Piecework

He wants to make money; nobody knows how much Tyson has left, not even Tyson, but his return to boxing could be the most lucrative campaign in the history of sport. “I want to have money for a family,” he says. “In the end, that’s how you can decide what kind of man I was. Not by how many guys I knocked out. But by the way I took care of my kids, how I made sure they went to college, that they had good lives and never wanted for nothing. And what I taught them. About the world. About character.”

Tyson would even like to try college himself. “I’d like to go to a black college that’s not well-known,” he says, “to study and learn. But also to have some kind of exhibitions, too, fights to benefit the college. 1 don’t have to fight benefits for a church or a mosque. But the black colleges, that I want to do. …”

In the end, of course, all education is self-education, and Tyson is clearly deep into the process. The faculty of Tyson’s university includes Cus D’Amato and Alexandre Dumas, Machiavelli and the prophet Muhammad, Dutch Schultz and Ernest Hemingway, and dozens of others. Part of the curriculum includes what some academics call life experience. There are millions of college graduates who don’t know what Tyson knows. About writers and thinkers. About life itself.

“A lot of people get the misconception that by being free that you’re free” he says. “That’s not necessarily true. There’s people on the outside who are more in prison than I’ll ever be in here.” He chuckles. “You know, it’s human to fall. But it’s a crime to stay down and not get up after you fall. You must get up.”

In the visitor’s lounge at the Indiana Youth Center, he smiles when a woman offers to buy him a soda. “Sorry, thank you, but I don’t drink soda.” He looks at his hands. Twenty-two months earlier, he’d come to this elaborate cage like a man knocked down. When he started school, he got to one knee. Now he’s standing up.

“I know this,” he says. “When I get out, I’m gonna be in charge of my own life. I used to leave it to others. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m the boss.’ But then I’d leave it to people, to Cus, to Don King, whatever. But that’s what you do when you’re a kid. You can’t do that when you’re a man.”

I utter some banality about the dangers that might still confront him on the outside, how powerful the pull of the ghetto spirit might be when the bad guys from the neighborhood come calling on him again.

“Well, that’s no problem anymore,” he says and laughs. “They’re all dead.”

He turns and glances at the picture window. Fat white snowflakes are now falling from the steel-colored sky, out there in the world of highways, car washes, diners, and motels. Another prisoner’s name is called, and a black man rises and touches his woman’s face. Time is running out.

“Sometimes I get so frustrated in here, I just want to cry,” says the fighter who once described himself as the baddest man on the planet. “But I don’t. I can’t. Because years from now, when this is long behind me, I want to know I went through it like a man. Not to impress anyone else. But to know it myself, know what I mean?”

A departing visitor nods, recognizing Tyson, and he nods back, a look granted like an autograph. He turns to me again, his hands kneading each other, his right leg bouncing like a timepiece.

“When you die, nothing matters but the dash,” Tyson says abruptly. “On your tombstone, it says 1933-2025, or something like that. The only thing that matters is that dash. That dash is your life. How you live is your life. And were you happy with the way you lived it.”

A guard calls Tyson’s name now. Time is up. Tyson rises slowly. He tells me to send his best to friends in New York. He promises to stay in touch. We embrace awkwardly. He looks as if he wants to freeze the moment, freeze time itself. Then he turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin to his visitor.

“Take care,” number 922335 says, and returns to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls.

ESQUIRE,

March 1994

MADONNA

Of this we can be certain: Madonna is the greatest artistic force of the AIDS generation. As a sex symbol, she is all we have, but she is a lot more than that. It doesn’t matter that she can’t sing very well, that she’s an ordinary dancer, that there are many women of more refined beauty. She is the triumphant mistress of her medium: the sexual imagination. In an age when real sex can lead to horror and death, here is Madonna — reckless, bawdy, laughing and offering us all the consolation of outrageous illusions.