Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [71]
Ali knew how smart Eddie was and often tried to lure him into his camp, motivated, perhaps to deprive Frazier or to have the security of Eddie’s presence. Why else? He surely wouldn’t have listened to him.
As the return bout with Frazier approached, Ali had finally vacated the Fifth St. Gym in Miami for the backwoods atmosphere of Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, a seventy-two-acre spread for which he paid $200,000. Here, Ali the set-director emerged to a new, expensive level. A growing maturity, he thought, demanded a more serious man. The camp reflected to what lengths Ali would go to keep his mind fresh and interested, how deeply he could sink into a role. The production costs for this were heavy. He was a one-man economic boom in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. A three-hundred-foot artesian well was drilled, builders swarmed over the place, and antique dealers, breathing heavily in anticipation, made trip after trip up to his mountain outpost. The place became sort of a rustic salon for local merchants.
Valid and old were two words that Ali would drop in a second. The camp had two bunkhouses for his retainers, his own cabin, a good gym, and a mess hall run by his aunt Coretta, all of them made with logs. There were no benches outside. “I decided they’re not valid,” he said. “I want my people to sit on rocks and logs, real logs.” One of his favorite items was an antique quarry wagon. “Look at that,” he said. “Steel! Wood! Soooo strong. It’s worked soooo hard.” Another was an 1896 bell (cost, $2,500) that he took joy in ringing each morning at 4:30, rousting the malingerers out of bed as he started his roadwork of four miles, cutting through the lit eyes of possums and rabbits. “It’s a valid bell, isn’t it?” he often asked. Ali’s log house was darker than the other buildings. A big boulder, painted very black, stood in front of it, and its white lettering read: JACK JOHNSON. Joe Louis had one on the grounds too, thirty-five tons of black granite, so did Sugar Ray, and there was thirty-five tons of Rocky Marciano sandstone. “My father,” Ali explained, “painted the names.” There was even a monument to Sonny Liston.
Cash had also painted a sign of kitchen rules for Coretta: “IF YOU must stick your finger in something stick it in the garbage disposal. DON’ T criticize the coffee you may be old and weak yourself some day. PLEASE WAITE Rome wasn’t burnt in a day and it takes awhile to burn a roaste.” Ali searched for an anchor here, far away from the usual training sites of hotels with chandeliers, pretty women, and heavy carpeting where “you get soft.” After roadwork, on some days, he’d cut down trees, eighty-five in all since he had been up there, rather proud that he had busted one ax and dulled five others. “I’m borrowin’ my strength from the trees,” he said. A curious resident was Gypsy Joe Harris, who was on hard times. Was he tutoring Ali about his pal, Joe?
“He don’t ask, never,” Gypsy said. “He knows Joe like a book.”
“How come you’re here?”
“He gives me something to eat and a warm place to sleep. Ali’s good that way. Knows how to help.”
And Joe?
“I’m in and out with Smoke,” Gypsy said. “I don’t know why.”
Ali and the members of his camp sat by kerosene lamps at night, amusing each other, talking about how right the move had been from the smog of Miami. “All them cars,” one said, “cause all that smog.” Ali said: “Is that right? Cars cause smog?” One day he had a visitor named Tombs, an undertaker from Atlanta. He wanted Ali to make an appearance for Ralph Abernathy, the movement heir to MLK, now in choppy straits. “He can’t even pay the phone bills,” Tombs said. “Well, you know how Ralph is.” Ali nodded, but preferred talking about undertaking. He asked: “Don’t you ever get scared working with all those dead people?” Tombs said he was an old hand, then got on the subject of how beautiful black was, especially black women. “Not all of ’em,” Ali said. “Some of them not so fine.” In this period, Ali was heavily into UFOlogy and spent some nights looking endlessly up at the clear, sparkling sky.