Free Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography by Mike Tyson

know it then, but after one of our first long talks, Cus confided in Camille. “Camille, this is the one I’ve been waiting for all my life.”
    I was getting close to being paroled back to Brooklyn when Bobby Stewart came to see me one day.
    “I don’t want you to go back to Brooklyn. I’m afraid you may do something stupid and get killed or get your ass locked up again. Do you want to move in with Cus?”
    I didn’t want to go back either. I was looking for change in my life. Plus, I liked the way those people talked and made me feel good, made me feel like I was part of society. So I talked to my mother about staying up there with Cus.
    “Ma, I want to go up there and train. I want to be a fighter. I can be the best fighter in the world.” Cus had my mind so fucked up. That’s all he talked to me about, how great I could become, how to improve myself, day by day, in every way. All that self-help shit.
    My mom felt bad about me leaving, but she signed the permission papers. Maybe she thought she’d failed as a mother.
    So I moved in with Cus and Camille and the other fighters in the house. I got to know more and more about Cus because we’d have these long talks after I trained. He was so happy when I told him my hard-luck stories about my life. He would light up like a Christmas tree. “Tell me more,” he’d say. I was the perfect guy for his mission – broken home, unloved, destitute. I was hard and strong and sneaky, but I was still a blank chalkboard. Cus wanted me to embrace my shortcomings. He didn’t make me feel ashamed or inferior because of my upbringing. He loved the fact that I had great enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm” – Cus taught me that word.
    Cus could relate to me because he’d had a hard life too. His mother died at a very early age. He’d lost his vision in one eye in a street fight when he was a little kid. His father died in his arms when he was a young man. A cop had murdered his favorite brother.
    Cus really only worked a nine-to-five job for one year in his life. And then he left because he got into fights with his coworkers. But he spent a lot of time helping out the people in his neighborhood, solving their problems almost like an unofficial social worker. He derived a lot of pleasure out of assisting other people. Cus helped weed out political corruption in his neighborhood when La Guardia was running for mayor of New York City as a reformer. He did it by standing up to one of the corrupt guys who had pulled a gun on him. He was fearless.
    He was also bitter.
    “I stood up for the little guy all my life,” Cus said. “Lot of my troubles came from standing up for the underdog. Some of the people that I did things for didn’t deserve it. Very few people are worth saving.”
    Cus was totally color-blind. His father’s best friend was black. When he was in the army, stationed in the South, he had a boxing team. When they traveled, no hotel would take his black fighters so he slept with them in parks.
    He was also a big-time socialist. He was in love with Che and Fidel and the Rosenbergs. He’d tell me about the Rosenberg case and I’d tease him.
    “Come on, Cus. That ain’t right. They were guilty,” I said.
    “Oh, yeah,” he’d roar. “You’re talking now but when they bring slavery back you’re not going to be able to say who was guilty or not. They’re planning to bring it back too, all right?”
    His biggest enemy was Ronald Reagan. Reagan would come on the TV and Cus would scream at the top of his lungs, “LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR!!!” Cus was a maniac. He would always be talking about who needed to die. “A man dies by the way he lives,” he’d tell me.
    One day Cus said, “When you make a lot of money, you could really help everybody you ever cared about. You could help the black churches.” He thought the black churches were the best grassroots social net for black people. He loved the Reverend Martin Luther King. Cus was always into helping people and