by Tom Wolfe
“Oh, they just the foxes,” said Cassius.
“Man, I like your choice of foxes, I’m telling you,” the kid said. This tickled Cassius and he leaned over and told it to Sophia.
The kid, meantime, went around to the other side of the booth. He had a glorified version of how Cassius was living. He believed Cassius as he leaned over to the girls when the waiter came around and said, “You get anything you want. I own this place. I own all of New York.” (Sophia gave him a derisive laugh for that.)
The kid leaned over to one of the girls and said: “Are you all his personal property?”
“What are you talking about, boy. What do you mean, his personal property?”
“You know, his,” said the kid. He was getting embarrassed, but he still had traces of a knowing look salivating around the edges.
“Why do we have to be his personal property?”
“Well, like, I mean, you know,” said the kid. His mouth had disintegrated completely into an embarrassed grin by now, but his eyes were still darting around, as if to say, “Why don’t they level with me. I’m a hip guy.”
Cassius also liked it when a Negro he had met a couple of nights before, an older guy, came around and didn’t ask when Liston would fall.
“I saw a crowd on the sidewalk out there, and I might have known you’d be inside,” he told Cassius. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, I’m just sitting here with the foxes,” said Cassius.
“You sure are,” the fellow said.
A young white kid with a crew cut said, “Are you afraid of Liston?”
Cassius said mechanically, “That big ugly bear? If I was worried, I’d be out training and I’m out partying.”
Cassius had a tall, pink drink. It was nothing but Hawaiian Punch, right out of the can.
“How you gonna beat him?”
“I’ll beat that bear in eight rounds. I’m strong and I’m beautiful and I’ll beat that bear in eight rounds.”
“You promise?” said the kid. He said it very seriously and shook Cassius’ hand, as though he were getting ready to go outside and drop off a couple of grand with his Weehawken bookmaker. He apparently squeezed pretty hard. This fellow being a fighter and all, a guy ought to shake hands like a man with him.
Cassius pulled his hand away suddenly and wrung it. “Don’t ever squeeze a fighter’s hand, man. That hand’s worth about three hundred thousand dollars,” he said, making a fist. “You don’t have to shake hands, you doing good just to lay eyes on me.”
The kid edged off with his buddy and he was saying, “He said, ‘Don’t ever squeeze a fighter’s hand.’ ”
By now Cassius was looking slightly worse than gloriously bored.
“If they don’t stop worrying me,” he said, “I’m gonna get up and walk out of here.”
Sophia leaned over and told me, “He doesn’t mean that. He loves it.”
Of all the girls, Sophia seemed to be closest to him. She found him amusing. She liked him.
“You know, he’s really a normal boy,” she told me. She threw her head to one side as if to dismiss Cassius’ big front. “Oh, he’s got a big mouth. But aside from that, he’s a real normal boy.”
The foxes were beginning to stare a little morosely into their Gin Fizzes and Brandy Alexanders and Sidecars, and even the stream of autograph seekers was slowing down. It was damned crowded and you could hardly hear yourself talk. Every now and then the drummer would go into one of those crazy skyrocketing solos suitable for the Metropole, and the trumpet player would take the microphone and say, “That’s what Cassius Clay is going to do to Sonny Liston’s head!” and Cassius would holler, “Right!” but it was heavy weather. By this time Richie Pittman had dropped in, and Cassius motioned to him. They got up and went out “for some air.” At the doorway there was a crowd on the sidewalk looking in at the bandstand, as always. They made a fuss over Cassius, but he just loosened his shoulders a little and made a few wisecracks. He and Richie started walking up toward the Americana.
It was after midnight, and at the foot of the hotel, where this paseo-style sidewalk pans out almost like a patio, there was a crowd gathered around. Cassius didn’t miss that. They were watching three street musicians, colored boys, one with a makeshift bass—a washtub turned upside down with a cord coming up out of the bottom, forming a single string; a drum—a large tin-can bottom with spoons as sticks; and one guy dancing. They were playing “Pennies from Heaven,” a pretty good number for three guys getting ready to pass the hat. Cassius just walked up to the edge of the crowd and stood there. One person noticed him, then another, and pretty soon the old “That’s Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay” business started. Cassius’ spirits were rising. “Pennies from Heaven” stopped, and the three colored boys looked a little nonplussed for a moment. The show was being stolen. Somebody had said something about “Sonny Liston,” only this time Cassius had the 150-watt eyes turned on, and he was saying, “The only thing I’m worried about is, I don’t want Sonny Liston trying to crash my victory party the way I crashed his. I’m gonna tell him right before the fight starts so he won’t forget it, ‘Sonny,’ I’m gonna tell him, ‘Sonny Liston, I don’t want you trying to crash my victory party tonight, you hear that? I want you to hear that now, ’cause you ain’t gonna be able to hear anything eight rounds from now.’ And if he gives me any jive when I tell him that, if he gives me any jive, he must fall in five.”
A soldier, a crank-sided kid who looked like he must have gone through the battered-child syndrome at about age four, came up to take the role of Cassius’ chief debater. Cassius likes that when he faces a street crowd. He’ll hold a press conference for anybody, even a soldier on leave on Seventh Avenue.
“Where you gonna go after Sonny Liston whips you?” the kid said. “I got some travel folders right here.”
“Boy,” said Cassius, “you talk about traveling. I want you to go to that fight, ’cause you gonna see the launching of a human satellite. Sonny Liston.”
The crowd was laughing and carrying on.
“I got some travel folders,” the kid said. “You better look ’em over. I can get you a mask, too.”
“You gonna bet against me?” said Cassius.
“Every cent I can get my hands on,” said the kid.
“Man,” said Cassius, “you better save your money, ‘cause there’s gonna be a total eclipse of the Sonny.”
Cassius was standing there looking like a million dollars, and Richie was standing by, sort of riding shotgun. By this time, the crowd was so big, it was spilling off the sidewalk into 52nd Street. All sorts of incredible people were moving up close, including sclerotic old men with big-lunch ties who edged in with jag-legged walks. A cop was out in the street going crazy, trying to prod everybody back on the sidewalk. A squad car drove up, and the cop on the street put on a real tough tone, “All right, goddamn it,” he said to an old sclerotic creeper with a big-lunch tie, “get up on the sidewalk.”
Cassius looked around at me as if to say, “See, man? That’s only what I predicted”—which is to say, “When I walk down the street, the crowds, they have to call the police.”
The autograph business had started now, and people were pushing in with paper and pens, but Cassius wheeled around toward the three colored boys, the musicians, and said, “Autographs are one dollar tonight. Everyone puts one dollar in there” (the musicians had a corduroy-ribbed box out in front of the tub) “gets the autograph of Cassius Clay, the world’s strongest fighter, the world’s most beautiful fighter, the onliest fighter who predicts when they will fall.”
The colored boys took the cue and started up with “Pennies from Heaven” again. The kid who danced was doing the merengue by himself. The kid on the bass was flailing away like a madman. All the while Cassius was orating on the corner.
“Come on, man, don’t put no fifty cents in there, get that old dollar bill outa there. Think at all you’re getting free here, the music’s so fine and here you got C
assius Clay right here in front of you in living color, the next heavyweight champion of the world, the man who’s gon’ put old man Liston in orbit.”
The dollar bills started piling up in the box, and the solo merengue kid was dervishing around wilder still, and Cassius wouldn’t let up.
“Yeah, they down there right now getting that Medicare ready for that old man, and if I hit him in the mouth he’s gonna need Denticare. That poor ol’ man, he’s so ugly, his wife drives him to the gym every morning ’fore the sun comes up, so nobody’ll have to look at him ’round home. Come on, man, put yo’ money in that box, people pay good money to hear this—”
The bass man was pounding away, and Cassius turned to me and said, behind his hand, “Man, you know one thing? If I get whipped, they gonna run me outa the country. You know that?” Then he threw his head back and his arms out, as if he were falling backward. “Can you see me flat out on my back like this?”
The colored kids were playing “Pennies from Heaven,” and Cassius Clay had his head thrown back and his arms out, laughing, and looking straight up at the top of the Americana Hotel.
Chapter 8
The Last American Hero
TEN O’CLOCK SUNDAY morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.
Seventeen thousand people, me included, all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile stock car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front. This is not to say there is no preaching and shouting in the South this morning. There is preaching and shouting. Any of us can turn on the old automobile transistor radio and get all we want:
“They are greedy dogs. Yeah! They ride around in big cars. Unnh-hunh! And chase women. Yeah! And drink liquor. Unnh-hunh! And smoke cigars. Oh yes! And they are greedy dogs. Yeah! Unh-hunh! Oh yes! Amen!”
There are also some commercials on the radio for Aunt Jemima grits, which cost ten cents a pound. There are also the Gospel Harmonettes, singing: “If you dig a ditch, you better dig two.…”
There are also three fools in a panel discussion on the New South, which they seem to conceive of as General Lee running the new Dulcidreme Labial Cream factory down at Griffin, Georgia.
And suddenly my car is stopped still on Sunday morning in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in the history of the world. It goes for ten miles in every direction from the North Wilkesboro Speedway. And right there it dawns on me that as far as this situation is concerned, anyway, all the conventional notions about the South are confined to … the Sunday radio. The South has preaching and shouting, the South has grits, the South has country songs, old mimosa traditions, clay dust, Old Bigots, New Liberals—and all of it, all of that old mental cholesterol, is confined to the Sunday radio. What I was in the middle of—well, it wasn’t anything one hears about in panels about the South today. Miles and miles of eye-busting pastel cars on the expressway, which roar right up into the hills, going to the stock car races. Fifteen years of stock car racing, and baseball—and the state of North Carolina alone used to have forty-four professional baseball teams—baseball is all over with in the South. We were all in the middle of a wild new thing, the Southern car world, and heading down the road on my way to see a breed such as sports never saw before, Southern stock car drivers, all lined up in these two-ton mothers that go over 175 m.p.h., Fireball Roberts, Freddie Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, Richard Petty, and—the hardest of all the hard chargers, one of the fastest automobile racing drivers in history—yes! Junior Johnson.
THE LEGEND OF Junior Johnson! In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copperstill operators of all time, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a famous stock car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963, for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and throughout the rural South. There is all this about how good old boys would wake up in the middle of the night in the apple shacks and hear a supercharged Oldsmobile engine roaring over Brushy Mountain and say, “Listen at him—there he goes!” although that part is doubtful, since some nights there were so many good old boys taking off down the road in supercharged automobiles out of Wilkes County, and running loads to Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, or wherever, it would be pretty hard to pick out one. It was Junior Johnson specifically, however, who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about-face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car up into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the agents by sight in a very short time. They would rag them practically to their faces on the subject of Junior Johnson, so that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there’s no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes—but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it’s another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then—Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson! with a gawdam agent’s si-reen and a red light in his grille!
I wasn’t in the South five minutes before people started making oaths, having visions, telling these hulking great stories, all on the subject of Junior Johnson. At the Greensboro, North Carolina, Airport there was one good old boy who vowed he would have eaten “a bucket of it” if that would have kept Junior Johnson from switching from a Dodge racer to a Ford. Hell yes, and after that—God-almighty, remember that 1963 Chevrolet of Junior’s? Whatever happened to that car? A couple of more good old boys join in. A good old boy, I ought to explain, is a generic term in the rural South referring to a man, of any age, but more often young than not, who fits in with the status system of the region. It usually means he has a good sense of humor and enjoys ironic jokes, is tolerant and easygoing enough to get along in long conversations at places like on the corner, and has a reasonable amount of physical courage. The term is usually heard in some such form as: “Lud? He’s a good old boy from over at Crozet.” These good old boys in the airport, by the way, were in their twenties, except for one fellow who was a cabdriver and was about forty-five, I would say. Except for the cabdriver, they all wore neo-Brummellian clothes such as Lacoste tennis shirts, Slim Jim pants, windbreakers with the collars turned up, “fast” shoes of the winkle-picker genre, and so on. I mention these details just by way of pointing out that very few grits, Iron Boy overalls, clodhoppers or hats with ventilation holes up near the crown enter into this story. Anyway, these good old boys are talking about junior Johnson and how he has switched to Ford. This they unanimously regard as some kind of betrayal on Johnson’s part. Ford, it seems, they regard as the car symbolizing the established power structure. Dodge is kind of a middle ground. Dodge is at least a challenger, not a ruler. But the Junior Johnson they like to remember is the Junior Johnson of 1963, who took on the whole field of NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Grand National racing with a Chevrolet. All the other drivers, the drivers driving Fords, Mercurys, Plymouths, Dodges, had millions, literally millions when it is all added up, million
s of dollars in backing from the Ford and Chrysler Corporations. Junior Johnson took them all on in a Chevrolet without one cent of backing from Detroit. Chevrolet had pulled out of stock-car racing. Yet every race it was the same. It was never a question of whether anybody was going to outrun Junior Johnson. It was just a question of whether he was going to win or his car was going to break down, since, for one thing, half the time he had to make his own racing parts. God! Junior Johnson was like Robin Hood or Jesse James or Little David or something. Every time that Chevrolet, No. 3, appeared on the track, wild curdled yells, “Rebel” yells, they still have those, would rise up. At Daytona, at Atlanta, at Charlotte, at Darlington, South Carolina; Bristol, Tennessee; Martinsville, Virginia—Junior Johnson!
And then the good old boys get to talking about whatever happened to that Chevrolet of Junior’s, and the cabdriver says he knows. He says Junior Johnson is using that car to run liquor out of Wilkes County. What does he mean? For Junior Johnson ever to go near another load of bootleg whiskey again—he would have to be insane. He has this huge racing income. He has two other businesses, a whole automated chicken farm with 42,000 chickens, a road-grading business—but the cabdriver says he has this dream Junior is still roaring down from Wilkes County, down through the clay cuts, with the Atlas Arc Lip jars full in the back of that Chevrolet. It is in Junior’s blood—and then at this point he puts his right hand up in front of him as if he is groping through fog, and his eyeballs glaze over and he looks out in the distance and he describes Junior Johnson roaring over the ridges of Wilkes County as if it is the ghost of Zapata he is describing, bounding over the Sierras on a white horse to rouse the peasants.
A stubborn notion! A crazy notion! Yet Junior Johnson has followers who need to keep him, symbolically, riding through nighttime like a demon. Madness! But Junior Johnson is one of the last of those sports stars who are not just aces at the game itself, but heroes a whole people or class of people can identify with. Other, older examples are the way Jack Dempsey stirred up the Irish or the way Joe Louis stirred up the Negroes. Junior Johnson is a modern figure. He is only thirty-three years old and still racing. He should be compared to two other sports heroes whose cultural impact is not too well known. One is Antonino Rocca, the professional wrestler, whose triumphs mean so much to New York City’s Puerto Ricans that he can fill Madison Square Garden, despite the fact that everybody, the Puerto Ricans included, knows that wrestling is nothing but a crude form of folk theatre. The other is Ingemar Johansson, who had a tremendous meaning to the Swedish masses—they were tired of that old king who played tennis all the time and all his friends who keep on drinking Cointreau behind the screen of socialism. Junior Johnson is a modern hero, all involved with car culture and car symbolism in the South. A wild new thing—
