Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (36 page)

So I dropped the idea.

They just kept trying to break your spirit in that place. If they saw you having a friend who was helping you do your time, they would take him away and ship him out. They did that to Wayno in the middle of the night. They sent him to Wabash, a brand-new level-four facility with a super max. Wayno was frantically writing down the phone numbers for his sister and his friends so I could call them and let them know where they had taken him.

That really made me hate Warden Trigg. I had to figure out a way to get back at him. He was pretty well disliked there. Every time he would walk the yard the inmates would yell, “You fucking George Jefferson-looking nigga. You’re just an Uncle Tom.” I remembered that he really liked this girlfriend of mine who would visit. She was a beautiful mulatto girl and he would let her come in even if she wasn’t on the approved list. Trigg had a house on the grounds, so I told her, “Go over to his house and chill with him. Let him have a feel and then we can say that he molested you.” I was real dark and bitter, but my mood changed and we never implemented that plan.

I was getting along well by then with my fellow inmates. I was feeling that I was a big motherfucker in prison, maybe even bigger than I was out in the world. My ego was that crazed. But everybody did know that I was a good guy at heart, as far as prison standards went. Whether you were white, black, whatever, if you needed something and Mike had it, you got it. It wasn’t about owing me anything.

By the time Wayno left, I was a straight-A prisoner. I never drank the whole time I was in and I didn’t smoke any pot. Nobody would have sold me any even if I wanted some. Everyone just wanted me to get into shape so I could come out strong and start fighting again.

But I couldn’t give up my sex, so I started getting it from the inside. It started when they made me go into the drug counseling program, because if you passed the test, you’d get time taken off your sentence, so everyone from the superintendent to Don to the inmates was encouraging me to take the class. Even the drug counselor approached me and said, “I can help you get six months taken off your time.” I didn’t want to because I wasn’t fucking with no drugs then, but it could get me time off, so I went to the class that was taught by this nice lady. She was a little big, but beggars can’t be choosers. I was in class for a few days when she came over to check on my work. I don’t know what came over me, but I started whispering in her ear.

“How are you doing?”

I so desperately wanted to get her. But she turned around on me and started talking street.

“Boy, anybody else say this to me, I’d have them shipped right out of here to Pendleton. You come in here and sexually harass me? Murderers wouldn’t even come to me with that bullshit.”

“Well, I am not one of those people,” I said. “I am just a man seeing somebody that needs some help, like myself. We are both in a situation where we need help. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, but I just saw you come in the other day with your son. I know you guys aren’t doing so well, so if I can help you please just let me know. I’m sorry.”

“Motherfucker, I should write your ass up.”

“Really, I’m for real.”

Then she told me some shit about her roof caving in during the last storm and I was thinking,
Yes!

“So you’ve got a caved-in roof and you’ve got the baby in there? Wild dogs could come in there and bite him. Anything could happen to you. You can’t defend yourself, you’re a single mother.”

“Yeah, and you’re going to send somebody to fix it?” she said. “How are you gonna do this shit?”

“Just give me your address and there will be a package there tomorrow,” I promised. I ran right to the phone and called a friend in Chicago and told him to get her ten grand by the morning.

The next day she came in wearing a pretty dress and nice makeup and a big smile. I thought,
OHHHHH shit!!!

“How are you doing today, Mr. Tyson?”

I guess she got the package. I got so nervous. I didn’t know what we were going to do. We were in the room by ourselves.

“You just go over to your usual desk over in the corner. Nobody can see it from the window. I am going to bend over to correct your work and you just stand behind me, all right?”

“Cool, cool,” I said.

I was so nervous, I couldn’t get hard. I was worried that it might be a setup. While we were trying to do it, I was looking around to see if there was a hidden camera somewhere. I was scared that any minute they were going to kick in the door and say that this was a rape.

So I tried to put that out of my mind, but I couldn’t get hard. I was thinking of nasty things, I was touching her, I was licking on her, but it wasn’t working. I even tried to stuff it in, but no luck.

“This is just not going to work. Let’s just try this some other time.”

I went back to my dorm and she called me back later that day and it worked out that time. Once we started we couldn’t get enough. She kept calling me back to the room.

“Tyson to the school,” I’d hear on the loudspeaker.

She’d be calling me back three times a day. She called me when I was doing my roadwork. I had to tell her, “No, you can’t call me when I’m running, baby. It’s the only time I’ve got to run.” If anyone asked why I was putting so much time into the class, she’d just say, “He needs to finish his preparation for his test.”

She was a heavy girl too. I had to pick her up and put her against the wall. Thank God I had been lifting weights. After a while, we did it on the desk, we did it on the floor. I was having so much sex that I was too tired to even go to the gym and work out. I’d just stay in my cell all day.

By then, Wayno had been transferred back and we were together again.

“How come you’re not working out, brother? You’re normally out here running ten miles a day,” he asked me.

“I’m hitting the drug counselor. I got me a girlfriend in here,” I said.

“You’ve got to stop this shit, Mike,” he said. “You’ll get into trouble. You’ve got to train.”

It turned out that Wayno knew this woman from the outside. She was a little upset at first that I told Wayno about us, but soon he was standing outside the classroom door as a lookout.

Then one day I found out that she was pregnant. I called my friend from Chicago and he came down and took her to the abortion clinic. He was so pissed off.

“Pussy is pussy when you’re in jail, but I’m the one who’s got everybody staring at me when I’m walking into the clinic with this big chick,” he complained to me.

After a couple of years, I really got used to being in prison. If I had a bad day because I saw something on television I didn’t like or if I had received a bad phone call and I didn’t want to talk to anybody, I’d tell Wayno to tell the administration that I wanted to check myself into the hole for a few days. Wayno would pack up my stuff – my glasses, a couple of books – and I would go and chill out in segregation detention. I even had a guard smuggle me in a Walkman. They didn’t allow inmates to possess Walkmans because the crazy-assed inmates would turn their Walkmans into walkie-talkies and spy on the whole fucking prison administration. But once you were in the hole, they didn’t check your cell, so I’d get my Walkman and listen to Tevin Campbell. His was the only cassette tape I had. I’d be running in place and doing my sit-ups butt-ass naked. I would run in place so much that when I left prison my imprints were in the cement. I broke that floor down.

I even got ahold of a cell phone down there. I’d be calling up friends at two in the morning and they’d freak out when the call didn’t come up collect. They had great reception down there too.

You really know who your friends are when you face adversity. So many people ran from me like the plague after my rape conviction. I was blessed to have so many good people in my life who supported me through thick and thin. My spirits would be boosted by everything I’d get and by visits from people who meant something to me.

My mom Camille came to visit me three times. I never wanted her to see me in there but I couldn’t keep her away. It was a tough trip for her; she was in her eighties, but she did it. Jay would come with her and we’d talk about comic book heroes. I’d be worked up after reading one of the comic books that Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics, had sent me. He also had a drawing done of me posing with some of his Marvel Comics superheroes like I was one of them. One time, Jay and I got into a debate about which cartoon character was the toughest. He picked Galactus and I had my man Apocalypse. We went round and round on that topic until Jay said, “Mike, Galactus eats planets. How can you beat that?”

My little daughter Mikey, my firstborn child, came to visit me a few times with her mom. She was only three years old then, but to this day she remembers those plane rides from New York to Indiana and posing for pictures with me in front of the brick walls.

Don King showed up a few times. Every time he came, he had a contract for me to sign, which was totally illegal, but he didn’t care. I was happy he came because I knew it was about making money. Rory and John Horne would come with him, but they’d visit me more often too. They put in some time.

I was also thrilled to get a visit from Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. That tripped me out. I was so surprised and intimidated that she came to see me, I was on my best behavior. I didn’t want to say anything crude. She was an awesome lady.

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, stopped in to see me. Brother Siddeeq brought him in. He was wearing a purple suit, purple shoes, and a red tie with his hair all processed. He was telling me how he was going to whip Jackie Wilson’s ass because Jackie tried to mess with James by running his fingers through his hair.

“I’m no boxer, I’m from Georgia,” he said. “People were scared of Jackie. I wasn’t. Feel this.”

He showed me his bicep.

“Hard as a rock.”

I asked James about Otis Redding, who was a good friend of his. James said that his plane was better than Otis’s plane, which had been overloaded and crashed, killing Otis. It was awesome to hear James boast like that. He had the ego of a fighter.

He went on and on about his various enterprises like the radio stations he owned. He pitched me on letting him manage me, so I told him to stay in touch with Siddeeq. He sent Siddeeq a letter shortly afterwards. He would manage me and he’d take 70 percent and I would get 30 percent. And I thought Don King was bad.

I’ll never forget the time that Tupac came to visit me in prison. Of all my celebrity friends, I’ve gotten more questions about Tupac than anybody else. All over the world when people see me, even before they ask me about boxing, they invariably go, “What was Tupac like?”

Tupac was everything. He was fucking Huey Newton, he was Mao Zedong, he was Karl Marx, he was just everything. I can quote Marx and Hegel, but Tupac was really prolific talking revolutionary theory. When you talked to him and got to know him, he was much more of a didactic cat than a thug. He had a fascinating mind.

I met him in 1990 at an industry party at a club on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. The promoter of the party was my friend and we were standing around outside shooting the shit. Everybody was dressed natty for this event and I saw a small black street kid lingering near the door.

“What’s up, Shorty? How are you doing?” I said to the kid. He reminded me of myself when I was a young kid on the streets, hanging out in front of clubs that I couldn’t get in.

“Nah. What’s up?” he replied.

I could see he wanted to go to the party, so I told my friend to let him in. But the little kid said, “One second,” and ran off and came back with fifty guys, one of whom was Tupac.

“Whoa,” my friend said. We walked all those kids around to the back door and let them in. I stayed outside talking for a while, but when I went back inside, I saw Tupac onstage with a mic rocking the party. I couldn’t believe it. He came offstage and we hugged and laughed together. When he smiled his beautiful smile, he lit up the whole goddamned club. I could see that this kid was someone special.

Fast-forward to prison. I got a letter from Tupac’s mom. I knew who he was, he was exploding overnight, but I didn’t realize that he had been the kid rocking that club back in 1990. His mother said in the letter that Tupac was going to be in Indianapolis for a show and wanted to come see me. As soon as he walked into the visiting room, it was bedlam. He maybe weighed 130 pounds, had on these clothes that were bigger than he was. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Martians, everybody started going crazy. Even the guards were cheering. I had no idea he was that famous. When I saw him, I realized he was one of the kids I let into that party in L.A. years earlier.

We went out to the picnic tables in the yard.

“We need to throw a concert right here for you,” he said and jumped up on the picnic table. “My nigga, I love you,” he screamed at me.

I was sitting at the table, begging him, “Get down, please. Please come down. They’ll lock you up with me. Please stop.”

He was bent on doing an impromptu concert, but I was getting nervous. Everything was peaceful and then all of a sudden Tupac was up on the table, and everyone was cheering.
Oh shit, this little motherfucker is going to get me in trouble,
I thought.

“Mike, don’t let them get you, brother, don’t let them get you, man.”

I finally got him down off the table. I started busting his chops. I had just become a Muslim and I was playing Mr. Righteous Guy.

“Listen, man, you need to stop eating that pork,” I said.

“How do you know I eat pork?” he said.

I was teasing him but he took it serious.

He calmed down and we started talking. He told me that he never forgot our first meeting.

“Nobody never done that – let a bunch of street niggas into a nice club like that. You kept it real,” he said.

“No, no, that’s crazy, nigga,” I said. “We’ve all got to enjoy this world. It’s nothing man, we’re just the same.”

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. For Tupac, being born in prison, seeing his mother’s friends killed or sent to prison forever, that just put him in a state of nonism where he felt no one was listening to him or cared. So he went on autopilot and did the best that he could. Tupac was really a freedom fighter.