Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [46]
He was now in temporary residence at a small retreat on the ocean, a frayed place for elderly Jewish people on fixed incomes. The lobby smelled of immigrant cuisine to Ali, “recipes they must’ve brought over on the boat.” Outside, on the porch, the old people rocked back and forth, talking in Yiddish. Often, Ali would join them, get in rhythm to their rocking, and sit mutely looking out over the ocean. It was a surreal frieze, broken only when he would joke with the old women, saying, “You all come down here from New York to get away from us people. Now, here I am right next to you. Ain’t you scared? I know you’re scared.”
The women just laughed and kept rocking. “I’m crazy with loneliness,” he said. He lived in a small apartment upstairs. Belinda was not on the scene. Bundini, sleeping on a sofa, woke him each morning for his roadwork. “But I got to get myself ready,” he added, “and I can’t have any distractions, for this is goin’ to be the biggest night in ring history, every eye in the world’s gonna be on me to see if the government beat me.” He looked at a picture of himself taped to a long mirror, one taken around the second Liston fight. He measured his sides with his hands, pinched the extra flesh on his belly, checked his jowls. “See how narrow and trim I was,” he said. “My weight’s not much different, but everything else is broader, fuller, my face, my arms, my legs.” In the gym, and now alone here in this Gregorian chant of a room, he seemed retracted, with no appetite at all for the imbecile proclamation, content to let his body, and what he could make it do, speak firmly of what he himself dared not sing prematurely.
Muhammad Ali returned to the ring for the first time in over three years at a former opera house in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry, a pale Irishman from California, transplanted from East Texas. It was the place to be, and every con man, pimp, ragged hippie, and boxing fan in the world seemed to be there, including press from around the world, just an ocean of bodies in flamboyant thread on Peachtree Street and in the lobby of a hotel, tricked up architecturally into a vision by Arthur Clarke of a new world. Revolution was snoozing, its props of berets, field jackets, and the fixed scowl were nowhere to be seen. Capitalism reigned, with big rolls of green flashing, with mink jumpsuits and even a long convertible with an alligator-skin roof. “Where did they all come from?” a grizzled old bellhop asked. “I thought the circus was the greatest show on earth.”
Ali was staying at LeRoy Johnson’s house, watching old fight films projected on a torn sheet. He was quiet about Quarry, didn’t try to heap race on a presence that shrunk by the day and nearly faded to black on the screen by fight time. Quarry had been a top contender for a long time until Frazier a year before had trimmed him like a bony shad in a vicious seven rounds. He might have been a champ had he not been so star-crossed as to have been in the same era as Ali, Frazier, and George Foreman. His problem was that he could never properly assemble himself, never knew precisely what to be: boxer, brawler, or counterpuncher. His instinct was to brawl, but his true skill was as a counterpuncher; he was quick and stinging when he was thinking