Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker,” I yelled as she pulled me away.

I deserved every beating I got. I just wanted to be one of the cool kids, the kid in the street who had jewelry on and money in their pockets, the older kids, the fifteen-year-olds who had girlfriends. I wasn’t really into girls that much then but I liked having the clothes and getting all the attention.

By then, my mother was giving up on me. She was well known in the neighborhood and knew how to speak eloquently when she needed to. Her other children had the capacity to learn to get along with others, but then there was me. I was the only one who couldn’t read and write. I couldn’t grasp that stuff.

“Why can’t you do this?” she’d say to me. “What’s wrong with you?”

She must have thought I was retarded. She had taken me to all these places on Lee Avenue when I was a baby and I’d undergo psychological evaluations. When I was young, I’d talk out loud to myself. I guess that wasn’t normal in the ’70s.

Once I got into the court system, I had to go to court-mandated special ed crazy schools. Special ed was like jail. They kept you locked up until it was time to go home. They’d bus in all the antisocial kids and the fucking nuts. You were supposed to do whatever they told you to do but I’d get up and fight with people, spit in people’s faces. They gave us tokens to go back and forth to school, and I’d rob the kids for their tokens and gamble with them. I’d even rob the teachers and come to school the next day wearing the new shit I bought with their money. I did a lot of bad shit.

They said I was hyperactive so they started giving me Thorazine. They skipped the Ritalin and went straight to the big T; that’s what they gave little bad black motherfuckers in the ’70s. Thorazine was a trip. I’d be sitting there looking at something but I couldn’t move, couldn’t do nothing. Everything was cool; I could hear everything, but I was just zonked out, I was a zombie. I didn’t ask for food, they just brought out the food at the right time. They would ask, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” And I would say, “Oh, yes I do.” I didn’t even know when I got to go to the bathroom.

When I took that shit, they sent me home from school. I’d stay in the house chilling, watching Rocky and His Friends. My mother thought something was wrong with her baby, but I was just a bad-assed fucking kid. They misdiagnosed me, probably fucked me up a little, but I never took it personally when people misdiagnosed me. I always thought that bad stuff happened to me because something was wrong with me.

Besides the zombies and the crazy kids, they sent the criminals to the special ed schools. Now all the criminals from different neighborhoods got to know each other. We’d go to Times Square to jostle and we’d see all the guys from our school, all dressed up in sheepskins and fancy clothes, money in our pocket, doing the same thing. I was in Times Square in 1977 just hanging out when I saw some guys from the old neighborhood in Bed-Stuy. We were talking and the next thing I knew one of them snatched the purse of this prostitute. She was ­furious and threw a cup of hot coffee at my face. The cops started ­coming towards us and my friend Bub and I took off. We ran into an XXX-rated theater to hide but the hooker came in shortly after with the cops.

“That’s them,” she pointed to Bub and I.

“Me? I didn’t do shit,” I protested, but the cops paraded us out and put us in the backseat of their car.

But this crazy lady wasn’t finished. She reached in through the back window and scratched my face with her long hooker nails.

They drove us to the midtown precinct. As we pulled away from Times Square, I saw my friends from Bed-Stuy, the ones who did all this shit, watching from the street. I had been arrested many times so I was used to the formation. But they looked at my rap sheet and I just had too many arrests, so I was going straight to Spofford.

Spofford was a juvenile detention center located in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I had heard horror stories about Spofford – ­people being beaten up by other inmates or by the staff – so I wasn’t too thrilled to be going there. They issued me some clothes and gave me a cell by myself and I went to sleep. In the morning, I was terrified. I had no idea what was going to go down in that place. But when I went to the cafeteria for breakfast, it was like a class reunion. I immediately saw my friend Curtis, the guy that I had robbed the house with who got clobbered by the owner. Then I start seeing all my old partners.

“Chill,” I said to myself. “All your boys are here.”

After that first time, I was going in and out of Spofford like it was nothing. Spofford became like a time-share for me. During one of my visits there we were all brought to the assembly room where we watched a movie called The Greatest, about Muhammad Ali. When it was over, we all applauded and were shocked when Ali himself walked out onto the stage. He looked larger than life. He didn’t have to even open his mouth – as soon as I saw him walk out, I thought, I want to be that guy. He talked to us and it was inspirational. I had no idea what I was doing with my life, but I knew that I wanted to be like him. It’s funny, people don’t use that terminology anymore. If they see a great fight, they may say, “I want to be a boxer.” But nobody says, “I want to be like him.” There are not many Alis. Right then I decided I wanted to be great. I didn’t know what it was I’d do but I ­decided that I wanted people to look at me like I was on show, the same way they did to Ali.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t get out of Spofford and do a ­three-sixty. I was still a little sewer rat. My situation at home was deteriorating. After all those arrests and special schools and medications, my mother had no hope for me at all. But she had never had any hope for me, going back to my infancy. I just know that one of those medical people, some racist asshole, some guy who said that I was fucked up and developmentally retarded, stole my mother’s hope for me right then and there. And they stole any love or security I might have had.

I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was fifteen, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.

Since I was now in the correctional system, the authorities decided to send me to group homes to get straightened out. They would take a bunch of kids who were down, abused, bad, psycho kids and throw them together in some home where the government paid people to take us in. The whole thing was a hustle. I would never last more than two days. I’d just run away. One time, I was in a group home in Brentwood, Long Island. I called home and bitched and moaned to my mother that I didn’t have any weed there, so she made Rodney buy me some and deliver it to me. She was always a facilitator.

Eventually I was sent to Mount Loretto, a facility in Staten Island, but nothing could change me. Now I was pickpocketing guys on the Staten Island ferry. You never know who you’re pickpocketing. Sometimes you pickpocket the wrong guy, a bad motherfucker, and he wants his money back. He just starts clocking everyone.

“Who took my motherfucking money?” he screamed.

He started beating on everyone around him, the whole ferry had to jump on the motherfucker. My friend was the one who jostled him, and he kicked my friend in the ass but he didn’t know he had gotten the perpetrator. We got off the boat and were all laughing ’cause we got the money. Even my friend was laughing through his tears because he was still in pain. That guy would have thrown us off the boat if he knew we had his money. I get scared now just thinking about the kind of life I was living then. Oh, God, he would have killed us, he was just that fucking fierce.

I was released from the juvie facility on Staten Island at the beginning of 1978, and I went back to Brownsville. I kept hearing that a lot of my friends were getting killed over ridiculous things like jewelry or a couple of hundred dollars. I was getting a little worried but I never stopped robbing and stealing. I watched the guys I looked up to, the older guys, I watched them rise, but I saw their bumps in the road too. I watched them get beat mercilessly because they were always hustling people. But still they never stopped, it was in their blood.

The neighborhood was getting more and more ominous and I was getting more and more hated. I was just eleven years old, but sometimes I’d walk through the neighborhood, minding my own business and a landlord or owner of a store would see me walking by and would pick up a rock or something and throw it at me.

“Motherfucking little thieving bastard,” they’d yell.

They’d see me in my nice clothes and they just knew that I was the nigga stealing from them. I was walking past a building one time and I stopped to talk to a friend and this guy Nicky came out with a shotgun and his friend had a pistol. His friend pulled out his pistol and Nicky put the shotgun over my penis.

“Listen, little nigga, if I hear you’ve been going up on that motherfucking roof again, I’ll fuck you up. If I ever see you in this neighborhood again, I am going to blow your balls off,” he said.

I didn’t even know who the fuck this guy was, but he evidently knew who I was. Can you believe I was just so used to people coming up to me and stepping to me like that?

A few months before I turned thirteen, I got arrested again for possession of stolen property. They had exhausted all the places in the New York City vicinity to keep me. I don’t know what kind of scientific diagnostic tests they used, but they decided to send me to the Tryon School for Boys, an upstate New York facility for juvenile offenders about an hour northwest of Albany.

My mother was happy that I was going upstate. By then, a lot of grown men had started coming to the house looking for me.

“Your brother is a dirty motherfucker. I’m going to kill your brother,” they’d tell my sister.

“He’s just a kid,” she’d say. “It’s not like he took your wife or ­something.”

Imagine that, grown men coming to your house looking for you, and you’re twelve years old. Ain’t that some shit? Can you blame my mother for giving up all hope for me?

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The fact that they were sending me up to the state reformatory was not cool. I was with the big boys now. They were more hard-core than the guys at Spofford. But Tryon wasn’t a bad place. There were a lot of cottages there, and you could walk outside, play basketball, walk to the gym. But I got in trouble right away. I was just angry all the time. I had a bad attitude. I’d be confrontational and let everyone know that I was from Brooklyn and I didn’t fuck around with any bullshit.

I was going to one of my classes one day when this guy walked by me in the hall. He was acting all tough, like he was a killer, and when he passed by, he saw that I was holding my hat in my hand. So he started pulling on it and kept walking. I didn’t know him, but he disrespected me. I sat in the class for the next whole forty-five minutes thinking about how I was going to kill this guy for tugging on my hat. When the class was over, I walked out and saw him and his friends at the door.

That’s your man, Mike, I thought. I walked up to him and he had his hands in his pockets, looking at me as if he had no worries in the world; like I forgot that he had pulled my hat forty-five minutes ago. So I attacked him rather ferociously.

They handcuffed me and sent me to Elmwood, which was a lockdown cottage for the incorrigible kids. Elmwood was creepy. They had big tough-ass redneck staff members over there. Every time you saw somebody from there, they were walking in handcuffs with two people escorting them.

On the weekends, all the kids from Elmwood who earned credits would go away for a few hours and then come back with broken noses, cracked teeth, busted mouths, bruised ribs – they were all jacked up. I just thought they were getting beat up by the staff, because back then nobody would call the Health Department or Social Services if the staff were hurting the kids. But the more I talked to these hurt guys, the more I realized they were happy.

“Yeah, man, we almost got him, we almost got him,” they laughed. I had no idea what they were talking about and then they told me. They were boxing Mr. Stewart, one of the counselors. Bobby Stewart was a tough Irish guy, around 170 pounds, who had been a ­professional boxer. He was a national amateur champ. When I was in the hole, staff members told me there was an ex-boxing champ teaching kids how to box. The staff members that told me about him were very nice to me and I wanted to meet him because I thought he’d be nice too.

I was in my room one night when there was a loud, intimidating knock on the door. I opened the door and it was Mr. Stewart.

“Hey, asshole, I heard you want to talk to me,” he growled.

“I want to be a fighter,” I said.

“So do the rest of the guys. But they don’t have the balls to work to be a fighter,” he said. “Maybe if you straighten up your act and stop being such an asshole and show some respect around here, I’ll work with you.”

So I really started to apply myself. I think I’m the stupidest guy in the world when it comes to scholastics, but I got my honor-roll star and I said “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” to everyone, just being a model citizen so I could go over to fight with Stewart. It took me a month, but I finally earned enough credits to go. All the other kids came to watch to see if I could kick his ass. I was supremely confident that I was going to demolish him and that everyone would suck up to me.

I immediately started flailing and throwing a bunch of punches and he covered up. I’m punching him and slugging him and then suddenly he slips by me and goes boom and hits me right in the stomach.

“Boosh. Uggghhh, uggghhh.” I threw up everything I had eaten for the last two years. What the fuck was that? I was thinking. I didn’t know anything about boxing then. Now I know that if you get hit in the stomach, you’re just going to lose your breath for a couple of seconds, but it comes back. I didn’t know that then. I really thought that I wouldn’t be able to ever breathe again and I’d die. I was trying desperately to breathe but all I could do was throw up. It was just ­horrible shit.

“Get up, walk it off,” he barked.

After everyone left, I approached him real humble. “Excuse me, sir, can you teach me how to do that?” I asked. I’m thinking that when I go back to Brownsville and hit a motherfucker in the stomach like that, he’s going to go down and I’m going to go in his pockets. That’s where my mind was at back then. He must have seen something in me that he liked, because after our second session he said to me, “Would you like to do this for real?” So we started training regularly. And after our workouts, I’d go back to my room and shadowbox all night long. I started to get a lot better. I didn’t know it at the time, but during one of our sparring sessions I hit Bobby with a jab and broke his nose and almost knocked him down. He had the next week off, so he just let it heal at home.

After a few months of workouts, I called my mother and put Bobby on the phone with her. “Tell her, tell her,” I said. I wanted him to tell her how good I was doing. I just wanted her to know I could do something. I figured she might believe me if a white person was telling her it. But she just told him that she had trouble believing that I had changed. She just thought I was incorrigible.