Pete Hamill - Piecework

“I miss him still. I miss him. I think about him. No, I don’t dream about him; I don’t dream much in this place. But I miss Cus. I still take care of him, make sure nothing bad happens, ’cause I promised Cus before he died to take care of Camille. I was young, I was, like, eighteen, and I said, ’I can’t fight if you’re not around, Cus.’ And he said, ‘You better fight, ’cause if you don’t fight, I’m gonna come back and haunt you.’

“The ghost of Cus D’Amato doesn’t haunt Tyson; if anything, the old manager instilled in the young man a respect for knowledge and a demand for discipline that are only now being fully developed. “Cus had flaws, like any man,” Tyson says. “But he was right most of the time. One thing I remember most clearly that he said: ‘Your brain is a muscle like any other; if you don’t use it, it gets soft and flabby.’”

Other things do haunt Tyson. One of them is that fatal trip to Indianapolis. “I had a dick problem,” he admits. “I didn’t even want to go to Indianapolis. But I went. I’m in town with the best girl [rapper B Angie BJ that everybody wants. And I had to get this — why’d I have to do that, huh, man? Why’d I have to do that? I had a girl with me. Why’d I have to make that call? Why’d I have to let her come to my room?”

He has his regrets too, and says that he is trying hard to acquire some measure of humility, leaning on the Koran.

“Remember, when I accomplished all that I did, I was just a kid,” he says quietly. “I was just a kid doing all that crazy stuff. I wanted to be like the old-time fighters, like Harry Greb or Mickey Walker, who would drink and fight. But a lot of the things I did I’m so embarrassed about,” he says. “It was very wrong and disrespectful for me to dehumanize my opponents by saying the things I said. If you could quote me, say that anything I ever said to any fighters that they remember- like making Tyrell Biggs cry like a girl, like putting a guy’s nose into his brain, like making Razor Ruddock my girlfriend — I’m deeply sorry. I will appreciate their forgiveness.”

He isn’t just embarrassed by the words he said to fighters. “I have girls that wrote to me and said they met me in a club,” he says. “And I said something crazy to them. And I know I said that, you know, ’cause that was my style. And I say, wow, what was going through my mind to say that? I don’t dwell on it too much. But I just think: What the hell was I thinking* To say this to another human being?”

Tyson tries to live in the present tense of jail, containing his longing for freedom through a sustained act of will. But when I pressed him one evening, he admitted that he does yearn for certain aspects of the outside world.

“I miss the very simple things,” he says. “I miss a woman sexually. But more important, I miss the pleasure of being in a woman’s presence. To speak to a woman in private and discuss things. Not just Oh! Oh! Oh! More subtle than that. I just want to be able to have privacy, where no one can say, ‘Time, Tyson! Let’s go!’ You miss being with people. I miss flying my birds. They’re not gonna know me, I’m not gonna know them, ’cause there’re so many new ones now ’cause of the babies. I miss being able to hang out. Talk to Camille. Laugh. I miss long drives. Sometimes I used to just get in the car and drive to Washington. I miss that a lot. I miss, sometimes, going to Brooklyn in the middle of the night, pulling up in front of the projects and one of my friends will be there, shooting baskets. I’ll get out of the car, and we’ll talk there, like from 4:00 in the morning until 9:00 or 10:00. People are going to work, and we’re just talking.” A pause. “I miss that.”

He insists that he doesn’t miss what he calls the craziness. “It was all unreal. Want to go to Paris? Want to fly to Russia? Sure. Why not? Let me have two of those and three of them and five of those. Nobody knows what it’s like — fame, millions — unless they went through it. It was unreal, unreal. I had a thousand women, the best champagne, the fanciest hotels, the fanciest cars, the greatest meals — and it got me here.”

He does have some specific plans for the future. “I want to visit all the great cities, I want to see the great libraries,” he says. “One of the few things I did that impressed me was going to Paris that time and visiting the Louvre. I was devastated by that place, man. I want to see all of that, everywhere.”

Yes, he said, he will box again. He will be twenty-eight when he returns, the same age as Ali when he made his comeback and certainly younger than George Foreman when he made his. He asks repeatedly about active fighters and how they looked in their latest bouts, because he only sees brief clips on CNN. “I’m a fighter,” he says. “That’s what I do. I was born to do that.”

He wants to make money; nobody knows how much Tyson has left, not even Tyson, but his return to boxing could be the most lucrative campaign in the history of sport. “I want to have money for a family,” he says. “In the end, that’s how you can decide what kind of man I was. Not by how many guys I knocked out. But by the way I took care of my kids, how I made sure they went to college, that they had good lives and never wanted for nothing. And what I taught them. About the world. About character.”

Tyson would even like to try college himself. “I’d like to go to a black college that’s not well-known,” he says, “to study and learn. But also to have some kind of exhibitions, too, fights to benefit the college. 1 don’t have to fight benefits for a church or a mosque. But the black colleges, that I want to do. …”

In the end, of course, all education is self-education, and Tyson is clearly deep into the process. The faculty of Tyson’s university includes Cus D’Amato and Alexandre Dumas, Machiavelli and the prophet Muhammad, Dutch Schultz and Ernest Hemingway, and dozens of others. Part of the curriculum includes what some academics call life experience. There are millions of college graduates who don’t know what Tyson knows. About writers and thinkers. About life itself.

“A lot of people get the misconception that by being free that you’re free” he says. “That’s not necessarily true. There’s people on the outside who are more in prison than I’ll ever be in here.” He chuckles. “You know, it’s human to fall. But it’s a crime to stay down and not get up after you fall. You must get up.”

In the visitor’s lounge at the Indiana Youth Center, he smiles when a woman offers to buy him a soda. “Sorry, thank you, but I don’t drink soda.” He looks at his hands. Twenty-two months earlier, he’d come to this elaborate cage like a man knocked down. When he started school, he got to one knee. Now he’s standing up.

“I know this,” he says. “When I get out, I’m gonna be in charge of my own life. I used to leave it to others. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m the boss.’ But then I’d leave it to people, to Cus, to Don King, whatever. But that’s what you do when you’re a kid. You can’t do that when you’re a man.”

I utter some banality about the dangers that might still confront him on the outside, how powerful the pull of the ghetto spirit might be when the bad guys from the neighborhood come calling on him again.

“Well, that’s no problem anymore,” he says and laughs. “They’re all dead.”

He turns and glances at the picture window. Fat white snowflakes are now falling from the steel-colored sky, out there in the world of highways, car washes, diners, and motels. Another prisoner’s name is called, and a black man rises and touches his woman’s face. Time is running out.