Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

Jimmy and Cayton wanted me to be another Joe Louis, not Ali or Sonny Liston. They wanted me to be a hero, but I wanted to be a villain. The villain is always remembered, even when he doesn’t outshine the hero. Even though the hero kills him, he makes the hero the hero. The villain is immortal. Besides, I knew that Joe Louis’s hero image was manufactured. In real life he liked to snort cocaine and screw lots of girls.

I wanted people bowing at my feet; I wanted people catering to me; I wanted to be chasing the women away from me. This was what Cus told me I would be doing, but I was not getting it. But it was supposed to be my time in the ring now. I was still sitting in the bleachers; they were not letting me in the ring.

When I moved into my apartment, Steve hooked me up with a great stereo system that cost about twelve grand, and he got shit from Jimmy for spending that much of my money on it. Later that year, we were walking through the Forum shops in Caesar’s and I saw a watch.

“Use your card, get me that watch,” I said.

“No fucking way,” Steve said.

“Why not? You know I’ll pay you back,” I protested.

“No way, Jim will fucking kill me,” he said.

It was then that my demons would tell me, “These white guys don’t care about you like Cus.”

I loved Jimmy, but he was always trying to keep me in line.

“Mike, you have to do this because if you don’t, this multimillion-dollar company will sue us.” So we had to do this fight or that commercial. I was still an immature kid. In the middle of shooting a commercial I’d say, “I don’t want to do this shit. I want to go to Brownsville and hang out with my friends.”

I went back to Brownsville almost every night that I wasn’t in training. I got the royal treatment there. Literally. When my Jamaican friends would see my limo roll up, they’d take out their guns.

“They’re shooting for you, Mike, twenty-one guns, nigga!” one of them would say.

And they’d give me a twenty-one-gun salute. Boom, boom, boom.

Sometimes I’d be walking down the street with a few friends and I’d see some guy who had bullied me years before. My friends didn’t know I had a beef with this guy, but they could tell just by the way the cat was looking at me that there was no love between us.

“You know this motherfucker looking at you? Who’s this bitch?” one of my friends would ask me.

I didn’t have to answer.

“Who the fuck are you looking at, motherfucker?” my friend said. And it’s on. They’d just crack him. I’d have to tell them to leave him alone.

Once I began making a lot of money boxing, I got a reputation as being a Robin Hood in the hood. People who didn’t know me would make a big deal about me going back to Brownsville and giving my money away. But it wasn’t like that. People who came from where I had come from had a responsibility to take care of their friends even if it was twenty years later. So if I went away and made this money and I went back I had to break off some for my friends who weren’t doing as well. I would pick up cash from Cayton’s office and divide the hundred-dollar bills into packets of a thousand dollars. I’d usually carry about twenty-five thousand in cash with me and would go around and distribute it to my friends when I’d see them. I’d tell them to go buy a tailored suit and then we’d go out that night.

I didn’t even have to know the people who I gave money to. I’d stop my car and give out hundred-dollar bills to bums and homeless people. I’d gather up a bunch of street urchins and take them to Lester’s Sporting Goods store and buy them all new sneakers. I later found out that Harry Houdini did the same thing when he started to make it. I guess that’s what poor people who get rich real quick do. They don’t feel like they deserve it. I felt that way sometimes, because I forgot how much hard work I had put into my career.

This was a really fucking downtrodden, drug-infested, gang-­infested, sex-infested, filth-infested neighborhood. And you’re from this cesspool, you know? Just giving them money and helping these people, it doesn’t solve their problems, but it makes them happy.

Whenever I was handing out money, I’d be sure to go and track down all the old ladies who were my mother’s friends. I’d be with a friend in the car and I’d drive to a certain project where I knew this one old lady lived and my friend would wait in the car and I’d get out and knock on her door and give her some cash. Then I’d do the same thing again and again. I didn’t think that I was noble doing all this. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Maybe I believed that that was how I could clean my sins and buy my way back to heaven. I guess I was looking for redemption.

I got down on myself a lot, but I always had friends in Brownsville who wouldn’t let me go there. I’d sit there and complain how hard life was and this one guy, who I prefer not to name, would look at me.

“Oh, it’s hard? Who did you kill lately, Mike? What house did you go into and tie everybody up, huh, Mike?”

Whenever I had something negative to say about myself, he’d say, “There’s nothing bad about you, Mike. You’re a good man. You don’t escape where you come from because you have money now. If you weren’t a good man, we would all have you in the trunk, Mike.”

A lot of my friends from Brownsville wound up incarcerated in Coxsackie, which was not too far from Catskill. I had gone to school with most of the people who worked at the prison there, so when I’d go up there to visit my friends who were in jail, I wasn’t going to the visiting room, I would hang out with them in their cells, because I knew the warden and all the guards. I gave my friends the shoes off my feet, the jewelry off my neck, and the guards were all looking the other way. One time, I was walking through the range, where the cells were, and I saw Little Spike from the Bronx who had been locked up with me in Spofford. Now he’s not so little, he’s a monster.

“Yo, Mike. What’s up, man? What are you doing?” he shouted.

He thought I had been busted again and they were taking me to a cell.

I was living this crazy dual life. One day visiting friends in their prison cells, the next day hanging out with Rick James. I had met him a few times before but the first time we really spoke to each other was at an after-party for some new movie. We were at a big club, maybe a thousand people were there, but you’re going to notice Rick James. He called me over.

“Hey Mike, get in this picture with us.”

He was posing with Eddie Murphy and Sylvester Stallone. Right around then he had made a lot of money from Hammer sampling him on “U Can’t Touch This,” so Rick was back in business.

Next time I saw him I was in the lobby of a hotel on Sunset Boulevard. I was sitting outside with Ricky Schroder and Alfonso Ribeiro from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, just chilling. Ricky was probably seventeen then and Alfonso was maybe sixteen. But we’re sitting there drinking, and I looked up and I saw a convertible Corniche Rolls-Royce pull up and Rick get out. He was wearing a loud shirt with a tie, but the tie wasn’t tied and the shirt was unbuttoned. He came over to us, slapped me five, and then he looked at Alfonso, and then, boom, he hit him hard in the chest.

“Gimme that fucking beer,” he said and grabbed Alfonso’s beer.

“Rick, this is a kid, you can’t hit this guy like that,” I protested.

He just took that bottle and swigged from it.

“What’s up, nigga?” he said to me.

Rick just didn’t give a fuck. Eddie Murphy and his brother Charles told me a great Rick James story. He once was working on some music with Eddie and he was over at Eddie’s house. I went in and Eddie came up to me.

“Mike, this nigga’s put his feet on my chairs,” Eddie said. He was complaining about Rick. Eddie had an immaculate house; everything had to be just right. And Rick was putting his smelly feet up on the chairs and they had asked him to stop, but Rick didn’t give a shit.

“Fuck this. I can do what I want,” he said.

So Charlie, Eddie’s brother, went over to Rick.

“Motherfucker, this ain’t no joke up here,” he said and started choking Rick to restrain him.

That didn’t go over too well with Rick. He got up and dusted himself off. And when Charlie turned his back to him, Rick called out.

“Hey, Charlie.”

Charlie turned around and, POW, Rick hit him so hard that you could see the impression “RJ” from Rick’s big diamond ring on Charlie’s face.