Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography by Mike Tyson Page 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?

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.