Tuff
“That charge has been dropped, Your Honor,” Rachel said, forcing a phony smile.
“I know that, Counsel. But I’m more concerned with the gun than the dead dog.”
“No smoking gun, Your Honor,” Winston said.
“And if there had been a smoking gun?”
“I took the gun from a little girl so she wouldn’t hurt herself or nobody else with it.”
“Did you hurt anybody else with it?”
“No, Your Honor. Just the dog. I ain’t never used a gun to do nothing.”
Judge Weinstein asked the bailiff to bring up Winston’s criminal record. He looked down the list for gun violations.
“Where’s the gun now?” the judge asked.
“In the East River, Your Honor,” Winston lied.
“Mr. Foshay, anyone ever tell you you look like Mookie Wilson?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“The people of the state of New York hereby sentence you to ninety hours’ community service.”
To the consternation of the drug-sweep detainees and the prosecutors, Winston pounded his breastbone. He thanked Rachel, then strode out of the courtroom, not quite a free man, but more an indentured servant. Close enough. As he exited, a court officer, his hands clasped in front of him, whispered, “You know who Mookie Wilson is?”
“No fucking idea.”
Winston shadowboxed his way out of the courthouse. Haymakers landed on the chins of Judge Weinstein, Rachel Fisher, and the assistant district attorney. With each punch he grunted and spat out a phrase of legalese. “Pro se”—jab. “Defendant”—jab, jab, right hook. “Penal code”—body blow. “The state sentences you to—” Winston fired an uppercut at the state, wondering exactly what the state looked like.
When he got back home he found the lock on his front door had been changed. After a few desperate knocks, he walked down the block, stopped outside Fariq’s building, and whistled the shrill bar that for over ten summers had called his best friend to the window. He whistled again. One more time.
Armello’s lockless front door opened with a haunted-house creak. The apartment was empty. He took a half-eaten Jamaican beef patty from the Salcedos’ refrigerator and washed it down with two gulps of ginger ale. Then it was on to Whitey’s. “Hey, Ms. O’Koren, is Whitey home?… Where he at?… Come on, they ain’t going rob no bank. Plus, they need a white lady to go in with them.… Well, as long as you only thinking about it.… Do mind if I use the phone?”
Winston couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of these lonesome summer weekdays. He felt betrayed. How dare his friends live the portions of their lives that didn’t include him? On days like this, he used to shovel breakfast cereal into his mouth, then bolt outside to play, only to discover nine-tenths of his world missing. Downcast, he’d return home and skim his sole Hardy Boys mystery, The Missing Chums, blind to the title’s irony. After a few boring pages, he’d behead a few of his sister’s dolls, then fight her off with the knife. Then they’d share a cantaloupe half, arguing about whether it tasted better with or without salt.
Thinking of Brenda, Winston rubbed the two one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, went back to Armello’s apartment, and made a phone call.
14- MUSKRAT LOVE
Top down, the faded pink Mustang convertible chugged up 106th Street, serenading the block with a selection from America’s Greatest Hits. Before Spencer could bring the car to a stop, Winston leapt into the passenger seat secret-agent style. He slunk low into the tattered leather. “Man, this ride is a piece of shit.”
“Big and Little Brother out for an afternoon jaunt. How quaint.”
“Don’t push it. But thanks for coming, yo.” Winston paused, his attention on the airy-voiced singer. “ ‘Muskrat Suzy, Muskrat Sam do the jitterbug out in Muskrat Land’? What the fuck you listening to, yo? A song about animals fuckin’?”
Spencer turned up the volume even louder and asked where to.
“The Ville,” Winston said. “The Ville.”
Some niggers like hanging out in the East Village, finding its effete bohemian sensibilities, if not exciting, at least freakish. Tuffy wasn’t one of them. He hated the place. It used to be a good spot to pass off bags of oregano as weed, and glassines of toasted bread crumbs as crack, on stupid white kids from the hinterlands, but that was about it. To him the neighborhood, with its hodgepodge architecture and populace, looked like the bottom of somebody’s shoe.
He and Spencer strode across St. Mark’s Place until Winston found what he was looking for, a sidewalk vendor selling glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white head shots of entertainers and sports figures.
“How much this one?” Winston asked, holding up a photo of Michael Jackson.
“Seven dollar.”
“You got any of him when he was dark-skinned and had a nose and ’fro?”
“Yes, only four dollar.”
“Prince?”
“Five dollar.”
“Todd Bridges?”
“Fifty cent. I give you Gary Coleman also. Free, no charge. You want MC Hammer? Arsenio Hall?”
He purchased twenty dollars’ worth of photos, mostly of has-been television actors and rhythm-and-blues one-hit wonders from the eighties and nineties. However, he did spend three dollars on a Denzel Washington. He also bought a roll of tape at a magazine stand, then asked Spencer to drive him to New Jersey.
“What’s in Jersey?”
“My sister.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“I do and I don’t.”
They drove to the Evergreen Cemetery listening to America’s Greatest Hits, Winston unconsciously bobbing his head and tapping his fingers to the chorus of “Horse with No Name.”
A wrought-iron fence separated the cemetery from the Weequihac Golf Course. Brenda was buried in the northwest corner of the grounds. Errant approach shots had nicked the tombstone. Tuffy knelt beside the grave, scraping the bird droppings from the headstone with a piece of bark. Taking out the stack of photographs and his marker, he began scribbling inscriptions and forging signatures on the faces of the washed-up heroes of his sister’s youth. Sometimes, to heighten the effect, he signed with his left hand.
To Brenda,
R.A.W.
Kool Moe Dee
Brenda,
Paz Mamacita!
Feliz Navidad!
Los chicos de Menudo
To Brenda,
My biggest fan,
thanks.
Much love,
Denzel Washington
After taping the signed publicity photos to the headstone, Tuffy bored a small cavity in the burial mound with his index finger. He rolled a hundred-dollar bill into a tube, placed the money in the hole, then covered it with mulch. “One for me and one for you,” he said, kissing the marker. As he stood to leave, a black foursome of golfers ambled up to the tee box on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, chattering loudly as they smacked their balls onto the fairway. Who are these niggers? Winston thought, as another foursome of black men tromped up the hill searching for golf balls in the rough. As he read the inscription on the headstone, he had a sobering thought. He wanted Jordy to grow up to be like the golfers: successful, carefree, suburban, independent—the kind of nigger he couldn’t stand. Carefully, as if he were peeling away a Band-Aid covering a tender blister, Winston removed the snapshot of Denzel Washington from Brenda’s marker, then tore the photo to pieces.
Two hours later Winston found Yolanda in a corner arcade playing a video machine. Spencer drove off and for five minutes Tuffy leaned against a post and watched her do battle with a computer villain, raining a torrent of thundering kicks and punches on her hapless opposition. Yolanda’s fighter grabbed the opponent by the nose and pulled the skin off its body with the ease of a magician snatching a satin sheet off a caged assistant. The gargoyle collapsed in a heap of muscle tissue and bone.
Looking at her surreptitiously from the rear gave him a perverted chill of sati
sfaction, a feeling similar to a breeder’s pride in watching his prized mare fly around the racetrack. When Yolanda first moved into his apartment, Winston, full of common-law jealousy, would follow her around the neighborhood, spying on her from behind double-parked cars, eavesdropping on her conversations to the best of his lip-reading ability. Once he saw Player Ham, the neighborhood ladies’ man, run out of Danny’s Cuts, still cloaked in the barber’s towel, smelling of coconut oil and hair sheen. “Damn, girl, you fine.” Cracking his knuckles, Winston hid behind a van, ready to pounce at the first peck on the neck or affectionate squeeze of the hand. “Thank you,” said Yolanda, going on about her business. “I just had to tell you, because you a looker.” Then softly to himself he said, “Boy, I’d tear that shit up.”
Winston emerged from behind the van, glowering at Player Ham. He waited a couple of beats and, when Yolanda was out of earshot, whispered, “Nigger, if I ever …” Shaking, Player Ham dug into his pocket, saying “Tuffy, come on now, I didn’t know,” and slapped forty dollars into Winston’s hand, paying back a debt he never owed. “We straight, right?” Jogging to catch Yolanda, Winston realized how lonely she was in the neighborhood without him. Her family and friends in Queens had written her off for moving in with an obese unemployed habitual offender, and the local women her age were just too fast for her. With Player Ham’s money he treated her to a bouquet of bird-of-paradise flowers and a dinner of bacalao and white rice.
Belted into his stroller, Jordy tried to alert his mother to his father’s presence, but she was too engrossed in the game to pay any attention. Tuffy nudged Yolanda aside and dropped fifty cents into the machine’s slot, interrupting her duel with a turbaned, scimitar-wielding Sikh caricature. As the coins plunked into the change box, the machine’s screen flashed A CHALLENGER COMES in bold red letters. Each player was presented with a cast of fighters from which to choose. Yolanda stuck with her warrior, Kashmira, a ponytailed ninja assassin. Winston selected a scaly green behemoth. He pressed a button and the video game roared “Rotundo” in a deep electronic voice. “That’s right, Rotundo in the house. Ro-fuckin’-tun-do about to get busy.” Yolanda said nothing, mentally rehearsing the intricate joystick-button combinations that would unleash a flurry of secret moves upon Winston’s fighter. Yolanda toggled her joystick with her left hand, the fingers of her right hand darting over the red, white, and blue set of buttons. Her dexterity resulted in a samurai sword assault that dropped Rotundo’s arms to the ground like pruned tree branches. Unfazed, Rotundo parried by raising his stumps and squirting a stream of his blue acidic blood in Kashmira’s face. Temporarily blinded, Kashmira endured a barrage of flying kicks that sapped her strength, turning her energy bar from green to yellow to red.
“Girl, you about to get laid the fuck out.”
Yolanda didn’t panic. Holding down the red button, she calmly jiggled the joystick left, right, up, then tapped the white button twice. Kashmira let out a threatening “Kiai!,” unsheathed two swords, and, raising her arms to the side, began to spin. The swords, twirling like helicopter rotors, lifted her up and sent her flailing toward Rotundo. Winston tapped his joystick twice to the right, causing Rotundo to back off, but before he could assume a defensive crouch Kashmira decapitated him, slicing the character’s balloon-sized head in half before it hit the ground. “Kashmira wins,” the machine announced.
“No fucking shit.”
Yolanda walked away from the game and pushed Jordy’s stroller outside. “Where you going? It’s still two more rounds left. Landa, you better get back here and finish.” Winston had Rotundo throw a couple of punches at the defenseless Kashmira, then gave up and followed Yolanda outside.
“How in the hell you come at me with ‘You better finish’? Winston, you leave me like that again and I’m done.”
“I know, Boo. I’m sorry. I got caught up. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“You know how Jordy get when one of us isn’t around. You know he had an attack.”
“He did? When?”
“Last night. The asthma hit him and he stopped breathing. If I wasn’t up doing homework, I wouldn’t have noticed. He was fucking turning blue. Like an idiot I called your name three times before I remembered your ass was in jail. I had to walk to Metropolitan. Three hours until the doctor saw him.”
“They put the oxygen mask on him?”
“I mean it, never again. Next time a locked door ain’t all you going to come home to.”
Winston gingerly took the stroller from Yolanda. In doing so commandeering his son and his status as head of the household. Yolanda hooked a finger around his belt loop and the trio slowly hiked back to the house. Winston played father at the steering wheel, his avuncular blather shortening the trip back home. “Long as you don’t lock up the coochie, Boo, you can lock anything up you damn well please. Because you know, sooner or later I’m going to fuck up. It’s in a nigger’s nature. All I ask is you two accept my apologies. I ain’t saying forgive and forget, but remember I’m just a young nigger trying to break the cycle.”
“Winston, unless you start acting right, I’m going to break your cycle.”
15- YORI-KIRI
Although his stalwart expression didn’t show it, Oyakata Hitomi Kinboshi was enraged. Sumo wrestling, his cherished livelihood, was dying an ignoble death in Spanish Harlem’s White Park. Here in a small local playground, the fifteen-hundred-year-old traditions of his sport were being violated like fourteen-year-olds at sleepaway camp. Instead of the yobidashi sitting cross-legged high up in a tower and announcing the start of the tournament with the customary playing of the sumo drums, a spindly-limbed herald sat atop a basketball hoop beating on a white plastic janitor’s bucket. In fifteen centuries a woman had never set foot on the dohyo, but a Japanese-American woman stood in the center of the hastily constructed ring, yelling inanities into the microphone like a Communist screech owl. The Oyakata’s English wasn’t very good, but he understood something to the effect of “No justice, no peace.”
Sumo wrestling, once the sport of the gods, was now a Japanese minstrel show, the wrestlers no longer warriors, but entertainers. They were Japan’s goodwill ambassadors, sent out by the government to make amends for each administration’s invariable breach of ethnic etiquette. Last year it was Vancouver to make amends for the foreign minister’s calling Canadians “junior Americans.” This time the justice minister blamed the country’s growing crime rate on Japanese youths’ desire to emulate American culture, specifically the wastrel and violent attitudes of blacks and Hispanics, characteristics inherent in most nonwhite races, but not the Japanese. Three months later, in an attempt to appease the unquieted ghetto masses, the Sumo Kyokai sent the Oyakata and the wrestlers to East Harlem.
The strange Japanese-American woman gestured to the crowd and a large black man rose to polite applause. The Oyakata smiled. It was the same sullen-faced young man he’d seen in the poster on the bus ride from the hotel—the one he thought looked like the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Standing up in the crowd, a child on his shoulders, a stuffed tiger on the child’s shoulders, the black man looked like the bottom of a totem pole. “What did the Japanese girl say?” Kinboshi asked his translator. The interpreter bowed. “She introduced the young man as Winston Foshay, a politician who is running for public office. There’s a petition circulating through the crowd. He needs fifty more signatures and he’ll be on the ballot.” Kinboshi shook his head in disgust. The translator must have made a mistake. That boy a politician? Never. Any fool could plainly see the impudence festering underneath a warrior’s I-don’t-give-a-damn expression. This Winston Foshay never had a civic thought in his life. With the body and face of a bullfrog, he was born to be either a sumo wrestler or blues singer. “Did she say something about Chairman Mao?” The interpreter answered yes, fumbling for a way to translate “Mao more than ever” into Japanese.
One of the sumotori, a Yokozuna named Takanohana, was in the ring performing the traditional dohyo-iri.
Rising from his squat, he clapped his hands; then, with a hand behind his knee, hoisted a massive leg high above his head. His foot stamped down on the clay surface with a resounding thump. Instead of responding to the demonstration of the Yokozuna’s uncanny balance with the customary shout of “Yoisho!” the audience answered each heavy stomp with a boisterous “Aiiight!” Under the searing New York City sun Oyakata Kinboshi reddened.
Ms. Nomura, how come they raising their arm to the side like that?”
“To show that they aren’t carrying any weapons.”
“Fair fight—I likes that.”
The ancient sport immediately appealed to Winston. Never had he been in the presence of so many men his size. And in the world of sumo, he was on the small end of the scale, as most of the rikishi outweighed him by fifty to eighty pounds.
“Look at them two motherfuckers, they huge!”
“That’s Akebono and Musashimaru,” Inez said, referring to the two largest rikishi, each of whom stood well over six feet tall and weighed over four hundred and fifty pounds.
“They black?” asked Winston, puzzled by the wrestlers’ swarthy skins and wavy hair tied into oily topknots.
“No, I think they’re both from Hawaii.”
“Hawaiians always looked kind of black to me. Big noses, grass skirts, and shit. They seem real African but more laid back.”
Two lower-ranked rikishi prepared to enter the ring. Each man stoically tossed a purifying fleck of salt onto the dohyo, before determinedly stepping into the circle of inlaid straw and assuming their starting positions. Crouched down in football-like four-point stance, the half-naked titans, without any visible signal from the formally dressed referee, fired into one another. The sound of a slab of meat landing on a butcher’s cutting board echoed throughout the park. The crowd, momentarily stunned by the ferocity, suddenly burst out in cheers, wildly applauding when one wrestler dumped the other unceremoniously out of the ring with a deftly executed leg trip. “Takanishiki, sotogake no kachi!” said the ring announcer.