One night Barkim went to pick his girl up and the three of us were walking through one of the Brownsville projects and we saw a couple of my old friends playing dice. Barkim was friends with them too, but he didn’t stop to talk to them, he just kept walking. I went over to say hello to them and they said, “What’s up, Mike?” but they were acting leery. “We’ll talk to you later,” they said. I could feel the vibe that something real bad happened, somebody died or somebody got a lot of shit taken from them.
I later found out that there had been some power struggles going on in the neighborhood and when the smoke had cleared, Barkim was on top. He had all of the cars and the girls and the jewelry and the guns, ’cause he had the neighborhood drug enterprise. The whole street scene had changed since I had lived there. Drugs had come in and people were dying. Guys we used to hang out with were killing one another for turf and money.
Then one day my sister came home. I was hungover, but I heard her key in the door, so I opened it and as soon as it swung open, POW, she punched me right in the face.
“Why did you do that?” I said.
“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. My sister was the strongest one in my family. She was good at dealing with tragedy. I couldn’t even go down with my sister and witness the body. My cousin Eric went with her.
My mom’s funeral was pathetic. She had saved up some money for a plot in Linden, New Jersey. There were only eight of us there – me, my brother and sister, my father Jimmy, her boyfriend Eddie, and three of my mother’s friends. I wore a suit that I had bought with some of the money that I had stolen. She only had a thin cardboard casket and there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Before we left the grave, I said, “Mom, I promise I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be the best fighter ever and everybody is going to know my name. When they think of Tyson, they’re not going to think of Tyson Foods or Cicely Tyson, they’re going to think of Mike Tyson.” I said this to her because this was what Cus had been telling me about the Tyson name. Up until then, our family’s only claim to fame was that we shared the same last name as Cicely. My mom loved Cicely Tyson.
After the funeral, I stayed in Brownsville for a few weeks, getting high. One night I saw my friends who had been playing dice a few nights before. They told me that Barkim had been killed.
“Yeah, they got your man,” one of them told me. “I thought they got you too, because last time I saw you, you were walking away from the dice game with him and I haven’t seen you since.”
Barkim’s death had a big impact on me. This was the guy who had first gotten me into robbing, making me his street son. And he had just told me to get out of here and go back with my white family. And it wasn’t just him. All my friends in the neighborhood had big hopes for me and Cus. Cus was going to take me places.
“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.
One day there was a knock on my door and it was Mrs. Coleman, my social worker. She had come to take my black ass back upstate because I got caught up robbing and stealing. I was supposed to return to Cus’s house three days after my mother’s funeral. Mrs. Coleman was a nice lady who drove over two hours from Catskill to get me. She was very supportive of Cus and thought that boxing was a positive direction for me. I was still out of it, so I told her that I wasn’t going back to Catskill. She informed me that if I wanted to stay in Brooklyn, then she’d have to do some paperwork and the police would pick me up and she’d place me somewhere in New York. I was sixteen by then, so I knew what she was saying was bullshit. Legally, I didn’t have to answer to anybody. 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 about how I was going to live my life. It might be short, but I was going to make sure it would be glorious.
When I got back to Catskill, Cus really helped get me over my mother’s death. He talked to me about the day his father died. Cus was in the house with him and his father was screaming. He couldn’t help him because he didn’t know what to do. Cus helped me get strong again. During this time there was a white South African boxer named Charlie Weir who was a top contender for the junior middleweight title. He and his team came to Catskill to train with Cus. This was during the apartheid era and Cus told them, “We have a black boy here. He’s part of our family. You have to treat him with respect. The same way you treat me and Camille, this is how you treat him.”
That was awesome. Nobody ever fought for me like that. Charlie and his team were paying to train with Cus and usually when you pay to train at a fight camp, you run the show. But Cus set them straight. And Cus talked like that at home too.
“Listen, we’re your family now, okay?” he told me. “And you’re our boy now. And you’re going to bring a lot of pride to this family. Pride and glory.”
The three of us would be sitting at the dining room table and Cus would say, “Look at your black son, Camille. What do you think about that?”
Camille would get up and come over to me and kiss me.
But our little idyllic scene got disrupted a month later. I fucked up. Cus was having trouble with my trainer Teddy Atlas. They were fighting over money. Teddy had recently married into a family that Cus was really dubious about, so when Teddy needed money, Cus wouldn’t give him much. Teddy was struggling, so he wanted me to turn pro so he could collect his share of my purses, but turning pro at that time wasn’t in Cus’s plan. So it was common knowledge that Teddy was going to leave Cus and that he would try to take me with him. There was no way in the world I would leave Cus.
But then I did something that made Cus get rid of Teddy. I had known Teddy’s sisters-in-law before Teddy even did. We had all gone to school together and were friends. The girls would always be flirtatious with me, but I never had a sexual thing with them. I was hanging out with his twelve-year-old sister-in-law one day and I grabbed her butt. I really didn’t mean to do anything evil. I was just playing around and I grabbed her butt and I shouldn’t have. It was just a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think it through. I had no social skills with girls because Cus kept me in the gym all the time. As soon as I did it, I immediately regretted it. She didn’t say anything to me but I knew it must have made her uncomfortable.
Later that evening my sparring partner drove me to the gym to work out with Teddy. I got out of the car and Teddy was waiting for me outside. He looked angry.
“Mike, come here. I want to talk to you,” he said.
I went over to him and he pulled out a gun and held it to my head.
“Motherfucker, don’t you ever touch my sister-in-law …”
He
