The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  Fuck this shit - adjournment for dick in the midst of this ever more precipitous and perplexing narrative. Let's talk cock. Let's talk all sorts of shit.

  Sonny Liston knew that he had what those lying niggers bragged about and those white motherfuckers feared they did.

  "Did you ever see him in the dressing room?" howled the famous St. Louis character Dean Shendal, extending his open palms outward as if in sacerdotal orans. "He had a prick this big. Holy Christ, he could scare a horse."

  "He was huge in his size," said Foneda Cox, his friend and sparring partner. "That was the biggest man I have ever seen, and I've been through the service, in gymnasiums all across the country, and I have never seen a man as big as that man was."

  That attracted the women, all right, said Foneda, who not only ate, drank, and traveled with Sonny, but fucked with him, too, in the hotel suites they shared.

  "When he wasn't training, his big sport was women. He used to get the hotel rooms and pick up women left and right. We would meet girls, and I think this is one of the reasons Sonny wanted me, because I would attract a lot of girls for him. So, this was what we would do. We would go into a new town, and we would have girls in there. When Sonny would have sex with women, I would have sex with them, too. And it's amazing the things that they would do." Foneda was a handsome, charming man, but he knew he was merely the procurer, the sidekick, the bait for Sonny's line. In the hotel suites, once Sonny had his britches down, "he was the main target for the women."

  It was a part of their routine. "We'd pick up a girl and keep her all night, and then, the next morning, that's when they would leave. So then we'd have some more the next night."

  When they couldn't get free women, they went with store bought; and these were usually the women that Sonny let loose on. "He put some of the prostitutes in the hospital. Yeah, because he would jam up on the inside, see. It would just be terrible the way he would be banging on some of them. You wouldn't believe the prostitutes he sent to the hospital."

  Sometimes they shared one woman, sometimes they shared a brace of women. Sometimes each man took a woman for himself, sometimes each took a brace for himself. Sonny liked that, going to bed with two ladies. It befitted him.

  I had heard a story about somebody who once called on Sonny at a hotel. There was a woman with Sonny, and the room was littered with bottles and crumpled paper sandwich wrappings. When the caller arrived, Sonny slipped something into the woman's hand and bade her adieu. She looked at what he had put in her hand. "Damn it, Sonny," she remonstrated. "Here I am with you all last night and half of today, all these hours, and this is all you give me."

  Sonny looked at her and said, "What about that tunafish sandwich I bought you?"

  It was this story that prompted me to ask Foneda if Sonny was cheap with prostitutes.

  "No, 'cause, see, he would give me the money, and then I would give the girls a hundred dollars apiece. I didn't let him worry about that."

  When morning came, Sonny and Foneda usually took breakfast together. "We never took 'em to breakfast too often," he said of the prostitutes. "They would be on their way. Once they got their money, they were ready to go."

  Foneda seemed at times wistful for those bygone days. As he spoke, phrases such as "It's amazing the things that they would do," "You'd be surprised at the things that they would do," and "They did everything" seemed in their utterance to be not so much a commentary or a part of his narrative, but rather recurrent, passing inner reflections of nostalgia stirred by the raised memories of that narrative.

  Both he and Sonny were blowjob men. Sure, Sonny liked to "jam up on the inside, see"; but a good piece of tail and a good blowjob were unto each other like penitentiary gruel and prime steak, or a dreary but winning decision after the full twelve rounds and a knockout through the ropes in the first. It was all the medicine, all the religion, that any man needed at times; and it was likely, polio vaccine and such notwithstanding, the greatest invention of the white man.

  Foneda remembered being around "maybe once or twice" when Black Muslim proselytes hovered near Liston, trying to get his ear. "He just didn't think too much of their expression on separating races. Sonny liked white women as much as he did black women. Sonny just didn't like the expression that they would greet the women with, call them 'white devils' and stuff. That wasn't his make at all."

  Actually, Sonny's loathing of the Black Muslims dated to his earliest exposure to them, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Some say it was fear as well as loathing, as Sonny generally was apprehensive of people who were, or were seen by him as, crazy, and in his suspicious and unspeaking eyes the Black Muslims were just that - crazy. He did not like them, and he did not like their ways, and he did not trust them.

  The so called Freedom Riders were in the forefront of the news in those days. Organized by CORE in 1961, Freedom Riders traveled through the South in buses to test the effectiveness of a 1960 Supreme Court decision declaring that segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The beatings and trouble the riders endured, which made crackerjack news, were a powerful demonstration of the gravity of commitment within the civil rights movement.

  "I think those Freedom Riders is stupid," said Sonny in that year of 1961. "That ain't no way to do things. You have to fight for what you get. It's like boxing. No use being in there if you just catch punches."

  Later, a writer from Ebony magazine asked if he regarded white opponents with particular severity. "Yes," he answered.

  What did he think of when the round one bell sounded and the man in the other corner was white?

  "Kill him," Sonny said, sullenly, matter of factly. "I always say kill him when I'm in the ring with a white boy. You got to knock 'em out to win. You won't get the decision. I try to knock 'em all out, white or black."

  This was the way of his life, and the way of his heart, and the way of his soul. Sonny Liston did not give a fuck what color you were when he knocked you down and dragged you in that alley. He did not give a fuck what color you were when he embraced you. He was - in good and in bad, if such distinction can or should even be made - pure. There were few friends in his life, as there are few real friends in any life; but for every Foneda Cox that he loved and trusted, there was some white gangster - and, yes, he did trust in thieves, as only a thief can -or some old Jewish cat that was writ just as deep in the lines of his palm.

  The writer Mark Kram encountered Sonny some years later. It was in the early hours before dawn in a Las Vegas casino. Sonny told him a story, which I here pass on. The story takes place in Houston in 1960, on the night Sonny beat Roy Harris. Sitting in a chair in the deserted lobby of the hotel where he was staying, Sonny had fallen into a tired, boozy nod and was almost asleep when he heard something - the creak of leather bootsteps, then the click of a gun - behind his ear:

  "Don't turn aroun', nigger."

  "What you want, man? I got a couple hundred. That what you want?"

  "You made a fool out of Roy in there tonight. Oh, you're a bad nigger, aren't you?"

  "Just a fight, man. Me or him. No more 'n that."

  "I got one bullet in this here Colt. I'm gonna pull this trigger till you tell me to stop."

  "I ain't done nothin'. You crazy."

  "I stop when you tell me you're a no-good, yeller nigger."

  "Shee-it, git lost. You ain't got no bullet in there."

  From behind, came the quite loud sound in silence of revolving chambers and their load.

  "Now, just say you're a no-good yeller nigger."

  "Fuck you."

  There was that sound again. "You scared, nigger? Let's-"

  "Wait. I'm a no-good nigger."

  "A yeller nigger. Say it."

  "Yeah, a yeller one."

  "Don't turn aroun'."

  He could hear the gun being uncocked, the creaking leather footsteps receding from him.

  And when Sonny told Mark Kram this little tale, he kept on telling. "I�
��ve heard that creak ever since," he said. "Folks are violent. It got to be torture for me, bein' public. Like bein' the only chicken in a bag full of cats."

  I don't think that Mark made up this story, but I wonder if Sonny did. I wonder if it filled some need to create a sense of himself as a victim of blind hatred. Those white cops in St. Louis, hell, man, that was no good a tale; wasn't just setting in no easy chair when they took to sweating him. Yeah, they were white, all right. But that other son-of-a-bitch cop, that one that wanted to baptize his ass with lead, well, hell, he was black. Maybe that creaking up behind him that he made up was not so much made up as the man that went with it. Maybe that creaking up behind him was a creeping up inside him from those places he did not want to look, and maybe he could only express fear in terms of something for which he had no fear, that is to say another man. Or maybe it just happened. Or maybe he was just drunk and running in it.

  Sonny's niece Ezraline, the daughter of his half-brother E.B. Ward, remembered Uncle Sonny coming down to visit his kin in Forrest City when she was a teenager. He had a fine big Cadillac convertible and a fine big white woman.

  "He came down here with that white woman, and they was telling him that he had to leave, they didn't allow that down here." It was in 1961, "before King did the Civil Rights March." Ezraline never forgot her Uncle Sonny's "sharp car" or that "nice-looking white lady." She could still picture it, still recall the scent of it, many years later. "Convertible, honey. Yeah. He was lookin' good, smellin' good. A whole lotta money. Mmm. Givin' everybody money. White lady friend." But Ezraline was not sure about what they said: that the white woman "was supposed to have been in love with him." Uncle Sonny, she said, was getting famous and "really making that money" at that time. "You know how womens be all over you then."

  In their travels with Sonny's dick, Geraldine Liston was not a part of the picture. "Sonny respected his wife," said Foneda, who was a bachelor in those days. "And he did not abuse Geraldine." But he rarely took her with him when he traveled.

  "We talked about a lot of things, me and Geri," said Foneda. "Geri was a sweet person. She knew within her heart that Sonny was going out and messing around with other women. But I would try to tone it down. I would never tell her the straight truth of what was happening. And Sonny wouldn't. I would be trying to build him up in her eyesight. I told her, I said, you know, a lot of times Sonny just wants to be around different girls, different people. I said he wouldn't do anything, they don't mean nothing to him; he just wants to be seen with pretty girls. She would say, 'Well, I'm gonna leave judgment up to you.' And I would not tell her the whole picture at no time. I never told her once that Sonny had a relationship with any woman." Yes, he concluded, "Geraldine was all right."

  Sonny loved children. They brought out the best in him, which is what he saw in them: the spirit of the loving child in himself, which had been extracted from him and butchered in the throes of his own miserable and stillborn childhood. If Sonny pretended to be good in the company of priests, he sincerely was good in the company of children, especially those in whom he discerned an echo of the loneliness and loss that had haunted his own boyhood. He wanted to give them something of friendship, goodness, and kindness - those same things that yet eluded him - and in giving them these things, in wanting to give them these things, he came closest to feeling and to having them himself. His compassion and the pangs of his own soul were one.

  Yet Sonny's marriage to Geraldine was childless, and, while he was a paternal provider for Geraldine's daughter, Arletha, who was thirteen when Sonny and Geraldine married, he neither acknowledged nor knew the whereabouts of a daughter that he himself had fathered in the lost days before his penitentiary time. Her name was Eleanor, and only years later would he seek her out.

  Yeah, that "L." How could a woman remember a goddamn "L" and not the goddamn name that went with it? A woman who had even less truck with the goddamn alphabet than him? How could she remember the "L" and not the goddamn day that she bore the child that got stuck to that "L"? And, knowing her, why in hell wouldn't she just make up something to go with that "L" instead of it leaving it by like some holy privy thing that came out the sky on a pentecostal tongue? It was a goddamn wonder she recalled that the other "L" stood for Liston. "And in this corner ... Lonesome Charles Liston." Yeah. That had a chime to it, sure enough. And what was that other one he had a mind of that time, before that prison tattoo of a nickname stuck. Yeah, that was it: "and in this corner-"

  "Where were you born, Mr. Liston?"

  "Little Rock."

  "Would you mind telling us how old you are?"

  "Twenty-seven."

  "How much education did you get?"

  "I didn't get any."

  "Do you know Frank Palermo?"

  "Yes, sir. I know him."

  "Do you know John Vitale?"

  "Yes, I know him."

  Senator Everett Dirksen stepped in to share questioning with Senator Kefauver.

  "You have a family?"

  "I have a wife."

  "Children?"

  "No, sir."

  Subcommittee counsel John G. Bonomi stepped in to share questioning with Dirksen and Kefauver. He asked Liston if he remembered being arrested in St. Louis on August 12, 1959.

  On that date, a week after the Valdes fight in Chicago, Sonny had been picked up and nominally booked on suspicion of gambling. Such had been his visitor's welcome as a hometown hero - one more sausage pinch. When the cops searched him, they found in his possession slips of paper bearing names and numbers - for John Vitale, Blinky Palermo, Barney Baker - that subsequently had been passed on to the investigators of the Kefauver Committee. "I couldn't recall the date," Sonny told him. "I don't carry around a pencil to see how many times I was picked up."

  "At the time that you were arrested in St. Louis in 1959, you apparently had in your possession a slip reading 'J.V. CO14972.' Do you recall having a slip in your possession?"

  "No, sir. I didn't have no such slip."

  He was shown a photostatic copy of the slip in question, asked again if he recalled it.

  "Maybe yes or maybe no. I don't remember. I can't remember now."

  "What would JV stand for?"

  "John Vitale, is that correct? You know that John Vitale's home number is Colfax 14972, do you not?"

  "That's right."

  Dirksen wanted to know why he had been arrested in the first place.

  "Why?" Liston said. "That's the question I would like to know."

  "That is what I would like to know also," Dirksen said.

  "Well." said Sonny. "I imagine he got the records - why did they arrest me?"

  "We will go into that next, Mr. Liston." Bonomi said.

  "Because they never told me anything. They just picked me up and put me in the can and questioned me."

  "That is a form of arrest, of course." Bonomi said.

  "Yes." Liston sighed.

  "Do you know whether or not Frank Palermo has been your undercover manager in the period of March of 1958 to the present, or one of your undercover managers?"

  "I only know what I got on paper."

  The investigating committee had something on paper too - something besides those slips. It was a letter that Sonny had "written," through Geraldine's hand, to Ike Williams, the former lightweight champ who had testified here before the subcommittee only yesterday. The letter had been written seven months ago, in mid-May.

  "'Dear Ike,'" Bonomi read aloud:

  "I received your letter and I was happy to hear from you. I had not seen you in a long time. I was wondering what had become of you. Thanks for writing me. It give you a happy feeling to know that people are thinking of you. I hope I can get a chance at the title, and if I win, I hope I can be a good champ, as Joe was. He was a great guy. Frank and Pep are-"

  Here Bonomi stopped, and Liston was asked if he remembered dictating the letter.