Pete Hamill - Piecework

More dangerous are people who seem to crack under the stress of doing time. “A couple of days ago, this guy who never bothered nobody just cracked a guy on the head with a lock in his sock,” he said in an amazed tone. “And there are other guys — they’ll do something disrespectful to some guy, and they’ll walk around with their headphones on, acting like they didn’t do anything, jamming, dancing, then, next thing you know — ka-pow! — they get clocked.”

In the bad old days, Tyson might have empathized with such people; he is, after all, the man who as champion once socked an off-duty heavyweight named Mitch Green in Harlem at 4:00 in the morning. But in prison, he is at once part of the general population and detached from it because of his celebrity. “When I get out, I have a future,” he says. “A lot of these guys don’t.” Sometimes he even volunteers for a form of solitary confinement (“to be alone, to focus, to meditate, to read, to get some fucking sleep”). But he also looks with compassion on his fellow prisoners.

“They send some guys to prison that don’t necessarily have bad records,” he says. “Instead of rehabilitating him, they Rehabilitate him by sending him to prison. Without him even being attacked or molested, just from what he witnesses, some things that are so taboo to his humanity. It could totally drive him insane.”

Among the scarier aspects of prison these days is AIDS. “They are falling like flies in here,” Tyson said. “And some of these guys keep boning each other over in the dorms.” There are other people for whom prison is life itself. “There’s one guy here who’s been inside for thirty-one years. Not in here but in other prisons. There are other guys with so much time… I watch them adapt. This is their home. You don’t go in their door without knocking.”

Tyson said that much of what he has seen is sad and comic at the same time.

“You see a guy, he’s doing all the time in a lifetime, he’s talking to a girl on a phone. I mean, he’s doing ninety years. And what’s he saying? ‘Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby.’”

Tyson laughed in a sad, rueful way.

“Most guys that are in here, they got a lot of time, so they lose hope. They get caught up in the sideshows, like homosexuality, drugs, you know what I mean? It’s very difficult for me to think about participating in the things these guys do. You talk to the guys, and to me they seem rather sane. But to see their conduct, some of them, they’re in a totally insane frame of mind. The fact is, prison is like a slave plantation. We have no rights which the authorities respect. I wasn’t a criminal when I got put in here. I didn’t commit no crime. But we become the problem out there, because we’re not aware. We become the problem because out there we’re robbing, we’re stealing, we’re selling drugs, we’re killing. I hear people talk about revolution. They mention Castro, Mao, Lenin, the Black Panthers. But how can you have a revolution when you have crime, when you have people selling drugs, you have people murdering? There’s no collective ideas there.”

I asked Tyson if the young prisoners from Indiana resembled the young men from his Brooklyn neighborhood. He said that many of them did. When he was champion, Tyson refused to offer himself as a role model; he certainly doesn’t see himself as one now. But he does understand the Brownsvilles of America.

“At the age of ten or fifteen, you become very influenced by what you see,” he said. “You see these guys looking good, with fly cars, nice girls on their arms. You think this is what you want to be. But any kind of proper success has to do with education, unless you’re an athlete, and everyone’s not going to be Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali. You fall in bad company. You see drug dealers and gangsters with all their bullshit. You know they didn’t go to school. So you don’t fill the holes. You go after the wrong shit. The thing I’ve noticed in here, with the white kids and the black kids and the Latin kids and the Asian kids — the only thing they have in common is poverty.”

I asked him if drugs were another common factor. Tyson himself was never a druggie in the conventional sense; his drugs were liquor and celebrity. He whispered, “Of course.

“Drugs and women,” he said. “You know, we all run through the same complexities in life.”

Among those many complexities in American life is racism.

“It’s very difficult being black,” he said one evening. “These reporters came to interview me from South Africa, and one of them asked me was I racist. And I said, ‘Yes, I am a racist — to people who are racist toward me.’ I never liked to believe that I’m a racist because of the way I was brought up, both from my mother and from Cus and Camille. But, you know what I mean, sometimes things are in the air and people say or do things detrimental or hurtful towards you. You strike back at them. That’s what I meant in that interview. Not all white people. Shit, no. Those people. Those specific people. I just want to be treated the way I treat people.”

Behind many of these feelings are jagged memories of that Brownsville childhood. “Too many guys, too many black people, men and women, hate themselves. They see the shit around them and they give up before they ever start. They get one or two little tastes of power — sticking a gun in somebody’s face — and then it’s over.”

He was in jail when the riots erupted in Los Angeles, and he hated what he saw on CNN.

“It could have all been prevented if people believed in fairness and equality. But you have to understand: The things that people do and what they should do are totally different. We should live like every man is equal, every woman is equal. But how we do live is, You get yours, I get mine, fuck you.” He talked about Rodney King. “Some guys in here, they heard Rodney King and they laughed. But what he said was powerful, man. Why can’t we live together? Why the fuck can’t we all live together?”

In jail Mike Tyson is engaged in an admirable attempt to find out who he is, to discover and shape the man who exists behind the surface of fame and notoriety. There is no Cus to explain the world, to tell him what to do. In the end, there’s only himself. And because he is in prison, this is no easy process.

“You have good days, and you have bad days, but you just think to yourself, This isn’t the end. You say, i was kind of wild out there; maybe I was heading for something more drastic’ Which is all a part of playing head games so you won’t get insane.”

Like anyone in prison, Tyson misses life on the outside. He misses certain people, and in most of our talks he circles back to Cus D’Amato. “A lot of things Cus told me, they are happening now,” he says. “But at that time, I didn’t keep them in mind, because I was just a kid. Cus tried to store everything in my mind so fast. He didn’t think that he was gonna be around. He tried to pack everything in at one moment, you know what I mean? I’m trying to be a fighter, I’m trying to have some fun on the side, and I’m just running crazy. Now I think about him all the time. Like, damn! Cus told me that. And God! He told me this too. And, oh! He told me that.

“He was always saying to me, before I was anything: ‘What are you gonna do? Look how you talk to me now, J he said. ‘Look how you act. How you gonna act when you’re a big-time fighter? You’re just gonna dump me.’ I said, ’I’m not gonna do that, Cus. I’m not gonna do it.’ And I didn’t.” He laughs. “I used to say, ‘Cus, I’ll sell my soul to be a great fighter.’ And he said, ‘Be careful what you wish for, ’cause you might get it.’