Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [37]
“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