Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  “Get me Clay,” Joe said.

  “You deaf? Clay can’t get a license.”

  “Just this then,” Joe said. “No even split on the money when he does. No way.”

  “What’s this now?” Yank asked. “Before, you wanna give him your house.”

  “I don’t care. That’s it.”

  “No, it ain’t. You got stockholders. You fight, they count.” Yank eyed him closely. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Nothin’,” Joe said. “He’s a bad man.”

  “Maybe somebody’ll kill him before he’s back,” Yank cracked. “Save us the trouble.”

  “I hope not,” Joe said.

  Shortly after being stripped of the opportunity to fight, Ali made one of the smartest moves of his career by marrying Belinda Boyd on August 17, 1967. The event immediately decreased his exposure to sexual trouble, curbed desires that would have led him into contact with unsavory women, for since Sonji he had become a determined hunter of sexual favor. Sex was never far from his thoughts. The official Muslim doctrine had an austere view of sexual behavior. Through sex, men lost control of their lives; answer to physical needs frequently, and you were answering to the lower beast of self; discipline was elevation. Adultery brought inquisitional techniques like flogging back at the temples.

  Abstinence would “mark me as a great man in history,” Ali said in an interview with Alex Haley. He said he had always had two big, pretty women beside him after each fight. The Muslims had saved him from reprobation. Plucking the words right from Elijah’s mouth, he said: “The downfall of so many great men is that they haven’t been able to control their appetite for women.” Of course, Elijah and most of his top lieutenants were energetic seducers of young women for many years preceding this.

  “Oh, and you have?” asked Haley.

  “We Muslims don’t touch a woman unless we’re married to her,” Ali said curtly.

  With a straight face, Haley continued: “Are you saying that you don’t have affairs with women?”

  “I don’t even kiss none,” he said, “because you get too close, it’s almost impossible to stop. I’m a young man, you know, in the prime of life.” There was a mildly plaintive tone to his recitation of sexual trials: women—white and black—forever dogging him, knocking at his door in the early morning; others sending him pictures and phone numbers, begging for a call or secretarial work. “I’ve even had girls,” he said, “come up here wearing scarves on their heads, with no makeup and all that, trying to act like young Muslim sisters. But the only catch was that a Muslim sister wouldn’t do that.” It was reverse psychology; he invariably melted at the sight of a smart, wriggling figure. Sonji had released the satyr that he would come to be. By 1967, there was little left of his comic and innocent rectitude; he was an indiscriminate sexual marksman.

  Even though he didn’t drink or keep late hours, a big name like Ali, footloose and adrift from his center, was perfect for victimization, whether through sexual traps or flash violence from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were no more Muslim bodyguards. With the prospect of jail and being all alone—a condition he could never bear with any poise—he needed ballast. By agreeing to marry him, Belinda gave him domestic grounding. He was heavy duty for any woman, let alone a seventeen-year-old, herself in the daily turbulence of change, suddenly thrust in with a wild libido and an atomic ego.

  But Belinda was not an ordinary young girl. For one thing, it was hard to imagine her ever having yanked the string on a Barbie doll, black or white, and hearing: “What should I wear to the prom tonight?” Where she went to school there were no such dances, and such a doll, hardly permitted, would not have matched her exterior—tall, attractively handsome, and distant, silent eyes that measured and probed. She was the acme of Ali’s then perfect woman: a sturdy Muslim sister of lineage, a pureblood in Ali’s eyes, one who knew her place, would fetch for him and bear his children steadily with robotic precision; in sum, a woman without temperament or complaint. But Belinda had a tone of demand, a flicker of independence to her voice. Seeing his autograph, she told him to “learn to write and read properly.”

  Belinda recounted how Ali pressed her hard for premarital sex, even bringing the equal of Vatican authority to the problem. The son of Elijah, his own manager, Herbert Muhammad himself, “said it was okay.” He’d have done better introducing the name of someone who ran an escort service. Herbert! Never mind whether or not old Elijah fiddled in the mansion, and Herbert wafted through the streets like an unchained sexual melody, Belinda Boyd would not defy her Muslim teachings; besides, her parents would turn her into one of whitey’s Boston cream pies if they ever found out. Ali would have to take a cold shower. If she had been suspicious of Herbert, an old family friend, she would now not trust him at all.

  The couple settled in a small South Chicago house. Belinda was real bunker material. She was not afraid of hardship. She sewed her own clothes, cooked, and each morning Ali drove her to school. Later she would become proficient in karate—regrettably, for Ali—and study photography. Right now, she was learning to type so she could answer his letters. In ankle-length Muslim dress around the house, she was of impenetrable visage, polite and careful to his each stage mark for a Muslim wife when around reporters. “Belinda doesn’t talk much,” it was pointed out to him. He answered rather proudly: “That’s ’cause she ain’t got nothin’ to say. I do the talkin’.” What was his view of women—outside of a four-poster bed? “Our women,” he said, “should be honored, but they should understand their inferiority. Man gotta look down on women, and women up to men whether they standin’ up or layin’ down. I don’t take any sass.” He called out for his food: “Belinda! What you doin’ with that meal?” Soon eating, he called out again.

  “Belinda, bring me a diet Coke!”

  “Belinda, bring the steak!”

  “Belinda, bring the brown sugar!”

  Requests granted, he said: “The okra’s too runny. The steak’s too tough. Bring me the chicken.”

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  “Bring it anyway.”

  In company, she never sat at the table, and when he drove her to school, if there was a visitor, he ordered her into the backseat; forget about opening the door for her as she left. By every action, she seemed intent on showing the Muslim husband as disciplinarian, as the center of unrelieved attention. In the sixties, her kind of marital comportment attracted a blizzard of thrown bras. But a Muslim marriage, for a wife, was a delicate transaction: public servitude for private rule. Behind closed doors, he listened, she talked, much more as she got older, and her influence would not go unnoticed by Herbert Muhammad.

  Belinda was the easy part of the show, sincere and natural in her role. The trouble was that Ali could never find his character, or kept blurring the lines. What did he want the world to believe during this period of stress and trial, for he always wanted it to believe something. Like when he used to take a limo and chauffeur up to Harlem, stop it suddenly, go into a small joint and order a $1.50 hamburger, and then leave behind the desired effect: Yeah, brother, you got the machine, you got the steam, but you know where you come from. Politicians and evangelists have been working this corn forever. Anyway, for now, what he wanted to illustrate were a number of things: his true Muslim marriage; his self-reliance; the wall of Muslim caring and protectiveness around him; his supreme indifference to money and boxing, “a white European sport invented by lowdown animals.”

  And the press, he figured, would corroborate all of the above. If he held an impromptu press conference, he’d count heads: “Is the AP here? I see. The UPI? Good. Anybody from Time? No. Newsweek? No again. Guess they can’t make any money since I’m gone. Television? Where you from? Local or network?” The fare was standard—jokes, Muslim harangue—but sometimes he seemed to be trying out new material for maybe some college-speaking work. Intermarriage: “You want a kid with kinky hair? No, you don’t. And I don’t want any green-eyed blond kid, either. T
hat’s why I got a wife looks like me, so I have a kid looks like me.” Hate: “I ain’t got no hate. People that take my title, they the only ones got hate. People been lynchin’ us for a hundred years, they got the hate.” Hardship: “You see me starvin’? They ain’t gonna starve me out. Allah will provide. I give my wife money for us to eat that you all spend just for snacks in a week. We can eat on three dollars a day, she such a good cook.”

  By 1968 he was ready for the colleges, lined up for him by the Dick Fulton Speakers Bureau. He had worked hard on the little cards that contained his subject matter, gleaned from the Bible, the Qur’an, and Elijah’s messages. Belinda helped him with his writing and spelling. The lectures made him feel significant in a different way, that he was tossing nets into the sea for Elijah, that he was an inside player in some large conspiracy for right. “I loved it,” he remembered later, “meetin’ students, the black power groups, the white hippies, and we’d all have sessions and dinner was then planned in the hall, and we’d go to the Student Union buildin’ and I’d give my talk and then they’d ask me questions, all the boys and girls, black and white. Like what should we do, or what do you think is gonna happen, you know—just like I was one of those sleepy-lookin’ senators at the Capitol.”

  The audiences were not all so convivial or supportive. Some middle-class schools greeted him as a rather quaint figure, the Ivies examined him the way they would iridescent flora, while others saw him as the leading act of a touring revue. In the main, though, he was being heard, and he seldom lost the crowds. There were often snickers and loud hecklers, whom he fumbled with at first, then learned to handle with the ease of a nightclub comic. His rap was the usual that had appeared in one form or another over the years, now much smoother and elongated, delivered with the cadence of a ring-wise preacher. At a white college in Buffalo, he looked at the many signs behind his platform, reading: LBJ, HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? He wouldn’t speak until they were removed. He sniffed the air for the smell of pot.

  Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived—by the right and the left; he was reminiscent of the simple Chauncey Gardener in Being There by Jerzy Kosinski; for his every utterance, heavy breathing from the know-nothings to the trendy tasters of faux revolution. In the mangle of cross-purposes of the sixties, Ali looked down a clear sight. He was not about the antiwar movement; that was peripheral, a college-kid issue that he tolerated and used. “You see,” he’d say, going into his wallet, “I ain’t burned my draft card.” He was not about the counterculture, and certainly not women’s rights; in his view both were avenues of disintegration, if he ever thought about them at all. Ali was about Ali—for his right to work and the teachings of Elijah that nourished him.

  The “briefcase of truth” that he took on the road was given other resonance. Each group would attach their own values to him, just as Chauncey’s talk of topsoil and the life cycle of the rhododendron was inflated into comic wisdom. Being There could be seen as a remark on the sixties, the willingness, the desperation to believe anybody in the face of intellectually destitute leaders, searching, confused, perhaps evil in blind resolution. Ali could not have picked a better time for campus exposure. The social and political climate finally matched him stride for stride. An old America had abused his rights and isolated him, now a new one was suddenly by his side. It was a sky lit with the celebration of chaos. The atmosphere was caught perfectly by Saul Bellow in his novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, when old Sammler, eternal student of the mind and friend of H. G. Wells, was pressed into talking about the British scene of the thirties at Columbia University.

  He hardly begins when a voice starts to attack him, shouting: “Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter-revolutionary.” The young man turns to the crowd, shouts again: “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.” Sammler was struck by the will to offend. Bellow writes: “What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency. All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing. Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler had once read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below.” Days later Sammler, having twice spotted a black pickpocket in his act on a bus, is followed into the empty lobby of his apartment house. The black pickpocket hurls him against the wall, grabs him by the neck. He does not intend to kill the old man. He simply pulls out his large penis and makes Sammler look down at it; the thing is shown with a “mystifying certitude”; black power is irrefutable, old America.

  Ali drifted back into the news in December when he was picked up for driving without a valid license. He spent seven days in a Miami jail where, according to a fellow inmate eager to sell information, he wrinkled his nose at the food and spent much time looking wistfully out of a window. A taste of jail sobered him—privately. “It’s a baaaad place,” he said. “You get lousy food. You think of home, you think of people walkin’ around free.” But Washington insiders precluded any jail time down the road for him, so charged was the public atmosphere; he wasn’t just a Muslim anymore; he had become incorporated into the whole fabric of civil and uncivil disobedience. Tex Maule told Ali of a discussion he had had with a key figure in the Justice Department. After Martin Luther King’s death and the riots, Tex related to him, “Putting you in jail would be politically stupid, though you’ll have to play it through the courts.” He looked at Tex with wonder. “Why should I believe they got smart just like that?” he replied. “They been so stupid so long.” To Tex, he appeared agitated over being reduced to a minor role when told of the government’s disinterest in jail time “when I got more of a followin’ than Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton put together.” No, being a bit player with major legal bills, and facing more, was too bizarre even for Ali’s mind. “Ohhhhh no,” Ali said, “I’m still beeeeg trouble in their minds. If I wasn’t, they’d give me back my passport.” The usual fate of saints did not elude him. “I could get killed any minute,” he told Maule, almost too agreeably. “All eyes are on me,” he said. “Ain’t it somethin’ to see. I don’t miss the ring.”

  He did miss the money, though his financial condition was hardly that of a robin pecking at the ground. Herbert, his manager, was hardly a financial guardian angel at this time. While Ali said he could be put on railroad tracks with a hobo’s stick and Allah would lead him to “gold on the train,” Herbert was less than convinced. Once he went to Herbert and said: “I am looking for Allah to do something. I am his servant. Allah, they’re punishing your servant!” Herbert had no answer. If he missed the big money, it was because it pinched his style; a contemporary, blossoming prophet needed to be munificent, money dispensed added a glow to the prophet’s robes. He was not being trampled over by mendicants, and was hardly suffocated by so-called friends who had long since fled. But he repeatedly stressed the importance of the $500 to $1,000 college talks. Yet it was hard to gauge how marginal he was. He would show up and tell a reporter that he just bought a new silver limousine for $10,000, “I mean cash, baby.” Then, he would express shock over a cleaning bill. “Got to be a place cheaper,” he’d say, then take the writer to a bakery and ask him for “thirty-five cents for a bean pie.”

  Ali knew the Muslim directive: he was to give no indication at all that he needed the white man’s fame or money or media. For all of his career, Ali thought most reporters were groupies content to be in his presence and fill notebooks with his gibberish, or if he thought they were clever they were no match for his own cleverness. He was suspicious of those who didn’t take down his every word. He was not concerned about accuracy; the note-taking process assured him that he was in command. Domination of content, the neutralization of hard questions by swarming nonsense, was what he was after. “Why aren’t you taking this down?” he’d often ask. A pencil and a no
tebook, worst of all, a tape recorder made him think that he was talking to millions.

  “People ain’t supposed to see I care anymore,” he said. He began to throw punches in front of a mirror, started to bob and weave around a glass coffee table, and put an opponent in with him; already he was looking down the road at Joe Frazier. He supplied narration, even the sound of the bell. Belinda came out and kept a steady eye on the coffee table. Before winning, Ali let Frazier knock him down in the second round, and he dropped with a thud to the floor, his legs twitching dramatically. He then disposed of Joe quickly and collapsed back onto the couch, puffing and laughing. “He’s always doing that,” said Belinda. “He’s crazy.”

  So, it was clear, he was still much more the fighter than the preacher; in a tenuous self, boxing was still irreducible. Later, I spent a few days with him in South Chicago. In these days he seemed unstrung, on an aimless search for the briefest reinforcement, from people in barber shops, bakeries, and the La Tease beauty shop filled with giggling women. One evening he ended up looking at his boxing gear. He said nothing about a past life, simply wrote with his finger M. Ali on the patina of dust on a boxing glove. He looked at it absently, then said abruptly: “Let’s take a ride. I got some business.”

  The tawny Cadillac Eldorado moved on the highway toward Milwaukee. He was eerily silent (for him) and kept looking at the speedometer. “Cops’ll put me in jail for anything.” He continued on, then finally said, “You don’t ever ask questions?”