Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [48]
“I don’t read,” he said. “My people tell me what’s said. All the bad things.” He paused, then said: “This plane ain’t gonna go down. Not with me on it. Besides, those pilots don’t wanna die, either.”
“Never overestimate humanity.”
“I used to be more scared than you,” he said. “I don’t care anymore.” He held up his hand. “See how steady. No nerves at all. I ever tell ya about the time I was going to the Olympics? They had to talk to me for days in New York. When I finally said okay, I went down to the surplus store and bought me a parachute. I sat on that plane the whole way to Rome with a parachute on. It was rough, a rough trip, too. Without that chute, I’d’ve turned white for sure.”
“What good was it? It was worthless.”
“How you know? Maybe I got lessons.” He laughed: “Nah, I probably didn’t even have it on right. But it felt better. Just having it with me. It’s all in the head, fear.”
“No kidding.”
“You got no faith in nothing,” he said. “All you gotta do is keep sayin’: Ali won’t let the plane crash. Over and over. Say it. You have to beat fear with a whip. Hard.”
“Mind if I think about it?”
“Crash if you want to,” he said. He paused. “Know any jokes?”
His oblique effort to calm and distract was telling. It showed Odessa’s side of him, as well as someone who intimately knew this fear in particular, and fear in general; that side was gaining on him. Gone, for the most part, except for lame filler material in public, was the insufferable drone of self-love; it had become by now, to the press and himself, the shrill whir of a mosquito drilling into a dead horse. Gone, too, except when Frazier was in his sights, was the dog-bite ugliness of the first half of his career, when he seemed to be trying to match an official attitude of the Muslims. Walk into a room, and there was the icy hostility of, say, Ali in bed, covers up to his chin, his face crusted with determined, silent rudeness. “They’ve changed my boy,” his father, Cash, would lament until it became a mantra.
Friction ground on a long time between father and son. Besides meddling, Ali saw him as too proprietary, too critical, too eager for bows, and the son fired at him once, saying: “Lot of people say they made me. Who made me is me!” Ali often grabbed the front of his shirt and supposedly whopped him with an open hand one time. “Nooooo way,” Cash said. “For damn sure. He got me by the shirt sometimes. But I told him outright, you do that again and I’m gonna pop you real good.” To Cash, denied and misadventurous all his life, his son meant proof of his own genetic greatness, what he should have been, perhaps, as a painter. His son’s accomplishments were his own. He’d look at the Muslims lounging around the house like beached sea lions and lose it. He saw each having yachts one day supplied with Dom Perignon, or Herbert with an armful of women throwing bacchanal feasts while his punched-out son was busing tables at a resort hotel. “This Herbert,” he yelled, “he and the old man gonna steal you dumb. Where’s your money? You care? Where’s your money?” Now, in these days, Cash just drifted with the perks, content with the ceremonial role of the father, always to be found, with a drink in his hand, singing “My Way” at hotel piano bars.
Angelo Dundee wasn’t immune, either, to Ali’s pique. He walked a narrow line with Ali throughout his career. There was an unspoken understanding between them, sharply felt and never abridged. Often, he seemed to serve merely as a statue in the camp and fight corner, a handy and much respected conduit for the press, a producer of excuses and chatter that filled notebooks. Given that exterior, it was not hard for his few doubters to exclude him from the company of Ray Arcel, Eddie Futch, Freddie Brown, and Charlie Goldman, the latter having been the sculptor of the once ragged Marciano. Dundee simply never had any material to shape. Ali never listened to anyone in the ring, he trained himself, and Dundee was never able, for all his pleading, to get Ali to stop engaging in masochism during gym sessions,