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