Pete Hamill - Piecework

He knows that for his life, the models in books might not always apply. But in all such books, he insists that he finds something of value.

“I was reading Maya Angelou,” he said one evening, “and she said something that equates with me so much. People always say how great a writer she is, and people used to say to me, ‘Mike, you’re great, you could beat anybody, you don’t even have to train.’ But you know how hard it is for me to do that? To win in ninety-one seconds? Do you know what it takes away from me? And Maya Angelou said about herself it takes so much from me to write, takes a lot out of me. In order for me to do that, she says, to perform at that level, it takes everything. It takes my personality. It takes my creativity as an individual. It takes away my social life. It takes away so much. And when she said that, I said, ‘Holy moley, this person understands me.’ They don’t understand why a person can go crazy, when you’re totally normal and you’re involved in a situation that takes all of your normal qualities away. It takes away all your sane qualities.”

In prison Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.

One of those roads is called Islam. Tyson was raised a Catholic by his mother, Lorna, and during the upheaval in that time before he went to jail, he was baptized as a favor to Don King in a much-photographed ceremony presided over by Jesse Jackson. But water, prayer, and photographs didn’t make him a born-again Christian. “That wasn’t real,” he says now. “As soon as I got baptized, I got one of the girls in the choir and went to a hotel room or my place or something.”

Now he has embraced Islam. In a vague way, he’d known about Islam for years; you could not grow up in the era of Muhammad Ali and know nothing about it. “But I was avoiding it because people would press it on me. I always avoided what people pressed on me. They wanted me to do the right thing — and Islam, I believe, is the right thing — but all these people wanted me to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

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.”