Well, this is an entry.

As if I had anything to write about besides unemployment.

Talk about bloody depressing.

The Onion is keeping me sane, especially such video nuggets as the following.

Best line: "I’m voting for a man I can imagine drowning a bag of cats." 

I’m voting for Joad!

I’ll have a real entry soon, once this depression lifts or I find a job, which ever comes first. So we’re talking 2010.

 A number of you perceptive folk have asked me, "Bookfraud, it’s been weeks since you posted. What the fuck?"

For this I have no answer, except to tell you I was laid off last week after 11 fun years at my job. 

Yay capitalism.

The following post is far longer than my usual fare, but I feel weirdly entitled to do so, as my job, retirement money, and what reason I had for getting up each morning have now evaporated.

It was a Saturday morning, and I was about 10 years old, furitively watching Memphis Mid-South Wrestling. This show was strictly prohibited in the Bookfraud household, but my father was out of town, and my mother was watching my brother and sister in parts unknown.

A wrestler of great local import was addressing the camera. "I’ll wrestle anyone, anytime, anywhere!" he said to a hapless emcee holding a microphone with an unsteady hand.

"And that includes…" the emcee said.

"Yeah, and that includes the heavyweight champion of the world — Muhammad Ali!"

"And I understand you have an interview with Ali you want to show."

"That’s right, Lance. Now, I haven’t seen this yet, but I guarantee you that I will whip this man in the ring — I don’t care who he is!"

Lance grimaced and nodded, as if he’d seen this type of ridiculous gamesmanship before. And he had. The wrestler, Jerry "The King" Lawler, had a long list of local enemies — Jackie Fargo, Tojo Yamamoto, Dutch Mantell, Bill "Superstar" Dundee. Every week on Memphis Mid-South Wrestling, Lawler, who was currently playing a "heel," would yammer and rant about he was going to put Fargo in the hospital or Dundee out of wrestling.

But this was not Jerry Lawler challenging Dutch Mantell, a man whose body hair could support a wig factory, or Tojo Yamamoto, who was actually Hawaiian. This was Muhammad Ali — The Greatest. The Greatest of All Time.

"Let’s take a look," Lance said, gesturing to the camera.

Ali was standing at an airport gate, wearing a gray trenchcoat buttoned to the neck. It was a couple of months after he’d regained his title by knocking out George Foreman. A small, elderly man with white hair but deft movements held a microphone, standing in front of Ali. (Sadly, it was not Howard Cosell.)

"We’re here with Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world," the man said in a nasal voice that sounded as if he was chewing gravel. "Muhammad, first of all, congratulations on reclaiming your title in October–"

"That’s right, Leo. I shocked the world again, didn’t I?"

"You certainly did, Muhammad. Now, I understand that another professional wrestler, Jerry Lawler, has sent you a challenge to meet him in the ring."

Of course, I had seen Ali before on television and in the papers, but today he looked benign, his face a little cheekier than I had remembered.

“Well, let me tell you something, Leo,” began The Greatest, his voice laconic and knowing. “Every day I get telegrams and phone calls and letters from ordinary folk sayin’ they want me to fight them. Now, I ain’t afraid of any man, but  I don’t want to fight no Jerry Lawler King or whatever he says he is. I’m sure he’s a good rassler and all that, but I’ve done finished fighting with them rasslers.”

“O.K. Muhammad,” Leo said in all earnestness, "but Lawler says that you’re scared to go down to Memphis, Tennessee, and fight him. He says you fight him and he’ll beat you, and you’ll no longer be the greatest.”

And then came that grin, wide as a ship’s berth and teeth that seemed to shine on cue. I got shivers.

“Awww, Leo, don’t be givin’ me no jive now.” Ali’s face lit up, his eyes spread wide.

“No, no, Muhammad, he really said that.”

“Well, let me tell you something. Is that camera filming me so that Jerry Lawler King can see me? Will he be able to see this here film? Good. Now everybody watching this, stop talking NOW. Pay attention. I ain’t afraid of nobody, and I’ll fight any man, any time, because I am the greatest fighter, not just of this time, but of all times. 

“Is this going out to Jerry Lawler? Do you hear me Jerry Lawler? You think you know something about boxing, Jerry Lawler, you big ugly hairy wrassler? You don’t know a damn thing about steppin’ in the ring with a pro boxer. And I am a pro!

"You’ve been reading about boxing in all the wrong places. If you want to know any damn thing about boxing, don’t see no Jimmy the Greek, don’t read no Ring magazine, you must come to me, Muhammad Ali. Like I said after I whupped Big George in Kinsasha, Zaire, I am the scholar of boxing! You just some rassler! I am the greatest fighter of all times! I told you all that I was the greatest when I whupped Sonny Liston, and I’m still the greatest!”

Ali crept towards the camera, Leo gamely stepping forward with him. Ali’s features came more into view: round face and bushy eyebrows. He had a wide nose with flashing nostrils but what really got me were his eyes, heavy with intent.

“The goverment took my title away because of my reglion, but God, Allah, is more powerful than any government! I was ready for the Rumble in the Jungle! With Allah’s help I beat big, bad George, and got back the title they took away from me. And everybody—EVERYBODY—said I was gonna get whupped, he was too big, too strong, too powerful and I was gonna get hurt!

"But you see what happened? Allah will make any man, even George Foreman, look like a baby! I told you I would knock out big George! I told you I would shock the world when I beat Sonny Liston! You all said I coudn’t do it! You said I was through! But I’m fast, I’m pretty, I’m the heavyweight champ-ee-on of the world! I must be the greatest!”

Now Ali was throwing punches, slashing uppercuts, tight roundhouse rights, and that famous left jab faster than an eyeblink. Despite his buttoned overcoat, there was a fluidity to Ali’s movements that was breathtaking: one could even tell that he was moving his feet beneath the camera’s range.

“Jerry Lawler, you ain’t nuthin’! Nuthin’! You think you so bad? Let me tell you something about people who are baaaaaaad. I’ve fought Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and whupped them all! They’re baaaaaad men! And I beat them all! All of them! Because I am badder! I shook up the world! I am the greatest, Jerry Lawer! I am the greatest fighter of all times! Of all times! OF ALL TIIIIIMES!”

Lawler and Russell: Childhood heroes take a fall

The tape ran out, and the TV went back to the studio: the audience — almost entirely white – had gone wild, laughing and screaming and clapping more furiously than they had for any match that I had seen. Jerry Lawler stood next to Lance Russell, his body angled to the camera; in my eyes, there was suddenly something vaguely inconsequential about him. Lance Russell shook his head, grinning, unable to contain something approaching glee. “Well, King, there you have it,” Lance said.

“Lance, let me tell you something. If Ali comes down here, I’ll show him who’s the King of professional wrestling.”

But it was too late. Lawler tried to keep his stature or even his dignity: he cast a I’m-the-meanest-son-of-a-bitch look at the audience and then at people watching at home. But it was too late. The audience knew it. The viewers knew it. Lawler knew it. Lance Russell knew it. I knew it.

“If Muhammad Ali is too chicken to come down and fight me—”

But his voice couldn’t be heard: the crowd was chanting, a one-word, two-syllable call that cast a spell upon me and made Jerry Lawler awash in resentment. “ALI! ALI! ALI!”

“Now listen here!” Lawler barked.

“ALI! ALI! ALI!”

“I want to say something here! If you rednecks—”

“ALI! ALI! ALI!”
 

And so it went for the next 20 seconds; Lawler would try to tell the audience to shut up, or say something about The Greatest, but the crowd would drown him out, each time hiking up the volume, as if in rejoinder. They cut to a commercial on auto transmissions.

I can’t really describe how radical a scene this was. This was Memphis, only six years after Martin Luther King Jr. had been assinated at the Lorraine Motel. This was Memphis, where you couldn’t spend a day without hearing the word "nigger." This was Memphis, rich with African-American history and thick with bigotry.

And you had a studio full of white, uneducated folk who wouldn’t look a black man in the eye giving Muhammad Ali their love and affection.

This was before I knew of Ali’s cruelty, of torturing Floyd Patterson in the ring for 13 rounds because Patterson called him Cassius Clay, of calling Joe Frazier an Uncle Tom and well before calling Frazier "a gorilla" for the Thrilla in Manila even after Frazier had once paid Ali’s hotel bill because he didn’t have the cash for it, of imitating punch-drunk Jerry Quarry long before Ali’s gift of gab had left him because of boxing-induced Parkinson’s syndrome.

I did not know that Ali had said, “Man, I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Cong” and he had made a stand of conscience that cost him his title, nor that he had four wives and that Angelo Dundee had called him a “pelvic missionary.” I did not know he had repudiated Malcom X under the orders of his spiritual leaders, nor that he later said he regretted that more than anything he had done. He had yet to lose to Leon Spinks and Larry Holmes; he had yet to drop out of the Nation of Islam and become a Muslim. I didn’t know that he’d beaten Sonny Liston and shocked the world. Angelo Dundee, Bundini Brown, the Louisville Syndicate, Elijah Muhammad—those were just words.

I simply saw the most charasmatic person alive, the most alive person alive, someone who Jerry Lawler could not begin to challenge in word nor deed.

There was something outside of my life that was greater, more interesting, more full of life. I needed to find out.