Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [40]
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