Tuff

  Tuffy sensed that Spencer was trying too hard to be accepted. The man didn’t even know brothers don’t give one another five anymore. Yolanda, meanwhile, was beginning to be swayed by his genteel dreadlock manner. She patted a spot on the sofa between herself and Winston. “Spencer, come on over here. Smush, bring in some more beer!” Spencer sat down on the couch, trying to hide his apprehension, with a long pull at his bottle. “You know, after the first few sips this malt liquor isn’t so bad.” Yolanda reached over to finger his cowrie-shell necklace. She tucked a couple of loose dreads behind his ear, and imagined herself as the love-starved protagonist in one of her sisterhood novels. “I’m beginning to think it might do Winston some good to have a Big Brother. Are you big? I mean, Spencer, are you a big brother?”

  Winston looked at the amount of beer remaining in Spencer’s bottle. It was about half full. Ten more minutes and Spencer Jefferson would be out of his life forever. Winston had an ergonomic chess move of his own. Like a gracious host Winston scooted away from Spencer, so his guest could make himself comfortable. As soon as Spencer’s back touched the sofa cushions, Winston leaned in on the rabbi until he heard Spencer’s ribs creak under his weight. He spread his legs until Spencer’s knees were cinched together like a schoolgirl’s on her first date. Lifting the remote, Winston shut off the television, which slapped Jordy from his cathode funk and sent him waddling to his mother in tears.

  “Sensory deprivation,” commented Yolanda.

  Fariq set the beers down on the coffee table.

  “Fariq,” said Winston, grabbing a beer.

  “What up?”

  “This stringy-headed nigger a Jew.”

  “No doubt.”

  Using his crutches like gondola poles, Fariq rolled his chair over to the sofa. “I thought the motherfucker smelled like new money when he walked in.”

  “Speak on the Jew, God.”

  “The Jew is the black man’s unnatural enemy.”

  “Unnatural?” asked Spencer, gasping for air, fighting for elbow room. “How can you can say a people who have been systematically hunted are the ‘unnatural enemy’?”

  Feigning camaraderie, Winston placed his arm on Spencer’s shoulder, then quickly bulldozed his forearm into the rabbi’s neck, cutting off his oxygen flow and hence his rebuttal. Fariq, thinking his opposition had been humbled into silence by the irrefutable logic of his statement, pressed his advantage.

  “The Jew isn’t a hunter in the spear-throwing sense, but an opportunist, a circling vulture, an egg-stealing muskrat, a germ-infested, night-crawling parasite. Tuffy, I’m telling you, don’t let this Hebrew motherfucker in your life. He’ll use you up and spit you out. The Jew always got an ulterior motive. Why you really here, Rabbi, spying among the enemy?”

  When he tired of Fariq’s vitriol, Winston eased off the rabbi just enough so Spencer could fill his lungs with air and free one hand. Spencer inhaled greedily in short quick breaths. He restored the circulation in his numb hand by clapping it against his thigh. After a few moments, Spencer spoke. “There’s a saying in the Talmud, ‘If two men claim your help and one is your enemy, help him first.’ ”

  “So that’s why you here? Your presence is an admission that the black man, the original man, is your enemy.”

  “Look—Fariq, is it? I don’t know what you have against me and my people, but if you want, I can send you some ADL pamphlets chronicling the commonalities and historical parallels of Jews and blacks.”

  Fariq grew excited, rubbing his ankh with one hand and pointing in Spencer’s face with the other. “ADL? Oh, you playing the acronym game? JDL and JDO. We got some initials too. I-S-L-A-M—I Self Lord and Master. F-O-I—Fruit of Islam, but when the jihad starts, F-O-I going to stand for Fariq Obliterating Infidels.”

  Fariq’s inchoate ranting became impossible to distinguish from the baby’s wails. It wasn’t often Spencer found himself confronted with rabid anti-Semitism, and he didn’t know how to respond. He regretted that rabbinical school offered no course on effective conflict resolution with the Jew hater. With his free hand he managed to remove his copy of the Tiny Tome of Jewish Enlightenment from his shirt pocket. He began reading aloud. “The Talmud says, ‘A guilty man who denies his guilt doubles it.’ ”

  “The Talmud.” Fariq rubbed his palms together and said, “Let’s break down that word, ‘Talmud.’ ‘Tal’ from the Dutch taal, or to talk. ‘Mud,’ a filthy, slimy substance. ‘Tal-mud,’ talking in a muddled way. Talk that confuses, abuses, and ruses the black man. ‘Hebrew’: He brew. He who brews. Brews, stirs. Wherever he goes, the Jew be stirring up trouble. I know my lessons, son. ‘Mint Julep’: Mint equals money. Jew lip. Lip, kiss. Jews kiss money. Kiss, love. Jews love money. ‘Ed-jew-cate’: Teach the ways of the Jew. ‘Jewlius Caesar’ …”

  Using one hand as best he could, Spencer hurriedly flipped through his small book, searching for a calming aphorism that would also refute Fariq’s slander. “ ‘Accept your afflictions with love and joy’—Eleazar ben Judah of Worms.”

  Silently, Fariq drained his beer. He removed the bottle from his lips with an audible pop. “Afflictions? How dare you say that to a handicapped motherfucker like me? That’s some typical patronizing Jew chicanery.”

  “ ‘Chicanery.’ ” Spencer was momentarily taken aback, impressed by the vocabulary. Fariq continued, ignoring an obvious example of exactly the haughtiness he was speaking of, “Everybody got they little book—the Jews, the Communists. Well, niggers got a little book too.” From his back pocket Fariq pulled out a tattered, photocopied, and shoddily stapled book the size of a travel postcard. He shoved the book so close to Spencer’s face, Spencer could taste the grit of pocket lint and copy-machine toner on his lips. “I can’t read the title,” Spencer announced. Fariq pulled the treatise away from his nose until the title came into sharp focus—The Little Black Book of Sophism: Fucked Up Things Jews Say About Black Folk. Like warlocks practicing ancient witchcrafts, Spencer and Fariq held their tiny books to their chests, taking turns hurling their spells back and forth.

  “ ‘I saw the best white minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the filthy, cum-stained, loud, over-sexed, Negro streets at dawn like Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzans looking for an angry fix.’—Allen Ginsberg.”

  “ ‘If you truly are a Jew, you will be respected because of it, not in spite of it.’—Samson Raphael Hirsch.”

  “ ‘Fee, fie, foo, fum. I smell the blood of a nigger!’—Andrew Dice Clay.”

  “ ‘I am a Jew. When the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman [Daniel O’Connell, member of the British Parliament] were living as savages on an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.’—Benjamin Disraeli.”

  “Hold up a minute—that ‘My people were doing shit while your people lived in caves’ is our line! ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger …’—Lenny Bruce.”

  “ ‘I am a Jew because in every place suffering weeps, the Jew weeps.’—Edmund Fleg.”

  “ ‘Shvartze, shvartze, shvartze …’—Jackie Mason.”

  “ ‘Man’s good deeds are single acts in the long drama of redemption.’—Abraham Joshua Heschel.”

  “ ‘Every prostitute the Muslims convert to a model of Calvinist virtue is replaced by the ghetto with two more. Dedicated as they are to maintenance of the ghetto, the Muslims are powerless to effect substantial moral reform.’—Bayard Rustin.”

  “Fariq, Bayard Rustin wasn’t Jewish, he was black!”

  “So what? He was probably working for the Jews when he wrote it. Besides, there’s a triangle by his name, which means he’s a homosexual—just as bad as being a Jew. Rabbi Kahane! Rabbi Kahane! Rabbi Kahane!”

  Winston could see his plan to let Fariq badger the rabbi into leaving was backfiring. “Rabbi!” he yelled, rising up from the sofa and flicking on the television. “Fariq! That’s enough with the ‘Jew,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘he say,’ ‘she say.’ Y’all giving me a headache.”


  Fariq stuffed his book into his back pocket like a victorious boom-town gunfighter. “C’mon, Winston, you can’t tell me you never felt the Jew’s foot in your ass. Let that shit out, my brother. Ease your burdens.”

  Winston thought a moment. “Naw, man, I ain’t got Jews on the brain like your ass. Really I never have no dealings with Jewish people.”

  “Because the Jew is an invisible threat. I’m going to hip you to something called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Lays the Jew master plan thing out.”

  “I don’t have to take this crap!” Spencer shouted, but he made no effort to leave.

  “And you’ve had some Jews in your life.”

  “Who?”

  “The judge who sent you up on that shit that went down on Twenty-fourth Street.”

  “Berman?”

  “There you go.”

  “And the one who tried get me on parole violation, when my public defender didn’t show, was he Jewish?”

  “Judge Arthur Katz.”

  “Damn, that’s two cases and two Jews. Smush, you better hurry up and tell them motherfuckers down at Muslim headquarters you’ve uncovered a new conspiracy.”

  “You think I won’t tell the Minister.”

  “That’s right, run to your leader,” wisecracked Spencer, seeing that Winston wasn’t entirely on Fariq’s side.

  “This nigger ain’t even Muslim,” said Winston, pointing to Fariq’s crutches. “The Muslims don’t want this motherfucker. He too crippled. Neither Muslim headquarters or Mecca has handicapped parking.”

  “Fuck you, Tuff!”

  Winston turned to Spencer. “But Smush do raise a good point. Why are you here, Rabbi, for reals?”

  Spencer looked shamefully down at the floor and confessed, “I became a Big Brother so I could write a feature article on ghetto youth for the newspaper. I didn’t know any ghetto youth, so …”

  His honesty was welcomed with palpable resentment. Yolanda no longer felt the need to use Spencer as a sounding board for her problems with her husband. Under his breath Fariq spoke of a consortium of Jews controlling the world’s media.

  “I’m sorry,” Winston and Spencer mumbled simultaneously.

  “Winston, what are you sorry for?” Yolanda snapped. “Don’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I know. But I just feel sorry.”

  Yolanda and Fariq waited for him to ask the clergyman to leave. After all, Spencer was his guest. Winston stayed on the couch, hands clasped behind his head, lips pursed, eyes closed. Spencer’s deceit left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth, and Jordy ran around the room in circles, a cherubic ladle stirring the soup of bitterness, disillusionment, and summer heat.

  On his fourth circuit he picked up his See ’n Say, pulling the string on the plastic toy designed to teach toddlers the rudiments of farm-animal communication. “The cow says, ‘Mooooo!’ This is how a dog sounds—‘Woof! Woof!’ This is how a turkey sounds: ‘Gobble! Gobble!’ ” After each bark or bellow Jordy would stop in front of his father and try to reproduce the animal’s characteristic call. His quacks and meows were a welcome distraction. For a moment Winston forgot about the dreadlocked rabbi’s duplicity. “The rooster says, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ What’s the rooster say, Jordy?”

  “Thabba-thubba-ooo,” mimicked Jordy, yanking on the string.

  Winston wondered, if the machine imitated a person, what would be the human equivalent for cock-a-doodle-doo?

  Spencer, hoping to make one final stab at a partnership, broke the silence. “Anyone seen any good movies lately?” And Winston had an answer to his question.

  “Jewboy, don’t you know when to be quiet,” Fariq said, his patience run dry. “Better yet, leave.”

  Tuffy opened another beer. “Ain’t no such thing as a good movie. At least not since the price of a ticket went past seven dollars.”

  “Oh, God, now the nigger going to start talking about ‘the film.’ ” Fariq said “the film” in one long wispy breath, as if enunciated by a Public Television cinéaste. Then he returned to passing his magnifying glass over the counterfeit money, occasionally scissoring slivers from spools of blue and red thread, arranging them haphazardly on a bill, and dusting the money with a coat of spray-on polyurethane. “ ‘The film.’ ”

  Yolanda whisked Jordy from his aimless rounds and sniffed his diaper.

  Spencer could see in the sparkle in Winston’s eye and the wry smile a subtle erosion in the rocky landscape that separated them. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Why do most people go to the movies? To be entertained, right? Maybe to learn something. But most motherfuckers go to guess who the fucking killer is. And it’s always the same person.”

  “Who?”

  “The motherfucker you least expect, of course.”

  “So why do you go? Why waste your money?”

  “I don’t even know. I knew when I was little. I went to the show to see some famous movie star’s titties. Now movies is so bad they’ve even ruined that simple pleasure.”

  “How?”

  “You sit down, popcorn in one hand, soda pop in the other. You wait a bit, look at your watch, and say, ‘Forty-five minutes, and this bitch ain’t showed no titty? This flick sucks.’ If she flash her chichis before forty-five minutes, then the movie really sucks.”

  “So any film with a female lead is a bad film?”

  “Except for La Femme Nikita. Some of them old Natalie Wood shits is all right too. That bitch was fine.”

  “And if the lead is played by a man?”

  “If it’s a man, especially if it’s a white man—and it usually is, even if a nigger is the star—then the film has to be about right and wrong. And whiteys is the last motherfuckers on earth to be teaching me about right and wrong. Much less charging me for the lesson.”

  “But why do you go?”

  “I go for the disappointment, I guess. I’m used to being disappointed, and I know I’ll find it in the movie theater.”

  Spencer reached for a unopened beer. Winston didn’t mind.

  “Winston, can I ask you something else?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you call Big Brothers of America?”

  “Suppose I knew I’d be disappointed.”

  “Maybe subconsciously you did, but that’s not the reason you made the call.”

  “True. I guess I really called because I’m looking for someone to explain shit. I don’t understand nothing about life, me—nothing.”

  “Kind of like someone to say, ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch …’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, when the Japanese used to show silent films the theater owners paid someone to stand next to the screen and explain the action.”

  “For reals? Didn’t they have those cards?”

  “Intertitles. I supposed they did, but, you know, sometimes those aren’t enough.”

  “That’s true. Whenever I go see one of those silent jammies, Charlie Chaplin or something, I be trying to read the lips. Figure out what’s really going on. So they had a motherfucker lip-reading or some shit?”

  “The guy was called a benshi. They’d show Battleship Potemkin and he’d say, ’Note Eisenstein’s simple yet masterful contrapuntal statements in this scene. The rectangular lines of sailors and officers standing on the quarterdeck, bisected by the battleship’s guns—the state’s guns, if you will.”

  “I seen that. ‘All for a spoonful of borscht.’ Baby carriage going down the stairs. Good fucking movie. Benshi. That’s deep.” Winston was stalling for time. He was enjoying the conversation. Here in front of him was the only person he’d ever spoken to who’d also seen Battleship Potemkin and was willing to discuss it in detail. But that was no reason to let a dreadlocked Yankee into his life. He asked Spencer why he knew so much about film. The rabbi told him the role of Jews in Hollywood was one of his lecture subjects. He then proceeded to assert that the recent independent film explosion was a Ge
ntile assault on the perceived Jewish domination of Hollywood. This proclamation was followed by a thin segue into the argument that the popularity of the remake was more than a function of the dearth of Tinseltown originality; it was the movie industry’s veiled attempt to recapture its image as art. Moviemaking, once a highbrow craft associated with the creative goyishe genius of Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, Dalí, and Faulkner, was now painting by numbers, dependent on the guile of moguls, computer geniuses erasing the distinction between actor and animation, and a slew of out-of-work nephews.

  Winston was having some difficulty following Spencer’s argument—not because he didn’t understand the artistic references or failed to see what Jewishness had to do with what Spencer was saying, but because he was having an epiphany. He interrupted Spencer’s speech. “Hey, Rabbi. Meanwhile, back at the ranch …”

  “What?”

  “You remember when I told you I was looking for understanding?”

  Spencer nodded.

  “I now understand that understanding is not something you look for, it’s something that finds you. You understand?”

  “What made you think of that?”

  “You was talking and for some reason I thought of Fugitive from a Chain Gang. You ever seen it? Paul Moody.”