Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [102]
Her hundred-year-old house was in bad shape. He said he would send money for repairs. In 1983 the furnace went up, leaving Khaliah and her without hot water or heat. They had to sleep by the fireplace to keep warm. They had little to eat. She refused to go on public assistance, or go to her parents. “Backbone,” the daughter Khaliah says now, “pulled us through, made us strong.” Khaliah was a sick child, went to the hospital twice with life-threatening conditions. When the furnace exploded again in 1984, she finally called Ali. He said: “You want to be independent, you think you don’t need me anymore. Get it fixed yourself.” He thought a moment, then said, “I’m going broke. I take care of my parents, my brother and his family. Veronica and her family. I can’t take care of everyone. I’ll try to help you.” Says Aaisha, “He never did.”
She went to court, and a four-year legal battle ensued. He had high-priced lawyers in California. Aaisha just wanted child support. The proceedings were filled with hurt for Khaliah. A deal was set up where a bank would create a trust on behalf of Khaliah. The money would be invested and the interest would go to Khaliah for support. When she turned twenty-one, the principal would revert back to Ali; not a dime for Khaliah. He was sitting in the corridor. Khaliah went over to him.
“Daddy,” she said.
“I can’t talk to you,” Ali said. “They tell me I can’t. Sorry, baby.”
“Well, Daddy,” Khaliah said, with tears in her eyes. “No one will ever tell me I can’t talk to you. You may think I’m too young to know, but I’m not.” Ali had million-dollar trusts for the rest of his kids. Khaliah continued, “I know I don’t get any money when I turn twenty-one. But all these lawyers are getting rich. But that’s all right. I don’t want your money. I’ll make my own way. I just want you to know that no matter what, I love you, Daddy.”
Ali went back to the courtroom and said he wanted to speak. He wanted to fire the lawyers. “He just wanted Khaliah to have the money,” Aaisha says. “It was sad. No one listened to him. His speech was thick, his movement stiff. He appeared incompetent. The lawyers and his new wife, Lonnie, totally ignored him, going on as if he weren’t in the room.” But Khaliah Ali, his bright daughter, would never stop in her love for her father, and in so doing would stand her ground more than once with Lonnie.
Aaisha remembers much about Ali. She knows what he truly thought of Joe Frazier. “He thought he was a pure nigger,” she says. “He said that Frazier didn’t know how to talk, or look good, and that it was insulting if he became the heavyweight champion.” If one moment sums up Ali for her, it was when they went to see The Wiz on Broadway. “Ali was always restless in theaters,” she says. “He wanted to leave. Then, the Tin Man came on, and he was hypnotized, especially when he began to sing ‘To Be Able to Feel.’ We went outside, and he said, ‘I wish I could feel something. I’ve never been able to in my life.’ He bought a player, got the tape, and ran that song over and over.”
At fifteen, Khaliah went to the American Broadcasters Dinner in New York to see her father. Lonnie, she says, would not allow her near him. She had no money, and Howard Bingham had to give her thirty dollars. At midnight, alone and angry, she made her way to the bus station. “Lonnie blocked me at every turn,” she says, “but I wouldn’t give up. I had a right to see my father.” With tenacity, she’d sneak around to see him, leaving scraps of paper with her number on it. “They’d find it in his pockets,” she says, “and throw them away. So I began writing my number on the bottom of his shoes. I’d be blocked at every turn by Lonnie and her aides. Look, I’m not the only kid of his who had trouble seeing him. They have to suck up to Lonnie. But I wouldn’t bow to her. Never. She once said to