When Clay beat Liston, he bounced up on his stool and shouted that he was King of the World. Corn king, summer king, America"s most beautiful young man. An angel in the boxing ring. A new and powerful image of black manhood.
He stepped up on that stool in 1964 and he put a noose around his neck.
The thing about magic is that it happens in spite of everything you can do to stop it.
And the wild old G.o.ds will have their sacrifice.
No excuses.
If they can"t have Charismatic, they"ll take the man that saved him.
So it goes.
8.
Sometimes it"s easier to tell yourself you quit than to admit that they beat you. Sometimes it"s easier to look down.
The civil rights movement in the early 1960s found Liston a thug and an embarra.s.sment. He was a jailbird, an illiterate, a dark unstoppable monster. The rumor was that he had a second career as a standover man-a mob enforcer. The NAACP protested when Floyd Patterson agreed to fight him in 1962.
9.
Sonny didn"t know his own birthday or maybe he lied about his age. Forty"s old for a fighter, and Sonny said he was born in "32 when he was might have been born as early as "27. There"s a big d.a.m.ned difference between thirty-two and thirty-seven in the boxing ring.
And there"s another thing, something about prize fighters you might not know. In Liston"s day, they shot the fighters" hands full of anesthetic before they wrapped them for the fight. So a guy who was a hitter-a puncher rather than a boxer, in the parlance-he could pound away on his opponent and never notice he"d broken all the G.o.dd.a.m.ned bones in his G.o.dd.a.m.ned hands.
Sonny Liston was a puncher. Muhammad Ali was a boxer.
Neither one of them, as it happens, could abide the needles. So when they went swinging into the ring, they earned every punch they threw.
Smack a sheetrock wall a couple of dozen times with your shoulder behind it if you want to build up a concept of what that means, in terms of endurance and of pain. Me? I would have taken the needle over feeling the bones I was breaking. Taken it in a heartbeat.
But Charismatic finished his race on a shattered leg, and so did Black Gold.
What the h.e.l.l were a few broken bones to Sonny Liston?
10.
You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man"s angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was the way and the path, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior G.o.d, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.
And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.
Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?
I am my city, and I contain mult.i.tudes. I"m the African-American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I"m the black neighborhoods near D Street that can"t keep a supermarket, and I"m Cartier Street and I"m Northtown and I"m Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn"t matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.
Because Sonny Liston died here, and he"s buried here in the palm of my hand. And I"m Sonny Liston too, wronged and wronging; he"s in here, boiling and bubbling away.
11.
I filled his gla.s.s one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his gla.s.s so it vanished. "You"re here on business, Jackie," he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. "n.o.body wants to listen to me talk."
"I want to listen, Sonny." The scotch didn"t taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I"d drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. "I"m here to listen as long as you want to talk."
His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn"t stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the gla.s.s in his hands. "I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for."
At Christmas time in 1970, Muhammad Ali-recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction-was preparing for a t.i.tle bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that year, his appeal, his demand to be granted status as a conscientious objector, was to go before the United States Supreme Court.
He faced a five year prison sentence.
In jail, he"d come up against everything Sonny Liston had. And maybe Ali was the stronger man. And maybe the young king wouldn"t break where the old one fell. Or maybe he wouldn"t make it out of prison alive, or free.
"Ali needs your help," I said.
"f.u.c.k Ca.s.sius Clay," he said.
Sonny finished his drink and spent a while staring at the bottom of his gla.s.s. I waited until he turned his head, skimming his eyes along the floor, and tried to sip again from the empty gla.s.s. Then I cleared my throat and said "It isn"t just for him."
Sonny flinched. See, the thing about Sonny-that he never learned to read, that doesn"t mean he was dumb. "The NAACP don"t want me. The Nation of Islam don"t want me. They didn"t even want Clay to box me. I"m an embarra.s.sment to the black man."
He dropped his gla.s.s on the table and held his breath for a moment before he shrugged and said, "Well, they got their n.i.g.g.e.r now."
Some of them know up front; they listen to the whispers, and they know the price they might have to pay if it"s their number that comes up. Some just kind of know in the back of their heads. About the corn king, and the laurel wreath, and the price that sometimes has to be paid.
Sonny Liston, like I said, he wasn"t dumb.
"Ali can do something you can"t, Sonny." Ali can be a symbol.
"I can"t have it," he drawled. "But I can buy it? Is that what you"re telling me, Jack?"
I finished my gla.s.s too, already drunk enough that it didn"t make my sinuses sting. "Sonny," I said, with that last bit of Dutch courage in me, "you"re gonna have to take another fall."
12.
When his wife-returning from a holiday visit to her relatives-found his body on January fifth, eleven days after I poured him that drink, maybe a week or so after he died, Sonny had needle marks in the crook of his arm, though the coroner"s report said heart failure.
Can you think of a worse way to kill the man?
13.
On March 8, 1971, a publicly reviled Muhammad Ali was defeated by Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in New York City in a boxing match billed at the "Fight of the Century." Ali had been vilified in the press as a Black Muslim, a religious and political radical, a black man who wouldn"t look down.
Three months later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, allowing Muhammad Ali"s conscientious objector status to stand.
He was a free man.
Ali fought Frazier twice more. He won both times, and went on to become the most respected fighter in the history of the sport. A beautiful avenging outspoken angel.
Almost thirty-five years after Sonny Liston died, in November of 2005, President George W. Bush awarded America"s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the draft-dodging, politically activist lay preacher Muhammad Ali.
14.
Sonny Liston never looked a man in the eye unless he meant to beat him down. Until he looked upon Ca.s.sius Clay and hated him. And looked past that hate and saw a dawning angel, and he saw the future, and he wanted it that bad.
Wanted it bad, Sonny Liston, illiterate jailbird and fighter and standover man. Sonny Liston the drunk, the s.e.x offender. Broken, brutal Sonny Liston with the scars on his face from St. Louis cops beating a confession from him, with the scars on his back from his daddy beating him down on the farm.
Sonny Liston, who loved children. He wanted that thing, and he knew it could never be his.
Wanted it and saw a way to make it happen for somebody else.
15.
And so he takes that fall, Sonny Liston. Again and again and again, like John Henry driving steel until his heart burst, like a jockey rolling over the shoulder of a running, broken horse. He takes the fall, and he saves the King.
And Muhammad Ali? He never once looks down.
King Pole, Gallow Pole.
Bottle Tree.
The ghosts from the dam come in summer. The official count is ninety-six, but "industrial fatalities" does not include the men who died of carbon monoxide poisoning-they were told it was "pneumonia"-or rock dust in their lungs. I"ve met the dead, and there"s more than ninety-six. Several hundred, enough to fill a big school cafeteria. If you could get them to muster out, you could count.
One came for me on Sunday, as I sat by a black-painted wrought-iron cafe table-which is not such a great idea in August when the in-the-shade temperature is 118-protected from the worst of the sun by an umbrella and a chinaberry tree. A pint of pear cider rested by my hand; a nibbled ploughman"s lunch spread across a plate I"d pushed to the other side of the table. The Stilton was real, but the cheddar might as well have been Velveeta. Just like Vegas. Just like me, the genius loci of Las Vegas. It"s all this facade of the exotic over solid Topeka.
I had finished with the Sunday Review-Journal/Sun, and was using it as an underpinning for my heaps of poker chips. The top story was about Martin Powers, the grandson of the owner of the Babylon Casino, who was up on racketeering charges.
Viva Las Vegas.
I was interested in the poker chips.
You can build cantilevered structures from them, where the only things holding them together are gravity and leverage and the weight of the pieces. The heavier the chip and the wider, the better. Some of these were Stratosphere millennium-fireworks chips, and some were black-and-white dollar chips from the old Silver Slipper, which isn"t there anymore. The red edges and the black edges made a pattern like the facade on a brick Victorian.
I was engrossed in trying to match the red and black ink of the spill of card suits small as a Gila"s beaded scales sleeving my left arm and curling across my throat.
I had stopped to think about my next move while smearing blue cheese on a white roll with all the flavor and consistency of drywall-because I"m Vegas, and we can get you Wyder"s pear cider and Branston pickle, but we"re not smart enough to figure out that a ploughman"s lunch is only as good as the bread-and after a minute or two I noticed somebody watching from the railing.
I was pretty sure he was a ghost.
n.o.body walks in Vegas if they can help it. One, it"s too hot. Two, we"re not real good on traffic signals and respecting the crosswalks and all that sissy East Coast stuff. Three, I saw him otherwise, not in the hard-world way. And finally, he was transparent, which was a clue. Even in the absence of apparent crushing damage.
I lifted up my eye patch and scratched under it, not-so-incidentally taking a long look with my otherwise eye while blocking it from casual view with the hand. He stared like a dog who is very politely noticing that you"re eating a steak dinner. I tipped cider onto the pavement.
The ghost brightened appreciably, but raised a hand and shook his head. More for me; I finished the pint and set the gla.s.s down so it wouldn"t tip on the latticework tabletop. The ghost turned away, looking over his shoulder. He couldn"t have said Follow me better if he was La.s.sie.
I pinned a twenty and a ten under my empty gla.s.s, stuffed a last piece of "cheddar" into my mouth, left the chips, and vaulted the white picket fence between the patio and the sidewalk. Painted wood scorched my palm.
Lucky the rail wasn"t iron. I blew on my palm and shook my fingers out as I followed the ghost down Tropicana toward the Strip, wheels sizzling by on my left. Each car kicked up a wave of heat and the oil stench of baking asphalt. Business owners tape towels around the handles of doors in a Vegas summer, and children blister bare feet on manhole covers. My feet baked in my Docs, the leather of my pants squeaking with every step. Up and down my left arm, the sun picked out the clubs and spades in hot pinp.r.i.c.ks.
In the lot, I yanked on my helmet, jacket, and gloves-not necessarily in that order-and rocked the old BMW off the stand before spurring it to life. A fortuitous break in traffic put me on the road.
Ghosts keep up with motor vehicles just fine-or maybe I should say, on the bike, I could move almost as fast as the ghost wanted. My guide led me up Maryland, through the old downtown with its square land-claim grid of numbered streets, then up Las Vegas Boulevard where it turns into Fifth Street. He turned west on Carey, along a strip of California-style stucco homes with six-foot block walls interspersed with desert lots.