The Domino Diaries

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

Picador ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:

us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For Leidys and Amanda

 

I am Cuba.

My sugar was carried away in ships.

But my tears were left behind.

Sugar is a strange thing, Mr. Columbus.

So many tears go into it,

And still it's sweet.

—“Soy Cuba” (from the 1964 film
Soy Cuba
)

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

—Italo Calvino,
Invisible Cities

 

1

HOW DID THIS WHITE MOTHERFUCKER GET INSIDE MY HOUSE?

M
AYBE THE REAL SUBJECT
of every interview is how you really can't learn much about anyone from an interview.

Back at his gym in Los Angeles, the only instruction Freddie Roach, the world's most famous boxing trainer, gave after offering Mike Tyson's phone number was a warning: “
Don't
blindside him. It doesn't matter if
I
sent you. If you see Mike and you blindside him, he's capable of attacking you.”

“I'm not looking to blindside anyone here,” I lied.

“Be careful, son.”

And then a couple months later, on Easter Sunday of 2010, I entered the front door of Tyson's Vegas home into a thick cloud of marijuana smoke while he descended the stairs toward me with just one question:

“So how did this white motherfucker get inside my house?”

*   *   *

On June 27, 1988, a twenty-one-year-old Mike Tyson made in excess of twenty-one million dollars for ninety-one seconds of work. That's how much the world wanted him. To put that into perspective, it took him just over fourteen seconds to pull in more money than Michael Jordan, in his prime, made for an entire
season
of work that year. But maybe you never cared much about sports or athletes and prefer art instead. So you might accept Andy Warhol's dictum that you can measure the worth of an artwork by what you can
get
for it. At Tyson's pay rate that night, after another round or so (227 seconds, to be exact), the work of art he created in the ring would've earned as much as Vincent van Gogh's efforts on a canvas—
Irises
had become the most expensive work of art in the world just several months before Tyson's fight, selling for 53.9 million dollars.

For most people, Tyson's legacy was staked on two equally shocking extremes. On November 22, 1986, at the age of twenty, he had become the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. And only three years later, he was on the losing end of the biggest upset in sports history when he was beaten by Buster Douglas. At his peak, critics used to laugh and tell you Mike Tyson never had a style, he just fought everyone as if they
stole
something from him. “All things truly
wicked
,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “start from innocence.”

*   *   *

Long before I ever had a chance to blindside him, Mike Tyson had blindsided me.

Even though we'd never met, seeing a reprinted photo booth picture of Tyson as a little boy saved my life. Mike Tyson's identity as a destination didn't mean anything to me until I'd gone back and packed some of his luggage to understand the journey he made. But I guess “Kid Dynamite,” like most boxers, was like any other powder keg made out of commonly found household items.

Start off with where the center of his universe is located: Brownsville, Brooklyn, one of the bleakest dungeons of poverty and violence America could dish out. Install an abusive pimp for a father and have him abandon the alcoholic mother before Tyson's third birthday. Make sure the mother sleeps with everyone in the neighborhood so the household and its inhabitants gain a glowing reputation from well-wishers in the community. Contaminate his soul with a sense of how worthless a human life can be as people he recognizes overdose or get robbed or raped or murdered. Make him an even more attractive target with no friends or any hope of protection in the neighborhood. Don't let him walk in any direction without it feeling like a plank. Never allow him to turn a corner without fearing for his life. And when anything catches up with him, make him too timid and sensitive to ever fight back. Hang cowardice as another millstone around his neck. And after you've torn his heart out, why not fan the scent? Best of all, when he begs for help, make sure his voice is so high and delicate he'll be afraid to scream no matter how much he wants to. And if the pathetic little faggot everybody has always insisted he is ever caves, why not give him a lisp as well. As far as he knows, he'll be dead and forgotten before he blows out the candles for his thirteenth birthday.

But before you finish him off, give him one place to hide. Offer him a hideaway where he can take refuge from the world. Let him stumble onto the rooftops of those abandoned tenements of Brownsville and fall in love with the pigeons up there. Watch him spend every dime he can scrape together for feed so he can reward the pigeons from his coop for doing what he can't: fly away. Make the relief of this refuge something that marks him forever and leaves a trail that others can find and hunt down.

Soon, some rapacious, observant predator in the neighborhood can observe the change in Tyson and follow him up there. He can trespass undetected into Tyson's most private world and savor the pillage to come. Let him find Tyson fully exposed, feeding and caring for his birds, and allow him to at once grasp the whole story behind it, the whole pawnshop of broken dreams in Tyson's heart. Let him hatch a plan to finish off another boy's life that's better than just pulling a trigger or pushing him off the roof. That way, when Tyson returns the next day to the rooftop and discovers one of his pigeons being choked inside the fist of this sadistic fuck he'll beg him not to hurt it. Tyson can helplessly watch as the bully takes his time soaking up Tyson's entreaties and savoring the spectacle of a shattered human being unraveling before twisting off the head of the pigeon and laughing at the heartbreakingly predictable outcome.

But instead, for the first time in his life, Tyson stood up for himself and summoned everything that once made him weak to unleash the first bars of his own Ninth Symphony with his fists. “Fighting to me is what theory was to Einstein,” Tyson later explained, “or words were to Hemingway or notes were to Beethoven.”

I used to wonder how long after that moment, when the world first heard that melody, it took Tyson to realize what
real
problems were in store for him. I used to wonder how long it took Tyson to get a whiff of
us
, and how, as Norman Mailer once said of George Foreman, a previously nightmarish boxer America had a fetish for, “Anyone is supposed to prepare to defend himself against the thoughts of everyone alive.”

At a certain point Mike Tyson and I reacted to violence a little differently. After my first fight, I was afraid to leave my house for three years, while Tyson became the heavyweight champion of the world. But, at first, our cowardice and trauma defined us both.

In the summer before tenth grade, back in 1994, I wrote a letter to inmate 922335, inside the Indiana Youth Center in Plainfield, Indiana. I'd never mailed a letter to anyone before. Up to that point the only letter I'd ever written had been a suicide note.

The week before, totally by accident, my mother had seen an interview with Tyson broadcast from prison, and at the end of it she was crying. I only caught the last few minutes. My mother was terrified of Mike Tyson for the same reasons everybody was terrified of Mike Tyson—yet, by the end of the interview, she loved him. I could see in her face the battle raging between her head and her heart. All I'd heard him talk about in the interview was reading books in the hole and how badly he'd been bullied in childhood. She filled me in on the rest.

I was writing a convicted rapist a thank-you letter. It's true that I didn't know whether or not Mike Tyson was guilty of raping an eighteen-year-old beauty contestant in Indiana, a crime for which he'd been convicted. But I did know without a doubt that he was responsible for sending me two places I'd never been on my own before: a boxing gym and a library. And, more important, I knew as clearly then as I do now, those places saved me.

And, later on, those places led me to Cuba, a place infamous around the world for resisting the most powerful nation on earth: the United States.

Mike Tyson had visited the island in 2002 while I was there training as an amateur boxer. Ostensibly that was why Freddie Roach had agreed to give me Tyson's phone number in the first place. At that time, Roach was training Guillermo Rigondeaux, the most notorious Cuban boxing defector in history. For Cuban boxers, America and Cuba had been distilled to the choice of fighting for Don King or Fidel Castro. Rigondeaux had already filled me in on what it was like fighting for Fidel; I wanted to hear Tyson shed some light on King.