“Who was you talking to?”
“Nobody. Just trying to figure out why I was still here.”
“You still here because you couldn’t leave without me, your so-called boy.”
“You is. But it wasn’t you—I barely got to work ten minutes ago, I didn’t even know you was here. Naw, it’s something else.”
Fariq was the coolest of the many cool handicapped East Harlemites. His appearance was inner-city dapper, functional and physically fit assimilationist. Despite the soft spot in his head where his skull had never fused, it’d been a long time since he’d worn a cyclist’s helmet. The bill of his fiberglass-reinforced Yankee baseball cap hung over his left eye, shadowing the surgical scars. The baggy corduroys covered up his leg braces. His clubfeet were squeezed into a pair of expensive sneakers, though he’d never run a step in his life. Fariq ran his tongue over his precious-metal-filled mouth, the front four incisors, top and bottom, capped in a gold-and-silver checkerboard pattern. Etched on his two front teeth were small black king and queen chess pieces, christened “Fariq” and “Nadine” in microscopic handwriting.
“Now look at these no-money motherfuckers—who going to take care of their families?” Fariq said, a rubber-tipped crutch sweeping across the carnage. “That’s why a prudent motherfucker like me has an IRA account, some short-term T-bills, a grip invested in long-term corporate bonds and high-risk foreign stock. Shit, the twenty-first-century nigger gots to have a diversified portfolio—never know when you gon’ have a rainy day. And look like it was thunderin’ and lightnin’ in this motherfucker.”
Winston and Fariq had known each other since the subway cost seventy-five cents. Fariq was an enterprising shyster who dragged Winston, the muscle, along on all his moneymaking schemes, the first of which was a fifth-grade dognapping operation so immense it required the use of every rooftop pigeon coop on 109th Street between Park and Second Avenues for kennel space.
The idea was to stalk the parks and streets of Manhattan luring unleashed dogs into the bushes with whistles, kindhearted “Here, boy”s, and hickory-smoked slabs of beef sausage. The poor, whining creatures left tethered to parking meters while their owners kibitzed over cappuccino were liberated with garden shears. Then the boys waited for the rewards to be posted and returned to collect the bounty. “Yeah, lady, the dog was wandering the streets of Harlem. Some crackheads had put an apple in his mouth and was fixing to skewer him with a barbecue spit up the ass, talking about ‘pooch du jour,’ when we rescued him and brought him here. Would fifty dollars be enough? Well, frankly, no.”
Winston ran up to Fariq and with one flabby arm buried his friend’s head in a boys-will-be-boys headlock. Fariq’s eyes bulged with pain, “Ow, Tuff! You know better than to do that shit.”
“Sorry, man—just trying show you some love, glad you alive and shit. Was it the spina bifida or the rickets flaring up? I can never remember which one you got.”
“Both, nigger, both. But I’m just sore from hiding in the tub. Heard that first shot, I belted my pants, fell into the tub, and pulled the shower curtain closed. Thank goodness those niggers didn’t have to piss.”
“We need to be out, son. Rollers going to show up any minute now.”
“The po-po ain’t here by now, they ain’t coming.”
“Well, them shoot-’em-up cowboys might be back to get me—don’t want to leave no witnesses behind.”
“Man, after they sparked up these clowns, I could hear them laughing at your big ass passed out on the floor. They ain’t worried about no swooning motherfucker coming back to get them. I thought I was going to come out and have to splash water on your face. Slap you around a bit, James Cagney style.”
“I didn’t faint. I was playing possum and shit.”
“Yeah, right. Let’s get ghost.”
“Who you, the leader now?”
“Fuck you, Tonto. Hi-yo, Silver, and away, nigger.”
“Robin.”
“Batgirl.”
“Al Cowlings.”
“Oh, a low blow.”
They left the apartment with a bravado that belied their fear. The halls normally filled with kids and the sounds of blaring televisions were silent. The refugees were holed up in their urban-renewal hovels waiting for the occupying forces to leave. A little girl, wearing a belled choker, peeked out of a doorway, stuck out her tongue at the two boys, and was snatched by her ponytails back inside so quickly the bell didn’t even tinkle. The building’s elevators never worked, so Winston carried Fariq in his arms down twelve flights of stairs, gently setting him down next to a battered block of mailboxes. Readjusting the collar on Fariq’s shirt, Winston stepped back and snapped his fingers. “Wait here. Now I know why I couldn’t leave—I forgot something. Be right back.” Before Fariq could say, “Naw, nigger, don’t leave me,” Winston was springing up the flight of stairs two and three steps at time.
Fariq was nervous about being left alone, but pleased to see Winston’s famed agility return. Nigger was fumbling around the spot telling jokes like he Henny Youngman and shit. Talking to himself. I know the boy don’t like Brooklyn, but goddamn, fainting? Many times fools pulled guns on him? Tuffy be like, “Shoot me, motherfucker!” I guess the good thing about fainting in the face of death is that it keeps you from begging. That’s the old Tuffy, running them stairs like the big Kodiak bear of a brother he is. Fariq grinned, recalling how during the summer-long games of tag, only the fastest kids on East 109th Street could outrun Tuffy, avoiding his painful, heavy-handed tag back. Fariq’s toes began to tingle. He could feel the vibrations—the vibrations from the scraping of his corrective shoes as he dragged them over the craggy pavement, trying to run. Fariq was It for an entire summer: lumbering after screaming hordes of children on his crutches, feeling like the neighborhood leper, never catching anyone. On the first day of fifth grade Fariq had to resort to ringing Sharif Middleton’s doorbell at six-thirty in the morning, tagging the unsuspecting mope with a crutch in the gut as he answered the door wiping the sleep from his eyes. Tuffy, my nukka, where you at?
Winston entered the apartment, stepped over a body, and grabbed a brown lunch bag from the rear of the refrigerator. He reached inside the sack and gobbled down a cold, soggy ham-and-cheese sandwich. His mouth still full, Winston flipped the plastic sandwich bag inside-out, walked over to the aquarium, sprinkled the crumbs into the water, and when the fish rose to the surface, deftly scooped it out, barely wetting his hands.
Winston was knotting the plastic bag and on his way out when he heard a tinny ringing sound. The girl from the hallway was cowering in the corner of the living room, holding three puffy wallets, some jewelry, and Demetrius’s .22 Raven pistol in the folds of her dress. Winston bristled. “You little vulture, these fools ain’t cold and you rifling pockets.”
“Finders keepers, losers weepers.”
“Christ, everybody and they mama got a hustle. Give me the gun.”
The girl scrunched her face and backed even further into the corner, sticking her tongue out again. Winston walked up to the girl and took the gun from her hands, then lifted her to her feet by the elbow.
“Go home.”
She skipped down the hall to her apartment, the door opened, and a thin hand reeled her inside by the hem of her dress. The door slammed shut. Winston waited for the click of the lock, stuffed the gun into his pants pocket, gently placed the fish into the lunch bag, and hustled back down the stairs.
“Where you been, man?” Fariq said in a nervous whisper. “Somebody’s out there.”
“I told you, I forgot something,” Winston answered, holding up the bag.
“You forgot your lunch? Here we are … niggers trying to kill—”
“Shhh! Cállete, man.” Winston peered around the corner. The security guard was sitting at his desk, scribbling phony names on the visitors’ sign-in sheet. The putrefied zombies of Al Capone, King Kong, and Mao could have entered the building, loading tommy guns, pining for Fay Wray, and talking a
bout a Cultural Revolution, and this minimum-wage watchman was going to wave them through, no questions asked.
“Ain’t nobody out there, just the rent-a-cop—let’s see if he know what the fuck up.” Winston, still out of sight, called the guard’s attention. “Hey yo, Barney Fife, couple of niggers come this way telling war stories?”
“Yup, came through a few minutes ago saying they now have to find and kill some crippled motherfucker. Asked me if I wanted to feel the guns. I did, and they was hot as a preacher’s brow Sunday morning.”
Fariq’s body buckled at the pelvis, the crutches slipping out from under his arms. As he righted himself, his peptic ulcer rumbled like an active volcano and a small accumulation of warm, lumpy excrement flowed into his underpants. “Shit.”
“Which way did they go?” Winston asked the guard.
“No way.”
“What?”
“They’re right out front, smoking Phillies and talking to some honeys.”
Fariq’s yellowed eyes closed softly as every affliction kicked in at once. His arrhythmic heartbeat grew more erratic, pumping his sickle-celled blood in stops and starts. Bracing himself against the broken elevator, he cursed his mother for drinking, smoking, and shunning prenatal care during her pregnancy. Swallowing hard, he repeatedly pressed the Up button and castigated his father for thinking that his two-month-premature birth meant that he was born “ready for Freddy.” That boy don’t need no incubator. He’s not no chicken.
Winston chewed his bottom lip and watched his friend shake, then suddenly zipped past the guard and raced for the fire exit. He pushed on the latch, swinging open the heavy door into the dusk. A zephyr of spring air gusted in and, for a moment, cooled Winston’s sweaty face. The alarm sounded, its deafening ring filling the cinder-block hallways. Winston hurried back to Fariq and in one motion hoisted his friend onto a shoulder and ran toward the front door. Pausing in a cranny, he watched the gunmen head for the back of the apartment building. Carrying Fariq like a wounded war buddy, Winston tore out for Bushwick Avenue, hurdling bushes and slipping around the mottled Brooklyn trees like the tag player of yore. The clap of the gun pounding against his thigh, the jingle of loose pocket change, and the squeaks of the metal brackets holding Fariq’s body together at the joints sounded to Winston like the score to the climax of a Hitchcock thriller. He stole a glance behind him, half expecting to be buzzed by a crop duster.
At the intersection of Bushwick and Myrtle, a line of public buses were impatiently queued up behind a lone drunk ranting in the middle of the street. Like a column of Tiananmen Square tanks, the buses tried to maneuver past the man, but he halted each advance, stepping in front of the buses and boldly waving them off with a raggedy sports jacket. From his drug errands Winston knew the man usually confronted his pink elephants about this time of night, and he counted on him being there, challenging the powers that be with non sequiturs. “I am black, it is raining. Warren Commission, I presume. Incoming!” Winston and Fariq skirted past the man (“You men, return to your positions”), hopped on the third bus, and headed for the back. They sank low in the plastic seats, gasping for air and waiting for the bus to move. Fariq was wheezing. He frantically removed his inhaler from his jacket and took two long hits.
“Shit, nigger, you didn’t have to do all that! You should have told me you was going to make your move, I could have followed you on my own.”
“Hah,” Winston snorted.
Fariq moved to whack Winston with a crutch, but it was wedged underneath the seat in front of him. “Naw, money, I’m serious. Shit is humiliating. I can take care of self, know what I’m saying, Tuffy?”
“Spare me, bro. I’d had to rescue your ass like in Deer Hunter. Wasn’t for me you’d be in a bamboo hut playing Russian roulette with the Brooklyn Viet Cong. Didi, mau! Mau!” Winston sniffed the air, then checked the bottoms of his sneakers. “Hey, did you poot?” he asked Fariq. Fariq said nothing, rolling his tongue in his cheek. For most young men this gesture was the sign for oral sex; for Fariq it was code for “I had an accident.” Winston reached under the seat and freed Fariq’s crutch.
The bus rolled onto Broadway, honking its way out of Bedford-Stuyvesant and into the fringes of the more cosmopolitan Williamsburg. As the projects receded into the distance the two survivors straightened in their seats, looking out the grimy windows. On the crowded sidewalks the people looked tired and angry, fighting for space on their way home from work. Bohemian whites weaved in and out of traffic, heads down, pissed off they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Pairs of Hasidic men, dapper in black pin-striped coat-and-tail suits, walked like dandies, holding attaché cases and rehashing last night’s Knicks game. The only people Winston could differentiate as individuals were the Puerto Ricans. To Winston the whites, Jewish and Gentile, had the same general physiognomy. With callous, tight-lipped expressions, they marched as one, lockstep, arms linked at the elbows. The Puerto Ricans reminded him of people he knew. They were more or less from around the way, more or less niggers, more or less poor. The Puerto Ricans had faces he could say hello to. And he said a big silent “What’s happening?” to the woman in the green rayon sweater. Yes, you, honey dip, with the shopping bag. Why you walking so fast? Hurrying to help the kids with their homework? I feel you. The capital of Kansas is Topeka, that’s all I remember.
Winston peered into the flitting eyes of the colored boys who had sprouted and grown up along market walls like vines. He could tell which ones were filial home-by-eleven mama’s boys, which ones were walking the tightrope between rebellion and sainthood. Some, like the young man about Winston’s age, diddy-bopping against the foot traffic, had surrendered to the streets. Winston knew that one well, a lost warrior looking for an arena to test his skills. Winston grinned and delivered a whispered challenge: “You lucky I ain’t out there. We could bump shoulders and squab. Wax that ass, nigger.” Then a bit louder: “Sucker.”
Winston pressed the expanse of his back against the engine-warmed seat. The motor’s churning caused the seat to vibrate and he relaxed for a moment, enjoying the free massage. Fariq looked at his friend. He knew that smirk, the satisfied look after Winston had beaten the crap out of someone. “Tuffy?”
“Mmm.”
“You really did faint back there, didn’t you?”
“Battle fatigue, I guess. Saved my life, though. Maybe it was God reaching down and touching me. Saving me for some higher purpose.” Winston laughed. “Quick, Smush, cheer me up.” Fariq drummed his fingers against his jawbone. “Remember the cat-ass punk you beat down last week in front of the Old Timers’ Lounge?”
“Yeah, waving that box cutter, ‘En garde, motherfucker,’ like he going to do somethin’.”
“I heard to avoid the neighborhood embarrassment the punk tried to join the armed forces. Been to all the motherfuckers—Navy, Marines, Coast Guard—but he can’t pass the psychological. You bruised his brain or some shit. Every two minutes for no reason at all he yells out ‘La Mega!’ like he a DJ on that Spanish station. He be taking the repeat-after-me oath, ‘I solemnly swear to uphold La Mega!’ ‘Yes sir, I’m really interested in flight mechanics and La Mega Noventa y siete punto nueve!’ Nigger a permanent radio jingle.”
Winston smiled. “So let’s call that nigger La Mega from now on, okay?”
“Yeah.”
Tuffy pulled a crinkled brown paper bag from his jacket pocket and offered it to Fariq. “You hungry?”
“What you got?”
“Pork rinds and fish.”
“You might has well got shot. The way you eat, you killing yourself anyway. How much you weigh now?”
“I don’t know—three-ten, three-twenty. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the meat-packing plant on Edgecombe to sit on the scale. Anyway, these are fat-free pork rinds.”
Fariq threw up his hands. “You idiot! Pork rinds are pieces of pig fat deep-fried in pig grease. How can they be fat-free when they’re one hundred percent fat? See, dumb niggers l
ike you keeps the white man in business.”
Winston shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a small clear plastic jug of a light blue syrupy punch. “And now you drinking a Thirstbuster? How many times I told you the Klan owns that shit. That junk will make you sterile. How you think the company can afford to charge only twenty-five cent for the stuff? CIA subsidizes that fucking poison. You ever see Thirstbusters in the white neighborhoods? Hell no. What, white folks don’t want a bargain?”
There was something to what Fariq was saying. Whenever Winston was in Midtown, doing the things he couldn’t do in Harlem, such as seeing a movie or shopping for logo-free clothes, and got a craving for a Thirstbuster, his favorite drink was impossible to find. Stocked with colas and nectars, the shelves in the clean East Side delicatessens had natural waters from every lake in Europe, but no Thirstbusters. Winston would ask the shopkeeper for a grape or pineapple Thirstbuster and get a blank stare in return, forced to exit the store examining his two-dollar bottle of melted glacier water for mastodon hairs.
Winston downed his prized drink in two gulps, slowly pulled the container from his mouth, and let out a loud “aaaahhhh.” “Dag, Fariq, you right, my sperms is fizzing.”
“Fuck you.”
Winston crushed the empty plastic container in one hand and bowled it down the aisle. The bus continued down Broadway.
“I got an idea how to make some cash. You down, Tuff?”
“Don’t know.”
“This drug insanity is played out. Shit is a hassle. You have to develop a regular clientele, the inventory is all complicated, one connect is LIFO, the other is FIFO. Too many unorganized crazy motherfuckers to deal with. We need to be into some self-contained shit. Make a quick strike and be out. Hit and quit it.”
“LIFO and FIFO? What the fuck you talking about?”
“Last in, first out; first in, first out. Man, I’m talking about revolutionizing the drug business. Inventin’ a product that if you look at it for more than two seconds, you’re addicted. Something that stays in your system forever, like PCP, and maybe throw in some trace amounts of Prozac to make it attractive to the upper-class-white market—ta-da, a drug that keeps losers high for life.” Fariq touched Winston lightly on the forearm like some used-car salesman with the deal of a lifetime. “A one-time, mind-altering gold mine. I’d call it Eternal Bliss, the dope fiend’s Everlasting Gobstopper. I’d be Willie Wonka up it this motherfucker. I’m tellin’ you.”