Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [96]
Burt Watson was asked if Joe might have been drinking. “I don’t know,” Watson said. “He has a lot of serious health problems. I don’t think he drinks much anymore.” He was also asked about Gypsy Joe Harris, how he later emerged in Frazier’s life. “Joe,” he said, “always had a soft spot for Gyp. He felt bad about his life. Homeless. Just short of being totally blind. He was kicked out of the gym over and over for having drugs and booze. He finally kicked cocaine, and Joe let him back in to help train fighters. Joe said: ‘The first time I see a bottle…you’re out.’” Did Joe help him with money? “I guess so,” Burt said. “But sometimes Joe never looked to help people close to him. Anyway, he was kicked out again, and several days later he was seeking to get back, and he died of a heart attack just steps from the gym door, damn near in Joe’s arms.” Frazier should have been thankful to Gyp. If it was true that Joe had been blind in his left eye his whole career, that Gypsy knew and never sold him out as he so easily could have done out of bitterness over his own aborted career. With one word, Joe would never have come to be haunted by Ali or Manila, would have been sentenced for life to chopping heads off of cattle.
In the late eighties, Ali was in Utah in political support of conservative senator Orrin Hatch, which meant he showed up in a crowd and waved; he was certainly not politically literate. He had the urge to move while staying at his inn, went outside, looked up at the jewelry of the big night sky, and began walking. He could see the cars, not many at 3 A.M., crawl toward him on the blacktop, until their headlights would fill up his eyes, and they’d swoosh by and vibrate his body. It was “scary” out there, he said. “So dark. A wolf out there? Wild dogs? Can’t see anything. Gotta look down at the white line in the middle of the road. Soooo quiet, it’s really scary.” On the way—where was he going?—he’d kneel and pray for his mother, or do exercises. Five miles out, he turned back for his hotel, arriving with the sun coming up. What was he doing out there? Any guess will do. It may not even have happened, could be he just wanted to tell himself a scary story.
What he was doing with Orrin Hatch, a politician who at one time would have put him in Leavenworth on bread and water, was not much clearer. Ali’s life now, beyond the circus, seemed a cratered dreamscape. And out of each crater popped a manipulative figure to lead the most dedicated of followers, an unorganized manipulator himself (any scheme used to gather his attention), into a newer reality. The old entourage was a child’s diversion, a game compared to the new ones that jerked his strings. Arthur Morrison, among others, comes readily to mind, Ali’s deal-a-minute sidekick for a while, who ended up in a Manhattan court trial for making threatening phone calls to former girlfriends and bomb threats to institutions, including a police station. Ali, the seeming professional friend of the accused, did not testify for him, though he would for many others, including Mike Tyson. Ali and Morrison had been together in cologne, shoe polish, and powdered milk business, all of which lost money—other people’s. But Morrison dropped Ali’s name while on the stand, repeatedly bringing up their unproductive trip to Iraq in 1990 to secure the release of hostages held by Saddam Hussein as human shields. Arthur was found guilty and sentenced to seventeen years.
But Morrison was a piker next to Richard Hirschfeld, the reason why Ali was out there allied with Senator Hatch. Hirschfeld was a fast talker, a lawyer who liked to play with a yo-yo, had extensive Middle East connections, and was generally viewed and passed off