The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Jesus, this is promising.

  Let’s just watch. We can talk afterwards.

  Why didn’t he put his name on it?

  He was worried about the reaction. And he was right to worry. They showed it on some student festival and there was a big gedoente.

  Why don’t I know about this?

  Give me that. She takes the remote and stops the film just as some blurry heads and hands begin to materialize on screen. You were caught up with other things, Branks. It’s not surprising.

  So what was the fuss about?

  The subject matter and him being a white film-maker. People thought he didn’t have the right. They thought it was exploitative.

  Is it?

  How do I know? She hits rewind and the film starts again. OVERKILL. A film by Juwardi X. A speculative documentary about death.

  It’s hard to say what it’s about. Mainly it seems to be home-movie footage from the family archive – he’s been snooping around my hard drives, the little shit – intercut with the cheerier parts of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There’s cellphone footage of me and Rita going over the household budget intercut with the bicycle scene. Paul Newman in the saddle, Katharine Ross on the handlebars. Now he’s showing off – look ma, no hands – while she watches from the barn. The soundtrack’s been stripped out but ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ plays in the back of my mind. I fell in love with Katharine Ross when I saw this as a teenager. I would get horny thinking of her while I gazed at Kathy van Deventer who sat in front of me in Guidance. Nothing seems to fit. And there’s Jordan when he played a wizard in the school play and Katharine Ross as Etta Place in the schoolroom. I want to hear what she’s telling the kids but it’s drowned out by some hectic bass piece. Could be the Prisoners of Strange.

  Now the pace changes and the screen becomes bloody. Surgical procedures. In graphic detail, as they say.

  I think it’s Botched, Rita says, that’s the one about people who’ve fucked up their bodies with cosmetic surgery.

  Is it about me? The surgeon as editor. Or rather the editor as surgeon.

  It’s about body image, she says.

  A close-up of a scalpel cutting through belly fat that’s been marked up like a dress pattern with dotted lines and arrows.

  Or maybe it’s My Extreme Excess Skin, she says. Isn’t it sad that some people just can’t accept themselves for who they are.

  A nurse in a green overall hefts a huge fillet of skin and fat into a plastic tub and waits for the needle on the scale to settle.

  And here’s my brother Joe talking at a launch in a book shop. I haven’t seen a moving image of him since he died and it’s like a punch in the face. A linger-on left.

  Who’s that he’s talking to?

  Beats me. Is it Jackie Wetzler?

  I wish I could hear what he’s saying.

  Music surges over this footage also. Agonized sax, John Zorn perhaps. Jordan’s been plundering my music files too. I must tell him that sometimes the sound you expect is exactly the sound you need.

  A couple of shots of Ali and Foreman. What the fuck! I say. That’s my stuff. He’s rumbling in my jungle.

  It’s not about boxing, Rita says, it’s about state violence and the violence of capital, and also the violence of the image and the violence done to the black body. That’s how he explained it.

  We watch in silence.

  It’s pretty good, she says.

  Sure.

  She turns the volume down. What do you think, Branks? Really.

  Well, it’s the work of a young film-maker, you can see that. It’s a bit obvious and strung out. And it meanders. He doesn’t have much of a sense of story, but then the story isn’t everything, never mind what the manuals say. Main thing is he’s got a good eye. And a good ear.

  Got that from you.

  It has an air of menace, which I like. There I am just pottering around the house in my slippers and he makes me look like a serial killer.

  There’s a commotion in the hallway and Jordan and Nomz spill in. I hit the pause button.

  Hi Mr B. I wish she’d stop that. Hi Reet.

  Thought you’d gone to a movie, Rita says.

  Changed our minds, he says, went for a walk instead.

  They slump down on the other sofa and I catch a whiff of smoke and peppermint. Nomz has been around here a lot over the last few months. She’s practically living under our roof. He looks at the screen where a blurred image of Joe is suspended and I can tell he recognizes it. It could be the one they published on the front page of The Star the day after he died.

  What are you guys watching?

  Butch Cassidy and My Old Man.

  No shit. You finally got around to it.

  It’s pretty good. I’m impressed.

  Ja, but he’s moved on, Nomz says. His new stuff’s quite different.

  Really. What are you working on Jord?

  Well, I’m writing now. It’s a feature. But I don’t like to talk about it. That’s what Uncle Joe taught me.

  We all stare at Joe’s face on the screen. He must have been turning away, fast enough to blur his features, and it looks as if he’s just been shot.

  Let’s watch the rest of it. Rita’s timing is perfect: she knows what to do in moments like this. She jabs the remote and the image comes back to life.

  Now footage of a man in a car driving. It could be me, actually. The garage lent us a Corolla when the SUV was in the shop. But that was a white car: this one is grey. We’re in the last act. The surgery has been put behind us. Newman and Redford are holed up in Bolivia surrounded by cops. Meanwhile, back in South Africa, the miners are on the koppie at Marikana. Is ‘meanwhile’ the right word? I’ve seen this footage of the massacre many times before, but it’s different now that it’s no longer news. The man in the car is still driving. Who is it? It might be my brother rather than me. Where did Jordan find it? Perhaps he filmed it himself, which means he must have gone driving around with Joe, and I don’t remember that. As the nyalas rumble into the frame, dragging trailers packed with concertina wire, and the cops in body armour stalk over the veld with their rifles at the ready, the old dread chills me to the bone, and I’m back in the car on the night Joe died with water coming down on the roof in chunks like spadefuls of earth. Doef doef doef. The music punches through the afternoon light. The miners creep past some thorn bushes, crouching as if they’re invisible, as if they’ve lost their way in the dark. There’s the Man in the Green Blanket. We saw him on the news. The soldiers pour in and take up position on rooftops and ramparts, rifles pointed. Inside Butch is hatching one last escape plan. Butch: They speak English in Australia. Sundance: They do? Butch: That’s right, smart guy, so we wouldn’t be foreigners. In Marikana the police line moves backwards as if the film has been reversed. There’s a shanty, some twisted fence posts, a thorn tree. Butch and Sundance break through the doorway, guns blazing, and freeze. Now it’s the jackhammer thud of automatic rifle fire. Nomz must have seen this too, but she gasps and presses her face into Jordan’s shoulder. The image jerks back into life. Or rather death. The miners twist and fall. The hail of bullets sounds like stones down a chute. Cease fire! In films people often die in slow motion but these men are cut down quickly, they jerk and drop, and are lost in the dust kicked up by bullets and falling bodies. The fusillade goes on.

  The credits roll over black. The last gunshots have turned into a dead march and the soft wet suck of a boot sole lifting out of mud in a narrow stope.

  We are flung about on the sofas like accident victims. Rita leans over and switches on the table lamp. Lights a cigarette. We have an agreement that she won’t smoke in the house but this is not the time to make a point.

  Nomz takes a cigarette too. As she speaks the smoke comes out of her mouth in acrid syllables. You see, Mr B, this is what I’m trying to tell you
. You say it doesn’t matter what colour the body is and I say it’s everything. We know what happens to Butch and Sundance, it’s in the books, but they won’t show it to us. It’s like Princess Diana in the car crash in Paris. Those paparazzi got nowhere. But who cares about these men? They may as well be cattle. Do you see what I mean, Mr B?

  I’m not sure I do. I can’t tell if she’s criticizing the film or coming to its defence. Rita said there was a fuss about it, people thought it was exploitative. Are these the scenes that upset them? Maybe there are things we can’t talk about and the retelling only redoubles the insult. The gunsmoke from the cigarettes drifts across the screen. Who do I mean by ‘we’? I look over her head into Juwardi’s face and for a moment I think we’re exchanging a meaningful glance, but then I see that his eyes are closed.

  Joe

  In the second half of 1975, the circus rolled on to the Philippines. Ali was scheduled to meet Joe Frazier for the third time in Quezon City, a fight he had dubbed the Thriller in Manila. Ali promised: It’ll be a killer and a chiller and a thriller when I get the Gorilla in Manila. He also promised to unleash a new weapon: I’m going to use a unique acupunch. I’ve been studying karate.

  The serious fans of the sport were sick of this nonsense. In the Johannesburg Sunday Express, Ray Woodley railed against the state of boxing in general and against Ali in particular. No one had the nerve to beat him, he said, to slay the golden glove of boxing, because it would ruin the financial fistic exchange…Ali is keeping boxing going, but at the same time he is destroying a once noble art.

  Woodley was annoyed that Joe Frazier had been invited to Johannesburg to watch the Fourie-Galindez return. He didn’t see what Frazier could add to the fistic scene. Instead he wished they’d invited the incomparable Joe Louis. I know Joe has had a few medical setbacks, but this writer would like nothing better than entertaining Louis. He was my hero as a schoolboy. Neither of them came.

  Although Ali was still generating columns by the yard – There, I filled your pad, he told reporters in Manila – the print media were no longer the heart of the enterprise. The socko of a lifetime, as Don King called it, was shaping up to be the largest single TV network show ever put together for a single sporting event, with a projected audience of over 700 million viewers. The satellite feed would go live to several Eastern Bloc countries and the USSR had taken a delayed broadcast. It was a long way from the two lines TASS gave the Fight of the Century four years earlier. China was still eluding Mr King.

  Ali arrived in the Philippines with no fewer than 38 handlers, helpers and walk-around guys. While this was smaller than the party of one hundred who had accompanied him to Malaysia, the numbers irked him. You’ve no idea what it costs to keep the Muhammad Ali show on the road. I pay my manager, my trainers, my family and my friends. In Kuala Lumpur, when I fought Joe Bugner, there were 52 people all signing my name to their account. Some of them I ain’t never seen before.

  The scribes still liked to cast the rivalry between Ali and Frazier as a clash of lifestyles and values, but the animosity between them no longer needed to be magnified in this way. Ali clowned around as usual, threatening Frazier with a toy gun and calling him a gorilla. I’m gonna make you uglier than you are. By all accounts, Frazier was deeply hurt by these jibes.

  Yet some of Ali’s exchanges with the press reveal a new openness and vulnerability. He told Alan Hubbard how hard it was to keep training, like taking medicine, he said, and how he struggled to keep his weight down. If I didn’t train I’d be big as a balloon…I’m a compulsive eater. And he spoke about his fear of dying. And about fate. Things have been going too good lately. Allah must make me pay for all this fame and power.

  He was paying already. His private life, if one can call it that, began to spill into the media. The main focus was on the spats between his wife Belinda and his girlfriend Veronica Porché, whom he would subsequently marry. Ali defended his philandering: Belinda was well off, she had two Rolls-Royces and a large mansion, and in any event, there was no such thing as bad publicity. Bravado aside, like many celebrities since, he still believed his engagement with the media was governed by rules of fairness and propriety that would keep certain subjects off limits. This is going too far. They got on me for the draft. They got on me for my religion. They got on me for all sorts of things. But they shouldn’t be able to get on me for having a girlfriend.

  The Sunday Times reported that the fight was now being discussed in the women’s pages of the papers and millions of women were rooting for Frazier. Male chauvinists are in full cry. Women libbers are outraged.

  Ray Woodley again accused Ali of making a mockery of the once noble art of self defence. He was especially upset by the shenanigans around Cousin Veronica. Woodley wrote plaintively: I am one of those old-fashioned fellows who still has fistic heroes like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, who did not need the sort of publicity Ali is generating for his fight with Frazier this week. Those champions of the past lived in monastic seclusion when they trained for their title defences.

  On the subject of women, Ali did see eye to eye with President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, who entertained him at the Presidential Palace. When Mrs Marcos came in, wearing a simply cut, hot-pink dress, Ali said: I respect you more than ever…Looking at your wife, I know you are not a dumb man. You know how to pick them.

  You are not far behind, Marcos responded, referring to Ali’s companion, who was wearing a long, pale-yellow skirt with a veil modestly wrapped over her hair.

  We’re kinda nice looking ourselves, said Ali.

  Then the two men discussed the role of women in marriage. A woman is what her husband makes her, Ali said with a glance at Mrs Marcos. A man is what he makes himself.

  Perhaps his marital problems were on his mind, because he went on, If we got a divorce, you would still be the President, and I would still be the world champion.

  Marcos pointed out that there was no divorce in his Roman Catholic country.

  Ali did not feel compelled to mention that the woman in the veil was his girlfriend rather than his wife.

  Later Joe Frazier arrived. Ali thoughtfully advised the President to keep an eye on his wife while Smokin’ Joe was around.

  Despite gloomy predictions to the contrary, the Thriller was a great fight, criticized by some as a bit of a brawl, but praised by others as one of Ali’s best performances. Frazier’s corner threw in the towel after the fourteenth.

  This is Hubbard’s livid description of Frazier in the closing stages of the fight: His face had become a swollen soufflé of pain and contusion, lanced repeatedly from the 10th round onwards by Ali’s unmatchable left jab and a right which flashed across his features like an adder’s lick.

  Ali was scarcely in better shape. Dave Anderson attended the reception held by Marcos for the boxers after the fight. Writing in the Pretoria News under the headline ‘Ali never looked like this before’, he said Ali was swollen, bruised, walking stiffly, almost limping. The swelling would go down, Ali said, he wasn’t feeling too bad. But his right hip hurt. He hit me with his left hook there. That stops you from dancin’, stops you from moving. Frazier had gone to work on his kidneys and every other body part he could reach.

  If there weren’t many smooth moves in the ring, there were plenty at the reception. It was quite a party. The Temptations sang some recent hits like ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and some classics like ‘Old Man River’. Mrs Marcos opened the dancing with Don King.

  Before the Thriller, a few articles had questioned the ethics of taking a $3 million purse from the government of a country with a per-capita annual income of $240 (then about R168). But no one was bothered by the boxers’ cosy relationship with Marcos. Nor had much been said about the jokey camaraderie with Mobutu in Zaire, where Ali stayed in the villa built for the dictator by the Chinese and lounged about on his yacht.

  Over the years a pattern had been established in the pre
ss. In the same edition that carried the reports on any given fight, or in the paper published the following day, the speculation would start about Ali’s next assignment. This was no exception. The final article on the Thriller – and in the archive – is by Alan Hubbard and its headline asks a question: ‘Ali swansong in Haiti?’

  The day after the fight, Don King was busy, meeting diplomats and dignitaries from around the world, all keen to present tenders from governments and financial consortiums for the next big fight (probably against Ken Norton). King was considering a bid from Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti and had been invited to inspect the facilities in Port-au-Prince (presumably the sports venues and hotels rather than the cells where political opponents were tortured and starved to death). There was interest also from Indonesia, Munich, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Teheran. As Hubbard put it, the globe-trotter in gloves would take the spectacle to wherever a prime minister seeks votes or a president international prestige. King liked the look of Haiti. I’ll be interested to hear what they have to say.

  And that was that. My love affair with Ali had run its course. I fell out of love with America too; perhaps it was the same thing. Distracted by new ideas about the world, exhausted by the sheer volume of hype, increasingly sceptical about the circus, I threw in the towel. It was a good time to close the bracket: from the Fight of the Century to the Thriller in Manila.

  This last set of cuttings on the Thriller, gathered at some point into a cardboard folder and labelled ALI VII for the sake of consistency, shows the predictable imbalance, with five times as many articles on the buildup than on the fight itself. Scattered among them are the usual stories with a South African spin. In mid-1975, film producer John Marshall was in Johannesburg to negotiate South African rights on a proposed Ali biopic with retail tycoon Tony Factor. Marshall, who had made documentaries on tennis player Stan Smith and on Arthur Ashe’s visit to South Africa in 1973, was a lucky man according to one report. For years, movie moguls with an interest in Ali’s life story had bumped their heads on a Black Muslim iron-curtain. It was not surprising that Marshall had leapt at the offer like a shipwrecked sailor being offered a four-course dinner. He wanted Al Pacino to play Angelo Dundee and had his eye on Diana Ross and Charlton Heston. The lead role? Ali is a natural to play himself.