Tuff

  Bendito turned the music off. “Listen, if I arrest you on day one, fifteen minutes into my tour, we’ll look like gung-ho supercops out to impress the brass and none of the other guys will trust us.”

  “Officer Negro here a new jack?”

  “Dave’s been on a year. Why do you want to get arrested anyway? Because you rappin’ now, you want some bad publicity for your album or something?”

  “I’m not rappin’,” Winston protested.

  “I had breakfast at Delia’s, I seen the poster.”

  “I’m running for City Council.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I not really running, I’m …” Winston looked hopelessly out the window. He could see Inez and Yolanda, carrying Jordy like a bag of groceries, huffing their way toward the car. “Look, do me this solid. Just take me in.”

  “And charge you with what?”

  With the heel of his hand, Winston cuffed Dave in the temple just hard enough to knock the officer’s hat askew. “Slapping Officer Negro upside the head.”

  “First arrest, assault on an officer? I don’t think so. I’d be the laughingstock of the precinct.”

  “Bendito, why you acting like I shot your dog? Just give me a break.”

  Fueled by memories of his beloved Der Kommissar lying dead in the gutter, Bendito gunned the car into reverse, just as Inez, Yolanda, and Jordy reached the passenger-side door. “Winston, where in the hell you going?” Yolanda asked, holding on to the door handle and jogging alongside the car.

  “Jail.”

  “Motherfucker, if you leave me to go to jail, don’t bother comin’ back. You hear?”

  “Calm down, damn. It ain’t serious. I’ll be out tomorrow—Wednesday at the latest.”

  Winston knew that if he had any outstanding warrants Tuesday or Wednesday could easily be February, and as a precaution, he peeled off two one-hundred-dollar bills from his bankroll, then, knowing Bendito wouldn’t say anything, brazenly reached into his sock for his gun. “Hold this for me,” he said, tossing the pistol and the rest of the money out the window. They continued to back down the street, while Inez and Yolanda stared at the money and the automatic. Yolanda picked up the gun. “Somebody get my money from out the goddamn street!” Winston ordered, his head sticking out the window. Inez and Yolanda both reached for the money. Inez yielded, and Yolanda slipped the cash into her purse.

  As Bendito backed the cruiser into the precinct parking lot, Winston, hoping to speed up the time it took to process him, removed his belt and shoelaces. Hands cuffed behind him, struggling to keep his baggy britches from falling to his knees, he entered the station looking like a maladroit circus clown. His size-fourteen boots flapped against the linoleum floor like shower slippers. Bendito shoved him into an empty cell and Winston began the interminable wait. Thinking the worst, he resigned himself to being Rikers Island–bound. Three dull months in a hangar-sized white fiberglass tent, trying his damnedest to stay out of trouble. Yolanda, right. I need to stop being so “impetuous.” Fuck am I doing? It’s easier to get jail time in jail than it is on the outside. I’ll be in Rikers forever. Fucking with them niggers and catching charges just for defending myself. In the cramped dampness of the holding tank, head against the bars, Tuffy heard his name. Someone reported to the process officer that the check came up clean, he didn’t have any outstanding warrants. The desk sergeant asked Bendito what charges he was filing. Bendito cited cruelty to animals and illegal possession of a firearm. Then the sergeant began adding what he termed “obligatory counts”: loitering, endangerment of public safety, criminal negligence, resisting arrest.

  “Well, no, Sarge, he didn’t exactly resist arrest.”

  The Tombs were overcrowded because of the previous night’s sweep, and Winston was hustled to a storage space that had been converted into a temporary billet. Designed to hold forty men, it currently held fifty, not including the seven corrections officers. Winston walked directly to an empty cot, shook the pillow, lifted the foam rubber mattress, then ran his hand underneath the bed frame. Turning to face the rest of the inhabitants of temporary holding pen D-6, he said, “Any motherfuckers got some shit hid up in, near, around, over, or under my area, come get it now. I’m not trying to catch no kind of charges on this bid, but I will get in your ass if I have to.” Winston immediately recognized at least two-thirds of the inhabitants, and his caveat, though earnest, was inflected with a bit of whimsy. No one spoke, though judging by the grins on their battered faces, most of his bunkmates were happy to see him.

  “Stop woofing, yo! This is a Blood thing, son.” A slim boy of about seventeen with a red bandanna tied around his neck stepped out of a pack of twelve rumpled, red-clad black men languishing about the center of the room. “We’ll hide anything we want, where we want.” Winston glanced at the nearest corrections officer, who was reading the paper and not paying much attention to the conversation. “I know you will,” he said, opening his hands and taking an easy stride toward the goateed young man. “But I’m just letting you know, you don’t want to hide jackshit my way.”

  Winston knew who he was talking to: Yancey “Whip Whop” Harris, member of the upper echelon of the Spanish Harlem Bloods, and once a gifted comedian. When he was younger Yancey was as far from the thug life as a boy could be. An honor student, he was the neighborhood funny man, whose antics and impressions made two hours’ worth of grade-school detention fly by. Whip Whop was the type of guy people fought to sit next to on the subway. When a merchant killed his two brothers during an armed robbery three years ago, Yancey stopped telling jokes, stepped off the stage, and joined the shock troops.

  Winston and Yancey both knew that in a fair fight Winston would beat Yancey like a slave, but none of the soldiers standing behind Yancey were fair. They also knew that after a night of police brutality from arrest to arraignment, Yancey wasn’t spoiling for a fight, just asserting his leadership. “Zero-zero-one,” Yancey said to his aide-de-camp, relaying some command in their coded binary language. The acolyte muttered back, “One-Zero-One-One-Zero,” then asked a guard to turn up the volume on the boom box, an implicit okay that it was now safe for Winston to turn his back.

  There was some temptation for Tuffy to throw his lot in with the Bloods—sit at their table, playfully pinch their wounds, thump their bruises, and stare down the Puerto Ricans. Though he remained alone, he found himself staring at the Puerto Ricans anyway. Not long ago they ran the city’s jails. Powered by overwhelming numbers and a loose coalition, the Latin Kings and La Ñeta regulated every aspect of a prisoner’s life, from what hand he ate his meals with to when he could defecate. The two groups feuded and the Bloods stepped in to fill the breach. Now reduced to being the French Résistance of the New York State prison system, the Latinos sat on their beds, observing the occupying forces. Scattered about the makeshift holding pen were the independents, most of their anuses puckered tight with fear. Three Asian boys huddled in a corner doing cigarette tricks. Two stray white boys, arrested on the wrong weekend for minor violations, changed positions every few minutes, trying to stay within the guards’ sight lines. The unaffiliated colored kids congregated in the corners. Those who had their sneakers stolen wore orange foam-rubber slippers that made a sickening crinkly noise when they walked. The mentally ill were the only ones who mingled.

  Tuffy, the collective eyes of the Bloods hawking him, approached a stocky Latin King, Brody Onteveras, known as King Bro. “You got case quarters for a dollar?”

  “Here.” King Bro slapped three quarters in his palm.

  Winston straightened. “Give me my fucking quarter, motherfucker. How you going to show, charging me a quarter for a dollar change?”

  “You lucky I don’t charge you four dollars a quarter.”

  “You better stop playing. Did I charge you when you needed a place to stay after Marisol …? Motherfucker, don’t let me put your shit in the street.” Blushing, King Bro handed Winston the fourth quarter.

  Winston cut the
line of inmates waiting for the phone and placed a call home. No answer.

  “What’s this I hear about you running for City Council?” King Bro asked, his question quickly followed by a chorus of “For reals?” from every corner of the room.

  “For reals. I’m running.”

  “Why you doing something foolish like that?” asked Whip Whop, rising from his seat and almost treading into the Latin King side of the bunker.

  Winston grabbed a chair, spun it backward, and sat in it so that his chin rested on the top of the seat back. He positioned himself between the Latin and the black camps. “Because I was talking out the back of my neck and said some shit without really thinking. Then someone put some money in my pocket.” The prisoners gathered around Winston as close as warring factions could gather around anything. “Man, can you imagine if a nigger like you won?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “That be some out shit, though.”

  “But if I did win, you know what I’d do?”

  “What?”

  “I’d sit in the meetings, take my shoes off, and put my funky feet on the table, and say, ‘I don’t know what you stupid motherfuckers is making laws about, but don’t forget the poor smelly motherfuckers like me.’ At the very least I’ll tell y’all niggers when the next roundup is.”

  “On the real, though,” Whip Whop and King Bro said simultaneously. With a nod Whip Whop yielded the floor. “We need a voice. One of us speaking, instead of some television nigger speaking for us. Tuffy, if you ran I’d vote for you just on some ol’ humbug-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-type-shit.”

  Winston took out a couple of empty petition pages and some voter registration cards, items neither the police nor the guards who frisked him deemed dangerous weapons. “CO,” he called out, “pen, please. I’m writing a letter to my lawyer.” The guard tossed him a felt-tipped pen. “All y’all sign here then, put me on the ballot. You nonfelony motherfuckers, fill these out. I’m going to send you misdemeanor bench warrant niggers absentee ballots.”

  While the men passed around the petition, Winston spoke until lights out, not politicking a bloc of potential voters, but just simply getting some thoughts off his chest. “Look at us—in jail, treated like animals. Take a last look at the white boys, because they fixing to get desk appearance tickets. Judge going to wave his finger in their faces, ‘Don’t do it again.’ For us it don’t matter if we do it once or two million times, we headed for Rikers to spend sleepless nights listening to jet airplanes take off and land, and niggers getting tossed. Look at y’all niggers, niggers I’ve known since back in the day when we was shorter than shorties. I played in the johnny-pump with Ramón, Peehole, Felipe, Point Blank, Carlos, Tony Bump-off, Yancey. Stolen petty shit with Foster, Pan-Pan, Hard Top, and Hennessey. Lent money, borrowed money from damn near everybody in this piece. But I realized soon as I walked in here, seen so many niggers I know to be down decent motherfuckers, I was like, ‘Damn, there’s some good niggers in jail.’ Most of us in here because we was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Been that way since our births, if you think about it.” As he spoke, the circle tightened around him, cinching like a drawstring to a felt bag of valuables. With Winston as the midpoint of the circle, the friction between the gangs eased. The arc of each gang circumscribed a disjointed circle around him. Winston imagined the ghost of Musashi Miyamoto, stick in hand, filling in its gaps. The young gangsters listened, sucking on razor blades lodged alongside their callused gums, rubbing the crescent-shaped scars on their faces with their fingertips.

  Ten minutes before his arraignment hearing, Winston was in a small holding cell behind the upstairs courtroom. Across from him sat his legal aid lawyer, Ms. Rachel Fisher. Rachel had the sniffles. As she leafed through the stack of Winston’s files, hawking and wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, errant droplets of snot fell on his docket. “Mr. Foshay?” Winston grunted, offended and pleased she didn’t offer to shake his hand. “You got some record here. Because of your propensity to skip bail and miss court appearances the Criminal Justice Agency has decided your bail should be set at three thousand dollars. Since there’s no way you can afford that amount, I’ll try to get it reduced.”

  “I can afford it.”

  Rachel looked up with a snort. “You can? We’ll make a plea, then they’ll send you home,” she said with a lawyerly finality.

  “Yeah, but I ain’t paying it. I need that money for other things.”

  “Well, then no matter how you plead, there’s a chance you’ll be remanded to Rikers if you don’t post bail. I think if we plead guilty now to the cruelty charge the district attorney will drop the other counts without much of a fight. Possession of firearm—there’s no evidence of a firearm. The rest of these are bullshit. I think you’ll get four months max, maybe a fine. Maybe nothing.”

  “I ain’t pleading guilty to shit. I ain’t done shit but get arrested.”

  “But Mr. Foshay, you’re charged with a weapons violation and cruelty to an animal. Specifically the shooting of a pit bull”—the lawyer lifted a sheet of paper—“named Der Kommissar in the head, so they arrested you for something.”

  “Nobody arrested me. I made a citizen’s arrest on myself because I needed to go to jail to take care of some business, but I ain’t done nothing.”

  “You were arrested, but no crime was committed, per se?”

  “No, I didn’t commit no crime, per se.”

  “Per se.” Winston allowed the phrase to dangle on the tip of his tongue, enjoying its foreign tang. “ ‘Per se’? What language is that?”

  “It’s Latin.”

  Fighting to breathe through her clogged sinuses, Rachel tilted her head back. For the next five minutes she counseled Winston on the efficacy of making a guilty plea with her nose pointed to the ceiling. “Any questions, Mr. Foshay?”

  “What’s the judge’s name?”

  “Judge Weinstein.”

  “He Jewish?”

  “Yes, I believe he is.”

  “Then I might got a chance. Maybe I’ll represent myself.”

  “You want to make a fool out of yourself, too cheap to hire a lawyer or post bail, you go pro se, be my guest.”

  “I don’t know about no pro se, but I arrested myself, and I’m going to represent myself. Shouldn’t be a problem. If I start losing I’ll just go Al Pacino in And Justice for All on them. Start screaming, ‘No, you’re out of order. In fact the whole system is out of order!’ ” The lawyer cleared her nasal passages with a loud sniffle, pinched her red-rimmed nostrils closed, and gathered her papers. “Fine, whatever,” she said. “Have you ever seen To Kill a Mockingbird?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I suggest you do a Gregory Peck and charm the judge.”

  Before she stood to leave, Winston grabbed her wrist. “Can you do like Gregory Peck and get an innocent nigger like me out the door?”

  Rachel affected a southern drawl and asked Winston, “You ain’t raped any white women, have you, boy?”

  Winston played along. “No, ma’am. Least not nones that’s lived to tell the tale.”

  “Winston, did you shoot the dog?”

  “Yes, but he tried to bite my son.”

  “I’ll talk to the DA.”

  As they entered the chambers Winston had a small panic attack when he remembered that in To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck lost the case.

  Judge Weinstein was presiding, barricaded against the hordes of miscreants seated in front of him by a nameplate and a tall mahogany bench. The cases heard before Winston’s moved like clockwork. Lasting no longer than forty-five seconds, each arraignment moved efficiently down the assembly line. The conveyor belt of justice moved its manufactured goods, the defendants, from their courtroom seats to the front of the judge’s bench. The assistant district attorney looked at a sheet of paper, recited the charges, and recommended that bail be set at x amount. The defense lawyer cited a mitigating circumstance, such as the defendant’s being the sole
provider for a destitute family, and requested the bail be reduced by a third. The prosecution would say the substantial bond was more than fair, since the defendant was a previous offender, a danger not only to law-abiding citizens of the community but to his own physical well-being. The judge would agree; the defendant would be stamped “Made in the USA” and shipped out on a bus to Rikers Island. During the paper shuffling between hearings, Judge Weinstein stuffed a transistor-radio earplug into one fleshy ear. He was listening to the Mets’ game.

  The bailiff called Winston’s docket number and motioned for Winston to approach the bench. As he walked through the swinging gate, the balding magistrate pulled the earplug from his ear and said, “The Mets are up five to three in the bottom of the seventh. Jenkins just hit a two-run homer.” There was scattered applause from the pews. Winston could see Weinstein was pleased with the progress of the baseball game and took it as a good sign. The bailiff called Winston’s name. He and Rachel approached the bench. The district attorney read the long list of charges. Judge Weinstein paused and put the earplug in his ear for about ten seconds. “Two strikes to Henderson. Mr. Foshay, do you understand these charges against you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you plead?”

  Winston looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at her watch. “Guilty.”

  “My client means guilty to the animal cruelty charge, Your Honor.”

  The DA announced that the people of New York would drop the remaining charges. Before he could be sentenced Winston blurted out, “The dog was attacking my son, Your Honor, he’s a baby.”

  Weinstein lifted his glasses to get a better look at Winston. Somewhere in Queens a Met hit a line drive that caromed off the shortstop’s mitt and into center field. This one looks like Mookie Wilson, the judge thought. God, I loved Mookie.

  “Mr. Foshay, what breed was the dog you shot?”

  “That would be a dog of the pit bull variety, Your Honor.”

  Judge Weinstein nodded his head. “Good, I hate those dogs. But Mr. Foshay, I’m concerned about the possession of an unregistered firearm.”