Tuff

  Waving a mindful finger, Spencer interrupted him. “I think we shouldn’t take this black-man’s-right-to-self-determination thing too far with Winston. It’s like calculating pi to the five-billionth place—so what?”

  “Wait a goddamn minute!”

  Like channelers at a séance, everyone looked around to see where the disembodied yell was coming from. “Hey, anybody out there?”

  “Oh shit, it’s Moms on the speaker phone. Everybody shut up! Go ’head, Mama.”

  “Listen up. It’s Winston’s life. Let Winston decide what he wants to do with it. I’ve got to go—bye, son. I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

  “Love you, Mama.”

  After Mrs. Foshay’s reproach the gathering sat upright in their chairs, waiting for Winston to take command of the meeting and his life. Winston, oblivious to the restlessness surrounding him, rummaged through his backpack and removed a box of food. He set a tin of pernil, habichuelas, and arroz amarillo topped with gandules aside. He unwrapped a thin, flimsy burrito and bit into it. After just one bite he spit out the mouthful of food. “Taco Bell will definitely fuck up your order. I told them no onions.” Winston took his time rewrapping the rest of the burrito. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “First, these niggers gots to go.”

  “Who, us?” asked Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke, flabbergasted, their index fingers pressed to their breastbones. “How you going to act?”

  “You four draft-dodging dashiki-wearing brown-car-driving leather-trenchcoat-in-the-summer-sportin’ stuck-on-stupid-played-out-1970s reject motherfuckers need to raise. You all ain’t none of my social support network.”

  Clifford defended his friends. “Winston, you’ve known these brothers all your life. Who looked out for you when I was gone? They did. Who turned you on to Miles and Monk? They did.”

  “Them niggers didn’t turn me on to shit. They only came over to the house to crash, smoke weed, and flirt with Moms. And when the electricity was turned off, they’d steal my boom box since it ran on batteries and force me to listen to all that fucked-up plink-plink-bong music.”

  Clifford covered Winston’s hand with his own and squeezed. “Winston, these are four brothers who’ve been around the block. Proud black men who’ve sacrificed their youth so young people like yourself wouldn’t have to go through what they did. Do you remember?”

  Winston’s resolve began to weaken as he recalled how comforting it was having the four men requisition the tiny apartment like Allied liberators. Their cocky banter made him and his mother laugh. Their menthol cigarettes dangled from ashtrays he’d made in school like smoking cannon from castle ramparts. Winston felt protected. And though he was too young to know the war had been over for more than a decade, he longed to be old enough to fight on the Revolution’s frontlines. After dinner the men would sit on the couch and clean their weapons. Carefully, they’d place dabs of brown oil on the guns’ mechanisms, smearing the droplets with their fingertips.

  “I remember when Gusto shot me, cleaning his fucking rifle. That’s what I fucking remember.”

  “You know that was an accident.”

  “Dead in my fucking thigh.”

  “Shit was an accident.”

  Clifford shook Winston’s shoulder, and Winston blinked away the memory of his leg pulsing blood. Brenda tying a bathrobe-belt terry-cloth tourniquet around his leg.

  “Winston.”

  “What?”

  “We’re all black men here, and men, especially black men, make mistakes. We need to forgive each other and work together. You’re a smart enough young man, not so different from Malcolm, Huey, and Eldridge when they were your age. Many a great black man has been in the same position you’re in now. Jesus, Hannibal, Pushkin, Babe Ruth, and Beethoven all listened to their elders, and you must do the same.”

  Winston looked at the man he had designated to be his elder. Spencer was wearing a stonewashed blue oxford shirt. He looked under the table: his new mentor’s sockless feet were shod in pewter Sperry Top-Siders. Sugarshack, noticing the look of chagrin on Winston’s face, reached across the table and fingered Spencer’s collar. “Nigger look like CIA, don’t he? This the type nigger you want on your team?”

  Winston popped off the plastic lid to his Spanish food and placed his face in the rising steam. Wrestling the slabs of fatty meat with his plastic utensils, he spoke without looking up. “Look, maybe y’all was throwing grenades, toting shotguns, feeding kids and shit back in the good ol’ days, but now you ain’t doing a damn thing but playing off-beat bongos and a dented-up saxophone behind my father’s wack-ass poetry, so even if Spencer is a CIA agent, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, because the statute of limitations has long expired on whatever revolutionary shit you’ve done.”

  Clifford shook his head. “Son, you’re missing the point. I know you think we’re old-fashioned, paranoid, and who knows what else—”

  “No, I know what else. Yolanda, what’s that word you always using for people who can’t function without certain other motherfuckers in they lives?”

  “ ‘Codependent,’ ” she shot back.

  “Right.” Winston turned to face Clifford and his rat pack. “Y’all codependent.… Yolanda, what’s that word you always use to describe me, Smush, Whitey, and Armello?”

  “ ‘Homoerotic’?” she said, a little unsure of her answer.

  “Yup, that’s it. Daddy, you, Sugarshack, and them are all old-fashioned, paranoid, codependent homoerotics.” Winston started flicking green snow peas from atop the mound of yellow rice at his father’s friends. “Now bounce! Before you motherfuckers start talking about John Coltrane.”

  “That’s wrong, Winston.”

  “Pops, you go too if you want.”

  Clifford remained seated while Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke got to up leave, pulling their collars up around their necks, tugging on the sleeves of their jackets, and patting down their Afros, trying to maintain their expired seventies insouciant chic. “No need to bring Coltrane into this,” said Gusto, licking his fingers, then matting down his eyebrows. Winston beat a rhythm on the tabletop, mocking their poetry as they skulked into the hallway.

  Coltrane be superbad.

  Coltrane be black love.

  Coltrane be a love supreme. A love supreme.

  Coltrane be a burrito supreme. A burrito supreme.

  “You call that poetry? I admit, when y’all used to bogart my tape deck, I liked that nigger’s music. That fucking horn would calm you down like a back rub. But after listening to you clowns write about his shit, I can’t stand his music. Whenever I hear one of his tunes I think about your bullshit poetry. Y’all must be killing the nigger’s record sales.”

  Extremely satisfied with himself, Winston returned to shoveling food into his mouth. “Man, that felt good, yo.” Everyone was staring at him with varying degrees of incredulity. “What y’all looking at?” he demanded, speaking with his mouth full.

  Spencer waited for Winston to swallow, looked him in the eye, and asked the question that forever has hounded any miscreant who’s ever tried to set his or her life straight. “Winston, what do you want to do?”

  A grim look of concern crossed Winston’s face. This question had been asked of him countless times, and for the first time in his life he didn’t respond with his stock answer: “I don’t have to do nothing but stay black and die.” He couldn’t verbalize it, but Winston was feeling the onset of the freedom his father and Inez were always saying his ancestors died for. “What do I want to do? I don’t know, but I want to do something.”

  “You want to make money,” blurted out Fariq.

  “True.”

  “You want to set a good example for your son,” suggested Yolanda, refilling Jordy’s baby bottle with apple juice and sliding it down the table as if it were a mug of beer in a saloon. Winston sipped from the bottle, then handed it to the baby.

  “Sure, you right.”

  “You want to emulate them,” Inez
said, pointing to a set of posters including Ho Chi Minh, Marx, Menelik II, and Emma Goldman, lined up on the wall like a radical Mount Rushmore.

  “If you say so,” Winston teased, looking over at the posters. “Who’s that?”

  “Which one?” asked Inez.

  “The one at the end—the crazy-looking white man.”

  “That’s Eugene V. Debs. He was a labor leader at the turn of the century. He ran for president a few times too.”

  Winston stared at the black-and-white photo of the bald, craggy-faced agitator. Eugene Debs was standing on an unseen soapbox, leaning over a sea of people like a figurehead lashed to a frigate bow, his fist beating the air, his mouth open in mid-mandate. You could almost hear the rabble rouser begging the crowd to overturn everything from corporate oligarchy to the horizon. The blown-up photo of Debs’s exhortations reminded Winston of himself: the pushy nigger who threatened and bitched and moaned and fought until he got his way. “That old motherfucker look like he about to have a heart attack. Nigger better calm down.”

  Inez nervously tugged on one earlobe. “Winston, you’ve mentioned money, family, social activism as possible goals and aspects of your life you want to work on. Where do you plan to start?”

  “Right here with my seed,” he answered, lifting Jordy up by the scruff of the neck like a mother lion lifting her cub. “This little nigger here is my first responsibility.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean, Ms. Nomura? I ain’t got to take care of Yolanda—she grown, she can look out for her own self.”

  “Winston, it’s like being on an airplane.”

  “I never been on a plane.”

  Winston knocked his fist on his forehead and let out a groan. “I fell into one of your moral traps, didn’t I? Go ahead, tell me what happens on a plane.”

  Inez winked. “Well, when you board the airplane they wait until everyone is seated; then the flight crew shows the passengers a safety video: how to fasten your seat belt, where the closest exit is, the life jacket is under the seat. Then on the screen are a mother and child sitting side by side. The narrator says, ‘If the cabin pressure falls, yellow oxygen masks will drop from directly overhead. Place one over your head and breathe as you would normally.’ ”

  Fariq objected. “How can you breathe normally? If the plane is fucking going down, you’d be hyperventilating and shit.” Inez offered Fariq a cigarette, hoping the smoke would occupy what little air he had in his asthmatic lungs. When Fariq started coughing, she continued.

  “The narrator goes on to say, ‘If you are traveling with a small child, put on your mask first, then place the mask on the child.’ ”

  “You trying to say I have to be responsible for myself first before I can do anything else?”

  “Exactly.”

  Yolanda folded her arms and sat back in her chair, bottom lip protruding. “Dag, Winston, I’ve been trying to tell you the same thing for the past year. Why when Ms. Nomura says it, instantly you understand?”

  “It’s not her saying it; it’s when and where she said it. You say it right after we’ve had sex. I’m not really listenin’ to your ‘Honey, when are you going to learn’ shit. I’m rubbing my dick against your thighs trying to get another hard-on.”

  “Tuffy!” Yolanda screamed, slapping the table in an effort to keep from laughing. Winston apologized with a kiss on the cheek. Although he hadn’t fully answered the question of what he wanted to do with his life, in deciding to take responsibility for himself he felt he’d made some progress.

  However, the unavoidable, but rarely acknowledged, corollary to the what-to-do quandary loomed unspoken in everyone’s mind as they watched Winston wolf down the rest of his lunch. Winston knew what they were thinking. Now that I’ve said I’m going to do something, the real question is what can a high-school-dropout short-tempered nigger like me do? I ain’t starting over. No way. Using his thumbnail he picked at a piece of meat lodged in his teeth. “So I suppose I have to get a job?”

  Winston spun about in his chair and looked at the cork job board on the wall behind him. Nestled among sheaves of multicolored flyers, the job board promoted everything from political rallies to a charity sumo demonstration in a local park to the candidates running in the upcoming election. Thumbtacked to the board were the job listings. Written with black felt-tipped pen on yellow three-by-five index cards, the listings were neatly arranged in columns under the headings Clerical, Child Care, Service, and Miscellaneous. Winston shuddered, thinking of the last time he’d found himself face-to-face with the dreaded job board.

  Just after Jordy was born, Winston, feeling the pressures of an extra mouth to feed, joined up with a chain-snatching ring that operated in the tony Chelsea/West Village area. Although the baby was good subterfuge, he quickly tired of lugging Jordy to work with him, but was averse to leaving him at the day-care centers in his neighborhood. He couldn’t bring himself to entrust his child to places that sounded more like halfway houses or reclamation institutions than nurseries: Bridge the Gap Day Care, Family Restoration Through Faith, Empowerment House, Sheltering Arms Children’s Service. Even Ms. Nomura’s day care at the community center was called the Crack Is Wack Children’s Center. Winston wanted to drop Jordy off at one of the Chelsea spots he passed while running from the cops—child-care centers whose names seemed to emphasize preparing kids for the future: the Multimedia Preschool, the Piaget Discovery School. The implied mission of the other nurseries was simply allowing children to be children: the Acorn School, City and Country School, Kids Curious, and Buckle My Shoe. Winston had fixated on Buckle My Shoe. To him it sounded like a luxury rumpus room where the staff called the kids “toddlers” and “youngsters,” not “clients” and “crumb snatchers.” He’d seen the name somewhere before. The job board!

  The index card termed the position as “custodial in nature,” one day a week, and ten cents over the minimum wage. Winston accepted the job, negotiating free child care two days a week for Jordy in return for an eighth of top-grade marijuana a week. On his first Tuesday, at precisely one-thirty, while Winston was cleaning the windows, Diedre Lewis, his supervisor, took a break to smoke her weed on the roof. “Watch my kids for me, Mr. Foshay.” The moment Diedre left the room, all fifteen brats started wailing like tripped-up security alarms, and no amount of cradling, lullabies, or “Aw, there now”s would silence them. Next Thursday, on his way to work, Winston grabbed a crusty brown bottle from the medicine cabinet—a bottle he hadn’t opened since his dognapping days. That afternoon when Diedre went on break, the kids cried like beaten seals. Winston twisted the cap off the bottle and poured the clear, dense liquid onto a cleaning rag. Shaking a box of Chiclets as if it were a hunting rattle, he lured Kyle Palmetti into striking distance. Quickly, Winston pounced on the boy, covering his mouth and nose with the towel. The child fell instantly into a deep sleep. Instead of fleeing after seeing one of their brethren incapacitated, the other kids clamored to be next. “How’d you do that?” “Do me next.” “No, me!” “Me!” When Diedre returned from her break, the entire brood were asleep in their cubbyholes. Winston sang the latest radio hit to himself and ran his squeegee over the windows. “How?” she asked.

  “Chloroform.”

  Convicted of child endangerment, the state sentenced him to six months’ probation.

  “Any of those jobs interest you, Winston?”

  “Ms. Nomura, can I get a job putting up jobs on the job board?”

  “No.”

  “This sumo sounds interesting. Is there a sumo school near here? Maybe I can be professional sumo wrestler.”

  “Get serious!”

  “Chill, Pops.”

  Winston put a beefy hand to the side of his face, a makeshift horse-blinder blocking out the distractions on his determined run for the roses.

  “If you’re going to get a job, get one you look forward to going to,” suggested Spencer. “Winston, what do you look forward to?”

  “This
documentary called Seven Up, where they follow these British people around. But it only comes out once every seven years.”

  Winston got up from his chair and, hands on knees, studied the board. Reading each card carefully, he hoped something in the text would jump out at him, showing itself from among the overabundance of data-entry positions. NEW YORK CITY PLANETARIUM—ASTRONOMER’S ASST. “Hey, I like this one,” he said, tapping the card with his finger. “Look into the sky all night. Naming stars, look for spaceships—who knows, maybe I’ll discover a comet. Tuffy’s Comet. Sounds kind of ill. This might could work.”

  “You should be a comet, ’cause niggers like you don’t come around too often.”

  Winston frowned at his father’s insult. Inez asked him to read the bottom of the card, trying her best not to sound too discouraging.

  His voice hesitant, Tuffy began reading. “ ‘Excellent math skills required. All applicants must have working knowledge of basic physics.’ Is my math that bad?”

  Fariq, who during games of twenty-one always knew when Winston had over fifteen in his hand because he’d roll his eyes into his head, count his fingers, and take forever to say “Hit me,” spat out, “You ain’t never even had pre-algebra, kid. What x stand for?”

  Winston shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Actually, that’s right—x stands for the unknown.”

  “Told you. Ask me another one.”

  “What’s an average?” Inez said impatiently.

  “Average? Let’s see …” Winston answered cautiously, gauging the correctness of his response by the twists and frowns in Inez’s expression, “that’s like the most regular. If you put everything together and picked out the most typical. I’ll use it in a sentence. ‘The average black man can whip four or five white boys.’ ” A look of skepticism swept over Inez’s face. “I mean, because of the anger,” Winston said quickly.

  Yolanda pointed at the job board. “Once more.”

  “I’m just playing.” Winston giggled. “I know what average is. That’s when you add the numbers, divide, and come up with the number in the middle. Ha, I’m about to be an Astronomer’s Assistant. Later for all y’all.”