Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [60]
But there was no similarity between their thoughts or actions. They shared only prosecution and hate. Big Jack was a loner and of the epicure school of thought—live hard and let somebody else pay for the burial. To the whites of his time, into the preservation of Nordic purity and dominance, Jack was going eye-to-eye with them, speaking to them of blood and sex and territory. Jack was as personal as the lock pick scratching at the bedroom door, the dreadful promise of untempered polluting sexuality. They drove him out of the country on flimsy pretext. The retaliation against Ali had seemed dry; rustling papers, stamped documents, the system in action like a vise. When it came to black power display, Ali was pallid next to Jack, who faced mob-think with just a confrontational grin and somehow reflected the brutally harnessed energy of his race, all of whose minds carried still lifes of a rope and a high oak tree.
Jack never had the multitudes of followers that lined up behind Ali for the biggest fight of his life. Not just blacks, but young whites whose fathers had looked upon Ali in the extreme as a traitor, at the least merely an hysterical Little Richard. The young people, the largest bulge of population in American history, influential by weight of numbers, were seeking their own cultural voice. An unjust war was their idealistic, surface complaint; the prospect of being drafted was more visceral. These were not boxing fans, they were seekers of the antihero. What mattered was Ali’s style, his desecrating mouth, his beautiful irrationality so like their music. His black mysticism only added to his credentials, all in all a true-born slayer of authority and the status quo, a man in opposition to whiney, evil politicians and psychotic generals in the field.
Where did they come from, this mass of angry, mewling youth? They were out of the Beats of the fifties, children of parents with middle class fears and docile lives, with a preoccupation with security and order; nonconformity was a sin. They grew up detesting the noose of the Cold War, people like Senator Joe McCarthy before whom their parents sat as if dumb. Their early spokesman was Jack Kerouac: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who never yawn, or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.” The kids of the fifties were statistical giants and glutted on a rarefied status that expected every material advantage. “The royalty of the Fifties,” Jay Stevens calls them in Storming Heaven. They grew up with the superheroes in the comics, who lanced with the forces of evil and injustice, graduated to Mad magazine with its knife bent into middle class values. Wave after wave came with their own proclivities that would outrage: rock music, the social deviancy of roles played by Marlon Brando and James Dean, the spirituality of the ethereal poet William Blake, LSD—and now near the death rattle of the sixties, when they would soon return to the suits of the organization man they hated and become ruthless material dandies, they had their own black superhero—Muhammad Ali, who had not the slightest idea of what the hell they were talking about, except there was a mood out there, and he owned it.
Down in Miami, Ali lay on a table as his black masseur, Luis Sarria, never seeming corporeal, just a pair of eyes beaming out in a dark mine shaft, worked his muscles.
“See how fit I am,” Ali told me.
“You look terrific.”
“Up here, too,” he said,