Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (70 page)

“Where the hell is Ali?” Conrad shouted, ignoring my question. “I sent a car out to pick you up,
both
of you!”

“You mean
all
of us,” I said. “His wife was with him, along with Pat Patterson and maybe a few others—I couldn’t tell, but it wouldn’t have made any difference; they
all
looked at me like I was weird; some kind of psycho trying to muscle into the act, babbling about sitting in Veronica’s seat . . .”

“That’s impossible,” Conrad snapped. “He knew—”

“Well, I guess he
forgot
!” I shouted, feeling my temper roving out on the edge again. “Are we talking about
brain damage
, Harold? Are you saying he
has no memory
?”

He hesitated just long enough to let me smile for the first time all day. “This could be an
ugly
story, Harold,” I said. “Ali is so punch-drunk that his memory’s all scrambled? Maybe they should lift his license, eh? ‘Yeah, let’s croak all this talk about comebacks, Dumbo. Your memory’s fucked, you’re on queer street—and by the way, Champ, what are your job prospects?’”

“You son of a bitch,” Conrad muttered. “Okay. To hell with all this bullshit. Just get a cab and meet us at the Plaza. I should have been there a half hour ago.”

“I thought you had us all booked into the Park Lane,” I said.

“Get moving and don’t worry about it,” he croaked. “I’ll meet you at the Plaza. Don’t waste any time.”

“WHAT?”
I screamed. “What am I doing
right now
? I have a
Friday deadline
, Harold, and this is Sunday! You call me in the middle of the goddamn night in Colorado and tell me to get on the first plane to Chicago because Muhammad Ali has all of a sudden decided he wants to talk to me—after all that lame bullshit in Vegas—so I take the
insane
risk of dumping my whole story in a parachute bag and flying off on a two-thousand-mile freakout right in the middle of a deadline crunch to meet a man in Chicago who treats me like a wino when I finally get there ... And now you’re talking to
me
, you pigfucker, about
wasting time
?”

I was raving at the top of my lungs now, drawing stares from every direction—so I tried to calm down; no need to get busted for public madness in the airport, I thought; but I was also in New York with no story and no place to work and only five days away from a clearly impossible deadline, and now Conrad was telling me that my long-overdue talk with Ali had once again “gone wrong.”

“Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza,” he was saying. “I’ll pull this mess together, don’t worry . . .”

I shrugged and hung up the phone. Why not? I thought. It was too late to catch a turnaround flight back to Colorado, so I might as well check into the Plaza and get rid of another credit card, along with another friend. Conrad was
trying
; I knew that—but I also knew that this time he was grasping at straws, because we both understood the deep and deceptively narrow-looking moat that eighteen years of celebrity forced Ali to dig between his “public” and his “private” personas.

It is more like a
ring
of moats than just one, and Ali has learned the subtle art of making each one seem like the last great leap between the intruder and himself ... But there is always
one more moat
to get across, and not many curious strangers have ever made it that far.

Some people will settle happily for a smile and a joke in a hotel lobby, and others will insist on crossing two or even three of his moats before they feel comfortably “private” with The Champ ... But very few people understand how many rings there really are:

My own quick guess would be nine; but Ali’s quick mind and his instinct for public relations can easily make the third moat
seem
like the ninth; and this world is full of sporting journalists who never realized where they were until the same “private thoughts” and “spontaneous bits of eloquence” they had worked so desperately to glean from The Champ in some rare flash of personal communication that none other would ever share, appeared word for word, in cold black type, under somebody else’s byline.

This is not a man who
needs
hired pros and wizards to speak for him; but he has learned how to use them so skillfully that he can save himself for the rare moments of confrontation that
interest
him . . . Which are few and far between, but anybody who has ever met Muhammad Ali on that level will never forget it. He has a very lonely sense of humor, and a sense of himself so firmly entrenched that it seems to hover, at times, in that nervous limbo between Egomania and genuine Invulnerability.

And now, as my cab moved jerkily through the snow-black streets of Brooklyn toward the Plaza Hotel, I was brooding on Conrad’s deranged plot that I felt would almost certainly cause me another nightmare of professional grief and personal humiliation. I felt like a rape victim on the way to a discussion with the rapist on the Johnny Carson show. Not even Hal Conrad’s fine sense of reality could take me past Moat #5—which would not be enough, because I’d made it clear from the start that I was not especially interested in anything short of at least #7 or 8.

Which struck me as far enough, for my purposes, because I understood #9 well enough to know that if Muhammad was as smart as I thought he was, I would never see or even smell that last moat.

I have known Conrad since 1962, when I met him in Las Vegas at the second Liston-Patterson fight. He was handling the press and publicity for that cruel oddity, and I was the youngest and most ignorant “sportswriter” ever accredited to cover a heavyweight championship fight ... But Conrad, who had total control of
all access to everything
, went out of his way to overlook my nervous ignorance and my total lack of expense money—including me along with all “big names” for things like press parties, interviews with the fighters, and above all, the awesome spectacle of Sonny Liston working out on the big bag, to the tune of “Night Train,” at his crowded and carpeted base camp in the Thunder-bird Hotel ... As the song moved louder and heavier toward a climax of big-band, rock & roll frenzy, Liston would step into the two-hundred-pound bag and hook it
straight up in the air
—where it would hang for one long and terrifying instant, before it fell back into place at the end of a one-inch logging chain with a vicious
clang
and a jerk that would shake the whole room.

I watched Sonny work out on that bag every afternoon for a week or so, or at least long enough to think he had to be at least nine feet tall . . . until one evening a day or so prior to the fight when I literally bumped into Liston and his two huge bodyguards at the door of the Thunderbird Casino, and I didn’t even recognize The Champ for a moment because he was only about six feet tall and with nothing but the dull, fixed stare in his eyes to make him seem different from all the other rich, mean niggers a man could bump into around the Thunderbird that week.

So now, on this jangled Sunday night in New York—more than fif-teen years and fifty-five thousand olive-drab tombstones from Maine to California since I first realized that Sonny Liston was three inches shorter than me—it was all coming together, or maybe coming apart once again, as my cab approached the Plaza and another wholly unpredictable but probably doomed and dumb encounter with the world of Big Time Boxing. I had stopped for a six-pack of Ballantine ale on the way in from the airport, and I also had a quart of Old Fitzgerald that I’d brought with me from home. My mood was ugly and cynical, tailored very carefully on the long drive through Brooklyn to match my lack of expectations with regard to anything Conrad might have tried to “set up” with Ali.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.

—Muhammad Ali

Indeed ... And that is also as fine a definition of “Gonzo Journalism” as anything I’ve ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my $88-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.

But this world does not work on “real plans”—mine or anyone else’s—so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a
serious
black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza:

“Doctor Thompson?” he said. “What?” I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point in denying it ... He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the light-heavyweight karate champion of the Italian navy; a
very quiet
presence that was far too heavy for a cop . . . He was on
my
side.

And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying—with a smile as uncomfortable as my own: “We’re going to the Park Lane; Mr. Conrad is waiting for you . . .”

I shrugged and followed him outside to the long black limo that was parked with the engine running so close to the front door of the Plaza that it was almost up on the sidewalk ... and about three minutes later I was face to face with Hal Conrad in the lobby of the Park Lane Hotel, more baffled than ever and not even allowed enough time to sign in and get my luggage up to the room . . .

“What took you so goddamn long?”

“I was masturbating in the limo,” I said. “We took a spin out around Sheepshead Bay and I—”

“Sober up!” he snapped. “Ali’s been
waiting
for you since ten o’clock.”

“Balls,” I said, as the door opened and he aimed me down the hall. “I’m tired of your bullshit, Harold—and where the hell is my luggage?”

“Fuck your luggage,” he replied as we stopped in front of 904 and he knocked, saying, “Open up, it’s
me.
”

The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands. “Welcome!” he said. “Come right in, Doc—make yourself at home.”

I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was—standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I’d seen on their faces in Chicago.

Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: “Is this
him
?” he asked. “You sure he’s safe?”

Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded ... but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes, and I heard myself saying, “What do you mean—
Is this him
? You bastard! I should have you
arrested
for what you did to me in Chicago!”

Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. “I’m sorry, boss, but I just couldn’t
recognize
you. I knew I was supposed to meet
somebody
, but—”

“Yeah!” I said. “That’s what I was trying to
tell
you. What did you think I was
there
for—an autograph?”

Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else’s movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer ... The pop-top came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.

“You
scared
me,” Ali was saying. “You looked like some kind of a bum—or a hippie.”

“What?” I almost shouted. “ ‘
A bum
?
A hippie
?’ ” I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking
and
drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that
nobody
smokes or drinks in
the same room with Muhammad Ali—and Jesus Christ! Not—of all places—in the sacred privacy of
his own bedroom at midnight
, where I had no business being in the first place.) ... But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not
second
nature to me, but
first
—and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foul-mouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.

Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful boot out of this bizarre spectacle—which was
me
; and when the adrenaline finally burned off, I realized that I’d backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually
sitting
on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda? ... Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names—let’s use
Budda
, and to hell with Edwin Newman) ... and suddenly I felt just fine.