The Fight (15 page)

“My black gums are dark with the misery and the wonder. The jewels of oppression are shining in my black gums, motherfucker.”

“You speaking of your black bar mitzvah gums?”

No smiles from the audience. Bundini was treating him like a stranger. “I learned my black name today,” he said, “I learned what Bundini means.”

“What does it mean?” The answer was weak. You did not parley the dozens, you brought forth an onslaught.

“Bundini means I’m back in the blood of my people. I’m the steeple. I’m the point of it all. My black heart is beautiful. Bundini!
Something like dark
is what they say Bundini means.
Something like dark
,” said Bundini, going back over the translation with relish.

“
Not quite dark
is what it means.” For the first time the Blacks around Bundini laughed a little.

“You’re just envious,” said Bundini, “because you don’t have a name in African, motherfucker. You have none of the black juice. The berries in your belly are pale. Your blood is in jail, motherfucker. As you shit, you mumble, you’re afraid of the jungle. You’re afraid of the jungle, motherfucker!”

“I just wish my mother was here,” Norman managed to say, “because if she was, she would give you a whupping!”

Maybe his voice caught something of Ali’s tone, or maybe it had just gone on long enough, but everybody burst into laughter, and Bundini smote his hand as if he was now Honorary Black. On the round of good feeling this had to offer, Norman also felt some large part of unforgiveness to Bundini begin to lift. Only afterward did it occur to him that drunk in the middle of the afternoon, Bundini was still wise enough to choose the dozens as a way of reestablishing relations, certainly wise enough to thrust victory upon him.

So this night, passing Bundini’s table where he sat with Shere, it was impossible to refuse his offer of a drink. Before too long, Norman accepted his invitation to dinner, and wondered what Bundini had in mind for he kept going over to other tables to advance his business interests, which
were numerous, various, in process, and secret. Shere made conversation with Norman about the ivory market, apartments in New York, her children, and these weeks of missing them, and finally they spoke of the absence of white women out at Nsele, which had been the reason for her desire to move to the Inter-Continental. “It got so I couldn’t put on a swimsuit without creating a near riot.” Truth, she had the figure to do that, but something strong and determined in her features would take no pleasure from such brouhaha. “At Nsele I just stayed in my room. Drew was out working with Ali, so what did he know, but I was going crazy. It’s much better here.”

Drew eventually came back. He was alternately surly and meek with his wife. He was preoccupied. He asked about Ali’s mood, and they talked about that for a while since Norman had spent the afternoon with Ali at Nsele. It had been a curious Sunday. Ali’s voice had left him. Whether it was the cold that appeared to be coming on the night they ran or simple laryngitis from talking too much, Ali could offer no more than a hoarse whisper, a frightening prospect for the fight if his voice was the measure of his strength. But he certainly seemed happy enough. At twilight, he took a walk on the banks of the river, and was surrounded by hundreds of Zairois men, women, and children. He kissed babies and had his picture taken with numbers of black and jubilant housewives in African Sunday dress, and with shy adolescent girls, and little boys who glared at the camera with machismo equal to the significance of these historic events. All the while Ali kissed babies with deliberation, slowly, savoring their skin, as if
he could divine which infants would grow up healthy. He was one politician who would love kissing babies.

Back inside the villa with friends and family for company, he kept speaking in a strained small tone. “Don’t talk too much,” Pat Patterson kept telling him. “Rest your voice.”

Ali shrugged. “Oh, I got to talk,” he said. “I’d die if I couldn’t talk. But I’ll be careful not to say too much.”

He began watching TV cassettes of Foreman’s fights. It was a curious half hour of early evening. Mrs. Clay was there, and she was a plump and very handsome woman with a light skin, a Southern lady, just about, indeed, she looked like a matronly version of Julie Eisenhower, or more properly, let us say we can see the way Julie Eisenhower may look when she is the age of Ali’s mother. Now as Ali watched the Frazier-Foreman fight, his mother sat on the other side of the living room and watched with him. Once more, George appeared in his red trunks and proceeded to demolish Frazier, once more the sledgehammering punches went bouncing off Frazier’s brain. Again came the sight of Frazier’s face as he got up in the first round looking like a man on whom a wall has just fallen. He is back on his feet but the sky is shocking in its tilt.

As Frazier went down for the third time and Foreman, in his red trunks, stepped away, Mrs. Clay said, “That’s going to be Ali in the red trunks.”

Ali watched the films in an odd good mood as if there were something he saw that he would certainly use two nights from now. The fight with José Roman in Tokyo was shown next, a fight in which Roman threw a total of six
punches before Foreman threw one. None of Roman’s punches reached Foreman. Foreman then threw twenty-four punches to Roman’s three. More than half of Foreman’s punches landed. He smashed through Roman’s arms to reach his body. Roman, lying on the floor, had the glitter of a dying animal in his eye. Then a cassette of the Foreman-Norton fight. In all, Ali watched three fights with Foreman, a total of five rounds and twelve knockdowns. He looked pleased. Something he had seen. Something he could use. Who could know what it was? Each time Foreman knocked a man out, frustration showed on his face. Foreman looked like he still wanted to kill them.

Bundini, having listened to Norman’s account, now nodded somberly, and said across the table, “Jesus has no fear.”

“Do you mean Allah has no fear?”

“I call Allah Jesus. It all comes out of God. Whatever you call Him. My man is right there with Jesus, Allah, Jehovah. He’s got it all.”

Slowly, the motive for Bundini’s invitation to dinner emerged. He wanted Norman to look at his scripts and advise him.

“But I thought you can’t read or write.”

“I can’t. But I can talk. People took down my words. I want you to take down some of my words.”

“Drew — why don’t you learn to write? You can do it. It’s time.”

Bundini looked serious and very sad. “I’m afraid to,” he said. “I learned what I learned not knowing how to read,
not knowing how to write. My strength is in the same place as Samson’s hair. Reading and writing is Delilah to me. I don’t want to lose the magic God alone gave me. I got to fight for my boy,” he said. “He’s in there to fight. I got to be there too.” He offered one fine confidence. “I’m sharpening the spike. I’m going to give Foreman’s people the needle tonight.”

“How do you do that?”

“Oh, I’m going up to them to put some money on Ali. But I won’t ask for 3 to 1. I’m going to give two thousand dollars against their three. That got to worry them. They be wondering where I get the confidence. It go right back to George Foreman.”

“You have a real two thousand dollars?”

“Better be real!”

They laughed.

And so in the middle of the same lobby where Bundini had been outshouted by Elmo Henderson on Sunday morning, Bundini returned to joust on Sunday night. Elmo was not about. For certain, Bundini must have picked a time when Elmo was not about.

Having attracted some of Foreman’s people, the sparring partner Stan Ward among them, Bundini began to jeer. “I don’t want 3 to 1, I don’t need 3 to 1.
My
man is 3 to 1.”

“Then give
us
3 to 1,” said Stan Ward.

“I would. If God was here, I would. But He ain’t. He don’t associate with flunkies who work for George Foreman, that big man, that big white man. I don’t give you 3 to 1 because I don’t give no advantage to people who work for the White Man.”

“Then why you asking 3 to 2 instead of 3 to 1,” someone said suspiciously.

“Because you the bullies. Anybody works for the White Man is a bully. A bully needs advantage. I’m giving you advantage. You go out in the casinos and try to get your bet. You have to lay three to get one. You people are too fucking scared to do that. ’Cause you know the White Man upstairs. You know his faults. You know you going to lose.”

“Foreman ain’t going to lose,” said Stan Ward.

“Give me
your
bet,” said Bundini.

“How much you laying?”

“My two thousand dollars is in my hands,” said Bundini pulling out a roll. “Now show me, nigger, where your three thousand dollars is.”

“I can’t get it right away,” said Ward. “But I’ll have it in the morning. I’ll meet you here at eleven in the morning.”

“Yeah, if the White Man tells you to go ahead and pee, then you can piss,” said Bundini.

“He ain’t the White Man.”

“Shit, he ain’t. There he is in the Olympics, a big fat fool dancing around with an eentsy American flag in his big dumb fist. He don’t know what to do with a fist. My man does. My man got his fist in the air when he wins. Power to the People! That’s my man. Millions follow him. Who follows your man? He’s got nobody to follow him,” said Bundini, “that’s why he keeps a
dog
.” The followers of Foreman suddenly roared with happiness. The kuntu was audacity and they paid their respects to the spirit of audacity embodied in Bundini. “What are you ready to die for?” asked Bundini. He answered them, “Nothing. You
ain’t ready for nothing. But I’m ready to die for Muhammad. I put my bread on the line. I don’t have to consult and come back here at eleven in the morning with my dick in my hand, permission to piss. I put my bread on the line. If I got no bread, I’m dead. If I got no loaves, I’m cold stone in the oven,” crooned Bundini. “That’s what it’s all about. Muhammad Ali has Bundini ready to die, and what does the White Man have? Twenty-two niggers and a dog.”

Foreman’s people roared with all the happiness of knowing that Foreman would win and that the spirit of audacity was nonetheless not dead. A very heavyset Negro with a cane for his game leg and heavy horn-rimmed glasses for his game eyes gave a peal of shrill laughter high as a spurt of water shooting up, and held out his palm.

Bundini struck it, showed his own palm, the man struck it back. Happiness. If words were blows, Bundini was champ of the kingdom of flunkies. Long live Nommo, spirit of words.

O
N
T
UESDAY EVENING
, the night of the fight (which in Kinshasa would not take place until 4
A.M.
on Wednesday morning), something like two hundred journalists were sweating in Press Headquarters at the back of the Hotel Memling. A bureaucratic room offering a dirty floor, dirty beige walls, and rows of aluminum chairs with pale orange plastic bucket seats, it was quickly characterized by the AP man, John Vinocur, as looking like the New York State Employment Office. An inadequate air-conditioning system added its clammy draft to the heat.

Once assembled, the reporters were kept waiting in the Press Room for an hour and a half. From seven in the evening to eight-thirty, two hundred members of the press jammed a room whose fire laws would have closed the door at population eighty, and in the wan light of the fluorescent tubes, reporters were crowded in on one another like a fast-growing culture in a Petri dish. Who knows the murderous remarks of bacteria? The media men talked with passion of Mobutu’s lack of faculty for public relations, yet no one
dared to leave. The press representative, Tshimpumpu, had announced that he wished to speak to the press. From experience, everyone knew the speech could contain information essential for getting into the stadium, mention of some arcane gate, for example, not listed on the ticket, but crucial. Besides, it was dangerous to miss picking up one’s ticket. The rest of the night could be spent pleading with Tshimpumpu’s assistants, who would be unable to make a decision without him. God’s blood, one didn’t want to miss obtaining the ticket now.

Yet as the first half hour went by and then the second, living conditions became intolerable in that overpacked room. After a while one began to recognize there were more important goals in life than fight tickets. Self-preservation might be one of them. An hour in the Press Room of the Memling under these conditions was like a festival for cancer cells. Some boredom was escalation in its promise of future disease.

So Norman Mailer and George Plimpton took off to get a beer and, having found a table in a café across a park behind the Memling (able thereby to keep an eye on the press-room door), were able to relax sufficiently to look for the intent of this peculiar way of distributing seats. Since nothing could have been simpler than to assign an official to a room where he could pass out the tickets as each reporter came by to show his credentials — a modest and natural method used for happier fight promotions — one had here to wonder at the motive: Was it the bureaucratic lust for wanton dislocation on a collective scale, or did Tshimpumpu look to stage the works of Franz Kafka? If the first seemed the likelier explanation, the second finally
proved better. For Tshimpumpu never appeared. Murray Goodman, Publicity Director representing the American and English elements of the promotion, Helmdale, Video Techniques, Don King Productions, etc., had the onus of facing the press.

Plimpton and Mailer once safe outside did not know, of course, how wise they had been to leave, but must have sensed it, for they enjoyed the beer, Primus, and the cool African air. They began to talk about Plimpton’s luck in finding a fetishist. The day before, Plimpton had mentioned that it might be interesting to visit a conjuror and buy some equivalent of a rabbit’s foot on which the sorcerer had worked a magic. “All the rich Blacks in Kinshasa are doing it with their own special medicine men,” remarked Plimpton, “and they say it’s very expensive. I wonder if you want to come in with me on it.”

“We’d buy it for Ali, of course,” Norman asked.