Ghosts of Manila (21 page)

Up in Deer Lake, serenity was the mood. Belinda was not there, nor was Veronica, only the mystery woman who searched the night sky with Ali for alien ships. Once, he put his boy, not much older than a year, on his knee and said: “One day you’ll go to Venus or Mars. You’re gonna be a good man when you get big. Speak three languages. Talk to your brothers all over the world. You’ll be smart. Not like your daddy. You’ll be able to read good. Use your brains like I do my fists.” A soft moment that seemed to adumbrate Odessa’s often buried influence on him. He had nothing to say about Elijah Muhammad, who died in February of 1975. He died intestate, but left over $5 million to his squabbling sons, including Herbert and Wallace. Not bad for a young man who, after a white guy (he said) pressed a black ear into his hand, would found an erstwhile movement of irregular energy. With that kind of money, why did Ali have to buy him a house in Phoenix and absorb his hospital expenses? “’Cause he’s a nut,” Cash said. “The old man took him to the cleaners, and they still not done.” In the ensuing struggle for power, Ali would align himself with Wallace, who had an orthodox Islamic world view rather than his father’s storefront hustle, though he was not void of unearthly power, according to Ali: “Wallace, he disappears in rooms.”

Two hours after tenderly designing his son’s future, Ali went into his packed gym for a workout, and if there was any doubt of his mellowing toward Frazier it was dispelled. He hit the gym like a kid bent on chasing the boredom of a late summer afternoon; burn the insect
or slowly dissect it of wing and leg? Of all the meanness, racial and personal, directed at Frazier over the years, this one was without duplication. As soon as he climbed into the ring, the crowd chanted his name, and he moved to the edge of the ring as if he were going to explain the finer parts of a seminar. Gypsy Joe Harris, back in Frazier’s good graces, stood next to me and watched as Ali let the crowd fall to a hush.

“Who am I?” he finally asked. “You know who I am?”

“The greatest!” Bundini shouted. “The king of all he see!”

The crowd began to chant, responding like one of those crowds that used to greet some Duke of Doo-Wop: “The greatest! The greatest!”

It continued until Ali spread his hands for silence. “Gorilla,” he then said. He waited, then came at them with a louder “Gorilla.”

“Joe Frazier!” a guy in the back shouted, looking like an arriviste Hell’s Angel.

“No!” a young white woman with a pasty face, blond hair like straw, and the decolletage of a barmaid shouted at ringside. “The ape man! Ape! Ape!”

Ali stared above the gathering into infinity, his mouth angry, eyes blank, then screamed: “Joe Frazier should give his face to the Wildlife Fund! He so ugly, blind men go the other way!” Bundini slapped his thighs, the comic in love with his own lines. “Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!” Ali went on, then added: “He not only looks bad! You can smell him in another country!” He held his nose. “What will the people in Manila think? We can’t have a gorilla for a champ. They’re gonna think, lookin’ at him, that all black brothers are animals. Ignorant. Stupid. Ugly. If he’s champ again, other nations will laugh at us.”

“Call us pig farmers!” the Hell’s Angel bleated. “Can’t have it!”

“Jist niggers!” a black guy screamed, tossing a grenade from the rear that extracted a sad expression from Ali. “Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “Jist niggahs and freaks. They gonna say that ’bout me?”

“Nooooooo!” the crowd roared in unison.

“Right on!” Ali agreed, then prepared for his parting shot. “Gorilla,” he said. “Ugly and smelly!” He then dropped low, on his haunches, splayed his feet, knuckles waving by his knees, and turned his nose flat and gross as he mimicked an ape. He jumped frantically around the ring, snorting and puzzled like an ape. The crowd chanted his name, mindless, nearly out of hand and, with Frazier not there to trample to death, it pushed toward the ring. Ali held his hands up, then dropped one finger to crush his nose again and said: “Settle down now. Be back in a few minutes and show ya how I’m gonna destroy the niggah.”

“Smoke ain’t gonna like this,” Gypsy said, shaking his head.

Did he have to tell him?

“Why you think I’m here?” he said. “Smoke wants to know everything.”

According to Gypsy, he reported back to Joe, who was getting dressed after a workout. A neat man, he was meticulous about the way he dressed and appeared. Music was playing, he splashed lotion on his face, and he was in a high mood.

“What you got, Gyp?” Joe asked.

“He ready to be a corpse,” Gyp said. “Not much left. The right hand slow. If you ask me.”

“He never looks good in training,” Joe said. “Was he hangin’ on the ropes like usual?”

“Yeah, you know how he is. Lets them big guys tear at him.”

Joe looked at Futch.

“He won’t be there in Manila,” Futch said.

“What else happenin’?” Joe asked. Gypsy did a little shuffle with his feet, looked at Eddie.

“Well?”

Joe listened to the abuse Ali had poured on him, then said: “Ya hear that, Eddie? He’s always after your manhood! Anything else?”

“Well, Smoke,” Gyp started. He hesitated, and Joe snapped at him, saying: “Gimme it!” Gyp said: “It was a big crowd. Couldn’t move in the place. He hopped ’round like an ape. Said you not fit to be champ. And you smell so bad they can smell you in another country.”

Joe turned, gunned a hole in the thin wood of the wall, then flipped over his desk. Futch tried to calm him. Joe, rubbing his hand, finally said: “Eddie, listen up! Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t stop the fight! We got nowhere to go after this. I’m gonna eat this half-breed’s heart right out of his chest.”

“Joe…” Futch said.

“I mean it,” Joe said. “This is the end of him or me.”

A
land of
palabas,
dramatic spectacle, it was said of the Philippines. Nothing was small there except the people. The squalor was immense, made worse by pounding heat and sun, relieved only by the monsoons, which drove against the islands like sheaths of warm metal. Outsize disaster had a regularity, overloaded island ferries going down with two thousand aboard, whole settlements even in the city washed away in an instant by floods, and always the promise of even worse from coughing volcanoes. Certain religious ceremonies—though increasingly viewed in the land as exhibitionistic machismo—portrayed a hunger for more suffering, with parades of bloody self-flagellants and crucifixions. Even the torture commandants of Marcos, it was said, had found new, diabolical ways into the human spirit; for the very special, a special room in the Malacanang Palace that contained the blackest practices. Yet the Filipinos were seen around the world as a remarkably peaceful, passive, fatalistic people, a myth according to one dissident priest who carried a gun while serving mass in what was known as the Church of the Black
Nazarene in the noisy Quippo section, its statue of Christ black from the bombing ash of World War II.

“Do not believe what you think you see or read in tourist books,” the priest said. “We are a gentle people but behind the smiles and our endless patience there is a fuse of violence that can go off at any time. One thing is that we know how to survive. We survive better than any people on earth. We suffered the Japanese, having even to bow to them on the streets. We suffered the Americans, who taught us how to be corrupt. The Spanish before them turned us into worthless peons. Centuries like this are evil to a culture, hard to escape. We will outlast Marcos, too.”

Manila did not provide the usual backlighting of film noir, endemic to boxing but for a long time hardly evident. Instead, the city, sagging under the weight of millions from the provinces, threw up the feel of tropic-gothic, a place, as Graham Greene once said of Saigon, that “held you as a smell does.” It was not hard to imagine Sydney Greenstreet, in a white suit stained by sweat, rolling his girth through an out-of-the-way, dark shop on a rumor, looking for the obsidian glare of the Maltese Falcon. The city was a crossroads of sorts, teeming with gem dealers and smugglers, weapons merchants, Arabs shopping for indentured slaves, homosexuals trolling for little boys, GIs from nearby Clark Field feverishly searching for the action that, unfortunately with each new posting, spread unfairly the label on Manila as the oral sex capital of the world. What other name could its powerful religious head have but Cardinal Sin?

Rumors moved as fast as the drinks by the pools and in the lavish hotels that Imelda Marcos, a queen with an “edifice complex,” was raising at an alarming rate to attract tourists, principally waves of Japanese. There were whispers of the “Bionic Boy” sequestered by Imelda and Ferdinand, a wastrel-seer picked up for his occult powers; the palace apparently creaked with Imelda’s palm readers, séances,
and the president’s own claim of clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences.

“Will I ever be poor again?” supposedly was one of Imelda’s favorite palm inquiries. Ferdinand had his own interest—Yamashita’s Gold, vast war loot said to have been left behind by the Japanese general. One rumor passed on to me by a Filipino cop was of the skeleton factory, where people murdered by cops were taken. Bones were boiled, marrow separated, steamed and blow-dried, then looped through with wiring before shipment to foreign scholars and labs. The skeleton chop-shop never stayed in the same place. I spent, given my curious propulsion toward the socially abnormal, a good part of the night with the cop looking for one in every fetid crevice. “We’ll know it by the smell,” he kept saying. We found one shop but it was empty, abandoned, with only a sweet excrescence faintly in the air and a splinter of bone the cop picked up in a corner.

It did not surprise that President Marcos agreed to an interview with myself and Peter Bonventre of
Newsweek.
That was the whole purpose of the fight, access and exposure to the rest of the world, to show that Manila was no more an outlaw city, that foreign investment was secure, that martial law, for all its connotations, was a cleansing instrument; Martial Law with a smile. For that opportunity, Marcos’s share was $5 million toward the promotion, $4.5 million to Ali, the rest to Frazier. Guns by the hundreds of thousands had been peaceably given up by Manilans. Rumors were considered subversive—and punishable by death. A 12
P
.
M
. curfew, obeyed only by the poor, was in place. Young women were no longer kidnapped from the streets, taken into concubinage, or sold abroad. No tanks in the streets. He was a cool customer sitting there in his white
barong,
made of pineapple fiber, with a jutting pompadour and a face like a folk art engraving. It was all rather boilerplate masquerade, a show, an interview done at the request of the home office. Behind the smiling
coercion, though, were the mothers searching for missing children and those skeleton factories.

Marcos had a high opinion of himself as a sportsman and a man of fitness, and at age fifty-six considered himself the most athletic head of state in the world. An aide later boasted of it, too, so I asked him if I could watch him go through his routine. No problem, and two days later, standing around like a court idiot, I attended a Marcos workout, wishing that I had kept my mouth shut. “I make my decisions early in the morning,” he said, “while jogging in place in the bedroom.” He played a fast game of
pelota,
moving like a jumping coffee bean. He did ten laps in the pool, then, just when I thought he would ask for a game of chess or pick up a piece to demonstrate his famed sharpshooting, he was off to his golf course, trailed by a platoon of aides; several carried automatic rifles, another a holster and a.45 that belonged to Marcos. There were scattered claps to his reasonably good strokes. He was asked his preference in the fight. “Lady Imelda,” he said, “is in love with Ali.” He laughed: “She has a taste for the feminine in men. I’m partial to Frazier. There is a danger about him.” I remarked on Ali’s reception at the airport. “If he was Filipino,” he said dryly, “I’d have to kill him. So popular.” He then said: “That’s a joke now, of course.” A big bird, perhaps a buzzard, began to annoy him by dropping down uncannily for four or so holes, say thirty yards in front of his shot. Marcos suddenly requested his .45, then aiming, the muzzle flashed, the bird bounced. He pushed on, stepped over the bird without notice.

“Quite a wingspan,” I noted.

“Not anymore,” he said curtly.

I wondered if there was a school for dictators, so confident was his stride and manner, with the detachment of a minor conquistador. Hard to believe then, but years later the diffident Filipinos would rise up in the streets, chase him into exile, and sack Malacanang. He had,
of course, never been the strongman in opposition to America, just a greedy colonialist himself, with his public anti-American patter and fever for the people’s treasury and a royal dynasty that would go on to Imelda and then to his son Bongbong. But Imelda got out of hand. Having been ceded too much power in governance (she had been more effective as the beauty with a motherly heart, the Eva Peron of Asia), she became treacherous inside the corridors and finally, at long last, alienating to the public with her extravagance; she’d buy a $5 million diamond on the spot. With his reign near an end, Marcos summoned the chess champion Eugene Torre to the palace; he had sometimes flown Bobby Fischer in for head-to-head matches. Marcos wanted save-the-day strategy from Torre, who told him: “Easy. Sacrifice the queen.”

Marcos was with Ali and Frazier only once before the fight, during a press affair at the palace. It was a sumptuous dwelling, with marble that echoed to the step blending with rich, crafted wood, and prominent was a portrait of Imelda set in Mikimoto pearls. Marcos stood between the pair when something was exchanged between them, and Frazier said loudly: “I’m gonna whup your half-breed ass once and for all!” He then abruptly took his leave. Marcos seemed startled for a moment; he was not used to the naked vow of violence, just the delivery of it. The president had met Ali on a previous occasion, was complimentary of Veronica’s beauty. She had been introduced by Ali as his wife. In Chicago, Belinda read of the moment in the papers. Embarrassed and angry, she flew immediately to Manila. Ali had also said that “even if [his] children died in a fire, nothing is gonna stop this fight.” Once in Manila, Belinda went to the Hilton Hotel, wrecked his suite with Ali gazing on in silence. A few hours later she flew back to Chicago; their marriage was over, and Belinda would get $2 million and their houses.