Everywhere I’d go, there were some women who would come up to me and say, “Come on, I’m not going to say that you raped me. You can come with me. I’ll let you film it.” I later realized that was their way of saying, “We believe you didn’t do it.” But I didn’t take it that way. I’d strike back indignantly with a rude response. Although they were saying what they said out of support, I was in too much pain to realize it. I was an ignorant, mad, bitter guy who had a lot of growing up to do.
But in my mind, I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. My style was impetuous, my defenses were impregnable, and I was ferocious. It’s amazing how a low self-esteem and a huge ego can give you delusions of grandeur. But after the trial, this god among men had to get his black ass back in court for his sentencing.
I might not have been a scumbag, but I was an arrogant pick. I was so arrogant in the courtroom during the trial there was no way there were going to give me a break. Even in my moment of doom, I was not a humble person. All those things they wrote about in that report — giving people money and turkeys, taking care of people, looking out for the weak and the infirm — I did all those things because I wanted to be that humble person, not because I was that person. I wanted so desperately to be humble but there wasn’t a humble bone in my body.
“When we leave, remember to keep your coat over your handcuff,” Voyles advised me? Was he for real? Slowly the numbness was leaving me and my rage was kicking in. I should be ashamed to be shown with handcuffs? That’s my badge of honor. If I hide the cuffs, then I’m a bitch. Jim thought that hiding my cuffs would stop me from experiencing shame, but that would have been the shame. I had to be seen with that steel on me. Fuck everybody else, the people who understand, they have got to see me with that steel on. I was going to warrior school.
There was a recession and my mom lost her job and we got evicted out of our nice apartment in Bed-Stuy. They came and took all our furniture and put it outside on the sidewalk. The three of us kids had to sit down on it and protect it so that nobody took it while my mother went to find a spot for us to stay.
She never got another job, and I remember waiting in these long lines with my mother down at the welfare center. We’d wait and wait for hours and then we’d be right up front, and it was five o’clock and they’d close the fucking shit on you, just like in the movies.
But for the most part, each time we moved, the conditions got worse — from being poor to being serious poor to being fucked-up poor. Eventually we lived in condemned buildings, with no heat, no water, maybe some electricity. In the wintertime all four of us slept in the same bed to keep warm. We’d stay there until a guy would come and kick us out. My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That often meant sleeping with someone that she really didn’t care for. That was just the way it was.
I jumped in between them trying to defend my mom and I was trying to restrain him and, whop, he slugged me in my stomach and I went down. I was, like, Oh, man, I can’t believe this shit. I was just a little kid! That’s why I’ve never put my hands on any of my kids. I don’t want them thinking I’m a monster when they get old. But back then, beating on a kid was just the way it was. Nobody cared. Now it’s murder, you go to jail.
When I think about it, I always thought of my mother as the victim in most situations, and Eddie did beat on her. I’m sure the lady lib would think that her reaction was great, but I thought, How could you do that to somebody who is supposed to be your boyfriend? It made me realize that my mother was no Mother Teresa. She did some serious stuff and he still stayed with her. In fact, he went to the store to buy her some liquor after she burned him. So you see, he rewarded her for it. That’s why I was so sexually dysfunctional.
I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I should have clobbered those guys, but I was so scared because those guys were so brazen and bold that I just figured they must know something I didn’t. “Don’t beat me up, leave me alone, stop!” I’d say. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. That day that guy took my glasses and put them in that gas tank was the last day I went to school. That was the end of my formal education. I was seven years old and I just never went back to class.
But I walked in and those guys went, “What’s that smell? Look at this dirty, stinking motherfucker.” The whole place started laughing and teasing me. I didn’t know what to do; it was such a traumatizing experience, everybody picking on me. I was crying, but I was laughing too because I wanted to fit in.
Barkim was the guy who introduced me into the life of crime. Before that, I never stole anything. Not a loaf of bread, not a piece of candy, nothing. I had no antisocial tendencies. I didn’t have the nerve. But Barkim explained to me that if you always looked good, people would treat you with respect. If you had the newest fashion, the finest stuff, you were a cool dude. You’d have status.
Some people might read some of the things I’m talking about and judge me as an adult, call me a criminal, but I did these things over 35 years ago. I was a little kid looking for love and acceptance and the streets were where I found it. It was the only education I had, and these guys were my teachers.
We always wanted to look nice on the streets because normally if you’re a little black kid out in the city looking bummy and dirty, people harass you. So we looked nice and nonthreatening. We had the school backpacks and little happy glasses and the Catholic school look with nice pants and white shirts, the whole school outfit.
Sometimes you’d find that you had competition for jostling. You’d get on a bus and there might be someone already on the bus waiting to pickpocket some people. But you might be more obvious. That was called “waking the bus.” The bus was quiet before you got on, but now that you’ve come aboard, the bus driver makes an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are some young men who just got on the bus. Watch your pockets. They will attempt to steal from you.”
The big kids in the neighborhood knew I was stealing, so they would take my money and my jewelry and my shoes, and I would be afraid to tell my mother. I didn’t know what to do. They’d beat me up and steal my birds, and they knew that they could get away with bullying me. Barkim didn’t teach me how to fight. He just taught me how to dress in nice clothes and wash my ass. Normally when someone was screaming at me in the street or chasing me, I would just drop my stuff and run.
Growing up, I always wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be the guy talking shit: “I’m the baddest motherfucker out here,” “I got the best birds.” I wanted to be that street guy, the fly slick-talking guy, but I was just too shy and awkward. When I tried to talk that way, somebody would hit me in the head and say, “Shut the fuck up, nigga.” But I got a taste of what it was like to bask in the adulation of an audience when I got into my first street fight.
I just seemed like the fly thing to do. I had practically the whole block watching my glory moment. Everybody started whooping and applauding me. It was an incredible feeling even though my heart was beating out of my chest.
I began to exact some revenge for the beatings I had taken from bullies. I’d be walking with some friends and I might see one of the guys who beat me up and bullied me years earlier. He might have gone into a store shopping and I would drag his ass out of the store and start pummeling him. I didn’t even tell my friends why, I’d just say, “I hate that motherfucker over there,” and they’d jump in too and rip his fucking clothes and beat his fucking ass. That guy who took my glasses and threw them away? I beat him in the streets like a fucking dog for humiliating me. He may have forgotten about it but I never did.
With this newfound confidence in my ability to stand up for myself, my criminality escalated. I became more and more brazen. I even began to steal in my own neighborhood. I thought that what people did. I didn’t understand the rules of the streets. I thought everybody was fair game because I sure seemed to be fair game to everybody else. I didn’t know that there were certain people you just don’t fuck with.
Everybody in the neighborhood started hating my guts. And if they didn’t hate me, they were jealous of me. Even the players. I had nerve.
It felt incredible. I didn’t care if I grabbed somebody’s chain and dragged them down the stairs with their head bouncing, boom, boom, boom. Do I care? No, I need that chain. I didn’t know anything about compassion. Why should I? No one ever showed me any compassion. The only compassion I had was when somebody shot or stabbed one of my friends during a robbery. Then I was sad.
But you still fucking do it. You think they’re not going to kill you; that it can’t happened to you. I just couldn’t stop. I knew there was a chance I would get killed but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I would live to see sixteen anyway so why not go hard?
I’d be curled up in the corner trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. That was some traumatizing shit. To this day I glance at the corners of any groom I’m in and I have to look away because it reminds me of all the beatings my mother gave me. I’d be curled up in the corner trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. She didn’t think nothing of beating me in a grocery store, in the street, in front of my schoolmates, or in the courtroom. The police certainly didn’t care. One time they were supposed to write up a report on me and my mother stormed in and beat my ass so bad they didn’t even write me up.
But she had never had any hope for me, going back to my infancy. I just know that one of those medical people, some racist asshole, some guy who said that I was fucked up and developmentally retarded, stole my mother’s hope for me right then and there. And they stole any love or security I might have had.
I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally that would have no effect on me, but emotionally and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends and I’d see my mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was fifteen, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.
We sat down and Cus told me he couldn’t believe I was only 15. And then he told me what my future would be. He had seen me spar for not even six minutes, but he said it in a way that was like law.
“You looked splendid,” he said. “You’re a great fighter.” “If you listen to me, I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.”
I had never heard anyone say nice things about me before. I wanted to stay around this old guy because I liked the way he made me feel. I’d later realize that this was Cus’s psychology. You give a weak man some strength and he becomes addicted.
Cus had given me a huge boxing encyclopedia to look at and I didn’t sleep that whole night, I just read the whole book. I got turned out real bad. I wanted to be like those guys; they looked like they had no rules. They worked hard, but on their downtime they just lounged and people came to them like they were gods.
When I first started going to Cus’s, he didn’t even let me box. After I finished my workout with Teddy, Cus would sit down with me and we’d talk. He’d talk about my feelings and emotions and about the psychology of boxing. He wanted to reach me at the root. We talked a lot about the spiritual aspects of the game. “If you don’t have the spiritual warrior in you, you’ll never be a fighter. I don’t care how big or how strong you are,” he told me. We talked about pretty abstract concepts, but he was getting through to me. Cus knew how to talk my language. He had grown up in tough neighborhoods and he had been a street kid too.
The first thing Cus talked about was fear and how to overcome it.
“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you. Like a snowball on a hill, you can pick it up and throw it or do anything you want with it before it starts rolling down, but once it rolls down and gets so big, it’ll crush you to death. So one must never allow fear to develop and build up without having control over it, because if you won’t be able to achieve your objective or save your life.”
“Where normally the deer can leap 15 feet, the adrenaline enables the first leap to be 40 or 50 feet, enough to escape from the present danger. The human being is no different. When confronted with a situation of fear of getting hurt or intimidation, the adrenaline speeds up the heart. Under the influence of adrenal glands people can perform extraordinary feats of strength.
You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.
You mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with you mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is 90 percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit. The night before a fight, you won’t sleep. Don’t worry, the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in, he’ll look much bigger than you and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings, and you come in contact with each other, suddenly your opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination has dissipated. The fight itself is the only reality that matters. You have to learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”
His nose was swollen, his eye was shut, he was bleeding. The guy asked him if he wanted to go a second round and Cus said he’d try. He went out there and suddenly his mind became detached from his body. He was watching himself from afar. The punches that hit him felt like they were coming from a distance. He was more aware of them than feeling them.
Cus told me that to be a great fighter you had to get out of your head. He would have me sit down and he’d say, “Transcend. Focus. Relax until you see yourself looking at yourself. Tell me when you get there.” That was very important for me. I’m way too emotional in general. Later on I realized that if I didn’t separate from my feelings inside the ring, I would be sunk. I might hit a guy with a hard punch and the get scared if he didn’t go down.
Cus took this out-of-body experience one step further. He would separate his mind from his body and then visualize the future. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself,” he told me. “It’s me, but it’s not me, as if my mind and my body aren’t connected, but they are connected. I get a picture in my mind, what it’s going to be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen. I can take a fighter who is just beginning and I can see exactly how he will respond. When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about this guy, I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I’m that guy, I’m inside him.”
Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only 14, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed.
Coue would tell his patients to repeat to themselves, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better” over and over again.
So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me. The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I love doing that, I loved hearing myself talk about myself.
The goal of all these technique was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.
He was a Roman warrior 2,000 years too late. Warriors like war, need war, that’s the atmosphere in which they feel most at home. In times of peace, they are restless and useless men they think. They like to stir up a lot. Cus, like Patton, felt alive when there was confusion, intrigue, a sense of impending battle. He felt most engaged with himself then, his nerve endings, his brainpower was most alive and he felt most fulfilled when he was in a state of agitation. And if he wasn’t there, he had to create or heighten it. If it was simmering, he had to turn up the flames to feel fully alive. It gave him a high. He was an activist, he needed action.
Cus was such a deep guy. No one ever made me more conscious of being a black man. He was so cold hard, giving it to me like a bitter black man would. “They think they’re better than you, Mike,” he’d say. If he saw somebody with a Fiat or a Rolls-Royce, he’d look at me and say, “You could get that. That’s not the hardest thing in the world to do, getting wealthy. You’re so superior to those people. They can never do what you are capable of doing. You got it in you. You think I would tell you this if you didn’t have it in you? I could probably make you a better fighter but I couldn’t make you champion.”
Whoa. I always thought I was shit. My mother had told me I was crap. Nobody had ever said anything good about me. And here’s this dude saying, “I bet you if you try, you could win an Oscar. You’d be just as good an actor as you’d be a boxer. You want to be a race-car driver? I bet you’d be the best race-car driver in the world; you’re smarter and tougher than those guys. You could conquer the world. Don’t use that word ‘can’t’. You can’t say ‘can’t’.”
When I got discouraged, as I often did, Cus would massage my mind with thoughts of an exotic world with great treasures. Everything he said was foreign to me, but I liked the sound of it.
“All you have to do is listen to me,” he’d say. “People of royal descent will know your name. Do you hear what I’m saying to you, boy? The whole world will know your name. Your family name will reign. People will respect your mother, your family, your children. When you enter a room, people will stand up and give you an ovation.”
Cus wouldn’t let me fail. When I felt like quitting and I got discouraged, he just kept on inspiring me. Cus would always say, “My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.” He was peeling me and it hurt! I was screaming, “Leave me alone. Aarrgghh!” He tortured my mind. He’d see me sparring with an older guy and it was in my mind that I was tired and I wasn’t punching back at the guy, the guy was just bullying me, and Cus would talk to me about that, make me confront my fears. He was such a perfectionist. I’d be hitting the heavy bag with combinations and Cus would be standing there, watching.
“It’s good. It’s good. But it’s not perfect,” he’d say in his thick Bronx accent.
Cus wanted the meanest fighter that God ever created, someone who scared the life out of people before they even entered the ring. He trained me to be totally ferocious, in the ring and out. At the time, I needed that. I was so insecure, so afraid. I was so traumatized from people picking on me when I was younger. I just hated the humiliation of being bullied. That feeling sticks with you for the rest of your life. It’s just such a bad, hopeless feeling. That’s why I always projected to the world that I was a mean, ferocious motherfucker. But Cus gave me the confidence so that I didn’t have to worry about being bullied ever again. I knew nobody was ever going to fuck with me physically.
No matter what any one says, no matter what the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.
I was standing on the scale and started getting nervous. These guys were gangsters, legitimate tough guys, and I wasn’t from their neighborhood. But then I remembered all those films I watched. Jack Johnson would be on the scale with a crowd around him. I always visualized myself in that position. Then I heard all the whispers and whistling. “That’s the guy who knocked out everyone in one round at the juniors,” they said.
My Cus thinking kicked in. I was nobility. I was this great gladiator, ready to do battle.
Before the fight, one of the local boxing officials came over to us.
“Cus, the man you’re fighting is big, strong, and scary,” he said.
Cus didn’t bat an eye.
“My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.”
I heard that and oh, my heart. Arrrghh. I would turn into fucking hot blue fire. I got so pumped up that I wanted to fight those guys before we got into the ring.
You’d think with all these knockouts and the junior championship Cus would have had little to criticize. Not Cus. He always treated me like a prima donna in front of people, but behind closed doors it wasn’t like that. I’d be alone with him at the house and he’d sit me down.
“You know, you had you hand low. With all due respect, if that gentleman was a bit more professional, a little bit calmer, he would have hit you with that punch.”
This was after I had knocked the guy out!
Cus was all about manipulation, psychological warfare. He believed that 90 percent of boxing was psychological and not physical. Will, not skill.
“How’s taking out the trash going to make me a better boxer?” I scoffed.
“Because doing something you hate to do like you love it is good conditioning for someone aspiring towards greatness.”
He began to train me hard every day. I never had the privilege of enjoying boxing as a sport or as something to do for fun.
“God, I wish I had more time with you,” he said. But then he would say, “I’ve been in the fight game for 60 years and I’ve never seen anybody with the kind of interest you have. You’re always talking about fighting.”
He thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.
My sparring sessions were like all-out war. Before we fought, Cus would take me aside. “You don’t take it easy, you go out there and do your best,” he said. “You do everything you learned and you do it at full speed. I want you to break the guy’s ribs.”
Break their ribs? Sparring? He wanted to get me prepared for the guys I’d fight and he certainly wanted me to break the ribs of my opponents in an actual fight.
Besides watching old fight films, I devoured everything I could read on these great fighters. Soon after I moved in with Cus, I was reading the boxing encyclopedia and I started laughing reading about a champion who only held his title for a year. Cus looked at me with his cold piercing eyes and said, “A one-year championship is worth more than a lifetime of obscurity.”
When I started studying the lives of the great old boxers, I saw a lot of similarity to what Cus was preaching. They were all mean motherfuckers.
Cus had given me a book to read called In This Corner. I couldn’t put it down. I saw how these fighters dealt with their emotions, how they prepared for fights. That book gave me such superior insight into the psychology of human beings. What struck me was how hard the old-time fighters worked, how hungry they were. I read that John L. Sullivan would train by running five miles and then he’d walk back the five miles and spar for twenty rounds. Ezzard Charles said he only ran three to four miles a day and boxed six rounds. I though, Damn, Sullivan trained harder in the 1880s than this guy did in the 1950s. So I started walking four miles to the gym, did my sparring, and then walked back to the house. I started emulating the old-school guys because they were hardcore. And they had long careers.
I was serious about my history because I learned so much from the old fighters. What did I have to do to be like this guy? What discipline did this other guy possess? Cus would tell me how vicious and mean they were outside the ring but when they’re in it, they’re relaxed and calm. I got excited hearing him talk about these guys, seeing that he held them in such high esteem. I wanted so much for someone to talk like that about me. I wanted to be part of that world. I would watch the fights on TV and I’d see the boxers punching with grimaces on their faces and the ripped bodies, and I wanted that to be my face and my body.
Make all his causes a fucking lie? Whoa. Then Cus would stare at me.
“If you listen to me, you’ll reign with the gods. See the way you’re interested and talk about all these old fighters? By the time you’re champ, if you listen to me, the only reason people would know about these guys was because you’d talk about them. You’ll supersede them all. You’ll make them forget about everybody. I watched Jack Dempsey as a boy. I’ve met these guys, shook their hands. They are not what you are. You are a giant; you are a colossus among men.”
Cus knew how to make me feel like I could conquer the world. But he also knew how to make me feel like shit. Sometimes he’d tell me, “You allow your mind to get the better of you.” That was his secret, unwritten code way of saying, “You’re a weak piece of shit. You don’t have the discipline to be one of the greats.” The greats could fight the best fight of their life even if someone had just kidnapped their child or killed their mother. Greats are totally emotionally independent. Performers are like that too, not just boxers. Some of the legendary artists I read about would be high on everything but still be able to go out there and do a record-breaking performance. They couldn’t even walk, but they had great discipline and determination. Sometimes they’d go directly from the arena to a hospital. I wanted to be one of those fighters and performers.
Right before my fight, I was so scared that I almost left. I was thinking about all that preparation that I had undergone with Cus. Even after all the sparring, I was still totally intimidated with fighting somebody in the ring. What if I failed and lost? I had been in a million fights on the streets of Brooklyn but this was a whole different kind of feeling. You don’t know the guy you’re fighting; you have no beef with him. I was there with Teddy Atlas, my trainer, and I told him that I was going down to the store for a second. I went downstairs and sat on the curb by the steps leading to the subway. For a minute, I thought I should just get on the damn train and go back to Brownsville. But then all of Cus’s teaching started to flow into my mind and I started to relax, and my pride and my ego started popping up, and I got up and walked back to the gym. It was on.
Those smokers meant so much to me, a lot more to me than the rest of the kids. The way I looked at it, I was born in hell and every time I won a fight, that was one step out of it. The other fighters weren’t as mean as I was. If I hadn’t had these smokers, I probably would have died in the sewers.
When I entered the dressing room, I remembered how all my heroes had behaved. The other kids would come up to me and put out their hand to shake, and I would just sneer and turn my back on them. I was playing a role. Someone would be talking and I’d just stare at him. Cus was all about manipulating your opponent by causing chaos and confusion, but staying cool under it all. I caused such chaos that a few of the other fighters took one look at me and lost their bouts so they wouldn’t have to fight me later on. I won all my fights by knockouts in the first round.
Cus and I had already established what we wanted to accomplish, so school seemed to be a distraction from that goal. I didn’t care about what they were teaching me, but I did have an urge to learn. So Cus would encourage me and I read some of the books from his library. I loved history. By reading history, I learned about human nature. I learned the hearts of men.
But the moment that I cried was when Cus really knew that he had me. From that moment on I became his slave. If he told me to kill someone, I would have killed them. I’m serious. Everybody thought I was up there with this old, sweet Italian guy, but I was there with a warrior. And I loved every minute of it. I was happy to be Cus’s soldier; it gave me a purpose in life. I liked being the one to complete the mission.
My second Junior Olympics started off well. We were back in Colorado, and in my preliminary matches I knocked out all of my opponents. Then it was time for the finals where I’d defend my title. That’s when the pressure got to me. I saw all of the cameras and my insecurities started to kick in. There were all these established boxing officials saying great things about me. I thought that that was wonderful, but that it was going to end because I was filthy, I was dirty. Even so, I certainly didn’t want to let Brownsville down. Cus had told me many times that if I listened to him, “when your mother walks the streets of Brownsville, people will carry her groceries.”
I couldn’t deal with all that pressure. Before the finals, Cus pulled me aside.
“Mike, this is the real world. You see all these people,” and he pointed to all the ring officials and the reporters and the boxing officials in the arena. “When you lose, they don’t like you anymore. If you’re not spectacular, they don’t like you anymore. Everybody used to like me. Believe me, when I was in my fifties, young, beautiful women would chase me all over the place. Now that I’m an old man, no one comes around anymore.”
I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out. I was trying to say that if I lost, nobody would ever like me again. Teddy comforted me and told me not to let my feelings get the best of me.
A lot of the guys who used to bully me came up to me on the street.
“Hey, Mike, you need anything? Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” they’d say.
They used to kick my ass, now they were kissing it.
But the audience I was really after was my mom. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with her.
“Why didn’t you tell me Mommy was dead?” she screamed.
I didn’t want to say “I didn’t go to the hospital. It was too painful to see Mom a shell of her old self” because my sister would have killed me, so I said, “Well, I didn’t want you to be hurt. I didn’t want you to know.” I was just too weak to deal with this.
Stick with that white man, Mike. We’re nothing, Mike, don’t come back here, Mike. I don’t want to hear no bullshit, nigga. You’re the only hope we have. We ain’t going to never go nowhere Mike, we’re going to die right here in Brownsville. We’ve got to tell people before we die that we hung out with you, you were our nigga.”
I was hearing variations of that everywhere I went. They took it seriously. To my friends, Brownsville was pure hell. They all wished they had an opportunity to get out like I did. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to come back, but I went back because I was trying to figure out who I really was. My two lives were so divergent, yet I felt at home in both worlds for different reasons.
But I went back upstate with her. I looked at my apartment and saw how my mother had lived in poverty and chaos and then thought about the way she died. That changed my whole perspective and about how I was going to live my life. It might be short, but I was going to make sure it would be glorious.
I was crushed. I wanted to win every tournament. I liked the way the champion was treated after he won. I wanted that feeling. I was addicted to that feeling.
Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights because the way that you fight your fights will be the way that you live your life.
Cus was angry about the decision, but he was happy to see that I could handle that type of competition. He knew that we had won morally, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was crying like a baby for a long time after the fight.
I often say to him, and I know he doesn’t know what I mean but I’m going to tell him now what I mean, because if he weren’t here I probably wouldn’t be alive today. The fact that he is here and doing what he’s doing and doing it so well and improving as he has gives me the motivation and interest in staying alive because I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live. Nature is smarter than we think. Little by little we lose our friends that we care about and little by little we lose our interest, until finally we say, “What the devil am I doing around here? I have no reason to go on.” But I have a reason with Mike here. He gives me the motivation and I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success because I will not leave until that happens because when I leave, he will not know how to fight, he will not only understand many things, but he will also know how to take care of himself.
“Dreams are just when you’re starting off. You have the dream to push the motivation. I just want to be alive ten years from now. People say I’m going to be a million-dollar fighter. Well, I know what I am, and that’s what counts more than anything else, because the people don’t know what I go through. They think I’m born this way. They don’t know what it took to get this way.”
“What do you go through?”
“The training. The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind. At this particular time it’s the amateurs and it’s all fun, trophies and medals, but I’m like you, I want to make money when it comes to being professional. I like the fancy hairdos and I like to wear fancy clothes, gold, jewelry, and everything. To continue this kind of lifestyle you have to earn the money the right way. You can’t take a gun an go into a bank. You might as well do it in away that you feel good about yourself by doing something you like.”
I was bitter about working that hard. I had never endured that kind of deprivation and then I had to get up the next day and do it all over again. I worked hard for those Olympics.
“This must be some good stuff, Mike. I know this must be good because you just let four hundred years of slaves and peasants to smoke it.”
He broke my spirit that day. He made me feel like an Uncle Tom nigga. And he hated those kinds of people. He really knew how to bring me to my nadir.
I got choked up. To this day, when I recount this story, I still choke up. I was offended and hurt but I wouldn’t tell Cus that because then he’d say, “Oh, you’re crying? What are you, a little baby? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have the emotional toughness?”
That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the thing, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.
This was my first pro fight outside of Albany, but Cus had sent me to watch big fights in cities all over the country to get me acclimated to the arenas. He also took me along when he hung out with big-time fighters. He had me sit with them around a dinner table and get familiar with them so I’d never get intimidated by a fighter.
When we lined up for the instructions, Johnson looked so arrogant, like he hated my guts. Within seconds he was down from a left hook to the kidney and then when he got up, I threw a spectacular right hand that hit him so hard his front two teeth were lodged in his mouthpiece.
Pete would bring me to the bar and we’d sit with Paulie Herman, one of the owners. Paulie was the man in New York at that time. It seemed to me that he was a bigger celebrity than the celebrities themselves. Everybody wanted to be around Paulie, sit at his table, ask him for favors. I thought that he was a Mafia boss or something.
I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sport Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.
I still wasn’t having sex. The last time I had gotten laid was at the Olympics with that intern. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, but I was too awkward with women. I din’t know how to access them.
“I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.”
“Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”
All the luminaries were there. Norman Mailer said his influence on boxing was as great as Hemingway’s influence on young American writers.
Mike Tyson is just a hardworking fighter that leads a boring life as an individual. Anyone who says “I wish I was in your shoes,” he hundreds of people who say that don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like babies. They couldn’t handle it.
My opponent was Mark Young, a tough-looking guy. When we came to the center of the ring for the instructions, I could feel his energy. You got to stare them down during the instructions, but that doesn’t mean anything, that’s just window dressing. You feel that energy from their spirit, you feel it from their soul, and then you go back to your corner and you go “Oh shit” or “This guy’s a pussy.” That night it was “Oh shit, he’s coming to fight.” Kevin felt it too.
Cus wasn’t there. Everybody tells me I’m doing good, I’m doing good, but nobody tells me if I do bad. It doesn’t matter how good I would have done, Cus would have probably seen something I did wrong.
I knew it was going to be a tough fight. During the instructions, he didn’t even look me in the eye. He had such a humble and submissive posture. But I didn’t detect even a drop of fear or intimidation from his energy, so I wasn’t going for any of that humble, afraid-to-look-me-in-the-eye shit. I felt that he couldn’t wait to slug me.
Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.
I dropped him once, which probably tipped the scales in my favor, but he was the toughest opponent that I had ever faced at that point. He gave me such a body beating that I couldn’t even walk after the fight. I had to stay in the hotel. I couldn’t even drive home.
People won’t want to be in my position. “Wow, I can make money,” they say. But if they had to go through some of the things I go through, they would cry. It’s so depressing. Everybody wants something. Just as hard as you’re working in the gym, people are working that hard trying to separate you from your money.
When I finally got back to my hotel room early that morning, I looked at myself in the mirror wearing that belt, and I realized that I had accomplished our mission. And now I was free.
But then I remembered reading something Lenin wrote in one of Cus’s books. “Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.” That was a statement I should have taken into consideration in the years that followed.
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 bene 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.
I wanted people bowing at my feet; I wanted people catering to me; I wanted to be chasing the women from me. This was what Cus told me I would be doing, but I was not getting it.
I later found out that Harry Houdini did the same thing when he started to make it. I guess that’s what poor people who get rich real quick do. They don’t feel like they deserve it. I felt that way sometimes, because I forgot how much hard work I had put into my career.
This was a really fucking downtrodden, drug-infested, gang-infested, sex-infested, filth-infested neighborhood. And you’re from this cesspool, you know? Just giving them money and helping these people, it doesn’t solve their problems, but it makes them happy.
I got down on myself a lot, but I always had friends in Brownsville who wouldn’t let me go there. I’d sit there and complain how hard life was and this one guy, who I prefer not to name, would look at me.
“Oh, it’s hard? Who did you kill lately, Mike? What house did you go into and tie everybody up, huh, Mike?”
Whenever I had something negative to say about myself, he’d say, “There’s nothing bad about you, Mike. You’re a good man. You don’t escape where you come from because you have money now. If you weren’t a good man, we would all have you in the trunk, Mike.”
My days of abstinence were over. I was an extremist at everything I did, including sex. Once I started banging women, the floodgates opened. Short, tall, sophisticated, ugly, high-society, street girls, my criteria was breathing. But I still had no line and for the most part didn’t know how to approach women.
It’s probably also why I used to work so hard to degrade myself. I couldn’t take being the big fish and having everyone talk nice about me. That made me feel uncomfortable because of my low self-esteem. It got to be overbearing and I had to berate myself and cut myself down. Everybody was saying so many good things about me that it fucked my head up. Hey, let’s get some balance. It’s not like I was a fucking saint. I shot at people. My social skills consisted of putting a guy in a coma. If I did that, I might get a good pasta meal. That’s how Cus programmed me. Every time you fight and win, you get rewarded.
So maybe Robin was just what the doctor ordered. A manipulative shrew who could bring me to my knees. I was like a fucking trained puppy dog around her. “That’s okay, please, please, you can steal my money, but don’t take the pussy away, please, please.” Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t just about sex. I think I got off most on the intimacy.
That’s the phony shit that Cus was talking about. So I had to go back and forth between my megalomaniac shit and my nonthreatening shit and it was confusing even me. It’s hard to be two motherfuckers at once in one place.
“You motherfucker, I’m going to kill you, nigga.” “So how are you doing, my love?”
In the sixth I got off a devastating left hook that exploded on his chin, but he was such a disciplined and composed fighter that he acted like it didn’t faze him. But I had watched all the great fighters, Robinson, Marciano, I knew that if I hit you right, you’re hurt. I don’t care how much of a poker face you have on. So I just threw everything I had at him, maybe a fifteen-punch barrage, and I came up with that resounding knockout. He was knocked-out cold and once he fell onto the floor, he was so gutsy he tried to get up. But I saw the pain on his face and I knew he wouldn’t make it. That might have been the most vicious knockout of my career. It was like hitting the heavy bag, I wasn’t worried about anything incoming. Just think about how much character he exhibited. All that pain on his face and he’s still trying to get up. I thought, Damn. You want some more?
I didn’t look good that fight even though the knockout was resounding. Cus would have been angry with me. But I didn’t have that anymore. I didn’t have to worry about somebody ripping my fucking ass out in the dressing room if he didn’t like what I was doing. I didn’t have to listen to anybody. You know how easy it is to relax when you don’t have to give a fuck?
The truth is I was sick of fighting. I was sick of fighting with Robin and I was sick of fighting in the ring. The stress of being the world’s champ and having to prove myself over and over just got to me. I had been doing that shit since I was 13. And it wasn’t just the time I spent in the ring. Whether it was during a fight or in camp sparring, I had always fought guys who were more experienced than me. Normally when you see a champion sparring somebody or even fighting someone, he’s fighting somebody who is inferior to him who he can handle with ease. But my sparring partners were constantly trying to hurt me. That was their instruction. If they didn’t do that, they’d be sent home. When you start training, you’re scared. You ain’t going to go out and play and party because you know you have to fight this guy and the last time he gave you a fucking headache. You’re not going to go outside to the bar around the corner and visit no girl. You’re going home, you go in the tub, you’re going to concentrate on how you are going to box this guy the next day. That was my life and I was tired of it.
I guess I just never thought I was good enough for the job. I was too insecure to be that dominant person.
Then Tony started praising Jesus. But it didn’t help. I won a unanimous decision but I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel good about anything at that point in my life.
As long as you make mistakes, you don’t have the means to be happy. I’m a perfectionist and I want to be perfect.
Some fan came up to us. “Good luck at the Olympics,” he told us both.
“What? You mean on this flight, not his fight. He’s not fighting at the Olympics,” Biggs said.
Shit like that stayed with me then. I trained so hard. I was motivated to kick his ass. I don’t even like talking about this fight. It was seven rounds of heartless punishment. I elbowed him, low-blowed him, punched him after the round was over. That was my dark, stupid, ignorant side, my side that I’m ashamed of, coming out. I prolonged the punishment over seven rounds. I was a young, insecure kid and I wanted to be special at someone else’s expense.
“I could have knocked him out in the third round, but I did it very slowly. I wanted him to remember it for a long time.”
Can you imagine me, a 21-year-old kid, living my dreams like this? Barbra Fucking Streisand coming to my dressing room to see me? Cus always told me that anything I ever saw on TV I could have. And that included women. Robin wasn’t the only girl I met like that. If I wanted some exotic car I could call any place in the world and they’d custom design it for me and put it on a boat and ship it to me.
Guys like me who had no core identity would emulate other people’s lives. If I read that Joe Louis loved champagne, I started drinking champagne.
When I recount these stories, I can’t believe what a disrespectful ignorant monster I was then. All that fame shit just makes you feel hollow if you’re not grounded. Add to that the boozing and the girls and it all began to affect my performance. Guys who I should have been able to knock out in one round would go five, six, sometimes the distance. There was no way that someone could be a sexual Tyrannosaurus and the world’s champion. You have to willingly surrender one of them. You could have sex at any age, but you can’t always be a world-class athlete. But I stuck with the sex.
I was just a miserable person then. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be with me. I didn’t want to be with me. I think that my mother handed down her depression to me. I didn’t know what I was doing when I was the champion. I just wanted to be like my old heroes. I didn’t care if I was going to die tomorrow. I had read a book about Alexander the Great when I was younger. He would rather have a few years of glory than a lifetime of obscurity. So what did I care if I died? I never had no fucking life, what did I have to look forward to?
I had everything I wanted, but I wasn’t happy within myself. The outside world wasn’t making me happy anymore. I didn’t know how to get it from the inside, because happiness, as I realized later, is an inside job. So in this state of despair I did the last thing I should have done. I got married.
It was around that time that Robin served notice on Cayton’s office, demanding to see all their financial records concerning me. Once we got married it was like a switch went off. Robin became more demanding. Nothing could please her. She wanted more and more control over me. I just got tired of that and started fucking more and more other girls.
The people in the fight business are so bad. I thought people where I came from were criminals, but these guys are bigger crooks than the guys in my neighborhood could ever be.
“They use them but they don’t like or respect black people. The way they talk about black people, you’d think you were living with the KKK,” I said. “They thought they were royalty. She and her mother wanted so much to be white, it’s a shame. And they were trying to take me away from the people I grew up with and throw me into their kind of high-class world.”
With Cus and Jim gone I didn’t care about any of those people. So I thought, Whoever gives me the highest bid, whatever I wanted, I’ll go with them. It became a game to me. Everybody was thinking about themselves, so I might as well think about myself.
“Brian, I’ve got so much money, I don’t give a fuck,” I said.
And I didn’t then. I didn’t know how long that ride was going to last. I was just living my life day by day. But I knew that I loved being champ and I felt that nobody could do that job better than me. I would destroy anything in front of me. If you were in the same occupation and we weighed the same, you would be dead.
Before I went to Mexico, I had such a big chip on my shoulder. I had never known anyone poorer than me. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being poorer than I had been. I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything in my life.
He got all apologetic. And the jokes about me stopped. All those comedian guys talk shit on stage or in front of the cameras, but when they see me, they want to slap five.
In my mind I was ordained to do this. All my heroes had had all these women. Someone should have said to me, “This is going to have an ugly ending.” But there was nobody there to do that.
Suddenly I broke down.
“Man, why’d she do me like that?”
I still hadn’t gotten over Robin.
“Man, take it easy,” EB said.
“That bitch. I loved her. She didn’t have to do me like that.”
One of the reasons that I didn’t think I was going to live long was because I thought I was the baddest man in the world, both in the arena and out on the streets. When you add the alcohol to that giant ego, anything could happen. It felt like I was always on a mission, but what was I looking for, what was the problem? I was always mad at the world. I always felt empty. Even after Mexico, I had a chip on my shoulder about being poor, my other dying, that I had no family life. Being champ of the world just accelerated and intensified those feelings.
Then I created that Iron Mike persona, that monster, and the media picked up on it and the whole world was afraid of that guy, the guy who could make women leave their husbands for a night and cheat. That image of being the big bad motherfucker was really intoxicating but inside I was still just a little pussy — this scared kid who didn’t want to get picked on.
Anthony always came up with plausible deniability. And he would often take the fall for me. Another time when we were at Bentley’s and I grabbed some girl’s ass and when she turned around Anthony piped in.
“No, no, that was me, baby. I’m sorry. I thought you were my ex-girl.”
“I had total trust, implicitly, totally, with every soul of my body, in Jim,” I testified. “I signed that agreement because Jimmy asked me to sign it. I always trusted Jimmy, I never believed my listening to Jimmy would all come down to this, and being here facing you.”
But I looked closer and saw that it was a dude. Someone she was probably giving head to. They pulled up and got out of the car and I saw that the guy was Brad Pitt. When Brad saw me standing there in front of the house, you had to see the look on his face. He looked like he was ready to receive his last rites. Plus, he looked stoned out of his gourd. Then he went all pre-Matrix on me. “Dude, don’t strike me, don’t strike me. We were just going over some lines. She was talking about you the whole time.”
I was free of Robin officially, but instead of being elated, I was really down. I didn’t want to be married to her anymore but I felt humiliated by the whole process. I felt like half a person. I had endured the dark side of love — betrayal — and I was ashamed because it had played out in front of millions of people. This was the first time I had made myself vulnerable to someone else. Here was someone I would have died for and now I didn’t even care if she died. How does love change like that?
I was scheduled to fight again in July, but HBO wanted to sign me to a lifetime contract. I was constantly the slave nigga. They needed me just like the head slave on a plantation. Just imagine that shit; these suits were fighting over me to rip my soul apart.
King met with the press and painted a rosy picture of our relationship.
“It’s a family affair, where togetherness, solidarity, and unity prevail. Mike understands he has to be better than he is. My job is to be honest with him. He’s the man, to allow him to make his own mistakes,” he said. “He has to grow up like everyone else, it’s all about Mike growing up and I can’t wait to make him independent of me.”
I was scared to take the test. I was always sleeping with nasty girls so I thought I had AIDS. They came to test me and I just refused.
One day Ali and a few other people were at Don’s house in Vegas. I used to hear stories that Ali and Larry Holmes and a lot of other boxers were scared of Don. I respected them and wanted them to know that Don was nobody to be scared of. I would say deplorable things about him in front of everyone just to prove how worthless he was. I don’t know if that was the real motivation for me whupping his ass. I was a young immature kid then and I just felt like doing it.
When I think about all the horrific things that Don has done to me over the years, I still feel like killing him. He’s such an asshole. He’s not a tough guy. He’s never been a tough guy. All the tough-guy things he’s done have been through him paying someone to do it for him.
How dare you talk to me? You never fought a day in your life and you’re here judging me. Who are you? You’ve never even put on a pair of gloves. You got your job from your brother. The only things you can do is drink and cheat on your wife. You’re just some fucking derelict that writes for a newspaper.
I never looked at guys like him as being bums or down on their luck. I looked at him as being bigger than me. It wasn’t like I was some big shot doing him a favor coming in; I was in awe to be there with him. I was just so happy to see him and touch him. When I went home that first night, I cried.
I went back to my hotel room. There was no maid there. It was weird not being the heavyweight champion of the world any longer. But in my mind it was a fluke. I knew that God didn’t pick on any small animals, that lightning only struck on the biggest animals, that those are the only ones that vex God. Minor animals don’t get God upset. God has to keep the big animals in check so they won’t get lofty on their thrones. I just lay on my bed and thought that I had become so big that God was jealous of me.
She was probably right. I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.
Then there were the reporters who couldn’t contain their glee that I had lost.
“Someone who bounces women around and gives it in the back to his friends and turn his back on people who helped make him champion, making it seem as if dogs have more loyalty than he does… Tyson was some kind of savage, on whom the culture bestows all that is normal, only for him to reject the gifts and the givers, and revert to life on the instinctual level. The only end for such a man is death.”
Woooo! I loved that shit.
I picked up on that sentiment in an interview I did with ESPN. They asked me why everyone was so fascinated with my life.
“I believe a lot of people want to see me self-destruct. They want to see me one day with handcuffs and walking in the police car or else going to jail. But I’m not in jail and I’m not in Brownsville anymore and I beat all the odds.”
Douglas won the fight but no one was paying any attention to him, people were looking for me.
Now I can’t quit, I’m a whore to the game. Now I have to prove something. In fact, now I wonder sometimes if I’m not bigger than I was before because I lost.
Despite thinking that the gods wanted me to get my belt back, I was sad and embarrassed and doubting myself after my loss. Jackie was always upbeat.
“Are you crazy, motherfucker?” she’d yell at me. “Do you know who you are? It was one fight, Mike. You lost. Big deal. Let’s move on. You’re the best.”
He had an interesting thing to say about losing a title.
“You are ashamed to see everybody, especially the skycaps at the airport. You don’t want to see the taxi drivers because everybody is going to say something, in your mind. And you have to build yourself up, so you start spending billions of dollars on cars, suits, anything you can make yourself look like the best in the world. Mike Tyson will never sleep again until he gets a chance to fight for the title again and win it. He’ll never sleep again until he redeems himself. I hate to see a young man go through that, but that is the way that it is.”
I didn’t necessarily agree with George then. I was such a megalomaniac that I knew that it was foreordained that I’d win the bell back. I just knew that I had to train.
He was out on his back. I really didn’t want to hurt Henry. I wanted to get it over with real quick. I liked him a lot and I was just glad he got a nice payday. Tillman was one of those fighters who was really great but just didn’t have confidence in himself. If he had believed in himself, he would have been a legendary fighter; he would have been in the Hall of Fame.
I knew Holyfield would win. Douglas went in a way overweight and Holyfield was the better fighter. Douglas just quit. He got hit a little and laid down. He was a whore for his $17M. He didn’t go into the fight with any dignity or pride to defend his belt. He made his payday but lost his honor. You can’t win honor, you can only lose it. Guys like him who only fight for money can never become legends. I can tell that it still affects Buster to this day. Years later, I ran into him again at an autograph session we both attended. No one wanted his autograph. This was the guy who made history for beating me but now his legacy had ben reduced to nothing.
“I am a champion. Being a champion is a frame of mind. I’m always going to be a champion. Being happy is just a feeling like when you are hungry or thirsty. When people say that you are happy, that’s just a word somebody gave you to describe a feeling. When I decided to accomplish my goals, I gave up all means of even thinking of being happy.”
I am not a happy camper. I just wasn’t built that way.
We were watching TV one night and one of Ruddock’s fights came on and I saw a flaw in Ruddock.
“I’m going to kill this guy,” I told Tom.
I knew that Ruddock was a dangerous puncher, but I also saw that I’d be too elusive for him. He wouldn’t be able to hit me solidly.
As soon as she got that money, she went out and got a lawyer and sued me for millions. Which was great because years later, as the case progressed, my lawyer had the court order a paternity test and it turned out that the kid wasn’t even mine. I deserved that. That’s what happens when you fuck with hos. It was another harsh betrayal. I was crushed when that first test came back. I really thought he was my kid. I had spent a lot of time with him. I even proudly posed with him on the cover of Jet magazine.
It was pretty inhumane to be in a room 23 hours a day with the light always on, but you get used to it. You become your own best company. In a weird way, you get your freedom in the hole. Nobody was controlling your every move like they did in the general population. The hole was the worst situation you could be in and that became my element.
Tupac was an immovable force as a personality. He’d seen so much pain and hardship. Sometimes the adversity we live through traumatizes us and gives us baggage, and we bring our baggage everywhere we go. I bring my baggage into my religion, I bring it into my relationships sometimes, I bring my baggage into my fucking fights. I don’t care how much we succeed, our baggage still comes with us.
In my sick mind, I was an ancient noble character and if I lost my quest to get the belt back, civilization as we knew it was done for. I was taking my little narcissistic quest and putting it on the whole world.
I needed that vision, though. I needed that drive for accomplishment or I would have rotted away in prison, so I made my plan. I knew what I had to do; I knew how to discipline my mind with the right things. The last thing I wanted to be was docile.
I love Allah, but I’m Mike too, and he made me this way — a manipulator and a hustler.
“Romantic love, you miss romantic love?”
“Maybe, but what is love? Love is like a game, love is competition. Most people who are gorgeous, a guy or a woman maybe, love comes to them all of the time because they attract love. But they never fought for love, what are they prepared to do for love? Love is a situation where you must be prepared to do something, because if you have something lovely, somebody is going to want to challenge you for it, and if you’ve never been competitive enough, the slightest struggle and you are going to give in.”
I had no time to adjust to the world. I had so many people in my face because I had $200M in fights lined up. It was worse than when I went in. Everybody was around me saying, “Mike’s the man. He’s the man.” But now I had a different frame of mind. I was afraid of everybody. Prison doesn’t rehabilitate anyone; it dehabilitates you. I don’t care how much money you earn when you get out, you’re still a lesser person than when you went in. I was paranoid. I thought everyone was gonna hurt me. I’d panic every time I’d hear an ambulance siren. One time, Monica and I were in bed and I woke up and looked at her and grabbed her. For some reason I thought somebody had come into the bed and was trying to stab me. I was so scared.
I wasn’t the same guy; I had become hard. Prison basically took the whole life out of me. I never again trusted anyone — not even myself around certain people.
I wanted to perform up to the most impeccable standards, but I didn’t know if I could. I was 29 years old, but I felt a lot slower. I didn’t have the same hunger I had before I went to jail. And, more than anything else, I felt ashamed that I had been in prison.
I really tried to be a good brother when I got out, but I got swept into the material world. There were too many people throwing themselves at me and my consciousness wasn’t fully developed then.
I had been confident about it at first because I was in such a great shape coming out of jail, but when we started sparring in camp in Ohio, I got hit with some punches from an amateur young kid and it hurt like hell. I wasn’t accustomed to getting hit. Fuck, I couldn’t believe that this little amateur kid had hurt me so bad. Taking punches was definitely different from being in shape. I thought, How could I beat McNeeley when that amateur nearly stopped me?
I find myself more nervous now than in the beginning of my career or when I was champion. Maybe it’s a slight insecurity. Even in training, I find myself taking that last breath. I don’t know if it’s good or not. I know what to do, but you have those doubts. I guess that’s what pisses you off — you have those doubts about yourself even though you’ve been successful for so many years.
Loved by few, hated by many, respected by all.
In the back of my mind I knew that if Bruno had fought me in this fight with the same spirit he did in the first fight, there was no way I would have beat him.
Losing is very traumatic for some people. Floyd Patterson would put on fake beards and wear dark glasses when he went out in public after he lost his title. When Foreman lost to Ali and then to Jimmy Young, the press asked him what it was like to lose and he said, “It’s like being in a deep dark nothing, nothing but nothing. A horrible smell came with it, a smell I hadn’t forgotten, a smell of sorrow. You multiply every sad thought you ever had it wouldn’t come close to this and then I looked around and I was dead. That was it. I thought of everything I worked for, I hadn’t said good-bye to my mother, my children, all the money I hid in safe-deposit boxes, you know how paper burns when you touch it, it just crumbles. That was my life. I looked back and I saw it crumble, like I’d fallen for a big joke.”
I never had a reaction like that. I know who I am, I know I’m a man. A guy like Holyfield based his whole existence around boxing, that’s why he continued to fight for so long. I was raised with Cus D’ Amato. He’d always say that boxing is not your life, it’s what you do for a living; it’s what you do to make a life, but it is not your life. He said, “Losing, winning, never take it personal.” Every time I lost, I just dealt with it, because it never became my life. That’s what I was taught.
I reached the darkest place that’s in each and every human being — the place where you say, “Oh, this is fucked, I shouldn’t do this, but this is who I am.” After a few days, I went out and there would be crowds of people applauding me for biting that guy. Everybody thought it was cool. I felt much better when people were condemning me for biting that ear than when they praised me for it.
I loved Rory but I had no choice but to fire him along with John. The more we dug, the more we found out that I’d signed contracts that screwed me right and left. By then, I was almost numb from all this betrayal and all the drugs I was taking.
John and Rory seemed to be in denial. “I think there is sometimes a frustration and misunderstanding that can occur in the best of friendships and business relationships, and that’s how we categorize this.”
Besides the two women in the restaurant, I was being sued by my former tiger trainer, the company that owned a house in LA that I backed out of buying, my jeweler in Vegas, my Vegas house contractor, that quack Dr. Smedi, and even Kevin Rooney, my old trainer.
Can you believe this shit? What was this, Stalinist Russia? These two fools wanted to use an interview where I blew off steam and a diagnosis from this Dr. Butterworth who never laid eyes on me to put me behind bars before this “time bomb” blew up. Anybody could see that these people were just out to abuse me, but no one cared because they probably thought I deserved this.
You’d be letting my mother down, my mother’s people down. You can’t let a lost generation that believed so much in your family down. Your father and your uncle were their hope and you’re the bloodline to that hope.”
He would have made a great politician. He really cared about people; you could tell it wasn’t some phony-baloney shit. Just the way he really engaged with people, really catching the eyes of people he didn’t even know. He wasn’t scared to be seen out in public, he was out there looking to engage. What, I’d think, this is one interesting guy.
I started these long walks when I was reading a book about Alexander the Great and his army. They were walking 60 miles a day back then so I just said, “Fuck this, I can do this.” I got to ten miles a day and my feet felt like someone had taken a blowtorch to them. I had great sneakers on too, and they still felt like someone set them on fire. I did a little more reading and I found out that all these great warriors would do these marches high. The history of war is the history of drugs. Every great general and warrior from the beginning of time was high.
Why was I such a pariah in my own country? Overseas, the people knew what time it was. Whenever I went abroad, especially in former Communist countries, I was treated like a hero.
I do need that money. That’s why it’s called “money” — because we all need it. It’s our god. It’s what we worship, and, if anybody tells me anything different, they’re a liar. Stop working, just live on the street and show me how much God’s going to take care of you.
A lot of my close friends and associates thought I had been drugged during the fight, I seemed so passive. I was in a fucked-up mood and it was hard for me to throw punches. It was as if all those heroes, those boxing gods, those old-time fighters had deserted me. Or I had deserted them. All of my heroes were truly miserable bastards, and I emulated them my whole career, a hundred percent, but I was never really one of those guys. I wish I was, but I wasn’t.
Now, you would think a girl would be out of her mind to put her hands on Mike Tyson. But when they got mad they didn’t give a shit. They’d hit me and scratch at my face. Then when you thought that it was all over and they’d cooled down, the next thing you know, a rock hits you in the head and she was mad as a motherfucker all over again.
The next day all the newspapers had every little detail of my finances splashed across their pages. I owed about $27M, $17M of which was for back taxes I owed the IRS and the English tax people. The other $10M was for personal expenses, which included the money I owed Monica from the divorce, what I owed the banks fro my mortgages, and my huge legal fees.
I’m rich, Mario. I don’t have no watch, no money, no phone, but I feel so peaceful. No one’s telling me to “go here,” “go there,” “do this.” I used to have cars that I never drove and I wouldn’t even know where the keys for them were. I had houses I didn’t live in. I had everybody robbing me. Now I have nothing. Nobody calls me, nobody bothers me, nobody is after me. It’s so peaceful. This is rich, man.
I don’t know. I’m realizing that I am not the only person that has been in a situation. You have to understand I have lost everything and I mean everything. Anyone I ever cared about, anybody I ever loved, romantic, I’ve just lost everything. My money, home, I’ve lost everything. The people who love you, you just chase them away by being so belligerent and crazy. You have to lose it all. And I think at some point of your life you wish you could receive them back but I guess that is part of our growing pain. We lose people that we love and care about the most in order to start our life off fresh, with a brand-new start.
Well, I would have like to have continued. But I saw that I was getting beat on. I realized, I don’t think I have it anymore, because, um… I got the ability to stay in shape, but I don’t got the fighting guts, I don’t think, anymore. I don’t have that ferocity. I’m not an animal anymore.
I wasn’t going to fight anymore because I didn’t want to disgrace the sport.
When you have that kind of pain, you can’t be friendly with anybody. You’re like a lion with a hurt paw. When an animal gets hurt, they know that the other animals will attack them. That’s how I felt when I was in pain, vulnerable and scared. So you get some coke and then you’re in the room alone with the coke and you want a woman in there, because you feel so bad about doing the drug that having a woman is going to kill the guilt.
When you start doing coke, you can see that people who you’ve know all your life and you’d never suspect are doing coke also. “People that do it know the people that do it, Mike. We have radar.”
It was just a wonderful world to live in. It seemed like one big blur. But one thing I did realize is that none of all that filled that big hole that I had in my soul. I never truly respected the championship; it all came very easy. I truly put in a lot of hard work to achieve what I did, but I took it for granted.
But I didn’t know Marilyn was a beast. She didn’t take any shit. She’s heard all the games before. I just never thought she had heard my international con game, the game I got over working with all those counselors since I was a kid.
In order to deal with me you had to have some kind of roaring ferocious animal in you to get my attention. Even if you go about it in a diplomatic way, even without expressing it to the naked eye, I have to know that that animal is in there. It might just be a subtle look in her eye. Well, Marilyn had it.
I told Marilyn that the scariest day of my life was when I won the championship belt and Cus wasn’t there. I had all this money and I didn’t have a clue who to comport myself. And then the vultures and leeches came out.
In all these countries, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, everything was about sex and power. As soon as we got off the plane, people were coming up to me. “Are you okay? Do you need a woman? You’re tired, you must want a woman.”
Can you imagine a hound like me in Russia? If you’re with the right people they will literally pull a girl off the street, pull her into the car next to you and say, “You go with him.” That shit was crazy over there.
It really was primitive culture in Chechnya. Half of the country had been burnt down during the wars with Russia. There were hardly any stores where I was. Nothing but land, no buildings.
Here I am, a psychologist, but nobody has ever been able to help me deal with my pain, all the psychological pain, the loss of my dad. I feel like I’ve waited my whole lifetime for Marilyn to come and to help me and know how to deal with this pain.
But I knew that Russia was no place for me. In Russia they don’t even have a word for “balance.” There’s no balance in Russia, only extreme. That’s why I fit in so good there. That place was just too perfect for me and my demons. I loved being in Russia. I could do anything I wanted with impunity.
At these after-hours spots you’d see everyone from celebrities and beautiful models to hard-core hustlers.
These beautiful people were all drugpires. You never saw them in the daytime, going to a dentist’s office or at a mall. Their life was just like mine; they’d be sleeping all day and partying all night.
Now I get nervous. This guy is watching his woman touch me. I’m getting sober because the fear and the high just don’t go together. Now I feel like a disgusting fat motherfucker. I can tell that this guy is a bad person. He’s probably done time already and he’s not afraid to kill someone.
But I didn’t heed her advice. I kept right on doing blow. Now, if you get high on coke and you don’t have girls around, that’s not a good high. And if you have girls without the coke, that’s not good either. You need both of them for the optimal experience. Now, you might think that doing a lot of cocaine was not conducive to having sex, but that’s what Cialis and Viagra were for.
Cocaine is the devil, there’s no doubt about it. I was always a chauvinist when it came to women. Even if I was broke, I’d never let them buy me dinner. But when I needed money for blow and I saw my girlfriend drop some money, I’d wait and then put it in my pocket. That was one of the worst feelings I ever felt. I didn’t want to play with the devil any longer, but he still wanted to play and it wouldn’t be over until he said it was over.
All the sniffers, the people who sniff cocaine, they all hated me smoking coke. Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined. A friend of mine once told me that when you want to know something about anything, put some fire under it, the fire brings out everything. You want to know something about a motherfucker, put some fire under his ass. Well, when you put some fire under that cocaine, you know what it’s made out of — all that poison, all that shit comes up out of there and it smells like hell.
By then, there was nothing euphoric anymore about coke, it was just numbing. I wasn’t even having sex with women with the coke anymore. Every now and then I had a girl with me but it was more to chill out with than to have sex.
I was living a crazy existence. One day I’d be in the sewage with some street hooker trying to get her to have sex without a condom, and the next night I’d be in Bel-Air with my rich friends with a happy face on, celebrating Rosh Hashanah. Right about then, I hit rock bottom. I was in a hotel suite in Phoenix. I had my morphine drip and my Cialis and my bottle of Hennessy. And seven hookers. All of a sudden, the coke me paranoid and I thought that these women were trying to set me up and rob me. So I started beating them. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just demons around me, it was the devil himself. And he had won. I kicked those hookers out of the room and did the rest of my coke.
How the hell did he know that I was using? I thought. But if you’re using, everybody who is using knows you’re using. We think no one sees us but we are more transparent than we believe.
That is one fascinating world. You think cops got the biggest fraternity in the world? You think gangs are big? They’re nothing compared to the recovery world. They got federal judges, marshals, and prosecutors. You be careful about what recovering alcoholic or addict you’re fucking with, because this is one huge powerful family. Don’t ever underestimate the power of recovery, because if you do, you’re going down. They’ve got the ear of everyone, including the President.
They are a different breed of people. All my intimidating, bullshit doesn’t work with them. Big killers with knife scars on their face, mob hit men, these AA people don’t get scared. It’s almost impossible to scare an addict. Even if they say they’re afraid of you, they’re really not.
What a beautiful man. People think addicts are bums and horrible people but they’re the geniuses of our times.
“Bright light, dark shadows. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” He told me that the biggest stars were the darkest ones, that was why I was here with him.
One day we had a guy show up who thought he was better than the rest of us guys because of his status.
“Hey, I don’t think I belong here with you guys,” he said. “I never chase a woman down the street and say I want to fuck her. The only reason I’m here is because my wife is frigid.”
“Because you even said something like that shows that you belong here,” I told him. “Don’t try to figure it out in one day. Just keep coming, okay?”
I felt like I was in a hole and the more people I fucked the more despair I felt.
After putting in a lot of work in the program I realized that the reason that I always wanted to satisfy women was because I was hoping that they would satisfy me not with sex but with their love. I was using sex to get intimacy. In order for me to get that intimacy and that attachment, I had to have sex.
It sounds trite but I was probably looking for someone to mother me. My whole life I was looking for love from my mother. My mother never gave love to a man. I never saw my mother kiss a man. I saw her in bed with them but I never heard “I love you” or saw someone kiss her forehead.
That’s one thing about happiness. You could be in hell and be happy there. Some people thrive in misery. You take away the misery and bring them into the light and they die emotionally and spiritually because pain and suffering has been their only comfort. The thought of someone loving them and helping them without wanting anything in return could never enter their minds.
One of the ways to break a sexual addiction, at least for me, was to be broke. If I didn’t have any money, that shit wasn’t fun anymore. If I’m broke I can’t even think about fucking anyone because in my delusional mind I need that grandeur. I’ve got to be in a major suite or on some beautiful island. If I’m doing it in a seedy motel that’s just me at my bottom.
And in AA when you stay clean for a certain amount of time they gave you a token or a chip. I carried those tokens with me religiously. I’m a peacock and I always have to be proving that I’m achieving something. That was just the way I was wired. Those tokens were like my belts. In our community the tokens infer respect. You could have all the money in the world but no tokens, no time, and we don’t respect you. I just loved it, I always looked forward to getting my chips.
I had instituted a dress code for the party. Everyone had to dress up sharp, no jeans. Of course I made my entrance later wearing jeans and a nice pair of Cartier diamond bracelets. That was what Cus taught me. You always have to create an environment where you can be what others can’t be. You set the rules. That was more of his psychological warfare. He was all about confusing the enemy.
I was a relapse artist. If you read anything about AA, you find that relapse is part of recovery. You can’t have recovery without relapse. You’ve still got those demons that you have to struggle with. The devil fucks with me all the time. He knows that I’m a relapse artist, that’s why he comes to me. If he thought I was strong he wouldn’t go near me. The devil is aware that I know God doesn’t like me very much, so he wants me to rebel.
“I’m going to be the brokest boyfriend you’ve ever had in your dating career.”
“Well, listen, you don’t have to be in the baby’s life,” she said.
Yeah, that same old bullshit — until the baby comes and hard times come and then I get hit with the fucking subpoena. That’s how that shit goes.
“Martin and Tyson are my only two friends. I want them to inherit my worldly possessions,” they read. What are among a drug dealer’w worldly possessions? His stash.
All that anxiety came back to me when Kiki and I would shop. My concept of buying things my whole adult life had been whatever I could see, I could buy. Now the sight of ordinary groceries intimidated me. Can you imagine that? I was the most vicious, feared fighter of my lifetime and the price of a fucking box of cereal was intimidating me.
Around then I began a series of relapses. I’d be good for a few weeks and then I’d go out and rage. I’d be gone a few days and then I’d come back all contrite.
“I’m a piece of shit. I just wish I was dead. I’m so sorry I’m doing this to you.”
For years and years I had gone through the motions of going to AA meetings and reading the book and working my program. Then all of a sudden, my daughter died and that knowledge just kicked in without me even knowing it.
I must have gotten this from Cus but in a tenth of a second, as soon as I detected any friendliness from him, I opened up all my love on him. I had to do something because my license was suspended and I had no document in the car.
“Hey, guy, I’m sorry if I was driving erratically because I’m kind of lost. I’m trying to find my friend’s house in Beverly Hills but I don’t know how to get to the freeway. Can you help me with this address?”
It just happened within a blink of an eye. I was drugged out on coke, almost suicidal, living the life of a loser and, BOOM. It happened so fast it was almost uncomfortable. But I knew I couldn’t blow this opportunity to reinvent myself again.
Sometimes I think that this life is just an illusion. Just think that I lost a child, and I think about that and it’s like she never existed. I say, what about my baby? What about Cus? I think about him all the time. They’re both a big part of my life, I think about them all the time. The more I think about these spiritual matters, the more I know that I know nothing.
Going to Mecca and Medina was an amazing experience. I got closer to my faith but in some ways I was put off by the actions of some of my brother Muslims. When I got there they immediately started broadcast my visit to show off that Islam was a better religion than Christianity or the rest of the religions. It wasn’t about me becoming a better person, it was more like, “We’ve got the Mighty Mike making haijj here.” They didn’t care about me as a person, they just cared about their publicity agenda. I was just a dumb nigga being used, that’s all I’ve ever been in my life.
Religion has to be in the man, a man can’t be in the religion. It really was almost juvenile, seeing all these religious figures in Islam fronting like, “My prophet is better than yours.”
But despite the political agendas, I felt good there. Anybody would feel like that there. Hundreds of thousands of people, all dressed the same, all there to worship and humble themselves. I was in a state of harmony, so I was harmonious.
It’s hard for me to be that way. If you really practice Islam in its purest form you’re a doormat. I don’t like to live my life that way. That’s beyond being pious, that’s being humble. And none of us can truly be humble. If you mention the word “humble” that in itself tells us that you’re not humble. Man is not meant to be humble, he’s meant to be humbled.
There are so many pilgrims though that some people who’ve been going to Mecca their whole lives have never kissed the black stone. I kissed it four times in 30 minutes. I’m there and they’re splitting the people like the Red Sea and bringing me right up to kiss it. They’re pushing these pious people to the side so that I can put my dirty-assed, diseased coke-licking mouth on it.
There’s no sport in the world that is more passionate than fighting, when it is done correctly. You want to fight your brother or your father because the guy you’re rooting for is you. He’s representing your whole barometer about how you feel and think. Mixed martial arts are more popular than boxing now because you see so much passion in the cage. Boxers don’t have that passion anymore. There’s no guy that really has the heart to say, “Not only do the gods deliver me and vex me, but one day I will reign with them.”
I’ve always had the profoundest veneration for great accomplishments. Money never meant anything to me but stories of great accomplishments always inspired me to rise to the highest occasions. Entertaining people doesn’t come easy for me as boxing did. I hate what acting makes me do but I love how it makes me feel. I would do almost anything to achieve the accomplishment of entertaining someone.
When I left the prison, I just started to cry. I didn’t think I’d do that but I felt like a weight had lifted off me. I realized that I had no problems with the city, I had issues with the prison. It was like I had been purified after seeing Slaven. It was incredible, I didn’t think at this stage of my life I would feel that kind of feeling.
When I look back on my life, it’s hard to believe how big an entity I was at the height of my fame. I was different than the rest of the big stars because I was flamboyant too. And I was just an immature child, really in over my head. I felt like I was part of a freak show for most of my career as a boxer. Later, I just felt like a freak. I’m truly grateful that I don’t have to live that way anymore. I’m reinventing myself, as they say.
All I wanted back then was to be glamorous and glorious. That’s why I fucked all my money away. I just wanted glory, glory, glory. Your whole objective is to win honor, but as time goes on in life, I realize that honor cannot be won, it can only be lost.
When you’ve never had anything, you tend to want to accumulate a lot when you can. But as you get older, you realize that life is not about accumulation, life is about loss. The older you get, the more loss you experience. We lose our hair, we lose our teeth, we lose our loved ones. Hopefully we learn to be strong from those losses and we can pass on our wisdom to the people we care about.
I’m so glad I’m not that guy anymore. Now I’m totally compassionate. And this is no religious rap. I don’t believe in confessing your sins to get into heaven. I don’t believe in an afterlife. This world is it. And it makes sense to do good in this world for your own moral existence. Doing good feels better than doing bad. Believe me, I should know. I’ve gotten away with doing a lot of bad things. There’s not satisfaction in that, only in doing good.
When you’re a young kid with a ton of money and girls, God is not really paramount in your life. As you get older, you realize that from a spiritual perspective your life has been a waste. You never did anything to help people collectively. I need to be of service rather than just going around doing meet and greets and collecting money. I feel dirty after my appearances.
I know there’s an empty hole in me and I spent a lot of years trying to fill it with drugs and booze and sex. I think it all goes back to our mortality. We know that all this is temporary. I’m going to grow old and die tomorrow or ten years from now or forty years if I’m lucky. But when you’re with your family, it makes you feel like you’ll last forever.
You get to this age and you just thank God for letting you live another day. He didn’t owe us that day.
I just don’t have a good psychological opinion of myself. I hate myself sometimes. I feel like I don’t deserve anything. Sometimes I just fantasize about blowing somebody’s brains out so I can go to prison for the rest of my life. Working on this book makes me think that my whole life has been a joke. I’m a dark and jaded motherfucker. I hate living like a peasant now. I don’t know if I’ll survive to the next day. I might just say “Fuck it” and jump and leave.
Whenever I’ve been in a relationship I’d always think, Bullshit, this can’t be real. This woman doesn’t love me. How can I be more special than any other people?
I was born in hell. And any time I came up in life it was one step out of hell. I think that part of the reason that I gave away so much of money was because I’m an ignorant child and I believe this was a way to cleanse my sins and buy my way back to heaven.
I’ve learned to bit my tongue because of my kids. A lot of times when I want to say things that are going to be nasty, I just bite it. It’s my turn to embrace these responsibilities. This stuff is not as stressful as fighting. I might blow it up, but it’s nowhere near as stressful.
I just didn’t have any love or security growing up. I look at my children and tease them and say they’re wimpy kids, but that’s what would have happened to me if I grew up with love. I’d have been just as wimpy.
How did I get out of that lowly, pathetic environment? How does a guy like me come out of Brownsville and become heavyweight champ? When you go back in history you see that the only thing I had in common with most of the champs was our poverty.
I always loved Barbra. When I was young, I read that her ego could have dwarfed Al Jolson’s. I was always attracted to people with big egos because Cus used to say that the reason that people were the best was because they thought about themselves with the grandest of visions. The sun would always set upon their eyes.
I have a favorite book that I try to read every day. It’s called The World’s Greatest Letters. I love connecting to the past this way. You learn so much about these people by reading their letters. What these people are writing is so poetic, the way they express themselves in language so breathtaking. And sometimes the person they’re writing to doesn’t give a shit about them.
I read these letters and I cry. You think about Napoleon, this great world leader, and you read a letter where he’s begging to his love Josephine to come to him and she doesn’t.
By what art have you become able to captivate all my faculties, to concentrate in my self my moral existence? It is a magic, my sweet love which will end only with me. To live for Josephine, that is the history of my life. I am trying to reach you, I am dying to be near you.
I don’t wanna fight you no more. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I just wanted to make amends. If he accepted it or not, at least I could die and go to my grave and say I made my amends with everybody I hurt.