The other day I was sitting front row with Habana´s 2nd coach and a kid from the gym I train at over here pulled up a chair. ¨Hola Gringo Tyson¨. So I nod and slap his hand. ¨Joo know I saw Mike Tyson een Habana. Doo years beefoo¨ ¨Yeah?¨ ¨He berry strong but fat. Muy triste tambien.¨
I know he´s sad. But it´s weird when anybody drops his name around me. I only picked up a book because of him. Fifteen in a house full of books, both my parents live more in books than in their homes, seemed a pretty good way to fuck'em over. Fuck myself over. Tyson was interviewed in jail back in 95 and a french interviewer asked him what he was doing with his time. He said reading. Especially in solitary confinement. What are you reading, Mike? Voltaire, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Dumas. Why, Mike? Out of boredom more than anything. I´m not on a quest for knowledge.
I wanted to know what a convicted rapist was doing reading that sorta thing. What use did a living nightmare have with good books?
Tyson´s a strange one. Havana has a nightmarish quality. A poetry about it that´s spooky in its purity. Like some little girl looking at you in a sexual way. You can´t stop thinking about how this place is one man´s struggle for 50 years, his life´s work, a very poetic one against a country that no matter what you say about it has some truth. One guy, who went up into a mountain with a handful of othere guys after his boat crashed into the shore here, and he came down 2 years later and has been the Man for 50 years.
Tyson was the most picked on kid in his neighborhood in the Bedsty in Brooklyn. "Faggot Mike" was his name until he puffed up to 190 pounds when he was 12 and became "Big Head Mike" when he rolled with a gang called the "Jolly Stompers". He lisped, he had no friends, he spoke in a high girlish-voice, his parents where drunks. He had nobody and nothing and knew he´d end up dead before he was 17. The only thing he had was pigeons on the roof of an abandoned tenement that he liked to fly because of the colors they made against the sky and that they were free.
One day a kid followed him up there and saw that this was what Mike cared about and he went over, opened the cage and Mike begged him not to hurt the bird and the kid laughed and literally ripped the pigeons head off and laughed. And for the first time in Tyson´s life, he stood up to a bully and pummeled him. And I think that´s what always interested me about Tyson. One time somebody asked him why everybody cares so much about a train wreck happening over and over in Tyson´s life. Tyson said it was simple, ¨I´m angelic.¨ And I looked at him very closely after he said it and realized he was the only one who GOT IT. Only somebody as innocent as Tyson obviously is---he looks like a baby all the time, he can´t hide a single emotion and they hit you like a baby´s-- could become something, twisted, into such evil and rage. Which is why it kinda makes sense the US is so fascinated by him. Nobody gets the purest virgins becoming the purest whores---if you apply a little rape into the equation---like they do.
One time somebody asked Tyson what fighting really was to him. ¨What are notes to Beethoven, or words to Hemingway, or theory to Einstein... It´s aggression.¨
I told my dad that after I heard it and it took him 30 seconds before he could even reply, ¨Tyson said that?¨
But boxing gets you down here. I mean, back in the US when they first introduced gassing a convinct as a means of humane execution---gee whiz who woulda thought that a black guy was the first one they tested on it---they recorded what was said in the chamber. ¨Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis....¨ I see the looks in their eyes down here watching champions stroll out to the ring and it´s that same quality of devotion. It hurts to see it a little. Because a guy selling gum on the street is making the same as a world champion. And they both know and respect it.
We´ll catch up with some boxing in a sec.
Two cycles here... Dawn with Hitchcock birds by the 1000´s in the trees yelling as loud as a highschool caferteria. Coffee thermoses poured by old women huddled in doorways into shot glasses then flipped into plastic cups. Geezers peddling newspapers. The free birthday cakes being biked around to kids (when I found out that it´s by law that kids 16 and under get cake... I was sold on this place). The fisherman dot the Malecon and smoke while they watch to see one point bobbing in the ocean drop. It´s a good town to write in.
Then night time. I tried calling a girl back home---that feels funny to say considering she´s in my country and I´m in her hometown over here---but when they put me on hold this classical number started and I was sure it was Chopin even though I´d never heard it before. They told me her number was restricted but I kept badgering the operator, WHO IS THIS COMPOSER? QUIENES ESTO! QUIENES ESTO! ¨I danno, sir.¨ ¨Find out, woman!¨ ¨What composer?¨ So I called back and get put on hold and dragged the doctor who owns the house I´m living in downstairs and jammed the phone against his ear. ¨AHHHHhhhhh...¨ ¨Chopin?¨ ¨No... Cuban. From the 30´s.¨ He tried to put it on the stereo but he had no batteries. I ran out and bought some and he played the same song in it´s entirety.
Then boxing. Fuck I was humming on-hold-song all the way down here to Old Havana for the 2nd to last day of the nationals of boxing. It´s capped off on wedsneday but the night fights are the hometown kids. They fight Gitmo tonight. And Felix Savon coaches them, the 3X olympic champ with meathooks the size of cantalopes. All he does is walk around shaking hands. And what impresses me more than anything is how he has this immensely bright say-cheese smile for every photo he gives. The best boxer in Cuban history, Teofillo Stevenson, was offered a million bucks in the 70´s to defect and turn pro and have his first fight against Ali. All he said was, ¨What´s a million dollars against the love of eight million Cubans?¨ Five hundred of them make more noise in Kid Chocolate than a Canucks game during the playoffs.
The final fight a man from the crowd rushed down the stands with a towel in his hands, dashed across the gym floor and hurled his town into the ring in protest of the beating the hometown champ was giving to a kid from the countryside. The crowd roared approval and roared louder when the cops hauled him off but the fight WAS stopped. And the tossed guy raised his hands in triumph just before he was dragged out of view and everybody applauded...
But after, when it sinks in, is the musicans in the forest at night. Always alone. Sillouttes with a trumpet extending playing Miles or Bird or their own thing. I like their own thing better. Cause when they play Miles or John Coltrane, it just reminds you that some artists hunt feelings as if they were butterflies and all they use is their finger tips. Copycats use a net. And it has holes. But when they go off on their own thing I get to go off on my own thing... and it´s a little less lonely under the stars.
And along the Malecon it´s better still. The kids glaze the cement, sticky in embrace, with waves just over the edge. And I heard one trumpet, lodged between two fisherman playing and it reminded me of my favorite animal, the bullfrog. The bullfrog´s love call plays out over the swamp and it´s such a sweet song that despite it garnering 1000´s of female bullfrogs who pile in for groupie privledges... the bullfrog keeps singing. Because he forgets in the beauty of his song that it´s intended as a mating call... and he just wants to keep listening to himself. The trumpeter I was listening to had some tourists gathered for him but he never paid the least bit of attention. People came out to their windows to see him but you couldn´t see him. Just hear. And turning a corner to head back down a narrow shit-smelling street he was still there, the song winding along with me for company in the dark...
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