Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [99]
There were a couple of places Ali didn’t show up. Not of a piece physically, it was perhaps understandable that he made no effort to relieve the poverty of Bundini Brown or see to the meager wants of the poor and dying Luis Sarria, the one man who never asked for anything from him. He did show up at the hospital to see Bundini as he was dying from a fall. He could only move his eyes. Ali leaned down to his ear and said: “We had some good times, didn’t we?” Bundini’s eyes scraped up and down. And, most of all, he was for years out of touch with the supposed love of his life, Aaisha Ali, the mystery woman who had performed the role of a fifth wife (simultaneously with Belinda), had given him a child, and had been left to blow to pieces in severe hard-luck winds. Aaisha’s little tale reveals all the gentleness, trickery, and spite of which Ali was capable in his dealings. Ali never acknowledged that he was married to her, a point that does not upset her. Nothing much does, except the lupus that has made her an invalid.
Aaisha was once Wanda Bolton, a pretty little high school junior, age seventeen, on her way to being a doctor like her brother and, presently, to Brazil on an international scholarship when she met Ali on a visit to Deer Lake with her brother and mother. It was meant to kill time, a little summer diversion that would end with estrangement from her father and deep regrets in her mother. Ali had just lost to Ken Norton and was getting ready for their second fight. He was talking to some fans when he picked up Wanda’s face and stayed on it. “Have you ever seen a fighter as pretty as me?” he asked. “Look, not a single scar.” His eyes captured her, they seemed controlling. He wasn’t pretty, she thought; his “head was too square.” She adds, “But there was this aura, he had an inner beauty.” Ali said to her: “You like an Indian princess. Come on, we’re going to the movies.” They went to see Charlotte’s Web. On return, they went horseback riding, sat after a while, and talked. Wanda said she was going to Brazil. He said he had been waiting for a blue-jeaned country girl like her for a long time. “You won’t be going to Brazil,” he said. “I have special powers. You’re meant to be with me.”
Wanda went home, “chalking it up as a wonderful memory.” Soon he was on the phone wanting her to go to Manhattan. No, her mother would not go for that. He called her mother at work and talked her into it, cinching the deal when he said her older brother and friend Kim could come, too. “I hadn’t even had a date in my life,” she says. They went to Herbert Muhammad’s apartment, and Wanda thought it strange when Herbert said: “She’ll give you many sons.” She says now, “Herbert had the same influence over Ali that Colonel Parker had over Elvis.” After that, he was at the Bolton house frequently, the two of them sitting on the porch and eating ice cream. “He had dental work in Miami,” she says, “and he wanted me to go with him. I did, too. But there was no way my parents would allow that. With a thirty-one-year-old boxer! No way. But he was clever. He hired my brother, Kelly, as a bodyguard. He told my mother that ‘we’re doin’ a documentary’ on how religion affects people. I was to give the Christian perspective.” Parents want experiences for their children; the trip was tough to pass up. “I was filled with a sense of adventure, and very much in love.”
Everyone was put up at the Fontainebleu Hotel, Ali’s favorite; mother, brother, a couple of classmates. She says: “We were all living in a warm, golden glow. None of us cared, or even realized it was really like a shadow. Often a cold and distant one of Muhammad Ali.” Ali put a full-court press on her mother, who watched things closely. Wanda roomed with her friend Jacqui. Ali kept going out with her mother on shopping trips, insisted she get