Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (72 page)

I can’t believe how my kids with Monica turned out. When I was younger I would have despised kids like them. They had it all, the nice house, the nice car, European trips since they were young. They had maids their whole life. The corners of the wall remind me of the beatings I got from my mother. My son doesn’t have that fear. I always thought kids should sacrifice to get things. That was my upbringing with Cus. You win this fight, I’ll give you this. If my son does something good or not, he’s still going to get it.

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. Hey, this is how I am now getting love late in my life. I’ve done things like biting Evander’s ear that have caused my kids to be teased. That’s just something they have to deal with. They surely haven’t been picked on and teased worse than I was. They haven’t been snatched off the street and beaten. They all go to private schools and, on paper, they have cool friends. My friends were pimps and killers, robbers and thieves.

I don’t have any parenting skills at all, not even to this day. I know my wife must think I’m a Neanderthal, but I’m doing my best. My older kids should be grateful that they didn’t have my father as their father. He wouldn’t be laid back waiting for a check every month. He’d tell the girls, “You don’t need anything from me. You’re sitting on your moneymaker.” I never told anybody to sell her pussy. They’d see how bad bad is if my father had got their mothers pregnant.

Speaking of kids, I’m taking care of that fifteen-year-old boy that’s still in me. I have the tools, I can do that now. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still traumatized, but he’s living a productive life now. It’s awesome. I could never do this when I had $300 million. I’m out here raising kids, being a respectable husband, not having to worry about giving my wife a venereal disease. I’ve never been in this space in my life before, and this is just going to be so awesome. I never thought I was the settling type, I thought I deserved the world, but I feel safe here. This is where I want to be. I get to nurture my children and grow deeper with my wife and it feels good in my soul. That’s why I’m here.

I could never go out at night again. That’s just not going to happen. I could never be me again because a lot of people would be unhappy. I believe I keep the peace by being at home a lot, because people would never think I’m somewhere doing something I shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes I think my wife would rather me go out sometimes. When you’re around too much you can become overbearing. I don’t care who you are. The real me probably wants to have some friends and shoot dice, have fun. I don’t do that anymore. Now fun is hanging out with my little girl and getting to know her and Rocco. And hopefully developing a better relationship with all my other kids. My oldest daughter Mikey is living with me now in Vegas. That’s been great. But I don’t have any man cave where me and my friends could go to smoke cigars and watch football.

Another reason I stay in the house is to avoid getting involved with people outside. Before I went out on my
Undisputed Truth
national tour I stayed in so I wouldn’t come into contact with strange people giving me bad vibes. I’d go outside for a minute or two and then come right back in. When I used to go out a lot it felt good but at the end of the day I was paying out of pocket to settle suits, apologizing to a bunch of people on television and maybe even doing time. So I don’t go that route anymore. I stay in the fucking house because I don’t want to get into an altercation. Can you believe that shit? But it’s necessary. Cus had programmed my mind to be a switch. I could be an emotional wreck and in the blink of an eye, boom, it changed. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable to go outside because I don’t know when that shit is going to click. I really don’t. When I’m outside on the street, I’m so scared of myself – how I might perceive a situation to be something it’s not. I have a lot more power over it than I did when I was younger. When I was younger I was programmed to attack all the time. That’s why I got into so many street brawls when I was champ. My ego got attacked. Cus was an ego guy too.

“This guy said what to you? What did you do about it?”

I was a little fucking kid and he was going, “What did you do about it?” That’s a part of me I always wanted to go away. I just never know what might trigger that shit, even an innocuous “Hey, guy” and then, boom, I was ferocious.

I have a pretty upside-down schedule now. I go to sleep at about six or seven, unless my wife gets me to watch a TV show with her, then it might be nine. I wake up at midnight or two a.m. Then I ride the stationary bike for an hour, do the Treadmaster, and then do squats. Today I did two hours with weights for my legs.

By then, Kiki is up. When I see her take both my babies and leave the house, I think they’re never coming back. That’s my biggest fear now. I’m in terror while she’s gone. It’s sad whenever my family isn’t here and I’m alone. I used to love being alone but that was before I had this family situation. I never even think about doing anything wrong now. I would never want to go to jail. My whole job in life now is just to take care of my family and try to help people less fortunate than us. I can’t believe I’m like this.

Because of the horrific things I’ve seen in my life, I get extra cautious. I’m always telling my wife to lock the doors, to keep her eyes on the place, to watch the workers. I tell her about my experiences where I was in a house talking to some friends and then I left and I heard that a few hours later everybody in the house got killed. So these ugly stories play in my head. My wife thinks I’m absolutely insane. They’ve never met anybody like me. If a stranger comes into the house, I think,
Who is this guy? Who brought him in here?
Then, after he leaves, I may ask her to get out the sage and cleanse the energy in the house. My borderline normal was to go into someone’s house and scope it out, then after I left, the thugs came in with the guns and screamed, “Everyone get down.” That was my borderline normal.

When Kiki and the kids are gone I have plenty of time to think. I think about what a weird childhood I had, depending on my mother most of the time. 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. Jack Dempsey was a fucking hobo. I tried to draw on that to make sense of my story but it didn’t click. How did I meet this guy Bobby Stewart who introduced me to Cus? How did Cus get me to think so gung ho? How did my mind just click and say, “Let’s do it?” Where did that thinking come from? Was it just from the way I would follow people when I was young? And then I morphed into this boxing mentality.

Cus was telling everyone that lightning had struck him twice and he was going to have another heavyweight champion. But I was only thirteen. I never had an amateur fight in my life when he first saw me.

So how did he know when he died that I was going to be that guy? He never saw me really being mean to anybody. He didn’t really see my confidence and arrogance grow in the ring. I wonder what he would have thought about who I became. He was a hard guy. He’d say stuff about other fighters like, “This guy is gutless. Leave him there to die.” Cus believed that in the ring you should die on your shield, you don’t quit. But now I realize that nothing is more important than life. There’s no trophy, no belt, no glory more important than life and the people you love. I used to be the first to want to die with honor in the ring. Not anymore. That’s a sucker’s game. And I was probably the biggest sucker that ever came into this game.

I just knew that I was the champion of the world before I even had that belt. That was who I was. I still had this other entity Mike Tyson who I really didn’t come to grips with. I didn’t know who the fuck that guy was. I was this super champion-type guy and I never found out who I was in there. You’d think I was one of America’s most wanted. Probation officers wanted detailed reports of where I was any time I went out. People were really afraid of me. I was such a little pussy kid but my image was so badass. That was pretty intoxicating. I always wanted to show people that I wasn’t afraid so I overcompensated. I thought I had to be tough and mean because Cus escalated that mentality. “Superior,” that was his favorite word. I was a superior fighter.

If Cus was around right now he’d say, “Mike, you should be fighting. Are you crazy?” But I don’t regret a minute of it. All of the great fighters, Ray Robinson, Peter Jackson, Joe Gans, Tony Canzoneri, ended up in the gutter or working in some goddamn hotel lobby sweeping up. They were so extreme in their passion for fighting that they never thought about exit plans. But whatever they went through afterwards, it was worth it to have that championship. Just to have one year of living Mike Tyson, the champ’s life, I would be a bum sucking rat piss in the gutter. Shit, yeah.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a total hermit. I do go out of the house and do things. When we were writing this book, Ratso, my collaborator, and I went to the fourth Pacquiao-Marquez fight. Going to the fight with me was one of the auction items at my first Mike Tyson Cares fund-raiser. Two really nice young Mexican gentlemen won the bid and they sat with Ratso and me. That was also the first public appearance since the election for Mitt Romney. Ratso and I couldn’t believe it when we saw him and his wife walk down to their ringside seats.

“Hey, Mitt, we’re the forty-seven percent!” I screamed at him. Being in a household with a liberal woman who watches MSNBC twenty-four-seven must have rubbed off on me.

“Mitt, you’re a little late courting the Mexican vote,” I yelled. The audience was predominately Mexican fans of Marquez. The fight itself was amazing. It was one of the nights that reminded people how great boxing can be.

A month earlier, Kiki, Ratso, and I went to see Barbra Streisand at the MGM Grand. 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 had met Barbra when she came to my dressing room after my fight with Larry Holmes. She was what I’d consider a superstar. She’s very soulful and I’m not saying this from a black or an ethnic perspective. She just makes you feel good in your soul with her singing. People get jealous and put down people like her because they can’t give off that kind of energy and love, they can’t woo people’s hearts like Barbra can. I was enraptured the whole show. Afterwards, we went back to her dressing room and took a picture with her and Marie Osmond. The next day I was still emotionally drained. It was so exciting to be around her and to have seen her sing. She’s meant so much to my mother and other people in my life. I’m just happy to be alive when she’s performing.

But even going to that concert was a bit of an ordeal. As we were walking to the show through the casino, I saw some of my old pimp and drug dealer friends. They see me with my wife, they know enough not to talk to me. They know I’m constantly battling demons. When I’m walking in a place like that I just walk straight through. The three of us went to another show while I was working on the book. Mike Epps was doing stand-up at the Palms. My wife was behind us and she didn’t see that when I came to the table a lady got up and tried to hug me.

“No, I can’t hug you,” I told her. Luckily some guy had gotten between us.

“See how I saved you just now,” the guy winked at me.

Kiki would have had a heart attack. That’s why I don’t like to go out that much. I have more fun chilling at home. It’s fun to be out if I’m in a controlled environment but most of the time people are all drunk and they can confront you. I’ve become more, I want to say protective, but it’s really possessive of my wife than when we were dating. I think I always have to protect her. but she’s very capable of handling men that hit on her. I forget how she handled me when I hit on her all those years before we finally connected. Kiki’s a very smart and sophisticated lady. She knows her way around. I may think of her as almost my child at times but in our relationship, I’m more her child than she is mine.

Whenever I go to see a great entertainer, I’m just so thrilled to be in the same fraternity as them. If I could live this way for the rest of my life and still be paying bills, I’d be happy with my destiny. Paying my bills, not getting caught, not getting thrown in jail, not getting in any drama. I don’t care if I don’t have anything to leave behind to the kids, just to live where nobody is hurting is enough. I never thought I’d be in such desperate, dire straits to survive. I’m a material nigga. Some bad habits die slow. I don’t want to be that way, I don’t want to care more about my clothes than I do about my health. When I die, I want to have the cheapest funeral of all time. Put me in the dirt, no casket or anything, just throw me in there. Don’t come visit me or none of that bullshit. But I’m sure some boxers in the future would search out my grave, like I did to the old-time guys. I’d be happy that people would treat me the same way I did with my heroes. Maybe I would have a tombstone. It could read, “Now I’m at peace.”

When I think about Kiki and me I’m still amazed. Our love blossomed during a time of real adversity. I am such a difficult person to live with. Cancers magnetize shit inwardly. It sounds cool to live with a person that’s so in tune with his sensitivity but there’s nothing actually cool about that. He’s so in tune with his sensitivity he may be delusional. I commend my wife for going through the duration of waiting for me to not be like that anymore. Going through the process of me changing my ill-thought-out ideas about women in general was almost like going through the Spanish Inquisition for her.

I have so much admiration for my wife. She makes me love myself when I want to blow my brains out. I respect her so much for how much she wants this stuff between us to work. If back then she would have said “Fuck it” and taken the baby somewhere else, I would have been so happy. I really have no idea what made me stay loyal to this girl. I don’t even know what gave me the strength to try to change my barometer of the past forty years. I never knew anything about commitment. I’ve been madly in love with girls before but I still always cheated on them and was disloyal emotionally and physically. Kiki made me strong enough to even attempt to go on that journey towards being a loyal man. It’s greatness in itself, even though you don’t accomplish that attempt, even though you fail. That’s how complex a situation this is. Imagine what you’d reach if you were that individual. That’s when you become a champion of moral accomplishments.