Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (7 page)

“Cus, you don’t know it but you practice Zen,” Mailer had told Cus, and then he gave him a book called
Zen in the Art of Archery
. Cus used to read that book to me. He told me that he had actually experienced the ultimate in emotional detachment in his first fight. He was training in a gym in the city because he wanted to be a professional fighter. He had been hitting the heavy bag for a week or two when the manager asked him if he wanted to box with someone. He got in the ring and his heart was beating like a drum, and the bell rang and the other guy charged him and he got knocked around. His nose was swollen, his eye was shut, he was bleeding. The guy asked him if he wanted to go a second round and Cus said he’d try. He went out there and suddenly his mind became detached from his body. He was watching himself from afar. The punches that hit him felt like they were coming from a distance. He was more aware of them than feeling them.

Cus told me that to be a great fighter you had to get out of your head. He would have me sit down and he’d say, “Transcend. Focus. Relax until you see yourself looking at yourself. Tell me when you get there.” That was very important for me. I’m way too emotional in general. Later on I realized that if I didn’t separate from my feelings inside the ring, I would be sunk. I might hit a guy with a hard punch and then get scared if he didn’t go down.

Cus took this out-of-body experience one step further. He would separate his mind from his body and then visualize the future. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself,” he told me. “It’s me, but it’s not me, as if my mind and my body aren’t connected, but they are connected. I get a picture in my mind, what it’s going to be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen. I can take a fighter who is just beginning and I can see exactly how he will respond. When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about this guy, I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I’m that guy, I’m inside him.”

He even claimed that he could control events using his mind. Cus trained Rocky Graziano when he was an amateur. One time, Cus was in Rocky’s corner and Rocky was taking a beating. After being knocked down twice, Rocky came back to the corner and wanted to quit. But Cus pushed him out for the next round, and before Rocky could quit, Cus used his mind to will Rocky’s arm to throw a punch and it connected and the guy went down and the ref stopped the fight. This was the heavy dude who was training me.

Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only fourteen, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed. He was practicing and teaching me the law of attraction without even knowing it.

Cus was also big on affirmations. He had a book called
Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion
by a French pharmacist/psychologist named Emile Coué. Coué would tell his patients to repeat to themselves, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better” over and over again. Cus had a bad cataract in one eye, and he would repeat that phrase and he claimed the phrase had made it better.

Cus had us modify the affirmations for our own situation. So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me. The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I loved doing that, I loved hearing myself talk about myself.

The goal of all these techniques was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.

Cus laid all this out for me in the first few weeks that we were together. He gave me the whole plan. He gave me a mission. I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time. I didn’t 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 that was how he gave all his money away.

“Money is something to throw off the back of trains,” he’d tell me. “Money means security, and to me security means death, so I never cared about money. To me all the things that I value I couldn’t buy for money. I was never impressed with money. Too many of the wrong people have a lot of money so the association is not good. The truth was, I wasn’t careless about money. I gave money to people in trouble. I don’t consider that wasting it.”

He also didn’t believe in paying taxes to a right-wing government. He declared bankruptcy when he owed $200,000 to the IRS.

How Cus got into boxing was itself a mystery. Out of nowhere he popped up and said, “I’m a boxing trainer.” Nobody had ever heard of him. He didn’t know anything about contracts or fighters, but he claimed to be a manager. He wound up managing and training a promising young heavyweight named Floyd Patterson who was also a poor kid who grew up in Brooklyn. At the time, boxing was ruled by a group called the IBC, the International Boxing Club, owned by rich entrepreneurs who had a stranglehold on the promotion of championship bouts. But Cus guided Floyd to the championship, and then he went after the IBC. Which meant he was going up against the mob, because Frankie Carbo, a soldier in the Lucchese family, was in bed with the IBC. Cus helped break the back of the IBC, and Carbo wound up in jail for conspiracy, extortion, and unlicensed management.

But Cus’s heart was broken when Roy Cohn, a right-wing attorney, stole Patterson away from him by wooing the newly converted Catholic boxer with a meeting with New York’s Cardinal Spellman. Cus never set foot inside a Catholic church again. He got increasingly paranoid after that. He claimed that someone tried to push him in front of a subway car. He stopped going to bars because he was afraid someone would spike his drink. He actually sewed shut the pockets of his coat jackets so no one could drop drugs into them to set him up. Finally he moved upstate to Catskill.

He was even paranoid in the house. Nobody was allowed into his room, and he would rig up some matches in his door so he could see if anyone had gone in while he was away. If he’d see me anywhere near his room, he’d say, “What are you doing up there?”

“I live up here, Cus. I live here,” I’d answer.

One time, me and Tom Patti and Frankie, two other boxers who were living at the house, went out. Cus didn’t trust anyone with keys, because we might lose them and then some stranger would have access to the house. When we came home and knocked on the door, there was no answer. I looked in the window and Cus had fallen asleep in his favorite plush chair with the TV blasting because he was half deaf. Tom figured that the time to knock was when the show went to commercial and there were a couple seconds of silence. So at exactly that moment we all banged on the window and yelled, “Cus!! Cus!!” In one-thousandth of a second, Cus did a one-eighty, dropped down, bent over at the waist, with his left hand bracing himself, ready to pop up with the right hand to knock the intruder out. We were all on the floor, laughing hysterically.

Another time, one of the sparring partners who was staying there snuck out during the night to go to town. Tom and I woke up early in the morning and we were going downstairs to get breakfast. We looked in the living room and Cus was on the floor doing an army crawl with his rifle in his hand. The guy had come home and knocked on the window and Cus probably thought it was some IBC guy after him. Tom and I stepped over him and walked into the kitchen to get some cereal.

I could go on and on with Cus stories. He was that unique and colorful a cat. But the best description of Cus I’ve ever heard was in an interview that the great writer Gay Talese gave to Paul Zuckerman, a young man who was researching a book about Cus.

“He was a Roman warrior two thousand years too late. Warriors like war, need war, that’s the atmosphere in which they feel most at home. In times of peace, they are restless and useless men they think. They like to stir up a lot. Cus, like Patton, felt alive when there was confusion, intrigue, a sense of impending battle. He felt most engaged with himself then, his nerve endings, his brainpower was most alive and he felt most fulfilled when he was in a state of agitation. And if it wasn’t there, he had to create or heighten it. If it was simmering, he had to turn up the flames to feel fully alive. It gave him a high. He was an activist, he needed action.”

Cus was a general and I was his soldier. And we were ready to go to war.

I was this useless Thorazined-out nigga who was diagnosed as retarded and this old white guy gets ahold of me and gives me an ego. Cus once said to me, “Mike, if you were sitting down with a psychiatrist and they asked you, ‘Are you hearing voices?’ You’re going to say no, but the voices are telling you to say no, aren’t they?” Cus was such a deep guy. No one ever made me more conscious of being a black man. He was so cold hard, giving it to me like a bitter black man would. “They think they’re better than you, Mike,” he’d say. If he saw somebody with a Fiat or a Rolls-Royce, he’d look at me and say, “You could get that. That’s not the hardest thing in the world to do, getting wealthy. You’re so superior to those people. They can never do what you are capable of doing. You got it in you. You think I would tell you this if you didn’t have it in you? I could probably make you a better fighter but I couldn’t make you champion.”

Whoa. I always thought I was shit. My mother had told me I was crap. Nobody had ever said anything good about me. And here’s this dude saying, “I bet you if you try, you could win an Oscar. You’d be just as good an actor as you’d be a boxer. You want to be a race-car driver? I bet you’d be the best race-car driver in the world; you’re smarter and tougher than those guys. You could conquer any world. Don’t use that word ‘can’t.’ You can’t say ‘can’t.’ ”

When I got discouraged, as I often did, Cus would massage my mind with thoughts of an exotic world with great treasures. Everything he said was foreign to me, but I liked the sound of it.

“All you have to do is listen to me,” he’d say. “People of royal descent will know your name. Do you hear what I’m saying to you, boy? The whole world will know who you are. Your family name will reign. People will respect your mother, your family, your children. When you enter a room, people will stand up and give you an ovation.”