Tuff

  “The mohel will see you now,” the nurse said, guiding Spencer down a dim corridor lit with buzzing and blinking fluorescent tubes.

  “Relax, my friend. I’m Mr. Epstein.” Mr. Epstein’s breath smelled of gin and lime, and to Spencer’s disappointment, he was clean-shaven. Spencer had pictured a man with an Eastern European accent and a full beard. With a callous, ungloved hand Mohel Epstein tugged on Spencer’s penis as if he were ringing a church bell. “Oww!”

  “You’re penile sensitive—we’ll use the anesthesia.” Mohel Epstein peeled back Spencer’s foreskin and took a sip of his drink. “A bit of smegma buildup—Nurse Lacey, the novocaine.” Mohel Epstein plunged the needle into the tip of Spencer’s penis, and the last thing Spencer felt was Epstein stenciling a very crooked line around what he called the “turtleneck” of his penis.

  As a blindfolded Spencer groped his way into the van for the return trip, he felt Epstein place a hand on top of his head. “Hold up a second, son, you need a name. Henceforth, you shall be known by the Hebrew name of Yitzhak.” Spencer was disappointed, having hoped for a short, sporty three- or four-letter name: Ari, Zev, Seth. He’d never known a Seth who wasn’t cool.

  For the next two weeks, Hadar treated Spencer like a wounded war veteran come home. She cooked, sang, and teased him into painful erections. One night she drew a pair of dark sunglasses on the white gauze bandage that covered his dick head, playfully addressing Spencer as “Yitzhak, the invisible penis.” On unveiling day, Hadar unwrapped the bandages. Instead of saying “ta-dah” and welcoming Spencer’s new penis into the world with a little fellatio, Hadar covered her mouth to stifle a scream and ran out of the bedroom sobbing. Spencer examined his new member. His dick looked as if it had been mutilated by a broken grade-school sharpener. He vainly tried to blow and brush away the corkscrew bits of scar tissue from his penis as if they were wood shavings. “Not to worry, honey—it’s just a little bruised, is all.”

  Despite the newfound carnal pleasures she received from Spencer’s penile mangling, Hadar left him at the end of the summer. “You’re too Jewish,” she explained, leaving him to a pile of law-school rejection letters.

  As a result of his conversion efforts, Spencer’s grades had dropped so dramatically that despite his skin color and his ability to pay for three years of graduate education without financial assistance, he couldn’t get admitted to even the chintziest law schools. Spencer thought of appealing the decisions but knew no admissions board in the country would be willing to acknowledge the mind-numbing rigors of a black male in an interracial relationship. “But you don’t understand, dating a white girl is an extracurricular activity!”

  Not wanting to waste his conversion, Spencer moved to New York and enrolled in Hebrew Union’s rabbinical program. Four years later he graduated, second-to-last in his class, and with one job prospect—“kosherizing” the steers in a slaughterhouse in Ames, Iowa. Turning down the offer, Rabbi Throckmorton supplemented his modest trust fund by guest-lecturing at the more liberal synagogues. His most popular address was entitled “The Ignored Indispensability of Jewish Support for African-American Politics and Art Forms: Without the Observers of Shabbat There’d Be No Martin Luther King Mountaintop, Bebop, Hip-hop, or Bad Shakespeare Productions.” Soon word of the existence of a hip young rabbi “who just happens to be black” spread. Spencer obtained notoriety as a freelance rabbi, speaker, and journalist, and New York City’s leading Jewish and secular publications, mistaking his innocuousness for intelligence, competed for his services. Spencer was the only black friend of many of the city’s political organizations. And since there was only one degree of separation between him and the Manhattan activists, but an immeasurable distance between them and the rest of mysterious black America, officers of various organizations would ask Spencer to recommend like-minded and like-tempered black folks for those high-paying display-window positions for which qualified black candidates were invariably hard to find. “Rabbi Throckmorton, do you know any black people qualified to head up our financial department in Milwaukee? Remember, they must be smart as a whip.” No one ever called Spencer looking for qualified white candidates who were smart as a whip, or even fellow Jews who were dumb as a doorknob; but he didn’t mind so long as they called.

  Spencer’s junket to East Harlem was no altruistic act. The trust fund was petering out, and Spencer was on assignment, as one of the few black writers who, as his African-American editor at a local paper put it, “possess a command of the language that most of us don’t have. Can describe the perverse ghetto mentality in a vernacular familiar to our readers. Doesn’t write in music-magazine expletive.” Spencer had been shocked by his editor’s elitist banter, but the banknote on the condominium was due, and with a gracious smile he played along. “I’m just keeping it real, homeboy.”

  Having schmoozed up the editor, he pitched an idea for a Sunday feature, using the tried-and-true derisive-article-about-minorities-written-by-a-minority approach. “Let’s capitalize on the city’s decreasing crime rate,” he said, straightening his tie to convey his seriousness and urbanity. “My sense is that your readership wants reassurance that this drop is more than just a lull. They’re seeking a guarantee that the criminal element—and let’s be frank, I mean the feral African-American and Hispanic youth, and one or two Italian boys—isn’t in hibernation like locusts awaiting nature’s signal. Who’s to say that one day without warning the hatchlings won’t swarm and devour the city?”

  The editor tilted back in his chair, thumbs linked under his suspenders. “A CAT scan of the sleeping giant. It’s a bit alarmist—where’s the human interest angle?”

  “A sidebar on the history of African-American paedogenesis.”

  “Big-bellied black girls—always good fodder for the editorial page. But what makes you think you’ll be able to mingle with the nitty-gitty element? Blend in and become one of the gang?”

  Spencer hunched his shoulders, folded his arms tightly across his chest, and delivered a line of classic hip-hop meter, laying out the verse as if he were a tap dancer challenging another hoofer to match a complicated step:

  I’ll take seven MCs

  Put ’em in a line

  Add seven more brothers

  Who think they can rhyme.…

  The editor, taking his cue like a pro, finished the verse off like a Japanese court poet exchanging haiku with Bashō.

  Well it’ll take seven more

  Before I go for mine.

  Now that’s twenty-one MCs

  Ate up at the same time.

  “You’re good, Throckmorton. You’re very good.”

  Two stern-faced teenage boys flanked the entrance to 291 East 109th Street. Studies in asymmetry, each lad sported a single pant leg hiked up to knicker height, exposing a thin calf lotioned to a mahogany sheen, one earring, one nose ring, and one shaved eyebrow. To further the sense of fashion imbalance, the taller kid’s T-shirt read, I AIN’T GOT TIME FOR NO FAKE NIGGAS, and the other’s shirt said, I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE, BUT I HATE NIGGAS.

  Spencer felt his world listing. “Hello, boys.” He raised his arms like a shaky gymnast on a balance beam and the wooziness abated. “Your shirts bespeak a bit of a familiar paradox. The quest for the real nigger within us, and the simultaneous hatred for that selfsame nigger as other. As in ’I’m a real nigger, but I hate all other niggers who aren’t like me in ways that fit my idiosyncratic perception of essentialist niggertude.”

  “ ‘Boys’?” said the short one. The other kid stared past Spencer, eyes fixed on the Mustang’s vintage hubcaps.

  “Not ‘boy’ in the pejorative sense of the word—I meant like ‘homey,’ ‘brother man,’ ‘compadre,’ ‘nigger’ even. Do you know where I can find the Foshay family?”

  The young man turned to his partner and began speaking as if Spencer weren’t there. “You hear this nigger, brother man. How much you think them rims is worth?”

  Feeling somewhat anxious about the future of his automobile, S
pencer pulled out his Tiny Tome of Jewish Enlightenment and comforted himself with a passage from the Talmud: “God detests a man who rushes to accuse a neighbor.” Squeezing between the two boys, he entered the building.

  The lobby was an atomic cyclotron: kids flocked about the hallways, black and brown molecules sliding along the linoleum, bouncing off the walls, reacting to boredom, the summer catalyst. “Anyone know Winston Foshay?” At the sound of Spencer’s voice every child froze, instantly inert. Spencer tried another tack. “Winston Foshay? Buenas tardes, muchachos. Yo buscando para el niño negro, Weeenston Foshay?” Nothing. At the end of the hallway a door opened. “In here,” said a faceless voice. The children didn’t move until the door shut tightly behind him.

  Spencer didn’t receive the fanfare he’d expected. He’d prepped for his mentorship by rereading his collection of pauper literature—Steinbeck, Bukowski, Hansberry, Hurston—hoping to gain some insight into the lives of the working poor. Spencer thought he’d walk into a welcoming party atmosphere—balloons and a paper banner hanging over a representative sampling of the dignified poor. The sturdy matron would offer him a party favor, a one-candle cupcake, and, after a bosomy hug, introduce her ragamuffin bastard.

  He followed the voices down the hallway and into the cramped living room. There was a chesty black woman inside but this one took one look at Spencer and muttered, “Oh, hell no,” and plopped down onto the couch, shaking her head in disgust. An obviously physically handicapped gentleman held up the magnifying glass he was using to examine some counterfeit twenty-dollar bills, and cast one enlarged eye toward the rabbi. “Tuffy, they sent you one of them alternative-hippie-goofball niggers.”

  “I tried to find the apartment, but the kids in the hall wouldn’t tell me where Winston lived.”

  The black behemoth in baggy jeans and tank top motioned for Spencer to sit in the lawn chair next to the bookshelf. “They probably thought you was a cop. If you’d have asked for Tuffy, they’d have told you which door to knock.”

  Spencer carefully sat in the creaky chair and faced what he guessed by the stoic look on his hosts’ faces would be his tribunal. “I’m Spencer Throckmorton. You folks must be Winston’s siblings. And where is the lucky protégé?” Spencer pointed to the child, who was doing the suspect lean against the television screen, hands on the tube, legs apart, eye-to-eye with an R&B diva, shaking his diapered behind to the beat. “Surely that tyke isn’t little Winston?” he asked. No one answered him. He looked about the stuffy, windowless, stiflingly hot room, feeling, for one of the few times in his life, out of place. “This motherfucker got dreadlocks!” yelled the woman.

  The big man placed his chin in his hand, “Man, I hate niggers with dreads. A coconut motherfucker, all right, but an American nigger? They too stuck-up.”

  “Think they playboys.”

  “But if they didn’t have dreads they’d look like plain old mailman niggers from around the way.”

  “Wouldn’t be so special.”

  “So fucking spiritual.”

  “So fucking revolutionary.”

  “So together.”

  “Self-actualized.”

  “Bracelet-, bangle-wearing, bitch-ass niggers.”

  “Don’t even listen to reggae music.”

  “Most of all you can’t trust ’em.”

  “True.”

  The baby stopped dancing, climbed onto Spencer’s lap, and tugged violently at one of his knotted strands of hair, dislodging the yarmulke from his head. The crippled kid dropped his magnifying glass and sounded the alarm:

  “Je-e-e-w!”

  Everyone looked at Spencer and waited for him to explode like a terrorist grenade rolled into the midst of a gathering of innocents. Jordy scooped up the knit cap and waddled over to his father. “What up with this?” asked Winston, flipping the yarmulke back to Spencer.

  “The nigger is a Jew,” said Fariq.

  “I can speak for myself,” Spencer said, popping the inside-out cap back into position. “Obviously, I’m a member of the Jewish faith. Not so evident is that I’m also a rabbi. But how does my religion bear on my ability to provide guidance to a troubled teen?”

  “Teen?” Winston shouted.

  “Winston Foshay.” Spencer was growing impatient, waving the referral paper in the air. “The boy I’m to be a Big Brother to.”

  “I’m Winston.”

  Spencer leaned forward in his chair. “Come again?”

  “You heard, Jewboy, he’s Winston Foshay, your Little Brother.”

  “Relax, Fariq. Look, Rabbi, I know you didn’t expect no big, three-hundred-pound-plus nigger like me, but I called the Big Brother program because my thing, my shit, is confused. I saw the commercial and I thought I needed a Big Brother, a father figure. You know, try to do something with my life.”

  “ ‘I need a father figure,’ ” Fariq cackled.

  “Shut up, Smush!” Yolanda scolded, flinging her hairbrush at Fariq, which he deftly knocked out of the air with his crutch.

  Spencer began to see the gravity of the task he’d undertaken. Here in front of him was a young, uneducated black man over twice his size looking to forge his way in the closed society that somewhere along the way he’d decided to join.

  His rabbinical duties were a cinch compared to this. You give a thirteen-year-old a phonetically transcribed script, he makes his bar mitzvah speech, counts the cash, and skips into young adulthood. Spencer wasn’t sure he wanted the responsibility of showing someone how to be responsible for himself. Jordy, still in front of the television, squatted and jabbed his hands in the air, furiously imitating the rapper in the video.

  “That’s all right, Mr. Throckmorton. You can go now.” Winston was at the front door, door handle in hand. “Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’ve decided I don’t need you. It’s been almost two weeks since I called Big Brothers of America and now I’ve changed my … changed my mind about this Big Brother stuff.”

  Spencer gathered his belongings and made his way to the door, seeing his Pulitzer disappear and feeling somewhat offended that a person in Winston’s position didn’t want his help. “What do you mean, you don’t need me?”

  “We don’t have anything in common.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That was you driving up, car stereo blasting some song about Winnie-the-Pooh? Some shit about counting bees and chasing clouds?”

  “Loggins and Messina, ‘The House at Pooh Corner.’ ”

  Winston rubbed the back of his neck. “We from two different worlds, Rabbi. Plus, I think I’m more mature than you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Look, you might have few years on me, but compared to you, my game is trump tight. I mean, I got a wife and kid, a goldfish.”

  “I thought these people were your sister and brother. You two are married? Where are the rings?”

  “We ain’t got no rings because this cheap, flabby motherfucker says he don’t believe in wedding rings.”

  “That’s right—wedding rings are signs of materialistic something or other.”

  “I swear, sometimes I could kill Ms. Nomura,” said Yolanda, rubbing the tension from her temples. “Wasn’t much of a wedding—we got married over the phone.”

  “The phone?”

  Winston was ushering Spencer outside, saying his thank-yous, when Yolanda asked Spencer to sit and told Fariq to bring him something to drink from the kitchen. Spencer returned to the rocking chair. “We were never properly introduced. I’m Yolanda, Winston’s wife; this is our son, Jordy; and the anti-Semitic motherfucker who’ll be carrying a six-pack in his teeth is Fariq.” Fariq exited the kitchen with the beer balanced on his head, sashaying his ass in the limited range of motion that his calcified bone structure allowed. “Check me out, toting the brew African-style. Baba laaay. Ta daa laay boo buubuu. That means, ‘I ain’t carrying nothin’ in my teeth like some fucking dog.’ I’m Afro-centric to the core. Y’all better take some African lessons from me, because I
’m the epicenter of Afro-centricism.”

  Yolanda snatched a beer from Fariq’s head, opened it on the edge of his crutch, then handed it to Spencer.

  “Damn, girl, you don’t have to do that—the fucking bottles are twist-off.”

  “I know.”

  The stale malt liquor wasn’t one of the Trappist ales Spencer preferred, but he thanked everyone just the same. As Fariq and Yolanda continued to bicker, Spencer drank his beverage, his face reddening and growing warmer with each sip. His rising body temperature combined with the blast-furnace effect of the unventilated apartment made him feel like Pliny the Elder running headlong toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. In the Foshays, Spencer saw the story of a lifetime. He encouraged Yolanda to continue her tale. “So you two got married over the phone?”

  “Yeah, the fool—”

  “Come on, Landa, he don’t want to know this.”

  “Winston married me while he was in jail. He’d lost his visitation privileges and called me at work one day. I’m eight months pregnant, he’s lonely, talking all lovey-dovey, ‘Let’s get married, Boo.’ When? ‘Now. Some friends hipped me to this reverend who does quickie marriages for inmates. Your phone got three-way? Call this 900 number.’ Boom, we gettin’ married for one ninety-five a minute. And you know what this idiot said instead of ‘I do’?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “After the reverend said the ‘Do you take this lawful wedded bride to have and to hold’ and all, he said, ‘Well, she’s the first woman I’ve been with for more than two menstrual periods, so fuck it.’ ”

  “ ‘So fuck it’?”

  “Next thing I know, I’m married and this nigger making kissing noises into the receiver.”

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “You got a wifey, Rabbi?” Winston asked. “You mean wife? No.”

  “I’m saying, you got a girl?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “She black?”

  “Of course,” Spencer confidently answered, not mentioning that his girlfriend, Natalie, wasn’t exactly what the T-shirted boys outside would call a “real nigga.” She chewed gum like an understudy for a college production of Grease, and ended every sentence with the exclamation “Fuck, yeah!,” “Cool!,” or “Excellent!” Natalie had recently confided in Spencer that she dated him only because his Caucasian sensibilities were muted by his black skin. She’d grown tired of unadulterated white boys making tanning jokes, buying her leopard-skin panties for her birthday, and asking why her pubic hairs weren’t as straight as the hair on her head. “Hey, it’s hard dating a sister. Give me some skin on that one,” said Spencer, thrusting his palm toward Winston, waiting for him to acknowledge the black man’s covenant. Winston remained still, looking at Spencer warily out of the corner of his eye. “You going to leave me hanging? Aw, man, that’s cold-blooded.” Winston reluctantly pounded a fist on Spencer’s upturned palm.