The re-enactors arrived in cars which had to be parked out of sight since

The re-enactors arrived in cars, which had to be parked out of sight since they ruined the set-dressing. Television news teams, who had also invaded from the foreign, northern, modern world, were permitted on to the premises. Reporters in jeans interviewed dancers in crinolines, the microphones reaching across an unbridgable chronological gulf. Perhaps the rifles which the sloping- shouldered, uncoordinated troops handled so clumsily had ammunition in them: there had been protests against the dance - tactlessly named Bonnie Blue, after the secessionist flag - for glorifying a culture which depended on slavery. These re-enactments fight all over again a war between amnesiac contemporary America and a past which (like Don King finessing his recollection of that homicide) it would prefer to suppress.The soldiers in their mothy uniforms had turned out to protect the guests at a Confederate Ball, staged in an iron foundry where the cannons used in the Civil War were manufactured.

His girlfriend, on hand to cook his breakfast with properly rancid bacon grease, took me on a guided tour of her lingerie. "Under my chemise this here's my privacy petticoats in case the wind gets a little frisky with my hoop. And these are my ankle- length drawers - aren't they cute? I made my corset with my own hands No, I don't have no Mammy to lace my stays. But I'm authentic from the skin out." She worked - when she commuted back to that other, ruder, less frilly time-zone - as a computer operator. He admitted, very reluctantly, to being a used-car salesman - that is, when he came home to the 20th century But he preferred to live in the 1860s. "We are Living History," one of them whispered to me, speaking out of the corner of his mouth while he shouldered arms. I sympathised with his unease: I was an intruder from the future - an alienation effect, threatening to disillusion the charade.

Shivering beside his tent, another recruit smoked a hickory pipe with a bamboo stem, carved according to period specifications, and swigged Drambuie from an antique flask. I will get blood from a turnip, you give me a stone and I will cook rock sauce." The stew of metaphors boiled over. "When I get a hot property, I gonna swallow the sword for him That's how you prove the pudding, man But I don't finagle I'd sooner be the screwer than the screwee Every deal's a individual Some is bonsai, some is kamikaze I don't have to have it all. I ain't no greedy man choked with indigestion."At this point King, belying himself, cavernously belched. I remembered reports of his extortionate contracts: fighters, deprived of all but a small fraction of their earnings, are made to pay for the protective cups with which they fortify their privates. If you have a quarter, one of his graduates once wailed, DK will take 26 cents of it.

King gulped some more soda, to help all those hot swords garnished with bleeding turnips and rock sauce through his ample alimentary canal. He then proceeded to feast upon his latest creation, a female boxer called Christy Martin, who is a castration complex in pink tights."Cain't no one call me no male shavingist I dare to be great. The man without imagination stands on earth and hath no wings This is my credo, this is my forte I rise up into the light of day, I extend the olive branch Christy Martin is a minority, but she will prevail She is of the quality and the ilk to fulfil the good word I'm marriaging sports and entertainment When people see her stuff, there will be a con-ta-gion. She sells the tickets, and when there ain't no more room at the inn, the news goes round the world. You hear me, Jack? She's no sissy, man, she won't embarrass me with no flailing femininity And with me, that little lady is gonna make a new life I want to get her to be a Revlon girl.