Piecework

So it isn’t just gangsters or pigeons that are crowding Tyson’s mind. He has been poring over Niccolò Machiavelli. “He wrote about the world we live in. The way it really is, without all the bullshit. Not just in The Prince, but in The Art of War, Discourses. … He saw how important it was to find out what someone’s motivation was. ‘What do they want?’ he says. What do they want, man?”

And Voltaire. “I loved Candide. That was also about the world and how you start out one thing and end up another, ’cause the world don’t let you do the right thing most of the time. And Voltaire himself, he was something, man. He wasn’t afraid. They kept putting him in jail, and he kept writing the truth.”

He has recently read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. “I identify with that book,” he says. “With Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. He was unjustly imprisoned, too. And he gets educated in prison by this Italian priest.” He laughs out loud. “And he gets his revenge too. I understand that; I feel that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want revenge against any person. I don’t mean that. I mean against fate, bad luck, whatever you want to call it.”

He is familiar with the Hemingway myth that so exhilarated earlier generations of Americans: Hemingway the warrior, Hemingway the hard drinker, Hemingway the boxer. But he talks most passionately about Hemingway the writer. “He uses those short, hard words, just like hooks and uppercuts inside. You always know what he’s saying, ’cause he says it very clearly. But a guy like Francis Bacon, hey, the sentences just go on and on and on. …”

Obviously, Tyson is not reading literature for simple entertainment, as a diversion from the tedium of prison routine. He is making connections between books and writers, noting distinctions about style and ideas, measuring the content of books against his life as he knows it. But he is not taking a formal course in literature, so I asked him one night how he made the choices about what he reads.

“Sometimes it’s just the books that come to me. People send them and I read them. But sometimes, most of the time, I’m looking. For example, I’m reading this thing about Hemingway and he says he doesn’t ever want to fight ten rounds with Tolstoy. So I say, ‘Hey, I better check out this guy Tolstoy!’ I did, too. It was hard. I sat there with the dictionary beside me, looking up words. But I like him. I don’t like his writing that much because it’s so complicated, but I just like the guy’s way of thinking.”

Along with literature, Tyson has been reading biographies: Mao, Karl Marx, Genghis Khan, Hernán Cortés. In casual talk, he scatters references to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell. “When you read about these individuals, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, they contribute to us a different way of thinking. But no one can really label them good or bad. Who actually knows the definition of good or bad? Good and bad might have a different definition to me than it may have in Webster’s Dictionary, than it may have to you.”

He knows that for his life, the models in books might not always apply. But in all such books, he insists that he finds something of value.

“I was reading Maya Angelou,” he said one evening, “and she said something that equates with me so much. People always say how great a writer she is, and people used to say to me, ‘Mike, you’re great, you could beat anybody, you don’t even have to train.’ But you know how hard it is for me to do that? To win in ninety-one seconds? Do you know what it takes away from me? And Maya Angelou said about herself it takes so much from me to write, takes a lot out of me. In order for me to do that, she says, to perform at that level, it takes everything. It takes my personality. It takes my creativity as an individual. It takes away my social life. It takes away so much. And when she said that, I said, ‘Holy moley, this person understands me.’ They don’t understand why a person can go crazy, when you’re totally normal and you’re involved in a situation that takes all of your normal qualities away. It takes away all your sane qualities.”

In prison Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.

One of those roads is called Islam. Tyson was raised a Catholic by his mother, Lorna, and during the upheaval in that time before he went to jail, he was baptized as a favor to Don King in a much-photographed ceremony presided over by Jesse Jackson. But water, prayer, and photographs didn’t make him a born-again Christian. “That wasn’t real,” he says now. “As soon as I got baptized, I got one of the girls in the choir and went to a hotel room or my place or something.”