Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  “’Cause I know the answers, maybe.”

  “You don’t know any answers. What color is God?”

  “Which is why I don’t ask you questions.”

  “You’re poor company,” he said.

  “All right, how’s your money situation?”

  “I got more money than you.”

  “That’s not hard.”

  “What else you got?”

  “All right, they’re going to the moon soon. That’s amazing, don’t you think? Kind of makes you feel tiny. How ’bout you?”

  “Not me, it don’t,” he said. “Black men put the moon up sixty trillion years ago, and…”

  “Oooops, wrong question.”

  “And there weren’t no white trash on the planet then. Whites just learnin’ ’bout gravity. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that black men drilled a hole in the earth, and with high explosives caused a piece to go into space. That piece is now the moon. Can’t nobody live on it. No water. When the white man goes up there, his eyes’ll pop out or sumpin.” He paused, adding with finality: “God is a black man!”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “He could be a porpoise.”

  “A what?”

  “A porpoise. It’s said they’re smart.”

  “God’s a porpoise!” he said. “You gonna go straight to hell sayin’ that.”

  Did he give $135,000 to the Chicago mosque?

  “There you go. Changin’ the subject. You always do it. We’re talkin’ ’bout a porpoise, and now you’re in my wallet.” He thought for a second, then said, “If I did, just like you puttin’ money in your church collection.”

  “I don’t go to church.”

  He said: “You not goin’ straight to hell. You already there.”

  “If eyes will pop on the moon,” he was asked, “there must be a lot of eyes you’d like to see pop here.”

  “I’d fill the moon ship with white women,” he said. “They dangerous. They lure you in with them smiles. But they’ll never get me. Then, on the second trip, I’d load it up with all those kinky-headed half-black niggers from mixed marriages.”

  “You’re not so dark yourself.”

  “Never mind that. My soul…it’s as black as night.”

  “You got business in Milwaukee?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, the only business I got now.” He added: “Just think, we get in a bad accident in the city. To die in Milwaukee. When I’ve been ’round the world. You…they not even goin’ to know you’re dead. It just be Ali this, Ali that. What was he doin’ in Milwaukee? Always a mystery, Ali.” He paused: “Nobody gonna remember you ever. Not even a church, ’cause you got a porpoise for a God.”

  We drove along in silence for about five miles, and he said: “Tell the truth, I shook you up. You’re thinkin’, ‘Suppose he wraps me round a phone pole, who gonna care ’bout me?’ What you need to do is get you a God like me. Life is a scary place, even when you the king of the world like me.”

  “The king of the barbershops.”

  He folded his upper teeth over his lower lip as he always liked to do to show humor, cocked his left fist, while keeping his right hand on the wheel. “You talk like that,” he said, “we are gonna have an accident.”

  “No, I was just thinking of your immortality. I figure for ten years. After you’re dead.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “We just flies, aren’t we? Just a whooooosh from God, and we’re dead all over the place, and soon all them flies that knew you, they all gone, too. Ain’t the world strange.”

  We arrived in Milwaukee, and I kept waiting for him to park and go into a hotel or someplace to conduct his business. Instead, he kept cruising up and down the main street, around and around, the car now like some traveler lost in a fog bank. He’d pull up to a red light, turn full face to the car idling next to him, and wait for recognition, and there never was any, and he’d go around again, lingering at the lights, his eyes silent and almost intense as if he were searching for witnesses to his existence, then after a while his silence turning into rapid speech and sound as he reproduced the thwack of gloves tracking toward his face; the feel of first sweat snaking down his back; the comradeship of the gym; the feel of a punch shivering up his arm. For a moment, it was as if he wanted to get out and stand in the middle of the traffic, so confounded was he that not one pair of eyes had met his and said, “Yes, you can’t fool me, I know who you are.” A cold, ineffable sadness billowed the curtains of the mind as he finally headed back toward the highway and Chicago, and there was no need to point out what he had done because he was now saying that he had made the trip several times in the past, going nowhere, around and around, and if there was a larger meaning he kept it concealed in what seemed a migratory soul—as the midnight car lights streaked across a quiet face, and he said only one sentence the entire trip back: “I know I’ll never fight again.”

  It was now almost two years into his exile. He was handling it with grace. The crucial point was to stay out of trouble; being picked up in Miami with an invalid license was more a reflection of FBI–local police targeting, an effort to make something happen, and they must have been badly disappointed when they didn’t find a gun or drugs that could be used to discredit him. It was rumored that he had once carried a gun for a few hours, then threw it in a river. If so, that would follow; real violence had always spooked him, and the sight of a gun in his hand or pocket would have rattled his consciousness to unbearable distraction; likewise with drugs, for even an aspirin was foreign to him. So, with the help of Belinda, he was doing more than holding his own, he was surviving with dignity. And the college lectures were keeping him afloat financially, though the money hardly supported the new limos that he said he had just purchased. Nor did the college money give him any relief from his legal bills. There was no aid from the Muslims. In Elijah’s mind—not Herbert’s, the sonmanager—Ali’s life as a fighter was history, and good riddance. He did not have to worry about his food or domicile, the Muslims would provide. Elijah was going to make good Ali’s wish to be a $150-a-week minister. Ali would subsist for life at the Muslim table. “We’ll take care of you,” Elijah said, offering a fork at the Muslim table.

  As the months wore on, it became more difficult for Ali to disguise a growing anxiety. When someone like Ali could make one comment on a 70-mile trip back from Milwaukee, it was clear that a terrible frustration, if not depression, was beginning to overwhelm him. By now, his future as a fighter, his right to the title, began to dominate his conversations with Belinda during long drives to the colleges. “We were sure,” she said, “that he’d never fight again. It got to him in a bad way.” Early in 1969, he finally gave mild release to his frustration on a national TV talk show. He had appeared on these shows often before, full of japery and vows of never wanting to fight again. Now, asked once more if he would ever return to the ring, he answered: “Why not? If they come up with enough money.”

  The comment just about blew in the windows of the House of Elijah. To Elijah, it was more than doctrinal affront, it was a repudiation of his humble fork, it was an eager acceptance to the white man’s banquet. He summoned Ali to the mansion and, with Ali looking like a grave prelate, he defrocked him of whatever he was supposed to be. Ali was stripped of his Muslim name, suspended for a year, and generally denounced as a helpless fool, slithering on the floor in front of the feet of white power and money.

  In the Muslim newspaper Muhammad Speaks, Elijah elaborated in a statement: “We tell the world we’re not with Muhammad Ali,” he began, then went on to say that Ali could not “speak to, visit with, or be seen with any Muslim, or take part in any Muslim religious activity.” He described his actions as those of a fool, of someone who did not want his survival to come from Allah, but from his enemy, the white man. “Mr. Muhammad Ali,” he said, “has sporting blood. Mr. Muhammad Ali wants a place in this sport world. He loves it. We will call him Cassius Clay.”

  Th
e inconsistency of Elijah’s edict shouted for illumination. He had allowed Ali to fight as a minister. He had even let his son manage him. Muslim laws, that is Elijah’s, were in pieces already. Now, by his condemnation, he was fortifying the government’s case that Ali was not sincere in his beliefs. One of Ali’s lawyers was as befogged as everyone else: “It doesn’t make sense. No use in trying to figure it out, because we are not dealing with reasonable people.” Nor did it make much sense to Muslims close to Ali, who had done everything asked of him.

  His conviction appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court was at this point also pending, and Elijah’s casting Ali as an unworthy Muslim was bad timing. It probably had no impact on the denial of the appeal, but it compromised him badly to his detractors and doubters; there, you see, even Elijah was branding him as a phony. The appeal denial did not shake Ali; the old man’s excommunication did. He was contrite, puzzled, and now vowed to silence, for “talking too much has got me into this trouble.”

  He hadn’t talked too much. After all the frustration, Ali had only started to share Herbert’s optimism, suddenly fired by what he thought would happen legally. If Elijah was harsh and erratic with Ali, he didn’t glance at the culpability of Herbert, who should have been bounced, too. Prior to the appeal, Herbert seemed certain they would get a nolle prosequi (a refusal of the government to prosecute further), and three days before Elijah’s purging of Ali he was trying to arrange a fight. With that view on his mind, Ali took seriously to roadwork in the morning, and he understandably felt that his return was imminent, hence his response on TV. Herbert would ultimately misread the government and be caught off-guard by his father’s new slant on Muslim veracity. Ali said he was now going “to pray hard and study hard, no runnin’ ’round on television.” He was asked by a friend soon after, if he was still running in the morning. “Sure enough,” he said.

  Physically, he was trim, a man who looked like he was ready to fight with four to five weeks’ notice. Inwardly, he felt more bewildered and alone than ever. He was a laughingstock to his political enemies, a heretic to his own Muslims, many of whom ducked him in the shops he liked to frequent. Even Herbert publicly renounced any association with Ali. To his critics, a main revenue source for the Muslims (when he was active) had been used and dropped on the first pretense, more shabbily than by any traditional manager.

  Herbert was going to make sure that his father would never hear the words debt and money emanate from Ali again. In the meantime, he was allowed to forage for paydays. The college lectures were fewer in number, his novelty either having faded or the kids having become wise to his narrow platform. When the boxing film archivist Jimmy Jacobs approached him about appearing in a documentary, Ali nearly kissed his hand. There were five days of shooting, and at the end of each Ali was given a thousand dollars in cash. By carrier pigeon, perhaps, Herbert notified Ali that he was going to relocate him in Philadelphia, in the shadow of the most violent Muslim mosque in the country and under the watchful eye of a diligent “minder” named Jeremiah Shabazz.

  As bleak as the picture was, especially with Richard Nixon now president and exercising his own brand of dementia on Vietnam, the bandwagon was definitely heading Ali’s way. The national consensus for the war was fragmenting rapidly, with mainstream families whose sons were exposed to the draft, who were only thirteen when it had begun in earnest, now leaning heavily on their politicians. The atmosphere was fast becoming perfect. The government wouldn’t risk a loss of face by giving him his passport back, but it couldn’t interfere with commerce. So thought Harold Conrad, to whom the opposition out there was now just “a few big-mouth congressmen.” Conrad was the reigning authority on the campaign to reinstate Ali. “I’ve been to more states than rain,” he said. “Reagan stopped me in California. I was close in Montana. They wanted a hundred grand or so for pocket money. I think we’re getting close again; the hysteria is over.”

  What Conrad needed was the perfect juxtaposition of motive and power. “Politicians did in Ali,” Conrad said, “and they’ll let him back.” And well into 1970, he found a triad of influence that disputed reason and proved how anemic imagination is when it comes to politics. He had a black state senator, a Jewish mayor in, of all places, Atlanta, an Old South town in a state run by a governor who told his troopers during Martin Luther King’s funeral that if marchers got out of hand at his capitol they were to “shoot ’em down and stack ’em up.” On the narrow plus side, it was true that Atlanta was heavily black and the base camp of civil rights leaders. It was also evident that Atlanta had grown bored with its Gone with the Wind reference in the national mind and eager to replace magnolia and rustling crinoline with the high-rise office buildings, job markets and culture that identified the classic cities of the world. Where was the common ground for such a spectacular event as Ali’s return? While state senator Leroy Johnson and Mayor Sam Massell of Atlanta supported the fight, Governor Lester Maddox opposed it.

  Though he had a lot of company at the time, Maddox would prove to be the last practitioner of what Robert Sherrill called the “gothic politics of the South.” He was from the lineage of Earl Long, Herman Talmadge, Leander Perez, Orville Faubus, and George Wallace, his Alabama peer, who seemed to wonder why critics wasted column inches on Lester when he could do away with him in one line: “Y’know, Lester ain’t got much character.” Wallace always treated him as if he were Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, the harmless simpleton, his political actions dictated by moon phases. Civil rights leader Hosea Williams didn’t think he was harmless, calling him a “living crime, an offense to God Almighty, a cancer that must be rooted out.” In another life, he ran a chicken shack called Pickrick and chased blacks away while waving an ax handle and a pistol. He didn’t improve as governor. He had a cure for hippie anarchists: “Make ’em drink a Molotov cocktail and give ’em a cigarette real quick.” He wailed against any government intervention in poverty; such programs kept “whorin’ nigra wenches in food while they turned out more bastards” to help the “Commonists.” He said that he would dearly love to conduct an “African hunt” in Atlanta. If you believed that Lester Maddox would step aside for Ali, then you had to accept Elijah Muhammad, mother ships and all; in a way, they weren’t dissimilar in the size of their furies.

  Maddox also had a big thing in common with Ali’s credo, his race fundamentalism. Desegregation, “race-mixin’,” was “ungodly.” Citing Deuteronomy 22:10 he would bellow, “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together.” Ali often used wildlife to make Elijah’s point of race isolation. But they parted company when it came to geography, allowing blacks their own nation. Such an idea could only have come from “a rotten Suvit Commonist, ’cause the races must learn to live together.” No, it was not likely that Maddox would do a Lazarus for Ali. How would he ever again be able to share a chicken wing with his Klansmen and rednecks? Except: Lester Maddox, near the end of his term, was now in a sort of political life review. There was the matter of a second term, and he was casting his “baby duck” eyes toward the presidency, one of many textbook self-delusions that Wallace thought made him psychiatrically committable. Lester had taken office in 1966 by a legal technicality that left the Georgia legislature, with a heavy Democratic majority, with the task of naming their governor; Lester was put in through the machinery of the courts. He was an hallucination to blacks, a fool and outcast to the monied Georgia aristocracy. Now, suddenly, Lester was dead-game on being viewed as a sensible bigot. Lacking a State Athletic Commission—the principal tool used nationally for denying Ali a license—through which he could kill the fight, he counted on Washington, where Ali by now had the attention of only a few demagogues. The most-sung name in racial politics was cornered, between having no constituency to back him up and his newfound pragmatism, and all Lester Maddox would ever do was proclaim a day of mourning in Georgia when Ali signed to fight Jerry Quarry in Atlanta.

  Quietly, Ali said, “My, my, right under the nose of Lester Maddox himself. Ain’t the
world strange. The Lord must have a lot of fun, don’t he?” He was belly-down on a table in a little dressing room in the back of the Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach. A gospel song floated thinly from a radio, “Yes, Jesus loves me…I know he does.” The bony fingers of Luis Sarria, his ancient, black masseur, worked through his muscles. These were the early days of his return, and it was all off-center to him, and he looked out from the table, eyes dead, as if he were wandering about in some labyrinthine daydream that maybe could help make sense of it all. This was the gym where he had begun ten years before, and now he was trying to make it a launching site again for a trip from the claustrophobic recent years into a ring hyperspace. “Who knows what I got left?” he brooded. “That ain’t just talk, either. For a fighter, I’m goin’ way out there now.” Bundini entered and referred to him as the “Blessing of the Planet.” Ali waved him away with a curt hand. He was in no mood for the arabesque curve of Bundini’s phraseology. He sat up on the end of the table and began to prepare for a workout.

  The dressing room door soon opened, and out came Ali, with Angelo Dundee smiling and Bundini yelling: “Look out, give him room. Here he come now, the king of allll he see!” Ali swatted him on the head with a taped hand, then seemed to squint as his eyes met the sun-swept, whitewashed walls that always made the gym look like a Sicilian hill dwelling. His first stride was toward a full-length mirror, where for a long moment he studied his visual progress and what centimeters of excess fat he would cleave off today. As he began to move, he got a big hand. Movements for a fighter are as important as the scales are to a pianist: jab, jab, dance, quick shuffle, several trunk twists, then coming out of the twists, the jabs exploded again, and then three rights almost as imperceptible as the flutter of a dragon wing. Inside the ring now, he worked a number of rounds with two sparring partners, steadily grouping his concentration, patiently searching for the spaces and geometry that were central to his composition, and then he’d spin toward the ropes like a billiard ball, let himself be whomped to the body, then fire off with a flurry that moved the other man backward and was notable for its ferocious suddenness. “Like lightning,” Dundee said. “Big man…he moves like silk, hits like a ton.”