The Fight (14 page)

On each side of the shelf was a partitioning wall of concrete flush with the shelf; it was also three feet in width but ran from floor to ceiling. Perhaps its function was to restrain a prowler from walking along the shelf to a stranger’s window.

Of course, it had not taken long to realize that the partition
might be no more than an ideological restraint. One could step around that side wall onto the next shelf. It would be necessary to lean out as you did it, and there would be nothing to hold onto for that moment but both sides of the partition. Those sides were six inches apart, palm to palm, which is to say, six inches thick. Holding on that way, you could conceivably rear backward, lose your grip, and fall. It was not likely, of course. You would have to lean out very far before your hands (pressed firmly, we may be certain, to both sides of the wall) would fail to hold. Probably no physical feat was involved. Nonetheless, the chance to whirl around that wall over to the next balcony offered vertigo. How ridiculous a way to get yourself killed. What could be worse than accidental suicide? A reverberation of Hemingway’s end shivered its echo. Once Norman had climbed up a ladder in the studio of a man who had died the season before. His heart beating ridiculously on that folding ladder, he mounted from the penultimate rung to the top. There, on the top rung, his body quivered back and forth like a tuning fork. He was caught in a current which had nothing to do with him. He had climbed the mast into a squall of magical forces. With what trembling he climbed down. He had reason to fear. Once, a little earlier in that same period of his life, while covering the second Ali-Liston fight, then scheduled for Boston, he had been miserable for days before forcing himself to take a short walk on a parapet. The parapet was a foot wide and required no exceptional sense of balance. Still it was fifteen steps along the edge of a roof of a high old building in Beacon Hill. He had been sick for days with the imperative
to do it. Finally, he did it. One hour later, Ali’s groin muscles tore. The fight was called off for months. How could you ever know with clarity whether the walk on the roof had been connected or absolutely unconnected to Ali’s rupture? A small obsession for a magician.

Now, these last few days, he had been passing through similar temptations. A Heavyweight Championship was a vortex; not surprising to get into the whirl. But for years he had been trying to avoid stunts. They were too removed from the daily ability to live with a reasonable balance between one’s courage and one’s fear; these private capers were out of measure. He knew he could slip around the partition. But what if he were visited by the involuntary trembling he felt on top of the ladder that summer day a decade ago? So he kept the possibility of going around the wall to the next balcony as a possibility he was simply not going to entertain. On the consequence of this thought he felt disloyal to Ali. He knew Muhammad’s chances would be greater if he did it than if he didn’t. And was furious at the vanity. Ali did not need his paltry magic — “Ali even motivates the dead.” Of course, considering Foreman, Ali might need all the help he could get.

On this Saturday night, long after the weigh-in, not dead drunk, but good and drunk, his mind clear, his limbs functioning as neatly as one can drive a car neatly when deep in drink, he came back to the room, opened his window without ado, stepped out on the balcony — it was 4
A.M.
Sunday morning — put his hands on each side of the partition, worked around to the next balcony, nodded, swung back to his own balcony, performed much the same crossing to
the balcony on the other side, nodded again, came back, climbed through the window, got into bed, and before falling asleep, had time to say to himself, “It was so fucking easy.”

Of course he had done it all in freedom from fear. The freedom that drinking brings. By the logic of magical equations, it was conceivable he had reversed the signs; to be drunk might be to reverse all signs. You could be working for the opposite of what you intend. So in the morning he did not have the remotest idea whether he had brought aid and comfort to the Muslims or the Foremans; he almost did not care. A modest element in this oncoming collision, he must have been picked up by forces he could find familiar but hardly comprehend. A Heavyweight Championship is as charged as a magnetic field. So he did not have the remotest doubt of his own sanity, just the rueful sensation of being tickled by magical tides he would never see.

Downstairs, on this Sunday morning, Bundini was having a war with Elmo.
“Oyé … Foreman boma yé …”
had been dominating the lobby too long. Bundini had gone into the lists for his boss. A crowd was gathered around Bundini and Elmo, who stood three feet apart, sure measure it was unwise to come nose to nose. Each man kept talking. It was not a flurry of sound but a melee — their voices clanged. “Your fighter is untutored, can’t move his head. My man is going to stick him till he’s bleeding and dead,” shouted Bundini. Having slammed his logic from rhyme to rhyme, he added, “God is going to leave him infirm, wailing like a worm, feed him a cabbage leaf, sucker!”

Elmo, unperturbed, stuck up three fingers, and held them in Bundini’s face. Elmo would spear a thrice-noxious orifice: two nostrils and a big mouth. “The flea,” said Elmo with all solemnity, “goes in three. Muhammad Ali.”

In the circle about the two men, just about everybody was working for Foreman. They laughed,
Foreman boma yé, Foreman boma yé
,” Henderson kept repeating to everything Bundini said at a volume just larger than the voice that shouted back. Bundini’s voice grew hoarse, his language was obscured. Pressure was certainly upon him. Back of Henderson, six feet back, his head in a book, stood Foreman. His huge police dog, Daggo, raised in George’s own kennels, stood next to him. On every side were sparring partners and members of the retinue. Each time Bundini began to speak, they would shout him down. “Bullshit,” they would cry. Henderson’s tongue would state: “The flea in three.” It was getting expensive for Bundini to pause. “Ali, the flea, he dead in three.
Oyé
,” boomed Elmo,
“Oyé!”

“You call that a sound?” roared Bundini,
“oyé?”
his eyes bulging out of his head. His eyes looked ready to be extruded from the skull. Plop would they fall to the floor.

“Foreman hits Ali. Muhammad is dead,” Elmo said.

“He’ll never hit him. My man will dance. My man will know how to prance. He’s a genius, he’s a god, your man’s a pug. Foreman’ll be looking for the rug. We’ll let him squirm,” said Bundini, his voice getting thinner,
“Ali boma yé.”
Catcalls and whistles.

“The flea in three,” said Elmo solemnly.

“Put your money where your mouth is,” Bundini screamed. He whipped the last of his vocal cords. “I got a man in my
corner ready to fight. I’m ready to go with him. Who do you have? Your man’s got a dog for a pet, and a nut for a companion.”

Foreman looked up for the first time and the dog looked up with him. Foreman put his face back resolutely in the book. But a wave came off. It was succinct. “Kidding is kidding,” said the wave, “but get your ass off my pillow.”

There were too many people working for Foreman. There was something tireless in the voice of Elmo Henderson. Bundini, bruising the air with his eyeballs, started heading for the elevator. He might have been hoping to extract the wrong turf. Elmo stuck with him, however, the sparring partners stuck, they all stuck with him on the move across that electric carpet. About ten large Black men piled into the elevator with Bundini. His voice slammed shut in the clanging of the gate. Images of mayhem rose in the mind — who could not see shreds and splinters of Bundini?

Still, in the evening, there was Bundini, eating in the restaurant on the open-air patio with his wife, Shere, a white girl from Texas with red hair, green eyes, a stubborn upturned nose, and a Down Home accent. Shere (pronounced Sherry or Cherie) looked as American as the boy with freckles whose face is on the box of breakfast food. Bundini kept calling her “Mother.” She called him by his first name, Drew, for Drew “Bundini” Brown.

Mailer was confused. The last time he had seen much of Bundini was years ago, and Bundini was married then to a Jewish girl. His son, he was proud to tell everyone, had been bar mitzvah. A tall good-looking young black boy with curly Jewish hair, Drew Brown, Jr., used to greet Bundini’s
Jewish friends with “Sholom, aleichom sholom.” To Black friends the boy would remark, “Begin running, motherfucker.”

Once, almost ten years ago, in Las Vegas for the Ali-Patterson fight, Mailer and Bundini had done some drinking together. At the time Bundini had been fired by Ali for some undescribed misdeed. It was obvious he still had much feeling for Ali, but if your man has chosen to reject you, the logic of hustling is to work against him. So Bundini was looking for a connection to Patterson. He knew, after all, every one of Ali’s weaknesses. Patterson, however, would not let Bundini near. Patterson did not trust him. Bundini, with the aid of George Plimpton, had to be content therefore with writing a neat piece for
Life
that gave open advice on the best tactics available to Patterson. Since Floyd’s back went out in the second round, and he fought in all the pain of a slipped disk and a muscle spasm, a brave but wholly miserable encounter, Bundini’s tip — that Patterson should crowd Ali as in a street fight, which proved to be exactly what Frazier would do six years later — proved academic. But then Bundini was down on his luck all over that year — there was nobody to whom he didn’t owe money.

In compensation, Bundini was never more likable. His eyes could send almost as much love as Don King’s and his voice grew as husky as the germination of thought itself. Bundini could neither read nor write — so he claimed — but he could speak. It was rare for him to make a remark void of metaphor. On the Ali-Foreman fight he commented to the press, “God set it up this way. This is the closing of
the book. The king gained his throne by killing a monster and the king will regain his throne by killing a bigger monster. This is the closing of the book.” Of training he would propose, “You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.” Of George Plimpton, who lent him money in the period when he was banished from Ali’s camp, Bundini said, “I’ll always be loyal to George, because he took care of me when my lips was chapped.”

Norman and Bundini might have become friends — the writer respected the style with which Bundini could pass through trouble. At a time when collection men were getting ready to break his legs, Bundini would drop his last four hundred dollars on eight rolls of the dice and walk away with a sad wise smile. Like many a hustler he was
sweet
. He could cry like a child — indeed he cried whenever Ali boxed with beauty, cried at the bounty of the Lord to provide such athletic bliss — and his eyes beamed with love at any remark that excited his own powers of metaphor. Then his big round face would show the simple happiness of Aunt Jemima, his big husky voice would croon in admiration at such wonders of wisdom. That was half of him; Bundini was just as proud of his other soul. If he was all emotion, he could show his ice; if he had class, he could be without class; he’d give his life for a friend and you might believe him, but “he would,” said a critic, “take the dimes off a dead man’s eyes and put nickels back.” Small surprise if he had a build like nobody else. Over six feet with a big crystal ball for a head, he had small shoulders, a small protruding stomach that seemed to center its melon
on his diaphragm, and spindles for legs — it was the body of a spaceman who grew up in a capsule. Yet he had fought in Navy competitions as an adolescent; even now nobody would take Bundini on for too little (except Ali, who slapped him at will as though dealing with an unregenerate child). Bundini was plain as a mouthful of gold teeth and handsome as black velvet; if he called his young wife “Mother,” he had been about as fatherly in his day as any other player: a magazine story once spoke of his desire to be a “marketable pimp.” But then he sold interviews of himself which told it all, and gave metaphors away for nothing; he could not spell a word and had a dozen movie scripts he was trying to sell, his own, he claimed. Recall us to “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Bundini was the walking definition of the idea that each human is born with two souls — two distinct persons to inhabit each body. If Africans did not have the concept, one would have to invent it. What a clash of Nommo and n’golo. All that spirit, all that prick. The two never came together. After a while, Norman and he were no longer friends. Their fight was serious enough not to speak for years. But the fight game shakes old prejudices like castanets. Since he and Bundini kept being thrown together at fights, and since Bundini kept helping him in little ways whether he wished it or not, they finally began to talk a little, if more than a little on guard. For years they talked to each other just a little.

This fight, Bundini was shifting the terms. One afternoon, just as Norman was walking down the bank of the Zaïre after a visit with Ali, he heard a voice shout to him from a neighboring villa.

“Hey, No’min, come here.”

The tone was not pleasant, but he was curious who was calling. Somewhat too late, he realized he was approaching Bundini, who stood in the vestibule of the villa surrounded by a group of Black friends. He had been drinking. Straight out, he was drunk. It was easy to tell with Bundini. The whites of his eyes turned egg-yolk yellow and blooded with webs of red. His breath smelled of the vats.

“I learned,” he declared to Norman, “the meaning of my name in African today. I’ve been blessed. What you been blessed with?”

“Meeting you.”

“You talking like I’m still a nigger. Niggers is yesterday. I’ve been blessed with the root. I’m in harmony. What you been blessed with?” he asked once more. Bundini was warming up to play the dozens. “Show me your blessing,” he said, “show me your blessing.” The dozens, no mistake. Other Blacks were grinning with the possibilities.

“I’m blessed with listening to you beat your gums.” Hardly a good reply. Points were already accumulating to Bundini.