes hanger and put it on a hot stove and beat his hos with it. He was the guy who, if it was raining out, told his girls, “Bitch, you had better walk between the raindrops and get my money. And don’t get wet.”
Berg wasn’t a happy, smiley kind of guy, and he wasn’t even excited that I had come to see him. I think that he thought that was the way it was supposed to be. He was the Mack. When you look at these pimps with their high heels and their funny-colored suits and stuff, we think they’re clowns, but their confidence is sky-high. We don’t understand how they get these girls to do what they do, but it’s all in the confidence. We laugh at these guys, but we envy them. How do these guys get this kind of control, to make these women do this stuff and then get money for doing it?
I kept making pilgrimages out to see Iceberg. I even invited him to see me fight but that would have been too much for him. Back in the day he was an immaculate dresser. He was one of the first guys to wear the ascots. He was the first nigga with French cuffs. But if he was to show up at one of my fights, he told me that he would have had to get his old leather suit out and he didn’t want to bother with that. He was very much into his brand. People expected him to look a certain way. “I got to be in my leather pants and I don’t feel like doing that,” he said. I respectfully told him that I would buy him whatever he wanted, but he was a classy guy and he refused my offer.
I once brought Don King, Rory, and John Horne to see Iceberg. Slim was in his pajamas in bed and we sat like little schoolkids at his feet on a raggedy old couch. We were paying homage to Berg, so if we wanted to talk we had to raise our hands. “Excuse me, Mr. Berg,” and then we’d ask him a question. That must have been killing Don’s arrogant ass to have to raise his hand and get called on.
One time, I raised my hand.
“Mr. Berg, what’s this macking shit? Does that mean if I can control a girl and make her do what I want her to do, that’s macking?”
“No, that’s not macking,” Berg replied slowly. “Macking is when you’re in control of all your elements, like right here. I know everything that is happening. Macking has nothing to do with the woman. The macking pulls in the woman, attracts the woman, then she knows what to do. In order for the macking to attract her, she has to be in the life. They’re magnetized; it’s magnetizing macking. It ain’t about no making girls do what you want them to do, she knows what to do. They’re automatically in the life, they’re attracted to the magnetizing of the macking and then that’s just it, everything is just opening up for you. They’re bringing you money, everything is happening. All this you hear about these young guys saying what they’re doing and who they’re beating. That’s not right. The woman chooses; this is by choice, not by force.”
We’re listening to this and thinking, What the fuck? I had to ask Don if this was the real guy. I was just taking Leon’s word. But Don was in the same demographic so he confirmed that that was the real Iceberg.
Even in his pajamas, you could sense his charisma. He knew that we were there to pay homage to him and get an education. We had thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of custom-made clothing on, carrying our finest leather bags, and he wasn’t impressed by us in the smallest bit. He expected us to be there.
It used to be that before we would go out to a club to hang out and get some girls, we’d go visit Berg and get his blessings.
“What’s up, Berg? We’re going out tonight,” I’d say.
“Well, just be careful, young man. Don’t be out there letting these girls touch you. I know you’re famous and it’s hard for you, you’ll probably let these girls touch you. You can’t do that, son. You tell them, ‘Hey, hey, get your hands off me. What’s your pedigree, baby? Where’s your man at? Don’t handle me like that, baby, please.’ You got them all touching you and you’re laughing and smiling, Mike, that’s not the way to go. I understand you’re in that beautiful-people life, Mike, but you can’t have these women handling you like that. What’s wrong with you man, are you a freak? You should be telling them, ‘I could choose you, but I want to see your man first.’ Is he of the top caliber? You have to see her pedigree. If she’s with a knuckleheaded two-dollar sneaker pimp, you can’t mess with her.”
Berg seemed content in his situation. There was nothing about him that made me feel that he was insecure. He lived in a dilapidated apartment building that was worth maybe fifty thousand dollars and I was a millionaire. I was carrying more cash in my bag than Berg’s whole building was worth. But we were paying homage to him. Before we left that day, I told Don to give Berg some money. He broke off about 10K.
Another day Iceberg began lecturing me.
“Mike, you’re a very dangerous kind of guy. You’re going to leave here and have women problems all your life, because you’ll just fuck anything. And then you want to give them all full speed ahead, you want to give them all everything you got. You just will always have women problems, boy. I see you’re into satisfying every woman and you’re going to lose at that every time. You let them invade your mind. You’re not a lovey-dovey guy, you’ve got to stick and move since you’re too emotional with women. You’re going to always have some kind of connection with them or they’re going to have some connection with you, because you have to satisfy that feeling. And that’s very dangerous. Dangerous to yourself. You put that pressure on yourself, you don’t feel good, you don’t satisfy the woman. That’s a problem with your mother. There’s some connection that you had with your mother.”
Berg was getting sick and he was getting ready to die. He told me that he wanted one of those coffins that goes in the wall, above the ground, so that the bugs and the roaches wouldn’t get him.
“Now listen, Mike, I don’t want to be in the ground, I want to be in the wall. I don’t want the roaches and bugs eating me up. I’m beautiful, Mike. I don’t want them eating my eyes. I gave too much to the world, Mike.”
That’s just how arrogant pimps are. A pimp wants to be able to go to his own funeral to see who came. He don’t care that he’s dead, he just wants to know that the whole world came.
So I gave him twenty-five thousand dollars in cash from my bag and politely said, “Bergie, man, don’t worry about it. This is for the walls.” Iceberg took the money and said, “Wow, man.” But he never once said “Thank you.” That’s why I loved him. He kept it real until the end. I think he expected me to say “Thank you” for giving him my money. Most pimps don’t care about anyone but I knew he did. If I didn’t think he was a good person I would never have given him the cash.
• • •
About a week after Robin and I got married, I was asleep in Catskill. When I woke up, I saw there was some snow on the ground, so I called Bill Cayton to tell him that I couldn’t make it into the city. He had wanted me to sign a new managerial contract that had been changed to state that if either Jim or Bill died, their wives would get their share of the proceeds. That seemed innocuous enough but alarms should have gone off in my head when Bill got the police commissioner of Albany to send a marked police car to drive me to the city. They wanted that thing signed awfully bad.
Jimmy and Bill were there along with José Torres. José was getting canned as the commissioner of boxing in New York, but I guess he was there to help out his friends Jimmy and Bill.
My next fight was with Tony Tubbs in Japan. If I thought I was getting the celebrity treatment in the States, Japan was totally over the top. There was mass hysteria when my plane landed and I was engulfed by thousands of screaming fans. We were the first attraction at the Tokyo Dome, a new stadium that held sixty-five thousand fans and within an hour of the tickets going on sale, we had sold 80
percent of them. The Japanese promoter, Mr. Honda, had handpicked Tony Tubbs as my opponent because he thought that he had the best shot at prolonging the fight into the later rounds and satisfying the audience. Don King had even promised Tony a $50,000 bonus if he came in at under 235 pounds. But Tony was battling some demons then and he couldn’t make weight.
Robin joined me in Tokyo and Larry Merchant interviewed her right before the fight.
“Inquiring minds want to know: How does a woman who went to Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard Medical School wind up falling in love with a guy who’s a graduate of the school of hard knocks?” he asked.
“God, I want to know too. We have a lot in common. Traditional families. It was sort of love at first sight. It was hard at the beginning but we got through it and we got married.”
Traditional families? Yeah, traditional for Iceberg Slim, maybe. But Robin loved the attention.
The fight didn’t last long. I felt Tubbs out in the first round and I was pleased to see that he wasn’t trying to clinch. It would have been hard for him to run at that weight. In the second round we actually traded punches and I stunned him with a left to the temple. Then I unloaded some vicious blows to the body and when he came off the ropes, I knocked him out with a left hook.
When Larry Merchant interviewed me after the fight, I was my usual megalomaniac self.
“I refuse to be hurt, to be knocked down. I refuse to lose!”
On the plane ride back to New York, Robin began throwing her weight around. She cornered Bill Cayton and according to him said, “I’m Mrs. Mike Tyson and I’m taking over.” She demanded to see all the paperwork concerning my agreements with Bill and Jim. If she wanted to see the books, it was fine with me. If Jimmy had been there, I’m sure the situation would have been handled more smoothly. He was much more of a people person than Bill. But Jimmy had to miss the fight because he was in a hospital in New York. He had lied to me and told me that he couldn’t attend the fight because he was trying to locate some rare film footage of black boxers from the turn of the century.
