Count Your Fingers

This does not look like someplace where history was made:

That is the Androscoggin Bank Colisée.  It is where the Maine Nordiques play.  The Nordiques are a team in the North American Hockey League, which is a USA-sanctioned Tier II junior hockey league.  The Colisée is in a crappy section of Lewiston which is, quite frankly, crappy all over.  You would never know from looking at it that it is where Muhammed Ali fought Sonny Liston the second time.

Ali and Liston were a match made in promoter heaven.  Ali was a boxer; Liston was a brawler.  Ali moved around the ring; Liston stood still.  Ali liked to shoot his mouth off; Liston didn’t talk much.  Ali was smart and charismatic; Liston had a chip on his shoulder the size of Aroostook County.  Liston was the second-youngest of family of twelve.  His father was a sharecropper and the first time he had enough to eat was when he went to prison.  Everyone liked Ali; Liston behaved as though he were constantly dunning the world for a debt.  They fought twice, once in Miami beach and the second time in Lewiston.  Ali won the belt in Miami Beach and he kept it with a first-round knockout in, of all places, Lewiston.

Larry Holmes fought both Ali and Tyson.  His comment was that they both hit hard.  Even as an old man, Ali was so fast that you couldn’t see his punches coming.  You could see Tyson’s punches – Holmes said – you just really, really didn’t want to look at them. 

It is trivial to say that Ali was a brilliant fighter.  He was so fast that he could slip punches by moving backward, which is something every fighter is taught not to do because it does not work for a person with normal reflexes.  But technical brilliance was not his true superpower.  Sugar Ray Robinson might have been better, pound-for-pound.  Archie Moore was wilier.  The little four who succeeded Ali, Frazier and Foreman – Hearns, Hagler, Leonard, Duran – were all, surely, excellent.  Chavez was tougher.  Paez was more of an entertainer.  Manny Pacquaio is a better all-around athlete.  But Ali was Ali.  When they stripped him of his title for not serving in Vietnam, he said, “I have nothing against the Viet Cong.  They never called me ‘nigger’”.  How can you beat that?

It causes cognitive dissonance to know that it all happened in Lewiston.  Lewiston is a pit.

The public library in Lewiston is housed in an exposed-brick old mill building.  The physical plant is pretty, but the bathrooms are closed-stack.  You can’t just walk in and do your business.  You have to ask for a key from the reference librarian.  There is one bathroom on the first floor and one on the second floor.  Both are one-holers and open to all genders.  Inside the bathroom, between the commode and the vanity, is a large sign that says that people should limit their stay to no more than twenty minutes.  If the key goes missing from the reference librarian’s desk for more than twenty minutes, they will come find you.  They don’t want homeless people camping out there.

Since I am an old cis guy, I have a short piss-fuse.  On a recent visit, I asked the reference librarian for the key to the first-floor bathroom.  He told me that it was in use.  The second-floor key was also in use.  I had come to the library to get some work done while I was in town on family business, but I couldn’t be productive with a full bladder and a prostate the size of a pineapple, so I stood outside the door and waited.  After five minutes, I knocked firmly and said, “Hey, could you hurry up in there?  Other people need to use the bathroom, too”.  A voice that sounded white, male, thirty-five years old and scruffy said, “I’ve only been here ten minutes!”  I said,

-You sound like a grown man.  That’s plenty of time for you what you need to do.

–I set my watch when I came here!

-Ten minutes is a long time.

– I’m takin a shit here!

-Other people need to use the bathroom.

–I have Crohn’s!

His tone tripped something in my head.  Like Proust sipping his tea, I was back in the park, standing on someone’s steps, dunning them for past-due lot rent.  I was being told, My father just died, My son has a brain tumor, My hours got cut, I have Crohn’s disease, SSI lost my paperwork.  Stories are powerful.  We are hard-wired to be moved by them.  When people try to manipulate you, they tell you stories.  When that happens, your job is to count the silverware and to not engage with the narrative.  I remembered, Keep it professional.  Never raise your voice.  Only use the third person.  Make it clear you are there to solve a problem, not to argue. Putting on my talking-to-difficult-residents voice, I said,

-There’s a line out here.

–I have Crohn’s, goddamn it!

-The twenty minutes is an upper limit. 

–I’m taking a shit!

I pondered whether I could walk outside and take a leak behind the dumpster in the library parking lot.  There were plenty of homeless-looking people on the streets.  It probably would not be the first time that happened.  I said,

-This is a public restroom.  Everyone needs to use it.

Through the door, I heard the whir of a toilet paper spindle and a flush.  Progress.  When the guy came out, he glared at me, handed me the key and told me, “It says here that you can use the bathroom for twenty minutes.”  I had the path to my piss clear, so I did not engage further with his story of bowel disease or his construction of the restroom regulation as permissive rather than restrictive.

A guy who serves thirty-day notices for me in my park in northern New York tells me that when residents give him excuses, he tells them to save it for the judge.  Frank Rolfe says, “Be easy to buy from”.  Both mean the same thing, in a way.  They mean that there is a time for getting things done and a time for spinning yarns.  Don’t burden a counterparty with stories about origin, disease, or process.  Tell stories at the bar, with your friends.  During business hours, when you are interacting with someone who wants to get something done, do, don’t tell.

Ted Cruz says that politics is storytelling.  Powerful tools can be used for evil, as well as good. Count your fingers after you shake hands with Ted Cruz.

Here are some proper responses to stories told by residents, suppliers and contractors:

–I will pay you what I can soon.  My kid is sick and my hours were cut.

-Dollar figure and date, please.

–I will pay you when I get the life insurance settlement for my mother.

-Dollar figure and date, please.

-We have a new head of accounting who is a real stickler.  Do you know which bank account we have on file for this legal entity?

-That’s your process.  You tell me.

-I couldn’t take the stuff to the dump because my kid is sick and my truck broke down.

-You’ll get paid when you finish the job.

When Odysseus sailed past the island of the Sirens, he told his men to plug their ears with wax.  The Sirens were a bunch of beautiful young women who sang songs that caused sailors to jump overboard and drown trying to reach the island.  The boss didn’t trust his men to hear the songs, but he kept his own ears clear.  Instead, he asked his men to tie him to the mast and to keep him there until they had passed out of earshot.  While they were tying him up, he said, “Do not­ – regardless of how I shout, foam at the mouth and gnaw my restraints – do. not. untie me until we are cleared by the harbor-master at Leros.”  That is how he became the only man to hear the Sirens’ song and live.  When you run a park, you are bombarded with stories like a sailor traveling past the island of the Sirens.  You will go bankrupt and crazy if you engage with them.  If you want to run the business, you can plug you ears or you can listen to what people say but tie yourself to the mast.  The one thing you can not do is to jump overboard and try to swim toward the island.  If you do that, the other people in your park– the majority of your residents, the people who don’t blow smoke up your ass – will suffer because you will no longer be able to provide them with clean, safe and affordable housing.

You can see a video of the second Ali-Liston fight on Youtube.  A lot of people say that Liston took a dive.  Ali throws the ‘invisible right hand’ at 0:59 here. For most of the short round, Liston chases Ali around the ring, like a bear stalking a big cat that is playing with him (part of Ali’s mind-game was to taunt Liston by calling him a bear.  He brought a bear trap to weigh-ins and told Liston, “You so ugly, man”.  Maybe Liston bought it.).  Ali shuffles a few times, does not allow Liston to cut off the ring, and uses his jab to keep him away.  The right hand that hits Liston is a mirage – sometimes you see it, if you do not look with the center of your field of vision, but sometimes it looks like thin air.  I confess that it looks to me like Liston slipped and then pretended to be groggy.  Everyone claimed it was a fair fight, but it would not be surprising if it was fixed.  Liston had a drug habit.  He worked as an enforcer for the Mob after his boxing career was over.  He was getting old, and he might have seen the writing on the wall.  Of course the better fighter won, but the proximate cause of the outcome of the fight will remain in doubt.  My theory is that Lewiston got to the bear.  The town is a pit.  It has a negative force-field that you need charisma, intelligence, heart, speed, wit and power to resist.  It has ground down lots of people who were smarter, better-looking and better tellers of their own stories than Sonny Liston.