Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (35 page)

“No, sir, I don’t know anything about any of that. I never wrote that girl,” I said. The prison was very concerned that they might get sued since I was a ward of the state. But they did some more investigation and caught Red and shipped him out.

By now you’re probably wondering what a young, virile man like me was doing for sex in jail? Well, I was getting some in jail thanks to this little white inmate. I would see this guy get a visit from this girl who came in all pregnant. I was thinking she had somebody else’s baby and was coming in to break the news to him, but it wasn’t like that. They were kissing and he was tonguing her. The administration went crazy and confronted him.

“You don’t care that your wife is having someone else’s baby?” they said.

“Hey, this is my personal business. Why are you up in my business?” he answered.

So I asked him what the real deal was.

“They’re my babies, Mike. I’ve had two of them since I was in here. This is how you do it. You get your lady to come in wearing crotchless underwear and one of those loose summer dresses with the buttons down the front. But you have her wear it backwards so the buttons are in the back. Then you request an outside visit and you go to the yard where they have the picnic tables set up. And she sits on your lap facing away from you and you just give it to her right there. There’s no cameras out there, you just have to watch out for the one guard who’s monitoring the inmates.”

That guy never should have told me that shit. I thought,
Why do I have to stop my sexual activities?
Why do I have to stop having sex?
That was my mind-set. I’d go through my fan mail and pick out the girls who I liked the most. I’d write them back, “Hey, would you be interested in visiting me? I’ll send you a ticket.” I’d give them all the instructions about the loose dress and the crotchless underwear. They were probably thinking that we were going to do the cheap-feel shit.

So when the first girl came, I was already sitting in the outside yard. I couldn’t go up and greet her because I was sitting there thinking nasty stuff so that I’d be ready for her. She came over and kissed me and I turned her around and, boom!

She could have had AIDS or anything. I was just reckless. I just flopped her on top of me without a condom on.

Lord, I didn’t even know this girl and we were doing it in broad daylight.

After a while, I had it down to a science. As soon as the girl got on my lap, I’d hold her hand and start stroking so that they couldn’t even see that she was moving. Because if you’re doing it too hard she’s up in the fucking air like she’s on a trampoline and that wasn’t going to work.

It was going great until I got stupid. One day I couldn’t control myself and I was just laying it down and going for it. What happened was that the guard had left his post and he had circled around and snuck up on me from behind and saw what was going on. Somebody probably ratted me out because the guards never left their position in the window. I got sucker-punched.

Around this same time, one of the girls who had visited me from Atlanta came out with an article in
Star
magazine. She claimed that I had got her pregnant in jail and they showed this picture of her with a big belly. Thank God it was just a fake belly that they rigged up so she could sell the story to the rag. I was really relieved, but that was the end of my little sexual escapades. They canceled all outside visits for the whole prison. Everybody was so pissed off at me. They even called it the Tyson Rule.

By now Earl was getting ready to get out. Before he left, he sat me down.

“When I leave, I want you to go with Wayno. He’s the only good guy here. Be careful of all those other guys, Mike. You’re an inmate, but those guys are convicts. They’re gonna do this until the day they die. Just stay with Wayno, he’s not going to run you up into some bullshit.”

I knew Wayno by then, but I wasn’t close to him. We became close as soon as he moved into the cell with me. In fact, we became so close that he’s still working with me to this day. Wayno practically ran that prison. He was in for dealing coke, but he had an IT background, so he worked processing the Inmate Tracking System. He was the president of our dorm, the assistant coach of the varsity basketball team, and a leading member of the Islamic community in there. Plus, he was from Indianapolis, so he had gone to school with a lot of the guards. Shit, he had probably sold them coke.

I was supposed to be working in the rec department. I guess they gave me that job so that I could be in the gym and train out. But most of the time I was on the phone. I was a real phone hog. As soon as the count was cleared after breakfast and everyone was accounted for I’d get on the phone. Each dorm had its own phone and it was on a first-come, first-served basis with a sign-in sheet. I’d have someone sign up and then trade them a couple of packs of cigarettes for their slot.

I would always say that I had legal shit to handle and that I was on with my lawyers, but most of the time I was talking to my friends and girls.

“Tyson, you’ve been on the phone for an hour,” another inmate would say.

“This is fucking legal business, okay? Go talk to the warden,” I’d answer.

I was treating that phone like it was an umbilical cord to the outside. But that was a big lesson I learned in prison. Wayno explained to me that sometimes when you’re trying to keep connections out there, it could only make your time in prison harder. I learned that you had to check all your cars and your money, your boxing gloves, your belts, your women, your rings, your cell phone, all that shit, just check it at the gate. They didn’t exist anymore until you got back out. But I was such a spoiled brat, I didn’t want to follow the rules, because I thought that I could change them even though they had been etched in stone. It didn’t work that way.

I had my close party friends all over the country who would talk to me at any time. One of them even had a dedicated phone line for me. He’d go out to parties and take his cell phone and I’d call him and he’d put some girls on the line.

When I wasn’t on the phone, I was in my room reading. The judge really wanted me to get my GED, so I started to study for that with Muhammad Siddeeq, who had become my spiritual advisor. I didn’t have any desire to do math or shit like that, so I started studying Chinese with a teacher that Siddeeq brought in. I learned enough Chinese so that when I went to China years later, I could actually carry on a conversation.

I was totally into reading though. There’s nothing that’ll pass time more than reading a whole book. Wayno and I would read to each other in our room every night. One guy would have the book and the other would have a thesaurus or a dictionary so that when we came across a word we didn’t know, we could look it up. We’d even use the words in sentences so we really got them down.

I really enjoyed Will Durant’s
The Story of Civilization
. I read Mao’s book, I read Che. I read Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Shakespeare, you name it. I read Hemingway, but he was too much of a downer. I gravitated to reading rebellious, revolutionary books. My favorite was Alexandre Dumas’s
The Count of Monte Cristo
. I really identified with the main character Edmond Dantes. He had been sent to jail too. But he didn’t just sit there and brood; he prepared for his eventual success. Whenever I felt lost in prison, I’d read some Dumas.

I was angry at society to begin with, and I began to see myself as a martyr. I always used to say that a tyrant dies when his reign ends, but when a martyr dies his reign begins. So when I read Mao and Che I became even more anti-establishment. I dug Mao so much that I had his face tattooed on my body. Arthur Ashe too. I really liked his autobiography, I had no idea he was so sound and adept.

I was right there next to Mao on the long fucking march. My objective became to manipulate the system every way I could. I’d look for the weakest, newest guard or just a guard who was impressed with who I am.

Once Wayno and I started to room together, we were unstoppable. Wayno had a store in his room. He would barter commissary items to the other inmates at a rate of two to one. If you wanted a bag of chips but didn’t have money in your commissary, you’d go to Wayno. He’d give you a bag and mark your name down and then you’d pay him back with two bags. So before I moved in with him, I told him, “Brother, if there’s anything in here now you need, take it. Take some soup.”

“Mike, I don’t need any of that, because if you give me anything, I’m just going to flip it and make some money for it, that’s all,” he said. So I gave him a bunch of stuff and by the time I moved in with him, our store was so big that he had to keep our merchandise in a few other people’s rooms.

We’d sell the usual commissary items – cookies, cigarettes, chips – but I decided to use my celebrity to our advantage. Maya Angelou had just visited me and we took a picture together. One night I was hungry and this other guy had some doughnuts that I really wanted.

“Hey, brother, I have the Queen of Intellect of our people here, Maya Angelou. Look at that picture. That’s worth at least fifty bucks,” I said.

That guy was crying he was so touched by that photo. He went and put ten bucks in my commissary each time, and little by little he paid that $50 off. I did that a number of times whenever someone famous came to visit me.

Some of the female fans who wrote to me would send me dirty pictures of themselves, so I sold the pictures and the letters separately. Either someone wanted some jerk-off material or they wanted a relationship. Sometimes I’d give them the picture and the letter together. Depending on the girl’s picture, I’d figure out what demographic would be attracted to that particular girl. If I had a picture from a Midwestern woodsy type of girl, I’d go to one of the redneck guys and say, “Check her out.” It’s funny, but some of those guys wrote those women and ended up getting married to them.

Then we progressed from nasty pictures to phone sex. When it was seven a.m. in Indianapolis, it was four a.m. in L.A. The clubs were just getting out and I’d call my friend collect. He’d have a few girls up at his pad ready for action.

“Let the games begin!” he’d say after accepting the collect call. We’d charge guys for listening to him and the girls having sex. Sometimes I’d find out the guy’s name and then tell the girl to tailor her conversation to him.

“Oh, John, you turn me on. I’m getting so wet now,” she’d say. John paid through the nose for that shit.

I was even getting my friends on the outside laid. I had a friend in Chicago who owned the hot club in town, and I’d send girls who wrote me from Chicago to his club so he could check them out, see if they were good stuff. That was an investment in my future. If they were nice, I’d see them when I got out.

Wayno and I were wheeling and dealing like crazy. We expanded our store to something like seven or eight rooms. Wayno kept the records and if someone was reluctant to pay us back, I was the enforcer.

“Motherfucker, give me my money, man.” I’d pay them a little visit. Needless to say, even if they had to borrow from someone else, we got paid.

We were living like kings. Wayno had all these connections to the Aryan guys who worked in the kitchen and to some of the corrupt guards who’d smuggle shit in for the inmates, so you’d never find me in the chow hall unless they were serving ice cream.

Most nights we’d just chill in our room and the guards would deliver whatever food we ordered – pizza, Chinese food, Kentucky Fried, White Castle, whatever. Sometimes we even ate lobster and barbecue. I think that Wayno had shrimp fried rice for the first time while he was in prison. He would read aloud some book about Cleopatra and we’d have discussions like we were in a college dorm while we ate. When we wanted an authentic home-cooked meal, I’d just tell Siddeeq to have his wife cook us some delicious red salmon steaks and salad.

I did want a bigger room. Wayno and I visited our friend Derrick and he was in a corner room, which was much bigger than the regular rooms. I needed more space. Shit, my mail alone almost ran us out.

“Wayno, I can’t take this shit, we need a bigger room,” I said. “Get us an appointment.”

He arranged for us to meet with Mr. Turner, who was our dorm counselor and worked under Mr. Dalton, who was in charge of all the dorms. We sat down and Wayno started making the case for us having a larger room. He was good at that because he used to represent other inmates when they had their hearings with the administration. So he was talking diplomatically and most articulately to Turner about our “legitimate needs” and if the administration could “consider our respectful request.” But I was getting frustrated with all the red tape.

“Mr. Turner, sir, do you think when you and Mr. Dalton are out there hunting deer and burning crosses over the weekend you could think about me and my brother here moving up to a bigger room?”

Turner turned whiter than he already was.

“Yes, Mr. Tyson, we’ll look into that right away.”

Needless to say, we didn’t get the larger room.

We had a guy on the payroll. He was a guard, but he was smuggling us in food and my favorite wave hair grease. I knew that greed reached into the core of human beings. I knew that you could always give people some money to do shit for you. You can buy people pretty cheap. The last part I didn’t fully understand. I was always overpaying.

One day I said, “Yo, can you get me any bitches?” He didn’t flinch. He stood there, like, “How many you want to get?”

“Listen, it don’t even have to be all that deep, right? Can I fuck that fucking guard right there? Do you think she’s down? I’ll give her a thousand bucks.”

Now he was thinking about his kickback.

“Mike, are you serious? Because I will talk to this bitch right now. I know this bitch from the clubs, Mike. This bitch will fuck you.”

This is a guard talking. I thought he’d say something like “Don’t worry about it. I’ll try to drop it by her later,” but he was all gung ho, so I got a little nervous that I was going to get in trouble.

“Brother, brother, you’re conducting yourself like a savage,” Wayno told me. “Go in the room and wash your face, brother. Conduct yourself like a businessman.”