The Fight (25 page)

Authors: Norman Mailer

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography, #Classics

BOOK: The Fight

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“I think,” said the pilot’s voice, “we’ve worked out a modus vivendi. The people out there don’t believe us when we tell them Muhammad Ali isn’t on board. So we’ve agreed to let a delegation come on and search the plane. They won’t incommode anybody, and it may enable us to get going. Incidentally, we’re going to disembark all departing passengers and take on the new ones right after the visit of the delegation.”

A cheer went up from the passengers. The stewardesses brought drinks, an emergency dispensation.

Now the delegation came through. It was a fair sampling of the crowd, officers in uniform, airport officials, workers, one woman, one cutthroat, maybe twelve Black people in the delegation. They started in Economy by looking under seats, and in the bathrooms, and by the time they reached the front were becoming unhappily convinced that maybe the Heavyweight Champion was not on board. In First Class, Bob Goodman, a public relations man for the fight, put a couple of pillows on his belly and covered them with a red blanket. “Muhammad Ali is hiding here,” he whispered to the delegation, and the sight of his pink round face delighted the first two Black representatives to come up the aisle, and they made a large play of peering delicately under the blanket before they began to laugh.

After the delegation left, passengers for Dakar got off,
and new passengers for New York got on, all of them walking through an aisle of police at the bottom of the mobile stairs which went up to the door of the plane. Announcements on the negative findings of the delegation were made periodically over loudspeakers, and a part of the crowd started to leave. A considerable number remained. They had been tricked too many times over the last twenty years, and over the last two thousand years, to believe a delegation. They knew Muhammad Ali was on the plane.

A stewardess went out on the platform at the top of the mobile stairs and began to talk to the crowd in French. “We would be proud to have him here,” she said through an electric bullhorn. “We would want him aboard. But he is not on board.
Je vous jure. Muhammad Ali n’est pas sur l’avion.
”

The crowd looked at her. They hardly moved. She was tall and thin with a quintessential American face, honest, good-featured, strong, a hint stingy, and she would never reveal a sense of humor too quickly to strangers. The crowd heard her out in distrust. She was a representative of the powers of vested white deceit. Catcalls came to her, but not too many. Black ears hung on the revelation of American character to be heard in the vowels and consonants of her French. Besides, she was the only actor left.

Norman had gone out to get some air on the platform at the top of the stairs. Since it was even hotter outside than in the cabin and smelled of old oil and jet exhaust, he stayed only to listen to the girl. She looked at him and shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to work,” she said, looking down on the waiting faces below.

“May I make a suggestion?”

“I wish you would.”

“Say to them that whether they believe you or not, they must know that the Champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, would never hide from his own people in a bathroom.”

“That’s good,” said the stewardess. “That might work. How do you say bathroom?”

“Try
lavabo
.”

“Lavabo. Lavabo.”
She picked up the bullhorn and delivered his thought, working gallantly at her French. He listened for a while.
“Muhammad Ali ne veut pas cacher dans la lavabo,”
said the girl.
“Il est trop grande pour cela. Un homme trop large pour avoir peur. La champion du monde qui avait le courage de battre avec George Foreman ne cache pas dans un lavabo quand il y a opportunité pour dire bonjour à son peuple. Il vous aime. Vous êtes son peuple.”

No, nothing much seemed to be going on. There was an air of dead disappointment in the crowd. The evening had promised much and now they were damp from their own sweat and the fire truck’s hosing. After a while, Norman went back into the plane.

Some few minutes later he saw that the crowd was, indeed, beginning to disperse. In another quarter of an hour, the stewardess came in and the stairs were removed, the airplane hatch was shut, the motors started up. Cheerfully, the captain shouted through the PA to the stewardesses, “Down girls, we’re about to roll.”

They taxied and took off. Back in the air again, the stewardess who had been at the bullhorn came by and told him
that she thought his idea had helped. He was sufficiently pleased to ask her name and explain that he was a writer and might wish to put this episode in his piece. She replied, “I think I’ve got to ask the captain for permission.” In a little while, she returned and said, “He says it’s all right to tell you. My name is Gail Toes. Mrs. Richard Toes from Schenectady, based in New York. Toes like feet,” she added with a slight stiffening of her diaphragm as if her husband might never know how much a girl loved him to take the name. One of the other stewardesses passing by now stopped and said to her, “Gail, I was proud of you. Your French is getting real good.”

“Well, you got to work at something,” said Gail Toes. She had much time on layovers in parts of Africa she knew little about, she explained, so she studied French.

A little later on the high trip over the Atlantic with the lights out and most of the passengers asleep, Norman played a game with the stewardesses in their forward compartment. It was something with five dice and many ways of counting bonuses, and he was not very good at it and lost by thousands of points, much to their amusement. Finally he went to sleep and had a few hours before they put down in New York, and did not remember the game until some weeks later when, thinking of it, he sent each of the girls an autographed copy of the softcover edition of
Marilyn
and expressed the hope they would think his ability to write was somewhat greater than his flair for dice.

19. LUCKY, THE THREE-TIME LOSER

W
OULD YOU LIKE
more of an ending? Here is an African tale. A tribal chief lent a sheep to a friend of Father Tempels. One morning the sheep was found dead. A dog belonging to the friend was found eating it. There was no evidence the dog had killed the sheep, indeed it probably died in its sleep. Still, the friend, whose name was Kapundwe, happened to be a chief himself, and he made reparations to the first chief. The animal, after all, had been in his care. So he gave back not one sheep but three and added a hundred francs. This large repayment was to compensate the first chief properly for his feeling that he had suffered something more than the mere loss of an animal. The shocking disappearance of his possession had disturbed his vital force. “His peaceful enjoyment of life” had been “wounded.” The payment, therefore, was to recognize his natural rights to a “restoration of being.” Both chiefs understood the transaction perfectly.

We are speaking of the economy of mood. Maybe it is the only economy in the play of forces between those who are living and those who are dead. Of course, we will hardly know until an African becomes emperor of the moon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.