Tuff

  “Paul Muni.”

  “So you seen it?”

  “No.”

  “Paul Muni down South, running from the police for a murder he didn’t commit. Gets caught and put in prison. Right there, you know I can relate. But one scene fucks me up. It’s late at night, he’s on a wagon with a bunch of white boys coming back from breaking rocks or picking cotton, and as he comes back to the jail, there’s a wagonload of black niggers about to go out to pick cotton, break rocks. And Muni and this pitch black motherfucker catch eyes for about two seconds. Oh, the shit is deep.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Hell, yeah, that’s it. Muni give that nigger a look like ‘Damn, now I understand the bullshit you black motherfuckers go through. People falsely accusing you of shit you ain’t done. Forced to pick cotton.’ But he don’t start crying. He don’t call nobody ‘brother’ or wish him luck, try to shake his hand, or talk about how they’ve got to unite. He don’t say not one word. Just gives Money a look that says, ‘I feel you, homey, but I gots to get mines.’ That’s real. That’s how it be in jail or in life. Sometimes you catch yourself feeling close to motherfuckers you not supposed to feel close to, but you can’t afford to play the humanitarian role. But I realized I’m waiting for someone to look at me like that or for me to look at someone else like that. I’m not sure which.”

  “Didn’t I look at you that way when I came in?”

  “No, Rabbi, you looked at me like you felt sorry for me.”

  “And what’s wrong with that? I do feel sorry for you.”

  “You need to also feel sorry for yourself.”

  “You’re saying I’m hollow, shallow, like today’s movies.”

  “Nothing wrong with being shallow, just shouldn’t be shallow when you trying act like you about something.”

  Spencer felt shamed, but there was no lingering anguish pressing on his shoulders, forcing him to his knees to beg for forgiveness or spiritual guidance. He begged his religion for a sign of contriteness. And his heart began to pound, the hairs on his arms to stand on end, his knees start to shake. “Did you feel that?” Spencer asked.

  “Feel what?”

  “A buzz, an ethereal presence in the room, like something was passing through.”

  “That’s the malt liquor talking to you. You getting fuzzy-faced. Take a piss, you’ll feel better.”

  “Shit, I was hoping God was about to say something to me.”

  “God ain’t never spoke to you?”

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “You’re a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?”

  “It’s what’s so great about being Jewish. You don’t have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish.”

  Winston had a strange, slanted smile on his face. He threw his arm around Spencer’s shoulders and escorted him to the door like a kind bouncer saying good night to the village drunk. “Rabbi, let’s start next week. I’ll put you on six months’ probation, but I ain’t making no promises.” Here would be the monk Winston needed. He had dreadlocks, but so what? He’d have a person in his life to whom he wasn’t emotionally attached. Who knows, Spencer could be an impartial voice-over that would cut through the white noise of Yolanda’s bickering, Fariq’s proselytizing, and Ms. Nomura’s good intentions. “Can I ask one thing before you go?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s borscht?”

  “Borscht is beet soup.”

  After shutting the door behind Spencer, Winston sat down on the couch, took out his marker, and drew a circle on his palm. Inside the circle he wrote his name. Yolanda stopped scouring Jordy’s anus and was about to place a fresh diaper, then the baby, on Winston’s lap, when he shot up and ran to the door. Spencer was ten paces past the threshold, trying to figure out how a young man with a child to support, living in an apartment with bedsheets for drapery and mayonnaise jars for glassware, could afford to see so many films. Maybe he walks in backwards, he thought, like Cacus stealing the cattle from Hercules.

  “Yo, Rabbi!” Winston’s head was sticking out of the door. “Since you thought you were going to be a Big Brother to an eight-year-old, what were you planning to do with me this afternoon? Take me to the zoo?”

  Spencer reached into his haversack and whipped out a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, which he expertly flung at Winston at warp speed. Winston laughed, and swiftly slammed the door. The disk bounced off the metal door frame with a thud and skidded to a wobbly stop at the feet of a young boy. The boy picked it up and offered it back to Spencer. “Keep it.”

  Spencer Jefferson walked to his car feeling as if he’d just interviewed for, and landed, a job as an urban mahout. He’d walk alongside the elephantine Winston Foshay, beating on his rib cage with a bamboo cane, steering him past life’s pitfalls, prodding him into performing the tricks required by respectable society.

  8- THE GAS THEORY

  There’s a certain quixotic calm to an empty school hallway. Even though he wasn’t enrolled in Ramón Emeterio Betances Community Center and Preparatory School, Winston felt privileged. Cruising the hallways while class was in session was as close as a city kid got to experiencing the serenity of Huck Finn guiding his craft down the Mississippi. Thank God I’m not in one of those classrooms. And summer school to boot? The baby stroller squeaking, Winston wheeled Jordy down the halls on his way to a meeting Spencer had organized on his behalf. On the phone, Spencer had compared the meeting to a football huddle. Winston and the important people in his life would get together, discuss the best strategy for scoring a touchdown, then execute the play. “Winston becomes a success, on five, ready, break!” Spencer had said. Winston doubted it would be that simple.

  He stuck his head into a second-floor room. Inside, a teacher stood in front of a pull-down map of New York City, reviewing the day’s social-studies lessons. “How many boroughs in New York City?”

  “Five! Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan!”

  “Which ones are islands?”

  “Staten Island!”

  “And?”

  “Manhattan!”

  “What’s the northernmost borough?”

  “The Bronx!”

  “Now, which way is north?” Every student in the class thrust a finger high in the air, pointing toward the heavens. The beleaguered teacher’s head dropped slowly into his hands. “No. No.”

  “Damn, this year’s crop is dumber than we were,” Winston said, pulling his head from the door frame and walking abjectly toward the teachers’ lounge. Ms. Dunleavy looked up from her lunch and saw a round silhouette pause on the other side of the fire glass. She opened the door. “Good eve-ning,” Winston said in a slow Hitchcockian drawl.

  “Winston, good to see you.” Seeing Jordy curled in his stroller, she asked, “Is that your son? He’s so cute, may I hold him?” Winston turned his back to her, wheeling the baby out of reach. “Can’t do that. No white person has ever touched him. If one does, I’ll have to kill him. Like a mama rabbit does when a human handles her kid.”

  Ms. Dunleavy had been Winston’s teacher last fall when he attended the GED preparatory program at the community center. Her notions of English didn’t feel right in his mouth. For Winston language was an extension of his soul. And if his speech, filled with double negatives, improper conjugations of the verb “to be,” and pluralized plurals (e.g., womens), was wrong, then his thoughts were wrong. And oftentimes her corrections had the effect of reducing him to ethnic errata.

  In an alternative school whose faculty were mostly ex–flower children still mad at Bob Dylan for going electric, Ms. Dunleavy was a tolerable teacher. She just taught. She never grilled Winston about his home life, digging for literary fodder to be used in a persona poem or a condescending novel so orchestrated for political correctness it read like Uncle Tom’s Cabin meets a televised broadcast of the President’s State of the Union Address.

  She didn’t conduct her geography lessons from a summer Sandinista intern’s perspective
and in a Public Radio accent: People, today I’m going to place a red flag in every Latin American country where the United States has conducted covert operations to assassinate its leader. Say the names of the countries with me as I insert the flag: Cuuu-baaa, Ar-hen-tee-na, Neek-kar-rah-ghgxgwhaw. During arithmetic Ms. Dunleavy didn’t adopt a faux street attitude to explain how to divide fractions in the local vernacular. So peep this, when you be like wanting to divide fractions, you take the reciprocal of the divisor, “reciprocal” means flip the script, find the highest common digit, squash the common denominators, then multiply across. That’s stupid dope, right? Unlike the male teachers, she didn’t compound her sins by being constantly late for class, and not-so-discreetly fucking the students on the weekends.

  Despite his resistance to Ms. Dunleavy’s ministrations, Winston was on the verge of reaching the delinquent’s equivalent of the four-minute mile, a two hundred score on the GED, when he quit school. When Ms. Dunleavy asked him why, he replied that he was afraid of what he’d do if he failed the test. “I know I’ll hurt somebody.” He also said he was afraid of what he’d do if he passed the test. “I know I’ll hurt myself. Sabotage my life.”

  Winston could hear the overlapping small talk coming from the conference room next door. “My father in there?” he asked Ms. Dunleavy.

  “Yes, he is. Are you going to stay for the reading?”

  “Hell no—my father’s poems is worser than shit you used to make us read. You all be falling for that Black Panther Up-with-People bullshit too.”

  “Your father is an inspiration to thousands of people involved in the struggle.”

  “All I know is when that nigger starts reading, I be struggling to stay awake. First thing he does, every time, is put his watch on the podium, all serious-like. As if what he has to say is so important. Like the Revolution might start at any moment, so there’s no time to waste. Then Pops proceeds to ignore the watch and read for three hours. Whitey could put us all back in slavery and the nigger would still be reading.”

  “Winston, you need to come back to school—it’s never too late.”

  “But it’s always too hard.”

  Winston lifted Jordy from the stroller, then walked into the conference room, wedging himself in the nearest corner. His entrance went unnoticed by everyone except Fariq, who silently acknowledged his friend with a raised eyebrow and an almost imperceptible lifting of his chin. Winston’s “peoples” sat around an oak table like off-Broadway dramaturges planning the last act of his life. Inez sat at the end of the table nearest him. On her right were Yolanda, Fariq, and Spencer. To her left a hedgerow of fluffy salt-and-pepper Afros crowning the heads of Winston’s father and his Panther cronies, Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke, each with a steel Afro pick tucked over one ear. At the foot of the table, in front of an empty chair, sat a speakerphone.

  Spencer was proud of himself. It had taken him a week to make the arrangements but by gathering all of Winston’s loved ones in a single room, he’d performed his first mitzvah, and he wasn’t going to let Clifford Foshay’s brutish tactics sour the miracle. He knew of Clifford’s Panther reputation for being an intimidator, and the square-shouldered leather jacket and Mennonite beard only enhanced it. It wasn’t hard to see where Winston had learned his bullish ways. “Where this fucking boy at?” asked Clifford without bothering to even look at the door. He reached for Spencer’s arm and, leather sleeve creaking menacingly, seized Spencer by the wrist. “Fuck time is it?” He hiked up Spencer’s sleeve and, not finding a watch, sank back into his chair. “Where’s your watch, brother? You know, Brother Malcolm said, ‘Don’t trust a man who doesn’t wear a watch.’ ”

  Spencer didn’t flinch. “Where’s your watch, Mr. Foshay?”

  “Nigger, my watch is in my bag with my poems. Where it’s supposed to be. And don’t puff your chest out at me, I know who you are. You that fucking Negro rabbi white folks drag out every time they need a reasonable black opinion.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Why should we trust you?” echoed Sugarshack. Clifford’s squires sat back in their seats, stroking their goatees and finishing one another’s sentences. “Do you understand what Mao meant when he said—”

  “ ‘In the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops, the former may be likened to—’ ”

  “ ‘—water, and the latter to the fish who inhabit it’?”

  Clifford held up his hand for quiet. “You a Tom. One of those political, cultural, social theorists. And now you cozying up to my son?”

  Spencer sat upright in his chair. “I do subscribe to one theory. A metatheory, if you will. That is, I think a good theory should be generalizable, accurate, and simple.”

  “Fuck kind of theory is that?” Clifford groused, finally letting go of Spencer’s wrist.

  “It’s the GAS Theory, a theory about theories. But no theory meets all three of the criteria: generalizable, accurate, and simple.”

  “Einstein’s theory of relativity!” shouted Sugarshack, pleased with himself for citing the grandest of theories.

  “Generalizable and accurate, but not simple,” Spencer answered.

  “What about the theory that fags and Hindu people talk a lot?” volunteered Gusto, unsheathing his Afro pick from his head and forking out his natural. Clifford frowned and asked, “Whose theory is that?”

  “It’s my theory, mofo,” Gusto answered, burying his metal-toothed rake in his now lopsided hairdo.

  “Sounds more like a prejudice than a theory,” Spencer said. “But for the sake of our getting-to-know-you discussion, we’ll call it a theory—though a simple one, it is definitely not generalizable, or accurate.”

  Tired of playing the wallflower at a party supposedly thrown in his honor, Winston uprooted himself, placed Jordy on the table in front of Inez, and sauntered to his seat. Jordy crawled down the length of the tabletop and nestled himself in his father’s lap. “Man, the only theory that satisfies all three bits of the GAS Theory is the GAS Theory itself.”

  “Where in hell you been, smartass?” asked Clifford.

  “Where in hell you been?”

  “Boy, don’t get uppity with me. Back in my day we didn’t need an intervention to straighten no young black boys out. Things was together. The community raised the children. If Mrs. Johnson saw you wasn’t acting right, she called you, you came. She put the stick to your behind, and you took it. Sent you home, called your mother. When your mother said, ‘Is what Mrs. Johnson said true?’ you said yes, and took another beating from your parents.”

  Tuffy casually waved off his father. “If shit was so righteous and together back in the day, how come you turned out so fucked-up?”

  Clifford stood up, his hand raised high overhead. “Nigger, don’t disrespect me!” The speakerphone crackled to life and the scratchy voice of Winston’s mother called out, “Clifford, you leave Winston alone!”

  “Tell that nigger something, Ma,” Winston said, pulling the speakerphone closer to him and adjusting its volume upward, “before I have to stuff them ‘We Shall Overcome’ civil rights sunglasses up his ass.”

  “How you doing, son?”

  “Good, Mama. I miss you.”

  “I’m here for you, baby, but I only got another thirty minutes until my lunch break is over.”

  Spencer scooted in closer to the table. “Speaking of theory, I think we’ve just seen a bit of Freud’s Oedipal theory at work.”

  “Now that’s one theory that isn’t generalizable,” said Yolanda. “It surely doesn’t apply to black folk. True, a nigger might want to kill his father, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to fuck his mother. He might fuck a cousin, but Mom is out.”

  Spencer picked up his pen and pad and began. “I’m pleased everyone could make it. We are here to help Winston Foshay get on what is called ‘the right track.’ We all know him to be a troubled youth with loads of untapped potential. And Winston, I know that you are cynical about this process and it probably fe
els like a funeral to you, but please keep in mind that whatever you hear said today, we, unlike Antony, Brutus, come not to bury you, but to praise you.”

  Fariq twisted the bill of his baseball cap to a rakish angle. “Tuffy, I don’t know what this fool talking about, but I came to make sure you find a job so you can pay me my ends, nigger.”

  “Fuck you, man. You get it when I got it.”

  “Let’s get started. Winston, one of a Big Brother’s initial duties is to alert the members of his Little Brother’s support group, assess the strength of the social network, then formulate a plan of action.”

  “One minute.”

  “Yes, Mr. Foshay.”

  “I cannot in good conscience agree to be party to this without knowing where your political sympathies lie, Mr. Throckmorton. How do we know that you’re not leading Winston down the road to black apathy?”

  “For the record, okay, I don’t believe in labels.”

  “You still a Jew asshole.”

  “Thank you, Fariq. As I was saying, before I was so rudely labeled, is that political terms such as ‘left,’ ‘right,’ ‘Democrat,’ ‘Republican’ have no meaning to me. They convey nothing about one’s political personality or motivations. I judge one’s political savvy on whether or not they capitalize the b in ‘black’ and can pronounce ‘Ntozake Shange.’ ”

  “Who?” asked Dawoud.

  Gusto nudged his stolid partner. “You know, that sister who wrote that play—Rainbows for Colored Chicks Whose Arms Too Short to Slap Box with God.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Some bitch talking about how brothers don’t respect them. That shit was pretty good—I saw it while I was coked up.”

  “Can we return to discussing Winston’s welfare?”

  Clifford drummed his fingers on the table. “I just don’t want my son’s integrity as a strong black man compromised. We must ensure the boy develops himself as a black man, a descendant of African aristocracy, the southern working class, and some hellified Brooklyn niggers who took no shorts.”