by Teddy Atlas
The sad thing is that when his trial did come, he won the case. He didn’t have to go back to prison, to the source of his torment. But it was too late. His mind—that battle—was lost. The next thing you knew, we were taking him to doctors, to psychiatric specialists. I remember one time we were in the car, on our way to a psychiatrist, and my mother said to Tommy, “Stop faking it.” I was young, but I could see she was just angry, mad at life. By that point, I knew he wasn’t faking it. My mother just couldn’t accept the truth. (It wasn’t entirely a case of denial on her part—one psychiatrist agreed with her, actually telling my parents that he thought Tommy was faking it the same way that some kids did to dodge the Vietnam draft, a diagnosis that was dangerously wrong.)
We spent years after that dealing with the problem. Tommy was in and out of Bellevue. He was treated with drugs like Thorazine, which was new at the time, and lithium; he even underwent shock therapy. I don’t think my father should ever have allowed that to happen, but he did. I’m talking about the treatments where they tie you down and zap you with high electrical voltage.
For a while my father sent him away to the Ozark Mountains, to this ranch he owned there. Tommy and my cousin Keith both went there to work on this ranch. Keith was supposed to keep an eye on Tommy, this poor sick-in-the-head kid out there in this beautiful mountain range in Missouri. It was a pretty crazy idea, when you think about it. That’s what happens when you’re desperate and grasping at straws. I don’t think Keith was much good for him. I mean, Tommy was out there having conversations with crows and then shooting at people in cars with a rifle, and I didn’t hear about Keith doing anything to stop him (not that he necessarily knew about the shooting at cars part). I only thank God Tommy didn’t kill anyone while he was there.
After that, he was put back in either Bellevue or Kings County, I can’t remember which. It went on for years. He’d get out, come back home, and everything would be okay for a while—at least until he stopped taking his medication and turned up walking around the streets naked or something. He was in one of the back-home periods now.
When I saw him coming down the stairs, I said, “Hey, Tommy. Do you want to come with me? I’ve gotta go deal with Dad’s car.”
He didn’t answer, but when I went out, he followed me. It was cold. Tommy wasn’t wearing a coat. We got in my car and I started driving.
“You okay?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Gaga died, huh?”
“Yeah. That’s why I came down from Catskill.”
We found my father’s car a few miles away, sort of angled into the curb, as if he’d just coasted to a stop and gotten out without really paying attention to the fact that the tail end was sticking out in the street. I got the jack out of the trunk and went to work. Tommy stood there, watching me.
“Did you like Gaga?” he asked me.
“Did I like her?” It was an odd question. “Yeah…I liked her.”
I pulled the wheel off the axle. Tommy had turned away. He was looking off in the distance at something I couldn’t see.
“You want to give me a hand with the spare?” I said. He stood there, not moving. I got up and got the spare out of the trunk myself. While I slid the tire into place, I found myself thinking about Gaga, thinking it was too bad I hadn’t taken her to bingo more often. I really thought I’d have the chance to spend more time with her.
When Tommy and I got back to the house, it was late afternoon and already getting dark. More people had shown up. Friends and family. Tommy went up to his room without saying anything to anyone. I went into the kitchen, and found Uncle Frank telling a funny story about the time my mother was delivered home by her date a little past the ten o’clock curfew Gaga had set. “Your mother took one look at Gaga and realized her date had better get out of there. But the poor guy didn’t get it. He started to say hello to Gaga and she walked over to his car and snapped the antenna off.” Everyone in the kitchen laughed as Uncle Frank finished.
I looked around, wondering where my father was. “He had to go out,” my mother told me.
When the phone rang a while later for about the hundredth time that day, I answered. It was my dad. I carried the phone on its long extension cord down into the basement, where no one could listen in.
“Where’s Tommy?” he asked.
“I think he went up to his room.”
“Well, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
“Dad, what’s going on?”
“Is Ralph still there? Let me talk to him.” Ralph Metz was my father’s best friend. I went back up to the kitchen to get him.
“You’re where?” Ralph Metz said, after he put the receiver to his ear. “What!” He grimaced, suddenly looking very uncomfortable. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh…I think you should talk to Teddy about this.” He extended his arm and I took the phone back from him.
“Dad, where are you?”
“I’m at the funeral parlor.”
“What are you doing there?”
“The police are on their way over to the house.” I looked over at Ralph Metz, who was pale and visibly distressed. “It looks like Tommy killed your grandmother,” my father said.
The mortician had found a bullet hole near her ear and called the cops. It wasn’t a cerebral hemorrhage at all. The fact that my father, the legendary Dr. Atlas, had missed something so crucial and apparently obvious was puzzling. One of the detectives said, “Of course we know that you would never have intentionally tried to cover this up….” But the implication was there. Faced suddenly with a very different set of facts, my father immediately understood the truth: “Let me call the house, and make sure Tommy doesn’t leave,” he said. There was another problem—namely, me. He knew right away that Tommy had done it, but he must have had some fears about the way I would react. That’s why he asked for Ralph first. But when Ralph passed off the phone to me, he had no choice except to tell me.
“I gotta go get Tommy,” I said as soon as I heard that the cops were on their way. “Get him out of here.” That was my instinct. The thing my father had been afraid of.
“Wait a minute!” he yelled with a ferociousness that shook me. There was no in-between with my father. He either said nothing and kept his feelings to himself—or he exploded. “You’ve done a lot of things wrong in your life! Don’t let this be another one!”
Maybe there was nothing worse he could have said to me at that moment. Here, I’d been up in Catskill, trying to turn my life around, and he said this thing that made me feel as though what I’d been doing didn’t count, or he hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care. Of course, there was truth to what he’d said, too. That was why it hurt so much.
“You’ve screwed up a lot of things,” he said. “You’ve hurt your family enough. Don’t screw this up!”
He hung up on me, and I lowered the phone, looking at Ralph Metz. For some reason, Ralph couldn’t even meet my eyes. I found out why almost immediately, as he grabbed his coat out of the closet and headed for the front door. Here was this guy, who was supposed to be my father’s best friend, walking out of the house. Just abandoning fuckin’ ship. You piece of shit, I thought. I started up the stairs toward my brother’s room. Everyone in the kitchen saw Ralph leaving. They knew that it had been my father on the phone. It was clear something was wrong.
“Ralph, wait,” my mother said. He was the one they focused on. The guy who was walking out the door, who knew the police were coming and didn’t want to get involved.
I got to my brother’s room and opened the door, and there he was, stretched out on his bed, asleep. In that moment, looking at him, I knew that my father was right, that Tommy had murdered my grandmother. I don’t know why I knew that, because Tommy looked so peaceful lying there. In sleep, his handsome, square-jawed face was nearly angelic. There was no sign of torment, no way of understanding the demons inside. I stood a few feet inside the door, looking at him, knowing the police were coming, knowing that I had to make a choice. Did I wake him up, get him out of there,
and worry about the consequences later? Or did I do what my father wanted?
Every instinct in me told me not to abandon my brother. At the same time I was afraid of my father. I could still hear his words echoing in my head. How I’d let everyone down in the past, and how I was about to do it again.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but the next thing I knew there were loud voices, footsteps thundering up the stairs. It was too late. The door flew open behind me, four cops rushed into the room, and I was thrown aside. I could hear my mother and everyone screaming.
When I looked over at Tommy, they had him belly-down on the floor, head turned to one side, and they were slapping cuffs on him. One of the cops was holding me back, and two of them were holding him down, but somehow Tommy’s eyes went right to mine, as if he knew I’d been standing there watching him all that time. There was no madness in his eyes, no anger, he was just looking at me. His older brother.
One of the cops flipped over his mattress, and there it was, a .22 rifle. They got Tommy to his feet, marched him past me, down the stairs and out the front door. I followed. The street was icy. Tommy slipped as they hustled him toward the open back door of a patrol car, but they didn’t let him fall. They held him up, and then they shoved him in the backseat, a hand on his head so he didn’t crack himself on the car’s door frame. All the noise from the house became distant to me as I watched the cop car pull away, the light on top spinning.
After he was gone, I stood there for a couple of minutes. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, so I got in my car and started driving. I was in a dangerous state of mind. I remember that I started running red lights, hoping something would happen. Logically, I knew that my brother was not well. That didn’t make me feel any better about how I had acted. Everyone had a price. Mine had been my father’s approval. All the things I’d gone through that time I hadn’t signed that sheet the cops put in front of me—now, I was just another guy who’d signed.
I must have run fifteen or twenty red lights, pushing my foot to the floor each time I approached an intersection. If there was such a thing as it not being your time, then I guess it wasn’t my time. Eventually, I wound up in Greenwich Village, outside Brother Tim’s place on Waverly. I double-parked and waited for him. I knew that he left for Rikers each morning around five a.m. Sure enough, a few minutes before five, the door opened and he came out, wearing his blue pea coat and watch cap.
“Teddy, what are you doing here?” he said when he saw me. He knew it must have been something bad. It wasn’t even light out yet.
I told him what had happened. He said, “Oh, my God.” He put his arm around me. “I’m so sorry.”
“I feel like I was supposed to do something more, like I let Tommy down,” I said. I told him about running the red lights. It was tough to admit it to him, because it felt like weakness.
“Teddy, I want you to listen to me,” Brother Tim said. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do for a person. It becomes more important to save yourself. You’ve gotten on a good track with your life. You mustn’t stop now. Those kids in Catskill need you.”
“But what about Tommy?”
“I’ll pray for him,” Brother Tim said.
Somehow the fact that I made it there that morning, that I ran all those red lights hoping something would happen and nothing did, got me past my darkest urges. At least that was the last day of that period of my life when I could act like I didn’t care.
I was there in court throughout Tommy’s trial, the only member of my family to attend. I watched him get sentenced to fifteen years. I also watched the powers that be in the criminal justice system stick him, in their infinite wisdom, into the prison’s general population at Green-haven prison. It was almost predictable that he wound up killing another inmate there. Too late, they put him in a prison for the criminally insane, which is where he remains to this day, having been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
For many years after the murder and Tommy’s arrest, my father didn’t have any contact with him at all. It was ironic that this great doctor, who had spent his life trying to save lives, saw somebody to whom he gave life take a life. Eventually, he softened to the extent of accepting calls from Tommy, but he was never able to tell my brother that he loved him. As a doctor, he could understand his son’s sickness on a scientific and intellectual level, but on an emotional level he could never fully forgive him. I remember a conversation I had with Tommy after the two of them renewed, in their very limited way, a dialogue. He said, “I talked to Dad….”
“You talked to him?”
“He knows I’m sick. He understands.”
“That’s good. He said that?”
“Do you understand, Ted?”
“I do.”
“Dad’s not mad at me anymore,” Tommy said. “He understands.”
“All right, Tom.”
“You understand, Ted?”
“Yes, Tom, I do.”
“That’s good.”
THE PROMISED
LAND
SOMETIME IN THE FALL OF 1979, CUS GOT A CALL from a guy named Bobby Stewart, who was a counselor at the Tryon reform school in Johnstown, New York. He had a twelve-year-old kid under his charge there he wanted us to take a look at. The kid’s name was Mike Tyson.
Stewart, a former U.S. Golden Gloves light heavyweight champ and, briefly, a pro, was in charge of Elmwood Cottage, a disciplinary dorm where the worst kids at Tryon often wound up. Tyson, recently arrived from the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx, landed in Elmwood after going into a rage and beating up a kid while in one of the lower-security cottages. The violent outburst wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew Tyson’s background. This was a poor kid, raised in the worst section of Brooklyn, who had accumulated, by the age of eleven, a rap sheet longer than the menu in a Greek diner. What set Tyson apart from most other violent young kids his age was his freakish physical size—five feet nine inches, a muscular hundred and ninety pounds—along with a survivor’s instinct for self-improvement. It’s unlikely, but not entirely out of the question, that the incident that got Tyson moved to Elmwood was calculated. He had been intent on meeting Bobby Stewart from the moment he learned Stewart was a former pro fighter. The assault—premeditated or not—helped him achieve that goal.
Tyson, like a lot of kids from rough backgrounds, saw boxing as a way out. When then-champ Muhammad Ali had visited Spofford the previous year, the impact on Tyson had been huge. Seeing “the Greatest” in the flesh was exciting enough for an underprivileged kid, but even more mind-bending was to see the way the other kids and the guards reacted to him, the way they hung on his every word and smiled and tried to touch him. If that’s what being the champ of the world got you, then Tyson wanted to be champ of the world. In Bobby Stewart, he saw someone who might be able to help him—if not to become a champion boxer, at least to help him improve his immediate situation and maybe gain him some special privileges.
Stewart, for his part, saw in this kid someone he might be able to help. He used boxing lessons as an incentive and a tool to get Tyson to behave better. It gives you a measure of Tyson’s ambition: He was so determined to take what he needed from Bobby Stewart that, to prove to his prospective mentor that he was sincere, this supposedly uncontrollable kid became a model inmate.
When Stewart began teaching him, several things became apparent almost immediately. First, and most obvious, was that Tyson was tremendously large and powerful for his age. Second, he was a prodigiously gifted athlete with exceptional hand speed. Third, and perhaps most impressive, he was a sponge who soaked up everything Stewart threw at him and then asked for more.
After a few months, Stewart decided he needed another set of eyes to confirm that this kid was as special as he thought, so he took Tyson over to Matt Baranski’s Trinity Club in Albany. Baranski had trained Stewart in his amateur career (and would later become Tyson’s cut man in the professional ranks). He seconded his former pupil’s assessment. The two di
scussed what to do next. Neither Baranski nor Stewart felt they had the time or the resources to unlock Tyson’s full potential. They both knew Cus and Jimmy Jacobs (Stewart had been managed by Jacobs during his brief pro career), and they knew about the program I’d been running for kids, some of whom actually lived in the house with us. It could be a good situation for Tyson, they agreed. They should definitely try to get Cus to take a look.
Bobby Stewart made the call. “The kid’s pretty good,” he told Cus, “but I think I’ve taken him as far as I can.”
Cus agreed to let them come down. He came to me and said, “I want your input, Teddy. You’re the one who’ll be working with him. Maybe Stewart is right and he’s a special kid.”
The day Stewart brought Tyson down, Cus showed up at the gym with his friend Don Shanager. I was training four of Shanager’s sons, and he told me, only half jokingly, that I was the reason they weren’t dead. He said he would have killed them if boxing and training with me hadn’t steadied them out and calmed them down. Shanager was a transplanted New York character, a hard-drinking Irishman who did some bookmaking down in Queens and considered himself sharper than the country bumpkins in Catskill. He enjoyed being around Cus and ate up his stories, so Cus liked that. Also, Shanager was a bit of a finagler and had political connections in town, which made him potentially useful. That’s the way Cus thought about things.
Anyway, it was the three of us there in the gym when Stewart showed up in the prison van—he had Tyson with him, and the kid was as impressive a physical specimen as advertised. A hundred and ninety pounds of pure muscle. It was hard to believe that he was an adolescent. In fact, when Stewart was gloving him up, Shanager said, “I gotta see this kid’s birth certificate. The only way he’s twelve years old is if he laid in his mother’s blubber for twelve years before they discovered him.” That was the way Shanager talked.
Stewart actually had documentation. The kid was twelve. You have to imagine it. I was up in the ring with them, Stewart and Tyson. Cus and Shanager were sitting in these folding seats outside the ring. Cus wore his glasses. Stewart, as I said, was a former pro fighter, with about fourteen fights. He was twenty-eight, a light heavyweight. A man. And he was in there with a twelve-year-old kid. True, the kid outweighed him by a few pounds, but he was a kid. He couldn’t even get into an R-rated movie by himself. It was one thing to look imposing; there were plenty of guys with impressive physiques who could shake the bag if you let them. It was something else entirely to put the gloves on and try to deal with another fighter.
