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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 4 Number 1 • 2010 • Literary Warriors | » |
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Max Apple
Note: Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From The Oranging of America. New York: Viking. 1976. pp. 49–60.
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I
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”
They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of Sports Illustrated, picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight that Mr. Mailer, the literary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey never earned you a dime.
Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But
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even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll,grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.
If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s toches affen tisch, you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.
While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.
I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex,
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the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.
You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.
Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus. They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”
“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories, now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.
The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The Times calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”
You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the Times.” They gave Clay no chance against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest”
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