LITMIR.BIZ

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      “My name is Mike Tyson. I’m a professional fighter. Boxing is a lonely sport. The sparring, the training, and especially the roadwork, give me plenty of time to think. One of the things I think about most is how bad drugs are and how much they hurt people. Well, we can get rid of drugs if each of us, one by one, decides to say ‘No.’ It’s a small word with a big meaning. Say it, SAY NO TO DRUGS!”

      That was a public service announcement I did for the Drug ­Enforcement Administration to be broadcast right before my first title defense in 1987. I also did PSAs for New York State. They showed me hitting a heavy bag and then turning to the camera. “That’s right, stay off crack, so you can win.”

      The irony of all this is that while I was filming these spots, I was financing my friend Albert in his crack enterprise back in Brownsville. Right around the time that Cus died, I started giving Albert five thousand dollars here, twenty thousand there, just so that he didn’t have to work for someone else. I wasn’t a partner and I never wanted any return from my investment. I was just worried about his safety. Albert and I had grown up and robbed and stolen together. I didn’t want him to worry if one of the dealers he was working for said, “Where’s my shit?” The drug business in Brownsville in the ’80s was like 1820s slavery. When you’re working for these guys, your life meant nothing. If you had that man’s package, you couldn’t quit when you wanted to. Once you held that hand and made that deal, you were his property.

      I thought about getting Albert to come to work with me. But guys like him were just too antisocial. They didn’t believe in hanging out, carrying no bag, being a yes-man, kissing ass because I was champ. Nobody was going to be bossing him around. The only thing we knew was violence in Brownsville, even with people we love. Albert was much too hard-core to be part of my entourage. He wasn’t going to do a Mike Tyson “Yes, ma’am, how are you doing? May I help you?” Guys like him would get angry and they’d have no control over their emotions. So rather I said, “Here. You take this money.”

      But my plan didn’t work. A young Turk ready to get his meat shot Albert and a couple of my other friends in 1989. They were only twenty at that time and there was also a sixteen-year-old who wanted a piece of the dream. The Benz, the girls, and the status killed them. There was a lot of dying then. I paid for a lot of funerals.

      I did two things right away when I went back to New York after winning the title. I went up to Catskill and showed my belt off everywhere. I wore it outside for three weeks, sometimes even sleeping with it on. One day I walked into the kitchen and told Jay Bright to come with me for a ride. There was one more person I wanted to show the belt to. I told Jay to drive to the liquor store and I gave him some money to buy a large magnum of Dom Pérignon champagne. Then I had him drive to Cus’s grave. When we got to his stone, we were both crying. We both said a little prayer and then I popped the cork and we both took a big swig and then I poured the rest of the bottle on Cus’s grave, left the empty bottle on the grass, and left.

      The second thing I did was to go down to New Jersey and deal with my mom’s grave. Her boyfriend Eddie had been hit by a car and died right before the Berbick fight, and he was buried next to my mother. So I had both of them exhumed and put into nice bronze caskets, and then I bought a massive seven-foot-tall headstone for her, so every time people came to the cemetery, they’d know that that was the Mike Tyson’s mother there.

      By that point, I had moved into my own apartment in Jimmy and Steve Lott’s building. Probably so they could spy on me because I was their cash cow. I really wanted to enjoy being the champion. It was the first time we had ever set a goal and gone through all the blood, sweat, and tears to accomplish it. Now I could be mentioned in the same breath as Joe Louis and Ali. I wanted to bask in that, but I felt guilty and empty. Cus wasn’t there to enjoy it with me or to give me direction. For the first time in years, I didn’t have a goal or a desire to do anything. It might have been different if I had a companion or a child. All of my friends had kids by then. But I had been too busy fighting.

      I also felt like a fake. Jimmy and Bill were intent on stripping away all the Brownsville from me and giving me a positive image. But Brownsville was who I was, my personality and my barometer. That was the important essence that Cus wanted me to keep. They had me doing those anti-drug messages and posing for posters for the NYPD but everyone knew I was a criminal. I had come from a detention home. Now all of a sudden I was a good guy? No, I was a fake fucking Uncle Tom nigga.

      I felt like a trained monkey. Everything I did now was critiqued, everything had to be premeditated. I’d go on a talk show and they didn’t want me to wear nice jewelry. Steve actually asked me to take off my matching gold bracelets. I didn’t want to live with restrictions like that. I didn’t become the heavyweight champ of the world to be a submissive nice guy.

      Jimmy and Cayton wanted me to be another Joe Louis, not Ali or Sonny Liston. They wanted me to be a hero, but I wanted to be a villain. The villain is always remembered, even when he doesn’t outshine the hero. Even though the hero kills him, he makes the hero the hero. The villain is immortal. Besides, I knew that Joe Louis’s hero image was manufactured. In real life he liked to snort cocaine and screw lots of girls.

      I wanted people bowing at my feet; I wanted people catering to me; I wanted to be chasing the women away from me. This was what Cus told me I would be doing, but I was not getting it. But it was supposed to be my time in the ring now. I was still sitting in the bleachers; they were not letting me in the ring.

      When I moved into my apartment, Steve hooked me up with a great stereo system that cost about twelve grand, and he got shit from Jimmy for spending that much of my money on it. Later that year, we were walking through the Forum shops in Caesar’s and I saw a watch.

      “Use your card, get me that watch,” I said.

      “No fucking way,” Steve said.

      “Why not? You know I’ll pay you back,” I protested.

      “No way, Jim will fucking kill me,” he said.

      It was then that my demons would tell me, “These white guys don’t care about you like Cus.”

      I loved Jimmy, but he was always trying to keep me in line.

      “Mike, you have to do this because if you don’t, this multimillion-dollar company will sue us.” So we had to do this fight or that commercial. I was still an immature kid. In the middle of shooting a commercial I’d say, “I don’t want to do this shit. I want to go to Brownsville and hang out with my friends.”

      I went back to Brownsville almost every night that I wasn’t in training. I got the royal treatment there. Literally. When my Jamaican friends would see my limo roll up, they’d take out their guns.

      “They’re shooting for you, Mike, twenty-one guns, nigga!” one of them would say.

      And they’d give me a twenty-one-gun salute. Boom, boom, boom.

      Sometimes I’d be walking down the street with a few friends and I’d see some guy who had bullied me years before. My friends didn’t know I had a beef with this guy, but they could tell just by the way the cat was looking at me that there was no love between us.

      “You know this motherfucker looking at you? Who’s this bitch?” one of my friends would ask me.

      I didn’t have to answer.

      “Who the fuck are you looking at, motherfucker?” my friend said. And it’s on. They’d just crack him. I’d have to tell them to leave him alone.

      Once I began making a lot of money boxing, I got a reputation as being a Robin Hood in the hood. People who didn’t know me would make a big deal about me going back to Brownsville and giving my money away. But it wasn’t like that. People who came from where I had come from had a responsibility to take care of their friends even if it was twenty years later. So if I went away and made this money and I went back I had to break off some for my friends who weren’t doing as well. I would pick up cash from Cayton’s office and divide the hundred-dollar bills into packets of a thousand

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