Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (37 page)

I would talk to Tupac about the Black Panthers. I knew about his mother’s involvement with them. She was a strong woman. By this time I had become pretty radicalized from reading all those militant books.

We got close after that, and he came out to visit me a few times. I would hear shit that he was in the paper for shooting cops, fighting with people.

“Hey, listen, if you’re not careful, you’re going to be coming in by the time I’m coming out.”

Then he got shot and he was locked up. I’d arrange with a friend on the outside to set up a three-way call with Tupac. He told me that a friend of mine had shot him, but I didn’t know that for certain.

Once I had gotten acclimated to prison, I started seriously plotting my comeback. It was depressing to hear the news about who was winning the heavyweight championship. The belt was being passed around like a volleyball. I was intent on getting out and reclaiming it and showing everybody that I wasn’t the loser that they thought I was. No, I would be a god reclaiming my throne. In my sick mind, I was an ancient noble character and if I lost my quest to get the belt back, civilization as we knew it was done for. I was taking my little narcissistic quest and putting it on the whole world.

I needed that vision, though. I needed that drive for accomplishment or I would have rotted away in prison, so I made my plan. I knew what I had to do; I knew how to discipline my mind with the right things. The last thing I wanted to be was docile. The administration had assigned me to the gym because they wanted me to keep in shape, but then they locked me out because they thought I was involved in the drug trade in prison. But I wasn’t. I was only smuggling in my hair grease. I wanted to get high in prison but I didn’t because I was on a mission to get the belt back.

So I mainly did running and calisthenics to get into shape. I’d run in the yard in the morning, then do a lot of cardio work, jumping rope and push-ups and sit-ups. I had gotten letters from two former boxers who were in prison – Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and James Scott, who actually fought the majority of his fights while he was in Rahway State Prison. Scott wrote to me that I wouldn’t be shit until I could do “a hundred push-ups in the clip.” That was street-gang talk, a gun clip that could hold a hundred bullets. I couldn’t do it at first, but I practiced and practiced and finally I wrote him back, “I got a hundred in the clip.”

At night I’d have Wayno hold my legs down and I’d do five hundred sit-ups at a clip. I did them until my butt would bleed. We had a wall radio in the cell where you could plug your headphones in and listen to music so you didn’t disturb your roommate, and I would get up at two in the morning, put on my shorts and my headphones, and jog in the room for hours. When Wayno would wake up, all the walls were sweating and steamed up from my exertions. Sometimes I’d jog in place in my room during the day and all the guards and inmates would come by and watch me through the little window for hours.

It was worse when I’d shadowbox. I’d be surrounded by inmates, guards, administration people, and every one of them was a fucking trainer.

“Move, nigga. Duck, duck,” they’d say. Everyone had comments to make.

“I’m the pro, goddamnit,” I’d say. “You just watch.”

When I went in, I was 272 pounds, but in six months I had gone down to 216. I went from a little gorilla to some chiseled Adonis.

I began studying Islam while I was in prison. I had actually been introduced in Islam way before I had even gone to jail. Captain Yusuf Shah, Don’s cook, was a Muslim brother who had been Malcolm X’s teacher and Elijah Muhammad’s right-hand man. Captain Joe, as we called him, was very highly respected. He had become my chauffeur, but he should have been my bodyguard; there was no problem that he couldn’t solve.

Don had fired him because he had stomped on Don’s pork chop. Don would routinely humiliate Captain Joe into cooking pork. Captain Joe used to actually wear iron gloves to prepare them. One day I saw Captain Joe crying and he was beating on the pork chop.

I was in L.A. when I heard that Don had fired Captain Joe, but when I landed back in New York, Captain Joe was there to pick me up at the airport.

“I heard you were fired,” I said.

“No, no, good champion brother, nothing happened,” the Captain said. “It was a misunderstanding. I upset Mr. King. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have done it because it’s his food. I’m just a silly man. Allah has blessed me with the privilege of working with Mr. King again.”

“Captain Joe, if you don’t tell me what happened,
I’m
going to fire you,” I said. “I heard some people came up to see Don. What happened? How many people came up?”

“Seventy-five, all strapped,” Captain Joe said humbly, but with a sinister strength that showed he still had power.

Apparently when he went back to Harlem and told his brothers in the Nation of Islam that Don had laid him off, seventy-five armed men went to Don’s office, roughed up a few people, and made Don hire Captain Joe back, from what I was told.

“You don’t fire Captain Joe, Captain Joe fires you,” they told Don’s staff.

So he went back and made Don assign him to me as my chauffeur. He still had a lot of pull. He was an old, harmless-looking man, but with one call he could get you what you needed. It was an honor for me to have him work for me. Captain Joe was an awesome mentor to me – kind, considerate, generous, a precious man. We would talk about spirituality all the time. He thought all spirituality was good. He was so happy when I got baptized; he thought it was wonderful that I took it seriously. I never had the heart to tell him that I took the choirgirl right back to my hotel room after the ceremony.

So I was already receptive to Islam when I went to prison. There was this convict from Detroit we called Chuck who had grown up as a Muslim. I met him at the mosque. Don’t get me wrong, you didn’t go to the mosque just to pray. Everybody transacted business in there. It was a place to meet up with other inmates from the various dorms. I was learning my prayers, but I would go and get my messages there too. I was praying to God, but I got a .45 too. It’s just what it was. I love Allah, but I’m Mike too, and he made me this way – a manipulator and a hustler.

So Chuck started teaching me the prayers. He was a horrible teacher. He was hyperactive and rude and not very friendly. But he spoke Arabic. We’d go over the prayers and he’d yell, “Did you get it yet?”

“You just told it to me once, what are you talking about?” I’d say.

He had said the prayer like a speed freak. He could have used some Ritalin.

So he’d slow down a little and go over the prayer, but then they’d yell, “Chow,” and it was lunchtime and he’d take off.

So I learned that opening prayer and then I started going to classes with Wayno. His Islamic name was Farid. At first I was rude and obnoxious. Brother Siddeeq would sit me down and talk about Islam, but I was so irritable I didn’t want to hear about it. But once we got to know each other, Siddeeq asked me if I would join with the others in prayer and I chilled out. I got in the habit of praying and then I started reading the Koran with Farid. I didn’t have any one moment of revelation. It was just like, this is who I am now.

I wasn’t getting the spiritual side of Islam. That came much later. I wasn’t really ready for religion then. Back then, I used Islam to subsidize my time and it helped me a great deal. I had something to believe in, but I did all of the right things for the wrong reasons. But it was definitely part of my growing up and learning about love and forgiveness. That was my first encounter with true love and forgiveness.

A year before I was scheduled to be released, there was talk that I would be granted an early release. A lot of national press people like Greta Van Susteren were questioning my conviction. My lawyers were talking to the court and to the Washingtons. Apparently, they had reached an agreement. I would pay the Washingtons $1.5 million and I would apologize to Desiree and I would get out of jail immediately. I didn’t even have to admit to raping her, just apologize for it. Some of my friends like Jeff Wald were pushing for the apology.

“Mike, I’d admit to raping Mother Teresa to get the fuck out of jail,” he told me.

“If I apologize, the prison in my head would be worse than the prison I’m in now,” I told him.

So they brought me to Judge Gifford’s courtroom in June of 1994 for a sentence reduction hearing. I was dressed in denim pants, a light blue work shirt, and work boots. The new prosecutor asked me if I had anything to say.

“I’ve committed no crime. I’m going to stick with that to my grave. I never violated anyone’s chastity.”

That wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear. They sent me right back to jail. Everyone was hugging and kissing me when I got back.

“Fuck them motherfuckers,” they all said.

“Chill out,” I said. “I’m cool. Another year. Let’s just do this shit.”

I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end of Mike. I was only twenty-eight by then, but I knew that there was going to be some good reward for me after I did my time. More press came out to interview me. I was reading a lot and I was sharp and very politically focused then.

Larry King came and did a two-part interview with me from jail. He really wanted to get a picture of what it was like for me to go from the top of the world to being behind bars.

“Romantic love, you miss romantic love?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell him about my teacher.

“Maybe, but what is love? Love is like a game, love is competition. Most people who are gorgeous, a guy or a woman maybe, love comes to them all of the time because they attract love. But they never fought for love, what are they prepared to do for love? Love is a situation where you must be prepared to do something, because if you have something lovely, somebody is going to want to challenge you for it, and if you’ve never been competitive enough, the slightest struggle and you are going to give in.”

“Obviously, you gained better control of your own total environment here. What about food? Do you miss certain foods, no?”

I couldn’t tell him about the lobster and the Chinese food and all the menus we had in our room.

“I’m just me,” I answered.

“I’m just trying to put the audience into what would it be like to not have the things they have every day,” Larry said.

“I’m going to tell you something, there are people that have been to prison, and perhaps a lot worse than the situation I am in. But you just become very much attached to yourself. I believe there is a playwright by the name of Tennessee Williams who said, ‘We must distrust one another because that is the only way to protect each other from betrayal.’ And I am a great believer in that, I’m a great believer. I believe everyone that is involved in my life, one day or the other will betray me. I totally believe that. And a lot of people say no, no, no. But that is what I believe.”

“If you believe that, you must be unhappy,” Larry said.

“No, I am not unhappy, I am just aware of my circumstances.”

“I’ll give you a human thing you must miss. Cheering,” Larry said. “You must miss that.”

“Can I tell you something now? Praise be to Allah, I cheer for myself a hundred million times a day in my mind. To me I am my biggest fan, there is nothing in the world better than me. So I don’t think about that, those guys really don’t know what they’re cheering for. I know the total me and I know why they should be cheering, but they don’t know, they cheer for the knockout. That’s all they cheer for, the knockout and the performance. I cheer because I know who I am.”

Everything was going fine in prison until someone ratted out me and the drug counselor. I was going to get out in one week if I passed the last test, but suddenly this guy from Internal Affairs came to see me. Someone had told them that I had been in the room for hours with this teacher, so they sent an investigator from outside the prison to interview me. I was sweating like a pimp with one ho.

“You’re supposed to be getting out in a few weeks but that will change if you’re found guilty,” he said calmly.

Holy shit. The air left me in a second.

“But I didn’t do anything, sir. Anybody can tell you that I’m a good student,” I said. I was so scared of this little white guy, I was Tomming it all up. “Yes, sir. No, sir.”

“There have been inmates saying that you have been in that room with the counselor for inordinately long amounts of time,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about that. I’m just doing my work. I have some counseling needs. I’ve used drugs and alcohol excessively and there are many temptations that I must battle every day …” I was freelancing it.

“You know, I think you got a real bum deal in your case, Mike, but this is a very different and very serious matter,” he said.

I was scared to death when I left that guy. I went out to the visiting area because I had this girl on her way to visit me. I was tripping out. And then I saw the white guy who had just interrogated me going to talk to my counselor.

“Are you looking for me, motherfucker?” she started yelling at the guy.

Holy moly. My balls were in my sneakers by then. I couldn’t believe she was screaming at this white guy. I was thinking,
Oh, God, we’re fucked now.

“What the hell do you want to know about me? I’ve been here for seventeen years doing my job.”

She ripped into this guy and pulled out her ghetto card and totally intimidated him. Then she came over to where I was sitting in the visiting room. She started talking to me and she touched my dick through my pants and it started getting hard and then she wrote her name right on my pants where my dick was.

“Holy shit, how could you do that?” I said.

She just smiled.

I never heard anything about that investigation again. At the end of the drug course, I passed my test, even though I shouldn’t have. On one of the tests they asked me to name the “three basic needs.” I answered – sex, food, and water in that order. No air, just sex, food, and water.

It was a matter of days before I’d be released. I was going out with millions and millions of dollars guaranteed to me from Showtime and the MGM Grand, thanks to deals that Don had made. I had been courted by everyone, but Don seemed to be the best move. He was offering the most money. And I was also leaving with a new girlfriend waiting for me.