Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I knew Wayno by then, but I wasn’t close to him. We became close as soon as he moved into the cell with me. In fact, we became so close that he’s still working with me to this day. Wayno practically ran that prison. He was in for dealing coke, but he had an IT background, so he worked processing the Inmate Tracking System. He was the president of our dorm, the assistant coach of the varsity basketball team, and a leading member of the Islamic community in there. Plus, he was from Indianapolis, so he had gone to school with a lot of the guards. Shit, he had probably sold them coke.

  I was supposed to be working in the rec department. I guess they gave me that job so that I could be in the gym and train out. But most of the time I was on the phone. I was a real phone hog. As soon as the count was cleared after breakfast and everyone was accounted for I’d get on the phone. Each dorm had its own phone and it was on a first-come, first-served basis with a sign-in sheet. I’d have someone sign up and then trade them a couple of packs of cigarettes for their slot.

  I would always say that I had legal shit to handle and that I was on with my lawyers, but most of the time I was talking to my friends and girls.

  “Tyson, you’ve been on the phone for an hour,” another inmate would say.

  “This is fucking legal business, okay? Go talk to the warden,” I’d answer.

  I was treating that phone like it was an umbilical cord to the outside. But that was a big lesson I learned in prison. Wayno explained to me that sometimes when you’re trying to keep connections out there, it could only make your time in prison harder. I learned that you had to check all your cars and your money, your boxing gloves, your belts, your women, your rings, your cell phone, all that shit, just check it at the gate. They didn’t exist anymore until you got back out. But I was such a spoiled brat, I didn’t want to follow the rules, because I thought that I could change them even though they had been etched in stone. It didn’t work that way.

  I had my close party friends all over the country who would talk to me at any time. One of them even had a dedicated phone line for me. He’d go out to parties and take his cell phone and I’d call him and he’d put some girls on the line.

  When I wasn’t on the phone, I was in my room reading. The judge really wanted me to get my GED, so I started to study for that with Muhammad Siddeeq, who had become my spiritual advisor. I didn’t have any desire to do math or shit like that, so I started studying Chinese with a teacher that Siddeeq brought in. I learned enough Chinese so that when I went to China years later, I could actually carry on a conversation.

  I was totally into reading though. There’s nothing that’ll pass time more than reading a whole book. Wayno and I would read to each other in our room every night. One guy would have the book and the other would have a thesaurus or a dictionary so that when we came across a word we didn’t know, we could look it up. We’d even use the words in sentences so we really got them down.

  I really enjoyed Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. I read Mao’s book, I read Che. I read Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Shakespeare, you name it. I read Hemingway, but he was too much of a downer. I gravitated to reading rebellious, revolutionary books. My favorite was Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. I really identified with the main character Edmond Dantes. He had been framed by his enemies and sent to jail too. But he didn’t just sit there and brood; he prepared for his eventual success and revenge. Whenever I felt lost in prison, I’d read some Dumas.

  I was angry at society to begin with, and I began to see myself as a martyr. I always used to say that a tyrant dies when his reign ends, but when a martyr dies his reign begins. So when I read Mao and Che I became even more anti-establishment. I dug Mao so much that I had his face tattooed on my body. Arthur Ashe too. I really liked his autobiography, I had no idea he was so sound and adept.

  I was right there next to Mao on the long fucking march. My objective became to manipulate the system every way I could. I’d look for the weakest, newest guard or just a guard who was impressed with who I am.

  Once Wayno and I started to room together, we were unstoppable. Wayno had a store in his room. He would barter commissary items to the other inmates at a rate of two to one. If you wanted a bag of chips but didn’t have money in your commissary, you’d go to Wayno. He’d give you a bag and mark your name down and then you’d pay him back with two bags. So before I moved in with him, I told him, “Brother, if there’s anything in here now you need, take it. Take some soup.”

  “Mike, I don’t need any of that, because if you give me anything, I’m just going to flip it and make some money for it, that’s all,” he said. So I gave him a bunch of stuff and by the time I moved in with him, our store was so big that he had to keep our merchandise in a few other people’s rooms.

  We’d sell the usual commissary items—cookies, cigarettes, chips—but I decided to use my celebrity to our advantage. Maya Angelou had just visited me and we took a picture together. One night I was hungry and this other guy had some doughnuts that I really wanted.

  “Hey, brother, I have the Queen of Intellect of our people here, Maya Angelou. Look at that picture. That’s worth at least fifty bucks,” I said.

  That guy was crying he was so touched by that photo. He went and put ten bucks in my commissary each time, and little by little he paid that $50 off. I did that a number of times whenever someone famous came to visit me.

  Some of the female fans who wrote to me would send me dirty pictures of themselves, so I sold the pictures and the letters separately. Either someone wanted some jerk-off material or they wanted a relationship. Sometimes I’d give them the picture and the letter together. Depending on the girl’s picture, I’d figure out what demographic would be attracted to that particular girl. If I had a picture from a Midwestern woodsy type of girl, I’d go to one of the redneck guys and say, “Check her out.” It’s funny, but some of those guys wrote those women and ended up getting married to them.

  Then we progressed from nasty pictures to phone sex. When it was seven a.m. in Indianapolis, it was four a.m. in L.A. The clubs were just getting out and I’d call my friend collect. He’d have a few girls up at his pad ready for action.

  “Let the games begin!” he’d say after accepting the collect call. We’d charge guys for listening to him and the girls having sex. Sometimes I’d find out the guy’s name and then tell the girl to tailor her conversation to him.

  “Oh, John, you turn me on. I’m getting so wet now,” she’d say. John paid through the nose for that shit.

  I was even getting my friends on the outside laid. I had a friend in Chicago who owned the hot club in town, and I’d send girls who wrote me from Chicago to his club so he could check them out, see if they were good stuff. That was an investment in my future. If they were nice, I’d see them when I got out.

  Wayno and I were wheeling and dealing like crazy. We expanded our store to something like seven or eight rooms. Wayno kept the records and if someone was reluctant to pay us back, I was the enforcer.

  “Motherfucker, give me my money, man.” I’d pay them a little visit. Needless to say, even if they had to borrow from someone else, we got paid.

  We were living like kings. Wayno had all these connections to the Aryan guys who worked in the kitchen and to some of the corrupt guards who’d smuggle shit in for the inmates, so you’d never find me in the chow hall unless they were serving ice cream.

  Most nights we’d just chill in our room and the guards would deliver whatever food we ordered—pizza, Chinese food, Kentucky Fried, White Castle, whatever. Sometimes we even ate lobster and barbecue. I think that Wayno had shrimp fried rice for the first time while he was in prison. He would read aloud some book about Cleopatra and we’d have discussions like we were in a college dorm while we ate. When we wanted an authentic home-cooked meal, I’d just tell Siddeeq to have his wife cook us some delicious red salmon steaks and salad.

&nbs
p; I did want a bigger room. Wayno and I visited our friend Derrick and he was in a corner room, which was much bigger than the regular rooms. I needed more space. Shit, my mail alone almost ran us out.

  “Wayno, I can’t take this shit, we need a bigger room,” I said. “Get us an appointment.”

  He arranged for us to meet with Mr. Turner, who was our dorm counselor and worked under Mr. Dalton, who was in charge of all the dorms. We sat down and Wayno started making the case for us having a larger room. He was good at that because he used to represent other inmates when they had their hearings with the administration. So he was talking diplomatically and most articulately to Turner about our “legitimate needs” and if the administration could “consider our respectful request.” But I was getting frustrated with all the red tape.

  “Mr. Turner, sir, do you think when you and Mr. Dalton are out there hunting deer and burning crosses over the weekend you could think about me and my brother here moving up to a bigger room?”

  Turner turned whiter than he already was.

  “Yes, Mr. Tyson, we’ll look into that right away.”

  Needless to say, we didn’t get the larger room.

  We had the basketball coach on the payroll. He was a guard, but he was smuggling us in food and my favorite wave hair grease. I knew that greed reached into the core of human beings. I knew that you could always give people some money to do shit for you. You can buy people pretty cheap. The last part I didn’t fully understand. I was always overpaying.

  One day I said, “Yo, can you get me any bitches?” He didn’t flinch. He stood there, like, “How many you want to get?”

  “Listen, it don’t even have to be all that deep, right? Can I fuck that fucking guard right there? Do you think she’s down? I’ll give her a thousand bucks.”

  Now he was thinking about his kickback.

  “Mike, are you serious? Because I will talk to this bitch right now. I know this bitch from the clubs, Mike. This bitch will fuck you.”

  This is a guard talking. I thought he’d say something like “Don’t worry about it. I’ll try to drop it by her later,” but he was all gung ho, so I got a little nervous that I was going to get in trouble.

  “Brother, brother, you’re conducting yourself like a savage,” Wayno told me. “Go in the room and wash your face, brother. Conduct yourself like a businessman.”

  So I dropped the idea.

  They just kept trying to break your spirit in that place. If they saw you having a friend who was helping you do your time, they would take him away and ship him out. They did that to Wayno in the middle of the night. They sent him to Wabash, a brand-new level-four facility with a super max. Wayno was frantically writing down the phone numbers for his sister and his friends so I could call them and let them know where they had taken him.

  That really made me hate Warden Trigg. I had to figure out a way to get back at him. He was pretty well disliked there. Every time he would walk the yard the inmates would yell, “You fucking George Jefferson–looking nigga. You’re just an Uncle Tom.” I remembered that he really liked this girlfriend of mine who would visit. She was a beautiful mulatto girl and he would let her come in even if she wasn’t on the approved list. Trigg had a house on the grounds, so I told her, “Go over to his house and chill with him. Let him have a feel and then we can say that he molested you.” I was real dark and bitter, but my mood changed and we never implemented that plan.

  I was getting along well by then with my fellow inmates. I was feeling that I was a big motherfucker in prison, maybe even bigger than I was out in the world. My ego was that crazed. But everybody did know that I was a good guy at heart, as far as prison standards went. Whether you were white, black, whatever, if you needed something and Mike had it, you got it. It wasn’t about owing me anything.

  By the time Wayno left, I was a straight-A prisoner. I never drank the whole time I was in and I didn’t smoke any pot. Nobody would have sold me any even if I wanted some. Everyone just wanted me to get into shape so I could come out strong and start fighting again.

  But I couldn’t give up my sex, so I started getting it from the inside. It started when they made me go into the drug counseling program, because if you passed the test, you’d get time taken off your sentence, so everyone from the superintendent to Don to the inmates was encouraging me to take the class. Even the drug counselor approached me and said, “I can help you get six months taken off your time.” I didn’t want to because I wasn’t fucking with no drugs then, but it could get me time off, so I went to the class that was taught by this nice lady. She was a little big, but beggars can’t be choosers. I was in class for a few days when she came over to check on my work. I don’t know what came over me, but I started whispering in her ear.

  “How are you doing?”

  I so desperately wanted to get her. But she turned around on me and started talking street.

  “Boy, anybody else say this to me, I’d have them shipped right out of here to Pendleton. You come in here and sexually harass me? Murderers wouldn’t even come to me with that bullshit.”

  “Well, I am not one of those people,” I said. “I am just a man seeing somebody that needs some help, like myself. We are both in a situation where we need help. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, but I just saw you come in the other day with your son. I know you guys aren’t doing so well, so if I can help you please just let me know. I’m sorry.”

  “Motherfucker, I should write your ass up.”

  “Really, I’m for real.”

  Then she told me some shit about her roof caving in during the last storm and I was thinking, Yes!

  “So you’ve got a caved-in roof and you’ve got the baby in there? Wild dogs could come in there and bite him. Anything could happen to you. You can’t defend yourself, you’re a single mother.”

  “Yeah, and you’re going to send somebody to fix it?” she said. “How are you gonna do this shit?”

  “Just give me your address and there will be a package there tomorrow,” I promised. I ran right to the phone and called a friend in Chicago and told him to get her ten grand by the morning.

  The next day she came in wearing a pretty dress and nice makeup and a big smile. I thought, OHHHHH shit!!!

  “How are you doing today, Mr. Tyson?”

  I guess she got the package. I got so nervous. I didn’t know what we were going to do. We were in the room by ourselves.

  “You just go over to your usual desk over in the corner. Nobody can see it from the window. I am going to bend over to correct your work and you just stand behind me, all right?”

  “Cool, cool,” I said.

  I was so nervous, I couldn’t get hard. I was worried that it might be a setup. While we were trying to do it, I was looking around to see if there was a hidden camera somewhere. I was scared that any minute they were going to kick in the door and say that this was a rape.

  So I tried to put that out of my mind, but I couldn’t get hard. I was thinking of nasty things, I was touching her, I was licking on her, but it wasn’t working. I even tried to stuff it in, but no luck.

  “This is just not going to work. Let’s just try this some other time.”

  I went back to my dorm and she called me back later that day and it worked out that time. Once we started we couldn’t get enough. She kept calling me back to the room.

  “Tyson to the school,” I’d hear on the loudspeaker.

  She’d be calling me back three times a day. She called me when I was doing my roadwork. I had to tell her, “No, you can’t call me when I’m running, baby. It’s the only time I’ve got to run.” If anyone asked why I was putting so much time into the class, she’d just say, “He needs to finish his preparation for his test.”

  She was a heavy girl too. I had to pick her up and put her against the wall. Thank God I had been lifting weights. After a while, we di
d it on the desk, we did it on the floor. I was having so much sex that I was too tired to even go to the gym and work out. I’d just stay in my cell all day.

  By then, Wayno had been transferred back and we were together again.

  “How come you’re not working out, brother? You’re normally out here running ten miles a day,” he asked me.

  “I’m hitting the drug counselor. I got me a girlfriend in here,” I said.

  “You’ve got to stop this shit, Mike,” he said. “You’ll get into trouble. You’ve got to train.”

  It turned out that Wayno knew this woman from the outside. She was a little upset at first that I told Wayno about us, but soon he was standing outside the classroom door as a lookout.

  Then one day I found out that she was pregnant. I called my friend from Chicago and he came down and took her to the abortion clinic. He was so pissed off.

  “Pussy is pussy when you’re in jail, but I’m the one who’s got everybody staring at me when I’m walking into the clinic with this big chick,” he complained to me.

  After a couple of years, I really got used to being in prison. If I had a bad day because I saw something on television I didn’t like or if I had received a bad phone call and I didn’t want to talk to anybody, I’d tell Wayno to tell the administration that I wanted to check myself into the hole for a few days. Wayno would pack up my stuff—my glasses, a couple of books—and I would go and chill out in segregation detention. I even had a guard smuggle me in a Walkman. They didn’t allow inmates to possess Walkmans because the crazy-assed inmates would turn their Walkmans into walkie-talkies and spy on the whole fucking prison administration. But once you were in the hole, they didn’t check your cell, so I’d get my Walkman and listen to Tevin Campbell. His was the only cassette tape I had. I’d be running in place and doing my sit-ups butt-ass naked. I would run in place so much that when I left prison my imprints were in the cement. I broke that floor down.