Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  “Do not believe what you think you see or read in tourist books,” the priest said. “We are a gentle people but behind the smiles and our endless patience there is a fuse of violence that can go off at any time. One thing is that we know how to survive. We survive better than any people on earth. We suffered the Japanese, having even to bow to them on the streets. We suffered the Americans, who taught us how to be corrupt. The Spanish before them turned us into worthless peons. Centuries like this are evil to a culture, hard to escape. We will outlast Marcos, too.”

  Manila did not provide the usual backlighting of film noir, endemic to boxing but for a long time hardly evident. Instead, the city, sagging under the weight of millions from the provinces, threw up the feel of tropic-gothic, a place, as Graham Greene once said of Saigon, that “held you as a smell does.” It was not hard to imagine Sydney Greenstreet, in a white suit stained by sweat, rolling his girth through an out-of-the-way, dark shop on a rumor, looking for the obsidian glare of the Maltese Falcon. The city was a crossroads of sorts, teeming with gem dealers and smugglers, weapons merchants, Arabs shopping for indentured slaves, homosexuals trolling for little boys, GIs from nearby Clark Field feverishly searching for the action that, unfortunately with each new posting, spread unfairly the label on Manila as the oral sex capital of the world. What other name could its powerful religious head have but Cardinal Sin?

  Rumors moved as fast as the drinks by the pools and in the lavish hotels that Imelda Marcos, a queen with an “edifice complex,” was raising at an alarming rate to attract tourists, principally waves of Japanese. There were whispers of the “Bionic Boy” sequestered by Imelda and Ferdinand, a wastrel-seer picked up for his occult powers; the palace apparently creaked with Imelda’s palm readers, séances, and the president’s own claim of clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences.

  “Will I ever be poor again?” supposedly was one of Imelda’s favorite palm inquiries. Ferdinand had his own interest—Yamashita’s Gold, vast war loot said to have been left behind by the Japanese general. One rumor passed on to me by a Filipino cop was of the skeleton factory, where people murdered by cops were taken. Bones were boiled, marrow separated, steamed and blow-dried, then looped through with wiring before shipment to foreign scholars and labs. The skeleton chop-shop never stayed in the same place. I spent, given my curious propulsion toward the socially abnormal, a good part of the night with the cop looking for one in every fetid crevice. “We’ll know it by the smell,” he kept saying. We found one shop but it was empty, abandoned, with only a sweet excrescence faintly in the air and a splinter of bone the cop picked up in a corner.

  It did not surprise that President Marcos agreed to an interview with myself and Peter Bonventre of Newsweek. That was the whole purpose of the fight, access and exposure to the rest of the world, to show that Manila was no more an outlaw city, that foreign investment was secure, that martial law, for all its connotations, was a cleansing instrument; Martial Law with a smile. For that opportunity, Marcos’s share was $5 million toward the promotion, $4.5 million to Ali, the rest to Frazier. Guns by the hundreds of thousands had been peaceably given up by Manilans. Rumors were considered subversive—and punishable by death. A 12 P. M. curfew, obeyed only by the poor, was in place. Young women were no longer kidnapped from the streets, taken into concubinage, or sold abroad. No tanks in the streets. He was a cool customer sitting there in his white barong, made of pineapple fiber, with a jutting pompadour and a face like a folk art engraving. It was all rather boilerplate masquerade, a show, an interview done at the request of the home office. Behind the smiling coercion, though, were the mothers searching for missing children and those skeleton factories.

  Marcos had a high opinion of himself as a sportsman and a man of fitness, and at age fifty-six considered himself the most athletic head of state in the world. An aide later boasted of it, too, so I asked him if I could watch him go through his routine. No problem, and two days later, standing around like a court idiot, I attended a Marcos workout, wishing that I had kept my mouth shut. “I make my decisions early in the morning,” he said, “while jogging in place in the bedroom.” He played a fast game of pelota, moving like a jumping coffee bean. He did ten laps in the pool, then, just when I thought he would ask for a game of chess or pick up a piece to demonstrate his famed sharpshooting, he was off to his golf course, trailed by a platoon of aides; several carried automatic rifles, another a holster and a.45 that belonged to Marcos. There were scattered claps to his reasonably good strokes. He was asked his preference in the fight. “Lady Imelda,” he said, “is in love with Ali.” He laughed: “She has a taste for the feminine in men. I’m partial to Frazier. There is a danger about him.” I remarked on Ali’s reception at the airport. “If he was Filipino,” he said dryly, “I’d have to kill him. So popular.” He then said: “That’s a joke now, of course.” A big bird, perhaps a buzzard, began to annoy him by dropping down uncannily for four or so holes, say thirty yards in front of his shot. Marcos suddenly requested his .45, then aiming, the muzzle flashed, the bird bounced. He pushed on, stepped over the bird without notice.

  “Quite a wingspan,” I noted.

  “Not anymore,” he said curtly.

  I wondered if there was a school for dictators, so confident was his stride and manner, with the detachment of a minor conquistador. Hard to believe then, but years later the diffident Filipinos would rise up in the streets, chase him into exile, and sack Malacanang. He had, of course, never been the strongman in opposition to America, just a greedy colonialist himself, with his public anti-American patter and fever for the people’s treasury and a royal dynasty that would go on to Imelda and then to his son Bongbong. But Imelda got out of hand. Having been ceded too much power in governance (she had been more effective as the beauty with a motherly heart, the Eva Peron of Asia), she became treacherous inside the corridors and finally, at long last, alienating to the public with her extravagance; she’d buy a $5 million diamond on the spot. With his reign near an end, Marcos summoned the chess champion Eugene Torre to the palace; he had sometimes flown Bobby Fischer in for head-to-head matches. Marcos wanted save-the-day strategy from Torre, who told him: “Easy. Sacrifice the queen.”

  Marcos was with Ali and Frazier only once before the fight, during a press affair at the palace. It was a sumptuous dwelling, with marble that echoed to the step blending with rich, crafted wood, and prominent was a portrait of Imelda set in Mikimoto pearls. Marcos stood between the pair when something was exchanged between them, and Frazier said loudly: “I’m gonna whup your half-breed ass once and for all!” He then abruptly took his leave. Marcos seemed startled for a moment; he was not used to the naked vow of violence, just the delivery of it. The president had met Ali on a previous occasion, was complimentary of Veronica’s beauty. She had been introduced by Ali as his wife. In Chicago, Belinda read of the moment in the papers. Embarrassed and angry, she flew immediately to Manila. Ali had also said that “even if [his] children died in a fire, nothing is gonna stop this fight.” Once in Manila, Belinda went to the Hilton Hotel, wrecked his suite with Ali gazing on in silence. A few hours later she flew back to Chicago; their marriage was over, and Belinda would get $2 million and their houses.

  The fighters trained at the Manila Folk Arts Center, facing the bay and built “for the people” by Imelda. Building was a huge part of her collectomania, as clinical as kleptocracy, and she was an overseer with merciless schedules. One of her hotels, now as numerous as the frangipani trees, was put up so hurriedly that it collapsed on workers. She would later build, in an effort to make Manila the equal of Cannes as a magnet to the stars, the Manila Film Center. With a twenty-four-hour breakneck schedule, it too descended on tired workers, killing hundreds, many with ghostly limbs dangling out of the concrete. Not enough to stop Imelda; she had them chainsawed, then had the place exorcised. Her most splendid creation was for a visit by the Pope, the Coconut Palace (made of 100,000 coconuts), filled with ivory and jade. The Pope refused to
take up residence there. “Quite a place,” Ali said of his training site. “There must be a lot of money here.”

  The Marcoses’ attitude must have been contagious. That thin line that separated Ali’s usual burlesque from insufferable ego seemed to disappear. It crossed over, without doubt, into a disturbing sense of his own power, not dissimilar to what the Marcoses had come to believe of themselves. After running, he’d sit in the predawn on the Hilton steps and say to the hundreds of Filipinos who had run with him: “Don’t judge us by ugly Joe Frazier. He’s the black who’s gone. Watch me! How pretty and smart. There’s a new black man in America! All of them like me.” At his workouts, he castigated Filipinos for working at menial jobs for a few pesos, while praising President Marcos, the source of all their misery in a brutal web of oligarchy. One day, he abused a shy little Filipino reporter who asked a perfectly clear question. “You don’t speak very good English,” he chastened him. Ali as Pygmalion? Ali slowly repeated the question (visibly shrinking the fellow into a little nut of shame) with his own brand of fractured syntax. Conspicuously supporting Ali at all times was his brother Rudy, now known as Rahman, a surly presence. His habit was to flick beads of sweat from Ali’s shoulders, or wail: “Preach! Preach!” When he saw no pencils wiggling, he shouted with a glower: “Take it down, do ya hear? Write down everything he says!”

  His brother was one of thirty eight in Ali’s entourage for this trip, about six or seven who could qualify as workers, and they all could write his room number with confident flourish on checks. He had picked up a new addition, a body servant from Malaysia named Bala, his latest favorite. “He’s so obedient,” Ali said. “Always saying ‘yes sir, no sir.’ He’ll go fetch anything for you. Even take your shoes off for you. I pay people who won’t do that. He’s civilized.” Otherwise, there were the all too familiar faces: Gene Kilroy, the chief of logistics; a couple of quack doctors worthy of being defrocked; Luis Sarria, the meditative masseur; the Texan Lloyd Wells, who got the women and had no other job until he was put in charge of hotel bills and rooms. “These are professional hangers-on,” Lloyd said, in admiration of the staggering bills. “We got the best in the business.” Jeremiah Shabazz, Herbert’s muscle and spy; the decent Wali Youngblood, the taster of Ali’s sweat from which he believed he could divine conditioning; the inimitable and garish Cash, who liked to say: “Without me, there ain’t no Ali.” Throw in assorted boyhood friends, groupies, and grifters, and you had a floating Casbah around the world.

  It was astonishing how unsubtly some of them seemed to live through him, become him. Out of the ring, the struggle for Ali’s favor went on like one of those old European wars, and no one was spared. “Look at the big trainer, Angelo,” one said. “He doesn’t know a cue tip from a bucket.” Youngblood, an assistant trainer, used to moan: “I build Ali up to condition, and Wells tears him down,” a comment that hinted that Wells was in charge of more than accounting. Ed Hughes, who was in charge of massaging Ali’s scalp, said: “Man, I’m not like the rest of these crabs in a can.” In Munich later, when he fought Richard Dunn, sand started to dribble from Ali’s heavy bag. Two workers, like wild insects, dove to clean it up, elbowing each other, with one saying: “Get away from me, boy. I’m handlin’ this mess.”

  In Japan, some of them would be thrown in jail for shooting pictures of nudity in a gender-neutral bathhouse, a sacramental ritual to the Japanese. A crisis point would evolve in Munich. Ali was weary of the bills, gathered them together. He picked on Bundini first. “You, Bundini!” he shouted. “How many phone calls can you make in a day? How many meals can you eat?” Shabazz, munching on a sandwich, shouted: “Amen!” Youngblood, a Muslim, complained: “Too many sausage eaters around here.” Ali asked: “Who you mean?” Wali didn’t speak. “You make a statement,” Ali said, “then don’t tell me what you mean. What kind of friend are you?” Youngblood was furious, took off his jacket.

  “Come on over here, sucker,” Ali yelled. “Come here and I’ll throw you out the window.”

  They all stood there frozen like blind men in Calcutta, sensing that their tin cups were about to be smashed. Ali then calmed down after a long silence and said: “Look, fellas. I don’t mind you eating. You want three steaks, get three steaks.” He started to get riled again. “I feed you niggers,” he said. “I take you all over the world. You see places. You learn things. Never been anywhere in your life. You treat me like this?” But he could never be the constable for long in his little town. “Look, just call long distance once a day, not every minute. Stay on the phone five minutes, okay? I understand. I get homesick myself.” He was very sensitive to his gang, patiently adjudicated their quarrels, played them off against each other, and it gave rise to the thought that he might need them more than they could ever suspect. “Nobody,” he liked to say, “has ever had a crowd around him like me. Not John Wayne, or Frank Sinatra, or Elvis Presley.”

  Two figures of perverse fascination were Bundini and Herbert, one for his histrionics and the other for his louche presence. Nominally an assistant trainer, Bundini was a pinwheel of character colors, a three-card monte dealer who could no doubt work the short con (like the pigeon drop); a piano player (usually lit up) in an old whorehouse; a stump preacher to whom the birds would listen; a philosopher manqué; whoever you wanted to see or pay for (he was adroit at getting reporters to go into pocket). His dossier was expansive and romantic—con man, merchant marine, entrepreneur of backroom crap games, close friend of God (he called Him “Shorty”), prodigious drinker, and now for years Ali’s emotional witch doctor, who supplied him with verbal dexterity and in a wink could go into a clairvoyant swoon as if the locusts were an instant away from darkening the sky.

  Bundini could rev Ali up into a zooming state of indignation, or make him laugh uncontrollably. His was the loudest voice in a ring corner often heavy with pandemonium, his words often drowning out any wisdom Dundee might convey. When Ali was cross, he could reduce Bundini to choking sobs; he had the fastest cry in the West. He felt one with Ali, and he had the peculiar habit of licking the champ’s mouthpiece. If Ali had ever seen that example of bonding, he would have surely slapped him—once again. Out of the blue, he would bust him for no apparent reason, except maybe he grew tired of the noise beating in his ear. In Africa, there was a tiff over a robe that Bundini, proudly, had commissioned for him. Ali didn’t like the robe and slapped him for his impertinence. To the Muslims, he was the infidel, the transparent opportunist (some nervy critique there), and fouler of the holy air. Years back in Miami, they spread a tale about him when he married a white woman. He went to the marriage bureau with his intended, and the clerk looked up and asked: “What kind of license? Hunting or fishing?” Herbert was now looking at Bundini by his T-shirt stand in the Hilton lobby. “I find it all rather regrettable,” he said, frowning at the peon trying to turn a buck.

  Herbert had little use for Ali’s entourage. “You don’t have to be brilliant to hustle Ali,” he said. “He’s a setup.” Who would know that better than he and the Muslims? Over the years, Herbert turned out to be the most proficient harvester of Ali’s sweat and pain. He got 50 percent of Ali’s earnings, and cut Don King, the promoter of many of his fights, 50 percent. King, no soft touch himself or stranger to the bent deal, gave it up to stay in business. He’d go anthropomorphic about Herbert, sometimes with a crazed look in his eyes, and likened him to every overfed animal in the kingdom; out of breath, he settled on Herbert being the king of wayward swag—everyone else’s.

  Herbert was a subatomic particle in Ali’s life, a certain lethal kind that cannot be seen even under a powerful microscope, their existence known only by their effects. With Herbert, sometimes you thought you saw something, but look back and all you had was a three-piece suit, a hat, brim up and down over his eyes. Others thought of him as a pudgy member of the old Our Gang cast, and still others viewed him as an insatiable King Farouk. Far too jolly company for a description of the son of Elijah. He fancied white women and rich cu
isine. He was the hatchet man for his father and was in New York, perhaps only a coincidence, when Malcolm X was killed. The entourage gave him a wide berth.

  Ali paid obsequious homage to him, the body in constant bow to the grave digger. Herbert held up the publication of Ali’s autobiography, not content with his subdued role in it; he was forever caught between wanting recognition—and invisibility. He was the architect of the book, and Richard Durham, the Muslim propagandist, was the writer; the editor was Toni Morrison, who it was rumored fingered the pages wearing gloves. I was doing a profile of Herbert in Munich. He wanted no part of it, with punctuated emphasis from Durham while we shared a taxi to a workout. “Stay away from Herbert,” he said. “Do yourself a favor.” Why? “You want some bad-ass trouble?” Durham asked.

  Joe Frazier looked upon Ali’s group as an expensive, distracting grotesquerie. He was a parsimonious caretaker of his money, watched every centime, and had no need for subjects or paid validation. He knew how to sit alone in an empty room. As much as he could, he kept his space from Ali. Except for one time near the fight when Ali—where did he get the energy for such juvenalia?—waited for him to take the air, such as it was, on his hotel balcony. Down below, Ali grabbed the security guard’s gun and clicked off several rounds up at Frazier; hotel guards didn’t carry live ammo. He raved at Joe: “Go back in your hole, Gorilla! You gonna scare the people! Come out again, and I’m gonna kill ya before time!” Joe turned lazily into his room. He just shook his head toward his visitors. He then looked into a mirror. “Am I a gorilla?” he asked. “Am I? He don’t know how this hurts my kids.”

  Eddie Futch confronted Don King over the selection of the referee. But King would rather face public and media jeers than the wrath of Herbert for a bungle; Herbert, through King, wanted every edge. He had three refs and some judges waiting as guests for Futch’s choice. Marcos had invited members from each camp to visit. Right off, Eddie could see the president was proud of this fight and that he wanted no hitches. Afterward, Futch collared the principal administrator of the fight and said: “Look, this event puts the Philippines in the world spotlight. You need a ref who can control the fight, or else the world will laugh at you.” He told him how Tony Perez had marred the second fight. He got a Filipino referee and judges, while King argued that Filipinos were too small to handle big men, not the best line of attack. Futch extracted even more: Ali’s trunks, per ring specifications, had to be worn below his belly button, and the ropes tightened (so Ali would have no mobility on them). “I want that belly button in plain sight,” Eddie warned again. Chalk up King’s defeat to inexperience, for he was not yet the Satan of loopholes. “Eddie fucked me,” King would moan at ringside.