Shoggoths in Bloom Read Online Free PDF

that saved him.
    So it goes.

    8.
    Sometimes it’s easier to tell yourself you quit than to admit that they beat you. Sometimes it’s easier to look down.
    The civil rights movement in the early 1960s found Liston a thug and an embarrassment. He was a jailbird, an illiterate, a dark unstoppable monster. The rumor was that he had a second career as a standover man—a mob enforcer. The NAACP protested when Floyd Patterson agreed to fight him in 1962.
    9 .
    Sonny didn’t know his own birthday or maybe he lied about his age. Forty’s old for a fighter, and Sonny said he was born in ’32 when he was might have been born as early as ’27. There’s a big damned difference between thirty-two and thirty-seven in the boxing ring.
    And there’s another thing, something about prize fighters you might not know. In Liston’s day, they shot the fighters’ hands full of anesthetic before they wrapped them for the fight. So a guy who was a hitter—a puncher rather than a boxer, in the parlance—he could pound away on his opponent and never notice he’d broken all the goddamned bones in his goddamned hands.
    Sonny Liston was a puncher. Muhammad Ali was a boxer.
    Neither one of them, as it happens, could abide the needles. So when they went swinging into the ring, they earned every punch they threw.
    Smack a sheetrock wall a couple of dozen times with your shoulder behind it if you want to build up a concept of what that means, in terms of endurance and of pain. Me? I would have taken the needle over feeling the bones I was breaking. Taken it in a heartbeat.
    But Charismatic finished his race on a shattered leg, and so did Black Gold.
    What the hell were a few broken bones to Sonny Liston?

    10.
    You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man’s angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was the way and the path, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior god, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.
    And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.
    Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?
    I am my city, and I contain multitudes. I’m the African-American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I’m the black neighborhoods near D Street that can’t keep a supermarket, and I’m Cartier Street and I’m Northtown and I’m Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn’t matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.
    Because Sonny Liston died here, and he’s buried here in the palm of my hand. And I’m Sonny Liston too, wronged and wronging; he’s in here, boiling and bubbling away.

    11.
    I filled his glass one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his glass so it vanished. “You’re here on business, Jackie,” he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. “Nobody wants to listen to me talk.”
    “I want to listen, Sonny.” The scotch didn’t taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I’d drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. “I’m here to listen as long as you want to talk.”
    His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn’t stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the glass in his hands. “I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for.”
    At Christmas time in 1970, Muhammad Ali—recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction—was preparing for a title bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that