The Domino Diaries (2 page)

*   *   *

So, once Mike Tyson got down the stairs, I answered his question about how this white motherfucker got inside his house. “
You
brought me here.”

After I'd explained to him how I'd come full circle and ended up in his living room, we both sat down opposite each other and he shook his huge head and smiled before asking:

“Is that all true?”

“What do you think?”

“So I'm guessing you being here, in my home, sitting across from me right now—I'm guessing this is pretty intense for you right now, huh?”

On Easter of 2010, the day I interviewed him, Mike Tyson's boxing career had been over for nearly five years. At this point, Tyson was more famous as a national punch line for biting off someone's ear than for any career achievement or even squandered potential. Besides that, a country sixteen trillion in debt mocked and remained endlessly fascinated by the question of how someone like Tyson could possibly have pissed away his entire fortune. The last picture I'd seen of him, taken a couple months before, showed a man who had ballooned to well over three hundred pounds. Though he had miraculously dropped most of it since then, he looked deflated from his championship days. Tyson lived in a gated community just outside Las Vegas in the town of Henderson, Nevada.

When he was only eighteen, Tyson's managers would market him with posters reminding you that if your grandfather had missed Joe Louis, or your father Muhammad Ali, you didn't want to miss Tyson. But what they didn't mention was that Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were a boy's
dream
of a fighter. Before long Tyson understood his customers a little better and modified the sales pitch. Tyson figured out, in his era, that America really craved a nightmare.

Tyson's first trainer, Teddy Atlas, had said this of his star pupil and America's addiction to him: “People are full of shit. They want to see something dark. People want to feel close to it and in on it, but, of course, only from the distance of their suburban homes. They want to have the benefit of comfort, security, safety, respect, and at the same time the privilege of watching something out of control—even promote it being out of control—as long as we can be secure that we're not accountable for it.… We wanted to believe that Mike Tyson was an American story: the kid who grows up in the horrible ghetto and then converts that dark power into a good cause. But then the story takes a turn. The dark side overwhelms him. He's cynical, he's out of control. And now the story is even better.”

“Okay.” Tyson glared, leaning forward in his chair across from me. A Sandra Bullock rom-com was muted on the flat-screen TV beside us; some of his children's toys were scattered by my feet. “You said I was your hero growing up. I wanna know who your other heroes are then.”

“They're all suicides.”

“Is that a prerequisite or something?” he smiled.

“For a while there, to be honest, I never thought you'd ever live long enough for me to have a chance to meet or say thank you.”

“Me neither,” Tyson said under his breath, looking over at his wife in the kitchen. “I was sure I'd be dead by now, too.”

“On the way over here I drove through Las Vegas for the first time. I've never had a desire to see Las Vegas. I hate everything about it. Joe Louis was a hero of mine. And even more depressing than a whole city built up by all the loss and suffering of ruined lives, it's the idea of someone like Louis, after all he did for this country, ending up broke and strung out on drugs working as a greeter at Caesar's Palace that—”

“You,” Tyson said, pointing his finger at me. “You know what your problem is? You're too sensitive. You probably don't think you had enough pain in your own life so you take on the pain of other people to make up for it. Taking on the pain of my life or Joe Louis's life doesn't help us. It doesn't help you, either.”

Tyson scratched the tattoo of famed African American tennis champion Arthur Ashe on his shoulder while his mother-in-law scurried into the kitchen with Tyson's baby in her arms.

“What was the next book you read after all those biographies on me?” Tyson asked.

“
Days of Grace
by Arthur Ashe.” I shrugged.

“Didn't anyone warn you that it's dangerous meeting your heroes?”

“You're not a very easy person to have as a hero, Mike.”

“That's true.” He smiled. “But how am I doing so far today?”

I smiled back at him.

“That Jewish proverb is true, man. ‘The brighter the light, the darker the shadow that's cast.' Whatever people think of me, most countries in the world that I visit, it's kings or presidents that want to greet me. I've been the most famous face on the planet. Why do you think that is? I've met anyone you can meet. And we're all part of the same club. The feeling of worthlessness is what drove us to greatness. Content people don't strive for anything. They don't
have
to. I never walked out to the ring without having dreamed the night before of losing.”

“When I mentioned to Freddie Roach that you were one of the most knowledgeable boxing historians in the world he interrupted me. He said, ‘Not
one of
, Mike Tyson is
the greatest boxing historian who ever lived
.'”

“So what's the connection with you and Cuba? That's what my assistant mentioned you wanted to talk to me about.”

“I know you were in Cuba back in 2002.”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“I was in Havana when you arrived.”

“Okay,” Tyson conceded. “I was there.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I wanted to meet Te
ó
filo Stevenson, the Cuban Muhammad Ali.”

“Did you have a chance?”

Tyson shook his head. “I got in some trouble and had to go.”

“If you had to choose between Fidel Castro or Don King, who do you think would be worse fighting for?”

“Cubans aren't fighting for money. They're fighting for glory. They're saying they're better than money by turning it down. They're better than us as human beings. All that stuff.”

“If you were born there and could only make money by leaving your family … If that was the choice you had to make. Could you do it?”

“Where I'm at now? No. I couldn't leave my family. But I was born here. They'll put me in the ground here. Those Cubans like Stevenson or Sav
ó
n represent all that insane stuff over there, I represent all
our
insane stuff. You have to think that boxing is just narrative. Stories. Why was everyone willing to put more money in the cash register for mine than anyone else? Was I the best? Maybe. But I had the story they cared about most. They saw themselves the most in me, whether they admit it or not.”

“I heard you answer that question once by saying it was because you were angelic and scum. Is that America, too?”

“Who knows.”

“I saw an interview with you once where you were crying. You were young. You weren't champ yet. But you were upset because you said how much you missed fighting when it wasn't just about the money.”

“Listen, man. I can't really believe this because I still can't figure out how you got in my house today. And I can't believe I'm going to talk about this to a stranger, but listen. You said the first book you ever read was about my life. Whatever. At least then you probably know what human being brought me more pain than anyone. And that woman, my mother, she was dead before I was sixteen. I'm the son of a pimp and an alcoholic. But if I ever brought anything home of value into my mother's house, she knew I'd stolen it. I never saw her proud of me in my entire life. Not once. And somewhere, somewhere I always had that in my mind. I was fighting to make this woman who caused me more pain than anyone in my life—” Tyson cleared his throat and wiped his face a couple times. “Deep down, I was always fighting to make that woman … I wanted to make that woman proud of me. That's what I was always fighting for.”

Right then a clock next to us tolled, then once more for two o'clock. Tyson cradled his face in his hand and cleared his throat again. The moment was gone and the assistant entered the room and told Mike Tyson they had appointments to meet.

“You like F. Scott Fitzgerald, man?” Tyson asked.

“Yep.”

“He said something like, ‘There are no second acts in American lives.' Some shit like that. Maybe I'll prove him wrong.”

 

2

THE ONE-EYED KING

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

—Fran Lebowitz

What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?

—Bertolt Brecht

I
'VE SUFFERED FROM A TERRIBLE
sense of direction all my life. My internal compass must be broken. I'm always lost. Yet almost every friend I've ever made I met asking for directions. I take a lot of care in choosing the strangers I approach.

Not long ago I was walking under the construction of the World Trade Center with a stranger. He was a former amateur fighter I'd just met for an interview named Eric Kelly. For a child growing up in the ghetto, a boxing gym was a lifeline to avoid a life working on a street corner. Gyms like that were now largely extinct across New York, traded in for more profitable gentrified white-collar gyms. Kelly had risen from the streets to become a four-time national amateur champion. Then, just before embarking on a professional career, he lost everything. His dream evaporated after he mouthed off to the wrong person in a pool hall and had a pool cue smashed over his eye. Multiple surgeries weren't able to fix the damage to the nerve endings and muscles over Kelly's eyelid.

Only recently Kelly had gotten famous around the country after a video went viral of him training various masters of the universe—mostly Wall Street bankers in the Financial District—to fight, and gleefully deriding them all as “softer than baby shit.” In a country where four hundred people controlled as much wealth as the bottom 150 million, Eric Kelly paid no attention to the bank statements of his clients and instead explored their
worth
.

I interviewed one of Kelly's boxing clients from J.P. Morgan who explained, “Maybe, deep down, we just miss that whole Occupy Wall Street movement a little bit. Maybe some of us are a little nostalgic for that hatred they had for us, and Eric Kelly picks up the slack.”

Another trader chimed in, “Maybe it's the stress of being full of shit as soon as you leave your front door every morning. Being full of shit at work. Where
don't
you have to be full of shit in this city? But you don't have to be
here
. I love Kelly. I signed up for a full year in advance after my first day with him. He doesn't care where you come from or how much you make. He's constitutionally incapable of being dishonest.”

I'd never heard of anyone from the 99 percent sought by the 1 percent—outside of dominatrices and day laborers—with Kelly's job description before. But then Trey Parker, America's answer to Jonathan Swift, once bemoaned
South Park
's impotence to satirize America given the nation's incapacity to feel shame about
anything
. Since I'd moved to Manhattan, Kelly's gym was the most interesting intersection of race and class I'd heard of in upstairs-downstairs New York society. America ate it up as CNN,
Fox News
, and
Bloomberg Businessweek
all covered the story. The William Morris agency signed Kelly within the month. After the uproar not only was Kelly not fired, but more Wall Street clients than ever lined up at his gym in the Financial District to have Eric Kelly do little more than tell them the truth. I'd seen Kelly's clients stare at themselves in the mirror, shadowboxing, searching for something they still weren't able to find. “Ain't you heard, motherfuckers?” Kelly would shout over. “You can look as hard as you want in the mirror, but vampires ain't
got
no reflection. But look away from the mirror and at me, and I'll see what I can do for you.”

*   *   *

“So what do you think being able to fight says about somebody?” I asked Kelly. “In that video and your gym, when you're making fun of these Wall Street guys for not being able to fight, what are you trying to say?”

“
You
ever been in a fight?” Kelly asked.

I nodded, feeling Kelly's damaged gaze unriddle me.

“You out looking for it or did it find you?” he followed up.

“The one that really counted—the
first
one—found me.”

I was eleven, lured out to a field in front of half my school, waiting like everyone else to watch a fight that was supposed to happen. I'd never seen any of the fights kids had organized before. I was small and terrified of violence. I kept looking around waiting for it to start until I was pushed from behind onto the ground and everyone swarmed in. For the few agonizing minutes it took me to escape, the kids not close enough to stomp or kick took turns clearing their throats to spit. The worst day of my life didn't just happen in front of everyone I knew, rather they had all
joined in
. Eventually, physically at least, I managed to get away, but it took me years to outrun the humiliation and cowardice all those people exposed in me that day. And even though New York was 2,500 miles and twenty-two years away from cowering into a ball under that mob's collective heel, it was pretty obvious to Kelly, as I explained the incident to him, that that day had marked my life as much as Kelly's in a pool hall.

“It's the only fight I've ever had outside a ring,” I told him.