Outside, Spencer turned to Fariq. “Are Winston and Inez serious?”
“Jewboy, I don’t know about Ms. Nomura, and I doubt Tuff will be out there campaigning and shit, but I know when he was talking about who he know in the neighborhood and all, he was coming from the heart. He only has two emotions: serious and serious as fuck, straight up. Only time I ever heard the nigger tell a joke was when we was working in Brooklyn, that shit was just a freak thing. Even when Tuffy jokin’, he bein’ dead real. He a sensitive nigger. You know how niggers be snappin’ on each other, ‘You so ugly,’ ‘so black,’ ‘so stupid’? Don’t no one get into it with Tuffy. Not since him and Carter got into it. One day we was comin’ from the beach and Carter was all over Tuffy, ‘Nigger, you so fat, you jumped into the sky and got stuck. Motherfucker, you so big, you wear pillow cases for socks. You so big, you shit cannonballs. You so fat the only things on earth the astronauts can see from space is the Great Wall of China and the crack of yo’ ass.’ This wasn’t no when-you-sit-around-the-house, you-sit-around-the-house, seafood-diet bullshit; this session was heated. Carter was rockin’ that nigger, and all Tuffy could do was take the blows. But Tuffy can’t play the dozens, ’cause he can’t lie. If he ever say to a nigger, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that boy will have fewer friends than Israel. So Carter breaking on Tuffy so hard he has to stop and catch his breath. Tuffy, tired of Carter fucking him up, right out of the blue says, ‘Yeah, nigger, like I fucked yo’ mama.’ Now normally when a nigger go into the ‘I fucked your mother’ bag, the other niggers start groaning, saying, ‘That shit’s a dud.’ But in this case they start laughin’, fallin’ off the stairs, runnin’ into traffic, giving each other pounds—niggers is straight dyin’.”
“Why?”
“Because they knew that if Tuffy had said it, then he’d really fucked Carter’s mother.”
“Oh, shit.”
“ ‘Oh, shit’ is right. A nigger who honest as Tuffy just said he fucked your mother in front of your boys? You gots to fight. Tuffy should’ve just let Carter hit him, he don’t weigh but a hundred twenty pounds. But Tuff play for keeps. Nigger hit Carter so hard—you ever see a matador stab a bull? Bull staggers for a quick second like, ‘Goddamn, this punk motherfucker stabbed me,’ then just fall to his knees. That’s how hard Tuffy hit Carter. Nigger dropped to his knees olé like a motherfucker. His nasal passages is all permanently crushed. The poor guy got to keep his mouth open to breathe. You give that nigger a lollipop and he’ll die.”
Fariq’s gaze shifted and Spencer looked over his shoulder to see Winston and Yolanda standing arm in arm behind him. Spencer now understood why little boys ran to Tuff in the streets, tugging on his shirt, begging to be “put down” on some invisible ghetto roster of the terminally bad. He knew why his hubcaps were still on his car after that initial visit to Winston’s apartment. Winston Foshay—a living African-American folk hero whose mythos lay somewhere between that of the angelic John Henry and the criminally insane Stagger Lee. Spencer had his newspaper story.
9- THE READING
Winston paused at the auditorium’s entrance. The stragglers hurried by, and he saw very few neighborhood faces. Whatever their ethnicity, these were people who only came uptown for the meager portions of soul food at Sylvia’s Restaurant, or to hear a career Negro such as his father pontificate on the challenges faced by black Americans and those enlightened few genuinely sympathetic to the cause. Each loyalist mention of his father’s name from a patron’s lips was preceded by a slew of adjectives that convinced Winston that if he ever wanted to get to know his father, he’d have to read his books, because the dynamic, insightful, devoted Clifford Foshay was a man he didn’t know.
“Tuff, you coming, yo?” asked Fariq. “Popduke be dropping bombs.”
“No, y’all go ahead.”
Yolanda and Fariq eagerly sought out seats in the small but crowded auditorium. Spotting Spencer about to settle into a front-row seat, Fariq called out, “Hey, Jewboy! Wait the fuck up! Save me a seat, can’t you see I’m crippled?” Yolanda shoved Fariq ahead of her. “Do you have to say ‘Jewboy’?”
“You sensitive to the word ‘Jewboy’?”
“No, I’m just tired of hearing you say it.”
“What else is there?”
“I thought you were a follower of the Nation? What about ‘Hebe,’ ‘kike,’ ‘hymie,’ ‘Yid.’ Anything but ‘Jewboy’ all the damn time!”
“ ‘Yid,’ ” Fariq said thoughtfully, smacking his tongue as if he were tasting a fine wine. “I like that one.”
Winston stood just inside the exit. On stage, Clifford’s band was in the middle of their preperformance primping. Sugarshack tuned his saxophone with puffs of sound, peering down the bell and then shaking the horn every few notes, hoping to dislodge some invisible clog. Gusto sat behind a small drum kit practicing his licks and his distorted drum-solo faces. Duke adjusted and readjusted the congas propped between his legs. Winston recalled how he used to drive Duke crazy by asking him to explain the difference between congas and bongos. Dawoud rummaged through his duffel bag of percussion instruments, his choices for the evening’s entertainment seemingly based on nonmusical attributes such as blatant Africanness and the dexterity required to play them.
Pointing Jordy’s finger for him, Winston followed the nervous pacing of his father. “That’s your grandfather, Jordy. He’s an asshole.” Clifford Foshay had changed into his poetry garb. The black fakir was resplendent in a Bengal tiger–patterned djellaba, topped off with an intricately woven macramé kufi, accessorized with wooden beads and yellowed lion’s teeth. Unintroduced, Clifford strode across the rostrum, carefully set his watch on the lectern and produced a shotgun, which he fired into the air, silencing the crowd. “That’s for Huey.” Blam! “That’s for Fred Hampton.” He opened the barrel and inserted two more cartridges into the breech. Blam! “That’s for raping my great-grandma.” Blam! “And that’s one to grow on.” A sleet of particleboard and ceiling plaster began to fall. The audience leaned forward in their seats.
When Winston was younger and forced to attend his father’s readings, Clifford’s ostentatious militancy embarrassed him. He would return home obsessed with one question: what would happen if his dad turned white overnight? One day his father was a panelist on a Sunday-afternoon television news forum. The guests, no matter their political bent, argued, threatened, and insulted one another. Winston realized that every guest reminded him of his father and that if his dad had been born white he would be the same person, bellicose and belligerent, spewing his rhetoric from overstuffed recliners and television-studio swivel chairs instead of prison cots and bar stools. When his father called him later that day asking if he’d seen him on television, Winston said yes, then asked his father why, if he talked so much about the glories of Africa and the repressions of America, he didn’t drop his slave name for an African one. Clifford replied, “Because then you can’t cash the checks.”
After invoking the requisite Yoruba spirits, Clifford was finally ready to read. There was a cannonade of shotgun fire, and Winston turned to leave. There was no purpose in his staying; he knew the program by heart. Poems about Clifford’s expatriation to Cuba: repetitive paeans layered with images of mangos, rusty automobiles, sugarcane, and raven-haired beauties who like to fuck until the roosters crow. To break the revolutionary reveille there would be some poems about basketball, drums, and of course John Coltrane. The freedom suite would be followed by intermittent tales of how Clifford, drunk on Cuban rum and missing his mama’s cooking, made a pontoon out of coconuts and fishnet, waded into the waters of Matanzas Bay, and extradited himself to Florida. For an encore Clifford would read an ode dedicated to Winston and his dead sister, Brenda. The poem would rumble incessantly onward, like the Iliad read aloud by a summer-school teacher on a gorgeous August afternoon. The first canto was the story of Clifford sending cross-country for Winston and Brenda when Huey P. Newton died tragically in the streets of Oakland, California. It
would be read with dramatic caesuras inserted, not between musical phrases, but between poignant images, for maximum pathos. After a three-day bus ride, Winston and his sister arrived the day of the funeral. Winston, lacking a pair of clean underwear, was forced to attend the burial wearing a pair of his sister’s panties. How he cried—not because the snake head of black-American rebellion had been severed from its body, but because his undergarment was thin, pink, and had “Tuesday” handwritten just under the waistband.
Canto 2 retold in quatrains how Clifford discovered his daughter was dead when the amount of the court-ordered alimony payments that followed him through four address changes had been halved. The third canto was a recounting of young Winston’s African-American-warrior training. His thirteenth birthday present the very same twelve-gauge shotgun balanced on Clifford’s right hip. The hunting trips took place in the swampy reeds of Wards Island, where shotgun fire scattered homeless men like park pigeons. Winston was made to fetch the kill, mostly buckshot-shredded possums and cats.
Tears of regret would pour down Clifford’s face, and he would remove his reading glasses, take a sip of water, and read the poem’s envoi, hammering home the point of how in fighting the war humane he’d sacrificed his humanity. Then Winston’s father would bow his head; the audience, unsure if the poem was over, would remain silent. After the whispered “Thank you” into the microphone, everyone would stand and applaud this lyrical airing of dirty laundry. Clifford would scan the crowd looking for his bereaved son. Finding him, he’d ask Winston to stand. And the crowd would then turn toward Winston and smile, their clapping growing even more intense in recognition of the revolutionary’s son who wore pink panties to Huey P. Newton’s funeral. Finally, when his father had finished signing all the books, exchanging phone numbers with all the agents and groupies, the redeemed freedom fighter would make his way to his son and heartily embrace him, fooling Winston into thinking they might head into the night together, Ajax and Telamon after the siege of Troy. I love you. No, you can’t come with us, we’re going to get some drinks. Call you tomorrow. Love you.
Winston lay Jordy in his stroller and backed quietly out of the room, leaving Clifford on a Dadaist roll, turning wordplay riffs on Fidel Castro:
Fidel’s fidelity
Hi-fidelity
Sieg heil fidelity
Two tablespoons of Castro Oil
Castro-castrate the bull market
Winston decided he would celebrate his candidacy at the movies. He bought a pint of gin and a bottle of lemonade, then flagged a livery cab.
The burgundy Buick Electra sailed down Second Avenue like an obsolete dreadnought full steam ahead on its way to the dry dock. Father and son poked their heads though the sunroof. Shirtsleeves flapping in the downtown traffic sirocco, they ahoyed everything from the prostitutes to leashed Pomeranians. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” Winston shouted, his arm stretched into the dusk in imitation of Debs’s pleading pose. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” He didn’t have anything else to say. He didn’t have a political platform—no programs for reform, no admonitions for society. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” As people turned to see who this crazy man yelling from an old Buick was, he could almost see his words drifting away in the slipstream of the muggy city air, like skywriting. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” He laughed, took a sip of his drink, then screamed, “All for a spoonful of borscht!”
“Here?” asked the driver, cruising the car past the multiplex. The marquee displayed six films, none of which Winston had any interest in. It was the usual dreck: a low-budget music video passing itself off as an African-American feature film; the summer blockbuster chock-full of special effects; three white independent “mosaics” of risqué subject matter, flat asses, dime-novel plot twists, and lots and lots of driving; and one big-budget masturbatory vehicle written, directed, and produced by an aging white Academy superstar playing a vile, bitter, successful old curmudgeon who finds humility and understanding for his fellow man in the arms of a young nubile. Fuck this garbage. He said aloud, “Take me to Chinatown.”
There is nothing darker than a Chinatown movie theater, and for a moment the gloom fooled Winston into thinking he was dead. After checking to make sure his heart was still beating, he groped his way down the aisle, his hand going from seat back to seat back, occasionally touching the sweaty neck of a sleeping old man. He found found two empty seats and rubbed the worn velvet cushions, checking for freshly chewed gum. Out of blankets and two small stuffed animals he made a pallet for Jordy, who quickly fell asleep, a parakeet in a covered cage.
Winston slouched in his seat and peered through the swirling cigarette smoke at the giant screen. Two Hong Kong brothers, obviously on different sides of the law, were arguing over who’d make the penultimate sacrifice. I’ll kill for you. No, I’ll die for you. Winston left the theater wondering if he would’ve thrown himself in front of the bullets that claimed his sister, dying in her arms with a noble look on his face. He headed north on Bowery singing the theme song to the second feature, Once Upon a Time in China, a picture he’d seen at least a dozen times. He was still singing when he walked into a pet store two blocks up from the theater. “Ao qi mian dui wan chong la-a-ang. Re xie xiang na hong ri gua-a-ang!” The proprietor greeted him with a smile and finished the chorus, “Dan si tie da-a-a. That’s a great movie.”
“The best.”
Winston asked to see the baby turtles, and the storekeeper placed a fishbowl full of dark-green inch-long turtles on the counter. Winston picked out a turtle and placed it in Jordy’s palm. “What do the words in that song mean?”
“ ‘Stand proud when you face wars. Hot-blooded like the red sun. Courage like iron.’ ”
“That’s good advice. How much them turtles?”
“One for a dollar, ten for eight.”
Hunching over the counter, Winston whispered into the owner’s ear, “You got them piranhas?”
The man looked around suspiciously, called for his attendant to watch the cash register, then headed to a back room, returning with a menacing-looking fish in a sandwich bag.
“That’s what I’m talking about! Let me get some of those little rocks, too—blue ones.”
When Winston got home, he placed the rocks into a corner of the casserole bowl that held his goldfish, sticking a plastic palm tree in the cobalt-blue mound, forming a makeshift tropical isle. He pried open Jordy’s hand and resuscitated the dried-out turtle with a globule of saliva, then dropped it into the water with the goldfish and a dead fly that was floating on the surface. Waving the sandwich bag over the casserole dish, Winston teased his pet, “Fishy, come out to play! Dustin, I want you to meet Sir Laurence Olivier.” The piranha swam out of the Baggie and into its new environs. “Is it safe? Hell naw, it isn’t safe.” The turtle scrambled for the rocks. The goldfish backed into the corner, cautiously eyeing his new neighbor. The piranha ate the dead fly. Winston took Jordy to bed, chuckling in his Ming the Merciless laugh.
10- PARADISE EX NIHILO
On a low-visibility day, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the Manhattan skyline looked like a giant histogram, the lofty edifices stretching upward along the X axis of greed. Beyond the midtown skyscrapers lay the meaningless statistical outliers, the barren flatlands of East Harlem. Tuffy looked back at Inez and Spencer, who were busily noshing on a plate of hot Empire State nachos, letting Winston have his moment.
The view always evoked mixed emotions in Winston. This high off the ground at the base of the clouds, he experienced the dissonant symptoms of social vertigo. He didn’t know whether he was flying or falling. Today, the view was more apropos of Tuffy’s life than ever before. Since declaring his halfhearted candidacy for public office, he’d begun to look at his neighborhood from the outside in. When he visited friends, the overwhelming stench of buckets that served as toilets for the people who lived on the top-floor landings no longer caused him to
gag and laugh in ridicule, but to daub his stinging eyes in shame. At night from his bedroom window, he counted the buildings on his block, stupefied that abandoned dwellings outnumbered occupied ones by two to one. He fell asleep watching the nocturnal drug addicts flit out of the concrete caves like bats, and the diurnal homeless return to burrow into the dilapidated warren.
. . .
The foreign tongues, drawls, and dialects of the tourists buzzed in Winston’s ears like forest mosquitoes. Their gaiety almost fooled him into believing that he too was a foreigner to the urban chaos down below. A gale of hot wind rustled the city map he was holding. Winston struggled to hold it at a readable angle. A German tour guide and his group surrounded him. “Im Norden liegt Harlem,” the tour guide said, his hand raised for attention, “… die Heimat des schwarzen Amerikas.” The German language made his epiglottis itch, but Winston distinctly heard “Harlem” and wondered what the tour guide was saying. He knew the man wasn’t saying anything about his Harlem, Ost Harlem.
There was little East Harlem folklore. There had been no Spanish Harlem Renaissance, only Ben E. King’s catamitic reference to a rose in his soul song “Spanish Harlem,” three poets of some renown (Willie Perdomo, Piri Thomas, and Doug E. Fresh), and a playground basketball legend (Joe Hammond). It would be impossible for any tour guide to convey the absurdity of daily life in the neighborhood. How could one even translate Winston’s chaotic morning?