The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”
+When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
+mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
+Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
+him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
+with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
+with an autograph.
+When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
+quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
+looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
+has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
+gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
+newness.
+Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
+of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
+place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
+one.
+I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
+To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.
+For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
+with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
+wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
+both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.
+I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.
+For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
+gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
+pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
+enough for Archie to stumble on.
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 [[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]