Tuff

  Watching his friends guzzle beer and chat, Winston wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He had a notion to call Spencer and seek some Big-Brotherly guidance. But the phone was near the transsexuals, one of whom was flitting his tongue like a disturbed snake. Winston let out a cry of frustration. “What’s wrong with you, son?” asked Armello.

  “You niggers seem different.”

  “Fuck, you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “I don’t know, Whitey, it’s like tonight I don’t know y’all.”

  Fariq moved from behind Nadine. He was a little drunk, and held his beer unsteadily, his middle finger off the can and pointing at Winston. “Nigger, you the one changed. Got a Jew and Ms. Inez running your fucking life. Man, I wouldn’t run for no white man’s City Council for no amount of money. Not fifteen thousand or fifteen million thousand.”

  “Easy for you to say, you got money in the bank. You got ideas.”

  Standing abreast at the bar, Fariq, Charley O’, and Armello looked to Winston like the Three Stooges in an army episode, lined up for inspection. He knew what happened next: the major would ask for a volunteer for a dangerous mission and they’d take one step backward. He’d be left standing alone having “volunteered” for who knows what. The Fourth Stooge assed out like a motherfucker.

  “And don’t be handing us that”—Fariq was signaling for another beer and talking to Winston at the same time—“ ‘You niggers seem different’ bullshit. That sound like whitey talking.”

  “What? I didn’t say nothing.”

  “Not you, Charles. I mean real white people. You know how they always want to make like there’s friction between niggers. Niggers can’t coexist unless they on one fucking wavelength. Divide and conquer. These niggers are different from these niggers. Fuck that. Winston, you want to act a fool and hang out with a black fucking rabbi and playact like you running for City Council, that’s your fucking business. You always have been, always will be my and our nigger. So don’t come to me with that ‘Y’all seem different’ sad-song bullshit.”

  Winston’s face flushed. “That’s on me, son. You talking good shit. Respect, nukka.”

  “Tuffy, long as you don’t come between me and my money green, we will always be boys.”

  Winston didn’t think the gap had been quite closed shut. But he knew that this sense of otherness wasn’t something to dwell on. He lifted his beer can off the bar. The condensation from the can left a wet ring on the wood. He thought of Musashi’s oneness with the universe, and knew no matter how different he felt, or was treated, he would never be different or removed. Not from these niggers at least.

  Charles slung an arm around Winston and pressed a cold can of beer into his hand. “I’m saying, son, you runnin’ for office, that shit inspirin’, B. You thinkin’ big. You ain’t goin’ to win, but that don’t make no nevermind. Because we all thinkin’ big now.” Winston soon found himself drowning in an affirmative tidal wave of “uh-huh”s “word”s, and “true, true”s. From the earnestness in their voices, the greed in their grins, the way Moneybags had his back turned away from the group and was peering into the pour spout of his Budweiser, Winston could sense that some grand scheme was afoot. Something bigger than the three-card-monte con they’d all come to Brooklyn to learn, some score that couldn’t be discussed in public. He played coy, and looked up at the television screen. “You niggers ain’t shit. I need some new cellies. Antoine!” The loud hail for someone outside the clan signaled to the rest of the bar that the meeting of the East Harlem Thieves’ Guild was adjourned. Moneybags lifted his head. Forthwith all conversation was public domain, and the regulars turned the volume of their causerie up a notch. Tuffy continued to bellow. “Antoine! Why you showing this movie?”

  The movie in question was Lord of the Flies. The troop of stranded boys was balkanizing into the savage and the civilized, and the bespectacled fat kid was vainly trying to maintain a semblance of prep-school decorum. “I have the conch. It’s my turn to speak.” Tugging on Tuffy’s shirtsleeve, Armello mocked the fat kid’s plea. “ ‘I have the conch’? Of course nobody is listening to his roly-poly ass—he’s carrying around an abalone shell like he crazy. Who’d want to hear what this fool has to say? ‘I have the conch.’ Please!” On the screen, the leader of the rebels eyed a nearby boulder. “I love this movie,” said Antoine.

  “You would, you sicko. All excited over little white boys running around the jungle half-naked, ain’t you?” snorted Fariq, slipping his arm around Nadine’s waist.

  “The leader—what’s his name, Ralph?—he got some muscles on him for a twelve-year-old. Look at those abs.”

  “Change the channel,” Winston pleaded. “This one is exactly like the original.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t exactly like the original.”

  “You right, the original was in black-and-white and they wasn’t wearing designer drawers, that’s the only difference.”

  “Look at the peter muscle on the redheaded boy with the spear.”

  “Oooh!” the entire bar gasped. Jack, leader of the primitives, caved in the chubby boy’s head with a boulder, ending his filibuster and his life. “I have the rock!” Armello shouted gleefully. “Now that’s how you get people to listen!”

  Winston pounded the bar top. “Man, I’m tired of the fat kid always getting fucked up. Why the fat guy always gots to be the star’s best friend? If you the star’s best friend, fat, and getting laughed at, you going to get fucked up. Plain and simple.”

  “At least there’s fat people in the movies,” Fariq said. “If by some miracle a handicap person is even in a flick, he’s in a wheelchair plotting to take over the world, snickering like a fucking maniac. And I ain’t never seen a movie with two handicapped motherfuckers in it. You might see two obese motherfuckers, twins or some shit.”

  Winston laughed, “Because you can’t have two crippled motherfuckers in the same room. Don’t think when the handicap van pulls up in front of the center I don’t see you trying to stare down the deaf and retarded waterhead niggers.”

  “Very funny, son. But I’m sayin’, if it’s a handicap in the movies, he’s a bank-robbing mastermind.”

  Nadine shushed Fariq. “Be quiet, Smush, you trippin’?”

  “My shit,” Fariq apologized, quickly setting about covering his slip by harassing Antoine. “Hey, Antoine, would you consider yourself to be an expert on fagness?”

  Winston rolled his beer across his forehead, trying to mollify his frustration with the can’s coolness. Charles’s we-got-to-think-big-now remark and Nadine’s admonishing Fariq for his “bank-robbing mastermind” comment made it obvious to him that one of the many golden nest eggs laid on the stoop was beginning to hatch. These stupid niggers fixin’ to rob a bank. This beer ain’t cuttin’ it. Leaning over the bar, Winston nimbly fingered a bottle of Idaho vodka off the shelf. Fariq and Antoine continued to flirt with one another.

  “Yeah, I know a thing or two about fagness. Fagocity. Fagology. Fagistics. You want me to give you a lesson?”

  Nadine placed her hands on her hips and looked Antoine up and down. “I don’t think so, not with my man, you fucking maricón.”

  Antoine rolled his eyes. “Shoot, I’ll show you something too, young lady.”

  Winston unscrewed the cap and sneakily filled his voluminous cheeks with vodka. The swallow produced a concussive sound in his head that clogged his ear canals, cleared his sinuses, and stiffened his fingers. While he was on top of the Empire State Building talking campaign strategy, his boys had planned something without him. After sixteen years of being consulted on everything from the rules for an afternoon game of kick-the-can to the proper attire for an evening of teen skulduggery, his friends had planned a robbery without him—a bank robbery, no less. It hurt that he wasn’t part of the heist’s planning, but he was also glad he hadn’t been. One less thing to worry about. The second swallow momentarily ceased all of Winston’s brain activity, dousing his synaptic impulse for bitterness and fusing his
short-term and long-term memories into a lump of neurons concerned only with the here-and-now and the never-was. Good luck to you motherfuckers.

  “I was down in the Village the other day, all these lesbos was holding hands.”

  “You never see none uptown holding hands.”

  “That’s because they’d get lit up. And Whitey, don’t interrupt me.”

  “Winston, do you and your friends go around bashing gay people?” asked Antoine.

  “Man, what you saying? If I recall correctly, when I was little you and your little crew of faggots used to tease me and then beat me up. I was one who was bashed. You always hear of violence against fags, but you don’t never hear of fag violence against straight motherfuckers.”

  “Fuck you, Tuffy.”

  “Then don’t start. I ain’t about to take your side just because we cousins.”

  Fariq began screaming, “Will you all, please, stop interrupting me and let me finish my story?”

  The others quieted down. “Go ’head, nigger, damn.”

  “Right. What the fuck was I talking about?”

  “Lesbians.”

  “Right. To each they own, know what I’m saying? But what I want to know is why lesbians dress so fuckin’ bad? I mean, they dress like they going to a cookout to roast frankfurters and eat discount potato chips. What they carry in their purses? Paper plates and plastic forks? Tan shorts, hiking boots, purple socks, and a fucked-up haircut. Look like they ready to pitch a tent and have a potato-sack race at a moment’s notice. How come these bitches ain’t got no style? I mean, I know all these bitches ain’t working construction?”

  Antoine sucked his teeth. “Smush, you need to be more sensitive to the homosexual community. Especially since you, you know, is crippled and all.”

  “Now what, I got to suck dick to be politically correct?”

  “Ask Tuffy, he a politician,” suggested Nadine.

  “Am I?” Winston asked, forcing another burning swallow down his gullet, and not so subtly sliding the vodka back on the shelf. By the gnarl in his voice it was evident to Fariq and the others that this drunk was going to be an introspective one for Winston. They almost preferred his mean psychosexual binges, when he would rampage through a club robbing men pressed up against the urinals, stand in the middle of the dance floor conducting the DJ by waving his penis like a flaccid baton. “Y’all better get off the politician thing. I ain’t never said I was a politician—even if I did say I was, it wouldn’t make me one. Whatever you seen me doing, that’s what I am.”

  Armello raised his can in Winston’s direction. “So right now you a drunk motherfucker?”

  “Yup, and ain’t ashamed of it neither. I ain’t like them cabdrivers. You get in the cab the driver try to start up a conversation, not because he a friendly guy, but to see if he fucked up and let the wrong nigger in his cab. ‘Hello, my friend. Back in my country, I am scientist. I am doctor.’ Motherfucker, shut the fuck up, you cabdriver!”

  “But I bet if you was back there bleeding to death, you’d be hoping he’d be saying ‘I am doctor,’ Fariq said, waylaying Winston’s Sophoclean complaint. “Come on, y’all, let’s do what we came to do before Tuffy end up doing something stupid.”

  Everyone agreed, reaching for their beer cans to take to the back room, mulling over which of the identical cans belonged to whom, their hands circling over the cluster of containers, wary of picking up someone else’s backwash. His lips pursed and making childlike airplane noises, Winston’s thick, flattened hand buzzed over the other hands; then, to the screeching whistle of a dive bomber making a pass, pitched and yawed its way through the other hands, swooping up a can from the middle of the pack. Satisfied, he scooted toward the back room, happily chugging his beer. “Nigger, how in fuck you know that’s your brew?” Armello shouted at Winston’s back. Winston flipped the now empty container over his shoulder. “Man, I twist the thingamajig on the lid.” Nadine reached out to catch the can. The pull tab was cleverly twisted to three o’clock. “Oh snap, that’s pretty smart.”

  “I thought you motherfuckers was supposed to be ghetto,” Winston said, disappearing into the darkness of the back room.

  Moneybags blocked his actors around the card table, which was nothing more than a cardboard box propped up on a milk crate. Though he was speaking in a barely comprehensible drunken brogue, Moneybags was more lucid than Winston had ever seen him. With the efficiency of a Broadway taskmaster, he rehearsed everyone for their roles in a three-card-monte production set to open in one week’s time. Armello, the leading man, stood behind the box, his magician-quick hands making the cards flip and leapfrog at will. Nadine was to play the ingenue. It would be her job to lure the marks to the game with a subtle squeeze of her breast, a slow lick of her upper lip, a foolhardy hundred-dollar bet. “Nadine, you have to sell that line: ‘Fuck, I’m losing my daughter’s birthday money.’ Make a man want to come and stand next to you. A whale with deep pockets, who thinks he can show the lady how it’s done—win some money and take you home.” Charles and Smush would be the supporting players, shills whose duties were to purposely obscure the mark’s view of the table, arousing his curiosity. Having enticed the mark into the game, the duo would advise him on its finer points, explaining that if they united in their efforts, they could turn the odds against the dealer. Charles was especially good at this. Winston remembered the time they’d stolen boxes of perfume from a broken-down van on FDR Drive, unloading it for five dollars a bottle in midtown, Whitey pitching the shag in an impeccable British accent: “Straight from France and Italy, the finest scents for your mum, your luv, and for you git wanker puftahs, your mates. Sixty dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, five dollars at just Fifth Avenue.” Upon hearing the princely argot of the United Kingdom, West Indians on their lunch breaks fought each other to purchase bottles of perfume from the benevolent Brit.

  Typecast as the heavy, Winston played the same part in the sham as always: he was to be the stick man—a bit player who stayed away from the action, vigilant for the police and the suckered, who having lost face in front of their girlfriends invariably returned demanding a refund. After he lobbied for a speaking role, Moneybags gave Tuffy a tryout as the lead shill, directly across from Armello. But Winston was in Armello’s light, and as Moneybags said while shunting him once more to the side: “Tuffy, you too big. Can’t nobody see the cards!” Winston kicked the milk crates, scattering the cards to the floor. Only Fariq deigned to speak up. “Look, Tuff, every nigger got to do what he do best, and motherfucker, can’t nobody regulate like you!”

  Winston brusquely stepped past Fariq toward Whitey. Reaching into Charley O’s trouser pocket, he pulled out a sack of weed and dangled it in front of his nose. The curl in the corner of Whitey’s mouth gave Winston tacit “But don’t smoke it all” approval, and he sauntered out of the room.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Antoine asked.

  “Nothing,” Winston replied, gazing up at the television set. Antoine laughed through his nose. Though he hadn’t seen his cousin in nearly two years, he hadn’t changed very much. “Tuff?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you sit?”

  Winston backed onto a bar stool. When he was younger, he thought the television screen was a mirror: a telepathic reflecting glass that sucked the thoughts from his mind, then played them back, so that he would know what he was thinking.

  “Antoine?”

  “What?”

  “Movie is this?”

  “You don’t know? Get out, I thought you’d seen everything ever made! It’s one of Carl’s movies, The Green Berets. John Wayne joint with this big-eared motherfucker as a nosy reporter. Sulu from Star Trek plays an Uncle Tom Vietnamese.”

  “I hate war movies. Especially ones with a reporter or a writer in it, always too good to shoot at the enemy until the very end, then they pick up a gun. Like if a writer has to kill, then war must really be horrible. And they never get killed. The writer never dies.”

&nbs
p; “Nigger, you must hate your father. Fuck was Uncle Clifford doing to you, man?”

  Both men watched the war reporter, David Janssen, smash a machine gun against the trunk of a tree. Winston giggled. “White people so fucking obvious.” He eased the bottle of vodka off the shelf and held it next to his leg. “Antoine, is there somewhere I can be alone in this place? I ain’t trying to hear John Wayne right now. I just want to smoke my get-high and chill, know what I’m saying? Carl still got them crazy videos?” Antoine handed Winston the key to his brother’s room upstairs. When Winston pinched the key’s blade, Antoine held tight onto the bow. Little Tuffy was growing up; he was just about at the age when cousins go from being trusted playmates to near-strangers seen only at funerals and on errands to the post office. Antoine let go of the key. “Thanks, cuz.” Tuffy headed for the stairs, keeping the bottle of vodka out of Antoine’s sight. “How Aunt Ruthie, by the way?”

  12- THE LITTLE BELL

  Carl’s room, the cupola of the brownstone, was cramped with war memorabilia. Winston bypassed the swords, Nazi flags, Croix de Guerre and went straight to the army footlocker stuffed with videos. He rummaged through the pile, reading the labels, then tossing them aside: AC/DC Live at Budokan; Faces of Death; Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Maginot Line; GG Allin; All-Time Greatest Hockey Fights—The Probert Years; Fuckman #144. “This one looks good,” Winston said, inserting a tape labeled Any Niggers Who Ain’t Paranoid Is Crazy—The History of Conspiracy into the VCR.

  The video opened with a washed-out fourth-generation dub of the Minister of the Nation of Islam standing behind a podium, dabbing his glistening brow with a meticulously folded handkerchief and addressing an auditorium filled with true believers.

  The history they teach us is incomplete! If you believe them, the black man wasn’t invented until the first day of slavery. The red man didn’t show up on the planet until Thanksgiving, the brown man until the Alamo, and the first time they set eyes on the yellow man he was dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor. You want to get somewhere in this world? Then you have to learn about them, the white man. I don’t know why black children do so badly in school, their version of history isn’t very difficult. Lesson One: The white man was the first to do this and that. Lesson Two: The white man is the best at such and such. If you’re lucky they tell you, then quiz you on the white man and the black man. And all you need to know is the white man did X, Y, and Z to and for the black man on such and such a date. But they’ll never teach what the black man has done independent of the white man. No multiple choice, true-or-false questions on the history of the black man that have nothing to do the white man, his wars, his foibles, his laws. And they definitely don’t … won’t teach you about the relationship between the white man, the black man and the sharks in the Pacific Ocean. What they don’t … what they won’t tell you is that sharks are in the Pacific Ocean because they followed the slave ships from Africa, eating the Africans as they were thrown overboard.